They Understood None of These Things

It is a telling remark that belongs to the possibility, on the one hand, of Lent as the pilgrimage of love in the Christian understanding, and to the whole project of education, on the other hand. Learning can only happen in the awareness and the acknowledgment of our ignorance. The disciplines of the spiritual traditions focus especially on the importance of self-examination. “The unexamined life,” Socrates goes so far as to say, “is not worth living.” Why? Because we are all learners in one way or another. Education necessarily emphasizes the theme of self-criticism as the counter to self-importance and pride. The Lenten journey begins with dust and ashes; in short, with the spirit of humility.

 

“Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” as the first Beatitude of the Sermon on the Mount puts it. The poor in spirit are the humble, precisely those who seek the things of God and recognize their need for what transcends the boastful claims and assertions about ourselves. We are too much with ourselves only to find a kind of emptiness within. Loneliness, we are told, is the major problem which our culture faces. It is the paradox of the ‘connect to the disconnect.’ The forms of connectivity actually separate us from being able to connect face-to-face and to engage in meaningful conversation. We need more than social media with all of its distortions and distractions to find meaning and purpose in our lives.

 

“We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus tells us in the Gospel story which launches us into “the journey of the mind to God,” to use Bonaventure’s great phrase for the pilgrimage of the soul (Itinerarium mentis ad Deum).  Jerusalem is the summit and symbol of human aspiration for what is beyond ourselves. It is the biblical symbol for the heavenly city, the “Jerusalem which is above,” as Paul puts it in Galatians. Our human longings - our desires - are incomplete and partial, an endless and futile chasing after this thing and that. Mercy is the gift of divine love which redeems and seeks the perfection of our partial loves. Thus, the story of Jesus going up to Jerusalem illustrates and is shaped by the divine love so extravagantly expressed in Paul’s great hymn to love which was read last week; the charity that never faileth, that suffereth long, that seeketh not her own.

Jesus tells the disciples precisely what it means to go up to Jerusalem. It means the spectacle of the disorders of our humanity made visible in the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus. He tells us that “all the things written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man shall be accomplished” in Jerusalem. Such is the divine love which overcomes all and every form of sin and evil. It is made manifest in the crucified Christ.

In the Gospel story read this week in Chapel, Luke makes the point that the disciples “understood none of these things: and this saying was hidden from them, neither knew they the things which were spoken.” Jesus tells us but we don’t get it, even after the fact perhaps. There is teaching but no learning. Why? And how might there be learning?

We enter into the spiritual disciplines of learning after the fact of Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection. We are meant to journey more deeply into the radical meaning of the love of God which endures and overcomes all of the limitations, sins, and follies of our humanity in its fallenness. In short, we confront our ignorance but only so as to begin to learn. To learn what? The divine love which we ultimately seek and desire for ourselves and for one another.

The Gospel reading from Luke 18 presents the clear contrast between Jerusalem, the symbol of the heavenly city, and Jericho, the symbol of the earthly city. How might there be learning? Only through the love or desire to see and know even as we are known and loved in God’s all-embracing love. In the Gospel story, we are meant to be like the blind man sitting and begging by the way-side near Jericho. Hearing that Jesus is passing by he calls out incessantly to him, much to the consternation of the disciples who try to shut him up. But Jesus has him brought to him and asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?” “That I may receive my sight,” he says. He has grasped something more than the disciples traveling with Jesus. Though blind, he has an insight into the greater mercy and truth of God. Jesus has drawn out of him what belongs to the universal desire of our humanity; the desire to know.

His story has its parallels with other stories about those who thought they saw and knew but were in fact blind about themselves; most famously, perhaps, the story of Oedipus Rex. He thought that his problem-solving form of knowing was all-sufficient, if not the only form of true knowing, only to come into contradiction with himself. In discovering his ignorance about himself he comes to know the truth about himself, as tragic and painful as that is. He came to know his blindness and in so doing came to know that his form of knowing was only partially true. He ends, we might say, where Paul would have us begin: knowing that we know only “in part,” seeing “in a glass darkly; but then face to face,” knowing even as we are known, our being known in a more complete form of knowledge, God’s knowing. Such is the divine love that is learned if ever we will learn, in going up to Jerusalem. To know our unknowing, our ignorance, and the limitations of our knowing, is an essential part of the journey of education but only through the desire to know and understand.