Sermon Sixteen: LETTING THE WILL GO

“Moses pleaded with the Lord his God.” (Ex. 32:11)^a

I have made a brief statement in Latin that is written in today’s Epistle. In German it means: “Moses pleaded with God his Lord: ‘Why should your wrath blaze out against your people?’” (Ex. 32:11). Then God made answer and said to him: “Moses, let me blaze forth; grant this to me; allow it to me; permit me to blaze with anger and avenge myself on the people.” And God made a promise to Moses and said: “I will raise you up and make you great and I will increase your descendants and make you lord over a great people” (Ex. 32:10). But Moses said: “Lord, blot me out of the book of the living or spare the people!” (Ex. 32:32).

What does it mean when it is written: “Moses pleaded with God his Lord”? Truly, if God is your Lord, then you must be his servant. If you accomplish your deeds for your own use or your own pleasure or your own happiness, truly you are not his servant. For you are not seeking God’s honor alone, but you are seeking your own advantage. Why does he say: “God his Lord”? If God wants you to be sick while you wish to be well, if God wants your friend to die while you want him to live, contrary to God’s wish, then truly God is not your God. If, however, you love God and then are sick, let it be in God’s name! If your friend dies, let it be in God’s name! If you lose an eye, let it be in God’s name! With such a person, may it be all right. If you are sick, however, and ask God for health, your health is dearer to you than God, and he is thus not your God. He is the God of the kingdom of heaven and of the kingdom of the earth, but he is not your God.

Now notice how God says: “Moses, let me blaze forth!” You can say to this: “Why is God blazing forth?” Over nothing less than the loss of our happiness, for he is not seeking his own interest. So sorry is God that we are behaving in a way contrary to our happiness. Nothing more sorrowful could happen to God than the martyrdom and death of our Lord Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son. This death Christ suffered for our happiness. Now notice once again that God says: “Moses, let me blaze forth!” See now what a good person can do with God. It is a certain and necessary truth that whoever always surrenders his will completely to God captures and binds God so that God wishes nothing but what that person wishes. Whoever always gives up his will completely, receives in return from God so completely and so truly God’s will that it becomes that person’s own will. And God has sworn to himself that he wishes nothing other than what that person wishes. For God will never belong to anyone who has not first become God’s own.

Saint Augustine says: “Lord, you will belong to no one until that person has first become yours.” We deafen God day and night and cry out: “Lord, your will be done!” (Mt 6:10). And yet when God’s will takes place, we blaze forth, which is quite improper. If our will is God’s will, it is good. But if God’s will becomes our will, it is far better. If your will becomes God’s will, and you then get sick, you would not wish to become well against God’s wish, but you would wish that it might be God’s will for you to become well. And if you are ill, you would wish that it might be God’s will for you to be well. On the other hand, if God’s will is your will and you are then sick, let it be in God’s name! If your friend dies, let it be in God’s name! This is a more certain and more necessary truth: if it were true that all the pain of hell and all the pain of purgatory and all the pain of the whole earth depended on it, our will would wish to endure it with God’s will in the pain of hell eternally and continuously. And our will would regard this forever as its happiness and would add to God’s will the happiness and all the perfection of our Lady and all the saints; in eternal pain and bitter suffering our will would also wish to persevere and not to turn away from all this for a moment. Indeed, our will could not wish to raise a thought of wishing to change anything in this situation. If our will thus becomes so one with God’s will that a single unity is formed as a result, then the Father from the kingdom of heaven will produce his only born Son in himself together with me. Why do I say “in himself together with me”? Because I am one with him and he cannot exclude me. And in this deed the Holy Spirit receives his being and his deed and his becoming from me as much as from God! That is because I am after all in God. If the Holy Spirit does not receive these things from me, then he also does not receive them from God. He cannot exclude me in any way. So completely had Moses’ will become God’s will that God’s honor toward the people was dearer to him than his own happiness.

God gave to Moses a promise, but Moses did not pay attention to it. Indeed, even if God had promised him his entire Godhead, Moses would not have allowed him to blaze forth. Moses, rather, pleaded with God and said: “Lord, blot me out of the book of the living” (Ex. 32:32). The masters of the spiritual life raise this question: “Did Moses love the people more than himself?” And they say no, for Moses knew very well that, if he sought God’s honor before the people, he was thus nearer to God than if he had abandoned Good’s honor before the people and had sought his own happiness. It is characteristic of good people that in all their deeds they seek not their own interests but God’s honor alone. So long as you are somehow more attentive in your action to yourself, or more attentive to one person than another, God’s will has not properly become your will.

Our Lord says in the Gospel: “My teaching is not my own teaching, but it is of the one who sent me” (Jn. 7:16). In the same way a good person must consider: “My deeds are not my deeds; my life is not my life.” And this is the way I conduct myself so that all the perfection and all the happiness of Saint Peter, and all the happiness of Saint Paul as a result of sticking out his head, and all the happiness they received from their deeds—all this gives me joy as much as it does them. Moreover, I shall participate in these deeds as if I myself had accomplished them. In addition, I shall receive eternal joy through all the deeds of all the saints and all the angels, and even through the deeds of Mary, the Mother of God, as if I had accomplished them myself.

I now state that “humanity” and “human being” are twofold. Humanity is so noble in itself that the highest of humanity has equality with the angels and kinship with the Godhead. It is possible for me to obtain the greatest unity that Christ possessed with the Father if only I could put aside what is from this individual or that individual, and could conceive of myself as “humanity.” Then God would give to me what he gave to his only begotten Son. He would give it to me as completely as to the Son, and no less. Indeed, he would give it to me in a higher measure. For he would be giving to my humanity in Christ more than he gave to Christ himself, for the Father gave him nothing since Christ possessed it already from eternity in the Father.

If I strike you, I am first of all striking a Tom or a Dick, and then I am striking a “human being.” Who is a human being? Whoever has his own name after Jesus Christ. For this reason our Lord says in the Scriptures: “Whoever disturbs one of these here touches me in the eye” (Zc. 2:8).

Now I repeat myself: “Moses pleaded with God his Lord.” Many people plead with God for everything that he can do for them. They do not wish, however, to give God all they are capable of giving. They want to share with God, and they would like to give him the less valuable part, and only a little at that The first thing that God gives, however, is himself. And if you have God, you have all things along with God. I have at times said that whoever has God and all things in addition, that person has no less than one who has God alone. I add to this that a thousand angels are in eternity not more numerous than two or a single one, for in eternity there is no number. Eternity is beyond numbering.

“Moses pleaded with God his Lord.” “Moses” means something like “one who has been raised from the water.” Now I shall speak again about the human will. If someone were to give a hundred gold marks for God’s sake, that would be a good deed and would seem something significant. But I say that if I have such a wish—provided that I possess a hundred marks so that I can give them away—and if it is my complete wish, then I have in this way really made a payment to God, and he must reward me, just as if I had paid him a hundred marks. In addition, I say that, if I had a wish—to the extent that I possessed a whole world—to give it to God, I have paid God a whole world. He must reward me for it, just as if I had counted out a whole world for him. Yes, I say that if the Pope were struck dead by my hand, quite against my wish, I would all the same go up to the altar and say Mass! I say that “humanity” in the poorest and most despised human being is just as complete as in the Pope or the Emperor. For “humanity” in itself is dearer to me than the human being I carry about in myself.

May the truth of which I have spoken help us to be united in the same way with God! Amen.

COMMENTARY:  How to Free the Will/The Need to Let Suffering and Pain Go/Letting Differences Go So as to Experience the Communion of Saints and the Nobility of Humanity

In the previous sermon Eckhart urged us to a radical letting go in order to let be. In this sermon, drawing on readings from the Lenten liturgy, Eckhart develops this way of letting go as it applies to the will and especially as it applies to suffering and pain in our lives. The Gospel Eckhart read for the day comments on our doing the will of God. Jesus is speaking:

“My teaching is not from myself:

it comes from the one who sent me;

and if anyone is prepared to do his will,

he will know whether my teaching is from God

or whether my doctrine is my own.

When a person’s doctrine is his own

he is hoping to get honor for himself;

but when he is working for the honor of one who sent him,

then he is sincere

and by no means an impostor.

Did not Moses give you the Law?

And yet not one of you keeps the Law!” (Jn. 7:16–19)

Eckhart repeats these very lines in his sermon when he warns that we are not seeking God’s honor alone, but you are seeking your own advantage and he relates the cause for this self-seeking to the distance between God’s will and ours. Whoever always gives up his will completely, receives in return from God so completely and so truly God’s will that it becomes that person’s own will. Eckhart seeks nothing less than an exchange of wills between God and us. If our will is God’s will, it is good. But if God’s will becomes our will, it is far better. How does it happen that we exchange wills with God? By letting God’s will be God’s will and by letting go of our will in order for God’s will to emerge. Eckhart draws on Moses’ encounter with an angry God and listens attentively to God’s prayer to Moses: “Moses, let me blaze forth; grant this to me; allow it to me; permit me to blaze with anger and avenge myself on the people” These words are, in fact, an elucidation of the biblical text by Eckhart that reveals how taken Eckhart was by the simpler biblical text which reads: “Leave me, now, my wrath shall blaze out against them and devour them” (Ex. 32:10). Eckhart, pursuing his theme in the previous sermon of letting go of God, asks his listeners to listen to God’s desire to let the divine anger be anger and to let God be God.

Eckhart’s advice as to how we are to let God be God is that we need to let our wills go. In doing so we touch the nothingness that we share in common with God.

A human being should seek nothing—neither discernment nor knowledge nor inwardness nor devotion nor rest—but only the will of God . . . Knowledge of God with the exclusion of God’s will is nothing. In God’s will all things are and are something, are pleasing to God and perfect; outside of the will of God, on the other hand, all things are nothing, are displeasing to God and imperfect. A human being should never pray for something, pray for God’s will and nothing else . . . then everything else will be given.¹

When we let our will go we are transformed into God’s will.

Now you might ask: When is the will right? The will is unimpaired and right when it is entirely free from self-seeking, and when It has forsaken itself and is formed and transformed into the will of God, indeed, the more it is so, the more the will is right and true.²

The God of the kingdom of heaven and of earth is not your God until that same God exchanges wills with us. Whoever always gives up his will completely, receives in return from God so completely and so truly God’s will that it becomes that person’s own will. How does this happen? By our letting go of our will.

This is why a person should give up everything he has for the kingdom of heaven, especially his own self-will. As long as he still holds on to some part of his own self-will, he has not earned the kingdom of heaven. But whoever can let go of himself and his own self-will will find it easy to relinquish all material things.³

The transformation from our will to God’s will is a matter of abandoning oneself or letting oneself go. “Hence our Lord said: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit/that is, poor in will . . . Consider yourself and where you find yourself, abandon yourself: That is the very best course.”⁴ Our letting go of our will is a way of entrapping God. See now what a good person can do with God . . . whoever a/ways surrenders his will completely to God captures and binds God so that God wishes nothing but what that person wishes. And this wishing is always for our happiness.

One reason why letting go of will and sinking into the freedom that is God’s will is a way to be trusted is that the goodness of the Creator is to be trusted. Evil is not as radical to creation as goodness is.

Evil is accidental in its nature: it stands outside, draws and directs things outward, distracts from inner things, draws to what is other, smacks of otherness, of division, withdrawal, or falling away. Evil, therefore, is nothing but a defect or shortcoming.

Evil does not have the last word. “What is evil for one person is good for another or for the universe; and he who takes harm from it now and in the present instance will benefit from it later in other circumstances.”⁵ Thus evil is profoundly relative and ought not to be clung to as if it were something absolute. Thus no suffering is pure suffering, no pain is total, for the good Creator of the good earth would not tolerate pure evil. “God and nature do not allow pure evil or pain to exist.”⁶ The biblical text for this sermon from Exodus 32:1–35 is a text dedicated to the subject of evil. “You yourself know how prone this people is to evil,” Aaron warns Moses (v. 23). Thus Eckhart is fully justified from a biblical point of view in discoursing on the meaning of divine anger and human suffering in this context. But what most occupies Eckhart’s attention, like Moses’, is not the evil but how to turn the evil to good, the suffering to joy, the sin to blessing. “I will raise you up and make you great and I will increase your descendants and make you lord over a great people.” Eckhart turns his attention to what a great people would be. Eckhart does not carry on with an abstract discourse on the nature of the free will or even whether the human will is free. He is interested in freeing the will and setting it free so that it can bless and be blessed once again. We free the will by letting it go.

But if God wishes our happiness and we wish our happiness, why are we not happier? Why is there so much suffering and so much pain? Eckhart would reply that it is because we have not let go of our wills radically enough. “The restlessness of all our storms comes entirely from self-will, whether we notice it or not.”⁷ Eckhart urges us, within the context of discussing our need to let go of will, to let go of suffering as well. Too often we cling to our suffering and become attached to it.

This is the meaning, in a good sense, of our Lord’s words, “If any one will come to me, let him deny himself and take up his cross,” that is, he should lay down everything and get rid of everything that is a cross and a shadow.⁸

It is suffering with attachment which is “hard for you to bear,” but suffering “for the love of God . . . does not hurt and is not hard to bear.”⁹ Eckhart tells the story of a man who had one hundred marks and lost forty. When he concentrates only on the lost forty, he

remains in despair and grief. How could he be comforted and free from sorrow if he turns to his loss and his pain and pictures it to himself and himself in it, and looks at it, and it looks at him again and talks to him. He speaks to his loss and the loss talks to him again, and they see each other face to face.

This is no way to let go of suffering, Eckhart is cautioning. Pain compulsively clung to is pain that is doubled. “Turn your back” on the lost forty marks, Eckhart advises, and concentrate

on the sixty and look at them face to face and talk to them . . . That which is good has the power to comfort, but what is nothing and is not good, what is not mine and is lost to me, must necessarily give despair and pain and distress. Hence Solomon says: “In the days of pain forget not the days of goodness” (cf. Si. 11:27). That means, when you are in pain and suffering, remember the good and the comfort that you still have and retain.¹⁰

We suffer to the extent that we are shallow in our letting go of things and to the extent that we cling to things instead of experiencing their transparency.

All suffering comes from love and affection. Therefore, if I suffer because of transient things, I still have, and my heart still has, love and affection for transient things, and I do not love God with all my heart. . .¹¹

Caputo points out how similar this diagnosis of suffering and of its cure—letting go—is to Buddha’s problem with suffering or dukkha. Buddha’s solution to suffering was to overcome it by releasing oneself from self-will and craving. “Like Buddha, Eckhart prescribes a comparable remedy: abandon yourself, let go of yourself (lass dichl).”¹² Eckhart paints a picture of what this abandonment of self-will does for a person.

A true and perfect will means to tread absolutely in the will of God and to be without self-will. The more one has of this, the more and more truly one is placed in God. Indeed, it is more profitable to say one Ave Maria if one has forsaken oneself than to read a thousand psalters without this. One step would be better with self-surrender than making a pilgrimage overseas without it.

The person who has thus let go of all that is his would therefore be so completely enveloped in God that when one wanted to touch him one would first have to touch God. For such a person is absolutely in God, and God is round about him, just as my hood is round my head. If anyone wanted to seize me he would first have to touch my garment.¹³

In the sermon we are reading, Eckhart has also spoken of his being in God. Our being “absolutely in God” is the fruit of our letting our will go.

Another experience of letting suffering go is letting God take it. Give the burden to God, Eckhart is saying. God is not a mere consoler: God is the one who is to bear the pain and the suffering provided we let him. “Moses, let me blaze forth; grant this to me; allow it to me; permit me to blaze with anger and avenge myself on the people” Eckhart has pictured Yahweh as saying.

It is God who carries the burden . . . If there were a person who liked to suffer for God and purely for God alone, and if this person felt in a single blow all the suffering that all people have ever suffered, and all the suffering the entire world bears, it would not hurt him and would not weigh him down, for it is God who would carry the burden.¹⁴

But there is no way to let God bear the burden except by relinquishing it ourselves and thus letting God be the bearer of the suffering. Our God is a God who can and does bear suffering.

However great suffering is, if it comes through God, God suffers from it first. Indeed, by the truth which is God, however slight the suffering that befalls a person may be, let us say some discomfort or trial, provided that one places it in God, it would affect God immeasurably more than the person . . .¹⁵

Schürmann comments on Eckhart’s teaching on suffering that “it is not enough to receive suffering passively as a ‘virgin,’ free of all attachment, but suffering must in turn be borne back into God. God is not only a consoler; he is no longer the ‘why’ of suffering, but its subject.”¹⁶

When we return the suffering to God we experience the joy and the equanimity that the spirit brings. “What constitutes man as Son most of all is equanimity. Is he sick? May he be as gladly sick as well, as gladly well as sick.”¹⁷ “So long as God is satisfied,” Eckhart counsels, “be content.”¹⁸

If anyone had forsaken himself and had denied himslf altogether, nothing could be a cross or sorrow or suffering to him. It would all be happiness, joy, and gladness, and he would come and truly follow God. For, as God cannot make anyone sad or sorrowful, in the same way, nothing could make such a person unhappy or sad.¹⁹

To be in God is to experience an equanimity of joy regardless of pain and suffering.

Your joy reaches to the greatest evenness; it never alters. Therefore Christ says: “No one can take your joy away from you.” And when I am correctly translated into the divine being, God becomes mine as well as everything he has. This is why he says: “I am God, your Lord.” I have rightful joy only when neither sufferings nor torments can ravish it from me. Then I am translated into the divine being where no suffering has a place. We see indeed that in God there is neither wrath nor grief, but only love and joy.²⁰

Our being in God is a source of equanimity and balance. There every tear is wiped away, “so that suffering is not suffering for you and that all things are sheer joy for you.”²¹

The joy that is experienced in the kinship with the Godhead is not restricted to my personal joy alone. Rather, the entire communion of saints dances to this same deep joy—Saints Peter and Paul and Mary too. All the happiness they received . . . gives me joy as much as it does them. And this sharing of eternal joy applies to all the deeds of all the saints and all the angels. By letting go of that which separates us from God, we also let go of that which separates us from others in the communion of saints and even from what separates us from our deepest self. For deep within us we are not ruggedly individualistic and separatist—my life is not my life—but we are, in God, a unity so that the happiness of one is the happiness of all. We bathe in one life; God is round about us all.

If you love the angel’s happiness as much as your own, and if you love our Lady’s happiness equally as your own, then you enjoy the same happiness quite properly as she does; it is your own as it is her own. Therefore it is said in the book of wisdom: “He has made him equal to the saints” (Si. 45:2).²²

Likewise, when I offend another I not only offend this particular person named Tom or Dick but I offend humanity. And where we offend humanity we offend Christ, who is a representative of humanity and not just a single human being. The mystical body rejoices when one member rejoices and suffers when a single member suffers.

But the key to realizing the oneness in joy and in suffering of all people is letting go of willfulness. This Moses was willing to do, namely, to let go of his will for the sake of the honor of his people. But first he had to let go of his will before God. So noble is humanity in itself that the highest of humanity has equality with the angels and kinship with the Godhead. We attain the unity with humanity that Christ had to the extent that we put aside what is from this individual or that individual and could conceive of ourselves as “humanity.” Humanity as such is not a respecter of persons. I say that “humanity” in the poorest and most despised human being is just as complete as in the Pope or the Emperor. It is also a more worthy object of our love than we are as individuals. Humanity in itself is dearer to me than the human being I carry about in myself. The letting go Eckhart advocates, then, is a letting go of our splendid isolationisms and rugged individualisms. It is a letting go of the I in order to let the We happen. It is a letting go of subject/object relations in order to let panentheistic relations happen. It is a letting go of My to let Our happen.

When we let go in such a radical way, then anything can happen. For our will, when united to God’s, is a source of action so thoroughly that it needs no action to justify its activity or its nonactivity. Such a will chooses without a why or wherefore. If it is my complete wish [to pay God a hundred marks], then I have in this way really made a payment to God, and he must reward me, just as if I had paid him a hundred marks. And if evil was done by my hand but quite against my wish, it would not be a sin that was laid on my responsibility.

In this will you can achieve all things, whether it is love or whatever else you like . . . The place of love is in the will alone; those who have more will have also more love. But no one knows whether someone else has more of it. It lies hidden in the soul as long as God lies buried in the ground of the soul.²³

It is from this freed will that our work takes on the character of being the work of God. Then, one “is working for the honor of one who sent him” and is “by no means an impostor” (Jn. 7:18). When the will is set free, we are free and God is free and our work is free.