Sermon for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany
admin | 23 January 2022“Overcome evil with good”
It epitomizes the essential message of the Epiphany in terms of the manifestation of the truth and goodness of God towards and with us in Christ Jesus and the radical meaning and purpose of our humanity as found in that truth and goodness. It is the triumph of the good not by way of opposition and division which is the way of the world but by way of the nature of the goodness of God itself. With God all is good. God overcomes all evil by good. Evil has no power over the essential goodness of God.
It is not an easy lesson, especially in our polarized world of opposition and division, yet it belongs to a central insight by Jew and Gentile alike, in terms of the Gospel, an ethical insight which belongs to the religions and philosophies of the world more generally speaking. It is a kind of epiphany ‘break-through of the understanding’ where we are allowed to look beyond the masques of the present to confront the sad reality of human suffering. Hence the power of the Gospel story which complements and completes the Epistle. It manifests the power of the good over the forms of human evil for both Jew and Gentile; in short, for all. Epiphany is for all. The truth and goodness of God are not confined to the limits of the finite. The infirmities of our humanity are universal as well. They affect us all.
“Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean“, a leper says to Jesus. “Speak the word only”, a centurion says to Jesus. These are epiphanies. They make known an insight into the truth and goodness of God manifest in Jesus which both have grasped. Such epiphanies are the only real antidotes to the miseries of our humanity. They manifest the overcoming of evil with good. Thus the Gospel story marks a further break-through of the understanding. Healing and wholeness are found in the motion of the Word of God towards us, the Word which is both creation and redemption.
This Sunday highlights our response to the creative and redemptive Word of God. As such it points to the resonance of that word in us by faith. The Gospel passage focuses on the remarkable exchange, first, between Jesus and the leper and, then, between Jesus and the centurion who seeks the healing of his servant. There are several points of interest here. First, this is the second healing in the passage, and secondly, in contrast with the first, it is moved by a concern for another and not simply for oneself. The healings are within and beyond Israel; they make manifest the universal principle of the goodness of God for the whole of our humanity. But they do so through the epiphany of prayer both for ourselves and for one another.
It is easy to read the Gospel story simply in terms of the contrast between Jew and non-Jew; after all, Jesus says about his engagement with the centurion that “I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel”. And yet that faith is precisely what belongs to the truth of Israel in its wrestling with the truth of God as being for all humanity. Jesus marvels at the insight of the centurion because he has grasped the essential teaching which is the truth of Israel in her relation to God.
This double healing is intriguing in another way. With the healing of the leper, it is by word and touch; there is an immediacy and a nearness. With the healing of the centurion’s servant, it is the word operating from afar and as such not constrained to the limits of time and space. Both aspects belong to the truth of the epiphany of Christ’s essential divinity made known in and through his humanity. Both speak to a deeper understanding of our humanity. Whether near to one another or far from one another, whether stranger or friend, there is a common bond that unites us and makes us, properly speaking, neighbours to one another as distinct from the fearful ‘other’. That common bond is grounded in the truth and goodness of God.
In our current distresses, we do well, I think, to contemplate the powerful spiritual and intellectual idea that the good is always greater than evil and that, as Augustine teaches, only God can bring something good out of evil. “Seek good, and not evil; that you may live”, as Amos bids us in the 1st lesson at Matins. It is in that sense, perhaps, that we can make sense of what Paul is saying about “overcoming evil with good” rather than “being overcome of evil”. We are, as he seems to recognise, easily tempted to seek revenge. It is a rather limited form of justice. We think we want to get back at those who have wronged us. But the truth of the matter is that we want more than just to get even; we want to dominate and destroy, to punish and crush. Paul’s point is to encourage us to leave judgment to God. Yet he seems to allow that in doing good to our enemy, by feeding him when he is hungry and by giving him drink if he is thirsty, we are “heap[ing] coals of fire on his head”! Are we doing good to get back at our enemies?
That is a problem and a temptation which Paul counters (perhaps) by immediately bidding us not to be “overcome of evil”, here in the sense of doing good to get back at others. That is not what it means to “overcome evil with good”. So if we take the idea of heaping ““coals of fire”” on the head of our enemies as meaning to get revenge and punish the other, then then we have a problem and are ourselves the problem. It might be possible to understand the “coals of fire” as intending purgation and perfection for our so-called enemy – goodness transforming their evil into good. Yet, at the very least, there is a struggle in us about our grasp and understanding of the goodness of God and how to act out of that goodness in our lives towards others. There is always the danger of our motives which, sadly, are always mixed. Such is our evil, on the one hand, and such is our challenge, on the other hand, about “going through the vale of misery and using it for a well”.
Justice, as Plato shows in The Republic, cannot mean doing harm to others. It cannot be the conventional and commonplace view of “doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies”. Here in this Gospel, which illustrates the ultimate power of the truth and goodness of God, the healing and perfection of our humanity is what is wanted by God. But it is to be wanted by us as well, hence the prayers of leper and centurion alike. Their prayers are already the motion of God’s goodness and will moving in them.
The Gospel touches upon the relation between word and will, between intellect and will. How that is seen by us is one thing; how it is in God is quite another. “If you will, you can make me clean”, the leper says to Jesus. Is he saying that it is merely arbitrary? A kind of favour extended to some and not to others? To seek to be healed is to seek a good but that good is conditioned by the greater goodness of God whose purpose for you may be about something else such as the grace to persevere and even more to see your sufferings as uniting you more fully to the sufferings of Christ. After all, we are all dying. Learning to live means learning to die. This brings this Gospel story into relation to last week’s Gospel where the true meaning of all the miracles has to do with the hour of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection. It is not for us to limit the goodness of God towards us to just some particular interest and concern, a partial good. That would make us the measure of God rather than the other way around.
The good that we seek for ourselves and for one another is found in the word and will of God for us which means more than simply this or that immediate concern. Such particular concerns have to be placed in the bigger picture of the work of human redemption which the epiphany season teaches. That is why the healing of the leper is juxtaposed so nicely with the healing of the centurion’s servant. The encounter with the centurion points to the integration of intellect and will in God. “Speak the word only”, he says, “and my servant shall be healed”.
That prayer becomes our prayer; “speak the word only and my soul shall be healed”, even in and through the forms of suffering in the body. These are words which we may pray at the time of communion. God seeks something better for us than our immediate and physical ‘creaturely’ comforts which is not to dismiss them as not important. It is, however, to recognise that they are not everything. “Speak the word only” has a sacramental meaning. It is about our seeking communion with God and with one another. Such is the resonance of God’s Word and Will, God’s truth and goodness alive and moving in us. An epiphany at work in us even in our current situation of eucharistic fast. “Speak the word only” means to seek to “overcome evil with good”.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 3, 2022
(under the suspension of services imposed by the Bishop)