Year: 2019

Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters’ table.

Little dogs. Dogs are not much mentioned in the Scriptures and rarely in a positive light. We hear of sinners being like dogs returning to their vomit and of dogs licking the blood of Jezebel, hardly attractive images. To call someone a dog in the Old Testament was to suggest that they were worthless; in short, an insult. In the New Testament such as in Revelation or as in Philippians we are told: “Look out for the dogs … for the evil-workers.” Dogs, it seems, are evil. Don’t ask about cats, let alone ‘snakes, shamrocks and shillelaghs’, not to mention green beer. St. Patrick? Well that is another matter, yet one which has to do with perseverance, attention, and insight as in this Gospel. And so with dogs, too, perhaps.

Isaiah speaks of “dumb dogs [that] cannot bark” (Is. 56.10), criticizing the watchmen, the leaders of Israel. Yet more than a thousand years later that phrase was turned about to become an image for dogs as preachers, meaning dogs that dobark and, indeed, bark incessantly against “foxes and wolves”, the heretics that threaten “the sheep”, the faithful, as Gregory the Great imagines. Preaching as barking! Just saying.

Several centuries later after him, it became an image for the Ordo Praedicatorum, St. Dominic’s Order of Preachers, later known as Dominicans. And no, the term Dominicans cannot be punned or played with as the Domini Canes, the dogs of the Lord; that is just bad Latin and not historical, just another one of those latter day myths. There is, however, nothing mythical about the dog with the flaming torch as the symbol of the Order of St. Dominic. And scripturally, at least in terms of one of “the other Books (as Hierome saith) [which] the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine”, as the sixth of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles puts it, there is the Old Testament Apocryphal or Deuterocanonical Book of Tobias or Tobit, which mentions in a kindly fashion, Tobias’ dog. This provides the sole biblical instance of the long-standing view of dogs as faithful and loyal companions much like Odysseus’s dog, Argos, in the Odyssey. He alone recognises his master, though disguised as a beggar in his return to reclaim Ithaca, and then dies but without betraying him. Seeing Argos brings tears to Odysseus’ eyes. It is a touching scene. As Homer beautifully puts it, “Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years”.

In the New Testament, there are the dogs that are the companions of Lazarus who lies at the gate of Dives, the rich man, “full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table”. It is the dogs who “came and licked his sores”. That, too, is a touching image of compassion and care. No doubt, they, too, desired to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table. And then there is this story, a most powerful and yet disturbing story in which rejection, and silence, and even insult give place, finally and heartbreakingly, to mercy and grace. The breakthrough moment is this remarkable women’s last statement to Jesus: “Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table”. Little dogs.

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“All men are seeking for thee”

Lent is the season of our striving to strive for the things of God that belong to the good of our humanity. The conjunction of this Ember Wednesday with the commemoration of St. Gregory the Great, one of the founding giants of the medieval Church and of western Europe, is perhaps instructive and at least intriguing. The Ember seasons belong really to the development of western Christianity to which Gregory was a major contributing figure; one has only to think of the formative power of what came to be known as Gregorian Chant in the liturgy of the western Church. The Ember seasons belong as well to a recognition of the order and life of the Church as the body of Christ and to a certain sensibility about the natural world in relation to our spiritual lives; in short, to a sacramental understanding. The Ember seasons not only recall us to Pentecost as the birth of the Christian Church; they also recall us to our lives as embodied within the patterns of nature’s year.

Our Lenten programme this year seeks to explore the sacramental imagery that the Christian Church found in the Scriptures, particularly the Jewish Scriptures or what Christians have commonly called the Old Testament. A sacramental understanding has very much to do with the relation between Word and Sacrament and with the way in which the things of the world belong and contribute to our life of faith and to the forms of our participation in the life of God in Christ. The sacraments are, after all, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”, as the Catechism teaches. In a way, they are a critical feature of all religions. Something invisible and spiritual is made known through what is external and visible.

It is a feature of Judaism that the world reveals the glory of the Lord. A sacramental understanding necessarily connects us to creation. To speak of creation is to speak about a relation to a Creator who by  definition is not created. That connection between God and the world and between God and our humanity as created beings is essential to our thinking sacramentally. The sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion recall us to creation as the means of our participation in the life of God. The things of the world become the vehicles and vessels of our spiritual life. As Paul wonderfully puts it in Romans, the invisible things of God are made known through the visible things of creation. At once, the scriptural ground for what will be known as natural law, it also belongs to a sacramental understanding. The sacraments are not an add-on, a holy extra, as it were, but rather essential to the nature of the Christian religion and to its doctrine and patterns of thinking.

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Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness,
to be tempted by the devil

Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, with the ashes of repentance and the idea of turning back to God. “Return to the Lord your God”, the prophet Joel exhorts us. But there can be no turning back to God without an awareness of our having turned away from God. That is the reason for today’s readings from Matthew and Paul, the one about the temptations of Christ, the other about our striving with God. Against the idea of the wilderness as a pristine place empty of human presence, Paul seems to suggest that the wilderness is inus. That is where the struggles of the soul for the good take place. And that is the true meaning of the story of Christ’s temptations. It illustrates the forms of our temptations.

The story of the temptations of Christ reveals to us a very basic and fundamental principle. All temptations have to do with our relation to the essential goodness of creation and to the will of the Creator. The very nature of God and the goodness of God is a challenge to us about what we think truly matters and what is truly good. This is what is set before us in the story of Christ’s temptations. The whole aspect of temptation turns on the idea of the good. That is what is primary and what the sequence of temptations in Matthew’s account shows us.

The temptations are about being put to the test. Temptation in that sense is about the relation of our knowing and our willing. Temptation tests us about our relation to what is good and true. They all involve a question about power in relation to truth. The devil here is the tempter as in The Book of Job and, as in The Book of Job, the matter of temptation is explicitly allowed by God; in other words it belongs to our good. Here Jesus is “led up by the Spirit”. The point is not about mere play-acting; the point is that the devil himself is good as a created being. His evil and the nature of all evil lies in his denial of his creatureliness and in his pride and presumption to be God himself. That is to will a lie. It is to turn your back on the truth of your own being. It involves a perversion of the good, a refusal to will the good order of creation and the will of God.

Temptation itself is not sin; sin is the yielding to temptation. The story of the temptations of Christ teaches us two things: first, the nature of all our temptations; and secondly, the way of the overcoming of all our temptations. In other words, we are shown the temptation and we are given the true response.

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