Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Ephrem Arcement
Pentecost, Proper 23 C - October 9, 2022
The babe in Christ is thankful when they receive something they really want. The adolescent in Christ, on a good day, is thankful for the hope of one day receiving something they really want. The mature in Christ is just thankful, whether they do or do not receive something they really want.
Unconditional gratitude is a sure sign that one is well on their way to putting on Christ, who on the night before he was crucified gave thanks that God’s will was being accomplished through his own gift of self in the sacrificial offering of his body and blood. In light of this, St. Paul would be inspired to write, “In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.” Easier said than done! It’s one thing to be thankful to God when your diagnosis turns out not to be life-threatening and quite another to be thankful when it does! Is it really possible to have a heart so touched by God’s grace that it can’t help but give thanks whatever the circumstance? Today’s readings are lessons on how to attain such unconditional gratitude.
The prophet Jeremiah lived during one of the most difficult times in Israel’s history. Her identity as God’s own people along with her hope of God’s promises for her future were suddenly dashed when the powerful kingdom to the northeast, Babylon, invaded, plundered and took her away captive. Who was she now? And where was her God?
The knee-jerk reaction of the vast majority of us who find ourselves in circumstances which we dread, like living in captivity in a foreign land, is, no doubt, to do everything in our power to liberate ourselves from the weight of the dread and, like Israel, to get back home as soon as possible. Surely, this is God’s will, right?
Jeremiah, however, steers Israel in quite another direction. Instead of being preoccupied about how you’re going to get yourself out of the mess you find yourself in, Jeremiah says to the Israelites, “build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce…take wives and have sons and daughters….”
In other words, resign yourself, Israel, that you’re going to have to bear this yoke for quite a while and seek a new way of being in this world and living with your God.
The temptation when bad things happen and our lives aren’t going according to plan, is to react by spending all of our energy on changing our circumstances instead of allowing the stripping away of our regular existence to cause us to find a deeper, perhaps more authentic, way of relating to God.
Jeremiah, speaking on behalf of God, tells the Israelites that they should “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile…for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”
He reassures Israel that God has not abandoned her at all and that this dreadful situation in which she now finds herself is serving to make God known in places God would otherwise not be known and is, in the process, serving to make Israel herself a more mature people.
“O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!”
Yet, let us be very careful here. The fact that oppression exists in the world and that God can make good come out of it never justifies it, and the church must continue to do everything it can to rid the world of it. But, the fact remains that the oppressive weight of the cross will at some level always remain as long as fallen humanity is a part of this broken world and sometimes we’re asked to bear its weight.
Jesus Christ came not to save us from the cross but to save us through the cross.
Think of St. Paul, the one who told us to be thankful in all things. This is the same Paul who, writing to Timothy, relates the many hardships he suffered for the sake of the gospel, even being chained like a criminal. Yet, even in this, he gave thanks because God was at work bringing the saving power of Christ to those who would not encounter it if it weren’t for those very chains.
Paul’s heart of gratitude was not that of a babe or adolescent in Christ whose gratitude is determined by what one does or does not receive from God but of one fully mature who knew how to be grateful in any circumstance. What happened to Paul that allowed him to be so unconditionally grateful? One thing is certain, it wasn’t simply something he just decided to do one day!
The Scriptures make clear that it was the encounter he had of the revelation of God’s corresponding unconditional love and mercy to one who so utterly did not deserve it, recounted three times in Acts and referenced by Paul himself in Galatians.
We don’t often associate humility with St. Paul, but I don’t think we should allow his bold confidence to be mistaken for personal arrogance. Paul was not confident in himself. His confidence came from a much deeper place. His heart, like the heart of all the great saints, had become utterly humbled and held captive by the love of God he found in Christ. Literally nothing else mattered than this love and making this love known. It owned him, it defined him, it possessed him! And if his personal inconvenience or suffering meant that this love would be magnified, then, thanks be to God…so be it.
So, gratitude isn’t just a choice we make when we wake up each morning. Gratitude, especially unconditional gratitude, is what happens when a heart that was once trapped in its own broken world and maybe even antagonistic to the things of God is embraced nonetheless by God’s overwhelming love and mercy…when one undergoes the transforming power of the cross and rises to the freedom of no longer being one’s own but God’s from whom nothing in this world can separate us.
Let us not be mistaken, God is calling us to much more than a life where we simply return thanks for favors granted. The call is to a far more radical way of being with God in this world…one that transcends the quid pro quo mentality that characterizes much of human, if not Christian, existence.
Like the heart of St. Paul wholly possessed of the love of God, I think of another saint which the church will remember this upcoming Saturday, the great Teresa of Avila, who recounts in her autobiography the experience, which Bernini helped make famous, of the event when she is pierced with the Cherubim's arrow. She writes, “I saw in his hands a long dart of gold, and at the end of the iron there seemed to me to be a little fire. This I thought he thrust through my heart several times, and that it reached my very entrails. As he withdrew it, I thought it brought them with it, and left me all burning with a great love of God. So great was the pain, that it made me give those moans; and so utter the sweetness that this sharpest of pains gave me, that there was no wanting it to stop, nor is there any contenting of the soul with less than God.”
This is mystical language of the highest order where pain and ecstasy coalesce in one overwhelming moment of absolute surrender and transcendence. This is the passion of the cross and the bliss of the resurrection in one transformative encounter where nothing is left for the heart to desire but God and where gratitude for such a great gift is the heart’s only response…no matter what!
And, yet, while we may never have such an intense mystical encounter as a St. Teresa or a St. Paul, over the course of our lifetime we do have such transformative moments of pain and ecstasy, of cross and resurrection, that likewise give us a taste of what life can be like when lived totally in the new creation of God’s love. It is there, and only there, that God’s grace abounds no matter what the circumstance and no matter what hell we face and where we, along with St. Paul and St. Teresa, can in all things with bold freedom offer our lives of gratitude to God.
In this Eucharist, may the veil be rent, and may we see in the crucified and pierced Christ the gratitude of God grateful for the opportunity of showing forth unconditional mercy and love in the flowing blood and water from the Savior’s side…and with Teresa be pierced straight through the heart that such a love is ours!
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