Lenten Mediation on Luke 4:1-13

Lent is a kind of spring cleaning. Once we set out with the idea that we are going to tidy up our spaces, we first make more of a mess. We have to pull the couch out from the wall, get the clothes out of the closet, and pick up the shower mat from the bathroom. Before you know it the space looked quite a lot nicer before we fumbled around trying to clean.

The season of Lent is something like this. We decide that we are going to pay attention to our space, our very person. Through fasting, prayer, worship, and devotional reading we set out to take stock of where we really are…you know, where we really are. Where are my fundamental allegiances? In what do I ultimately trust? How committed or obedient am I to the truth?

So we find Jesus in the desert. Recently baptized, committing himself to do the will of the one who sent him into the world. In order to run the race set before him, one that ends with the costliness of the cross, Jesus goes into the desert to take stock. We remember that Israel, as God’s chosen people, were brought across the Red Sea by the power of God and spent 40-years in the wilderness putting God to the test. Jesus, as the representative of God’s people, spends 40-days in the wilderness.

The voice he encounters is the same tone in our heads that lobbies for our trust, one that suggests that short circuiting our faith in the living God of love can produce results. Instead of opening ourselves up to the depths of God’s life we can escape the gaze of God and scurry into cheap power, lust, money, and the sense that we are the creator of ourselves. Jesus, as Israel’s Messiah, is offered all the kingdoms of the world. He could implement his ideas of public policy as the one in control. However, this is a king of different sorts; his policy is inextricably wrapped up with his obedience to the Father. Jesus is tested while sharing in our humanity and he perfects it where Israel falls short. It is through his personal humility to live out the will of the Father that he becomes the light of the world.

The asceticism of Lent is not to deprive us of certain crucial elements of our humanity but to put to question what we deem to be the true nature of our very lives. Opening ourselves up to stand in the place where Jesus Christ stood in the desert, we create the possibility of becoming human beings fully alive. Humans that are participating in the life of God and healing the world by who we are. We don’t suppose that the Church has all the social programs and policies outlined perfectly, instead our trust is that aligning our will to the will of the Christ brings truth to life in us. As Christ’s followers- Christians we call ourselves- pursuing the path set forth in history by God’s Son, we enter into true humility which is life before our creator, and in so doing we become fully human. Let us put our trust to the test in this season so that we might be opened up to depths of God’s love.

Faith entails transformation

"Thus the trinitarian dogma proposes a model of personal being which radically challenges the assumptions of the fallen human mind: thought itself must be turned upside down by grace if we are to grasp the mystery in any way. The dogma is a 'cross for human ways of thought' because it demands a belief that the abnegation of self and the absence of self-asserted, self-interested 'individualism' are the fundamental notes of personal existence at its source, in God. In its fallen and encapsulated condition, the individual human subject cannot accept this: only in the life of the Spirit, who transforms the whole of human being, is faith in the trinitarian dogma possible."

+Archbishop Rowan Williams

It is by way of the Spirit, that Christ has bestowed upon us in His Church, that our minds must be renewed so that we can see into the depth of things, the gift of the new creation.

Understanding Scripture equips the saints

At More than a via media I came across a great post on the communal nature of learning how to understand Scripture. Two pieces of the article struck me as particularly important:

"catechesis, corporate reading of Scripture, preaching, liturgy. It is in this context - of catechesis, engaging preaching, liturgy and sacraments which proclaim the saving history of the acts of the Triune God - that I, that we come to understand Scripture."
- Richard Hooker

"Reading is a Christological business ... the reading of Scripture is a collective enterprise, a task of the whole communion of saints, in which every generation participates. Together with the Biblical authors we may read their past readers, and if we take the canonical text seriously as the fulfilling of the law, we shall not imagine that good reading could be set in partisan opposition to them. All serious reading of the canonical text has in view the catholic horizon".
- Oliver O'Donovan



I have been pondering Alisdair MaCintyre's call for a new St Benedict as a means to create local community that has a Rule (a way of making sense of identity)that can preserve and build up virtue in the midst of the dark ages. Scripture, as understood within the Church Catholic, is the Rule by which the parish church grows into itself. Let's be clear that Scripture is not a rulebook (but rather our story), instead as the community opens up the Scriptures together in the context of the Church Catholic with all of the past teaching, the sacraments, sound preaching, etc. then we have the capacity to move into our new identity as called out by the Triune God and we make space for the perpetual growth of all the saints throughout God's One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

Anglican Communion as an Expression of Catholicity

Here is a good post, from Cynthia Nielsen, on +Rowan's statement regarding the future of Anglicanism.

Archbishop of Canterbury's Anglican Vision

On Monday, the Archbishop released a letter to all the Anglican faithful regarding the future of the Anglican Communion. It is a gift to have such a thoughtful theologian at the helm. It has been posited that +Rowan's theology begins with his ecclesiology, and it is evident that this is the most important thrust of his vision for Anglicanism. As a Communion that has a vocation to be an expression of the Church Catholic we must move forward in a way that 'intensifies existing relationships,' which allows for stronger theological cohesion, resulting in more 'recognizability' both within the Communion and the Church Catholic. It is clear that the Covenant is the way in which theological consistency will enhance. The Covenant is simply the instrument to allow the Communion to act as a global body of Christ rather than local and autonomous national churches. As the Communion continues to imagine its future, what is most promising is the clear vision that the Archbishop offers: that the Anglican Church enhances its vocation as an expression of Catholicity.
A valuable commentary can be found here and there.

Hart, Aquinas, and sacramental participation

David B. Hart writes, "It is undoubtedly the case that it is our shared imaginative grammar that determines for us how and to what degree we can reconcile our native human longing for the divine with our love of the things of earth. In a more hospitable cosmos than ours now appears to be, it was much easier to be at home in the world and to believe that that which lies farthest beyond us is also that which lies most deeply within all things; in such a cosmos, transcendence is the mystery at once of the far and the near. But the modern perspective seems to shatter that unity; for us, to a greater degree than for most of our more distant ancestors, the beyond is only beyond, and transcendence is a kind of absence or impenetrable paradox, announced to us not so much in the splendor and order of nature as in our alienation from it.
My final observation, I suppose, would be this: Our longing for transcendence is inextinguishable in us, and the appeal of the transcendent to our deepest natures will always be audible and visible to us in some form—first and finally in the form of beauty—and will continue to waken in us both wonder and an often inexpressible unhappiness. But in an age such as ours, within the picture of the world that now prevails, that beauty must seem more ambiguous, more beleaguered, and the call of transcendence more elusive of interpretation, like a voice heard in a dream.
In the absence of that scale of shining mediations that once seemed seamlessly to unite the immanent and the transcendent, the earthly and the heavenly, nature and supernature, we are nevertheless still open to the same summons issued in every age to every soul; but it must for now come to us as something more mysterious, tragic, and terrible than it once was."

I read this after just beginning to plunge into St Thomas' Summa Theologica, with Milbank and Pickstock's claim, that Thomas' project hinges upon the theological idea of participation, in mind. Specifically, that because the logos has become incarnate and instituted the Church and her sacraments we are able to actively take part in the life of the transcendent which flips our understanding of beauty upside down, as the glory of the Lord has been revealed in a particular life, death, and resurrection. This makes space for us to have an "imaginative grammar" that is rooted in God's self disclosure and we may encounter the things of this world with a sacramental longing for beauty.

Liturgical World

"Jesus' Jewish world was a deeply liturgical world, a world in which the central activity for an entire culture and community was the cycle of annual events, in the Temple, though not exclusively so, that had to do with the restoration of humanity to its proper place in creation. The divine image overlaid by the passage of time and the corruption of sin had to be laid bare and restored to its full glory. Humanity had to clothe itself afresh in the garments of light, lost at the beginning. In this process, humanity was revealed in its proper relationship to God and to creation as a whole. Liturgy in the Temple 'activated God-wards' the buried divine image. And all of this language was at hand for those early Christian believers seeking to make sense of the impact of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. In the wake of those events, humanity had discovered itself afresh. Humanity had been clothed anew in the garments of light, restored in its place before God and its relationship with the rest of the created order -- and all of that because humanity had been invited, summoned to stand in the place of Jesus the New Adam, the Son of Man, the focus of God's creative and re-creative work and power.

So as the New Testament evolves and as its theology takes sharper and deeper form, part at least of what is going on is that the new Christian identity is being thought through and imagined in terms of that legacy of liturgy. The whole process of becoming a Christian and growing up as a Christian, growing into your full humanity as a believer, is to do with what the Temple liturgy was all about. It's a restoration to the place of Adam. It's a clothing with light and the uncovering (to use the opposite image) of the naked likeness of God in human nature."

Rowan Williams
http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2449