Lent has begun. You finish the work day exhausted,
stumbling into your darkened church. As you struggle to clear your mind of the
worries of the work day, and the troubles that will meet you tomorrow, strange
sounds enter your head:
“The place of bodily Eve has been taken for me by the
Eve of my mind in the shape of a passionate thought in the flesh, showing me
sweet things, yet ever making me taste and swallow bitter things.”
The words warp your tired brain, twist your
imagination, sending you to your knees not necessarily in repentance but utter
confusion.
What is St. Andrew of Crete doing in his Great Canon?
Is he trying to confuse and bewilder? No, he is moving us through the Scripture
using the moral sense of Scripture.
There are four main senses the Church uses when
encountering God’s word. There is the literal, the typological, the anagogical,
and the moral. The literal is the apparent literary meaning that one gets when
reading the text. The typological is seeing the characters and events as images
and reflections of Christ, His Church, and His saints. The anagogical is seeing
the completion of all things fulfilled in the Kingdom of Heaven.
St. Andrew dips into the three above, but in his Great
Canon, he is primarily using the moral sense. This sense allows you to discover
the people and places of Scripture as instruments of repentance. In the moral,
we find ourselves mired in sin, but there is hope because the goal of the moral
is union with God and the transformation of ourselves into His image.
Examples will clarify what St. Andrew is doing. In the
beginning of the Book of Joshua, Joshua leads the people across the Jordan into
the Promised Land. After this miraculous crossing, Joshua memorializes the
event by stacking up twelve stones, one for each of the twelve tribes of
Israel. The moral sees beyond the physical event. The stack of stones becomes
the Christian placing remembrances of God’s events in his or her life so as not
to forget and wander away from God’s presence. The stones are also a reminder
that the Christian should be a living stone, reminding the world of God’s
presence.
An example in contrast is the city of Jerusalem
throughout the Scriptures. In the literal sense, Jerusalem is the physical
city. In the typological sense, it is the Church. In the anagogical, it is the
kingdom of heaven, and in the moral, it is the Christian.
As a final example, before jumping into St. Andrew’s
canon, let’s examine one event that St. Andrew will touch upon—the story of
Jacob’s ladder. Jacob, exhausted from fleeing from Esau, makes camp in a
deserted lonely place using a rock as a pillow. He is awakened from his sleep
with a vision. It is a vision of a ladder reaching from heaven to earth, with
angels ascending and descending, and at the top of the ladder, the Lord Himself
speaks to Jacob. The Church reads this and sees God comforting Jacob and giving
him hope. It is also a type of the Theotokos as the ladder that brings God to
humanity. The moral view sees the ladder as the Christian struggle toward union
with God.
To deeply understand the moral way of reading
Scripture, there is no better teacher than St. Andrew, and his canon is the
textbook. There are three basic approaches that St. Andrew takes.
Communion with Sinners. St. Andrew will see himself in
the sins of the people in the Biblical story. More times than not, he will gaze
upon their sins and condemn himself for being a greater sinner, a chief of
sinners.
The Example of the Righteous. He looks at the
righteous and sees how far removed he is from their way of life, and lunges
toward them as a goal for his life.
The Mercy of God. In spite of the deep condemnation of
self, St. Andrew won’t allow it to lead him into despair. But the spotlight the
Scripture shines on his soul forces a cry to God, trusting in His mercy to
save.
Here are a couple of examples from St. Andrew’s canon.
From Genesis:
“I have killed a man to the wounding of myself,’ said
Lamech, ‘and a young man to my own hurt,’ he cried out wailing. But you, my
soul, do not tremble, while polluting the flesh and defiling the mind.”
Lamech can be found in the world before the Flood, when
life was violent and humanity was increasingly depraved. Depravity ran so
rampant that the spark of salvation was quickly fading. The way of repentance
was disappearing from the earth, and Lamech is an example. Not only does he
kill, he does so indiscriminately for minor offenses then boasts of such
violence. St. Andrew encounters Lamech and likewise sees the damage his sin is
doing to his own soul.
Here’s another from Genesis:
“You know, my soul, of the Ladder shown to Jacob
reaching from earth to Heaven. Why have you not clung to the sure step of
piety?”
We referenced this story of Jacob’s ladder earlier,
and St. Andrew echoes what others like St. John of the Ladder have seen in this
story. The ladder is the path of piety whereby the soul unites himself to God.
Yet, it spite of the salvation God offers, St. Andrew weeps for the many times
he rejects that path rather than clinging to it.
Lest you think St. Andrew is only dipping in the Old
Testament, here he pulls from the New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan:
“The priest saw me first and passed by on the other side. Then the Levite took
a look at my sufferings and disdained my nakedness. But stand by Me, O Jesus…”
St. Andrew takes the story of the Good Samaritan
beyond the need to love one’s neighbor. His soul is the wounded man, wounded by
his own sins. Nothing could save him, so he cries out, to the one who truly is
the Good Samaritan, “Stand by me, O Jesus.”
St. Andrew plumbs the depths of Scripture, pulling out
characters and events that force us back into Scripture. He mentions everyone
from Noah’s sons to Esau, to Reuben, Job, Hophni, Phineas, Dathan, Abiram,
Hosea, and the Judges.
During Lent, Old Testament readings take center stage.
Let St. Andrew’s Canon be the doorway to our Lenten Old Testament readings.
Read prayerfully like St. Andrew. Read with an eye not to doctrine or
theological musings but toward repentance. Take your soul on a journey through
the Scripture, finding the dirt in your soul and letting God wash it clean.
CONVERSATION