Category: Sermons

“Then opened he their understanding”

Luke, “dear and glorious physician”, as the novelist Taylor Caldwell styled him, has been the Church’s spiritual director for much of the Trinity season. Tonight we celebrate his witness and writings – The Third Gospel and The Book of the Acts of the Apostles. What we celebrate are the things which are particularly outstanding about Luke, identified by Dante as scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. But what kind of gentleness?

A gentleness that is expressed in compassion and in intellect. Luke alone of the evangelists gives us some especially poignant examples of compassion, such as the story of the Good Samaritan, the great classic of care and compassion, and the story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain, a classic of compassion. In both “he saw and had compassion”, a favourite phrase with Luke. But as our Gospel for his commemoration reminds us, Luke presents Christ most powerfully as the one who opens our understanding that we might understand the Scriptures. The emphasis is on the understanding, particularly as he says, about repentance and the forgiveness of sins. It is not by accident that the winged ox is the symbol for St. Luke’s Gospel.

Luke tells the story, too, about Mary and Martha in which Martha, distressed and distracted by much busyness in playing hostess to Jesus, complains about Mary “sitting at Jesus’s feet and listening to his word.” Jesus’ response is at once most direct and most gentle. “Martha, Martha,” he says, “thou art anxious and troubled about a multitude of things”, naming precisely one of the diseases of our disordered times, yet, he says “one thing is needful; and Mary hath chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.” It is a gentle rebuke and a strong reminder to us about the dangers of getting too caught up in all our busyness with all of the stresses and sense of preoccupation and self-importance that comes with it. One thing is needful. What is that? To seek to learn and to understand by listening to his word.

This is not to deny the activities of Martha but to call attention to the contemplative activity of Mary as being the one thing needful in every age. We so easily get caught up in our own busyness and forget the purpose and truth of our being which is found in God. It is a gentle reminder about the opening out of our understanding of the Scriptures without which we cannot really act properly and charitably in the world around us. Contemplation is about that one thing needful without which we lose our humanity in the mindless busyness of our contemporary world. ‘Don’t just do something, sit there’; this is the gentle wisdom of Luke signalled in his Gospel and in Acts and in the witness of his life. Only so will we find healing for our anxious souls.

“Then opened he their understanding”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of St. Luke, 2017

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“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”

Pumpkins, pucks, and parades seem to define Windsor, particularly on this post-thanksgiving weekend! How they relate to the matter of love is another question. For here today love constrains us to speak of love. It might not seem all that remarkable a thing to say but I wonder if we do not altogether fail to see how special, how precious, how extraordinary Christ’s lesson is for us here in this gospel. It goes to the heart of the matter, to the heart that was willing to be pierced and broken for you and for me, indeed, for the whole world. That heart is the heart of Christ. That love is spoken and shown in the face of controversy and debate; in short, in the midst of the hostilities and animosities of our human hearts and so, too, in the midst of all of our current confusions and uncertainties within and without the Church. “And yet the common people heard him gladly.” Can that be said of us?

Two things are extraordinary here. First, God commands us to love him. Secondly, Christ unites the love of God and the love of neighbour in himself. At first glance, such things may not seem so amazing, partly because they are so familiar. After all, they are words which we frequently hear: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength;” in short, with the whole of our being. “Hear O Israel,” says the One who is the Word of God himself.

To hear that Word is to be Israel, a people who are open to the Word of God, who are defined by that Word. That self-same Word now proclaims that “the Lord our God is one Lord.” That unity is no mere oneness, no empty aloneness. It is the fullness and the completeness of the divine life in itself. As Aquinas remarks, “the perfection of Christian life consists in charity.” That charity begins and ends with God whose grace defines us against “the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil” as the Collect puts it, reminding us of our baptismal identity in Christ, a far, far different thing that pumpkins, pucks, and parades!

God commands us to love him. This is the first extraordinary thing. What does this mean? Does God stand in need of our love?

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“So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth”

It is not often that the epistle reading at Holy Communion is a lesson from the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures, what Christians know as the Old Testament, and in this case, a passage from The Book of the Prophet Isaiah. It is an especially wonderful passage that deals with the overarching theme of God’s providence at work in creation and redemption and that belongs to a theology of the land and our labours on the land. As such it connects with the celebration of Harvest Thanksgiving.

We are being reminded of the spiritual nature of thanksgiving precisely through the power of the divine word without which there can be no harvest and no thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a profoundly reflective and spiritual activity as well as the freest thing that we can do. The Greek word is one which is somewhat familiar to you: eucharist. The root of that word is charis – grace. Thus thanksgiving is the movement of grace in our souls. It can’t be forced and it can’t be denied. It extends beyond mere courtesy, important as courtesy is. The act of thanksgiving to God raises the character of our duties and obligations to one another to an entirely different and higher level: quite simply to the nature of our engagement with God and his Word and that Word made flesh in Jesus Christ. In turn, as the Gospel for Harvest Thanksgiving makes perfectly clear, it is that Divine Word Incarnate whose “word” is the bread of our lives, the very principle of our existence in, to and with God. It is all a kind of redire ad principia, a return to God as the principle of our very existence.

And while this activity of thanksgiving seems to be predicated and therefore dependent upon our experience of the good things of creation and human labour that we enjoy, it is actually something far more radical and far more challenging because it is about our life with God, summed up, perhaps, in that rich and provocative statement in the great Eucharistic prayer. It is about “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving”. And all because the Word which “goes forth” from God goes forth with purpose and becomes first, the Word made flesh and, then, the Word which is given to us as “the bread of life.”

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“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”

Dante describes Luke as the scriba mansuetudinis Christi, “the scribe of the gentleness of Christ”. It is not by accident that St. Luke’s Gospel is sometimes called the Gospel of Compassion and rightly so. The phrase “he saw… and he had compassion…” appears in several places in the Gospels and particularly in Luke’s Gospel. Somehow how we see leads to how we act.

This is almost the reverse of our age which tends to think of thinking as what follows action rather than what precedes or is implicit in each and every thing that we do. Thinking is more than reaction to actions; it is more than afterthought which doesn’t mean that it is simply predictive – a feature of the scientific world or at least one of its desiderata.

We meet in the angelic air of the early Fall and just after Michaelmas, the feast of St. Michael and All Angels. The Angels are very much part of the liturgical and spiritual landscape of our thinking and praying. We are very much a part of a spiritual community – the host of heaven comprising saints and angels. Redeemed humanity finds itself in the company of angels – such is our liturgy. Unseen and yet known, the Angels belong to our thinking the good and refusing the evil; they are the ideas of God in creation. Perhaps it is with angels’ sight that we can best think about the seeing that is compassion, even the compassion of Christ.

Luke consistently links seeing with compassion but with the awareness that our seeing others in need does not always result in acts of compassion. “A certain priest” and “Levite” “see” but “pass by,” after all. Ten men were cleansed but only one “when he saw that he was healed” turned back “giving thanks” to the one whose compassion upon our humanity results in healing. In the parable of the prodigal son, the Father “saw” his wayward son returning to him and “had compassion on him”. Just so, too, “a certain Samaritan” who “when he saw him” – meaning the man who is in need – “he had compassion on him.” There is something important about the seeing that results in compassion and restoration; in short, salvation. And just perhaps it has something to do with angels’ vision.

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“There was war in heaven”

Dancing with angels is a way of speaking about what we do every day in our spiritual and intellectual lives; it is particularly a feature of our life as students and teachers and as priest and people. Angels are very much about the principles of the understanding, the intellectual and spiritual principles that belong to our understanding of the human and the natural world. They remind us that there is more to reality than what meets the eye. They speak as well, to that common feature of our humanity, our loneliness, what Alistair MacLeod calls our “inarticulate loneliness” out of which comes the struggle to articulate and communicate. The Angels remind us that we have dance partners in the pursuit of understanding and in the struggle to act rightly and to be good. We are part of a larger spiritual community, the community of Angels and humans. “The services of Angels and men”, the Collect notes, are “ordained and constituted” by God “in a wonderful order.” We pray to God that “they may succor and defend us on earth”.

Angels? But you can’t see them! True. You can only think them. That, of course, is exactly the point. We can only think them and we can only think with them. We can even learn from them. The outstanding theologian, Thomas Aquinas, known as Doctor Angelicus, the angelic doctor, asked the question, “Can a man be taught by an Angel?” (Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Q.11, art. Iii). The Angels can teach us, he shows, not by supplanting what is given by the light of nature or the light of grace, the human and the divine respectively, but by “moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding.”

Angels help us to understand the terrible, hard and harsh events of our own world and day. After all, will we really even begin to comprehend the forms of violence and abuse, for example, merely through the lenses of social and economic determinism? Perhaps we need the spiritual wisdom which talks about the struggles between the good and evil which we are afraid to name, the spiritual struggles which the religions of the world in their truth and integrity contemplate and know.

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“I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus”

Paul’s words in today’s Epistle stand in stark contrast, it might seem, to the spirit of the Gospel which seems to suggest that we should not worry about the things of the body – “what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” After all, “is not the life more than meat, and the body more than raiment?” Jesus recalls us to the primary and necessary consideration of Providence. “Behold,” he says, “Consider,” he says, and above all, “Seek,” he says.

It is not that the things of the body and of the world don’t matter. They do. At issue is in what way and to what extent. Jesus in the Gospel puts his finger on a perennial issue in the human story and one which is even more pronounced and even more of a problem in our modern dsytopia. Anxiety doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Anxiety is a relatively modern word, largely derived from the German “angst” and freighted with a whole lot of baggage from the psycho-philosophical traditions of Nietzsche and Freud. It captures a certain unease about the world in which we find ourselves. Since the twentieth century it has displaced the word which Tyndale and the Translators of the King James Version of the Bible used in this passage from Matthew. The English word was “carefull” – be not so full of cares or encumbered, burdened with cares. In a way that describes our world a bit better and in a more concrete way than the various therapeutic descriptors that are part of our contemporary landscape, literally littered by a plethora of conditions and symptoms. We miss, I fear, the deeper spiritual understanding which today’s readings offer.

Suffering is real and the forms of suffering are endlessly diverse and individual. Today’s readings belong, I think, to important questions about good and evil, about suffering and redemption that need to be explored more deeply, especially by the Church. Why? Because of the essential question about ‘redemptive suffering’.

Jesus is not saying that there won’t be hardships and suffering. There will be. And that is the point of connection to the Epistle. To bear in our own bodies “the marks of the Lord Jesus” is to bear the marks of redemptive suffering. It is to bear the marks of the profoundest form of the Providence of God imaginable.

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“And he arose and followed him”

The call of Matthew from “the receipt of custom” – a wonderful phrase! – seems rather disturbing and disquieting. It is so abrupt and seemingly arbitrary. Jesus says “follow me” and “he arose and followed him.” At best, it suggests a crisis to which there seems to be but one response.

It is a story of conversion but without anything of the inner struggle and conflict displayed in the conversion of St. Paul. Yet the external details suffice. He is a tax-collector and that is associated here with being a sinner. Why? Publicans, as the name suggests, have an immediate connection to the res publica, the public things, the things pertaining to the life of the political community especially in its natural and economic life. There is a certain necessity to taxes, unpleasant as they may seem to be. Why then the association with sin?

There are two reasons. The first has to do with the particular context. Matthew’s tax-collecting is seen as a kind of spiritual betrayal, a form of treason against the spiritual community to which he properly belongs. He is collaborating with the Roman overlords in collecting taxes for them from his own people while benefiting personally. Rome, perhaps, was the first imperial power to outsource tax collecting! Matthew, like Zacchaeus, is despised by his own community. It is an issue of spiritual justice, we might say, a question of fundamental loyalties and identities.

The second reason is more universal and brings out the real problem with each and every form of economic determinism. It is signaled in the Collect for St. Matthew’s day which applies Matthew’s conversion to every one of us. “Grant us grace to forsake all covetous desires and inordinate love of riches.” It is a question of disordered love, of love in disarray, a question of fundamental loyalties and identities for each of us. We sense the gospel imperative, “ye cannot serve God and Mammon” – worldly riches – “for what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?” The suggestion of the gospel is that we are more than our material acquisitions and more than our acquisitiveness. We are spiritual creatures who cannot, ultimately, be satisfied with anything less than the kingdom of God.

At issue is the relationship between the forms of our spiritual identity and the forms of economic life. What is overlooked in all forms of economic determinism is sin and evil, in the form of our “covetous desires” and “inordinate love of riches” and the willful destructiveness born out of deep hatred and animosity. What is overlooked is how all forms of economic determinism are essentially materialistic and atheistic.

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“And one of them … turned back … giving him thanks;
and he was a Samaritan”

Last Sunday we had the powerful and familiar story of the Good Samaritan. Today we have another gospel story in which a Samaritan figures also most prominently. It is an intriguing aspect of the Christian Scriptures, particularly of St. Luke’s Gospel, that the Samaritans are often used by Jesus to teach us about what belongs to the truth of our common humanity. At once an implied criticism of religious divisions, particularly among the Jews but by extension to other religions, Jesus talks about what transcends the differences between and within religious cultures. In these back-to-back Sunday Gospels we are reminded about the true nature of our obligations to God and to one another as well as our failings.

Both Gospels, the one a parable, the other an encounter, reveal to us something of ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’ about our humanity at the same time as they remind us of the necessity of God’s grace as the operative principle in our lives. There are our failings but there is the triumph of God’s grace in us compelling to “go and do likewise” both towards our neighbour and towards God. “A certain man” is wounded, lying half-dead on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, the heavenly and the earthly cities respectively. “A certain Priest” and “Levite” “look and pass by”. There were “ten men that were lepers,” ten that were healed by Jesus.

Only “a certain Samaritan as he journeyed”, who having seen the man who was wounded, “had compassion on him” and “came where he was”, “tak[ing] care of him.” Only one of the ten who were healed “turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks; and he was a Samaritan.” In the Jewish context of the Gospel, the Samaritans were a despised sect, outcasts, the proverbial “other.” The area of dispute between the Samaritans and the Jews is about the place where the Law of Moses was delivered and about what books truly comprise the Scriptures. In the encounter in John’s Gospel with the woman at the well of Samaria – the most intense Gospel story of Christ in his engagement with the Samaritans – Jesus is very clear about how they have erred on these doctrinal points at the same time as drawing them into conversation, even into communion with him.

Outsiders such as the Samaritans provide a corrective lesson to all the forms of religious self-righteousness and division. Jesus uses the Samaritans to show us our failings and to show us the setting right of our hearts and minds. No one lies outside of the reach of the Gospel.

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“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place,
having obtained eternal redemption for us”

Our Prayer Book provides a Collect for Holy Cross Day and appoints the Epistle and Gospel of Passion Sunday for its commemoration. There is something quite wonderful and powerful about that sensibility. We are being recalled through a non-biblical feast based upon a set of post-biblical events to what is central and essential to the Christian faith. We are simply recalled to the centrality of the Cross.

Why? The Cross is at once the meeting place of lovers and the betrayal of all our loves. We crucify Christ. The Cross confronts us with the failings and failures of our humanity, of the disorder and disarray of our hearts and minds that lead to devastation and destruction in every age. But the Cross confronts us with the greatest betrayal – our betrayal of God and his friendship with us. To be recalled to the Cross is to be recalled to the Passion of Christ – to what he wills to endure for us. It shows us the divine love which is greater than all and every human love and which overcomes all our sin and folly. Such is the power of forgiveness.

Forgiveness. The Cross is the sign of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the reconciling love that makes all things new out of the violent nothingness of our sins. Forgiveness is made visible and audible on the cross. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Christ carries us in our ignorant folly and violence into the hands of his Father, into the reconciling love which is his Passion and Death. Such is the radical meaning of the Cross. It is then in turn required of us to live and act in the same way. What is that way? It is the way signaled in the Collect. God’s grace is given so that we take up the Cross and follow Christ through life and death.

The Cross speaks to us about death and resurrection and about the necessity of sacrifice. Sacrifice is about Christ’s life in us. Another lives in me and I in him and only so can we live for one another. It means a dying to ourselves and living to God and one another in the body of Christ, the Church.

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“And when he saw him, he had compassion on him”

We know it as the parable of the Good Samaritan. A familiar story, a familiar concept, even in our secular world, it suggests the powerful influence of religion on culture and society. We want to think that we can and should do good towards our neighbours, towards our fellow human beings. But we know, too, that what we want to do and even what we do is never fully complete, never fully enough. We even know at times that our efforts to do good have precisely the opposite effect. We make things worse.

Such reflections do not take away from the power and the truth of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Quite the opposite. They help to make us think more deeply about the Good and to realize that the power of doing good does not simply come from us. It is really altogether about God in us, not as if we are merely ‘passive vessels,’ but as moving our hearts and minds as active agents towards certain actions that arise from a certain kind of thinking. In a way, the parable is more about a certain attitude of mind that is needed in us and which is illustrated so beautifully, so powerfully, and so poignantly in the parable which Jesus tells.

What we see is the radical nature of love itself, the love that is God himself and God in us without which we are not lovely and without which we can only ‘look and pass by’ those in need. The divine love moving in us allows us in the journey of our own lives to come near to those in distress. It allows to see, to have compassion and to act. But it does not allow us the presumption to think that it is all our doing or that we have all the answers to the world’s problems. The parable of the Good Samaritan teaches us about what I would call, the humility of compassion.

What that entails is the realization that we ourselves are like that “certain man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead”. And we ourselves are like that “certain Priest” and “Levite” who “look and pass by”. But we are also to be like that “certain Samaritan” who, “as he journeyed, came where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion on him.” In other words, we ourselves are in this parable in every way both in our intentions and actions and our sufferings and failings. Yet we are called to be compassionate towards one another, both the stranger and the friend, because of the divine compassion which has been bestowed upon us. That is the deeper meaning of the parable, I think, and the only way in which we can understand it in relation to the questions which precede it.

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