Seeking the face of God

An audio version of today's gospel can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 14: 12-14) offers us once more a lesson in many layers. On the surface, it is a simply matter of whom one extends charity to: Jesus tells one of the leading Pharisees not to invite desirable guests to his dinners but the humanly undesirable ones, so that his reward will be given him in terms of eternal merit, not some earthly currency.  This teaching follows the lesson in Matthew chapter 6 when Jesus warns His listeners not to practise their virtues ostentatiously in front of others:

When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then, your Father who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Yet this is not so much about whom one invites to dinner or whom one extends one’s charity to, as about the motives behind such actions.

Jesus does not, for example, mean that people should not invite friends, brothers, relations or rich neighbours at all, as if the standard of the gospel were not so much to love the poor as to deliberately offend the wealthy. There are the physically poor and lame, and then there are the spiritually poor and lame; the former benefit from our corporal works of mercy, while the latter from our spiritual works of mercy. They may sometimes be the same person!

Of course, Jesus Himself deliberately offends against the niceties of the Pharisees but His aim is not to give offence, so much as to offer two further lessons.

The first of these is for the Pharisees whom we should understand as those devout in their religion, and the lesson is not to do the done thing, so much as the thing that is pleasing to God. The Pharisees seem to have operated like a select club; appearances were important; conformism was expected; a judging eye for failures in observance was simply de rigueur; unity mattered more than justice; and as for cover-ups, they were probably considered a duty. All of these tendencies reflect what happens to religion when it seems to become skin deep, enmeshed in shallow priorities, attached to a kind of performative, self-congratulatory perfectionism. This kind of religion is up with the latest trends or else it is all ears for the voices of the right-minded people. Pharisaism invented virtue signalling long before the twenty-first century adherents of what some call moralistic, therapeutic deism, the touchy-feely and intolerant version of Christianity that loves the Way but neglects the Truth and the Life of the gospel. Jesus’ reproaches to the Pharisees offer a standing rebuke to every devout soul who becomes absorbed not in God but in their own service of God.

But if we should not do the done thing, what then is pleasing to God? This is the second lesson to take on board here. Ultimately, as we noted in last Friday’s gospel, and in Sunday’s gospel, what is pleasing to God is that we should love Him above all things, seeking His face and yearning for it. St Augustine of Hippo summed it up nearly four hundred years after Christ walked the earth:

Two loves have made two cities. Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city; and love of God, even to the point of contempt for self, made the heavenly city.

This then was the challenge for the Pharisees, as it is for ourselves. Our souls are a battleground for two competing loves. No matter our levels of piety or regular devotion, the battle is not done. It wages on, even as we seek the face of the Lord. The terrible thing about total self-surrender to God is that it may not be half so pretty as all the regular practices, the pious statuary, and the romantic imaginings our minds prefer to conjure. It may involve something as cruel and painful as wrongful condemnation, a tortured final mile, and an agonising death on a rain-soaked hill of humiliation. But perhaps it is much harder to find the face of God in the darkness if we have not become accustomed to finding the face of God in the ordinary world that surrounds us, or even in those aspects of the human world that repel us. There is the peace of God that keeps us – united in love with a common purpose and a common mind: the mind of Christ.

For the Pharisee, it was never wrong to invite the rich and famous to supper. It was only wrong not to seek the face of God and to yearn for it in the dinner guests, yearning instead for the earthly gain that such company seemed to offer. For the Pharisees, Jesus’ counsel to invite the humanly undesirable guests was only ever a way of removing that temptation from the table so that their souls could journey towards God, rather than sinking more deeply into the mire of their own self love.

It is mostly easy to spot the temptations of the world and the devil around us. What is more difficult to spot is the more insidious temptations that our own self-love draws into the very fabric of our religion, making a parody of the kingdom of God within us.

The alternative is to seek the face of God and yearn for it, in every moment of our lives like Mary. For there is the peace of God.