Readings

This morning’s collect:

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

It would be hard to improve on that collect as a guide to our lessons—and I’m not going to try. Rather, we’ll look at the collect, and then use it as a lens for looking at the lessons.

First, notice where the collect ends up: joy: “our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found.” God is seeking nothing less than our joy. C.S. Lewis nails it in The Screwtape Letters in Screwtape’s description of God:

“He’s a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a façade. Or only like foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it: at His right hand are ‘pleasures for evermore’. Ugh!” (Letter XXII)

Particularly as we approach Holy Week, we need to remember that the sorrow and suffering of Holy Week are on the way to something else: our joy and God’s.

To get to joy there’s work to be done, and that occupies the rest of the collect: “the unruly wills and affections of sinners.” Our wills and affections are “unruly” not only because they may run counter to God’s rule, but also because they’re very imperfect indicators of even what we really want. The British ethicist Oliver O’Donovan recently took this up: “We cannot take any of them [desires] at their face value. ‘It wasn’t what I really wanted!’ is the familiar complaint of a disappointed literalism. To all desire its appropriate self-questioning: what wider, broader good does this desire serve? How does it spring out of our strengths, and how does it spring out of our weaknesses? Where in relation to this desire does real fulfilment lie?”

Strange, isn’t it? In most areas our culture encourages us to be suspicious; three of our great secular “saints” are the masters of suspicion: Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. But when it comes to our desires that same culture encourages no suspicion. When a desire says “Jump!” my only appropriate response is “How high?” With a little more wisdom, when a desire appears, we might well ask “Well, what’s that about?”

Our collect asks God to “order” these desires: “Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise.” Both love and desire are in themselves good; if they can just be properly connected to appropriate objects! And, as the collect recognizes, loving God’s commands and desiring what God promises are not bad places to start.

Our first lesson, the promise of salvation in Jeremiah, deals with the people of God as a whole. God will make a new covenant. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” How this will happen is not explained. And while the New Testament (“the New Covenant”) picks up Jeremiah’s language, it is reticent about claiming too much. In the light of the history of the Church, that’s probably fortunate. That said, the collect’s “Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise” sounds very much like the interior change we need.

Our psalm continues the same themes. As you may recall, all of Ps 119, the longest of the psalms in the Psalter, is dedicated to the praise of the Law. The bottom line, again, is joy (note “delight” in vv 14, 16). And because of the joy and for the sake of future joy the psalmist immerses him- or herself in the Law, treasuring it, meditating on it, probing it, putting it into practice. (In passing, notice that the psalmist is assuming a certain amount of simple memorization, a practice that has too much fallen out of fashion in our tradition.)

In our New Testament lessons we watch the concerns of the collect play out in Jesus’ life. While there’s no suggestion that Jesus shares our sinfulness, it’s clear that even for Jesus obedience is not effortless. Hebrews tells us: “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and being made perfect he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him.”

Again, in the Gospel Jesus looking toward to his own death says “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” The other Gospels describe Jesus wrestling with the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane; this is John’s Gethsemane scene. “And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’?” This is how the collect’s “Grant your people grace to love what you command” plays out.

It has to do with the Father’s will, it has to do—and this is essentially to say the same thing—with the sort of world the Father created: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” This applies to Jesus’ followers; it applies equally to Jesus. Again, Jesus does not send us down a road on which he has not already walked.

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.