The Rev. Charles Hoffacker

Today’s gospel is one of the many stories where Jesus engages in verbal conflict with representatives of factions  among his own people. In this case, it’s “the Pharisees and some of the scribes  who had come from Jerusalem.”

As usual, Jesus raises the conflict to a different level. Here’s how we can restate his point in terms that speak to us today. Our problem is not  with things outside us. Our problem is with the disorientation inside us that gets expressed in our behavior.

Take a recovering alcoholic as an example. Insofar as that person is recovering, she will recognize that the problem is not a bottle of whiskey sitting on a table. The problem is that she suffers from a disease called alcoholism. If she decides to make an exception to her practice of sobriety and starts drinking that whiskey, then all hell will break loose.

Take another example: a man who has  both a sports car and a son. If this man cares for his car more than he cares for his son, that’s a big problem. But the problem is not the sports car which is simply a shiny machine. The problem  is the father’s inner attitude that prefers the car to the child.

We’ll return to this point a little later. Now let’s consider something else  about how we human beings function. Huston Smith, a committed Christian and scholar of world religions, discussed it in his book Forgotten Truth.( Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions (HarperSanFrancisco, 1976), 75-87).  I’ll summarize what he says.  Throughout history, human beings have apparently been searching for an object to love, serve, and adore wholeheartedly. Despite numerous disappointments, the search continues. The entire history of humanity is a record of this search for some beckoning object.

Influential figures have understood this search in different ways. Sigmund Freud thought it was connected somehow with sexual release. Another psychologist, Alfred Adler, thought it was connected with a drive for power. Karl Marx related it to economic issues. An answer that includes and surpasses all of these  is that our desire  is toward being and its increase. We seek to flourish. We want an abundant existence.

Thus, in pursuit of being and its increase, we seek out such things as wealth and power, friendship and knowledge, and so much more.

We may want and pursue our beloved. Why do we love that particular person? It seems that through that person being and the promise of its increase pours forth to us in the largest portions. With our beloved we feel so much more alive.

Some pathways of pursuit may turn out to be  blind alleys. Thus the practicing alcoholic expects to find being and its increase in getting drunk, tragically mistaking spirits for the true spirit. The sports car owner  may love his car too much and his son not enough, perhaps because the auto’s behavior is predictable, and the child’s behavior is not.

All of us make the mistake, perhaps occasionally, perhaps as a destructive habit, of believing that our fulfillment lies in what is finite, because, after all, we are finite ourselves.

We treat finite things as though they were infinite. When we do so, these finite things  reliably disappoint us, whether they are a shot of whiskey, a sports car, or the Nobel Prize.

We pervert whatever goodness these things possess when we treat that goodness as infinite. They will disappoint us, and may even turn on us and destroy us. We are left in agony: we are given what is finite, but we want what is infinite.

The situation becomes even more complicated. Because finite things in their goodness make available to us some suggestion, small or large, of infinite goodness, we are right to enjoy that goodness, but must recognize that it is limited and that infinite goodness resides somehow beyond the finite, even if our access to it is often through the finite.

So we come to a situation  that has two necessary aspects.

One is that  we must not stop  at the level of the goodness of anything finite, but seek that goodness which is unlimited and surpasses every finite thing, no matter how great.

The second is that we must recognize and celebrate the goodness of finite things and the way each one mirrors, however imperfectly, something of the goodness which is unlimited and divine.

Maintaining a lively sense of both of these aspects requires yet a third: a desire for God, a desire for the infinite God which recognizes goodness in finite things yet always looks through them and beyond them.

This desire for God involves nothing less than the realignment of all our desires, and the realignment of desires is nothing less than another name for living the Christian life.

The disorientation that lurks inside us consists of countless ways in which our desires are out of line. We love less what should be loved more.

We love more what should be loved less. But love for God functions like a magnet that arranges iron filings. By divine grace, everything out of line is reordered in the right direction, and that right direction is how every other love serves and contributes to love for God, rather than functioning  as an obstacle to such love.

There are destructive ways, of course, in which to address  how our desires are out of alignment, and these other ways are often put into practice.
Desires can be denied; they can be suppressed; they can be indulged and  given license and even control over our lives.

But Christianity at its truest is a true realignment, a re-education of our desires, with our desire for God  as the central, preeminent desire that places all other desires in their true and subordinate locations.

What happens  as this realignment takes place?

Huston Smith, reflecting an extensive tradition, speaks of “the soul’s romance with its Creator” as including “three distinguishable modes.”(Smith, 82) These are not phases distinct in time where one ends and the next begins. Rather they are ways of experiencing that recur and overlap.

•The first of these is my love for God, where the focus is on me. Here love is expressed through the finite, namely who I am. This is a necessary mode, but it is preliminary to the others. It is immature, incomplete.

•In the second mode, the accent is instead on God’s love for me. I recognize myself  as loved by the infinite God.

While a human is finite, God is infinite. Thus my love for God is no match for God’s love that comes to me.

•The third mode involves recognition of the extent of grace, for the love with which I love God is but God’s love for me returning to its source. In the words of the Flemish mystic Jan van Ruysbroeck, “The love of God is an outpouring and an incoming tide.” (Quoted in Smith, 85.)

So our Christian living is a realignment, a re-education of our desires. Did you notice how  today’s first reading is  an episode about desire?

It comes from the Song of Solomon, known also as the Song of Songs, or in other words, the best song of them all. This Old Testament book is a collection of love poems, not pale, sentimental ones, but strong and graphic compositions that revel in the delightful, mysterious passion binding together a woman and a man.

Both synagogue and church have understood these poems as pointing beyond human eros to a union even more sublime: the one uniting the human and the divine.

The voice in today’s passage is that of a woman speaking about her lover. He draws near, full of energy, eager to behold her beauty. He summons her to arise  and come away with him.

Will she do so? I invite you to read the rest of the Song of Solomon.

Each of us is caught up  in a passionate relationship like this one.

We love God, however incompletely. God loves us in a way that is infinite. And moreover, the great surprise  is that the love we have for God is secretly infinite: it is God’s love for us returning to its source, for divine love  is an outpouring  and an incoming tide.

“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.” That voice addresses us. It is the music  at the foundation of our lives, seeking to realign our desires and to fulfill them, if only we will respond.

Copyright 2015, Charles Hoffacker. Used by permission.