Sermon for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany
“Speak the word only”
It complements Paul’s final words in today’s epistle. “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” How? By letting the Word of God have its resonance and its presence in our lives. Letting God be God in us, if you will. Only so can good triumph over evil, even the evil of our own hearts. It complements, too, Paul’s first word here. “Be not wise in your own conceits,” the idea of trusting in our own wisdom rather than being open to the wisdom of God and letting that rule and move in our hearts and minds. Oftentimes it is our own cleverness that is the problem. We are too clever for our own good.
No Gospel story illustrates more profoundly the idea of God’s word resonating in our being and overcoming the evil of our own self-will. Here is Epiphany as Catechism. Catechism simply means instruction, an instruction about the fundamental teachings of the Christian faith. The word itself refers to an echo and, indeed, there was a time where even things like the Lord’s Prayer were prayed in the liturgy by being repeated phrase after phrase, first by priest and then by people.
Repeated. Saying the same things over and over again. However much that seems to go against the grain of more experiential forms of contemporary religion, it belongs to the deeper logic of the Christian faith and to the ways in which we participate in it. We could do a whole lot worse than catechism! It is really all about Christ in us; his word dwelling in us richly.
This year the Epiphany season ends with The Third Sunday after Epiphany and with a Gospel which presents us with an intriguing and important teaching. A double miracle, a healing within Israel – the healing of the Leper by word and touch – and the healing of the centurion’s servant, a healing outside of Israel, the healing not only of a non-Israelite but a healing, too, from afar, a healing by word only. Few stories concentrate for us more wonderfully the nature of the Epiphany, about the manifestation of Christ’s divinity, on the one hand, and about the making known of the divine will for the whole of our humanity, on the other hand. Such a Gospel story in the contrast between a healing within and without Israel sharpens the tension between the universal and the particular. Here is a healing outside of Israel which convicts and confirms an essential Jewish teaching. God is the God of all otherwise he is not God but merely some tribal deity.
And it is “at thy Word.” What is revealed here is the power and the truth of the divine word which by definition is not constrained to the limits of time and space. The healings are both near at hand and far away whether with or without the necessity of physical touch. At the risk of being a bit flippant, Jesus does not have to make house calls! Yet something about the power of the divine word is shown to us not only by the healing from afar of the centurion’s servant but perhaps even more by the centurion’s insight and comment.
