A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on March 27, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Reading for address: George Herbert, ‘The Agonie’
In his poem ‘The Agonie,’ George Herbert speaks about two defining moments in Christ’s passion. The language he uses is vivid – he speaks of hair, skin, and juice, the latter a particularly intense term for all bodily fluids. The whole poem is a contrast between the love of knowledge and the knowledge of love. The two defining moments offer a kind of knowledge more profound than the measurements of conventional things like mountains, states, seas and fountains (by which I assume he means waterfalls). They offer a knowledge of things that can’t be measured. Those two things are sin and love.
Herbert talks of sin in relation to Jesus’ experience in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus begs the Father to take the cup of suffering away from him, but then relents and puts the Father’s will ahead of his own. Herbert offers a disturbing image of sin forcing pain through every vein of Christ’s body, like an oversized cork that struggles to fit through the neck of a bottle. The image is one of a winepress, but described in terms that make the winepress feel clumsy. The key word is ‘vice,’ which means both grip and sin, and the double meaning is deliberate. You can feel the agony of the process taking place in every vein of Christ’s body – an almost infinite number of agonising thrusts. Here we appreciate that Herbert sees sin as unnatural, as unfitting as trying to force a cork through an aperture too narrow for it to fit, something that only a perverse imagination would even attempt, and ultimately doomed to damaging failure.
Then Herbert turns to love. Love is made manifest on Calvary. As Christ hangs on the cross, a speak is shoved into his side, out of which comes water and blood, here conflated in the intriguing word ‘juice.’ But the word juice invites the word ‘taste,’ which would otherwise feel out of place in relation to blood. And this enables Herbert to transpose speech about Christ’s cross into language about the Eucharist, and to conjure a delicate contrast that concludes the poem, with the words ‘liquor sweet and most divine, Which my God feels as blood; but I as wine.’ Hence whereas sin seems unnatural and disjointed, love feels sweet and divine. Thus what was agonising when being forced through a winepress like an instrument of torture, in the end becomes delightful and heavenly.
But there’s something theological going on here that’s beyond the imagery of winepress and wine. In conventional theology, the cross is invariably associated with sin, as the price God paid in Christ for the sin of Adam and all such consequences of the fall. But when Herbert here mentions the cross, it’s not in relation to sin, but in the context of love. Where sin does get a mention is in Gethsemane, when Jesus is weighing whether to put his own fears and needs in the centre of the story, or whether to let the Father be the fulcrum of all things. Herbert appears in the first verse to be saying sin and love are equally immeasurable, and thus equally important. But by the end of the poem that’s not the case. Sin has been displaced from its role in the middle of the story, the second verse, and has been supplanted by love as the final goal of the story, where the narrative concludes. Sin intrudes, but love has the last word.
The significance of what Herbert is doing here can be appreciated if we look at the contrast between the twentieth century’s two best-known theologians, Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth. Niebuhr talks a lot about the real, and contrasts it with the ideal. For Niebuhr, love is an unreachable ideal. Love serves to highlight sin and prevent us imagining any human achievement is perfect. Thus love is an impossible possibility, because it’s always there, but always out of reach, always ideal but elusive. Karl Barth didn’t contrast the real with the ideal. He contrasted the real with the unreal. The real was God. Anything opposed to God was fundamentally unreal. Sin is temporary; it will one day disappear. It has to be accounted for, but as something absurd. Thus sin is an impossible possibility. So Barth and Niebuhr both think of the impossible possibility, but it has opposite meanings. Niebuhr is anthropocentric: he thinks we know what sin is from understanding human nature, but love is out of reach. Barth is theocentric: he thinks we know what love is, because we see the love of God in Jesus, but sin is absurd.
If we return to George Herbert, we see how this contrast plays out in a poem written 300 years before this theological difference was aired. By saying there are two fathomless, spacious things, Herbert seems to be treading a path halfway between Niebuhr and Barth: according equal status to sin and love. But as I read it, and in the light of other poems in this collection, Herbert sees love as something that comes before and after sin, not so much vanquishing it as outlasting it and enveloping it and, in Karl Barth’s terminology, proving more real than it. A few weeks ago in the poem Angela reflected upon, we saw the impossible possibility of sin, that for all the formation by the church and disciplines of devotion, sin frequently intrudes like weeds among flowers. Here we see that love is the reality that abides beyond sin, and is made tangible to us in the form of the wine of the Eucharist.
How do we inscribe in our hearts and souls the conviction and confidence that love is real while sin is unreal? A few weeks ago, I got into a conversation with a man who’d recently been told he had months to live. He’s spent a lot of his life struggling across the line between faith and unfaith. But he said a beautiful thing to me. He said, ‘I’d like to die a death that is pleasing in God’s sight, because I am realising I have grown to love him more than anything else.’ Then he said ‘How should I live my remaining months, given my doubts and fears?’ I thought I’d share with you what I suggested in return, because I think the question is the same question as this poem asks, that’s to say, how do we live between the deep reality of love and the pressing unreality of sin?
You won’t be surprised to hear that I made three suggestions. The first was this. Get into a regular habit, perhaps twice a day, of taking something in your vicinity, indoors like a chair or outdoors like a tree, and contemplating the profound complexity of its coming into being and the countless micro- and macro-interactions that have constituted its life. The result will be an overflow of gratitude that will fill your soul. The second was similarly, once or twice a day, to ask God to cradle you into the future. Death is powerlessness and unknowing. Eternal life isn’t necessarily knowing, but fully trusting. Third, you try each day to do one thing that’s a blessing to someone else, whether leaving your will in order or earmarking one of your possessions for a child.
What I was trying to do was to articulate a humility that fundamentally recognises the greatest things in existence are beyond our control, yet an empowerment that enables us nonetheless to exist and act in ways that still matter. The first way, to cultivate gratitude, is to embrace the powerlessness and begin to experience it as gift rather than threat. The second way, to ask God to cradle you into the future, is to recognise one’s own powerlessness in the context of the one in whom ultimate power finally lies. It’s to cross over from sin, which centres ourselves in the story, to love, which centres God. The third way, to be a blessing, is to seek to assist others on the path of grace – to cease to cling to life and possessions for as long as we can but to hold everything in our lives gently, as gifts to be passed on rather than as property to be gripped on to.
George Herbert shows us in this short poem how to live lives of wonder, with a balance of humility and empowerment – lives that dwell with the pressing unreality of sin and the ultimate reality of love. These are the two vast, spacious things that tussle in our soul through Lent and through life. But only one of them lasts forever. Thanks be to God. Amen.
