by CCW | 17 July 2011 15:02
Luke provides us with an extended version of what we know as the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s Gospel. Only here it is a Sermon on the Plain, on the flatlands of our human existence, as it were. Today’s gospel is sometimes known as ‘the mercy gospel’ because of this opening line.
It complements one of the most powerful of the Beatitudes in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.” Unlike the other beatitudes which confront us with the paradox of difference, this beatitude is about the paradox of the same. Luke emphasizes that element in this passage and in a way deepens, perhaps, our understanding. There is the element of equality: judge not and not be judged; condemn not and not be condemned; forgive and be forgiven; give and it shall be given to you. But these conditions hang, it seems to me, on the opening statement. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.”
It is, I think, a remarkably profound statement. It lies at the heart of Christian prayer, captured in the Lord’s Prayer: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The point is that somehow the realities of heaven are what are looked for and expected on earth. But that is the point of Jesus Christ. He is God with us, the very Logos of God who “suffers in us at every moment”, as James Joyce notes in his rambling novel, Ulysses. What is opened out to us are the properties of heaven, of what is eternal and true, as being the measure and truth of our lives. “For with the same measure that ye mete withal, it shall be measured to you again.”
You get what you give, it seems. There seems to be a kind of justice in that idea, yet one which does not always equate with our experiences. Sometimes we are on the receiving end of a whole mess of suffering. Sometimes we are the authors of the sufferings of others – all of it quite beyond any proportion of justice. Life just doesn’t seem fair. And yet, the whole notion of this kind of quid pro quo, getting what you give, is predicated upon mercy and mercy is always more, though not less or other, than justice. Mercy is the charity of God which (as Aquinas teaches us) a higher form of justice, the divine justice which is always about the greatest good despite the inequalities in our sufferings. That greatest good is to be found in the relation of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Spirit. It is the great equalizer.
“Be ye merciful,” Jesus says, “as your Father is merciful.” He is talking about his Father who becomes our Father because of Christ’s being with us. It is Jesus who teaches us the most about God the Father and about the Holy Spirit, too. Somehow that divine relationship conditions and defines our relationships with one another. Somehow what obtains in heaven is to be realized on earth. The truth is something heavenly and it embraces the quotidian realities of our earthly lives. That is a marvel and a wonder, the marvel and wonder of grace. That is itself a mercy, it seems to me.
The Gospel is complemented by the Epistle reading from Paul’s Letter to the Romans. A powerful passage, it may be familiar to you from the Prayer Book Burial Office. It reminds us that the sufferings which belong to the human condition in this fallen world are not “to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed unto us.” Glory is greater than suffering. That is a wonderful thought, precisely for those who are suffering, whether in soul or body. “The light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not.” The light is greater than the darkness; likewise glory is greater than suffering. Paul’s thought does not deny the realities of suffering; suffering is not simply illusory anymore than the world is just an illusion. No. He sees suffering as having a purpose. The passage is about redemptive suffering and it encompasses the whole creation and it emphatically embraces our bodies. Somehow they are part of the divine redemption of the whole of creation.
Which means that we are to see everything as embraced in God’s love. Which means that we are to live what we see and act out of what has been revealed to us. What Paul is saying makes absolutely no sense whatsoever without the idea of Jesus Christ as the Word made flesh, the Logos of God who suffers in us. And for a purpose – our heavenly good as accomplished and realized in him. Only so can Jesus teach us, command us, to be merciful. He is the mercy of the Father towards us, after all.
But do we see this? Do we know this? Jesus goes on to tell us the famous parable of the blind leading the blind. “Shall they not both fall into the ditch?” There is a kind of equality in our folly and blindness, especially when we think that we see but do not or at least not very clearly. The problem is not just with our vision, however, the problem is with our wills. We claim to see the faults of others while being blind to the faults of ourselves. As such we are blind to the mercy of God in Christ Jesus and, instead, of giving mercy, we judge and condemn others. “Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote,” the little speck, Jesus says, “that is in thy brother’s eye.” Powerful stuff, it seems to me, and one that captures us all in one way or another. Hypocrisy is part and parcel of our human condition, part and parcel of the reality of original sin. We neither think, say, nor do what we know we should think, say, and do. We are in contradiction within ourselves in our divided wills and affections. “The good that I would I do not,” Paul says, “the evil that I would not do, that do I do.”
Jesus simply reminds us of this truth, the truth of our separation from the truth. Why? To recall us to the mercy that is greater than our follies. That is the mercy which we have to want to rule and move in our lives. This is captured wonderfully in the Collect where we pray God to “increase and multiply upon us thy mercy” so that “we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal.” How is that possible? Through the mercies of God in Jesus Christ, through him “being our ruler and guide.”
“The things eternal” have been opened out to us. They are the constants in this world of “things temporal” that are constantly passing away. The mercy is that they have been opened out to us. There is, perhaps, no greater task than to reclaim for our minds the truth of “the things eternal” in the face of a culture which denies such things altogether. To reclaim the idea of “the things eternal” is to recover the true dignity and worth of our humanity and world.
In a way, the Trinity Season is about the application of the Creedal mysteries of the Faith to our lives with a view towards progressing spiritually, growing into the mercy which has been revealed, glimpsing the glory that is always greater than our sufferings and sorrows.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity IV, 2011
Christ Church & St. Michael’s, Windsor Forks
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2011/07/17/sermon-for-the-fourth-sunday-after-trinity/
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