Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent, 8:00am service

admin | 28 February 2010

“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.

Humility is not the same thing as low self-esteem. It is not the whinge of “I can’t do this” which really means “I won’t even try”. It is not the whine of the “poor-me-s” which is really only our grovelling for attention. Humility is not grovelling self-pity. For such things are really our presumption. We demand all the attention as if we were the centre of everything. We aren’t. Humility is the recognition that Jesus is the centre and that we have access to him.

“Then came she and knelt before him, saying, Lord, help me.” There is an encounter and an engagement with Jesus. The dialogue is quite intense – even frighteningly so. But her kneeling down is neither manipulation nor cringing self-abasement. It is instead the attitude and posture of Faith. It says, in effect, that God is God and we are not. Such is humility. It is also the first commandment. “I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods.” Here, it is the condition of our access to God. “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve”, we heard from Jesus in the wilderness of our temptations last Sunday. The woman does not presume to be the centre of attention. For all her persistence, what is constant is her focus on Jesus. He has her undivided attention. “Even so our eyes wait upon the Lord our God,/until he have mercy upon us”, as the Psalmist puts it (the Gradual Psalm for Lent II, Ps. 123.3). She sees in him the mercies of God which she seeks; “Lord, help me”, she says with quiet insistence.

It is not a plaintive cry. It is the prayer of Faith. The strong sense of the mercy of God is the counter to our self-presumption and self-preoccupation. We look unto him, “as the eyes of a maiden unto the hand of her mistress” (Ps. 123.2b).

She seeks a healing mercy from Jesus not for herself but for her daughter. A mother’s love is a strong and compelling motive. The sickness of a child or some other crisis in our lives will often bring us to our knees. We are rendered helpless. “We have no power of ourselves to help ourselves,” as the Collect so clearly puts it. It would be foolish to deny this.

But the point of this Gospel really is not that we should wait for some emergency to bring us on our knees before God. No. The point of the Gospel is seen in its application as expressed in The Prayer of Humble Access. “Lord, help me” is a constant prayer, a daily prayer. It belongs to the constantly recurring theme of our liturgy: “Lord, have mercy upon us.” It is especially the signal note of the Lenten journey of our lives, “trusting” not in ourselves “but in thy manifold and great mercies.”

Humility ever looks to Christ. It is our openness to him as the centre of our lives, “even as the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their masters” (Ps. 123.2a). It is the condition of our access to him. When we are presumptuous, then we are full of ourselves. There is no room for God. We presume to be the centre which we are not. Humility opens us out to the mercies of God in Jesus Christ. It is, we might almost say, the rhapsody of Lent.

The humility of Christ is the hope of our exaltation. He lifts us up even when we seem most down and are even “utterly despised.” Humility is not only the condition of our access to God; it is also our exaltation. For in our humility our wills are one with God’s will. We are open to what he wants for us, “our eyes wait[ing] upon the Lord our God until he have mercy upon us.” It is what we see in this extraordinary woman, and it is what Jesus sees.