Month: February 2013

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

It is called The Prayer of Humble Access, one of the beautiful prayers of the Anglican liturgical tradition.

“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…”

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.

There are two words which 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 – 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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“Have mercy on me, O Lord”

An appropriate text, I suppose, for anyone about to preach!

Dust and ashes, temptations, heartfelt desire. Such are the strong images that are before us in the early days of Lent. The dust of creation and of our common mortality and the ashes of repentance on Ash Wednesday, the temptations that challenge the truth of very being and belong to the disorders of our hearts on the First Sunday in Lent, all these raise important religious and philosophical question about human desire, “for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Mt. 6. 21). Unlike the Buddhist annihilation of desire, Lent seeks the redemption of desire. Nowhere, perhaps, is that seen more wonderfully and powerfully in this Gospel story for the Second Sunday in Lent. “Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David,” the Canaanite woman cries unto Jesus.

It is the recurring refrain of the Lenten season and so, too, of the pilgrimage of our lives, echoed in the liturgy of the Church: “Kyrie Eleison” – “Lord, have mercy upon us.” Is it about groveling and wallowing in self-pity? Is it about a sense of self-denigration and self-degradation – putting ourselves down, making ourselves feel miserable, the proverbial beating up on ourselves? No, emphatically no. For such things are, to be rigorously truthful, all about pride – the pride which cuts us off from truth, the truth of God and the truth about ourselves both in terms of our God-given capacities and potentialities and our all too real sins and wickednesses. We are too much with ourselves.

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“Have mercy on me, O Lord”

It is the recurring refrain of the Lenten season and so, too, of the pilgrimage of our lives, echoed in the liturgy of the Church: “Kyrie Eleison” – “Lord, have mercy upon us.” Is it about grovelling and wallowing in self-pity? Is it about a sense of self-denigration and self-degradation – putting ourselves down, making ourselves feel miserable, the proverbial beating up on ourselves? No, emphatically no. For such things are, to be rigorously truthful, all about pride – the pride which cuts us off from truth, the truth of God and the truth about ourselves both in terms of our God-given capacities and potentialities and our all too real sins and wickednesses. We are too much with ourselves.

Far from being a plaintive cry of the weak and the pitiful, “have mercy upon me, O Lord” is the strong prayer of the honest soul. Nowhere does the strength of that honesty appear more forcibly and clearly than in this gospel story. The prayer for mercy is incredibly insistent. The Canaanite woman in the story won’t give up and won’t shut up. She is like the blind man whom Jesus encounters on the way to Jerusalem who also cried out to Jesus “have mercy on me” that he might receive his sight. He, too, would not be silenced but “cried so much the more, Thou Son of David, have mercy on me” (Luke 18. 39).

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UPDATE (22 Mar.): This is the first of four Lenten reflections on The Kiss of Judas: Themes of Betrayal and Forgiveness in the Scriptures. The four addresses have been compiled into a booklet, which can be accessed here.

“Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”

They are haunting and troubling words. All of the Gospels identify Judas in one way or another as the betrayer of Christ, the grand paradigm in a way of all betrayal. Luke alone has Jesus address Judas with this telling question in the very moment of his being taken captive (Luke 22.48), a chilling moment of truth and its betrayal. Mark, with admirable economy of expression, has Judas simply tell the crowd “whomsoever I kiss, that same is he; take him, and lead him away safely.” Whose safety, we may ask? “And as soon as he was come [Judas] goeth straightway to him, and saith, Master, master; and kissed him” (Mark 14. 44-45). Matthew identifies Judas outright as the betrayer. “Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, The one I shall kiss is the man; seize him. And he came up to Jesus at once and said, Hail, Master! And he kissed him” (Matthew 26. 48-49). Only John says nothing about the kiss of Judas, though he is very clear about Judas’ betrayal.

Luke gives us this most intimate moment of betrayal, a moment made ever so memorable by its intensity and its intimacy. It has, to be sure, captured the imagination of the artists, though depictions of the betrayal, like the crucifixion itself, are relatively rare at least in early Christian art. Apart from a few sarcophagi, the earliest artistic representation in a Church appears in Ravenna, Italy, at the Church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in a lovely mosaic dating to the sixth century. But perhaps the most arresting artistic representation of the betrayal is Giotto’s fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (1305/6). In a way it has become iconic. There are other representations to be sure – by Duccio in Sienna, Fra Angelico in Florence, and, later in the sixteenth century, Caravaggio in Rome, to name but a few – all of which connect the betrayal with violence as well. “Are ye come out as against a thief, with swords and staves, to take me?” Jesus says, (Mt. 26.55, Mk. 14.48). There are representations in stone and wood and in stained glass, too, scattered among the Cathedrals and churches of Europe and beyond. But one could hardly say that there was an excess of artistic representation of this momentous scene which is such a telling moment in the life of Christ. There is, after all, a disturbing quality about such a theme.

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