Patrick Comerford
Next Sunday, 19 August 2018, is the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity (Trinity XII, Proper 15B).
The readings in the Revised Common Lectionary, as adapted in the Church of Ireland, for next Sunday are:
Continuous readings: I Kings 2: 10-12, 3: 3-14; Psalm 111; Ephesians 5: 15-20; John 6: 51-58.
Paired readings: Proverbs 9: 1-6; Psalm 34: 9-14; Ephesians 5: 15-20; John 6: 51-58.
There is a link to the readings HERE.
Introduction:
In next Sunday’s continuous readings, Old Testament, Psalm and Epistle reading ask us to consider where we find wisdom, and the Psalm reminds us that ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.’
But the purpose of wisdom, which Solomon asks for alone, is so that good and evil can be distinguished, especially when it comes to the needs of the people.
In the Gospel reading, Christ teaches and shows how he cares for the needs of the people, both spiritually and physically.
I Kings 2: 10-12, 3: 3-14:
This book (I Kings) begins when David is an old and infirm man, his days as king are over, and a struggle for the throne breaks out between Adonijah, his oldest living son, and Solomon, the son of David and Bathsheba.
This reading begins where David dies and is buried in Jerusalem. Solomon firmly established his kingdom by killing or banishing Adonijah and his supporters, an account in the missing verses (2: 13-46). Solomon’s reign now begins.
God appears to Solomon in a dream. Solomon in a child-like way, realises he is dependent on God, and asks for the gift of wisdom. God grants this request, but also adds riches and honour above other kings, which Solomon did not ask for.
Solomon is also promised that if he follows God’s ways, he will enjoy a long life.
Psalm 111:
Psalm 111 is a hymn of praise, thanking God for his great deeds, especially for making and keeping his covenant with his people. The psalmist is a wise person, and for him holding the Lord in awe is the beginning of knowing him, for him wisdom comes from increasing knowledge of God.
He praises God for his works and deeds, his interventions in the world and his commandments. He is holy and awesome, and living by his commandments is the start to understanding him.
There is an opportunity too of linking the Psalm with the Gospel reading: ‘He provides food for those who fear him … The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Psalm 111: 5, 10).
Ephesians 5: 15-20:
Saint Paul has written to the Church in Ephesus, urging the new members of the Church there to harbour anger, to actively care for the poor, and to build up the community, forgiving and loving as Christ forgives and loves.
Now Saint Paul tells them that wisdom is a characteristic of Christian living, and we are privileged to share in God’s wisdom and insights through Christ. Before Christ comes again, we are to use this time wisely, effectively, to know the difference between wisdom and foolishness, to be filled with the Spirit instead of drunkenness, ; showing this joy among ourselves, and giving thanks to God at all times for the whole of creation.
John 6: 51-58:
This Gospel reading continues the discourse after the feeding of the multitude, in which Christ describes himself as ‘the living bread’ (verse 51).
This key ‘I AM’ saying in Saint John’s Gospel reminds me of two great sayings.
This Gospel reading develops one of the great ‘I AM’ sayings in Saint John’s Gospel, the first of these seven sayings, which we heard the previous Sunday.
In the previous Sunday’s Gospel reading, Christ said to the multitude: ‘I am the bread of life’ (John 6: 35). And he emphasised it, not once but twice, when he said: ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven’ (verse 41) and again ‘I am the bread of life’ (verse 48).
Christ develops that theme in this Gospel reading when he says: ‘I am the living bread’ (verse 51).
These are emphatic declarations. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus says ‘I am’ 45 times. But he uses this particular way of saying ‘I am’ 24 times. He says ‘I AM,’ ἐγώ εἰμί (ego eimi), explicitly including the Greek pronoun ‘I’ (ἐγώ, ego) which is not necessary in Greek grammar at the time.
Why?
What is Christ saying?
I want to avoid being obscure about finer points of Greek and Greek grammar. But it is a point that was immediately obvious to the first readers of Saint John’s Gospel.
In the Hebrew Bible, the meaning of God’s name is closely related to the emphatic statement ‘I AM’ (see Exodus 3: 14; 6: 2; Deuteronomy 32: 39; Isaiah 43: 25; 48: 12; 51: 12; etc.). In the Greek translation, the Septuagint, most of these passages are translated with as ‘I AM,’ ἐγώ εἰμί (ego eimi).
The ‘I AM’ of the Old Testament and the ‘I AM’ of Saint John’s Gospel is the God who creates us, who communicates with us, who gives himself to us.
But it is worth asking ourselves, what does it mean to acknowledge Christ as ‘the bread of life’?
I was at a wedding recently that was celebrated within the context of the Eucharist or the Holy Communion.
In his sermon, the priest compared God’s self-giving to us in Christ’s body as an expression of God’s deepest love for us with the way in which a couple getting married give themselves bodily to each other … the most intimate loving action to be shown to each other.
Of course, for the love of God and the love of one another are inseparable.
It could be argued that the sublime sacramental theology in this part of the discourse would not have been understood by a Galilean audience at that time. It has also been argued that this part of the discourse draws on Eucharistic material from the Last Supper to bring out the deeper sacramental meaning of the heavenly bread, which can only be grasped in the light of the institution of the Eucharist.
In a deeper sense, the life-giving and living bread is Christ’s own flesh.
Verse 51:
John gives us the words: ‘The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’ This appears to be a variant of the words of the institution in the Eucharist (see Luke 22: 19; I Corinthians 11: 26).
For the Apostle Paul, the Eucharist proclaims the death of the Lord until he comes again. But for John, the emphasis is on the Word that has become flesh and that gives up his flesh and blood as the food of life.
There is profound sacramental theology here. If baptism gives us that life which the Father shares with the Son, then the Eucharist is the food nourishing it.
Three illustrations:
1, ‘The bread which you do not use is the bread of the hungry’
I spent some time recently in Cappadocia, in south-central Turkey. I was there because of my interest in sites associated with the three Cappadocian Fathers.
These were three key Patristic writers and saints: Saint Basil the Great (329-379), Bishop of Caesarea, his brother Saint Gregory (335-395), Bishop of Nyssa, and Saint Gregory Nazianzus (329-390), who became Patriarch of Constantinople.
They challenged heresies such as Arianism and their thinking was instrumental in formulating the phrases that shaped the Nicene Creed.
But their thinking was not about doctrine alone. It was also about living the Christian life.
So, for example, Saint Basil is also remembered for his challenging social values. He wrote: ‘The bread which you do not use is the bread of the hungry; the garment hanging in your wardrobe is the garment of him who is naked; the shoes that you do not wear are the shoes of the one who is barefoot; the money that you keep locked away is the money of the poor; the acts of charity that you do not perform are so many injustices that you commit.’
Sacramental practice must be related to the practice of Christianity, and doctrine and belief must be related to how we live our lives as Christians.
The memorial in Saint Matthew’s Church, Westminster, to the former curate, Bishop Frank Weston (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)2, The ‘folly and madness’ of Bishop Frank Weston
I have also stayed in Saint Matthew’s Vicarage in Westminster, where Bishop Frank Weston (1871-1924) is said to have written a key, influential speech just a year before he died.
Frank Weston, who was the Bishop of Zanzibar from 1908, held together in a creative combination his incarnational and sacramental theology with his radical social concerns formed the keynote of his address to the Anglo-Catholic Congress in 1923. He believed that the sacramental focus gave a reality to Christ’s presence and power that nothing else could. ‘The one thing England needs to learn is that Christ is in and amid matter, God in flesh, God in sacrament.’
And so he concluded: ‘But I say to you, and I say it with all the earnestness that I have, if you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in His Blessed Sacrament, then, when you come out from before your tabernacles, you must walk with Christ, mystically present in you through the streets of this country, and find the same Christ in the peoples of your cities and villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slums … It is folly – it is madness – to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children.’
He told people at the congress: ‘Go out and look for Jesus in the ragged, in the naked, in the oppressed and sweated, in those who have lost hope, in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus. And when you see him, gird yourselves with his towel and try to wash their feet.’
Something similar was said in a recent letter in The Tablet [4 August 2018] by Father Derek P Reeve, a retired parish priest in Portsmouth: ‘The … Lord whom we receive at the Eucharist is the one whom we go out to serve, and, dare I say it, to adore in our neighbour …’
So sacramental life is meaningless unless it is lived out in our care for those who are hungry, suffering and marginalised.
The Clergy House and Saint Matthew’s Church, Westminster, where Bishop Frank Weston wrote his speech in 1923 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)3, Practical expression of Christian values in public action
Some years ago, the Anglican priest and Guardian columnist Giles Fraser visited the migrant camps in Calais and worshipped with them in the makeshift chapel served by Eritrean priests.
His visit stirred controversy in the red-top tabloids in England. There was speculation at the time in the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and other papers that the BBC was going to film Songs of Praise in Calais, which caused furtive but feigned panic about public money, the licence fees, being used to tell the migrants’ stories.
Giles Fraser replied to his tabloid critics, saying: ‘The right-wing press keeps banging on about this being a Christian nation. But they hate it when it behaves like one.’
The public consternation in Britain was not calmed by politicians deploying words like ‘swarm’ and ‘marauding.’ The language become alarmist and increasingly racist, to the point that the Sun columnist Katie Hopkins descended to using the language of the Third Reich when she wrote about migrants as ‘cockroaches.’
Despite hyped-up talk long before the ‘Brexit’ referendum about the ‘swarms’ of migrants supposedly trying to reach British shores from Calais, only four per cent of Europe’s asylum seekers are applying to stay in the UK.
In telling contrast, a report in the Guardian showed that unemployed Britons in Europe are drawing much more in benefits and allowances in the wealthier EU member states than their nationals are claiming in Britain, despite British government arguments about migrants flocking in to secure better welfare payments.
At least 30,000 British nationals are claiming unemployment benefit in countries around the EU, the Guardian reported at the time. Four times as many Britons claim unemployment benefits in Germany as Germans do in Britain, and the number of unemployed Britons receiving benefits in Ireland exceeds their Irish counterparts in the UK by a rate of five to one.
That debate in Britain was in sharp contrast to the humanitarian work of the Irish naval vessels on the high seas at the same time, saving hundreds if not thousands of lives in the Mediterranean waters between Italy and North Africa.
The crews of those naval vessels are hallowed expressions of public values in this society … and a practical expression of Christian values in public action.
Appropriately, the Post-Communion Prayer next Sunday prays: ‘God of compassion, in this eucharist we know again your forgiveness and the healing power of your love. Grant that we who are made whole in Christ may bring that forgiveness and healing to this broken world, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.’
Some conclusions
There are three points that might be drawn from next Sunday’s Gospel reading:
1, God gives to us in Christ, and in the Sacrament, so too we must give lovingly.
2, Doctrine and belief must be related to discipleship, indeed they are meaningless unless they are reflected in how we live our lives, a point also made in our reading from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians.
3, Our sacramental practice must always be related to how we live our lives every day so that we make Christ’s love visible.
To summarise, our doctrines and creedal expressions, our attention to Scripture and our attention to sacramental life find their fullest meaning in how we reflect God’s love for each other and how we express God’s love for those who are left without loving care. For they too are made in God’s image and likeness, and in their faces we see the face of Christ.
John 6: 51-58:
51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’
52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ 53 So Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; 55 for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. 56 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. 57 Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live for ever.’
Liturgical resources:
Liturgical Colour: Green.
The Collect:
Almighty and everlasting God,
you are always more ready to hear than we to pray
and to give more than either we desire, or deserve:
Pour down upon us the abundance of your mercy,
forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid,
and giving us those good things
which we are not worthy to ask
save through the merits and mediation
of Jesus Christ your Son our Lord.
Post-Communion Prayer:
God of compassion,
in this eucharist we know again your forgiveness
and the healing power of your love.
Grant that we who are made whole in Christ
may bring that forgiveness and healing to this broken world,
in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Prayers during the Papal visit:
Our Roman Catholic neighbours in this diocese and throughout Ireland are preparing to welcome Pope Francis to this island in the context of the World Meeting of Families. This is an important event, not only for the Roman Catholic Church but for all Christians in Ireland, as we welcome someone who is exercising remarkable Christian leadership on a global scale.
The Bishop of Limerick and Killaloe, the Right Revd Kenneth Kearon, has written to my fellow Roman Catholic bishops, and given the very warm and cordial relationship we share with our Catholic parishes and neighbours, he suggests:
● That we pray in church for Pope Francis and other global Christian leaders at this time.
●That we pray in church for the World Meeting of Families and for family life.
●That where appropriate we send a message, possibly a letter or a visit, to your local Catholic parishes, assuring them of our prayers and good wishes at this time.
He says, ‘This is an important time of celebration for our Roman Catholic neighbours and we should assure them that we share in their joy and celebrations.’
He has circulated the following prayers:
A Prayer for Christian Leaders:
Hear us, O Lord, as we lift up before you all who bear the bewildering responsibility of Christian leadership among the churches of the world. Especially at this time we pray for Pope Francis and his visit to Ireland, for Justin, Archbishop of Canterbury and His All Holiness Bartholomew, Ecumenical Patriarch.
Give them wisdom beyond their own, integrity in all their dealings, and a resolve to seek first your kingdom and your righteousness for all humankind.
We ask it in the name of Christ.
A Prayer for Family Life:
God our Father, whose Son Jesus Christ lived at Nazareth as a member of a human family; hear our prayer for all homes and families, and especially for our own, that they may be blessed by his presence and united in his love.
We ask this in his name.
Suggested Hymns:
The hymns suggested for next Sunday, the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity (Proper 15B) in Sing to the Word (2000), edited by Bishop Edward Darling, include:
I Kings 2: 10-12; 3: 3-14:
643, Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart
533, God of grace and God of glory
Psalm 111:
84, Alleluia! raise the anthem
130, Jesus came, the heavens adoring
529, Thy hand, O God, has guided
373, To God be the glory! Great things he has done!
Proverbs 9: 1-6:
433, My God, your table here is spread
Psalm 34: 9-14:
507, Put peace into each other’s hands
372, Through all the changing scenes of life
Ephesians 5: 15-20:
346, Angel voices ever singing
454, Forth in the peace of Christ we go
92, How sweet the name of Jesus sounds
356, I will sing, I will sing a song unto the Lord
360, Let all the world in every corner sing
362, O God beyond all praising
708, O praise ye the Lord! Praise him in the height
364, Praise him on the trumpet, the psaltery and harp
710, Sing to God new songs of worship
369, Songs of praise the angels sang
313, The Spirit came, as promise
d 374, When all thy mercies, O my God
458, When, in our music, God is glorified
344, When morning gilds the skies
376, Ye holy angels bright
John 6: 51-58:
398, Alleluia! sing to Jesus
401, Be known to us in breaking bread
403, Bread of the world in mercy broken
407, Christ is the heavenly food that gives
411, Draw near and take the body of the Lord
220, Glory be to Jesus
647, Guide me, O thou great Jehovah
420, ‘I am the bread of life’
581, I, the Lord of sea and sky
422, In the quiet consecration
425, Jesus, thou joy of loving hearts
435, O God, unseen, yet ever near
624, Speak, Lord, in the stillness
449, Thee we adore, O hidden Saviour, thee
451, We come as guests invited
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, and are used by permission. All rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment