2024-08-28 A Meditation on the Power of the Gospel
“44 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. The Parable of the Pearl of Great Value 45 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, 46 who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it. The Parable of the Net 47 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. 48 When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers but threw away the bad. 49 So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous 50 and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. New and Old Treasures 51 “Have you understood all these things?” They said to him, “Yes.” 52 And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”” (Matt 13:44-52 ESV)
To say the Gospel has power is to say a judgment over all Law and all Teachings of secondary nature. Those teachings, that Law, percolate and invite themself in to any house cleansed and vacated by the teaching of Grace. The teaching of Gospel, of Grace, no bland “blessing” but a scientific distinction made, is a teaching with itself as the reward: upon a fellow in the faith proclaiming some judgment over us, in this climate, it is a reward of Invisibles, the deep reassurance: “Oh, yeah, time was when I listed my fasts and programmed my hours of prayer”. Yet all trained up on Gospel truth still do those things, just not as the means of salvation, but as the owner of a room and a house swept and put in good order… by Grace.
Therefore there is no contradiction to the mandate to Fight tandem to the mandate to Accept or to Pray. We are laborers in a Vineyard easily compromised. We are adventurers in this strange Intake and Receptivity called Prayer. We receive. We intake. Notions and facts, blessed assurances and more sobering judgments. We pray through the human inclination unto Positives, and in so doing become receptive also to the Negatives. Horrors and vehement rejectamenta, are the stuff of reluctant prayer; we are facing many downward intimations, our age, our vast sense at times of emptiness or meaninglessness, our finite length of life.
To die already, is to see Something life-affirming in the post-Experience, the post-Exhaustion, that is, the post-Sacrament. We were running well, then All Things came together, conspired in positive sense, unto the throne before which we kneel. At that juncture, it was suddenly Okay: eternal life, perhaps yes, eternal hope, yes, eternal relevance, indeed.
The days’ passing time, the hours spent in tangential prayer-work, aka thought and what-if’s, only serve of a sudden to inspire some seemingly unrelated meditations. Yet also the reflection that Forgives and sees with wily clever explanatory devices, why and how these our friends and peers are operating. We see plain Calvinistic total depravity: all are needing this Mercy; and Perfection: all are in Divine Choreograph and Meaningful Action.
Flip-side of the equation, and the gauntlet is still Christ For Us. It is still strangely inoffensive Moralism vis-a-vis the Moralism of evasive elusive sought-out Grace. Ours to own, to soldier after, to Bless and be Receptive in full knowledge: that “hang-up”, that “guilt trip”, that “unpresentable fact”, that “failure”, separates us no longer. We are zealots for the clarion Call and Service—in full sense of hours, of labor, of time sheets and employment—unto the Gospel. All that fills the house that is swept, is juxtaposition of the Rule-based, Law-based faith of others, in plain positive sense to serve to remind us and then inspire us, unto these truly secondary natures of things. Yes, that we have the gift of patience. Yes, that we have the gift of discernment. Yes, that we have the gift of love. But, yes, that the gift of servant mentality be summed up as Grace rather than as a moral totem pole.