by CCW | 24 February 2013 15:15
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).
That she seeks a mercy for another, namely, her daughter “grievously vexed with a devil,” that is to say, suffering from a mental affliction, only illustrates another feature of this recurring refrain of the Lenten season and of the whole pilgrimage of Christian life. It is not merely a solitary prayer but a corporate prayer, prayer that belongs to the life of the body, the Church. It is our prayer that we make together. That, too, is a counter to pride, to the pride which always isolates us from God and from one another. It is a prayer in which we find our true mind.
Our lives have an inescapable public character to them. Religion is not simply a private affair. The strong sense of intention demands an equally strong outward expression. In some sense, the proclamation of the Word and the celebration of the Sacraments are about that sense of inward intention expressed outwardly. They signal a strong sense of the reality and the objectivity of God and the motions of his love towards us. They signal the equally strong sense of the necessity of our responding freely and willingly to what is mediated to us by God’s word. “Lord, have mercy on us” is a strong response and one which challenges us.
It does not constrain God, however, as if God’s ‘hands’, so to speak, were to be tied by human demands. No. And it is this gospel story which would remind us of the deeper and truer nature of Christian prayer. It means perseverance. It means insistence, even to the point of “importunity”! Why? Because God so wills to have us will what he wills for us; in short, what he wants for us lies precisely in our discovering what he wants for us. He wants us to ask and to ask strongly. Why? Because what is at stake is the truth – the truth of ourselves and the truth of God, the only truth there is. Prayer is about taking the truth of God seriously. And it opens us out to a whole new reality.
Lent is about the rebirth of orthodoxy, the rebirth of our lives as lived to God, humbly and strongly, perseveringly and insistently. Enough of the easy excuses, the insouciance and the indifference of our spiritual laziness which assumes that nothing we do really matters anyway; in short, the curious complacency of our fatalisms. The truth of the matter is that nothing happens without us – either in our doings or our not-doings. This gospel story tells us to get with it – to get with God, to wrestle with the will of God so that there can be that break-through of grace and forgiveness that is new life, new life in the soul and the body, a rebirth of our right worship of God, a rebirth of orthodoxy, of right belief.
“She came and knelt before him, saying, Lord, help me.” In that attitude of prayer the most extraordinary and intense exchange in the whole of the Gospels occurs. Like Job, we might note, she gets an answer to her request, but only through the dialogue, only through the dialectic of discourse with Jesus. How can this be? Because of the truth of God. She knows the truth of God. His truth is mercy. His truth is the only mercy there is. It cannot be taken for granted. It cannot be ignored. It must be sought and looked for. Ultimately, the significant point is not simply the granting of her particular request but that her petition finds its hearing. Her prayer breaks through into the heart of Jesus whose heart is always at one with the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Her prayer is the full-hearted acknowledgment of the truth of the God who cares. She never lets up on that hold of the truth which truly defines her. Such is strong prayer.
And our prayers? Are they similarly so insistent and so strong in the awareness of the mercy and truth of God? Are they half-baked and tentative or desperate and pathetic, like throwing coins in a wishing-well or buying lottery tickets? How seriously do we take our faith? Seriously enough to persevere like this Caananite woman? Seriously enough to commit ourselves to the truth of God in Jesus Christ? Seriously enough to be the Church and to undertake the struggle of prayer and praise, of service and sacrifice?
The struggle is clearly and unambiguously named in this gospel story. It signals the real dignity and spiritual freedom of our humanity. It is found, paradoxically it may seem, on our knees in the attitude of prayer, the prayer that actively seeks the will of God and will be content with nothing less.
Therein lies the mercy, the mercy of God that is at work within human hearts. God wills that the kingdom of heaven should be taken by the storm of our prayers.
Fr. David Curry
Lent II, 8:00am
Feb. 24th, 2013
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2013/02/24/sermon-for-the-second-sunday-in-lent-800am-service-2/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.