Author: CCW

“Jesus sat down and taught the people out of the ship.”

Jesus, “seeing the multitudes went up into a mountain … sat down and opened his mouth and taught them,” saying “blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” Jesus, standing by the lake of Gennesaret when “the people pressed upon them to hear the word of God,” entered one of the ships, and “sat down and taught the people out of the ship.” Like the ancient philosophers of the schools of pagan antiquity, he sits in the seat of wisdom. He is the teacher. It is, I think, a wonderful image. Jesus in the seat of wisdom; Jesus as the wisdom of God. The image of sitting and teaching belongs to the great religions and philosophies of the world.

But what does Jesus teach us? All the things that belong to wisdom. What is wisdom? All the things that belong to our life with God, the eternal things that are opened out in the midst of the passing things, the temporal things, of our world and day. It is about the understanding which alone can govern and peaceably order our world. It is about the understanding which alone enables the “Church to joyfully serve [God] in all godly quietness.”

Now there’s a thought! “Godly quietness.” It seems the exact opposite of our activity-fixated age in our obsession with practicality and action and our lust for power and domination. The very things, of course, which contribute to the destruction of our world and ourselves.  When wisdom is lost and gone, we are easily the victims and even the perpetrators of violence and destruction. We contemplate the horrendous loss of life in Norway by a right-wing fanatic intent, it seems, in making a statement about political policies regarding immigration, resulting in mind-numbing and indiscriminate carnage. Terrorism is always indiscriminate in the range and the rage of its destruction.

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

Luke provides us with an extended version of what we know as the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s Gospel. Only here it is a Sermon on the Plain, on the flatlands of our human existence, as it were. Today’s gospel is sometimes known as ‘the mercy gospel’ because of this opening line.

It complements one of the most powerful of the Beatitudes in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.” Unlike the other beatitudes which confront us with the paradox of difference, this beatitude is about the paradox of the same. Luke emphasizes that element in this passage and in a way deepens, perhaps, our understanding. There is the element of equality: judge not and not be judged; condemn not and not be condemned; forgive and be forgiven; give and it shall be given to you. But these conditions hang, it seems to me, on the opening statement. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.”

It is, I think, a remarkably profound statement. It lies at the heart of Christian prayer, captured in the Lord’s Prayer: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The point is that somehow the realities of heaven are what are looked for and expected on earth. But that is the point of Jesus Christ. He is God with us, the very Logos of God who “suffers in us at every moment”, as James Joyce notes in his rambling novel, Ulysses. What is opened out to us are the properties of heaven, of what is eternal and true, as being the measure and truth of our lives. “For with the same measure that ye mete withal, it shall be measured to you again.”

You get what you give, it seems. There seems to be a kind of justice in that idea, yet one which does not always equate with our experiences. (more…)

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“Rejoice with me”

Jesus tells two parables, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. They are interrelated parables and they actually serve as the introduction to a third parable, the parable of the prodigal son. They are all about the divine mercy which reaches out to gather us into God’s love.

Such is the occasion for rejoicing. In what do we rejoice? We rejoice in the redemption of the lost sheep and the lost coin. We rejoice in the redemption of the lost son. Through these parables we rejoice in the redemption of our humanity.

The parables are lessons in the divine mercy which redeems our humanity. What does that mean? It means that there is more to our lives than the everyday and the mundane. It means there is more to who we are than just what belongs to the immediacy of our experiences. The mercy here which is the occasion of great rejoicing is that we are found in God’s love for us without which we are lost in ourselves and in the vagaries of our circumstances.

Trinity Season abounds in the lessons of love, the divine love which sets our human loves in order. We are meant to see ourselves in these parables as the one lost sheep or the one lost coin whom the shepherd and the woman of the house “seek diligently,” meaning lovingly, until we are found. God is the shepherd and God is the woman who rejoice in our being found. Even more, we are meant to find ourselves in the figure of the prodigal son who returns in repentance, having squandered all that he had, and finds that he is embraced in his father’s love. God is the father. But Christ is the son who has gone into the far-away land of our sinfulness and wastefulness. In coming to ourselves, we remember who we are in the sight of God. That remembrance marks a turning point. It is a movement of divine grace in us that impels our return to the one whose love seeks our return.

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