“His the humiliation Whose also [is] the glory”: Reading with the Fathers, Lenten Programme III
“Blessed are your eyes, for they see; and your ears, for they hear.”
Such is the hope for ourselves as we enter into the Passion of Christ. The joint commemoration of Benedict, the founder of Benedictine monasticism, along with Thomas Cranmer, the architect of The Book of Common Prayer, suggests the legacy of the Fathers for the continuing life of the Church. Benedict (480-547) was the founder of Benedictine monasticism which has shaped the European world. It was in the Benedictine monasteries that the writings of the Fathers were largely preserved and passed on as living presences and voices in the devotional and doctrinal life of the Church. What we have come to call ‘Anglicanism’ is itself an inheritor of that tradition with its attention to “the mind of the Fathers.” Diarmaid McCulloch observes that Gerlach Flicke’s iconic 16th century portrait of Cranmer (1545) captures the essential features of the English Reformation project: the reading of the Scriptures through the Fathers, principally, though not exclusively, Augustine. Augustine, however, is certainly the dominant and seminal figure for the shaping of Benedictine monasticism and its heirs.
The one, who founded the spiritual and intellectual traditions which remain with us, at least for those, who, as Jesus says, “have ears to hear,” complements the other who was an Archbishop and a martyr. Together they contribute to our Lenten reflections on reading with the Fathers especially with respect to Passiontide. I want to offer a few passages from Origen, Chrysostom, and Leo on the symbolic meaning of Christ’s Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem which emphasize the centrality of the Passion. Leo the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church (b. ? – d. 461) concentrates the doctrinal emphasis for us: “His the humiliation Whose also [is] the glory.” That marks the character of our participation in the Passion through the pageant of Holy Week.
Origen (185-254) the great theologian and biblical exegete par excellence, commenting on Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, states what becomes a common approach of the Fathers to the Scriptures. “It is,” he says, “worth while in such places in the Gospel to apply our minds to the meaning and purpose of the writers, and to consider why, after they had related the wonders and portents of the Saviour’s actions, they should also record these things which reveal nothing of this sort.” Something is to be learned even in the seemingly minor details of the Gospel narratives. As he says:
It is understandable that the Evangelists should commemorate the restoration of sight to the blind man, the healing of the paralytic, the raising of the dead, the cleansing of the lepers, in order that those who would read their writings might be strengthened in Jesus. But what purpose had they in mind in this place in which it is recounted, that, after Jesus had with His disciples drawn near to Jerusalem, and had come to Bethphage close to Mount Olivet, He sent two Disciples with the command that they should loose and bring to Him an ass that was tied, together with its colt [?]; He Who frequently made long journeys on foot, and did not refuse to complete His sojourn here on foot, as when He had come to Jerusalem, and passing through Samaria arrived at the well, and being weary from the road had sat down by it? And what did Jesus also mean when He bade them loose the ass that was tied, and the colt with her, telling them to answer any man who asked them: ‘Why do you loose him?’ to answer, ‘that the Lord hath need of them: and forthwith he will let them go?’”