Fourth Sunday of Easter, April 30, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
George and Anne’s wedding
Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever enters a sheepfold through the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens it for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He walks ahead of them, and the sheep follow him, because they recognize his voice.
In what had been intended to be the final installment of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, Father Brown encounters an “Insoluble Problem.” Written forty or so years after Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Final Problem” of Sherlock Holmes, this tale gives Father Brown space to be the Catholic priest he has always been along with an especially effective detective. His friend/nemesis Flambeau accompanies him this time, as they attempt to understand and then solve a mysterious murder.
But Father Brown’s relatively quick understanding of the non-murder murder allows him to reflect on the household where it all took place. Grandfather, who is now dead, held his Catholic beliefs high, while his daughter did not. His daughter seemed caught in a lesser love, or rather a second love which became her first.
“Nobody had any dislike of anybody,” said Father Brown with a groan. “That was the dreadful thing in that darkness. It was love.” Father Brown groaned again. “She is in love with her husband. It is ghastly.”
“It is a state of things that I have often heard you recommend,” replied Flambeau. “You cannot call that lawless love.”
“Not lawless in that sense,” answered Father Brown; then he turned sharply on his elbow and spoke with a new warmth: “Do you think I don’t know that the love of a man and a woman was the first command of God and is glorious forever? Are you one of those idiots who think we priests don’t admire love and marriage? Do I need to be told of the Garden of Eden or the wine of Cana? It is just because the strength in the thing was the strength of God, that it rages with that awful energy even when it breaks loose from God. When the Garden becomes a jungle, but still a glorious jungle; when the second fermentation turns the wine of Cana into the vinegar of Calvary. Do you think I don’t know all that?”
Perhaps Pastor Delton Weiser at Point of Grace Lutheran Church has read this story. At any rate he made sure to include special vows for our friends George and Anne Enriquez at their wedding yesterday.
“I promise to love God more than I love you.”
Both of them repeated these words, looking into each other’s eyes.
I think they knew they were the most important words of all. Because the confession of their faith is what will hold them together when nothing else can quite do the trick.
Miles and Jasper wore their best farm formal cowboy clothes and carried the rings down the aisle, to the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The peaceful beauty of a sweet post-storm Saturday morning enveloped us. In his day Father Brown had no wedding to attend or officiate, but he did spend time in a nearby chapel after the story’s mystery was resolved. He reflected on the immensity of God, and our attempts to love him.
He raised his eyes and saw through the veil of incense smoke and of twinkling lights that Benediction was drawing to its end while the procession waited. The sense of accumulated riches of time and tradition pressed past him like a crowd moving in rank after rank, through unending centuries; and high above them all, like a garland of unfading flames, like the sun of our mortal midnight, the great monstrance blazed against the darkness of the vaulted shadows, as it blazes against the black enigma of the universe. For some are convinced that this enigma also is an Insoluble Problem. And others have equal certitude that it has but one solution.
Jesus tells us about that.
I am the gate for the sheep. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy; I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.
(Acts 2, Psalm 23, 1 Peter 2, John 10)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
