29th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Isaiah 53:10-11; Hebrews 4:14-16; Mark 10:35-45

St. Thomas Aquinas once said 
that the death of Christ, 
for us and for our salvation, 
“is so tremendous a fact 
that our intellect can scarcely grasp it.”
In the midst of the horror of death
the mercy of God manifests itself;
divine love and compassion 
burst forth from within an act
of human hatred and condemnation.
As the hymn “How great Thou Art” puts it,
“And when I think
That God, 
His Son not sparing,
Sent Him to die,
I scarce can take it in.”

But we want to take it in.
Our souls want to grasp such love
so that it might dwell within us.
And so, like someone 
circling a magnificent sculpture
in order to see it from all angles,
or someone listening to a symphony
over and over to find 
new nuances and hidden harmonies,
the cross of Christ, 
God’s magnum opus,
must be seen from as many sides as possible,
must be called to mind again and again,
in order to catch even a fraction
of the beauty of divine love that it reveals.
We must mediate on the cross of Jesus
so as to drink in its riches
and be transformed by the grace 
that pours forth from it.

The Letter to the Hebrews tells us
that in Jesus “we do not have 
a high priest who is unable 
to sympathize with our weaknesses.”
In taking on our human nature,
God has taken on human weakness as well.
Jesus, like us, skinned his knees as a child;
he got colds and grew hungry;
he was misunderstood and disappointed.
But most of all, 
on the cross God has taken on 
the weakness of the persecuted,
of those condemned to death by systems
that care more about the exercise of power
than about justice or mercy.
God has entered into solidarity with those
who lives are crushed by forces
that do not even recognize their humanity.
God has made himself present to the countless millions 
ground beneath the wheels of human hatred—
of war and injustice and oppression—
those whose names are lost to history
but whom God remembers.

But God’s solidarity with us 
in our suffering and weakness
is only one facet of Jesus’ cross.
As our mind moves around this great work of God,
as we listen again to the symphony of salvation,
we see that, in Christ, God not only suffers with us,
but he also suffers for us.
Jesus does for us what we cannot do for ourselves,
by offering his life in perfect love to the Father
so that we might be freed from sin’s prison
and be reconciled to God.
Fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy of the Servant of God
who “gives his life as an offering for sin,”
Jesus tells his followers that “the Son of Man 
did not come to be served but to serve 
and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
More than simply suffering alongside us,
Jesus offers his sinless life as our “ransom”—
the price that is paid to redeem us 
from sin and death, which hold us captive.
How this exchange is accomplished 
he does not explain;
what matters is the simple fact
that he will drink for us the cup of suffering
and be baptized for us in the waters of death,
so that we might be saved from eternal suffering
and raised up from eternal death.

Yet there is still another side of all this
that we must see,
another harmony we must hear.
If on the cross the Son of God 
joins us in our suffering,
and by his love 
pays the cost of our freedom,
we now are left with the question 
posed by Jesus to James and John:
“Can you drink the cup that I drink
or be baptized with the baptism 
with which I am baptized?”
For while Jesus does for us
what we cannot do for ourselves—
gives his sinless life 
to free us from sin and death
and reconcile us to God—
we are in turn called to give our own lives
in service to God and neighbor.
We are called to imitate the love
by which we have been saved.

Thomas Aquinas wrote that
“Whoever wishes to live perfectly 
need do nothing other than despise 
what Christ despised on the cross, 
and desire what Christ desired.”
What did Christ despise on the cross?
He despised all earthly honors and riches,
preferring to be found among the ranks
of those who are oppressed and killed.
What did Christ desire?
He desired to give himself for our salvation,
a salvation bought with charity and patience, 
humility and obedience;
he desired the will of his Father,
which seeks us out in our lostness
to bring us back to our true homeland.
So we too, in turn, 
must despise earthly honors;
we must refuse to feed 
what the philosopher Iris Murdoch called
“the fat relentless ego.”
We too must desire selfless love
and endurance of suffering,
a recognition of our own poverty of spirit
and a willingness to answer God’s call.
We too must find greatness in service
and freedom in binding ourselves 
to God’s holy will.

The love of God shown forth 
in the cross of Jesus:
I scarce can take it in.
But just as we can find ourselves
captivated by a magnificent work of art
or absorbed by a great piece of music,
so too we are drawn into this great work of God.
What I cannot take in,
can take me in.
By the mercy of God,
I, unworthy as I am, 
become myself a part 
of God’s great work.
Christ welcomes me to drink 
his cup of suffering and joy;
he washes me in his baptism of death
and raises me to life in his Spirit
and calls me into God’s service.
And all this because of his mercy. 
So let us pray that we might know this mercy,
and that God, who is merciful,
might have mercy on us all.

Commemoration of St. John Henry Newman

Readings: Song of Songs 3:1-4; 1 John 4:13-21

Our two readings today seem to present us
with two very different kinds of love.
The Song of Songs presents a love
rooted in passion for the absent beloved—
a love for a particular other
for whom my heart longs
and whom I want to possess.
The First Letter of John, on the other hand,
with its famous claim that God is love,
presents us with a love
that seems not a matter 
of passion or self-fulfillment
but is a response to the generous gift 
of the God who unselfishly loves us first 
and call us to show to others 
the same sort of selfless love.
It is a love that is universal,
directed to all people.

When you go to seminary and get all smartened up,
you are taught to identify these two sorts of love
with two different Greek words: eros and agape.
You are perhaps taught that eros—
praised by pagan Greek thinkers such as Plato—
is egoistic, particular, and ultimately selfish.
And you may be taught that agape 
is the kind of love spoken of in the New Testament—
an altruistic, universal, self-sacrificial love
exemplified in the cross of Jesus
and in God’s grace shown to sinners.

 
But the fact that the erotic Song of Songs
and the agapeic First Letter of John
are both in the canon the Scripture,
and that they appear side by side 
in our worship this morning,
suggests that this contrast between agape and eros
is one of those the teachable bits of simplified truth
that your teachers feed you,
not in malice,
but because your minds are thirsting for understanding
and simple distinctions and broadly drawn contrasts
are the most effective way to slake that thirst.
These sorts of distinctions and contrasts
are handy pegs on which to organize 
your theological hat collection,
but they also tend to collapse under scrutiny,
and we who teach theology 
pass them along to our students
with our fingers crossed
and a nagging voice in the back of our minds
saying, “Well…more or less,”
trusting that our students will supply for themselves
the nuance that we don’t have the time to convey.

And this strategy more or less works,
because simply trying to live as a Christian
teaches us that universal love of God and neighbor
is inextricably tangled up with love of particular others:
our yearning for a spouse, a friends, a child.
My living shows me that the yearning of eros 
to escape the confines of the self,
to live ecstatically within the life of my beloved
and to have my beloved live in me,
is itself a kind of self-sacrificial love. 
It shows me that it is in my yearning
for this one, this particular beloved
whom I see here, now, before me,
that fosters in me love 
for all those others
whom I cannot now see,
and ultimately love for the God
whom no one can see in this life,
the beloved who dwells 
in unapproachable light.

John Henry Newman, 
whom we commemorate today,
and whom God blessed with 
the kind of supernatural common sense 
that is a mark of sanctity,
noted that we mistakenly think 
that the yearning we feel for particular others 
is a distraction from our real task
of loving everybody indiscriminately.
Newman thought this got things quite wrong.
He thought that our natural yearning
to love and be loved by this beloved—
this spouse,
this child,
this friend—
is the ground from which 
a more universal love might grow.
He wrote, “the best preparation
for loving the world at large,
and loving it duly and wisely,
is to cultivate an intimate friendship 
and affection toward those 
who are immediately around us.” 
Newman thought that St. John,
who teaches us that God is agape,
learned this truth from the very particular love 
that Jesus shared with him.
Newman says of John,
“did he begin with some vast effort 
at loving on a large scale?
Nay, he had the unspeakable privilege
of being the friend of Christ.
Thus he was taught to love others;
first his affection was concentrated,
then it was expanded” (Sermons II.5).

On this score, Newman can teach us something
about our quest for the unity of Christians.
As far as I know, he never expressed an intellectual regret
over leaving the Church of England for Roman Catholicism,
but he was grieved throughout his life 
by the broken friendships that resulted from his decision.
Just as love is always rooted in the particular,
so too is sorrow over separation:
“I will seek him whom my soul loves.”
Though high-level theological discussions are important,
what really drives the quest 
to overcome the divisions of Christians 
are not abstractions like 
“organic unity” or “reconciled diversity,”
but a yearning for union with the brother or sister
who was reborn with me 
from the same womb of living water;
a hunger to share with this one whom I love
at the banquet of the bread of life.   
Our desire for unity must be concentrated
before it is expanded.

It was no accident that, 
upon becoming a cardinal,
Newman chose as his motto
cor ad cor loquitur—heart speaks to heart.
For it is within the heart that speaks
to the heart of a particular beloved
that the voice of God resounds.
This notion that time-bound and particular realities
are the doorway into the eternal and universal
is what Newman called “the sacramental principle.”
The brother or sister who stands before us—
who evokes our love and yearning, 
whom we seek in the nighttime of our restlessness,
whom we desire to hold and never let go—
is the sacrament of a love that expands
to encompass those brothers and sisters
whom we have not yet seen,
to compass even the God 
whom we will only see
in the light of heavenly glory.

Let us pray that God will give us the grace
to love with passionate particularity,
and selfless generosity,
to love the distant through the near
and the unseen in the seen.
St. John Henry Newman, pray for us.

Preached at an ecumenical commemoration of Newman at Duke Divinity School Chapel.