Sow Bountifully, Love Freely: The Abundant Life in Christ

Drawing on C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, Sub Dn. Timothy Grace explores the abundant life God offers us through the day's two readings. From St. Paul he draws the law of sowing and reaping: God loves a cheerful giver, and what we give freely bears fruit for eternity. From the Gospel comes the harder, supernatural call to love our enemies without discrimination — not a loss, he shows, but the path to true freedom, embodied by Christ on the Cross.

Transcript

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The great Christian writer C.S. Lewis wrote a novel called The Great Divorce, where he imagines what it would be like for people from hell to meet people in heaven. There's a scene where a woman and a man who were together on earth meet. She is a saint in heaven, whose beauty and light are so overpowering that the narrator can hardly stand in her presence, and she walks in a procession of all the people who loved her. Her husband, by contrast, is sadly a citizen of hell and has been reduced to a shrivelled dwarf. In their lifetime, in his selfishness, he consistently tried to control and manipulate her, and when they meet, he tries the same tactics on her. But she is so drenched in the glory of God's grace, so filled with overwhelming love and mercy, that his attempts fail. She is free in the fullness of the life in Christ, and his actions hurt only himself.

It's a startling picture of the life of freedom and abundance that God wants to offer to us too. Both readings today, the Epistle and the Gospel, share a common theme of living this abundant life, and each focuses on a different aspect. So let's take them in turn.

Starting with the Epistle, St. Paul speaks about the abundance of life in the matter of generosity. He is exhorting the Corinthians to dig deep and contribute to a collection he is taking up for poor Christians in Jerusalem. And here we see a great spiritual law revealed: your actions have a corresponding effect on what you then receive.

St. Paul uses farming imagery for his people: you will reap what you sow. If you sow sparingly, he says, you will reap sparingly; and if you sow bountifully, you will reap bountifully. The irrefutable logic of such an analogy is easily understood by even the simplest of audiences. It's interesting that he says a similar thing when he writes to the Galatians, in chapter 6 of that letter, but to them he puts it in spiritual terms: "Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life."

So we see that this principle applies both to how we live with regard to physical or earthly matters and to spiritual ones too. In other words, your own actions will determine the quality of the life that God gives back to you.

And God wants us to be like Him. He scatters abroad. He fills to overflowing. He does not stint. He gives and offers freely. St. Paul tells us that we too must act without reluctance and without compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. I'm reminded here of the words of St. Sophrony of Essex, who said that only that which is done willingly will have eternal benefit. If we do things gritting our teeth, if we do things reluctantly or because we believe we're being forced, they will not have lasting importance for us.

In this, we become like Christ, who acted without compulsion when He gave of Himself, who freely chose to lay down His life. So this spiritual law is baked into our very nature, as it were, by virtue of Christ's work. And just as His free choice resulted in His immense glorification, our actions bring a similar benefit to us when we go about them the right way: when we cheerfully give our money, cheerfully give our time, cheerfully give our attention to the person we are talking to, cheerfully give up food in fasting, cheerfully give up our pride in confession, cheerfully fulfil our prayer rule, and cheerfully serve our family members.

Now, the second aspect of abundance comes to us from the Gospel reading, and it is about showing abundant love to all without discrimination, even to those who don't deserve it. I think it goes without saying that this second aspect is more difficult than the first. The first aspect of abundant living is about what you will receive in return for your actions. Love of enemies, by contrast, is not about what you will receive; it's about whose image you are imaging, whose footsteps you are walking in. In fact, it will probably even look like losing something rather than gaining anything.

The first is a natural law. Even non-Christians understand it. Everyone understands that you reap what you sow, right? People might call it the law of karma, or "you get what you give." But the second, love your enemies, is a supernatural law. It's not something natural; it runs counter to our natural instincts. Yet in this second aspect the same principle applies: we have to do it willingly. We have to desire it. And it's very hard, because it means letting go of the right to feel hurt, the right to take revenge, the right to be a victim. It's so hard that we might have to start small with this one, and we may even be dragged to it kicking and screaming at first.

It may even be beyond us to have actual enemies, and here we might interrogate this word "enemies." We may never have a person in our lives who is a real enemy, who wilfully seeks to harm us maliciously. Maybe your so-called enemy is someone you just don't get along with, right? Even in your own family, or, dare I say it, maybe even a fellow parishioner: someone you find hard to love, someone who pushes your buttons. Well, the Orthodox psychologist Dr. Philip Mamalakis says that the buttons that get pushed in you are the unhealed aspects of yourself that need healing. So this enemy may actually turn out to be a very useful person in helping you to achieve self-knowledge, and praying for this person could help you see this.

Loving your enemies in this regard could be as simple, and yet as difficult, as doing something kind for the sibling who annoys you; showing patience, gentleness and forgiveness to your spouse after you've had a fight; showing humility before a workmate who rubs you up the wrong way; or perhaps even wilfully losing an argument.

But maybe someone deliberately does wish you harm. They do not realise that they have become the tool of the real enemy, the devil. Loving your enemies, then, is seeing reality: the person you see as an enemy is to be greatly pitied, for they have become the plaything of the real enemy.

In fact, St. Sophrony, once again, in his spiritual biography of St. Silouan the Athonite, speaks of us Christians reaching a place where we avoid even the word "enemies." He says that to say "enemy" implies rejection, and by such rejection a man falls from the plenitude of God and is no longer in God. Christ uses the analogy of the sun shining on the earth at all times. Just as the sun does not reject the earth on which it shines, neither should we reject anyone as an enemy. The saints all showed this same attitude. St. Seraphim of Sarov used to call all the people who visited him "my joy": friend, enemy, Christian, non-Christian — "my joy" to everyone.

What is ultimately offered to us in return, even though I said it might seem like losing, is actually freedom. I recently saw the movie The Interpreter, with Nicole Kidman. She plays a woman who used to work in a particular community in Africa, and she relates how this community responds when there has been a killing. It's very interesting. She says the people believe that the only way to end grief is to save a life. If someone is murdered, a year of mourning ends with a ritual called the drowning man trial. There is an all-night party beside a river. At dawn, the killer is put in a boat, taken out on the water and dropped into it, bound so that he cannot swim. The family of the dead then has to choose: they can let him drown, or they can save him. The people believe that if the family lets the killer drown, they will have justice, but they will spend the rest of their lives in mourning. But if they save him, if they admit that life isn't always just, that very act can take away their sorrow. "Vengeance is a lazy form of grief."

Wow, what a line. Vengeance is a lazy form of grief. Offering forgiveness and praying for our enemies, then, is a way that we are released, a way that we find freedom.

I was on a plane recently and was reminded that the sun is always shining above the clouds. That's the place we need to reach: above the storm of our likes and dislikes, the annoyances and prejudices and the subtle revenges we exact on other people, offering the indiscriminate love of God to all. To reach a place where the love we give is not dependent on the love we receive, a place where the worth or merit of the recipient is not weighed and judged, as we so often do.

So, in finishing, we remember that Christ on the Cross embodies both of these aspects of abundance in His person. Even as He is being crucified, He offers salvation to all in His utmost generosity and love. Not under any compulsion, He sows the seeds of salvation, ready to be reaped in willing hearts. And He offers this salvation as much to the worst of sinners as to the holiest of saints.

In this life, God will not take away our pain, suffering and death. But He will give us His life in such abundance that these things cannot take away our joy. So may God fill us with His abundance, that we may be people who joyously sow love into all we do, becoming icons of His mercy; letting go of the merely human — the miserliness, the pettiness, the resentment, the hatred, the revenge, the miserable games that everyone plays — and finding the divine, the freedom that God gives freely. May it be so for all of us, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.