“What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you”

St. Paul’s sermon on the Areopagus is one of the most remarkable and influential sermons of all time. It illustrates wonderfully, I think, the contemplative theme of this Sunday, the theme of mercy, signaled in the Eucharistic Gospel. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” But what is the mercy? It is the mercy of revelation. What was unknown has been made known. We walk in the light of what has been revealed. If we do not, then we walk in the darkness and lead others astray as well; “shall they not both fall into the ditch?” Such is the import of the Gospel parable of “the blind leading the blind.” Our self-righteous judgments point accusing fingers at the minor faults of others while being blind to the major faults in ourselves.

The point of the reading of the Scriptures in the public and common life of the Church is to reveal God to us and us to God. We learn about “the good, the bad and the ugly” of ourselves in the light of God’s mercy and truth. This requires our openness to the Scriptures and our willingness to engage and think the Scriptures. The Old Testament lesson from 1^st Kings is particularly instructive, too, because it illustrates the theme of mercy over harsh judgments in the reign of King Rehoboam who ignores the wise counsel of the old men in favour of the rash advice of the young men. It is a supreme instance of an abusive authority that imposes impossible demands.

“To your tents, O Israel” is the only response, a fleeing from what is persecutory and destructive but only so as to recall ourselves to what is primary and definitive. Ultimately, God has tented among us. “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us;” literally, “tented among us,” a phrase which picks up on the Old Testament image of the tent of meeting between God and man, the tent of meeting where the glory of God is made known.

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“Forgive and ye shall be forgiven”

Forgiveness. It is the hardest thing and yet it is one of the most free things that we can ever do, perhaps even one of the simplest things, in our lives. It is connected to that most free of all things: the power of God’s praise which brings the walls of presumption tumbling to the ground, like the walls of Jericho, for example. It belongs as well to the power of God’s love which moves in human loves; for instance, the love of friendship seen in David and Jonathan which remains a strong and precious bond even in the face of the enmity of a father and a king, namely, Saul. It is the abundance of divine charity that alone can open our eyes and soften our hearts.

What makes forgiveness so hard? It is our hypocrisy. It is not just our saying one thing and our doing another, but also our doing one thing and thinking another. We are divided within ourselves against ourselves, against one another and against God. There is our blindness and there is our judgmentalism – both of which are eloquently illustrated in the Gospel for today. “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?…Cast out first the beam that is in thine own eye, then shall thou see clearly the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.” We presume to know what in fact we do not know. It is not just our ignorance but our arrogance that is the problem. It is a willful blindness, a kind of refusal to see what in fact we have been given to see and know, for instance, in the witness of the Scriptures. But then, again, we frequently refuse to act upon what we do know. It is not our knowing but our indifference or our stubbornness that is the problem.

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“For God resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the humble.”

The humility of God’s charity is all our theme on this day, and not for this day only, but also for the week that brings us to the celebration of the Nativity of John the Baptist. What is the humility of God’s charity? It is God’s reaching down to us so that his love may take shape in us.

The Nativity of John the Baptist signals the preparations which God himself makes for his coming into our midst as the Incarnate Lord in the Nativity of Jesus Christ. The summer solstice is upon us; the long summer’s march to winter is about to begin! Say it isn’t so! But, already, Christmas is in view! Yet, this summer’s feast, the Nativity of John the Baptist (on June 24) signals something more. Beyond the reminder of God’s coming to us, there is the purpose of his coming in us. The redemption of our humanity revealed in Christ is about the motions of his grace taking shape in our lives.  The humility of God’s charity in us means the “scattering of the proud in the imagination of their [our] hearts.” There are the practical lessons about the necessity of humility.

The humility of God’s charity calls us to humility against our pride. Pride is that grand delusion whereby we presume to be the center of everything either in our complacency or in our whining neediness. The self-giving love of God stands altogether opposed to the self-centeredness of our pride. Pride stands utterly opposed to God and to God’s ways with us.

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“Rejoice with me”

Humility is the condition of our rejoicing, the condition of our redemption in Christ. Nothing could go down harder in our contemporary world than such a concept. Yet, nothing could be truer to the imperative of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

“God resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the humble,” St. Peter tells us in his First Epistle General and certainly it is a lesson which he himself has learned. The Gospel reading from St. Luke complements it with a very powerful message about the nature of humility as the counter to human pride and about the paradoxical reality of the divine humility.

The context is animosity and hostility. Publicans and sinners draw near to Jesus; Pharisees and Scribes murmur because of the company which he keeps. They are scandalised and critical. Doesn’t he know with whom he is associating? How can he be a true religious teacher? Jesus response is revelatory and transforming. He tells two parables – actually, three. We have in the gospel for today two of the three, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. The third parable of this triptych of divine humility is the tremendous parable of the lost or prodigal son.

The fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke comprises these three parables, each told in sequence. It is a most powerful illustration of the message of the Epistle about God’s resisting pride and about his giving grace to the humble.

Humility is the counter to our pride which pretends to our self-sufficiency, on the one hand, and our self-centredness, on the other hand. Either we have it all and need nothing outside ourselves or we presume to think that we deserve what we presently don’t have but desire. The gospel of humility is precisely the counter to our pride.

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