Passing Through

The Collect for this Fourth Sunday after Trinity is one of the great prayers of the Western Church. It comes to us through Cranmer from the ancient Sacramentary, shaped by fifteen centuries of use, and it prays with the kind of honest simplicity that only long experience can produce. It does not ask for an easy road. It does not ask that the temporal be taken away. It asks only for this: that we may so pass through things temporal that we finally lose not the things eternal.

The very structure of that prayer discloses the Christian's situation in this world. We are people who are passing through. Not visitors merely, who keep themselves apart from the common life; not citizens who have settled here as if this were our final home; but pilgrims — those who live fully within the temporal order and are deeply affected by it, who groan with its groaning and are sustained by its good gifts, yet whose faces are set toward a city not built with hands. The whole difficulty of Christian life is packed into the petition: that the passage does not become a forgetfulness, that the goods of time do not crowd out the goods of eternity.

But what does that actually look like — this passing through without losing? How does a person live fully in the world of suffering and ordinary duty without letting it become the only world there is? Saint Paul, in this morning's Epistle, gives us the answer. And it begins not with a technique but with a reckoning.

I. The whole creation groaneth

Saint Paul, writing to the Romans, meets us precisely at that difficulty. In the eighteenth verse of the eighth chapter he speaks not as a man removed from temporal suffering but as one who has felt it at every point. I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. That word reckon is important. It is the word of a man who has laid two things side by side — what he suffers now and what is to be disclosed then — and made a deliberate calculation. He is not denying the pain. He has been beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, and deserted. He carried, by his own testimony, a thorn in the flesh — some affliction he prayed three times to have removed, and was answered not with removal but with a promise: My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. He is not making a virtue of stoicism. He is making an arithmetic of hope, and the one who keeps the accounts is not Paul himself but the Spirit given to him.

Then he opens the lens wide, past his own biography, to the whole created order. The earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. There is something in the creation itself, Paul says, that is straining forward, as a man on tiptoe strains to see over the heads of a crowd. The creation was not made to be as it is. It was subjected to vanity — to frustration, to futility, to the experience of being less than it was made to be — not of its own choice, but in the hope that it too shall be delivered. And so it groans. And so do we. Not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.

Some of us feel that keenly. We have been baptised, confirmed, communicated year upon year — and we still carry grief, and fear, and the sense that something is not yet right. Is that a failure of faith? Has something gone wrong? No. That is a word of great pastoral tenderness to those who sometimes wonder why the Christian life does not feel like the end of all longing. It does not feel that way because it is not that yet. The firstfruits are real. The Spirit is truly given. The presence of Christ in the Sacrament is genuine. And yet we are still in via — still on the road, still passing through, still waiting for what the Collect calls the things eternal, the things that shall not be lost when time itself is gathered up at last into the eternal morning. The Spirit does not remove us from the road; he equips us for it. He is the provision for the journey, not the end of it.

The Gospel does not contradict this. It shows us what that Spirit-equipped life looks like from the outside. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. The word therefore is doing a great deal of work. It connects the mercy we are commanded to show with the mercy we have already received — which is to say, with our whole condition as people who live by grace rather than desert, sustained by Another's strength rather than our own. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven. These are not rewards dangled before reluctant virtue. They describe what naturally flows from a life kept open to the Spirit's sustaining work. The man who is daily renewed by that mercy does not stand over his neighbour with a magnifying glass, because he is too aware of his own need to pretend to a superiority he does not possess. The man who points at the mote in his brother's eye while carrying a beam in his own has not simply forgotten good manners; he has stopped relying on the mercy of God. He is attempting the passage on his own resources — and it has made him blind. That is the error the parable names: not hypocrisy as a character flaw, but the spiritual blindness that results from self-sufficiency.

This is how we pass through things temporal without losing things eternal. Not by refusing to be in the world, but by being in the world as forgiven and forgiving people — people whose lives embody, in however small a measure, the mercy of the Father who rules and guides our passage.

II. We cannot but speak

So what does this passage look like in an actual human life? The Collect gives us the theology; the Gospel gives us the manner. But is there a person, a face, a biography we can point to and say: there is what passing through things temporal without losing things eternal actually looks like? There is. In fact there are two — and the Church has arranged them on either side of this day like a diptych, each panel illuminating the other.

Consider Saint Paul first, since he has just given us our Epistle. Here is a man who, before his conversion, was not merely indifferent to Christ but actively consumed with destroying those who bore his name. He held the cloaks at the stoning of Stephen. He entered houses and dragged men and women to prison. He breathed, as the Acts of the Apostles tells us, threatenings and slaughter against the disciples. And then Christ met him on the Damascus road — not because Paul deserved it, not because Paul sought it, but because grace is, by definition, unearned. The man who had been a vessel of hatred was made, by that same sovereign mercy, into the Apostle to the Gentiles: the one sent precisely to the people most unlike the Israel he had been zealous to defend. There is something almost ironic in the economy of God. The man most determined to contain the gospel within the boundaries of one people became the instrument of its universal proclamation. And he carried his thorn the whole way. The Spirit did not spare him suffering; the Spirit made him sufficient for it.

And then there is Saint Peter, whose feast falls tomorrow on the twenty-ninth of June, and whose Eve the Church keeps this very evening.

The Prophet Ezekiel is sent by the Lord to the house of Israel with a message they may or may not receive. Go, speak unto the house of Israel with my words. The commission is unconditional. Ezekiel is not told that the people will listen. He is told that whether they listen or refuse, they will know that a prophet has been among them. The prophet's faithfulness does not depend on the audience's response. He speaks because he is sent; the hearing belongs to God.

The Evening lessons appointed for this Eve — Psalm 118, Ezekiel 3, and Acts 4 — are not incidental. They are a catechesis in the apostolic vocation, and they shed a particular light on the morning's Collect. But Peter himself is the living catechesis. Where Paul's obstacle was the violence of his hatred, Peter's was the weight of his guilt. This is a man who had walked on water and sunk; who had confessed Christ as the Son of the living God and then, within the week, told him that suffering was beneath him; who had sworn he would die before he denied — and then denied three times before the cock crowed, and went out and wept bitterly. He knew exactly what the beam in his own eye felt like. He had no grounds for standing over anyone.

And yet. The risen Christ did not merely forgive Peter in the abstract. He sought him out, fed him breakfast on a beach, and asked him three times — once for each denial — Lovest thou me? Each answer was met not with a rebuke but with a commission: Feed my sheep. The guilt was not erased as though it had never happened; it was transformed into the very material of Peter's vocation. The man who had been tormented by his own failure became, by the power of Christ and the Holy Ghost, the Chief of the Apostles — the rock on which the Church was built, the first preacher at Pentecost, the one who opened the door to the Gentiles at the house of Cornelius.

It is that Peter — restored, Spirit-filled, carrying both his memory of failure and his commission to feed — whom we find in the Acts of the Apostles standing before the very council that had delivered his Lord to crucifixion. The rulers ask by what power or name the lame man has been healed. And Peter, filled with the Holy Ghost, answers them without flinching: Be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand here before you whole.

When the rulers threaten them and command them to speak no more in this name, Peter and John make the answer that has echoed through every generation of martyrs and confessors since: Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye. For we cannot but speak the things we have seen and heard.

Here is Saint Peter passing through things temporal in the precise manner the Collect has asked for. He is not indifferent to the temporal world — the lame man who was healed had sat at the Beautiful Gate for forty years; Peter saw him and stopped. He is not insulated from temporal danger — the council has real power to imprison and to kill. But he passes through both the mercy and the menace of the temporal order with his face toward the eternal, because what he has seen and heard has made forgetfulness impossible. The resurrection of Jesus Christ has reorganized his interior life in such a way that he cannot be silent about it, whatever the cost.

Psalm 118, which opens the Evening Office for this day, provides the voice in which all of this is sung: I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord. That is the psalm of the Passover, the psalm our Lord himself sang with his disciples on the night he was betrayed, the psalm the Church puts on the lips of the Apostle whose feast we keep. It is the voice of a man who has been pressed hard enough to understand that his life is not his own to lose, and free enough thereby to spend it without holding back.

The Collect, then, is not merely a prayer for safe passage through the inconveniences of temporal life. It is a prayer to be made into the kind of people who can do what these two men did: carry a thorn and make an arithmetic of hope; carry a memory of denial and let it become the ground of a deeper compassion; live mercifully, forgive as they have been forgiven, speak when they have been silenced. The hater became the apostle of love to all nations. The denier became the shepherd of the universal Church. If that is what the Spirit does with hatred and guilt, what might he do with the smaller failures and sorrows we carry? Thou being our ruler and guide — that is the whole secret. The passage is possible not because we are sufficient for it, but because the One who equips us for it has already proved, in Paul and in Peter, that his grace is.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen ✟