Day: October 17, 2024

Sermons

Meditation for Eve of the Feast of St. Luke

“While he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven”

The Gospel reading for the Feast of St. Luke is the very end of his Gospel. It ends not with the resurrection appearences of Jesus as in Matthew, Mark, and John, but with the Ascension, though that has been, at the very least, prepared for us in John’s Gospel, too. The ending of Luke’s Gospel is somewhat elaborated upon in the opening chapter of Acts, also attributed to Luke. Yet rather than emphasizing the problematic of Jesus’ going from us, as John in particular explains as ultimately being expedient or good for us, despite the sense of loss and grief, Luke sees the Ascension of Christ as the cause of great joy. The disciples, he says, “returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God.” Luke shows us that Christ’s going from us is the condition of his being with us and of our being with him.

Such is “the work of an evangelist”, Paul suggests in 2 Timothy, the Epistle reading for the Feast, already intuiting what the Church Fathers will say about the Ascension as “the exaltation of our humanity”. While the Collect speaks about the healing of “all the diseases of our souls” by the wholesome medicines of Luke’s doctrine or teaching, there is more to the good news of his Gospel than healing. He shows us our end in God, our ultimate restoration to unity with God in his eternity. The point is that we participate in this now because time has been gathered into eternity.

Luke’s feast day belongs to the autumnal pageant which will bring us to All Saints’. What we are given to think is the Ascension of Christ as signifying our end with God and in God now and forever. But how? It is, I think, by attending to what Luke and Luke alone has Jesus ask us. “What is written? How readest thou”. In a way, his Gospel is particularly emphatic about how Jesus opens our understanding by providing a way of interpreting the Scriptures about Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection, about repentance and forgiveness of sins, about the promise of the Father in the coming of the Holy Spirit wonderfully presented in Acts, and here about Christ’s Ascension.

Luke points us to our end in Christ by way of attending to his Word and its radical meaning about the quality of our life in Christ. Luke is the spiritual director of the Church throughout the Trinity Season especially. More Gospel readings come from Luke than from any other Evangelist, readings that move our hearts and illuminate our minds. As Dante so concisely puts it, Luke is scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the Scribe of the gentleness of Christ, and perhaps nowhere more wonderfully than in the readings for his feast day. Only Luke is with me, Paul says, with just a hint that this is almost enough though wanting the books and parchments that belong to the understanding of Christ. Luke shows us Jesus as opening our understanding about our end and life in Christ. This is our blessing and the reason for our gathering in the temple in great joy, “praising and blessing God”.

“While he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of St. Luke, 2024

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 17 October

Your brother’s blood is crying to me

There is something incredibly moving about the story of Cain and Abel. It belongs to the fall-out from the Fall, the fall from the harmony between our humanity and God and between our humanity and the created order. The fall-out also means division and animosity, envy and murder among ourselves. The story is the beginning of the long, sad story of our inhumanity towards one another.

The questions of God call us to account but only so as to awaken us to self-consciousness and understanding, and thus to the radical meaning of human freedom and dignity, albeit through the forms of negation. “Where is Abel, your brother?” God asks Cain. Cain lies, “I do not know”, he says, only to add the telling and dismissive rhetorical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” This leads to God’s further question that echoes his question to Eve in the previous chapter. “What have you done?” Again, it is not that he doesn’t know, rather he wants Cain to acknowledge what he has done and to realize its significance. This comes out in the amazingly heart-felt statement of the Lord: “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground”. So simple and yet so profound. God knows and God cares. This underlines the whole meaning of the Creation stories and suggests the profound reciprocity between the Creator and the created as well as the ethical demands that belong to the truth of our humanity as part of that created order, indeed, an essential part.

God’s statement reminds us that our obligations towards one another in the human community belong to our relationship with God. To violate one is to violate the other. This underlies what will become the commandment to love God with the whole of ourselves and to love our neighbour as ourselves. It has come to be known as the Summary of the Law, in the Christian understanding and as building upon the Jewish Shema, the commandment to love God with the whole of one’s being. The story of Cain’s killing of Abel is precisely about the negation of what belongs to the truth of our humanity as made in God’s image. In killing Abel, Cain kills what belongs to his own being and truth. But it cannot be denied and dismissed. It is known by God and God cares because we are made in his image. The dialogue between the Lord and Cain highlights this truth which has been negated by Cain’s action.

In the face of our troubled world of war and destruction, with the mind-numbing number of deaths that come in its wake, this statement by God is particularly compelling. Why? Because it says that God knows and cares, that those who are killed are known and loved in God regardless; their blood cries out to him from the ground. There is no escaping this divine knowledge. Yet the God who knows all the secret desires of our hearts seeks to draw us into his goodness and love. This is the counter to all of the horrors of our hearts and world. It simply recalls us to the truth of ourselves in God which in turn convicts us about our relations with one another, each as made in the image of God, each as known and loved by God.

The point of the questions and statement by God is to awaken us to truth and to love. At the very least, it suggests the beginning of a way to transcend the divisions and hatreds in our hearts and our world. It challenges our thinking and changes our entire outlook. In this sense, the awakening to self-consciousness is also an awakening to ethical responsibility and genuine care for one another. A counter indeed to our culture of death and destruction, of division and animosity.

(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy

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Prayers and liturgy

Etheldreda, Queen and Abbess

Walpole St. Peter, St. EtheldredaThe collect for today, the Feast of St. Etheldreda (d. 679), Queen, Foundress and Abbess of Ely (source):

O eternal God,
who didst bestow such grace on thy servant Etheldreda
that she gave herself wholly to the life of prayer
and to the service of thy true religion:
grant that we may in like manner
seek thy kingdom in our earthly lives,
that by thy guidance
we may be united in the glorious fellowship of thy saints;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: Philippians 3:7-14
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:29-34

Artwork: St. Etheldreda, stained glass. St. Peter’s Church, Walpole St. Peter, Norfolk, England. Photograph taken by admin, 3 October 2014.

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