Author: CCW

This is the second of four Lenten meditations on original sin. The previous meditation is posted here.

“Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David”

Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy upon us. It is the recurring refrain, not just of the season of Lent, but of our Anglican liturgy. In a way, it is an implicit acknowledgment of the condition of our sinfulness, the on-going legacy of original sin, if you will, the mystery which we are pondering in this series of Lenten addresses.

The Canaanite woman in the Gospel story for the Second Sunday in Lent cries out for mercy. It is, evidently, not a cri de coeur that is restricted to the people of Israel. It is universal. She cries out for mercy to Jesus for her daughter who is grievously vexed with a devil, deeply troubled spiritually or mentally, we might say. But that whole idea of being vexed by a devil suggests the power and hold of evil on our souls. Somehow it seems that we cannot just go and do all that we would like to do or even believe that we ought to do for ourselves or for one another.

Paul expresses that deep sense of how we are divided within ourselves. He states the condition of our divided wills, “the good that I would I do not, the evil that I would not do, that do I do.” We are a divided house and we cannot stand on the power of our strength of will, crowing to the universe, like Frank Sinatra, that “I did it my way.” Time and time again, the Church in the liturgy through the Collects and the Scripture readings especially, reminds us of this deeply disturbing feature of our human lives, the condition of our divided selves, the reality of our corrupted wills.

And yet, to pray for mercy is to acknowledge this reality without succumbing to the utter hopelessness of despair. To pray for mercy is to be open to God’s power and grace which is greater than the contradictions of our being. This is an important point, I think, because logically there is something incomplete in defining ourselves negatively. It presupposes something positive. Sin, original sin, is about privation, a lack or absence of being and truth. But it is totally dependent upon what it denies. Sin is nothing in itself.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which
fall from their masters’ table”

It is a powerful and amazing Gospel story. And very disturbing. I wonder if we can hear it. Sometimes, I think, ours is the culture of fragile, wounded and broken souls, strong, perhaps, mostly in its sense of entitlement and in its sense of injury. This story surely disturbs and disquiets us. Why?

Consider what we see here. A mother whose daughter is sick. Ordinarily, we may uphold the strength of a parents’ love for their children as being quite powerful and most strong. Isaiah, in a remarkable passage asks the question whether “a woman can forget her sucking child” and suggests that even that form of love is not as strong as God’s love. “Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you,” he has God say. His point is that our human loves are always incomplete in comparison to the divine love. “Behold, I have graven you on the palms of my hands,” God says in a wonderful image.

And yet, we may wonder about such loves, the love of a mother for her child as a limited love and the unlimited, unforgetting love of God, in the wake of this story. We may see here the power of a mother’s love for her daughter, to be sure, but we may question the love of God. If the love of God is what we are meant to see in Jesus Christ, then that love seems very odd, harsh and strange; indeed, disturbing. So what then are we to make of this story?

(more…)

Print this entry

“The people which sat in darkness have seen a great light”

Matthew recalls Isaiah’s prophecy about the light that has arisen upon “them which sat in the region and shadow of death.” He does so in the context of Christ’s coming to Capernaum which is on the sea-coast of Galilee in the land of Zebulon and Naphtali. Christ’s coming there occasions the connection in his mind with Isaiah’s prophecy about those same sea-coast lands. Matthew is suggesting the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy in Christ Jesus, the Jesus whose mission of repentance, discipleship, healing and salvation are the very things that belong to the evangelium – the good news that is the meaning of the word, gospel.

The lesson from the Acts of the Apostles echoes that same theme. “The word of God grew and multiplied,” we are told, and we hear of the spreading of that word into Seleucia and Cyprus through Barnabas and Saul; all under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. With the commemoration of St. Patrick, we are taken in an opposite direction, “away in the lovable west,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, to the shores of Ireland but with that same spirit of mission. St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland; the one who brought the good news of the Gospel to those sea-coast islands on the far, far reaches of Europe, the very outposts of civilization and order in the fifth century.

The remarkable spread of Christianity is one of the great mysteries of the world; an undeniable fact that bespeaks a remarkable revolution from pagan darkness to the light of Christ. With the coming of Christ, light and hope triumph over the dismal darkness and despairing fatalisms of the pagan cultures, whether sophisticated and urban or rustic and rural, whether ancient or modern. Patrick lit the paschal fire, the fire of Easter triumph of Christ’s resurrection, on the hill of Tara. It signaled the conversion of the Irish.

(more…)

Print this entry