The Perfect Mirror

How Prayer Transforms Us from Hearers to Doers

“Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only.”

Doers, not just hearers.

With this concise distinction, St James brings home the essential message of the Resurrection.

In fact, this distinction gives the pattern to all of the pairs of readings, the Epistles and Gospels, that the ancient lectionary of the West, preserved in our Prayer Book, has given us since Easter. Every week, the Gospel reading has been given us the teaching we need to hear, and the Epistle the guidance we need to put that teaching into action.

That same pattern is crystallised in today’s collect:

O LORD, from whom all good things do come: Grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same; through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

This in an ancient prayer - it comes from an eighth century anthology acscribed to the 5^th century Pope Gelasius. It begins by reminding us of the revelation we heard from St James’ last week, of God as the Father of Lights from whom every good and perfect gift comes. It then shows the order in which we receive those gifts: first, that by God’s holy inspiration we may think those things that be good – that is what S. James calls being a hearer of the Word, the thoughts entering our mind by the gift of God’s Spirit; and second, by God’s merciful guiding so that we may perform the same – or, in S. James’s language, becoming a doer of the Word.

Let’s see how this distinction works in practice with today’s readings. The Gospel, S. John 16.23 onwards, continues Our Lord’s speech at the Last Supper. He speaks plainly: He has come from the Father, and now He is returning to the Father. The disciples believe Him. But for Jesus, this is not enough:

Do ye now believe? Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered every man to his own, and shall leave me alone.

Oh, they believe, all right: they believe that He has come from the Father and will return to the Father. They have heard. So be it. As St James will say later in another context, the devils also believe, and tremble. The legions of fallen angels that possessed the Gadarene demoniac, the ones our Lord famously cast out into a herd of swine, knew who Jesus was. They believed! They heard. But they resisted and rebelled.

And the disciples may have believed at that moment, at the Last Supper, but when the time came to action, they failed. They fled the scene. They heard the Word, but they did not yet have it in them to be doers of the Word. As St James writes in the Epistle (1.22–), it is as though they looked at themselves briefly in a mirror, taken stock of who they were, seen themselves as humans with a face, perhaps recognised their own deficiencies and their own nobility, their share of ugliness and beauty – then walked off and forgot themselves, going back to their usual ways. These were, we might remember, people for whom mirrors were rare, expensive items, and made of metal rather than glass, so not all that accurate – they were not constantly looking at hi-res pictures of themselves on screens, either – so the mirror metaphor had rather more strength in St James’s day than perhaps it does in ours. You might go weeks, or longer, without seeing your own face, and when you did, you would think: “ah, so that is what I look like!” But then you go away, and forget, and build up a false or flawed mental image of yourself.

That fleeting awareness of one’s self-image is what S. James compares to hearing the word only. It is like the seed sown on the rocky ground, in the famous parable, springing up for a moment, then withering. But if you want to be a doer of the Word, it needs to be engrafted in your soul, to take another of S. James’ words from last week’s Epistle (1:17–). And that means gazing at a better mirror: the mirror S. James calls the “perfect law of liberty.”

And what is that law? Well, when we hear the word “law” in the New Testament, our ears should prick up to what it meant to Jewish listeners back in Jesus’ day. It means the Law, the Torah: not just the “thou shalts” and “shalt nots,” but the entirety of the first five books of the Bible. This is God’s blueprint not so much for believing, as for doing, for putting into action. And it is this Torah Law which Our Lord claims not to have changed, not to have destroyed, but to have fulfilled or perfected. And that word, Our Lord’s word, takes us back to S. James: the perfect law, the perfect Torah, is the Torah embodied and engrafted in the person of Jesus Christ. He is the living Torah, in whose service we find perfect freedom: so, the perfect Law of liberty.

So how do we do that? How do we turn our gaze from our own faces to the face of Him who is the perfect Law of liberty? How do we become doers of the Word, strengthened to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep ourselves unspotted from the world?

Our Lord gives the answer. Ask for it. But not in any old way: ask in His Name, the Name of Jesus, the Name – as the ancient hymn of Philippian 2 has it – which is above every Name, at which every knee in heaven and earth and under the earth shall bend. The Name that means, literally, “God saves.” It is by taking refuge in His Holy Name in prayerful supplication to the Father, that we come to receive His peace and enter into the fullness of joy.

Let’s break this down a little further. S. James’ metaphor about mirror images takes us back to Genesis 1, where humanity is made in the “image and likeness” of God. The image and likeness then get corrupted at the Fall, as though the mirror in our souls that used to reflect God perfectly is now cracked and dirty. So first, in hearing the Word, and believing, the mirror is repaired, and the image is restored. This happens, specifically, in baptism, when we are justified by God’s grace and cleansed of our sins, turned away from the world, the flesh and the Devil, towards His Face.

But then, we continue to turn away from God’s path, and even though the mirror is mended, the image is restored, our likeness to God still needs a lot of work. This is the work of sanctification. It, too, is the work of the Holy Spirit. It corresponds especially to the Eucharist, when by the Spirit, Our Lord keeps coming down to us, keeps descending through the altar of the Cross, via the Blessed Sacrament, the Divine Word engrafting Himself into our souls.

And it is all His work. But we have our work to do, too: and that work is prayer. We receive the Word in teaching, and offer it back in prayer. Prayer is our chief duty, the means whereby the Spirit guides and trains our desires for union with the sovereign good, which is Christ our God. The culmination of all this prayer is the Mass, surely, where our sullied humanity is exchanged with God’s luminous divinity. But the daily round of the offices of Mattins and Vespers, and our own private meditations on Scripture, our confessions well-made, and our silent contemplation of the Face of Christ are essential rungs on the ladder which God has given us, in the Church, for our sanctification.

Today is Rogation Sunday, which starts the three days of Rogation – the Latin for “asking” – when the Church traditionally asks God to bless the crops being planted. Let us ask for that, but let us also ask for much more. As we look forward to the Feast of the Ascension, this Thursday, and the uplifting of our humanity to its heavenly home, let us ask not only to be hearers, but also doers of the Word; not only saved, but holy; not only human, but divine. And let us ask God to set our hearts in fervent prayer, in the saving Name of Jesus Christ alone, that we may know the perfect peace, greater even than the shalom rest of the Seventh Day: the peace of the Resurrection, by which our Saviour has overcome the tribulation of this changing world.