Sermon for the 13th of October - Twentieth Sunday after Trinity

The Christian journey has sometimes been described as a movement toward sharing in the divine life of the Trinity. Jesus’ prayer in John’s gospel, at the Last Supper, was that his disciples would share ‘in the glory which I had with you before the world was made’ (John 17.5). That’s the invitation.

Being made in the image and likeness of God, humans have an inbuilt instinct for seeing and loving what is real and true. A kind of magnetic turning in the direction of God, the source of love and life. It’s like the iron filings twitching at the approach of a magnet. Or to change metaphor, a worm under the soil making its way towards the light.

This is at the heart of who we are. But things aren’t quite so simple because we live in a broken world of constraints and challenges.

There are two bundles of instincts that move us away from a Godward direction. Plato famously used the image of a chariot drawn by two horses, with the charioteer struggling to keep it on track. One of horses could be described as aggression; and the other, desire.

The first is what pushes people or things away from us, driven by a fear that the world is going to violate of absorb us. The desire was associated physically with the chest. So, you might beat your breast to show your strength or dominance. Cast your mind back to the Olympic games this summer, and you might remember the winners of some of the races doing exactly this.

The other horse is the opposite: the urge not to push away but to consume. To absorb people or things into my narrative and my needs. This impulse to acquire and consume was physically associated with the lower belly. And it’s seen in crowds of people heading not to church on Sunday but to the great cathedral-like shopping centres.

So, a threefold pattern – the instinctive drawing towards God, plus the two bundles of reactive habits pulling us in different directions. And the Christian life is to find a balancing point of truthfulness and it’s connected with love.  Love is what happens when you stop being aggressive and greedy, and stop to look at your whole self.

Rowan Williams puts if like this: ‘Love has room to flower when you stop either pushing reality away or making reality serve your purpose. In that space, love grows.’ (Passions of the Soul, p. xxxi)

What has this to do with today’s Gospel reading?

It has a rich young man running to Jesus and falling at his feet. He recognises that something is missing in his life. Despite his possessions and pieties, he is consumed with a longing for more. Perhaps like the twitching magnet, he has the sort of hunger that finds him sprinting to the source of life and kneeling there in supplication. He recognises that his life is insufficient, and something he can barely name draws him to Jesus.

Jesus ‘looks at the young man and loves him’. There’s a lovely tenderness here. It’s the loving gaze of a God who cherishes our earnestness, our fervour, our trying. Yet Jesus’s love also challenges. Jesus’s love for the young man doesn’t leave him where he is.

God’s love holds a mirror to our delusions and our disordered affections. God’s love shows us what we really are. And he doesn’t do this to shame us, but to deliver us. The Hebrew’s reading describes this in such a way that it sounds painful:

The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

And for this young man it’s too painful. After a conversation around the rich young man’s piety, keeping the rules and practicing the rituals, it comes down to this. Divest yourself of your wealth; give it to the poor, then follow me. That was too much, and so the story concludes: ‘he went away sad’.

The encounter between Jesus and the rich ruler isn’t simply about wealth. It’s about anything that hinders our relationship with God. Rowan William’s excellent book, Passions of the Soul, takes a look at some of those things that blocks our spiritual growth.

Drawing from the Eastern monastic tradition he identifies eight passions of the soul: greed, lust, avarice, anger, dejection, listlessness, self-esteem, and pride. These passions aren’t wrong in themselves, but they are “ways in which natural impulses can be distorted and can cloud our perception”.

At heart, it’s an invitation to look with clarity at what might hinder us from following Christ more deeply, be that money, like the rich young man, or something else.

I wonder what we need to let go of in our lives so as to allow ourselves to follow Christ more fully. What is that we hold so sacred? What is the “one thing” I lack, the one thing that might cause me to walk away if God points it out to me and says, “Let it go?"

Jesus lets the young man go because that’s the requirement of love. Jesus doesn’t run after the young man. Love lets go. Love bides its time. But all the while, love dreams of return, because even when a situation appears impossible to us mortals, ‘for God, all things are possible’.

Returning to Plato’s chariot. As we hold on to the reigns of our chariot through life, being pulled this way and that, let us keep an absolute focus on that magnetic north. Because that is the direction that leads to God. It’s the path that will lead to life, it’s the path of true freedom, and it’s the path that will lead us to God’s loving embrace. 

Reference:

Rowan William, Passions of the Soul

Debie Thomas, 10 October, 2021