Sexagesima Sunday 2010
You
are under the power of no other enemy, are held in no other captivity and want
no other deliverance but from the power of your own earthly self. This is
the one murderer of the divine life within you. It is your own Cain that
murders your own Abel. Now everything that your earthly nature does is
under the influence of self-will, self-love, and self-seeking, whether it
carries you to laudable or blamable practices; all is done in the nature and spirit
of Cain and only helps you to such goodness as when Cain slew his
brother. For every action and motion of self has the spirit of Antichrist
and murders the divine life within you. William
Law:
You
and I find ourselves situated in that brief time of the Church’s life between
Epiphany and Lent. We have endured and embraced the vision of God manifested
in the life of Jesus Christ, and have quietly meditated upon the magnificent
and brilliant beauty of God’s love in the Incarnation of his only-begotten
Son. We are preparing for a deeper encounter with the effects of that vision
on our lives, when in Lent we begin truly to die and fall away from ourselves.
We are being moved inward to the center of our being. In the Gesima
Season, on the Sundays of Septuagesima, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima, roughly
seventy, sixty and fifty days before Easter, you and I are bidden to prepare
our souls and bodies to receive God’s living Word, and to encounter and experience
of our own deaths in the face of the one death whose memory must always change
and transform us. On the Gesima Sundays you and
I face ourselves, admit who we are and begin to die. And what better way to
begin this journey that with the thoughts and prayers of William Law, steadfast,
eighteenth-century follower of the Saviour.
William
Law, you will remember, lived in a time in world history when the civilized
world was being assaulted by the ideas and words of a Deist world. A Deist is
one who believes in God, but for all practical purposes has removed himself
from the God-man, from the unity and communion binding man to God, in Jesus
Christ. The eighteenth century rationalists or Deists, you see, found
themselves embarrassed by the notion of God in the flesh, in Jesus Christ,
precisely because they could not prove it. Not being able to prove it has been
a problem for philosophers in all ages, and respectable European gentlemen of
the time found it best to dispense with anything smacking of a faith that
would assent to it. So a world emerged, from which we have yet to recover, in
which faith and assent to the God-man, and his unifying and reconciling mission
of redemptive love, was denied. But our friend, the good and noble Mr. William
Law, would have none of it. Against the rationalist pride of the Deists, William
Law was one of few voices, like Blaise Pascal across
the Channel in
But
interestingly enough, rather than inveighing against the outside powers and
words seeking to demolish and destroy the Word made flesh, or Jesus Christ,
William Law rather reminds us of the real enemy to our faith. He brings us into
the presence of our own inner temptations which emerge even when, with the best
of intentions, we seek to faithfully follow Jesus Christ. William Law does not
recall his audience and us to a condemnation or judgment of the “bad guys”, be
they Deists then or secular humanists now, but rather to ourselves. After all,
we will not be spared at the last day of Judgment
because we recognized the evils in our society and pointed the finger at
others. We will be spared then, only if even now we begin to look at ourselves,
and the true enemy lurking within which threatens to separate us from Jesus
Christ. You are under the power of no other enemy, are held in no
other captivity and want no other deliverance but from the power of your own
earthly self. This is the one murderer of the divine life within you. Truly
we are in one danger, and that danger is that we shall fall under the power and
spell of our own self-destructive potentiality. The one danger that we must
face is that of the self. And the self, at the end of the day, is the only
being capable of keeping God out and the self within, to cultivate and work all
manner of death-bound destruction.
William
Law continues: It is your own Cain that murders your own Abel. Now
everything that your earthly nature does is under the influence of self-will,
self-love, and self-seeking, whether it carries you to laudable or blamable
practices… Law links our potential to inner destruction to the history
recorded in the 4th chapter of Genesis. There we read that Abel
was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. And in process of
time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering
unto the LORD. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of
the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering: Cain,
like you and I, was made to be a tiller of the ground. As such, he is
symbolically and allegorically the man who tills and cultivates the soil of the
soul. Cain was made to receive and care for the first encounter of God with
man, as God sews and plants his Word within the human soul. Abel was a keeper
of the sheep, and is truly superior to Cain allegorically and spiritually, for
he is the symbol of Christ the Good Shepherd, who comes to bring his offering
of love and goodness to the soul whose soil is ready for the coming of Christ.
But we read that Cain slew Abel, and so we interpret this as meaning that Cain
did not cherish and grow his gift of the implanted Word of God, expecting and
welcoming the gift which would perfect his preparation, the offering of his
younger brother, the keeper of sheep, and of himself.
Cain
surrendered to himself, and became the murderer of the divine within
himself. First, he was ungrateful for the gift of his calling, to cultivate the
soil of the soul. Second he became envious of his brother’s gift, the care and
love of his soul, figured in his younger brother’s vocation to tend to and care
for the sheep. Again, Abel symbolizes Christ the Good Shepherd who comes to the
soul only when it has been made ready in Cain, in us, when we realize that the
Word addressed to us, and then implanted and sown in us can be properly loved
and cared for only by the shepherd. But Cain, and you and I who are very much
like him, rather envy the presence of the shepherd in our lives, and so cannot
welcome him, because we have killed the divine within ourselves. We follow
rather self-will, self-love, self-seeking, and so ignore what God the Word has
been trying to do in us as he makes us fit to welcome the work and labour of the Good Shepherd.
In
today’s Gospel we learn of a parable which can be applied to our Cain-like
existence. We learn about what can and does
progressively destroy the Word God sown in the human heart and in the soul. God
addresses Cain. God the sower goes out to sow his
seed and as he sowed, some fell by the way-side, and it was trodden down,
and the fowls of the air devoured it. Sometimes we are Cain when we treat
the Word of God as that which has been sown outside of the heart, on the side
and removed from it, and so it is subject to a primitive form of despair which
does not see and know it for what it is. We are like those who are by the
way side and hear; then cometh the devil, and taketh
away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe, and be saved.
We have heard the Word addressed to us; we are even reminded of our being
blessed by him. God says, Why are you
extremely sorrowful? Why has your countenance fallen? God has made us
and given us a labour. We are to till the soil of our
souls. But we treat God’s Word as an outside, unimportant phenomenon. We are so
distracted by the blessings of others, like Abel. We do not remember that we
come from God, he has given us the gift, but we forget and so the Word is
easily taken from us. It does not move and define us. We treat human life as our
own, ours for the making and unmaking, ours for the
creating and uncreating. We treat ourselves as gods,
knowing good and evil, or rather determining good and evil for ourselves. If
so, the Word of God falls by the wayside, and is devoured.
In
another way God addresses us. The same Word is sown and, as our Gospel tells
us, it falls upon a rock, and as soon as it springs up, it withers away
because it lacked moisture. Perhaps with Cain we know that the Word has
been sown, and at first we have a time of accepting it, but then we grow cold,
because we do not cultivate the gift within, out of envy for our brother’s gift
without. We progressively respond to it with cold indifference or determined
refusal to allow it to grow. Our pride is strengthened, and we kill the divine
within ourselves because we allow it to sit on top of the frozen and unyielding
surface of our lives. We do not allow it entry. It has been sown, but we
respond by killing its beginnings and startings in
our lives. We have no root, and for a while believe, and in time of
temptation fall away. We are tempted to view what others have or do
not have, and we are wrongly moved and defined by our brother’s life, be it his
vice or virtue, and so forget that the Word needs to be grown within our own souls.
What was envy limited to the outward irritation of Abel, or any blessed brother
or sister, moves inward. We cultivate inner envy, wrath begins to boil, and so
our hearts are hardened to the healing power of the Word. We cannot will the
good of our brother, and if we do not love our brothers whom we see, how can we
love God whom we do not see?
Our
sin grows and matures. The same Word is sown, following the Gospel, and
sometimes it falls among thorns, and the thorns sprang up with it, and choke
it. With Cain the Word had been heard, but by now we are so consumed with
our self-will, self-love, and self-seeking, that it is choked and killed and so
is destroyed effectively for us. We have allowed the self to be so wounded and
possessed by pride, envy and wrath, that we have become truly narcissistic.
In addition to being envious of his brother Abel, Cain was truly
possessed with his own self-importance and the praise and blessing that he felt
was due to him. And so he pursued the good only for himself, or was so moved by
it in relation only to himself, that the Word could not breathe its way and
place into his heart and his soul. You and I do this also. If it is not moved
by envy of others, my heart and yours might be moved to seek the things of this
world in order to ensure our health, our comfort, our pleasure and our security
in the world. You and I then choke the life of the divine Word within and so
kill its growth so that we cannot accept and welcome it both in ourselves and
in others.
The
seed that longs to be sown in the heart of Cain and in your heart and mind, is the Word of God. Its intended place and space of
growth and flowering is the soil of the human soul. And Cain, you and I spend
much of our lives refusing the implanted Word because we murder our brothers
and sisters in thought, word and deed. The murder of Abel is but a sign and
illustration of our murder of Jesus Christ. William Law reminds us that
every action and motion of self has the spirit of Antichrist and murders the
divine life within you. When we murder another, be in any man of Christ the
God-man, we kill the Word of divine life within us. We render ourselves nearly
incapable of receiving the Word of God, and then of rejoicing at its presence
in others. Thankfully for all of us, Cain and you and I are forgiven. For the
true brother, who is Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh for us, will accept our
murder of him, and even in the midst of the act itself, offer to us the Word
that persists in longing to be planted in our souls. It is only through the
murder that Cain comes to experience the love of God. It is only in our murder
of our brother Jesus Christ, in himself and in the least of these his brethren, that we come to perceive and sense the
inconceivable and unbelievable mercy and love of God.
Today,
knowing that blood is on our hands, let us again
become that rich and fertile soil ready to receive the implanted Word of God.
Let us with St. Paul “glory in the things which concern our infirmities,” that
is, glory in the fact that we are infirm, weak, and powerless without God’s
persistent and moving love and mercy. Let us know that we are made to be “our
brother’s keeper.” Let us know that first we are meant to keep and grow God’s
Word in our souls. Let us know that we are meant to keep, cherish and encourage
the presence of God’s word in others lives. Let us know that we are meant to
keep and embrace the love of God in our true brother, the new Abel, Jesus
Christ. And then we shall know that the Word is both from God and in man, from
God and in us. Amen.
©
W.J. Martin†