Day: July 2, 2023

“Be ye merciful, as your Father also is merciful”

We shall return to this chapter from St. Luke’s Gospel later on with the passage which immediately precedes this morning’s gospel about “lov[ing] your enemies” (Trinity 6). Here we have the further articulation of the reciprocity of grace that is to be at work in us which belongs to the pageant of sanctification. It is about our life in Christ, about our abiding, quite literally, in the doctrine of Christ. What that means belongs to our attention to the reading of the Scriptures as they shape our lives in grace.

That means reminding ourselves of the interplay between the various texts of the Scriptures. To be sure, we have these marvellous and, of course, challenging readings each Sunday at Mass but they do not stand simply by themselves. They need to be seen as complemented by other Scripture readings that are also set before us both in the Sunday Office lectionary and the Daily Office lectionary. In a way this points us to the two great questions that we will hear at the midpoint of the Trinity season and which belong to the Christian ethic of compassion in the story of the Good Samaritan, namely, “what is written in the law? How readest thou?”

I was reminded of this by the readings in the Daily Office from Proverbs and from the Letters of John this week that speak to the nature of our abiding in the love of God, something which has already been highlighted in the readings for the first two Sundays after Trinity. Proverbs is, I think, a bit more than simply a loose collection of wise sayings or maxims; it provides a way of thinking things through and of the reciprocity and exchange of ideas that are meant to be lived out in our lives. In that sense, it belongs to our reading in the Trinity season because of its emphasis on sanctification, on our abiding in the Trinity through the words of Scripture which are understood in their unity as the words of Christ. As Cranmer puts it, “he that keepeth the words of Christ is promised the love and favour of God and that he shall be the dwelling-place or temple of the Blessed Trinity”.

In 2 John (9,10), we read that “he who abides in the doctrine [of Christ] has both the Father and the Son.” Doctrine is the teaching, διδακη. In Proverbs 9, “Wisdom”, we are told, “has built her house” and there is the intriguing and at first puzzling contrast between the invitation of the wise woman and the foolish woman. They begin with the exact same words: “whoever is simple, let him turn in here!” But there is all the difference in what that turning in leads to and means.

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