Patrick Comerford
Next Sunday, 30 June 2019, is the Second Sunday after Trinity (Proper 13).
The appointed readings in the Revised Common Lectionary for Proper 13 (Year C), as adapted for use in the Church of Ireland are in two groups.
The continuous readings are: II Kings 2: 1-2, 6-14; Psalm 77: 1-2, 11-20; Galatians 5: 1, 13-25; Luke 9: 51-62.
The paired readings are: I Kings 19: 15-16, 19-21; Psalm 16; Galatians 5: 1, 13-25; Luke 9: 51-62.
There is a link to the continuous readings HERE.
Introducing the readings:
Excuses, Excuses, Excuses. We have all found good excuses at times to avoid doing the right thing at the right time, and so end up with the prospect of having to make a choice between doing nothing or doing the wrong thing.
Elisha is presented with good excuses to turn away from following Elijah, the disciples find good excuses to rain terror on the wrong people, and prospective disciples find good excuses to delay following Jesus or even not following him at all.
But Saint Paul reminds us in the Epistle reading, if we ‘live by the Spirit,’ we will not seek to devour one another or ‘gratify the desires of the flesh.’ Instead, we will seek to love one another, which he says is the one single commandment that sums up all the law.
II Kings 2: 1-2, 6-14:
The Old Testament reading continues the story of Elijah and Elisha, which we began reading about last Sunday [23 June 2019]. The two kingdoms of Israel in the north and Judah in the south have been divided. At the time of this reading (850-849 BC), Ahaziah is the King of Israel.
Elijah and Elisha start their journey at Gilgal, in the hill country north of Bethel. Elijah invites Elisha to travel no further not just once but three times (verses 2-3, 4-5 and 6). Elijah tests Elisha to determine whether he is truly loyal to his master. Each time, Elisha proves his loyalty, and so the two travel south from Gilgal to Bethel, then east to Jericho and the Jordan.
Elijah’s mantle or cloak is almost part of him. As at crossing the Red Sea (Exodus 14) and carrying the Ark across the Jordan (Joshua 3: 14-17), the waters part miraculously.
When they cross the water and Elijah offers Elisha a reward for his loyalty, Elisha asks for the principal share (‘double’) of Elijah’s spirituality. But Elijah cannot grant this request himself, for it is God’s to give. If Elisha sees Elijah taken up, God has granted the wish.
Elisha indeed see Elijah’s departure, and picks up Elijah’s mantle. The water again parts. God recognizes Elisha as Elijah’s successor, as do the company of prophets who have been Elijah’s followers. Some of them search for days for Elijah’s body, but in vain, for Elijah has been taken up to heaven.
Psalm 77: 1-2, 11-20:
The psalmist is probably keeping an all-night vigil in the Temple and prays for deliverance from trouble, either for himself or for the community. He is so troubled that he cannot pray directly to God. Instead, he pours out his own agony. Has God spurned him, or the people? Has God gone back on his promises to Moses at the Exodus?
But the psalmist gains some hope by recalling God’s mighty actions in the past. God is holy, his ways are mysterious. He rescued his ancestors (‘Jacob and Joseph’) from slavery.
He recalls how God commands the waters and the seas, the clouds and the skies, the thunder and the tremors, and that God is in control.
Galatians 5: 1, 13-25:
In the Epistle reading, Saint Paul is addressing the Church in Galatia, where the members of the Church, who are mainly Celtic people, and probably with groups of Greek-speakers and some Roman citizens. They have been divided by the demands or expectations of some Christians that they should first become converts to Judiasm and obey the Mosaic laws in order to become Christians. But Saint Paul tells his readers, ‘For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ (Galatian 5: 14).
The command to love, to love God and to love our neighbour, is at the heart of the Gospel. It is summarised in the two great commandments in Matthew 22: 36-40 and Luke 10: 27 (see Leviticus 19: 18). In Matthew alone, Christ says, ‘On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
But Saint Paul, on more than one occasion, reduces it all down to this one great commandment:
‘Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments … are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law’ (Romans 13: 8-10).
And again, in the Epistle reading next Sunday:
‘For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”.’ (Galatians 5: 14).
In a sentence edited out of this reading, he writes:
‘The only thing that counts is faith working through love’ (Galatians 5: 6).
In other places, he writes:
Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in harmony (Colossians 3: 14).
And:
If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, and compassion and sympathy. Make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind (Philippians 2: 1-2).
In the Orthodox Liturgy, the priest introduces the Creed with the words: ‘Let us love one another, that with one mind we may confess.’ In other words, our statement of belief, in ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Trinity consubstantial and undivided,’ is confirmed, realised and lived out in our love for one another.
To love our neighbour as ourselves means to love them as we are ourselves, as being of the same substance – created in the image and likeness of God. The Church Fathers teach that we find our true self in loving our neighbour, and that love is not a feeling but an action.
Two books that remain on an easy-to-reach shelf in the Rectory in Askeaton are I love therefore I am, by Father Nicholas V Sakharov (Crestwood NY: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002); and Father Andrew Louth’s Modern Orthodox Thinkers (London: SPCK, 2015).
Father Nicholas is a monk in Tolleshunt Knights, and his great uncle, Father Sophrony, was the saintly founder of the monastery. Father Sophrony talks in La Félicité (p 21) about ‘the absolute perfection of love in the bosom of the Trinity’ and he says: ‘Embracing the whole world in prayerful love, the persona achieves ad intra all that exists.’
In Andrew Louth’s book, love is an all-pervading theme in the writings of each of the 20th century theologians he portrays. For example, he summarises Mother Maria of Paris as saying that it is all too easy to sidestep the demands of love, to seem to be loving, when really love itself has been set aside, or turned into a means to an end. This is avoided by realising the complementarity of the two commands to love.
Mother Maria says there are two ways of loving to be avoided: one which subordinates love of our fellow humans to love of God, so that humans become means whereby we ascend to God, and the other of which forgets love of God, and so loves our fellow humans in a merely human way, not discerning in them the image of God, or the ways in which it has been damaged or distorted.
Yet, despite all this, I find a more difficult commandment is the third and great neglected commandment: to love our enemies (Matthew 5: 44). In our pastoral roles, we spend a lot of time helping people to talk about God; we all have a good idea of who our neighbour is; but when do we ask: ‘Who is my enemy?’
Do I define who my enemy is?
Or does the other person define me or himself, or herself, as the enemy?
And so I turn to a non-Pauline passage:
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them … Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also. (I John 4: 16, 20-21).
Saint Paul concludes our reading on Sunday by reminding us that ‘the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control … If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit’ (Galatians 5: 22-25).
Luke 9: 51-62:
Because Easter has been so late this year, we have been late in returning to Ordinary Times and the Lectionary readings that have included some of the well-loved and well-known stories in Saint Luke’s Gospel: the healing of the Centurion’s servant in Capernaum (Luke 7: 1b-10); the raising of the widow’s son in Nain (Luke 7: 11-17); and the anointing of Jesus by the woman with the alabaster jar (Luke 7: 36 to 8: 3); although last Sunday [23 June 2019] we heard of the healing of the Gerasene man possessed by a legion of demons.
Saint Luke is a great story-teller; we are all captivated by his stories of healing and his parables: the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the unjust steward, and so on.
And so Sunday’s Gospel reading comes as a little surprise. The first impression is that there is no story here, no drama, no healing, no showing how society’s perceived underdog is really a model for our own behaviour, for my behaviour – indeed a model of how God behaves, and behaves towards us.
Instead, what we have in this Gospel reading sounds like a series of pithy statements from Jesus: like a collection of sayings from the Desert Fathers or even a collection of popular sayings from Zen masters.
Good stories about wayward sons and muggings on the roadside make for good drama, and healing stories are great soap opera. But they only remain stories and they only remain mini-stage-plays if all we want is good entertainment and forget all about what the main storyline is, what the underlying plot in Saint Luke’s Gospel is.
And, just in case we forget the plot, in case we might be in danger of forgetting what it is all about, Saint Luke now gives us a little reminder in the opening verse of this Gospel reading: the days are drawing near and Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem (Luke 9: 51) – the days are drawing near and Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem.
It is a challenge to us all. We are called to live not for the pleasure of a dramatic moment, but to live in the one great drama that is taking place: to set our faces on the heavenly Jerusalem; to live as if we really believe in the New Heaven and the New Earth.
We are called not to be conditional disciples – to be a Christian when we look after everything else, sometime in the future. We are called to be committed disciples – to live as Christians in the here-and-now.
To illustrate the difference in, the tensions between, being a conditional disciple and being a committed disciple, Saint Luke plays the playwright once again and introduces us to one little drama and then three characters who are just like you and me, three ‘wannabe’ disciples, three figures who illustrate the conflict of loyalties that inevitably comes with trying to answer the call to discipleship.
The first drama is a ready-made piece of self-criticism for each and every one of us. Christ and his followers have arrived in a Samaritan village.
At a mundane level, at the level of visible difference, the Samaritans would not have been particularly warm and welcoming to provincial, rustic Galilean Jewish pilgrims making their way to Jerusalem through their villages, looking down their noses at Samaritan religious beliefs and customs, and seeing the Samaritan worship of God at Mount Gerizim, at best, as second best.
And look at what the disciples want to do when they get a whiff of difference, an inkling of rejection. A whiff of difference creates a whiff of sulphur. They want to burn the Samaritan village to the ground.
What have they been learning from Jesus so far about basic, fundamental Christian beliefs and values being expressed in how we love God and love one another?
Yet, so often in Christianity, we have behaved like James and John in this story, rather than adhering to the values of Jesus. So often we have burned down and gobbled up those we see as different: in the past, this is how Christians behaved in the Crusades, at the Inquisition, during the wars sparked by the Reformation, acting on prejudice against people of different faiths and different ethnic backgrounds – often without apology and without realising, like James and John, that this was totally contrary to the basic teaching of Jesus: that we must love God and love each other.
The Crusades and the Inquisition are long gone, but we continue to behave in the same way today: Islamophobia is a creation, not of the Muslim world, but of European and American societies; we need little reminding of how many Christians continue to demand burning and slashing when it comes to human sexuality and difference.
What had the disciples learned from Jesus about compassion, tolerance and forbearance in the immediate weeks and months before they arrived in this Samaritan village?
How embarrassed they must have been if this was the same Samaritan village that Christ visits in Saint John’s Gospel (see John 3: 4-42), where it is a Samaritan woman, and not the disciples, who realise who Jesus really is. She is a Samaritan woman of questionable sexual moral values. But it is she, and not the disciples, who brings a whole village to faith in Christ; it is she who asks for the water of life; it is she who first suggests that indeed he may be, that he is, the Messiah.
How embarrassed they must be a little while later when Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan (see Luke 10: 29-37). The one person I want to meet on the road, on the pilgrimage in life, is not a priest or a Temple official, but the sort of man who lives in the very sort of village I have suggested, because of my religious bigotry and narrow-mindedness, should be consumed with fire, burned to the ground, all its people gobbled up.
The woman at the well and the Good Samaritan are examples of ideal disciples, committed disciples. On the other hand, on Sunday morning, we are presented with three ‘wannabe’ disciples, three examples of conditional disciples, people who are happy to be called, but who only want to follow on their own terms.
There is the man who wants to follow Jesus, but only if he can hold on to his wealth and property (Luke 9: 57-58). There is the man who wants to follow Jesus, but not until he has looked after burying his father (Luke 9: 59-60). There is the man who wants to follow Jesus, but who thinks first he must consider what his friends and those at home would think before he leaves them (Luke 10: 61-62).
Of course, it is good to have a home of my own and not to live in a foxhole. Of course, it is good that each of us should take responsibility for ageing parents and to bury them when they die. Of course, it is good that we should not walk out on our families, our friends and our responsibilities.
Of course, domestic security, filial duty and loyal affection are high ideals, as Elijah accepted in our Old Testament reading, when Elisha went back home to say farewell. But they are conditional, while the call of the kingdom is urgent and imperative. And it demands commitment in such a way that it puts all other loyalties in second place.
Jesus is not saying that these men had the wrong values. But he sees how we can use good values so that we can have the right excuses and so end up with the wrong priorities.
In recent years in Irish society, we have failed to put Christian values first. We should have said that property does not have the highest value. We should have realised that property is there first of all to provide people with decent places to live and work, it is there to provide places for their education and recreation, it is there to serve our lives and our commerce.
But instead, our lives and our economy were relegated to second place while people speculated on the property market, borrowed from our future, and the future of our children and grandchildren, to satisfy their own greed. Generations to come will be paying for this and getting no return. Already, people are being evicted from their homes.
How often do people use the values of ageing parents and past generations to justify present behaviour? ‘What would the men of 1916 say if we dare to play rugby at Croke Park or welcome the head of state from our nearest neighbours and friends to Arus an Uachtarain?’ Our so-called Gaelic patriots continue to try to dig a deep and deadly pit between themselves and the Samaritans of their own creation, and those of us who try to cross that pit have too often had fire and consummation called down on us.
How often have we used those around us as an excuse to justify our own intransigence? It happened in the past in Anglicanism when some said we should not ordain woman because ‘oh, but what would the neighbours say? … It’s not the right time yet.’ We might ask whether we are saying the same today in the Anglican Communion about others.
As GB Caird points out in his commentary on Saint Luke’s Gospel, sometimes the most difficult choices in life for most of us are not between good and evil, but between the good and the best. I’m sure these three wannabe disciples presented good excuses. But discipleship on my own terms is not what Jesus asks of me. It can only be on his terms. There is no such thing as conditional discipleship, there is only committed discipleship.
As advertisers remind us constantly, there are terms and conditions attached to most things in life. But there can be no terms and conditions attached when it comes to being a disciple, to being a follower of Jesus.
And, as Saint Paul reminds us this morning in our epistle reading, committed discipleship is costly and demanding, but rewarding. It finds its true expression in ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.’
Luke 9: 51-62:
51 When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. 52 And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; 53 but they did not receive him, because his face was set towards Jerusalem. 54 When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, ‘Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?’ 55 But he turned and rebuked them. 56 Then they went on to another village.
57 As they were going along the road, someone said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ 58 And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ 59 To another he said, ‘Follow me.’ But he said, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ 60 But Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ 61 Another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.’ 62 Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’
Liturgical resources:
Liturgical Colour: Green.
The Collect:
Lord, you have taught us
that all our doings without love are nothing worth:
Send your Holy Spirit
and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of love,
the true bond of peace and of all virtues,
without which whoever lives is counted dead before you.
Grant this for your only Son Jesus Christ’s sake.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
Loving Father,
we thank you for feeding us at the supper of your Son.
Sustain us with your Spirit,
that we may serve you here on earth
until our joy is complete in heaven,
and we share in the eternal banquet
with Jesus Christ our Lord.
Suggested Hymns:
II Kings 2: 1-2, 6-14:
643, Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart
297, Come, thou Holy Spirit, come
298, Filled with the Spirit’s power, with one accord
647, Guide me, O thou great Jehovah
383, Lord, be thy word my rule
386, Spirit of God, unseen as the wind
310, Spirit of the living God
Psalm 77: 1-2, 11-20:
593, O Jesus, I have promised
372, Through all the changing scenes of life
529, Thy hand, O God, has guided
I Kings 19: 15-16, 19-21:
125, Hail to the Lord’s anointed
Psalm 16:
567, Forth in thy name, O Lord, I go
300, Holy Spirit, truth divine
553, Jesu, lover of my soul
652, Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us
392, Now is eternal life
289, [This joyful Eastertide]
Galatians 5: 1, 13-25:
297, Come, thou Holy Spirit, come
320, Firmly I believe and truly
39, For the fruits of his creation
311, Fruitful trees, the Spirit’s sowing
652, Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us
490, The Spirit lives to set us free
81, Lord, for the years your love has kept and guided
395, When Jesus taught by Galilee
144, Word of justice, alleluia
Luke 9: 51-62:
608, Be still and know that I am God
219, From heav’n you came, helpless babe
421, I come with joy, a child of God
115, Thou art the Way: to thee alone
114, Thou didst leave thy throne and thy kingly crown
605, Will you come and follow me
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
The hymns suggestions are provided in Sing to the Word (2000), edited by Bishop Edward Darling. The hymn numbers refer to the Church of Ireland’s Church Hymnal (5th edition, Oxford: OUP, 2000)
Material from the Book of Common Prayer is copyright © 2004, Representative Body of the Church of Ireland.
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