Year: 2017

“Then opened he their understanding”

Luke, “dear and glorious physician”, as the novelist Taylor Caldwell styled him, has been the Church’s spiritual director for much of the Trinity season. Tonight we celebrate his witness and writings – The Third Gospel and The Book of the Acts of the Apostles. What we celebrate are the things which are particularly outstanding about Luke, identified by Dante as scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. But what kind of gentleness?

A gentleness that is expressed in compassion and in intellect. Luke alone of the evangelists gives us some especially poignant examples of compassion, such as the story of the Good Samaritan, the great classic of care and compassion, and the story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain, a classic of compassion. In both “he saw and had compassion”, a favourite phrase with Luke. But as our Gospel for his commemoration reminds us, Luke presents Christ most powerfully as the one who opens our understanding that we might understand the Scriptures. The emphasis is on the understanding, particularly as he says, about repentance and the forgiveness of sins. It is not by accident that the winged ox is the symbol for St. Luke’s Gospel.

Luke tells the story, too, about Mary and Martha in which Martha, distressed and distracted by much busyness in playing hostess to Jesus, complains about Mary “sitting at Jesus’s feet and listening to his word.” Jesus’ response is at once most direct and most gentle. “Martha, Martha,” he says, “thou art anxious and troubled about a multitude of things”, naming precisely one of the diseases of our disordered times, yet, he says “one thing is needful; and Mary hath chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.” It is a gentle rebuke and a strong reminder to us about the dangers of getting too caught up in all our busyness with all of the stresses and sense of preoccupation and self-importance that comes with it. One thing is needful. What is that? To seek to learn and to understand by listening to his word.

This is not to deny the activities of Martha but to call attention to the contemplative activity of Mary as being the one thing needful in every age. We so easily get caught up in our own busyness and forget the purpose and truth of our being which is found in God. It is a gentle reminder about the opening out of our understanding of the Scriptures without which we cannot really act properly and charitably in the world around us. Contemplation is about that one thing needful without which we lose our humanity in the mindless busyness of our contemporary world. ‘Don’t just do something, sit there’; this is the gentle wisdom of Luke signalled in his Gospel and in Acts and in the witness of his life. Only so will we find healing for our anxious souls.

“Then opened he their understanding”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of St. Luke, 2017

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“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”

Pumpkins, pucks, and parades seem to define Windsor, particularly on this post-thanksgiving weekend! How they relate to the matter of love is another question. For here today love constrains us to speak of love. It might not seem all that remarkable a thing to say but I wonder if we do not altogether fail to see how special, how precious, how extraordinary Christ’s lesson is for us here in this gospel. It goes to the heart of the matter, to the heart that was willing to be pierced and broken for you and for me, indeed, for the whole world. That heart is the heart of Christ. That love is spoken and shown in the face of controversy and debate; in short, in the midst of the hostilities and animosities of our human hearts and so, too, in the midst of all of our current confusions and uncertainties within and without the Church. “And yet the common people heard him gladly.” Can that be said of us?

Two things are extraordinary here. First, God commands us to love him. Secondly, Christ unites the love of God and the love of neighbour in himself. At first glance, such things may not seem so amazing, partly because they are so familiar. After all, they are words which we frequently hear: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength;” in short, with the whole of our being. “Hear O Israel,” says the One who is the Word of God himself.

To hear that Word is to be Israel, a people who are open to the Word of God, who are defined by that Word. That self-same Word now proclaims that “the Lord our God is one Lord.” That unity is no mere oneness, no empty aloneness. It is the fullness and the completeness of the divine life in itself. As Aquinas remarks, “the perfection of Christian life consists in charity.” That charity begins and ends with God whose grace defines us against “the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil” as the Collect puts it, reminding us of our baptismal identity in Christ, a far, far different thing that pumpkins, pucks, and parades!

God commands us to love him. This is the first extraordinary thing. What does this mean? Does God stand in need of our love?

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