Author: CCW

“I have compassion on the multitude”

It must seem strange in the sultry heat of the quiet summer and in the lush richness of nature’s bounty in the beauty and peace of the valley, to hear about sin and death and about being in the wilderness with nothing to eat. Perhaps, such things merely confirm our current prejudices and biases about religion as something negative and threatening, judgmental and hateful.

To the contrary, it seems to me, these rich and wonderful lessons open out to us things that we need to hear and to hear in the context of the Eucharist, things which have to do with a larger, more complete and more honest view about human life. Ultimately, it is about life with God in Jesus Christ, something of lasting worth and meaning in which we participate here and now. To put it more simply, there is a spiritual and scriptural wisdom here which challenges the all-too-easy complacencies and certainties of our ordinary lives. The culture of full bellies and empty souls faces the deep and great question about what it means to be human. The spiritual and biblical view is that it has altogether to do with the dynamic of our life with God. This is wonderfully illustrated in the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for today.

“The free gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ,” St. Paul tells us. “I have compassion on the multitude,” Jesus says. These are the strong positives of our spiritual life that speak directly and profoundly to the human condition and to the primacy of thanksgiving “at all times and in all places,” as our liturgy puts it, emphasizing in a phrase the freest and truest aspect of redeemed humanity. They are profoundly suggestive of the dynamic of our spiritual life expressed sacramentally in terms of Baptism, on the one hand, and Communion, on the other hand, that capture the distinctive interplay between the theological themes of justification and sanctification; or more simply put, Christ for us and Christ in us. As Richard Hooker notes: “we receive Christ Jesus in baptism once as the first beginner, in the eucharist often as being by continual degrees the finisher of our life” (Lawes, Bk.V, ch. LVII), suggesting exactly how Christ is “Alpha and Omega,” something which even the architecture of our churches often reveals. You need only look up and marvel at the Alpha and Omega beams of Christ Church and of many other Maritime Churches in the Carpenter Gothic style. The idea belongs to a basic and universal or catholic Christian understanding. Again, as Hooker notes: “nevertheless touching Baptism and the Supper of the Lord, we may with consent of the whole Christian world conclude they are necessary, the one to initiate or begin, the other to consummate or make perfect our life in Christ” (Lawes, Bk.V, ch. LXVII).

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

These are words we have heard before only two weeks ago in the Gospel reading for Trinity IV: there at the beginning and setting for the parable of the blind leading the blind; here at the end of an extraordinary passage about loving your enemies. The first suggests how mercy is the counter to our hypocrisy and self-righteousness; the second, the deeper reality of mercy itself is on display. Love your enemies is mercy indeed!

We live in a world of conflicts and divisions, of hatreds and animosities, of bullies and cowards. How do we deal with such things? The tendenz of our age is to assert our various senses of entitlement, our claims to what we are owed, to a sense of justice or more accurately, self-righteousness. We think we deserve certain things and if we can’t get them it is someone else’s fault and, of course, there are always things which offend us. What we assert as a culture is the right not to be offended and endlessly to demand redress. There is no mercy, no toleration, no compassion in this; only a sense of injury, the world of the perpetually aggrieved and the endlessly resentful. All because we think we are better than others.

Today’s collect counters the entitlement culture. God has “prepared for them that love” him, “such good things as pass man’s understanding” – something more. What God seeks for us “exceeds” – goes beyond – “all that we can desire.” This is the great mercy of God that is the true and only counter to the divisions and tensions in our hearts and culture. It is precisely the something more of God’s love for our humanity that transcends our hearts of hatred and enmity, of hurt and injury, of endless cries of entitlement about what we think we are owed.

Mercy is precisely what we are not owed. It is precisely what is given in spite of ourselves, in spite of our claims to certain rights. The contemporary ‘rights culture’ pits us against one another; it creates enmities. Mercy counters and transcends our hatreds. It is about deep love. “Love – and you shall be loved” as one character says to another in David Adams Richards’ novel, “Crimes Against My Brother.”

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“It came to pass that as the people pressed upon him to hear the word of God,
Jesus stood by the lake of Gennesaret”

“It came to pass.” Something happened. It seems almost like the beginning of a fairy tale ‘long ago and far away,’ or ‘once upon a time,’ as it were. Yet this is no ordinary event but something extraordinary communicated through the quotidian, every day events of human lives. This story speaks wonderfully and directly to the deepest concerns of our contemporary world and day, namely, the sense of nothingness, the meaninglessness of our lives, what is properly called nihilism. The nothingness of life.

“If you live today, you breathe in nihilism,” the American writer Flannery O’Connor observed. It is “the very gas you breath,” whether you are “religious” or “secular” as the publishing venture “Interventions” notes in promoting works aimed at providing an alternative to the nihilisms of our day theologically and philosophically through a thorough-going and “genuinely interdisciplinary” approach. The challenge and the task is about rethinking everything, we might say.

Such an approach might be said to have a kind of Scriptural beginning with this Gospel story along with the Epistle from 1 Peter. We read these anciently appointed readings this year in what is traditionally and anciently known as Petertide, referring to the Feast of St. Peter to which is also added the figure of St. Paul. Both were martyred in Rome albeit at different times and buried originally at different places. Their common commemoration arises from the translation of their remains to a common place of burial during a time of persecution in 258; subsequently, their remains were returned to what is thought to have been their original places of burial.

As Fr. Park reminded us at his 30^th anniversary celebration of his ordination to the Priesthood this week, both Peter and Paul were missionaries and both Peter and Paul spoke to both Jew and Gentile communities alike. There is an intercultural engagement that belongs to the emergence and the development of the Christian Faith. Add to the picture that their joint commemoration has very much to do with Rome, with the way in which, through both, the Gospel of Jesus Christ engages the Graeco-Roman world of law and philosophy, and one begins to see the necessary nature of the interdisciplinary and intercultural aspects of our thinking and believing.

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