Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B: January 28, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B- Sunday, January 28, 2018

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC 

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.

Into what may seem to our modern ears to be a confusing exploration of the intricacies of food and idolatry, the Apostle Paul drops these few lines of profound mystical depth.

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him.

What are the boundaries between knowledge and love?

In the early Christian sayings Gospel of Thomas, Jesus echoes these words of Paul. He tells his disciples: “When you know yourself, then you will be known, and you will know that you are the children of the Living One. If you do not know yourselves, you live in poverty, and you are poverty.”

When you know yourself, then you will be known, and you will know that you are the children of the Living One. If you do not know yourselves, you live in poverty, and you are poverty.

Knowing and being known; loving and being loved.

There comes a point, it seems, when all of our knowledge fails us, and we are left utterly impoverished. No one can know God, The Cloud of Unknowing tells us. Our knowledge is too small to comprehend the Living One. But we can love God, and in that loving we can come to be known, to be comprehended.

Knowledge and love flowing into one another.

Paradoxically, it is only in allowing ourselves to become poverty that we can truly surrender to God’s all-knowing love and all-loving knowledge.

Thomas Merton speaks of this terrain deep within the human heart: “At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.” 

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him.

When you know yourself, then you will be known, and you will know that you are the children of the Living One. If you do not know yourselves, you live in poverty, and you are poverty.

Beyond all of our knowledge, our self-markers, our identities, beyond the hurts and the joys, the gifts and the growing edges, beyond all of that, there is a place within us where, with the Living One we can say, simply and without ornamentation: I am