Love Strong as Death
“We were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children.”
Vivid Danse Macabre frescoes, like Bernt Notke's 15th century Surmatants in at St. Nicholas' Church in Tallinn, Estonia offer a stark visual meditation on the inevitability of death. Skeletal figures joyously dance and pipe, beckoning emperors, popes, and peasants alike to join their ghastly parade. Such memento mori confronts us with our mortality, prompting solemn reflection upon our earthly lives.
It may seem a jarring disjuncture from Christ's teaching we hear in this week's Scriptures, to love God and neighbor wholeheartedly. But in fact, we recognize, considering the poignancy of death in the dramatic deepening of autumn, and the turnings of the end of November, death is a greater equalizer than love: but the power of the Gospel reveals to us that love is strong as death, and stronger still -- joining us together as one Body of Christ, living and dead. The Macabre dance equalizes rich and poor, high and low, great and humble: so too might love be universal and boundary breaking, extended to all regardless of status. Considering the shortness of life and the universal sentence of death, we are summoned towards compassion, mercy, and service. Just as we wish to be treated gently when facing death's dance, so we must gently care for others.
Most importantly, however, the hour of our death points to love's permanence beyond the grave. Our souls endure, called to union with Love eternal. Thus Notke's grim revelry directs our thoughts not only to love's horizontal expression, but also its transcendent, vertical consummation in the divine embrace. Memento mori becomes memento amor.
So while the Danse Macabre confronts us with death's inevitability, it also directs us towards life's purpose - wholehearted love. We are called to serve our neighbors, remembering our shared mortality: but even more, to love bask totally in the love of God, the one who loves us without end.
Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked...but his delight is in the law of the Lord.
— Psalm 1:1-2
Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
Texts for This Week
Prayer
Almighty and everlasting God, you govern all things both in heaven and on earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of your people, and in our time grant us your peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Christ has no body now but yours
The eminent folk-worship collaboration The Porter’s Gate breathes new life into the classic prayer of St. Theresa of Avila in their watershed album of songs on Christian vocation. The melody is haunting in its somber simplicity, the instrumentation rich and delicious, the emulation of the real and variegated worshipping life of the People of God, the Body of the Church is deeply moving.
The music and words together distill the essence of loving God and our neighbor into a poignant reminder of our own positioning as a vessel and instrument of Christ’s love, poured out in us and through us for the life of the world. By God’s grace and the Spirit moving through us, our living bodies become vehicles by which make God's love tangible through humble service to all people.
John Chrysostom of Matthew 22:15
“Then the Pharisees went and strategized how they might entrap Him in His words.”
Then - when? When most of all they should have been moved to remorse, when they should have been amazed at His love for humankind, when they should have feared what was to come, when from the past they should have believed concerning the future also. For indeed, the things that had been said cried aloud in actual fulfillment. I mean, that tax collectors and prostitutes believed, and prophets and righteous people were killed, and from these things they should not have contradicted concerning their own destruction, but even believed and been sobered.
But nevertheless, not even so do their wicked actions cease, but continue further. And because they could not lay hands on Him (for they feared the crowd), they took another way with the intention of bringing Him into danger, and making Him guilty of crimes against the state.
