Month: March 2024

“Gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost”

Our Lenten programme reflects on the Fathers of the Early Church in their reading of some of the Sunday Gospels in Lent. We have already touched upon who the Fathers are and their significance for the establishment of the Scriptures and the credal understanding of the Faith itself. I would like to offer a few brief passages from Augustine in particular that shed light on the Church’s general reading of the Scriptures in the liturgical patterns of Lent.

Here is Augustine on the powerful Gospel story for the Second Sunday in Lent about the encounter between the Canaanite Woman and Christ.

She “shows us,” he says, “an example of humility, and the way of godliness; [and] shows us how to rise from humility unto exaltation.” That is a pretty good summary of the spiritual teaching of this scene and its meaning for us in our pilgrimage. “Now she was, as it appears,” Augustine goes on to say, “not of the people of Israel, of whom came the Patriarchs, and Prophets, and the parents of the Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh; of whom the Virgin Mary herself was, who was the Mother of Christ. This woman then was not of this people; but of the Gentiles. For, as we have heard, the Lord “departed into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, and behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts,” and with the greatest earnestness begged of Him the mercy to heal her daughter, “who was grievously vexed with a devil.” Tyre and Sidon were not cities of the people of Israel, but of the Gentiles; though they bordered on that people. So then, as being eager to obtain mercy she cried out, and boldly knocked; and He made as though He heard her not, not to the end that mercy might be refused her, but that her desire might be enkindled; and not only that her desire might be enkindled, but that, as I have said before, her humility might be set forth.”

His interest is to bring out the universality of the Gospel of Christ for all peoples and yet as arising from the particularity of the people of Israel. His sermons, like many in the Patristic period, endeavour to distinguish between things Jewish and things Christian at the same time as showing their intrinsic connection. The task belongs to the larger aspect of an essential feature of philosophical religion in the idea of a necessary self-critique of religion itself, the awareness of a tendency to reduce God to the forms of human thought rather than recognizing how human thought is raised up into the divine thinking and thus redeemed from its follies.

Here is how Augustine approaches this question. “Therefore did she cry, while the Lord was as though He heard her not, but was ordering in silence what He was about to do. The disciples besought the Lord for her, and said, “Send her away; for she cries after us. And He said, I am not sent, but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” As he says, “Here arises a question out of these words; If He was not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel, how came we from among the Gentiles into Christ’s fold? What is the meaning of the so deep economy of this mystery, that whereas the Lord knew the purpose of His coming — that He might have a Church in all nations, He said that ‘He was not sent, but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel’? We understand then by this that it behooved Him to manifest His Bodily presence, His Birth, the exhibition of His miracles, and the power of His Resurrection, among that people: that so it had been ordained, so set forth from the beginning, so predicted, and so fulfilled; that Christ Jesus was to come to the nation of the Jews, to be seen and slain, and to gain from among them those whom He foreknew. For that people was not wholly condemned, but sifted. There was among them a great quantity of chaff, but there was also the hidden worth of the grain; there was among them that which was to be burnt, there was among them also that wherewith the barn was to be filled. For whence came the Apostles? Whence came Peter? Whence the rest?”

Connection and differentiation. Are we not all and always being sifted, tried and tested, as it were? Do not these comments about Israel equally extend to all of us? The sermon highlights the themes of faith, humility and perseverance; the qualities necessary for the pilgrimage of Lent.

(more…)

Print this entry