by CCW | 16 March 2014 14:24
You get what you want sometimes, it seems. Let’s hope that we really know what we want and that what we want is what is right and good and, ultimately, what God wants for us. But is that all that is required, namely, a certain clarity about our desires and wishes? No. There is something more than mere clarity about the desires of our hearts, important as that is.
Lent seeks the clarification of our minds and the purification of our wills. Purgation and illumination are fundamental features of the classical understanding of Christian pilgrimage, the pilgrimage concentrated for us in the season of Lent, but which is really the pilgrimage of our souls to God. The third part of the classical understanding of Christian pilgrimage has to do with the perfection and unity of our wills with God. Purgation, illumination, and perfection or unity. These three classical aspects of pilgrimage are the Trinitarian principles of our journeying to God, in the sense that you can’t have one without the others. But there is a necessary prerequisite. It is humility, the note sounded in our liturgy in The Prayer of Humble Access, the note, too, signaled in today’s gospel.
The Prayer of Humble Access is familiar to you all, I am sure. At once poetic and theological, it speaks directly to the nature of our engagement with all things divine, especially with respect to the Sacrament of Holy Communion.
“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…”
We pray this as a necessary part of our preparation and approach to the Sacrament of the altar. The prayer echoes the Gospel for this day – the story of the Canaanite woman who approaches Jesus so resolutely and yet so humbly.
Two words stand here in a complementary relation; the words ‘humble’ and ‘access’. Humility is the condition of our access to God. The prayer expresses 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” that is altogether crucial. Against all that is thrown at her, this woman has a hold of this one thing – the mercies of God in Jesus Christ. To have a hold of that is humility – she presumes upon nothing else – and this gains her access to the heart of Christ. Humility gains access.
Humility is not the same thing as low self-esteem. It is not the whinge of “I can’t do that” which really means “I won’t even try”. It is not the whine of the “poor-me’s” which is really our grovelling for attention; in other words, our self-centered pride. Humility is not grovelling self-pity. For such things are really our presumption. We demand all the attention as if we were the center of everything. We aren’t. Humility is the recognition that Jesus is the center and that we have access to him – on his conditions, not ours.
“Then came she and knelt before him, saying, Lord, help me.” There is an encounter and an engagement with Jesus. The dialogue is quite intense – even frighteningly so. But her kneeling down is not manipulative self-abasement. It is, instead, the attitude and posture of Faith. It says, in effect, that God is God and we are not. Such is humility, the condition of our access to God. The woman does not presume to be the center of attention. For all her persistence, what is constant is her focus on Jesus. He has her undivided attention. She sees in him the mercies of God which she seeks. “Lord, help me”.
It is not a plaintive cry. It is the prayer of Faith. The strong sense of the mercy of God is the counter to our self-presumption and self-preoccupation.
She seeks a healing mercy from Jesus not for herself but for her daughter. A mother’s love is a strong and compelling motive. The sickness of a child or some other crisis in our lives will often bring us to our knees. We are rendered helpless. “We have no power of ourselves to help ourselves,” as the Collect puts it. It would be foolish to deny this.
The point of this Gospel is not that we should wait for some emergency to bring us on our knees before God. No. The point of the Gospel is seen in its application as expressed in The Prayer of Humble Access. “Lord, help me” is a constant prayer, a daily prayer. It belongs to the constantly recurring theme of our liturgy: “Lord, have mercy upon us.” It belongs, in other words, to the maturity of our faith, the faith that holds onto the mercy of God and will not let go.
Humility ever looks to Christ. It is our openness to him as the center of our lives. It is the condition of our access to him. When we are presumptuous we are full of ourselves. There is no room for God. We presume to be the center which we are not. Humility opens us out to the mercies of God in Jesus Christ.
Yet the prayer does more than open us to such possibilities. It indicates the form of our incorporation in Christ, the very nature of our being with Christ, faithfully and sacramentally. “Grant us therefore, gracious Lord,” on the basis of this necessary humility, we might say, “So to eat the Flesh of thy dear Son, Jesus Christ, And to drink his Blood,” and for what purpose? “That our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body, And our souls washed through his most precious Blood,” and, even more, “that we may evermore dwell in him, And he in us.”
A most powerful and theological prayer, it speaks about our incorporation in Christ sacramentally, about our being with Christ in his being with us. This belongs to the very nature of the Christian pilgrimage of love. The pilgrimage of our souls to God is seen in terms of God’s being with us in Jesus Christ. How wonderful! And yet, as with so many things, it has been vilified and misconstrued. For some this prayer is rather disquieting.
Taken at face value, after all, what is one to make of such phrases as “eat[ing] the flesh” and “drink[ing] the blood” of Jesus? Doesn’t this sound horribly cannibalistic? Certainly in a literalist reading of the prayer, but in response let us suggest that it expresses a deep sense of the intimacy and the reality of Christ’s life in us, that it expresses the deep meaning and logic of the Incarnation and the Atonement. It is very much about our lives in him and he in us, otherwise it is all nothing worth. It is about the spiritual nature of our actual incorporation into Christ. Salvation is about his life and word in us. Just as we are in Adam, to extend the form of theological reasoning, and so tainted and stained by original sin, so now we are in Christ, the new Adam, and his life is given to live in us.
There is the theological insight arising out of Augustine which locates our humanity in Adam and in Christ in the following way. Man or Adam, that is to say our humanity, before the fall was able not to sin (posse non peccare). Our humanity after the fall was not able not to sin (non posse non peccare). Our humanity as fully redeemed in Christ is not able to sin (non posse peccare). What Christ has done for our humanity is perfect and complete though it has yet to be fully realized in us. Such is the pilgrimage of our souls to God.
There is another equally literalist complaint, too, about this Prayer. It is suggested, famously by a liturgical scholar, Dom Gregory Dix, in an enormously influential work called The Shape of the Liturgy, that this prayer commits us to “pray[ing] medieval speculations” that imply that the sacrament is divided between what the consecrated bread, signifying the flesh or body of Christ, does and what the consecrated wine, signifying the blood of Christ, accomplishes: the one washing our sinful bodies; the other washing our souls. This overlooks a minor but important teaching known as the Doctrine of Concomitance which means that the whole power of the Sacrament, the means of participating in Christ, is present in both aspects of the Sacrament. The whole is received in either of the parts, as it were. There is a deeper and more spiritual understanding about how Christ’s life and saving work takes shape in us. Such is poetry. Such is theology.
The humility of Christ is the hope of our exaltation. He lifts us up. Humility is not only the condition of our access to God; it is also our exaltation, even more, it is our actual participation in the life and work of Christ. In our humility our wills are one with God’s will. We are open to what he wants for us. What he wants is his life in us and we in him.
Fr. David Curry
Lent II, 2014, Christ Church
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