The Sermons of Johannes Tauler · 37 of 124

Second Sermon for Good Friday

And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to Myself. — John xii, 32.

Our Lord Jesus Christ means that He will draw all men to Himself when He is lifted up; for man has a share of all things in himself — in common with the stones of the earth he has existence, life with the trees and plants, sense with animals, and reason with angels.

Insight

I, if I be lifted up, will draw all things to myself. The verse is the Johannine seed of universalist hope, and Tauler reads it cosmically: every level of created being has its analog in the human person, and all of them are drawn in the lifting up. The stone in you, the plant in you, the animal in you, the angelic reason in you — each is pulled by the crucified center. Origen had read the verse the same way in the third century and got himself condemned for it, but the language survives in Tauler without flinching. The Sufi mystic al-Hallaj, executed in Baghdad in 922 for crying out An’al-Haqq, I am the Truth, dies in a configuration that resembles Christ’s deliberately and consciously. He himself read his death as a sharing in the Johannine lifting up. The parallel is uncomfortable and real.

But someone might say, O Christ. Thou eternal truth, I do not feel Thy drawing, l am not attracted to Thee. St. Augustine answers: “Then pray that thou mayst be drawn to Him.” The fisherman casts his baited hook that the fish may seize it, and if it does not do so, then the fisherman does not get the fish; if it does, then the fisherman is sure of it and draws it in to the shore. So has God cast his hooks and his nets toward us and all around us; they are His angels and all His ether creatures, by which He would draw us to Him most gladly by our eyes and our ears and our hearts. By joyous things he draws us to Him, and by painful things as well. Whosoever is not caught and drawn to God has only himself to blame, for he has wilfully avoided the angels’ drawing — he will not receive God’s baited hook nor enter His net. If he had done so, God would have surely captured him; we have only to reach a hand toward God, and He will never fail to grasp it and draw us to Himself. Suppose you are at the bottom of a deep well and someone comes and lets down a rope to you; ought you not to grasp it and be saved?

The soul is like a feather blown about by the wind; but if a weight is attached to it, it rests idly on the ground. So does a soul freed from all weight of sinfulness easily soar aloft to God on the wings of holy

God’s praises are unceasingly sounded in that soul. And this happens because the soul is self-denying in all things, as far as its state of life will allow. Whosoever is for God’s sake far removed from love of earthly things, becomes transformed, and, like an angel, he is drawn deep into God. And, being so closely joined to Him, then whatever happens to that soul in its outward life is received in God and on account of God — eating or drinking, sleeping or waking, or whatsoever else he does, that man does all for the best honor of God.

A man’s highest perfection consists in interior tranquillity, all his faculties drawn in by an indescribably powerful detachment from created things, producing an angelic state of soul. Such a one is freed from what is offensively unlike God, and is granted a foretaste of that Divine union which he shall enjoy in eternity. Therefore, retire into thyself and be at rest from all outward and inward stirring, as far as God’s law will allow thee; give thyself up to Him in that state of mind, receiving His communication with thee directly or otherwise, according to His good pleasure. And whatever then comes to thee from God, accept it in entire self-renunciation, as being wholly from His hand, and be sure to return it back to Him in deep gratitude; receive all as a loan from Him, for it is His and not thine, and ever so remains. Thus wilt thou give God His glory, and thy own nature and heart and mind will abide in holy poverty in His sight.

When a man is thoroughly detached from all transitory things, and is rightly ordered in self-renunciation, he is in the first degree of his progress toward God. The second degree is when his soul is established in peace and rest. The third degree is when he receives all things, pleasant or unpleasant, from God’s hand in equal contentment of mind and is wholly resigned to God. This happens when a man lives in self-forgetfulness, in forgetfulness of all created things, and is lost in God. This degree is the highest perfection of purity of heart.

But let no man presume to take up this high and holy work of God of his own initiative. Bather let him humbly await God’s guidance, abandoning himself in all peacefulness and in total detachment to the Divine influence, whenever and however it may come to him. This will be all that God requires of him — that he stand before Him meekly and as a poor sinner, and await in entire self-denial the working of Divine

God’s hidden operations of grace, him will the power of the Almighty Father visit, and the light of the only begotten Son will shine within him, and the infinite love of the Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son, will be poured out upon him, and the heavens will rain down on him the dew of divine sweetness, and the earth and all creatures will minister to his happiness.

The lowest grade of these men are drawn close into God; those of the higher grade are illuminated and strengthened; the highest are elevated into union with Him. Yet be it known, that the entrancing joy and the. quiet stillness of God’s peace is not always perceptible to one’s natural faculties; the soul is often placed in a state of poverty of feeling. Int that state let one remain content in all self-renunciation, for God reveals; Himself only in a supernatural manner. What if a man, who has given himself up entirely to God as the source of all his being and is lost entirely in the Divine will— what if he does not always experience the sensible emotions of piety and of love; he is none the less pure of heart, none the less pleasing to God. The more God leaves a man in a state of natural desolation of spirit, the stronger does He establish him in supers natural grace. The more a man is tried by natural feelings of dread and of anguish — as long as these are not quite intolerable — the more do these very sufferings become an element of security in his spiritual life by nourishing holy humility. They hold him back from ruin; they are like a stout wall built up between him and the danger of losing all the graces that have been granted him. These trials hinder him from rashness and over-security. May God’s eternal love, overflowing and ever faithful, thus be given to us. Amen.

Ood — Many ways shown of thus dying and rising again — After that created things may be more safely used — Marvellous effects on the deeper interior life.