Sermon for Quinquagesima Sunday, 2021
Homily for Quinquagesima Sunday
February 14, 2021
Fr. Tony Melton
I’ve had an experience a few times while being married to Vandi. This experience has happened between 5 and 10 times throughout the 14 years of our marriage. We will be going about our day, and I will be struck with the realization that she is a different person than me. This might sound very strange to you, and that probably means that you are a much better person than I am. For about a minute or so, I’ve felt the clearest apprehension of her as an individual, distinct from me, with her own story and fears and hopes and wounds. Every time it has happened, and she can tell you this, I am moved to say, “Oh my goodness, you are a different person than me.”
I have come to interpret these episodes as gifts from God, who is the perfect communion of three distinct persons, the perfection of love in that communion. Within the Triune God is the perfect apprehension of the Other, which is Love. To love to is to truly see the Other, and in that full apprehension of the Other in their Otherness, to desire their good fully.
Our texts today are the Epistle and the Gospel, namely, St. Paul’s Ode to Love and the story of the blind beggar. The theme for Quinquagesima is Love. The fact that today is Valentine’s Day is serendipitous, perhaps providential. Our Collect begins “all our doings without Love are nothing worth.” The reason why this theme is given to us today, on Quinquagesima, is because we are about to enter into a season full of “our doings”, acts of “love”, and it is essential that we hear that all our deeds are worth nothing without love. All our fasting, prayers, almsgiving, roses, chocolates, and back rubs, are worth nothing without love.
This idea that love is the apprehension of the Other is found in both the Epistle and the Gospel readings. Let’s start with the Gospel. Jesus is taking the twelve up to Jerusalem and is explaining, in detail, all that will happen to him. “For [the Son of Man] shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on: and they shall scourge him, and put him to death: and the third day he shall rise again.” But they understood none of these things. They couldn’t see it. They could not see Jesus for who He was. They could only conceive of Jesus as they wanted him to be. They did not love Jesus. They loved the idea of Jesus, which meant that they loved themselves, which is not really love. So, they were blind.
They continue on the road, and what would have it, they run into a blind man begging by the side of the road, and he is screaming at the top of his lungs, “Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me.” And the disciples rebuked the man, “Don’t disturb the teacher!” Jesus has the man brought to him and asks, “What wilt thou that I shall do unto thee? And he said, Lord, that I may receive my sight. And Jesus said unto him, Receive thy sight: thy faith hath saved thee. And immediately he received his sight, and followed him, glorifying God.
What do we learn? First, we learn that the disciples were blind in two ways. They could not see who Jesus was and what He really came to do, and they could not see the blind beggar. To them, he was an annoyance. They ignored the fact that he was one of the only people to recognize Jesus as the Son of David, the Messiah. To them, he was a clop of human flesh, taking up space, breathing their air, inflicting their ears with pitiful screams, but they had no pity. He was not another person. He was not the Other. It was as if he didn’t exist at all. Second, we learn that sight is the gift of God. Jesus grants the man vision. Now he can literally see the Messiah, and the disciples.
St. Paul also speaks of love and vision in the Epistle. In 1 Corinthians 13, he says, “Love never faileth…For we know in part… But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away…For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” When perfect love is come, then shall we see clearly, face to face. We will know truly the Other, which is God. Love is not blind; it gives us sight!
Men, perhaps you’ve experienced this frequent marital mishap. The week is hectic. And even though your wife is an incredible homemaker, the house can every once in a blue moon get a little messy. Moved by a deep, real desire to have a clean kitchen, you clean it, poorly, with a slight bit of resentment, muttering under your breath. “I work all day…” Near the end, you realize what our Collect states so clearly, that “all our doings without Love are nothing worth.” So you try to sweeten up, flash a smile or a wink to your Bride, but it is too late. She knows that your labor was not done out of love, but out of resentment. And, just as the Collect says, it is worth nothing.
We have seen that Love is the ability to see the Other, and that at least for me, this is a rare and divinely given occurrence. What the example above illustrates is that it is extremely difficult to act truly out of love. So love is rare and love is hard. Even our best actions are often mixed with vainglory, or quid-pro-quo, or the desire to possess another person exclusively, either as a friend or as a spouse. It is also difficult to grow in love. I mean, look at the disciples. This story is in Luke chapter 18. Chapter 18! They had 18 chapters to learn not to treat blind beggars like that! They had 18 chapters to be able to come to such an understanding of the Messiah that we he said, “They are going to beat me, spit on me, crucify me, and then I will be raised from the dead”, that they wouldn’t say, “I don’t get it.” But they had not love. They could not see. Not yet.
St. Paul also communicates in his own way the difficulty of acting out of true love, or possessing the virtue of love. He says, “though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not Love, it profiteth me nothing.” You’d think that giving away all one’s possessions to feed the poor, or dying a martyr’s death by fire, would automatically qualify as a loving act. Yet we learn from the passage that even great “doings” such as these can be without love, and if so, are worth nothing.
And lest we take comfort in thinking we possess love when we do not, the very description of love by St. Paul confirms that true Love, true perception of the Other, true desire for the Other’s Good, is far beyond any of our reach. “Love suffereth long, and is kind; Love envieth not; Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth.”
Where does this leave us? We have seen that love empowers the soul to truly see the Other, both God, the Cross, and our Neighbor. We have seen that love is extremely difficult to possess, and impossible to attain to. And the clear warning of Quinquagesima Sunday is that without this love, all our doings, all our disciplines and acts of Mercy, are worth nothing. What are we to do with this?
The answer is simple. We are to play the part of the blind begger and cry out to God to have mercy on us, to remove the blindness of selfishness and give us a vision of the Other. I commend to you the beggar’s prayer, which is perhaps the most frequently said prayer in the history of the Church, “Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me.”
Or, pray the Collect for this week. “O LORD, who hast taught us that all our doings without Love are nothing worth; Send thy Holy Ghost, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of Love.” Notice that our only hope for acquiring Love comes from God’s action through the Holy Spirit. The only way to attain to the unreachable description of Love in 1 Corinthians 13 is for God, who is Love, to pour into our hearts His very nature. How can all your doings this Lent be of great worth? Pray to the Lord your God to grant you that most excellent gift of Love.
And, lastly, of course, receive the love of God in the Eucharist. There is no greater love in all the world than the gift of His Body and Blood for you. When we receive Him, we dwell in Him and He in us. Just like with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, the Eucharist opens our eyes to behold Him face to face, to perceive each other as distinct persons, and to love one another, even as we are loved.
I leave you with Fr. Farrer’s Paragraph on Quinquagesima, a great devotional resource for the Liturgical Year.
“WHAT is this gift of Love? I stand before the altar today, I spread out my hands as though to call down something from the skies, and I ask for Love. In asking I say that unless I receive it, I may seem to myself to be alive, but God will see that I am dead. Am I dead, then, or am I alive in his eyes? Have I this gift? Will God give it me? What is it, to begin with? Not only doing the decent and helpful thing, for, says Christ’s apostle, I might go to the extreme of visible generosity, I might give all my goods to feed the poor, and yet lack Love. Still less is it mere tolerance and a show of amiability. It means that a caring for God and my neighbour becomes the stuff of my being, the mainspring of my will, not something joined on from outside. God does not have love, he is love, and to have love we also must become it. Why then, if to be alive I must have love thus, it is plain enough that I am dead. Let me be dead; I come to this sacrament to take part in the resurrection. I throw myself into the hands of God, and God is known to be God by this token: he raises the dead.” Amen.