Words on the Word
The One and the Many
Sermon preached at Evensong at Pusey House this evening.
Psalm 74: There is no more any among us any that knoweth how long.
Deuteronomy 30: Call them to mind among the nations, whither the Lord hath driven thee.
Acts 17.16-34: May we know what this new doctrine is?
The problem of establishing the right relationship of particulars to universals, of the specific to the general has always exercised philosophers. It is not an abstract conundrum, though. It impinges on our lives tangibly. We see it in politics with painful intensity right now, as peoples and governments here and there strive to formulate statements of corporate identity with varying degrees of credibility: for how easy it is to slide from celebrations of patriotic ethos into mindless chauvinism! We see it, too, in the more intimate sphere of personal identity, where many, now, relinquish objective criteria and leave the statement of what something or someone is to pure preference, effectively atomising any meaningful notion of society.
Can Sacred Scripture help us out in this fix? Of course it can. It lists pitfalls and promises with that keen mixture of realism and elevation that typifies Holy Writ and helps us think in aspirational, hopeful terms, something few party manifestos these days, as far as I can see, manage to do.
Our reading from Deuteronomy lets us consider in retrospect Israel’s exodus by which Jacob’s descendants joined to an ethnically ‘mixed multitude’ (Ex 12.38) through trials and consolations became a people. The Lord enabled this process by three providential means: first, by shared experience, manifestations of divine power which Israel would retell its children till the end of time in collective anamnesis; secondly, by giving the law, which regulated life according to a horizontal and a vertical axis, the first teaching people to coexist in justice and delight, the second providing a model of right worship; then, thirdly, by confederative enterprise, notably the construction of the tabernacle for which people came forward, ‘every one whose spirit moved him’, bringing ‘offering to be used for the tent of meeting’ (Ex 35.21), some gold, acacia wood, skins or onyx stones, others practical or engineering skills, all participating as one in a work of creation that at once produced and sealed their unity.
We can easily see how possession of such great gifts — the remembrance, the commandments, God’s dwelling — might inspire a sense of entitlement. Awareness of being singularly blessed would seem, unto the ages of ages, to provide a guarantee of election. The assumption solidified, naturally, as people stood on the threshold of the land, about to settle into novel stability.
Well, God’s oracle denounces it as illusion. Election and belonging are not static possessions but dynamic components of a bilateral compact. One side, God’s is sure; the other, ours, is fickle. Faced with the choice between life and good on the one hand, death and evil on the other, it cannot be taken for granted, alas, that we shall choose what benefits us. To live well we must heed ever anew the call to step out of captivity, to follow God’s law, and to join in the building of his holy temple, ignoring lesser siren calls apt to distract and divert us. Is God’s heavenly word, in which all things live and move and have their being, alive in my heart as an active principle of motion and decision? Only if it is shall I be an agent of unification, not of division, a witness to a new humanity.
The Psalmist’s call Usquequo? — How long? — shows what perseverance is required of anyone resolved to fashion a life according to God’s call. Often we shall feel like the Biblical ‘owl among ruins’ (Psalm 102.6), hooting watchers in the night perched on the rubble of yesterday’s sureties. We must face an uncomfortable fact amply evidenced in Sacred Scripture: God cares less than we for monuments of reassurance.
Time and again the chosen people is sent forth again from the land of promise into exile in order that a remnant may form, a people fit to assume again the particular obligations of covenantal fidelity for the sake of universal testimony.
As the tree of Israel is rerooted near living water, chaff is surrendered to the wind, even as most of the individuals called out of Egypt, who crossed the Red Sea and saw with their eyes the chariots of Pharaoh sink like a stone (Exodus 15.4-5), were held unworthy to traverse the Jordan, their bones being buried instead in the arid, uncharted wilderness.
‘We see not our signs’, sighs the Psalmist, ‘there is no more any prophet’. To see, our eyes must be fit; to hear, our ears must be attentive to the voice that, manifest as charity speaking through truth, calls forth prophecy, the statement of things as they really are. We must not let ourselves be overwhelmed by the clamour of our foes, reduced to the foolishness that knows no other idiom than that of reproach.
The encounter of Paul with the Athenians displays a mode of proclamation beyond reproach. Having seen the city mired in idolatry, the absolutisation of provisional goods, Paul’s spirit ‘was stirred in him’, for it is an ethical imperative to let truth’s light shine in darkness.
Paul is at this stage a hardened apostle, ‘hardened’ in the sense that he — after lashings, persecutions, and shipwrecks — has developed elephant skin, impervious now to slights and physical menace; his heart meanwhile has grown soft and vulnerable, imbued with the charity of Christ, who wishes all men to be saved. He speaks graciously, attractively, in such a way that people are glad to hear more.
The Areopagus discourse is a model of primary catechesis. Paul proceeds from what his listeners know to what they know not. He shows how intuitions they have long entertained reach fulfilment in the evangelion whose messenger he is. Without bombast, and without humiliation, he displays the Athenians’ ignorance supposing that they, self-declared seekers after wisdom, will want to become wise. At the end, however, most stay non-committal: entertained but unconvinced, they go home, there to stay fixed on, and in, the familiar. Only a few, like Dionysius and Damaris, ‘clave unto Paul’, a cleaver unto Christ, ‘and believed’.
The problem with the rest is not their attachment to particular affections or loyalties; the problem is their failing readiness to let this attachment be ordered, and if need be corrected, by cleaving to the One who alone can combine myriad individual voices in symphony. That was the case during the exodus, in royal Israel, and in the early Church. It is also our case now.
Sir James Thornhill, Paul Preaching in the Areopagus (1729-31), now in the Royal Academy.