Month: February 2010

“Your name shall no more be called Jacob but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed”

It is one of the most outstanding statements in the whole of the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures, in what Christians know as the Old Testament. It marks and establishes the real meaning of Judaism and its further fulfillment, dare I say, in Christianity, or at least, in Jesus Christ in the Christian understanding. Nowhere does the striving with God and man appear more completely and more concentrated fashion than on the way of the Cross, the way of our Lenten pilgrimage.

The tragedy of our age lies in our ignorance, wilful and otherwise, of this understanding and perspective. We have become so accustomed and cynically inured to the endless posturing and manipulations of power politics, on the one hand, and the defeatist mentality of victim and entitlement politics, on the other hand, that we have little or no capacity to grasp the transcendent truths that the Scriptures constantly open out to us. We are, I fear, as dead to metaphor as we are to metaphysics (read God). And yet, these stories, by virtue of their being proclaimed, speak to our need and our situation.

Jacob is the deceiver, the trickster, the supplanter, a clever fellow, we might say, perhaps too clever by half and, no doubt, that view of things has influenced the whole tradition of anti-Jewish sentiment and bias which, in turn, issues in the hideous realities of anti-Semitism and racism signalled so graphically and so disturbingly in the unforgettable horrors of the Holocaust. The Jews of Europe, after all, were betrayed by the culture which betrayed itself. Such things are the very spectacle of deceit and betrayal. But that is not, ultimately, who he is.

This is, I think, what makes the story of Jacob so compelling. It is the picture of a soul who in his struggle persists in the quest to understand and be faithful to what is understood such that there is a remarkable transformation. Indeed the transformation of Jacob into Israel complements the Eucharistic gospel for this day, where the Canaanite woman shows herself to be a true Israelite, indeed, precisely because of her tenacity of intellectual spirit in holding on to what she has rightly perceived as the truth of God in Jesus Christ. She will not be put off and her struggle, akin to Jacob’s, is the great struggle, the great struggle of faith that reveals the true nature of Israel. It is accomplished in its fullness and truth on the Cross.

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“O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.”

There is a wonderful devotional prayer in our Prayer Book Communion Liturgy that is known as The Prayer of Humble Access. I won’t go into how it has been mocked and derided by the literalism of some liturgical scholars, who being tone deaf to the nuances and beauty of poetry, suppose that the last phrases attribute one power to the Body of Christ and another to the Blood of Christ with respect to our bodies and our souls, having forgotten the doctrine of concomitance, it seems, namely, that the sacrament is whole in each of its parts. The prayer works doctrinally as well as devotionally. It is profoundly sacramental.

The prayer says it all, however:

We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord; Trusting in our own righteousness, But in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy So much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, Whose property is always to have mercy…

We pray this as a necessary part of our preparation and approach to the Sacrament. The prayer echoes explicitly the Gospel for this day, the story of the Canaanite woman who approaches Jesus so resolutely, so determinedly and yet so humbly.

Two words stand here in a complementary relation. They are the words “humble” and “access.” Humility is the condition of our access to God. What the prayer expresses is a fundamental attitude of Faith. It is not our presumption, our “trusting in our own righteousness,” but our humility, our trusting in the “manifold and great mercies” of God. Against everything that is thrown at her, she has a hold of this one thing, namely, the mercies of God in Christ Jesus. To have a hold of that is humility. She presumes upon nothing else and it is this that gains her access to the heart of Christ.

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“Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God,
And him only shalt thou serve”

For centuries upon centuries, the story of the temptations of Christ has been read on the First Sunday in Lent. But what are the temptations of Christ? They are our temptations brought to clarity in Jesus Christ. We are inclined, perhaps, to have a negative view of temptation. But in truth, there is something altogether positive about the fact of temptations. They are a necessary feature of our humanity. At issue is how we understand and respond to the temptations.

The temptations of Christ are about two things: the naming of the three forms of temptation which embrace every temptation; and the threefold overcoming of temptation. The critical lesson for us, in the Christian understanding, is that temptation is properly named and overcome only by Christ and by Christ in us; the grace that is given is not given in vain provided we act upon it.

In the Gospels, the account of the temptations of Christ follows the baptism of Christ. The baptism of Christ is an epiphany – a making known of his essential divine identity: “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” What immediately follows is that Christ is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. Mark’s word ‘driven’ is more intense than the word ‘led’ used by Matthew and Luke; it, literally, is about being cast out or thrown into the wilderness and suggests the alienating and violent aspects of sin as well as the divine determination to achieve our reconciliation; after all, it is the Holy Spirit who drives or leads Jesus into the wilderness. The temptations belong to the intensity of the pageant of Christ’s passion.

The wilderness is the place of spiritual combat. It is also the place of spiritual refreshment and renewal. There is a struggle, a conflict, an agone that is more intense than the Olympics. The conflict is within. It is the conflict of wills within us. We are divided against ourselves in every temptation. It is a question about our fundamental identity. What really defines us?

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