Day: October 19, 2014

“Let me go to the field, and glean among the ears of grain after him
in whose sight I shall find favour.”

My thanks to Fr. Peter Harris and to St. Peter’s Cathedral for the privilege of being here and speaking to you this evening. I hope that this can be the beginning of an annual Choral Evensong in the Fall sponsored by the Prayer Book Society of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. There is something wonderfully calming, beautiful and intentional about Evensong. It is, dare I say, one of the glories of our Anglican witness to the Catholic Faith. I am most grateful for the wonderful musical offering of your choir. Actually, I think that all I have to say has been sung already in that lovely motet by Giovanni Croce. Gaudate et Exultate! “Rejoice ye and be exulatant,” uplifted, regardless of the hardships of life, even the hardships of persecution! Wonderful.

We seem to be very much in the company of grieving widows and sorrowing mothers! And yet we glean in the fields of Boaz to discover divine truth and human dignity. Perhaps, that is the real mission of the Prayer Book Society in times of uncertainty, of loss and sorrow. Perhaps, in so doing, we shall discover those “wholesome medicines of doctrine” delivered to us by such figures as St. Luke.

Naomi has lost her husband Elimelech and her two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, who were also the husbands of her two daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, the latter after whom The Book of Ruth is named. Such situations, though sad, are hardly unique. You only need to think about your own families and your own communities to recall similar sadnesses, sorrows and losses. And yet, as Paul suggests in our second lesson from his Letter to the Philippians, such commonplaces of sadness and sorrow, the things that have happened, can be the cause of joy and rejoicing. Somehow such circumstances can be the occasions in which Christ can be honoured and glorified. In another words, Scripture gives us ways to face the hard and sad things of human life.

Probably written sometime after the Babylonian exile, The Book of Ruth with its timeless and reflective mood is notionally set in the time of the Judges. In the Christian Bible, it is found immediately after The Book of Judges. In a way, it is a kind of critical commentary on The Book of Judges, offering a completely contrasting account of Jewish identity and mission. The Book of Judges, like many of the early books of the Hebrew Scriptures, is written from a kind of exclusionary viewpoint with the emphasis upon Israel as the Chosen People separate and apart from the nations round about. It is a point of view that has a long pedigree. Over and against that stands another perspective which emphasizes the role and mission of Israel as “a light to lighten the Gentiles,” as Isaiah puts it and which the Nunc Dimittis from Luke’s Gospel repeats in our evening liturgy, the idea that what has been proclaimed to Israel is for all people, something universal in principle. These tensions define Jewish history and thought, oscillating between the one and the other, and in the Christian understanding resolved in Christ.

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“He had answered them well”

The context is controversy. It almost always is when it is a matter of spiritual truth. Truth which unites frequently divides. Yet a deeper unity may sometimes be only found through the divisions of our hearts, when our hearts are broken and opened to view. For then, and only then, perhaps, we discover what it is that we believe, what it is that we stand for, if anything at all. Sometimes it takes controversy.

But what does it mean to stand for something? Is it simply a matter of assertion, a matter of self-definition which demands recognition upon no other basis than our subjective desires and opinions? Is the truth just what we make it? Or do we stand for something objective and received, truth that defines us even in our untruth?Sometimes we learn through controversy. Sometimes through controversy something of the truth of God is at once communicated and received. What is to be looked for is some deeper understanding of truth, “tam antiquo, tam novo”, “truth so ancient and so new,” as Augustine puts it. Jesus is engaged in religious disputation. “Which is the first commandment of all?” he is asked by a member of the literary caste, the scribes, the writers of words which are like pictures into which we may step if we choose. We shall never be the same for truth always confronts and convicts us. This scribe, about whom Jesus will ultimately say, “thou art not far from the Kingdom of God” perceived that “[Jesus] had answered them well” and so is led to ask the overwhelming question, “which is the first commandment of all?” He is, we might say, compelled by the truth itself in the context of controversy and even intellectual animosity where power seems more at issue than truth. But “Jesus had answered them well”. And he continues to do so in his magisterial “Summary of the Law”. The greatest commandment is the love of God and the love of neighbour, no “commandment greater than these”. Powerful stuff. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets,” as our liturgy notes. And yet, profoundly provocative and controversial. Why? Because of its clarity. It cuts through all the clutter and confusion of history and experience. It crystallizes the whole of the Jewish Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament. It is a kind of distillation of its teachings, almost, we might say, a kind of Old Testament Creed, and certainly one which challenges many perspectives about that remarkable collection of books and stories and poems. Is it really all about love? How can law be love? Because the Law is nothing more than the expression of God’s will and truth for our humanity and, if it convicts us of our own shortcomings, as it most surely does, then it does so only to recall us to truth. Such is repentance and prayer.

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