Year: 2014

“Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord; / Lord, hear my voice”
(Psalm 130.1)

The psalmist’s cry echoes the cry of Jonah from the belly of the great fish, a cry, he suggests, that is from “the belly of Sheol,” the term for the Jewish underworld. Jonah is as far from God as he can be. And yet, not unlike Christ on the cross in his cry of dereliction, he cries out to God. In the case of Jonah, he cries out to the God from whom he has tried to get as far away from as possible. The biblical, theological, and psychological point is that you can’t.

As another psalm (Psalm 139) reminds us, “O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me:/ thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising; thou understandest my thoughts from afar” (vs.1). It goes on to ask “whither shall I go then from thy spirit?/ or whither shall I flee from thy presence?/ If I climb up into heaven, thou art there:/ if I go down to hell, thou art there also” (vs. 6,7). God would not be God if we thought we could escape his presence and his truth.

The story of Jonah is partly told to make this point about God and about God as the universal God and not just the God of a particular people, a tribal god as it were. The Book of Jonah is actually a profound satire upon the folly of that kind of thinking. A most unusual book of Hebrew prophecy, to be sure, it yet offers an important spiritual insight into the nature of God, not altogether unlike The Book of Ruth with her insight that “your people shall be my people, your God my God” for God is for all people. They may have been written about the same time in the third century BC.

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“That ye may know”

Jesus wants us to know that he is the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins connects us to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The forgiveness of sins is about the death and resurrection of Jesus in us.

St. Matthew’s story of the paralytic abbreviates St. Mark’s account. St. Mark’s fuller story reads like a burial-scene. The paralytic is helpless as the dead, he is carried out like the dead by his four bearers; a hole is opened for him, as for the dead, he is lowered into it, as unto his grave. But falling, he does not fall into clay, he falls before the feet of the Son of God, who says to him, first, “thy sins are forgiven thee” and then “arise and walk” (Austin Farrer).

With Matthew, too, we are brought dead in our sins into the presence of Christ. We are brought by faith and Jesus, seeing the faith of those who brought him, says, “Son be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee”.

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“Be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you”

A most compelling and touching scene, at once a story of friendship and forgiveness, of healing and restoration, it illustrates what St. Paul is saying in the Epistle. Here is the kindness of friends towards one another. Here in Christ’s words of forgiveness towards the man sick of the palsy is the tender-heartedness of Jesus.

And yet there is something else here too, something of a more sombre and disturbing nature. There is as well in this Gospel scene “the vanity of minds,” “the darkening of the understanding,” “the hardness of hearts,” “ the corruption of souls”; in short, all the other things that the Epistle mentions – the evil in the heart which resents and opposes the good that might be done to others.

The soul is the battlefield between good and evil. And we all stand convicted or better yet, in the imagery of the Gospel, we are all paralyzed, unable to move, palsied limbs reflecting a deeper paralysis of the soul which we see in the resistance and opposition of the scribes to Christ’s words of forgiveness to the one who was paralyzed. They say nothing but “Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?”

Christ addresses that obduracy of the mind, that stubbornness of the soul, which remains closed to the possibilities of God’s grace at work in people’s lives, the kind of grace which is already evident in the action of those who brought their paralyzed friend to Jesus.

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“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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