A Sermon for All Saints' Day
Oct 31 at King's College Halifax, Nov 3 at Christ Church Shelburne
“They loved not their lives unto the death” (Revelation 12:11). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.
The 2020 film Nomadland is the only Oscar Best Picture winner in which real people appear as themselves. The film straddles the line between drama and documentary. They are nomads, people who live on the road in trailers and RVs, working for a few weeks or months at a time when they need cash, gathering occasionally in vacant lots and trailer parks, and always promising to meet each other “down the road.”
In the documentary segments they speak in their own voices and tell stories around the campfire of how they ended up on the road. Most of them have other places they could go: parents or adult children to stay with, places they used to have apartments they could afford, even if barely. But they all reached a crisis in which conventional living wasn’t meeting their spiritual needs anymore. Some of them had relationship trauma; others simply became disillusioned with the consumeristic status quo. And the answer for them all was perpetual pilgrimage.
In today’s Epistle we meet a great assembly around the throne of God, engaged in perpetual liturgy. St John is asked identify them, but he cannot, so the heavenly priest answers, “These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:14). They are the martyrs who, shedding their own blood, found it to be none other than the very blood of the Lamb whom they had followed through life and death. They are the nameless saints of the great persecutions in whose honour Christians first celebrated All Saints Day.
But this is not the first time that we have met this assembly. On September 29, the Epistle for Michaelmas was also from Revelation. There, the assembly is a band of brothers against whom the Accuser has no power because, we hear, they “overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their martyrdom, and they loved not their lives unto the death” (Revelation 12:11).
Does martyrdom involve hating your life? Have we dug up a bitter and masochistic root at the heart of the Christian faith?
The classic Christian answer is that the martyr doesn’t hate life as such, but is willing to give up a lower life to attain a higher life. When forced to choose, the martyr prefers the life of the kingdom to life in this world which is, in any case, passing away and being made new. This answer is not only correct, but it’s actually nearer at hand in the text than we might think.
There are three words in the New Testament which are all translated by the single English word “life”: psyche, bios, and zoe. Out of context it would be standard to translate psyche as “soul,” not in the sense of “the immortal soul, the intellect,” but as “mortal soul, animal soul,” the moving force of the living organism. Psyche is the site of the passions—hence psychology, the science of human emotional interiority. Bios means just what it sounds like: biology, the material “stuff” of life, and so by extension (and this is actually its most common use in the New Testament) the “goods of life,” the possessions by which we live. Bios also comes to denote the genre of biography: in the ancient world, the “Life of Alexander,” for example, means his biography. Third, zoe is the word always used in constructions like “eternal life,” or (from John’s Gospel) “in him was life” (John 1:4). Zoe is life understood in its principle, which for theologians means that Life is a divine name.
So when Revelation says that that the martyrs “loved not their lives unto the death," the word used for “life” is of course not zoe, but psyche. The mortal life of animal soul, the life of nourishment, growth, decay, and death, was not so precious to them that they wouldn’t set it aside to gain Life. They lay down their psyche not out of hatred for life, but out of love for it, love for zoe. The “word of their martyrdom” is that life is not lost when passionate soul is given laid, but that it is gained.
Without this insight, fasting and every other spiritual discipline is very difficult to understand. When we fast, when we keep vigil, when we live simply, we give up one thing to gain something else which competes for the same space in our life and attention. What we gain is far more valuable than what we give up. We take less of what we share with the animals (psyche) that we may take more of what we share with the angels (zoe).
Although Revelation tells us that the martyrs “loved not their souls (psyches) unto death,” it might just as well have said that they “loved not their goods (bioi) unto death.” Jesus assures his disciples in Matthew 19 that “every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake”—that is, all the stuff of bios, both the stuff of daily sustenance and the stuff of one’s biography—”shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life (zoe)” (v 29). On this St Jerome comments with luminous simplicity that “the meaning is this: that everyone who for our Saviour’s sake hath forsaken earthly things, shall receive spiritual things. Which things, being rightly weighed against earthly things, are as though an hundredfold were weighed against one” (Lesson ix Of Abbots, Hermits, and Monks).
Katy and I recently acquired a collection of children’s books about the saints to read with our daughters. Whatever Theodora has got out of them, I have learned a lot. Something has come back to me many times: even the saints that attracted a following in their lifetimes were, by and large, men and women who rejected the conventions of their own biographies. I think of St Sophia of Kleisoura, a Greek woman who, displaced by the upheavals of the early 20th century, widowed of her husband and bereaved of her son, chose not to rebuild. Instead, she found an abandoned monastery, slept in the dubious shelter of its chimney, and prayed. Her biography ends there: she never moved again, never married again, had no employment. But it was also the beginning of a rich inner life which overflowed in words of wisdom and gifts of healing. Her biography ended, but her life began.
I opened this sermon talking about nomads to illustrate just this point. It is possible to reject the conventions of your own biography. Your life does not have to be about growth and acquisition and ego-construction. You will be alright. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these” (Matthew 6:28–29). If you refuse to toil and spin, the Lord of the martyrs will clothe you better than he clothes the flowers: you will wear a white robe, and in this life and the next you will be before the throne of God, and the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be your shepherd (Revelation 7:14–15).
Komentarze