Christ Church

“Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures”

We have had occasion to remark upon the significance of St. Luke as the Church’s spiritual director for over half the year in terms of the quantity of the readings from his Gospel appointed to be read at Holy Communion. We have had occasion, too, to mention the quality of those readings, captured best, perhaps, in Dante’s evocative phrase about St. Luke as scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. How wonderful then that his feast day should fall upon a Sunday and command our attention in our weekly celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection. That is, after all, the main focus of each Sunday’s worship. The intent is the deepening of our understanding of that fundamental mystery of Christian faith and identity.

Consider the Gospel reading from St. Luke appointed for today. “He opened their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures.” But then, what is that understanding? “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer, and rise again from the dead the third day; and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name among the all nations.” Powerful words which provide us with a sense of the tenor of his Gospel. Death and resurrection, repentance and forgiveness. Could anything be more concise, more clear, and more complete?

We know precious little by way of biographical detail about St. Luke. As the Collect notes, his “praise is in the Gospel”, meaning that St. Luke is mentioned in the Scriptures of the New Testament, quite apart from the attribution of the third Gospel and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles to his mind and pen. Our Epistle reading specifically places him in the company of Paul. “Only Luke is with me,” he says in the context of a discourse about evangelism.

The Collect identifies St. Luke as both “an Evangelist, and Physician of the soul”. A healer, to be sure, but by way of something which must strike us as rather strange. The healing is by way of “the wholesome medicines of the doctrine delivered by him”. Healing by way of teaching? I wonder what sense we can make of that.

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

There is something quite pleasing and aesthetically delightful about Harvest Thanksgiving. In our rural farming communities, Harvest Thanksgiving serves as a kind of testament to the hard work and labour of those who work on the land. It speaks to a sense of identity and vocation. The fruits of creation and human labour are gathered into the Church in a kind of celebration. How wonderful it is to see the things of the natural world, transformed by human labour and industry, brought into the holy places! We are taught by pumpkins and, perhaps, even by zucchini, that the natural world, and that world as transformed by human endeavour and enterprise, exists for God. Harvest Thanksgiving reminds us of the profoundly spiritual nature of our very existence.

Harvest Thanksgiving is a wonderful counter to our contemporary confusions about our world and day and about ourselves. Are we really supposed to believe, as some evolutionary biologists and physicists (though certainly not all nor many) would have it, that the world and all the things in it are just the result of the random coming together of various bits of matter? In other words, that there is no purpose to nature, just blind chance? And therefore no goodness to nature either? There can be no morality in any meaningful sense in such a view. Each thing just happens to be in the way in which it has come to be. But, then, how to speak of one thing as distinct from another? How does one know what and when something is anything as opposed to being on the way to becoming something else or to mere nothingness? These fruits which you see before you have an extraordinary elusive character to their nature, it seems!

Thanksgiving is a fundamental feature of the great religions of the world, particularly of the religions of the revealed word such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Through the Word revealed, nature and human life are understood to have a purpose, a destiny and a direction. We have an end with God. Harvest Thanksgiving reminds us that pumpkins and squash, cucumbers and gourds, apples and pears, are all part of that spiritual end and purpose that belongs to creation itself. Creation exists for something beyond itself. And our western secular cultures, too, (the idolatry of instrumental reason notwithstanding), retain a strong sense of purpose and direction critical to ideas of the self, even if God has been long forgotten and dismissed.

The proper term is Providence. There can be no Harvest Thanksgiving without the idea of the Providence of God written for us to read in nature and in human lives but, much more clearly and fully, in the Holy Scriptures. (more…)

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