Year: 2011

“Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful”

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. (more…)

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“Rejoice with me”

Jesus tells two parables, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. They are interrelated parables and they actually serve as the introduction to a third parable, the parable of the prodigal son. They are all about the divine mercy which reaches out to gather us into God’s love.

Such is the occasion for rejoicing. In what do we rejoice? We rejoice in the redemption of the lost sheep and the lost coin. We rejoice in the redemption of the lost son. Through these parables we rejoice in the redemption of our humanity.

The parables are lessons in the divine mercy which redeems our humanity. What does that mean? It means that there is more to our lives than the everyday and the mundane. It means there is more to who we are than just what belongs to the immediacy of our experiences. The mercy here which is the occasion of great rejoicing is that we are found in God’s love for us without which we are lost in ourselves and in the vagaries of our circumstances.

Trinity Season abounds in the lessons of love, the divine love which sets our human loves in order. We are meant to see ourselves in these parables as the one lost sheep or the one lost coin whom the shepherd and the woman of the house “seek diligently,” meaning lovingly, until we are found. God is the shepherd and God is the woman who rejoice in our being found. Even more, we are meant to find ourselves in the figure of the prodigal son who returns in repentance, having squandered all that he had, and finds that he is embraced in his father’s love. God is the father. But Christ is the son who has gone into the far-away land of our sinfulness and wastefulness. In coming to ourselves, we remember who we are in the sight of God. That remembrance marks a turning point. It is a movement of divine grace in us that impels our return to the one whose love seeks our return.

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“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart
and knoweth all things”

It is, I think, a great comfort. St. John in his epistle-treatise on love seeks to settle us upon “the one thing needful”, our contemplation of the love of God that dwells in us and the necessity of acting out of that love in our love for one another. Yet, while it is comforting in the biblical and theological sense of strengthening, it is also convicting. It challenges and convicts our hearts.

For where are our hearts? Everywhere except with God because of our excuses. The Gospel story from St. Luke illustrates how our hearts condemn us. There is the invitation to love and there are our refusals of that love.

Excuses, excuses. We all make them. What are they about? Simply our capacity to turn away from God. How? By our turning towards the everyday and the practical, so-called, which is always about our own immediate interests; by our turning, quite literally, to the ground rather than to God. The problem here is not with the world, with the everyday realities of our lives, with the practical necessities of life. No. The problem is with our wills. The question is about our attachments. We are too attached to the wrong things or in the wrong way.

This is a function of the disarray of our hearts. The whole project of the Trinity season and, indeed, of the pilgrimage of our lives in faith is about “setting our loves in order”. We all stand convicted by the Epistle and the Gospel of the forms of our disordered souls. The theological insight here is our experiential reality. Just consider.

If I were to ask you, as I sometimes ask the students in Chapel, how many of you have said to a brother or a sister, a husband or a wife, a mother or a father, or any figure in authority, “I hate you” or, “I kill you” the chances are pretty good that most of you, if you were honest, would have to raise your hands. Even more, if were to ask how many of you have ever thought such things! I argue that we all stand convicted. And what is John telling us? “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer.” Guess what, at least in thought and often in word, we are all murderers! If looks and words could kill we would all be dead; even worse, we would all be murderers.

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