Day: June 25, 2023

“The God of all grace … shall himself restore, stablish, strengthen you.”

The epistles, especially of the Trinity season, lay out the doctrine of our abiding in Christ. They focus on the qualities of our being in Christ. The First Sunday after Trinity sets before us the principle of abiding in God and God abiding in us; it belongs entirely to God as love and that love as shaping our loves and our lives. The Second Sunday showed us something of its radical meaning in terms of how that divine love overcomes the animosities, divisions, and condemnations of both others and ourselves. Both those epistles were taken from John’s First Epistle. Today, the epistle reading is from 1st Peter from which the epistle for the Fifth Sunday will also be taken. Next Sunday, the epistle reading is from Paul’s letter to the Romans. These so-called ‘catholic’ epistles of John and Peter, meaning that they are addressed to the whole or universal church, along with Romans 8 next week, emphasize the theme of our sanctification in and through “the sufferings of this present world” and thus provide an introduction to a series of readings from Paul’s epistles that will instruct us in our life in Christ over the rest of the Trinity season. “Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts,” as Peter will tell us.

The emphasis on the doctrine of our abiding in God and God in us is sanctification. The pageant of justifying grace in what Christ has done for us from Advent through to Trinity Sunday now gives over to the qualities of its realization in us, the pageant of sanctifying grace which belongs to our life in Christ. The Gospels illustrate the meaning of the doctrine or teaching and in often vivid ways.

Today’s epistle reading exhorts us to humility as the necessary condition of our being “restored, stablished and strengthened” which the Gospel illustrates in “this parable” which “[Jesus] spake unto them.” Who are they? Well, the motley crew of our wounded and broken humanity! Publicans and sinners, on the one hand, and Pharisees and Scribes, on the other hand. In a way, it embraces the whole range of our humanity. Publicans here refer to tax-collectors who are linked to the more general aspect of our humanity as sinners. The Pharisees and Scribes, the religious leaders and authorities in the Jewish world with their different approaches to the law, murmur against Jesus. Why? Because the Publicans and sinners “drew near … for to hear him.” The context is again the ways in which the human community is divided against itself and in particular against others; the Pharisees and Scribes against the publicans and sinners. But even more, there is the reality of our opposition to God.

The positive lies in the drawing near of the publicans and sinners to hear Jesus. This suggests the desire of our souls for the teaching of God beyond the divisions and divides in our worldly lives. But the condition is repentance; something which the witness of John the Baptist also highlights “by preaching of repentance.”

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