A Homily for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Wisdom 18:6-9 Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-19 Luke 12:32-48
Some things can only be known from the inside. Outsiders may know they exist, but they cannot assess their worth.
Here is an amusing example of that axiom. It is found in Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby. A rather poor family manages to secure the services of a tutor, who will teach French to their daughters. Their uncle, a collector of revenues and until then the tallest peak in the family’s social range, is quite ambivalent about the value of the unknown—at least to him—language.
“I am ready to hear, if Mr. Johnson is ready to commence, my dear,” said the collector, assuming the air of a profound critic. “What sort of language do you consider French, sir?”
“How do you mean?” asked Nicholas.
“Do you consider it a good language, sir?” said the collector; “a pretty language, a sensible language?”
“A pretty language, certainly,” replied Nicholas; “and as it has a name for everything, and admits of elegant conversation about everything, I presume it is a sensible one.”
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Lillyvick, doubtfully. “Do you call it a cheerful language, now?”
“Yes,” replied Nicholas, “I should say it was, certainly.”
“It’s very much changed since my time, then,” said the collector, “very much.”
“Was it a dismal one in your time?” asked Nicholas, scarcely able to repress a smile.
“Very,” replied Mr. Lillyvick, with some vehemence of manner. “It’s the war time I speak of; the last war. It may be a cheerful language. I should be sorry to contradict anybody; but I can only say that I’ve heard the French prisoners, who were natives, and ought to know how to speak it, talking in such a dismal manner, that it made one miserable to hear them. Ay, that I have, fifty times sir—fifty times!”
Successful and trained as he might be, Mr. Lillyvick reduces the entire French world into his own small box, and it is labeled “not English.” But to know that French is not English, while true, is not to know much.
“What’s the water in French, sir?”
“L’Eau,” replied Nicholas.
“Ah! Said Mr. Lillywick, shaking his head mournfully, “I thought as much. Lo, eh? I don’t think anything of that language—nothing at all.”
Some things can only be known from the inside. Outsiders may know they exist, but they cannot assess their worth.
Love is like that. Lovers know each other in a way no one else can. The love between a parent and child, between spouses, even between friends opens a world that no outsider can truly access. The words used might be the same, but the meanings behind them are utterly unique, irreplaceable. Lovers have their own language.
The same is true of doctrines and dogmas. Anyone can access them, learn them, but what they do, what they truly mean, is given only to those who stand within the faith. Outsiders cannot help but to evaluate them like Mr. Lillyvick appraises French.
Doctrines and dogmas are both teachings of the church. Doctrines tend to be scriptural, while dogmas are subsequent definitions, typically defined to dissipate doctrinal confusion.
We live in an age that treats both with suspicion. To call someone “doctrinaire” is not a compliment. And if you say, “You don’t need to be so dogmatic about it,” you accuse your interlocutor of being close-minded.
But our modern idioms come from a faithless age. They were fashioned by those who reject the realities that faith accesses. Sadly, there are Christians who like to style themselves free of doctrines and dogmas. Some suggest that the church should be a place that welcomes everyone’s story without dogma or doctrine, or, as they might put it, “all those things that divide.”
They are right! Doctrines and dogmas do divide. And so they must because they were created by the community of faith, which we call the church, to distinguish the right path from the wrong, the fruitful from the barren.
The church does welcome the stories, the experiences of her members, and doing so, she cannot help but evaluate them as her Lord enjoined her to do, choosing the wealth that is faith over the sterility of doubt. Thus we hear in St. Matthew’s Gospel, the great ecclesial Gospel, the only one even to employ the word “church,” “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Mt 16:19; cf. also 18:18).
The 1,700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed provides a helpful example. In 325 A.D., the Emperor Constantine summoned the world’s bishops to Nicaea, a suburb of the imperial capital Constantinople, to resolve a dispute that threatened not only to splinter the church but to destroy her life-giving witness to Christ as the Son of God.
The great struggle for the first Christians was how to reconcile their own experience of Christ with the monotheism of both the Jewish faith and of enlightened Greek thought. Israel daily professed in its Shema, “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone!” (Dt 6:4). And Greek philosophy insisted that simply to know the meaning of the word “God” was to know that its referent had to be uniquely singular.
Yet the first disciples were convinced that in Jesus of Nazareth they had encountered more than the Christ, the promised Messiah of Israel. In the light of the resurrection, they knew—beyond the ability to doubt—that they had seen, heard and touched the living God! But if God had come among them in the flesh, why did Jesus speak to and of his Father? Why did he speak of a divine person yet to come, a Holy Spirit?
Arius, a priest of Alexandria, the great center of learning in the ancient world, spoke for many Christians—for a time perhaps even the numerical majority—when he suggested that we should only speak of the Father as God, that when Christ called himself the Son of God, he meant that he, a mortal creature, had been raised, adopted into the divine.
Arius distinguished between the Father and the Son by saying, “There was a time when he (the Son) was not.” Put another way, the Father alone is creator; the Son is only a creature, one born in time, albeit the most exalted.
The fundamental question, upon which everything hangs, is the identity of Jesus the Christ. Either he is God-made-flesh, or he is only human. Either he himself is the revelation of the Father, or he simply speaks, however exaltedly, as one more prophet. But surrender to God is an all-or-nothing affair. We either know God or we do not. To give oneself to Jesus either is—or is not—to surrender to God. Are we meant to love Jesus as God, or is such an identification idolatrous?
Scripture alone was of no avail. For every verse that proclaimed Jesus to be God in the flesh, Arian Christians could marshal several more that seemed to speak of the Son as knowing less than the Father, of being less than the Father.
Thus, the Council of Nicaea created dogmas and set many more of them in motion. After much debate, the council fathers even imposed a word upon all orthodox Christians, one not found in the Scriptures. To belong to the church catholic, the universal assembly, one had to profess that Christ was of the same nature as the Father: homoousias.
Each Sunday, so many Christians still publicly profess what we now call the Nicene Creed. The purpose of each line, each metaphor, is to say in effect: Here lies the life-giving truth; that way is sterile. Pray to Jesus. Surrender to him. Believe that you receive his divine body and blood when we assemble. If you reduce our Christ to a prophet, you have squandered away the knowledge of God-made-flesh; you have closed the door God opened.
Faith is the realization of what is hoped for
and evidence of things not seen (Heb 11:1).
If one stands outside the faith or if one stands barely within it, doctrines and dogmas may seem arcane, unneeded, essentially meaningless. And so they must, because those outside the circle of love are trying—and failing—to make sense of what is being said by those who love. Lovers use the same words as anyone else, but they create utterly individual and irreplaceable meanings. Love must express itself. It must choose its words wisely. Love has its own language.
The church would go on to create more doctrines and dogmas. She had to do so when some of her faithful took a wrong path and thus curtailed the flow of life and truth that Christ brought into the world.
Those who embrace the fullness of the faith embrace each teaching because they have found it to be life-giving, a channel of grace, a way of knowing the fruitful from the barren. For ultimately, the truth of church teaching is only known, as Christ said it would be, by its fruit (Mt 7:16). But this is why only believers can evaluate the truth of teaching, truly understand and speak the language of faith. Because they alone have been given access to the life unleashed and expressed in these words. They alone speak the language of Christ’s love.
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