Meditation on the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity
“But Jesus turned him about”
A Meditation on the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity
This year the Trinity Season runs to twenty-five Sundays, just one shy of the longest it can be. Its length depends on the date of Easter. Trinity Season and the Epiphany Season push and pull one another accordingly with a variable number of Sundays for each season. If the one is short, the other is long. This year, November 10th, is the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity. All this is but preamble to the readings which we have on these last Sundays of Trinity because we don’t always have them every year for the reason just stated.
That brings us to an important consideration, however: the idea of an established pattern of Scripture readings. For some Christian traditions, this is anathema as being too formal and too restrictive. The irony is that if left to ministers or even parochial spiritual committees the range and choice of Scripture readings is often quite constrained and limited. At issue, too, is who chooses and upon what basis? What are the principles that determine the pattern of scripture readings called a lectionary?
One feature of the contemporary church and its confusions is the jettisoning of a very ancient tradition of reading the Scriptures embodied in the Eucharistic lectionary, the readings at Holy Communion. Not only ancient, it was also the most ecumenical lectionary, historically speaking. Developed from the fifth century onwards, it was the pattern of reading common to the Western Church throughout the medieval period and into the modern; post-reformation, mutatis mutandi, it remained the common property of Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Anglicans, for instance. This alone is suggestive and compelling. In jettisoning it, we have been left with a rather confusing array of lectionaries which all bear a common shape – three readings rather than two at Holy Communion, for instance – and which claim a kind of ecumenicity.
Despite the attempt at achieving a Common Lectionary, it hasn’t happened. But there is a further problem, the question of what are the principles that inform the pattern of readings. What are the themes and ideas that determine the choice of passages? For the older ecumenical lectionary (wonderfully present in our 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer, albeit with some changes to be sure), the principles are inescapably creedal. In other words, the pattern of reading relates to the Creeds, to the foundational and formative principles of the Christian Faith.