Ocean of Grace (12): SUNDAY – Love Bade Me Welcome (p46ff)

 Lent Book: https://www.thegoodbook.co.uk/an-ocean-of-grace

 

My jottings:

 

(Comments welcome)

 

Ocean of Grace (12): SUNDAY – Love Bade Me Welcome (p46ff)

 

You might like to look online for video / audio of these poems.

 

E.g. The Agony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFvGG0MkYvk

 

The Love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gunHbqY4PJw

 

We are invited to come home to God. But in a way it is a home we have never seen – a home from which we have always been alienated. There is in us by nature a hatred of God and also a remnant or shadow of love for God, or at least a space left by its absence (for we were made in his image for friendship with him). Without Christ, although we do not realise it, we are homesick for God even while we run from him.

 

We often say there is no such thing as a free lunch, but the prophet Isaiah offers us a genuinely free meal. It cost Christ everything. It is his gift to us. But it is not cheap grace to us: there is a cost to following Christ, but it is genuinely free.

 

The Agony

 

In many of these readings we have been trying to measure (or at least get some fuller understanding of) sin and love, and we have found that we cannot know them fully. It is striking to compare the study of them with the feats of science. Calculating the height of Everest or the dimensions of China is easy, compared to knowing the human heart or the heart of God.

 

We are more sinful than we often care to admit and more loved than we dare to dream.

 

And we have thought a number of times already about the relationship between sin and love. To know the depths of one helps to illuminate the other. Christ’s love goes deeper than the depths of our sin. We foolishly sin against his fathomless love.

 

To know sin and love, we might try to turn within, to understand our own hearts. Herbert directs our view to Christ, to the Garden of Gethsemane and to the cross. Here we see an objective demonstration of sin and love made visible.  

 

Olivet = The Mount of Olives, connected to the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus agonised before the cross. (You may wish the re-read the gospel accounts, e.g. Mark 14). The word “Gethsemane” is derived from two Hebrew words: gat, which means "a place for pressing oil (or wine)" and shemanim, which means "oils." Gethsemane is the oil press. Jesus faces the crushing burden of sin there, from which the shinning richness of the anointing Spirit will flow for us. For the biblical associations of a winepress see also Isaiah 63:3. The poem expresses sin and love, the agony and the blessing we get from the blood of Christ signified by the wine of Holy Communion.

 

Remember that water and blood flowed from Jesus side as it was pierced (John 19). Jesus’ body becomes a wine cask opened for us by the death of Christ.

 

(Some of these comments draw on Malcolm Guite, Word in the Wilderness: A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter (Canterbury Press, 2014))

 

Love

 

Think of God wooing and inviting us, taking care to gently encourage us. We must let him be the judge of whom he will draw in, even if we feel (rightly and accurately) unworthy.

 

Jesus does of course call us to his service. But first we must allow him to serve us. Like Mary, we should sit at his feet and hear his word as his disciple rather than being worried and distracted by many duties, like Martha (Luke 10). Like Peter, we must allow the Servant King to wash our feet (John 13).

 

(Analysis and commentary on both Herbert poems is also only a Google away)

 

Hymn: King of God, King of Peace (by George Herbert)

 

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSESknkhPd0

 

Words etc.: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/k/g/l/o/kglokpea.htm

 

(You can find a list of many George Herbert hymns here: https://hymnary.org/person/Herbert_G)