Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent
“Truth, Lord; yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters’ table”
What’s this? Have I got the wrong Sunday? Am I having a senior’s moment? Didn’t we have that Gospel story and text two Sundays ago? We did and no, I am not losing it – at least not any more than usual! It’s just that this text also speaks to our readings today. It illumines an interesting sacramental emphasis to the traditional Gospel readings for the Lenten Sundays which culminates on this Sunday at the same time as today’s overtly sacramental Gospel reading catapults us ahead to Maundy Thursday, to the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, to Christ’s Last Supper. That event anticipates and inaugurates the sacramental life of the Church established through his sacrifice on the Cross.
The Gospel readings for the Lenten Sundays anticipate the concentration of the Lenten journey in the events of Holy Week. There is, too, a sacramental focus to the readings which belongs to the form of our participation in Christ’s sacrifice. “We go up to Jerusalem” sacramentally, it seems to me, journeying in the wilderness and contending against temptation including the temptation to “turn stones into bread,” learning instead to live not “by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God,” as we heard on The First Sunday in Lent. Yet that is the basis for the sacraments, too. The Word of God made flesh takes bread, gives thanks and breaks it, saying “Take eat; this is my Body.” We are not to tempt God, to put him to the test, but to worship him and serve him. On The Second Sunday in Lent, we learn from the Canaanite woman precisely about the goodness of God in Jesus Christ through her incredible insight into how God provides for us through the struggles of our lives, learning through a kind of humility that even the crumbs which fall from our master’s table are enough to sustain us and to bring healing and salvation to our wounded and broken souls.
