“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.
The idea of reading at Holy Communion a set of readings year in and year out may seem boring and limiting. And yet, the challenge for preacher and people alike is found in the great and inexhaustible wisdom found in the readings and in their inter-relation. The repetition, year in and year out, helps in the growth of our understanding. They provide an interpretative matrix for the public reading of Scripture in the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer both on Sundays and throughout the Week, and for the private reading of Scripture, too. In other words, we are provided with a way to read the Scriptures with understanding.
Our reading is not simply individual and idiosyncratic; it is about learning how to read with those who have gone before us with the mind of Christ, to use a phrase from John Wycliffe (c. 1320-1384), an early translator of the Scriptures into English.
To read with the mind of Christ recalls us to the body of Christ, the Church. At issue is the relation between the mind and body of Christ, we might say. At the heart of our present confusions is our forgetfulness of what we have received, in this case our forgetfulness of the creedal reading of Scripture. The Creeds come out of the Scriptures, to be sure, and yet they return us to the Scriptures, shaping and governing our understanding. They provide us with a pattern of understanding. Without that measure the Scriptures become a proverbial nose of wax twisted and molded to suit the fancies and fantasies of our passing age as if that were the only measure, as if only we ourselves in our moment in time were all that mattered. What is missing is the partnership of the generations, a kind of friendship between those who have gone before us and those who come after. In other words, our reading is part and parcel of our life in the body of Christ, the Communion of Saints.
The older classical lectionary is not carved in stone; it has an organic and dynamic character. It belongs to a development that took place over many centuries and there are important changes, some good and some not so good, that have been part of its history. My point is that something important has been lost in its being thrust aside and that has to do with a doctrinal or creedal reading of the Scriptures. That kind of reading provides us with a richness of understanding about the fundamental or essentials of the Christian Faith, something into which we constantly grow. To reclaim this quietly and yet insistently is a critical part of our witness in our present confusions. In place of the Creeds, there are all the endless vagaries of human experience. But there is no God where time is history, no way in which the experiences of human life are gathered into the life of God and find their meaning; in short, no wisdom.
How do these reflections relate to the Gospel for the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity? The Gospel presents us with a double miracle. On his way down to the ruler’s house to heal his dying daughter, a woman who had been afflicted for twelve years with an issue of blood, came up behind Jesus and touches his garment. Her intention is revealed to us. “If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole,” she says. It is an intriguing scene. Why? The reading of Scripture cannot be merely a private affair; the whole point of an ordered way of reading the Scriptures is that it is public. As such it can be engaged. To say that the pattern is creedal is to underscore the consensus fidelium – the consensus of the faithful – about what the Scriptures essentially teach about God, about our humanity, about the relationship between God and Man in Jesus Christ and about the community of our humanity with God in Christ, namely the Communion of Saints.
Anglicans, classically speaking, have placed their reading of the Scriptures under this understanding, receiving the three great Creeds of the Church as being the deposit of the faith and the expression of the catholic consensus fidelium. It was the achievement of the Patristic period to have worked out through controversy and debate what the Christian Faith essentially is and to express it in the Creeds. It is not for each generation to re-invent or re-image the Christian Faith but to receive it anew in our own hearts and souls. There are no new essentials of the Faith; it is truth ever ancient and yet ever new, as Augustine observes.
The classical lectionary is authoritative, to be sure, but not authority as merely arbitrary and dictatorial. It is the authority of a measured way of thinking and being. It ushers us into a life with Christ and one another. The reading of Scripture is about wisdom not information. It is wisdom to which we can ever turn because it is about the wisdom of God which has turned to us in Jesus Christ.
To touch but the hem of his garment unawares conceals this crucial point. “But Jesus turned him about,” we are told. He turns around to look at the woman face to face. We may think of this as being wonderfully personal; Jesus has a personal relationship to us. The deeper point is that it is public. We cannot steal a cure from Jesus unawares; our faith in Christ, too, can never be a purely private matter. How we are seen in the eyes of God conditions how we see one another. Through the witness of the Scriptures we are opened out to the radical ways in which we are made whole. It happens through our being face to face with Jesus and not simply in trying to gain something for ourselves. We can understand what the woman sought from Jesus, a healing of her body. But as always with the miracle stories and the other teachings of Jesus we are opened out to a deeper understanding, to the wisdom of our life in Christ, to our being made whole. That cannot be a private matter entirely. “Even the anchorite who meditates alone,” as T.S. Eliot notes, “prays for the Church, the Body of Christ incarnate” (Choruses from the Rock II).
Faith means our personal commitment to Christ but the Faith also means what is believed, the objective principles wonderfully concentrated for us in the Creeds, themselves the distillation of the Scriptures. We find our wholeness in God’s turning to us in Christ and we find the truth of ourselves in our communion with God and with one another because of that turning. In a way, the public reading of the Scriptures is about God turning to us. Through the wisdom of the Scriptures, in the ordered and creedal pattern of their being read, we may discover what the woman with the affliction of blood discovered, God turns to us and in his sight we are made whole.
“But Jesus turned him about”
Fr. David Curry
November 8th, 2013