Trinity 8
“The earnest expectation of the creature waits for the revelation of the sons of God.”
This translation of the verse set me to thinking about lots of matters theological. But I started out with the question, “Does this sentence make sense to people today?” I was in two minds as to whether we do really understand it.
We all know about earnest expectation – we have a very good idea what is meant by such heartfelt longing. We all know that we await something, perhaps it is the next pay cheque, or the holiday, or our retirement, or perhaps we merely wait to die. These hopes are clear in our everyday lives, where we, as creatures, dwell for the most part.
But what does Paul mean by “creature” in this verse? What in fact do we mean by the word? The definition of “creature” changes with every individual who is called upon to make it. The “created world” is all that we know; we usually understand it to mean “all that is around us.”
Then there is the object of this sentence, “the revelation of the sons of God.” What is the meaning of that? Of course Paul means “children,” or “humanity” itself, with the word.
You now see how the theologians get bogged down so easily, soon I may be discussing heads of pins and angels, if I were of a scholastic nature. Happily, however, I will refrain from such a systematic theology today.
My task is much more prosaic, to bring us the the meaning of this sentence to us today.
There are two couplets of meaning in the previous chapter and the beginning of this one. They are summed up in the pair, “bondage of corruption” and “glorious liberty of the children of God.” The creation, “the world, the flesh and the devil”, as the book of Common Prayer has it, is the significance of chapter seven. The world so conceived must make us pause theologically, for we must shed our selves of “the creation” as Paul is generally understood, as much of the tradition tells us. Augustine amongst the ancients, Luther and Calvin as examples of reformers, Karl Barth and Anders Nygren among our contemporaries. All of these respected theologians give us the impression that Paul only wrote that we should not enjoy ourselves in this world. Indeed, much of modern spirituality is based on this, for we are told that this world is a sham and we will get our real reward in heaven, we have to be grim and dour, never smiling and always grumbling, much like everyone does about the weather on a rainy day.
But that view of Paul and this theology of never enjoying yourselves is utterly preposterous. Jesus and Paul would never have pronounced any such judgement on the world. Now let us be a little theological today, I want to talk about two courses of action available to us in our faithful meditations. The first is “negative theology,” the via negativa, which the medieval scholars took on their way to salvation within the monasteries.
The mystical writers take this “way” or “road” – this via, as in the middle of Gloucester, the via sacra. Let us strip away all of our all too human and creaturely hopes and fears, “pay cheque, or the holiday, or our retirement” as we said earlier of our expectations. We should not be thinking on our everyday hopes and fears, the mortgage, the letters from the bank manager, our employers petty posturing, our children’s moods, the colour of the sky, even the beauty of the earth.
All of our physical comforts and enjoyments must be given up as mere dross – meaning-full but of no consequence ultimately.
Also our emotions are as cloying as our physical entanglements. Even our intellect is tainted by what Paul calls “the flesh.”
But if we are able to take this hard road, we will have found something which should yield a new Eden. When we have stripped away the created from ourselves, what is left? Surely when we have negated every sensation, emotion and thought because it was tainted by the sinfulness of fallen nature, we are left with nothing at all.
That is what some people think when they consider themselves are mere creatures, and so they await the holiday, the pay-cheque, the Friday-night gathering at the pub, and eventually only death. But this negative theology only serves to illuminate our very selves. When we have taken the hard road of renunciation, when we have confessed with a contrite heart all of our sinfulness, only then will we have the ability to go on a new way, a via positiva, the sacred road on which mystics have travelled before us, a road which leads to God and our ultimate fulfilment. This other way is one of turning from the I and Thou, the whither the way of renunciation leads. The via positiva allows us to open up a world of delightful experience, a new garden of Eden, a communing with the God of our fathers in a way that Jesus Christ showed us through our faith. We become new Adams and Eves through Christ.
Let us take the phrase “the veil of flesh” and see how we can understand the two ways of mystical theology. This word veil is the crux, for vale although pronounced the same has two different spellings and two different meanings. I would liken veil, V E I L, to the via negativa where one must unmask the reality which lies beyond the appearance. This veil is a cloaking which must be taken off the essence so that we can truly understand its being. And so it is in theology, we must take away the false idols of human frailty, cleaning the glass so we can see clearly.
When we do see clearly, then it is time to build up the image of God both in the world and in ourselves, and so we travel through the vale, V A L E, where we can encounter the divine in the whole of creation. I suppose we cut everything away so that we can see the essence, and then build up our experience of that essence and make it our own. This is just what Paul did all those centuries ago, and so that must be why we still read his letters week by week in the Church, one, holy, catholic and apostolic. Theology must get its VALE/VEILS right. We must be able to renounce the world in order to gain it, just as Jesus says.