ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

3rd Sunday before Lent - Evensong

Fr Ivan Aquilina

We follow in the footsteps of Christ as his disciples in the context of our human experience. When we worship God we use all our senses together with our intellect and love. Following His Son is done also by using all our senses, our intellect and our heart. It is the intellect that enables to know what we know of God, to perceive and accept Divine Revelation. It is therefore the intellect that informs our hearts to love Him unconditionally. The intellect is constantly formed and re-formed and reacts and responds to the experience around us. Our human experience is of the essence in our journey of Faith.
This means that there will be a struggle, sometimes positive and sometimes negative. The struggle is positive when our human experience informs and enlightens our discipleship and in turn our discipleship enlightens our human experience. The struggle is negative when our context dictates the form of discipleship we are to have.

The two parts of this struggle are presented to us in tonight’s readings.

The first lesson taken from the book Numbers shows us the negative side of this struggle.
The chosen people are literally on their faith journey. They left the comfort of the known to the wilderness of the unknown, an experience we all have when we follow God’s calling. They left behind the relative comfort of working in Egypt were at least they had grain and figs and vines and pomegranates and water. They journeyed in the desert were all these comforts were taken away. Comparing their freedom here with their slavery in Egypt they say that dying in slavery seems more honourable. Their immediate experience was unhappiness, hunger and thirst and discontent. This experience was influencing their discipleship negatively as they lost trust in God and His messenger: Moses. They complained and demanded rather than prayed and asked. They focused on the immediate situation rather than on the bigger picture; on their immediate needs rather than the security of their children and their children’s children. Their human experience touched negatively their discipleship; they focused on themselves rather than on the providence of God.

God is a compassionate God and He provided for them the essential: water. They had to do without the grain and figs and vines and pomegranates. For that water they paid a high price, God respected their decision of focusing on the immediate rather than reaching the Promised Land. Their household of faith was built on sand rather than rock. The waters of Meribah are the condemnation of the Chosen People. This happens to us when we loose sight of our heavenly city and get to much immersed in the transient world around us as if it was our final end. It works the other way round: our heavenly city informs and sheds light on how to sanctify and purify the present age.

An example of this is given to us by St Paul in our second reading taken from the letter to the Philippians. This is a model of the positive tension and struggle between our human experience and our discipleship. Paul considers that his context and whatever gains he had are secondary to the love of his life: Jesus. The main driving force for Paul and those of us who follow the Master is “knowing Christ Jesus our Lord”. This relationship is based on faith which leads to Resurrection. Resurrection is the gate of our heavenly Jerusalem. Conforming to Christ and allowing this higher relationship to inform our context is participating in the Easter Mystery of Christ and breaking open the flood of pure water, salvation in Christ, to restore and refresh our human experience. Lifting up our eyes to see what is above is the secret; listen to Paul: “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead”.

This is the message for us tonight. We can not allow our human experience to dictate on our discipleship. It is our life with God in Jesus that informs us how to transform our human experience into salvation. Like Paul this comes at a great personal cost as we would rather do what takes our fancy. Our commonwealth is in heaven were Christ will subject all things to himself. We are called to be like that rock in the aridness of Meribah. As instruments of God we are to dispense the water of salvation rather than allow the desert to make us as dry as rocks. We bring to God our humanity, He changes it into His divinity.

This was summed up beautifully by St Anselm: Fides querens intellectum. Faith seeks the intellect so that the intellect can give shape to our life of faith.