The Elixir of Life
10 October 2009
Some words of Evelyn Waugh:
Man is made for joy in the love of God.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of + the Holy Spirit.
Just a little short of twenty years ago– a blink in the eye of history, but now beyond the memory of every undergraduate in this University – the world changed. On Thursday, 9th November 1989, East German border guards allowed citizens of the German Democratic Republic through to the West; the Berlin Wall was breached, and one by one, the communist regimes of cold war Europe fell. Those were heady days. To that generation – my own – brought up in the world of the arms race, the potential for nuclear war between the superpowers, and the threat of mutually assured destruction, it had seemed unthinkable that the apparently monolithic and impregnable regime in Soviet Russia, and those of her satellite states, should ever crumble. Now their very existence seems as implausible and unlikely to those for whom Europe naturally includes Poland and Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia and the Baltic states every bit as much as France and Italy and Spain and (dare I say it) the United Kingdom.
The Communist governments of the USSR and her short-lived puppets in eastern Europe claimed to give their people an answer to the question which the rich man posed to Jesus in today’s Gospel, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”, with this obvious difference: salvation was there to be achieved in this world, heaven could be accomplished on earth, according to the precepts and doctrines of democratic socialism, as those regimes understood them. We can only guess at how many – or how few – of both leaders and led ever truly believed the propaganda; the speed with which Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, East Germans and (though much more violently and perhaps ambiguously) Romanians all threw off their communist rulers when given the chance to do so must point us towards the answer. What is certainly true is that atheistic communism is but one fatally misguided attempt among many in history to paint a picture and describe a vision of human fulfilment without reference to God; without reference to Him who alone is good, and who wills only that which is good for those whom He has made and whom He desires to bring back to Himself – even ourselves, men and women made in his own image and likeness, stamped with the seal of His Spirit, called to be changed from glory to glory.
Communism may have been a philosophy, a political ideology, explicitly premised upon godlessness. Yet we too have had to witness the end of a fantasy, no less based, in its own way, on the supremacy of man and man alone. The wreckage of credit crunch and economic downturn, and the collapse of once mighty financial institutions have shattered the illusion of limitless growth and the belief that money alone is a commodity capable of endless manipulation by the magicians of Wall Street and the City of London. Eternal Life is no more the fruit of western-style unregulated capitalism, with the market as its god, than it could ever have been of the empty promises of the now defunct ‘People’s Republics’ of the east.
No, the Christian claim, the Christian hope, is that the goal of all human longing – what the title of this sermon calls ‘the elixir of life’ - is to be found in the one to whom the young man runs up with his question, Jesus of Nazareth. In Jesus, as the earliest apologists for the faith taught so clearly, the principle of intelligence at the very heart of the created order, the eternal Word, has taken flesh; the Living God has come among us. Careful listeners here this morning might have noted that in the list of commandments which Jesus repeats – ‘You must not kill,’ ‘You must not steal,’ ‘You must not commit adultery’ and so on – the commandment to worship God and Him alone is omitted, for in Jesus, God is here. Truth, meaning, purpose, goodness stand before us in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ; and it is as we participate in Christ, and share His life, that we discover (in contrast to the illusory promises of systems of merely human devising of whatever hue) what it means to be truly human and where our fulfilment truly lies. The invitation to know Christ and to share his life is, in essence I suppose, the invitation which this House makes at the beginning of another academic year.
And how do we set about that, the journey home to the Father, through Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit, which is the Christian calling? You’ll notice that once or twice in this sermon, I have used the phrase, ‘the Living God.’ Now if you’re reading theology in this University, or if you’re interested in the history of ideas, or in playing intellectual games for their own sake, the chances are that you might come across the God of the philosophers; and best of luck when you do. The God of the philosophers – whose existence Dr Dawkins in this University and Christopher Hitchens and others out there in grub street expend such energy trying to disprove – belongs in the library and the lecture room, and is best left there – whether he exists or not. Let me be clear. The Christian faith is neither irrational nor unreasonable; oddly, both Dr Dawkins and the fundamentalists imagine that we must leave our minds, our intellects, at the church door. But the God who is the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the God whose Spirit is poured into our hearts that we too may cry out, ‘Abba,’ ‘Father,’ is the God who is Love; and to that God of Love, our response is not principally or primarily intellectual assent – though that should come – but worship. The summons to know Christ, to share his life, is realised through the life of the Church, above all through her liturgy and sacraments: through Baptism, the sacrament of new life, the gateway to membership of Christ and of His body the Church, and through the Mass, the sacrament of love, and the reception of Holy Communion, the bread of life, and the cup of eternal salvation. Hence at the start of a new year, every year, and throughout the year, it is the sacramental life which this House and this Chapel sets before all who cross its threshold.
The discipline of the sacramental life is so important because it keeps us rooted, anchored, in Christ who is our life and our salvation. Not for nothing are the words discipline and discipleship so related. There are many distractions along the way. For the young man in today’s Gospel, the distraction is, wealth; and as we have seen, the love of wealth, the love of money, makes money one of the pagan gods of our own day. It is possibly not the case that the average undergraduate is so rolling in cash as to fall for the worship of money, not yet at least. But there are plenty of other gods – and goddesses – out there, not least in Oxford, and some stronger here than elsewhere. The Baals, the gods of power, are certainly about, the gods of vanity, and love of reputation, the gods and goddesses of craving for the wrong sort of attention, of being thought cleverer-than-Thou. Long ago S Augustine analysed the three basic desires of fallen mankind and found in each of them the search for fulfilment where it cannot be found, the hunt for the elixir of life in the wrong place. Hence voluptas seeks only material or physical beauty (without consideration of the One who has brought the beautiful person or thing into being); superbia seeks fulfilment in power over material things (without acknowledging the sovereignty of the divine creator over all things); and curiositas seeks fulfilment in the knowledge of things transitory (without seeking God, the source of all knowledge). That analysis, it seems to me, is as penetrating in the twenty first century as in the fourth. But by means of our life in Christ – that life begun at our baptism and continually renewed as we come to the altar – those tendencies which all of us share can begin to be ordered aright, until they come to perfection in love, hope and charity, the virtues of the Kingdom.
The invitation to know Christ; the invitation to know Him in His body the Church, her liturgy, her Scriptures and her Sacraments; there is the manifesto at the start of this anniversary and celebration year, 125 years on from when the founders of this place set out in faith and generosity to establish this House of piety and learning.
What of my opening quotation, Man is made for joy in the love of God? It is the contention of the Church fathers, the theologians and doctors of every age, that it is as we become the people whom God creates us to be, that we become truly ourselves, truly free. Each illusory path, each so-called elixir of life created in the laboratories of the alchemists, the high priests of money and power, superficial beauty, fame (or celebrity, its contemporary bastard offspring), knowledge which does not serve truth, each of these leads not to happiness, but to frustration, envy, misery, despair. That is why the path of faith is also the path of joy; real joy, the joy of knowing that you are loved by God without illusion or pretence, and that your place in the world rests quite securely on that great truth. (I wonder, by the way, if there would be a better word to characterise the communist regimes which fell 20 years ago, than joylessness). In the passage from which I quoted, Waugh goes on to say, following St Thomas Aquinas, that when man deliberately turns away from that joy in the love of God, he is denying the very meaning of his existence, and so becomes horribly and irrevocably diminished. What a curious place we have come to, that so many people – intelligent, humane people – have come to believe that it is only by rejecting the claims of Christianity that men and women can only become truly human. It is the opposite which is the case. As Pope Benedict has written: ‘If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, absolutely nothing, of what makes life free, beautiful and great. Only in the friendship of Christ are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation.’ Well, perhaps Christians have only themselves to blame. Perhaps it should be a test of a place claiming to be a place of faith, a place of God – is it also a place of joy? I’ll venture to suggest that Pusey House passes the test. If you’re new here today, I hope you’ll stay to prove it for yourself; and to all the rest of you, welcome back. We wish you joy in the love of God.
The Principal