Author: CCW

“Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful”

Suffering and glory. Mercy and justice. They seem to stand in opposition one to the other yet our readings suggest otherwise and illuminate the nature of the Christian pilgrimage of the soul. It is nothing less than our participation in what has been fully and completely accomplished for us in Christ’s sacrifice but which remains to be more fully realized in us. We live by faith in what we have been given to know. We live by hope in what belongs to the truth and end or purpose of our humanity in God. We live by love that unites faith and hope and sustains us in the journey of our souls to our homeland in God both now and evermore. In short, we await “our full adoption as sons.”

That sense of participation highlights a sense of agency in our taking a hold of the life of Christ. Our seeking is our finding in order to seek all the more. It is not about possessing the truth, as if it were a thing, a consumer product, or simply a fantasy of our own devising; rather it is about being possessed by the truth. What that means is further illustrated in the witness of John the Baptist whose nativity was this week. In the tradition of the church we meet within the Octave of that feast precisely because of the significance of John the Baptist in the pilgrimage of sanctification.

An intriguing and challenging figure, his life and story is only about one thing and one thing only: he points us to the truth of God in Christ. The whole purpose of his being from his birth to his death is to point to the one who is greater than himself, the one whom he names as “the Lamb of God”. John the Baptist prepares the way of Christ by preaching of repentance. Repentance is our constant turning to God, a twofold turning, a turning towards God and a turning away from our sins which separate us from God; in short, conversion and contrition. John the Baptist preaches a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins; Christ is that forgiveness. Christ’s baptism by John in Jordan reveals the truth of God and the meaning of that truth for us in the restoration of the image of God as Trinity in us, for that is the radical meaning of our pilgrimage, our sanctification in embracing and growing into Christ.

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“Rejoice with me”

Humility and rejoicing are intimately connected. The one, humility, is the condition for the other, our true rejoicing in the absolute goodness of God’s love imaged in Luke 15 by the shepherd’s care, the woman’s diligence, and the father’s love. The humility of God’s charity calls us to humility against our pride. Pride is that grand delusion in which we think we are totally self-sufficient; as if we stand in need of nothing. We presume to be the centre of everything. The self-giving love of God stands opposed to the self-centeredness of our pride. Our pride opposes God and God’s ways for us and with us in our lives.

In the Gospel, “all the publicans (meaning here tax collectors) and sinners [drew near] to hear Jesus”. But there were others who objected. “The Pharisees and Scribes murmured, saying, this man receiveth sinners and eateth with them”. In other words, the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law, the self-righteous about their religion, complain about the company which Jesus keeps, the company of tax collectors and sinners. Jesus tells this parable in relation to this division between tax collectors and sinners, on the one hand, and Pharisees and the teachers of the law, on the other hand.

Tax collecting is a necessary feature of public life in any organized state or political community. Tax collectors are hardly ever regarded in a favourable light, but how much less so in the context of the Gospel? For then, they were seen as traitors to Israel because they were working for the Roman Authorities over and against their own people. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they were seen as extortionists. The business of tax collecting was out-sourced by the Roman government to local agents. They were given a quota they had to meet; anything above that was for themselves. Consequently, the tax collectors were out to get whatever they could from an unwilling and hostile population.

Traitors to Israel and extortionists of their own people. No one could be more despised and seen as a sinner than a tax collector. Hardly respectable company for a teacher of religion, it might seem, or, at least, so the Pharisees and the teachers of the law thought. After all, they saw themselves as the worthy ones, as the respectable company with whom Jesus should be, not this rabble of unworthy tax collectors and sinners. How does Jesus respond?

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