Quinquagesima

Luke 18:31-46 - Quinquagesima - February 15, 2015         
Hide & Seek

+

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”  These words of St. Paul, which we heard in our Epistle lesson, have a very simple meaning.  He’s saying that just as one grows up from being a child who knows very little about the world to becoming an adult who knows much more, so also our understanding of God’s love in Christ in this earthly life is but a shadow of what we will know when we are glorified in heaven.  In other words, just as grownups know more than children, so also, Christians in heaven who live by sight know more than Christians on earth who live by faith and hope.  Paul’s analogy is a simple one.  When adulthood comes, childhood passes away.  So also, “when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.”  Now our knowledge of God’s love is partial.  In heaven it will be perfect.  Faith and hope will cease and give way to sight.  But love, which we know even now, will endure forever. 

Consider what we sing in the hymn:

Now I may know
Both joy and woe,
Someday I shall see clearly
That He hath loved me dearly.

It’s hard to see it now.  Now we suffer.  And in our suffering, we see only dimly, like in a foggy mirror, how much God truly loves us.  For now, we wade through the murky cloud of pain and sorrow where there are confusing and contradictory signals.  God’s word says he loves us.  Our joys confirm it, and we say, yes, it is clear he does.  But then our woes seem to contradict it, and we think, no, it doesn’t look like he does.  God’s word says he forgives us, and declares us righteous for Jesus’ sake, and gives us eternal life.  Some moments our faith is strong and we say amen with all our heart.  Other moments, as guilt and lingering shame afflict our conscience, and even ungodly desires tug at our hearts, we wonder whether he really forgives us at all, but only others who don’t sin so horribly and often.  We see dimly God’s love for us.  Dimly, not because God’s word is unclear, but because we are sinners who are constantly tempted by the devil, the world, and our sinful flesh to doubt God’s word.  God’s word shines brightly.  But because we are sinners who think and reason like sinners, our life is beset with every sort of trouble and affliction.  This is why God gives us his word so that we might learn to think and reason and speak like his own beloved children who trust him. 

This life of labor will soon be left behind us like a dream that is past, or like the forgotten memories of early childhood.  Christ will bring us to himself.  And when he does, our foolishness and weakness and struggles of earthly life will be gone forever.  We will put them aside like a man puts aside his childish ways.  This is what Paul is talking about.  As he also says: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” 

When Paul tells us that when he became a man he put away childish ways, he is not telling us to put away childish ways.  He’s not telling us to stop speaking, and thinking, and reasoning like children.  Taken out of context, it sounds like that’s what he’s saying.  But really he’s saying the exact opposite.  He’s telling us that we are children and that the only way we can know God’s love is to continue on as children.  We can’t expect to see God’s love any more clearly than what God’s word grants us in the gospel of Jesus Christ.  We dare not put away childish things until we are perfected in heaven.  For now, we depend on the word of faith and the hope of glory.  We depend on our childish ways of relying on God’s promise despite the fact that we can’t see it, and despite the fact that things appear contrary. 

And yet, with these words, St. Paul assures us that one day we will be perfected.  One day we will be able to see things through clear eyes.  He’s giving us the encouragement that a mother gives her son who is having a hard time coping with his father’s discipline: You’ll understand someday, child.  Now you don’t see it clearly; but you will.  Your father loves you, and he wants what is best for you.  That’s why he deals with you harshly.  You’ll understand when you have put away your childish ways; but for now, remember that you are his child, and he loves you.  The child who receives this grows in respect and affection toward his father.  The child who rejects this grows bitter. 

If we try to put away our childish ways right now, we would be lost.  We would grow to hate our Father in heaven.  If we imagined that we could already see clearly, we would be blind.  His grace and mercy would be hidden from us.  But this is what people do.  God chastens those whom he loves as a father chastens his son.  But people get tired of being treated like children.  They demand that God be accountable for the pain and suffering that he allows in this world.  They refuse to learn patiently from God, but denounce him, saying, How can a just and loving God permit so much pain and sorrow?  And so by refusing to trust that God knows what is best as a loving Father, they put away their childish ways and act as though they were all grown up.  Pain is bad, they say.  A good God wouldn’t make me suffer.  So they imagine that they see things clearly.  They become blind.  The true mystery of God’s love is hidden from them, because they put away their childish ways before the time.  And then they invent their own idea of love that has no room for suffering and the cross. 

But this love of theirs is a false love.  Love that takes the good and refuses the bad is a love that lives for itself.  It’s a love that is based on self-merit – as though we were entitled to God’s favor.  It’s a love that does not take into account the real issue that love must address, namely, sin and the awful debt that we owe to God.  But God takes this debt seriously.  God, who is love, reveals his answer to love’s most pressing question.  He reveals it in the bitter suffering of Christ, his beloved Son.  My dad often quotes these lines from the Norwegian poet, Henry Ibsen:

Of what the paltering world calls love,
I will not know, I cannot speak;
I know but His who reigns above,
And His is neither mild nor weak;
Hard even unto death is this,
And smiting with its awful kiss.
What was the answer of God’s love
Of old, when in the olive grove
In anguish-sweat His own Son lay;
And prayed, O, Take this cup away?
Did God take from him then the cup?
No, child; His Son must drink it up! 

And here we see true love.  It is a hard love.  It is the love of the eternal Father for his eternal Son.  It is the love of the eternal God for us.  And we see this eternal love revealed where the Son bears the Fathers wrath in our place.  It is God’s wrath against our sin.  But Jesus bears it — because he loves us.  We see God’s love in miserable suffering and abandonment on the cross.  Only this love can rescue us from sin, because only this love gives an answer to sin.  The answer is Christ.  The answer is that Christ has borne our punishment.  He who lived the perfect and pleasing life, who knew his Father with unclouded mind and saw what his Father willed with un-dimmed and perfect vision – this One did what his Father gave him to do.  He gave his life to redeem us.  “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”   This is love.  As the hymn puts it:

My song is love unknown,
My Savior’s love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I, that for my sake
My Lord should take, frail flesh and die? 

Jesus spoke of this love.  He spoke remarkably clear.  What the prophets had made plain, Jesus stated with no ambiguity:

“Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man will be accomplished.  For He will be delivered to the Gentiles and will be mocked and insulted and spit upon.  They will scourge Him and kill Him. And the third day He will rise again.”

And yet his disciples understood none of these things.  It was hidden from them.  They didn’t know what was spoken.  Not even dimly.  And why?  It’s because they had a worldly view of love.  Instead of love, they heard Jesus speak of hate.  Instead of love, they heard of suffering and mockery.  They heard death.  They heard a resurrection from death, but they thought they were already alive.  That’s why it was hidden from them.  They couldn’t recognize love, because they didn’t recognize the love they needed.  

What the disciples needed was to know their blindness.  They needed to see their need for mercy instead of judging Jesus’ words by their own false understanding of how love should look.  This is what we need too. 

St. Paul says, “now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”  But this doesn’t mean that faith and hope are unimportant and that love trumps them both.  Not at all.  Just as the Apostle does not tell us to put away childish ways, but instead to embrace our childish ways until we are perfected in heaven, so also St. Paul does not tell us to abandon faith and hope in favor of love.  Rather, he tells us to embrace faith and hope for the sake of love.  If we try to know love apart from faith in Christ, we will not know true love.  We will come up with a false love.  If we aim for a love apart from the hope for eternal life that Christ has purchased and secured by his death and resurrection, then our quest is vain.  As true as it is that faith and hope are empty apart from love, so also love is meaningless and false if we lack faith and hope.  Love is not accessible except by faith in God’s word and by the sure hope that he will rescue us from our loveless misery. 

This is what the blind man had going for him that the disciples did not.  He could not see.  His burden was his greatest advantage.  He could not trust in what his eyes beheld because his eyes beheld only darkness.  And this is what the disciples and we need to behold as well.  We cannot lean on our own evaluation of our situation in life.  We must recognize how dimly we are truly able to see.  Instead of relying on our own understanding of love and our own ability to love, we must rely on the love that God promises us; we must rely on his word that we hear. 

The blind man heard that Jesus was near – Jesus who had compassion on sinners.  He cried out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”  He was told to be quiet.  But he stuck to his childish ways and cried out all the more: Kyrie Eleison, which is, Lord have mercy.  Jesus asked him what he wanted.  And he knew.  I want to see.  And Jesus gave him sight.  We know what we want.  We want to see.  We want to see that God loves us in the midst of our sorrow and pain.  And this is what Jesus grants us.  He shows us in his own suffering the love that God has for those who suffer.  He shows us in his pain and death the salvation he wins for those who are perishing. 

Love to the loveless.  He sees us in our sin.  He sees us in our grumbling.  He sees us in our impatience toward God and others, in our failure to be kind, in our pride and arrogance.  He sees us in our selfish ambitions that set the needs of others aside.  He sees us in our rejoicing over unrighteousness and our setting the truth aside.  He sees us in our loveless refusal to bear all things, to believe all things, to hope all things, and to endure all things.  He sees it.  And yet his love for us doesn’t end. 

Because the love we need is not the love that we are able to accomplish.  The love we need is the love that Christ has shown to us.  He covers our sins.  He does not judge us.  He sees us in our blind pride and gives us a glimpse of the eternal love God has for us by rendering us righteous in his sight.  He restores our sight by giving us faith in his word and promising us the hope of glory.  “Now [we] know in part; [but soon we] shall know fully, even as [we] have been fully known.”  For now, we keep our childish ways, we trust God in faith and hope until we know even better the love that never ends.  Amen.