by CCW | 21 January 2024 10:00
The Collect, Epistle and Gospel for each Sunday provide the interpretative framework for the pilgrimage of our souls to God and with God. The epiphany season is particularly about the pilgrimage or journey of the understanding with respect to the things of God made manifest in the images and teaching of the eucharistic lessons. They are at the heart of The Book of Common Prayer, itself the heart of Anglican Spirituality, at once reformed and catholic, and as embodying a credal or doctrinal reading of Scripture. It is a good devotional practice, I suggest, to pray and read the Collect, Epistle and Gospel before the service in preparation for hearing and receiving the Word proclaimed and celebrated.
Today’s Gospel presents us with a double healing, the healing of the leper and the Centurion’s servant by Jesus Christ. Epiphany season abounds in miracles. They belong to the making visible of the glory of God. A miracle, after all, is a sign of wonder as we saw, I think, last Sunday. The healing miracles are a wonder. But what exactly do we see? Only the signs of the glory in the effects of what is said and done. The wonder, really, is the wonder of Christ.
Christ heals a leper from within Israel and he heals the paralyzed servant of the Centurion who is part of the Roman military order, literally responsible for one hundred men, but who is from outside Israel. Jesus speaks and he acts. There is healing. The healings are within Israel and beyond Israel; both to those near and those far away in every sense of distance literal and metaphorical, cultural and historical. Through the history and meaning of Israel, the glory of God is not only made known to the world but for the whole world. The leper is healed within the context of Israel and is held to the requirements of the Law in Israel. Yet with the Centurion’s request, Jesus acknowledges something more: there is the wonder of faith which coming out of Israel transcends Israel. “I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel.” For both the leper and the Centurion, Christ is the wonder. There is an epiphany.
Christ is the wonder before he puts forth his hand, even before he speaks. The healing miracles are surprisingly not the glory. They are only the making visible of the glory which is already present in Christ Jesus. He is the glory. And he is the glory which is somehow known and known not just in his effects but in his person.
The leper came and worshipped him saying, “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.” It is a petition which finds its heart of meaning in things like “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” and more profoundly, “if it be possible let this cup pass from me, nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.” It belongs to the one who says he “has come to do the will of him who sent me.” And so it enters into the glory of the Son with the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. “Through him we have access in one Spirit to the Father.”
The leper somehow senses and knows the presence of the glory of God in Christ Jesus. His petition is a response to what he knows. The healing act which follows both confirms and illuminates the glory. “Jesus put forth his hand and touched him saying, I will; be thou clean.” A window is opened upon the glory of heaven now on earth. The glory is made visible in that Will declared. That will is the love that made the heaven and the earth and all that therein is. “The love that moves the sun and the other stars,” as Dante puts it, an epiphany par excellence.
The Centurion came and besought him with the simple description of his servant’s condition. It, too, is a petition. He, too, knows something of the glory of Christ before he speaks and acts. The brief dialogue makes that glory known. Jesus says, “I will come and heal him,” to which the Centurion says, “Lord, I am not worthy” but “speak the word only.” He engages with the glory he senses and knows. The engagement shows us the directness and the insight of faith. It enters into the glory. The glory is made visible not just in the healing but in the proclamation which precedes it.
“If thou wilt.” “Speak the word only.” “I will; be thou clean.” “I will come and heal him.” The vistas of heaven’s glory are seen in such earthly scenes, simply in what is said, the word spoken by the one who is the Word and Son of the Father.
The Gospels do not show us the process by which the leper and the Centurion come to such an insight. They show us, perhaps, how the Evangelists have come to such knowledge through these events. So, too, may we come to know and grow into the greater knowledge of the glory of the Lord. But something first has had to be communicated. It is communicated in Christ. The light which irradiates the world illumines the souls of those seeking grace. It is there in the idea of the reality of Jesus Christ, God’s Word and Son, made known and proclaimed.
The Epistle, almost in a kind of reversal, shows us the application or illustration of the Gospel teaching. It counters all our human conceits, our foolishness in attempting to take God captive to ourselves. “Be not wise in your own conceits,” Paul warns us. Yet what is made known compels an ethical response in us, a sense of responsibility for what we come to know. It is service towards others. The reading from Romans signals how this Gospel teaching is to have its resonance in us in the works of corporal mercy. What are they? Technically, there are seven: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, hospitality to the stranger, healing the sick, visiting those in prison, and burying the dead. Two of these are suggested in today’s Epistle, albeit in a more radical sense of service: feeding the hungry and giving drink to the thirsty. More radically it is about doing good to others, even those who are seen as enemies: not “recompen[sing] evil for evil,” and instead, “overcom[ing] evil with good;” in short transcending the divisions of our souls and world.
How is that possible except by what epiphany makes manifest, the light of the divinity of Christ shining out to us in the life of Christ? It can’t be simply by us in the conceits of our hearts, for our own conceits, meaning our opinions and interests, fall far short of the glory and grace of God.
The light of Epiphany would open us out to the glory of God in Jesus Christ. The hand which is put forth is the hand of glory. It goes forth to effect our healing – our salvation, our wholeness. But our healing, our salvation, is but the effect of God’s glory. Epiphany makes the glory known. Christ is the glory in himself. He puts forth his hand; he speaks his word, and we are healed. We enter into the glory of his presence. “Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak the word only and my servant shall be healed.” Yes, but that in turn compels us to act out of the motions of that self-same act of love: “If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink.” Wonderful.
But then what follows is surely troubling: “for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.” What? How is that good? Does it not smack of revenge and retaliation? Or is it rather about effecting the possibilities of remorse and repentance in the other named here as “enemy,” thus overcoming the evil of enmity in ourselves and others whether within or without the church? I think it is the latter precisely because of how the passage ends about overoming evil with good. This belongs to the epiphany themes of the making known of the Good as greater than all and every evil. This belongs, too, we might say, to the making known of the “infinite power, wisdom and goodness” of God as the First Article of the 39 Articles of Religion states. This suggests the deeper ethical teaching that is universal but intensified in the person of Christ.
“Speak the word only.” These are words of real faith, words that are grace-given but articulated on human lips. “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God,” as Paul puts it in Ephesians (2.8). The passage that complements both the Epistle and Gospel reading for this day. It is “not because of works, lest any one should boast” (Eph. 2.9). Our task is to acknowledge Christ as Lord. It is our freedom and it is God’s grace. It has its application for us in a prayer, sometimes used before receiving communion, that is based on this Gospel text: “Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak the word only and my soul shall be healed.” Soul and servant, ourselves and one another.
The Epiphany season ends this year with these readings: the epiphany of grace and glory made manifest to us and made to live in us signalling so profoundly the divine will and purpose for our humanity even in our divided and troubled world. Here is the illuminating grace of Christ revealed to us for our good and the good of our humanity.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 3, 2024
(revised & expanded from 1999/2011)
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