A Beautiful Kind of Fear

Beauty and the Beast, by KmyeChan

Propers: The Fifth Sunday of Easter, AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“Perfect love casts out fear.”

Today we think of fear as an emotion. But in the understanding of Jesus’ day—an understanding common to the ancient, classical, and medieval worlds—fear was held to be a passion, a lower function of the soul, designed to keep us alive. Our ancestors conceived of the soul—which is to say, the psyche, the mind—as possessing three distinct parts: the intellect, the will, and the passions.

The intellect consists of the higher functions of the mind: abstraction, transcendence, ideals, morality. It’s the part of the mind that mingles with the spirit, with reality beyond mere space and time. Our intellect has more in common with angels than with beasts. Passions, on the other hand, have to do with the nitty-gritty of life, the things we need within the here and now. Today we’d call them instincts. Our passions keep us alive.

And they come in two flavors: the irascible and concupiscible. The concupiscible passions are the appetites, for food, for sex, for comfort and entertainments. And those are not bad things, are they? We need to eat. We need to rest. We need to raise our families. The irascible passions deal with our response to threat. It’s fight or flight. We put up our dukes, or we run away. So here we find our anger and our fear.

Passions cover the basics. The intellect sees beyond the horizon. And in between the two we have the will. The will weighs the counsels of our angel on the one shoulder and our devil on the other. And then the will in justice makes a choice. This is not an antiquated model, mind you. This is how psychology still works, only instead of using terms such as intellect and passions, we call them the superego and the id. But that’s a modern gloss on an ancient understanding.

Or, if you’re of a more biological bent, we can talk about the mammalian brain, the reptilian brain, and the prefrontal cortex. Still the same idea that Plato penned.

In a healthy human soul, the intellect directs the will, which then in turn restrains the passions. Passions are good things, remember. You want to know when you’re hungry. You want to be able to defend yourself. But in an unhealthy soul, the opposite is true. The disordered mind is driven by its passions run amok. Anger, fear, and hunger override the power of our will, which then shackles the intellect to the task not of reason but of rationalization, the justifying of our selfish and savage behavior.

Fear within its proper bounds is simply information. It’s good to know that I should give the venomous snake a wide berth, or maybe not swim with the sharks. Yet fear, like fire, makes for a wonderful servant but a terrible master. We cannot let it govern us, for that is not its job. We have to keep our fear within control. For cowardice makes a man cruel, every single time.

I think it safe to say that our culture rarely bothers to appeal to our intellect. We’re no longer even certain what the intellect is for. The only measure of the mind, the only value that we place upon ideas, is whether or not they can make us any money. In other words, we assume that the proper use of the intellect is in service to our passions, our desires, our appetites. The baser bits of the soul now pilot the ship.

This affects society. News media no longer even attempt to express ideas, nor to facilitate a deeper understanding of our world. How could that compete for ratings? No, it’s all about our passions: our hunger, our anger, our fear. “If it bleeds, it leads,” right? When you treat people like animals, when you appeal to the reptile brain, reptiles are exactly what you get. What won’t we do in the name of fear? Whom won’t we hate? Hate is so easy, hate is so quick, because hate is the mask worn by fear. It’s all “I,” and never “we.”

“Perfect love casts out fear.”

We think of fear as an emotion, but it isn’t. It’s an instinct, a knee-jerk reaction. Well, neither is love an emotion. Love is not a sentiment; it isn’t about how you feel. Love is a virtue, a habitual choice, to put the good of another before our own. It’s an act of the will, serving a higher purpose, a comprehensive field of view. And a healthy will, a strong will, keeps the passions in line. Yes, I’m hungry, but so is someone else. Yes, we’re afraid, but we can’t let that harm other people.

Love is not so much the cancellation of fear as it can be its expansion. Passions serve life. They protect us on the most immediate level of our existence, and that is no bad thing. But if we start to see, as we ought to see, that I am not a solitary self, that there are other people who matter, and that they are part of me, then that instinct to live can expand. It can grow to encompass others, a broader understanding of the self, of humanity, of life.

I have often opined that before we have children each of us has our own unique greatest fear—of spiders or heights or closed-in spaces or what-have-you—but once we do have children, we all have the same greatest fear. And Stephen King exploits it well. This is of course my perspective as a parent. You needn’t have kids to reach the maturity of valuing someone’s life beyond your own. But for those of us who are a little slow, our children make it clear, in ways we can’t ignore, that love is a beautiful kind of fear.

To love someone like that is to have your heart leap out of your chest and go running about on legs of its own. It is so wonderful, so joyful, so painful, and so terrifying. And you wouldn’t give it up for all the world. Love and fear together form a sacrifice. We pour out who we are for one another. We give away ourselves, and kind of die. But it’s worth it. Love is worth it. It is death and resurrection every day.

The root of Holy Wisdom is the Oneness of all things. We call ourselves contingent, as we’re made of many parts. If you remove any one of them—a single ancestor, a single meal, a single day—the whole thing comes unraveled. I am dependent on a thousand-thousand things, without which I could never hope to be; dependent on the sun, the earth, on gravity; on my neighbors, my parents, my education; on farmers and teachers and sanitation workers, and everything else in the cosmos; which all comes down to the simple fact that I am dependent on God.

God alone is absolute, self-sufficient, transcending dependence or need—which means that everything God does, He does purely out of love. He gives of Himself, that everything else can exist. You and I and all of us, animals and plants, earth and sky, galaxies and gluons, all of it produced in endless love, the infinite outpouring, the eternal sacrifice of God, to and for and in Creation.

Christ on the Cross, blood and water pouring from His side, is the visible Image of the invisible Father, forever opening and emptying Himself for all the world. This is what Jesus means when He says that “I am the vine [and] you are the branches.” We are all of us connected, all of us one, all of us constantly sustained by and sharing between us the infinite love of God, which is the very essence of ourselves.

Apart from God, and the life of His love, we would wither, we would die. We all share the one lifeblood, the one source and ground of existence, in whom we live and move and have our being. And so the only fear we ought to have is the fear inherent in love: namely, the fear that withholding our love would thus bring harm to our beloved. Passion is the instinct to preserve our own life. Well, everyone’s life is mine! And all of us are God’s.

This is the truth at the root of the world: that everything runs on love. Despite our agonies, our sufferings, our injustices and fears, all good things flow from God, to whom we all return. Christ is with us, Christ is for us, and Christ will raise us up. He is the vine. We are the branches. And His love casts out fear.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
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St Peter’s Lutheran
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Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/
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Nidaros Lutheran
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026