Day: July 23, 2023

“I have compassion on the multitude”

Today’s Collect is a loaded prayer that pulls together the central ideas of the Epistle and Gospel readings. Through a set of images which are essentially organic in character, it gathers us into an understanding which is spiritual and substantial, that is to say, it concerns the quality of our lives with God as standing upon the truth of God revealed. The images of grafting, growing, nurturing and preserving are organic and agricultural – most fitting for our lives in the valley – but they follow upon an understanding of God as the “Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things”. That understanding shapes the meaning of these images. It makes them profoundly sacramental.

The Collect prays the understanding which the Scriptures reveal, particularly in the inter-relation between the Epistle and the Gospel. The Epistle unpacks, we might say, the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Baptism: we are grafted into the life of God without which we are dead in ourselves. And we pray that we may ever be kept in this living relationship. The Gospel alludes to the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Communion. Our growth and nurture in the goodness of God, “the author and giver of all good things”, is through the compassion of Christ who feeds us in the wilderness and sets us upon our way, “he in us and we in him,” as the Prayer of Humble Access in our liturgy put it. Grafted into “that pattern of teaching whereunto you were delivered,” as Paul teaches, we are meant to live from that Word of God revealed.

That we are grafted not simply into the name of God but into “the love of thy name” reminds us that Baptism marks the beginning of a dynamic relationship which has its continuation in the Eucharist. The fruit of these organic, spiritual, substantial and sacramental relationships is holy lives and a holy end. “But now being made free from sin and become servants to God, you have your fruit unto holiness and the end everlasting life”. Thus the interplay between the Epistle and the Gospel is like the connection between Baptism and Communion.

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