Homily for 29th Sunday in ordinary time 17 October 2010
We continue our journey through St Luke’s Gospel with another one of his rather strange parables, you remember the really confusing one two weeks ago about the so-called dishonest steward, this time we have a story about a dishonest judge. And this unjust judge is compared to God himself! It has to be said that some of Luke’s stories are not that straightforward! Some, like last week’s story about the ten lepers, all cured but only one saying thank you, are easy enough for us to understand, but others have awkward bits that are hard to explain.
This story seems to be about a widow trying to get justice. We know that one of the main characteristics of Luke’s Gospel is its preoccupation with the poor, the needy, the outcasts of society, those who don’t fit in. St Luke emphasises again and again in his Gospel that these are just the people Our Lord has come into the world to save, and he shows Our Lord constantly finding ways to demonstrate the value that such people have- that is why Our Lord mixes with them, he is mixing with the outcasts, the out crowd, to show us and them that they are in fact very much the in crowd and even if they don’t seem to fit in very well to society, or our view of it, they fit or should fit perfectly into his view of society, in other words, the Church. This is why we have a widow in this parable. Widows were at best an awkward presence in Jewish society, often scorned by their late husband’s family and often condemned to live on charity. All through the Old Testament we find examples of widows to whom justice is denied, who are disgraced just by being a widow and who have no rights, no chance. The first Christians were always anxious to reverse this, hence all the injunctions in the New Testament about looking after widows and orphans. So the widow is there as an example of someone at a disadvantage in the world, someone with no privileges and no support. And of course she is there in the story as an example of constancy in prayer, an example for all Christians, to be constant in prayer. Of course, if you’re in trouble and life is hard, you are more likely to be saying your prayers every day, aren’t you- when our life is beset with problems, we feel our need for God and his loving help all the more keenly. We know, when our troubles fall thick and fast upon us, that we can’t manage alone, and we call then upon God all the more urgently, to get us through. How different when everything is a bed of roses and we are coasting merrily along- then, like last week’s lepers, very few of us keep the prayers going!
And then there is this wretched judge, who can’t be bothered to help her at first but then gives in because he just knows she’s going to go on nag nag nag until she drives him up the wall. Does this remind you of another parable of Luke’s? Do you remember the man whose friend arrives at midnight and he goes and knocks on the neighbours’ door to borrow some food? It comes in Chapter 11, straight after the version of the Lord’s Prayer that Luke gives us, and Jesus comments on the neighbour in the story “though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him whatever he needs” (Lk 11 viii). Another lesson to drive home the importance of being constant in prayer! But back to this unjust judge! The idea of God as Judge is of course found right across the Old Testament but I wonder if this parable is a conscious echo of a passage in the book of Sirach – a writer as close to Jesus’s own time as Newman is to us. I refer to chapter 35; listen to how it fits in: “the Lord is the judge, and with him is no partiality. He will not show partiality in the case of a poor man and he will listen to the prayer of one who is wronged. He will not ignore the supplication of the fatherless, nor the widow when she pours out her story. Do not the tears of the widow run down her cheek as she cries out against him who has caused them to fall?” (Sir 35 xii-xv).
But I think the best way to understand this story is to look at its context in Luke’s Gospel, to see where it stands. After last week’s story of the ungrateful lepers, chapter 17 goes on at great length about the end of the world, how unexpected the Return of Our Lord will be and how it will be a time of suffering and of decision - Luke has Jesus comparing these end times to the days of Noah and of Lot, and insisting that there must be no turning back, no dithering – “let him who is on then housetop with his goods in the house, not come down to take them away; and likewise let him who is in the field not turn back” (Lk 17 xxxi) That is the light in which we must read today’s Gospel about this corrupt judge and this nagging woman; we are in the end times, the world will come to its end one day we know not when or how, but we must live with that sense of urgency that goes with being on red alert- we should be keeping our prayers going, making sure we frequent the sacraments, getting our priorities right, deciding once and for all what matters and what doesn’t matter in our lives, and above all keeping our confidence up that God will look after us. As Our Lord says in this text “Now will not God see justice done to his chosen who cry to him day and night even when he delays to help them? I promise you, he will see justice done to them!” Of course that is why this story ends with Jesus asking the question about faith- when all this happens, when Our Lord, the Son of Man as he likes to call himself, comes to find us, what will he find? “Will he find any faith on earth?” Let us assure Our Lord this evening that when he comes to Lewisham tonight, when he arrives on our altar when the words of consecration turn bread and wine into his very Body and Blood, when he is here among us and we come close to his Presence at communion, let us assure him that he will find faith on earth, that we are among those who will never lose heart, who will cry to him in prayer day and night, who want to be his chosen, the chosen for whom God will see justice done. Amen
Saturday, 16 October 2010
October Devotions
Homily for October Devotions Sunday 3 October 2010
Today’s gospel at Mass is from St Luke chapter 17 and it in Luke has Our Lord speaking of faith, and answering the disciples’ request for an increase in their faith by mentioning the mustard seed- if only you had faith the size of a tiny grain of mustard…and so on. Luke rather likes this image of the mustard seed, he has already referred to it in an earlier chapter (Lk 13 xix) when he compares the kingdom of God, the ideal and easy relationship that mankind should have with God, as “like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden”. Now St Ambrose commenting on this text back in the fourth century said “The Lord himself is the mustard seed”. Our Lord is the seed sown in the garden. And I raise this idea with you because I want to reflect this afternoon with you on one of Our Lady’s ancient titles, but one that is not in the well known Litany of Loretto which we shall address to her later in our devotions today- it is “Our Lady, the Garden Enclosed”- or it the Latin, Hortus Conclusus”. This was a late mediaeval devotion particular to the Low Countries- there is in the cathedral of Ypres still a shrine to Our Lady of the Garden.
This title is a very rich image. The word “garden” brings so many scripture passages at once to mind doesn’t it. The garden of Eden- that perfect state in which humans in their innocence could naturally and without effort maintain the intimacy with God that is our destiny. In the creation account in Genesis 2 we read “God planted a garden in Eden….and there he put the man he had formed” (Gen 2 viii). And of course the garden was the place of the fall, of the disobedience of man and woman, after which they forfeited for us all the right to inhabit that place of peaceful co-existence with God, they are expelled from it because of their sin. So no human being is in the garden, no one can be so innocent and free of self will any more to qualify as it were to be in the garden – or is there someone? Is there? Of course – the one sinless member of our race, Our Lady herself. She, as we have said before, allowed no shred of self, of selfishness and self will, to come between herself and the will of God for her, the version of herself that God wanted her to be. And therefore she inhabits still the garden, the garden of innocence and of perfect harmony with God that we the rest of us find so elusive and difficult to maintain.
We will come back to Our Lady, but for a moment let’s concentrate on her Son, her Son and the garden. God put Adam into a garden, and Adam messed the garden up. Now who else does God put in a garden? Yes, he puts that part of the Divinity that is Our Lord Jesus, who has taken on human flesh to become, as St Paul loves to tell us, the second Adam. Newman’s hymn springs to mind- “A second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came”. Quite a lot of things happen to Jesus in a garden, don’t they: the Passion begins on the Mount of Olives, where St John tells us “there was a garden, into which he went with his disciples” (Jn 18 i) and here of course he was arrested; later we read in John that Jesus is crucified and died in a garden- “at the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in this garden a new tomb in which no one had been yet buried” (Jn19 xli). And so, like the mustard seed sown in the garden where it must die underground, Jesus is buried in a garden, and just as a vast mustard tree will in the fullness of time grow from that seed, so the vast living edifice that is the Church will arise from Our Lord in his resurrection life.
We could go on with this, and think about the connexions with the word “tree”- Jesus hanging on the tree in the garden of Calvary, and by his death on the tree bringing life to the whole of humanity, and that other tree, which God has planted in the Genesis story – “the tree of life in the middle of the garden” (Gen 2 ix). But back to Our Lady! Our Lady has been called a garden, partly because she cannot leave the paradise of harmony with God by any sinfulness, which has barred all of us; but she is called “A garden enclosed” and this is a way of describing her fruitfulness that is combined with her virginity: this is a quotation from the Song of Songs used from the patristic period of Our Lady: “She is a garden enclosed, my sister, my promised bride, a garden enclosed, a sealed fountain”. (Cant 4 xii). And so we move to a further development: Our Lady is not only a garden, she is a garden reserved for God’s own use, a garden which no man can enter, or should presume to enter, because God’s Holy Spirit came to this garden to overshadow it and engender in the garden of Our Lady’s womb the seed that would be the second Adam, the one that would help us all find our way back to paradise, to the garden of harmony with God. This idea is foreshadowed in the prophesies of Ezekiel, where he speaks of the Eastern Gate of the Temple as being permanently shut- (Ezek 44 ii)- because God once entered through it: “for the Lord the God of Israel has entered by it, therefore it shall remain shut”. Again, the Fathers of the Early Church were clear that this referred to Our Lady’s perpetual virginity, and so this title, the Shut Gate, Porta Clausa, was also used of Our Lady. I think that in this passage in Ezekiel there is a prediction if you like of what we are doing today, of the great devotion that would come in later centuries to Our Lady, the garden in which God planted his seed. I end with this verse (Ezek 46 iii): “The people of the land shall worship at the entrance of that Gate before the Lord”. We are your people, Lord Jesus, and here we are in your presence, and we feel the presence close to us of your holy Mother whom we honour today, we venerate her as the Garden and as the Gate, the Gate through which you passed as you came into our world. Let us always worship at the entrance of that gate. Amen.
Today’s gospel at Mass is from St Luke chapter 17 and it in Luke has Our Lord speaking of faith, and answering the disciples’ request for an increase in their faith by mentioning the mustard seed- if only you had faith the size of a tiny grain of mustard…and so on. Luke rather likes this image of the mustard seed, he has already referred to it in an earlier chapter (Lk 13 xix) when he compares the kingdom of God, the ideal and easy relationship that mankind should have with God, as “like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden”. Now St Ambrose commenting on this text back in the fourth century said “The Lord himself is the mustard seed”. Our Lord is the seed sown in the garden. And I raise this idea with you because I want to reflect this afternoon with you on one of Our Lady’s ancient titles, but one that is not in the well known Litany of Loretto which we shall address to her later in our devotions today- it is “Our Lady, the Garden Enclosed”- or it the Latin, Hortus Conclusus”. This was a late mediaeval devotion particular to the Low Countries- there is in the cathedral of Ypres still a shrine to Our Lady of the Garden.
This title is a very rich image. The word “garden” brings so many scripture passages at once to mind doesn’t it. The garden of Eden- that perfect state in which humans in their innocence could naturally and without effort maintain the intimacy with God that is our destiny. In the creation account in Genesis 2 we read “God planted a garden in Eden….and there he put the man he had formed” (Gen 2 viii). And of course the garden was the place of the fall, of the disobedience of man and woman, after which they forfeited for us all the right to inhabit that place of peaceful co-existence with God, they are expelled from it because of their sin. So no human being is in the garden, no one can be so innocent and free of self will any more to qualify as it were to be in the garden – or is there someone? Is there? Of course – the one sinless member of our race, Our Lady herself. She, as we have said before, allowed no shred of self, of selfishness and self will, to come between herself and the will of God for her, the version of herself that God wanted her to be. And therefore she inhabits still the garden, the garden of innocence and of perfect harmony with God that we the rest of us find so elusive and difficult to maintain.
We will come back to Our Lady, but for a moment let’s concentrate on her Son, her Son and the garden. God put Adam into a garden, and Adam messed the garden up. Now who else does God put in a garden? Yes, he puts that part of the Divinity that is Our Lord Jesus, who has taken on human flesh to become, as St Paul loves to tell us, the second Adam. Newman’s hymn springs to mind- “A second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came”. Quite a lot of things happen to Jesus in a garden, don’t they: the Passion begins on the Mount of Olives, where St John tells us “there was a garden, into which he went with his disciples” (Jn 18 i) and here of course he was arrested; later we read in John that Jesus is crucified and died in a garden- “at the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in this garden a new tomb in which no one had been yet buried” (Jn19 xli). And so, like the mustard seed sown in the garden where it must die underground, Jesus is buried in a garden, and just as a vast mustard tree will in the fullness of time grow from that seed, so the vast living edifice that is the Church will arise from Our Lord in his resurrection life.
We could go on with this, and think about the connexions with the word “tree”- Jesus hanging on the tree in the garden of Calvary, and by his death on the tree bringing life to the whole of humanity, and that other tree, which God has planted in the Genesis story – “the tree of life in the middle of the garden” (Gen 2 ix). But back to Our Lady! Our Lady has been called a garden, partly because she cannot leave the paradise of harmony with God by any sinfulness, which has barred all of us; but she is called “A garden enclosed” and this is a way of describing her fruitfulness that is combined with her virginity: this is a quotation from the Song of Songs used from the patristic period of Our Lady: “She is a garden enclosed, my sister, my promised bride, a garden enclosed, a sealed fountain”. (Cant 4 xii). And so we move to a further development: Our Lady is not only a garden, she is a garden reserved for God’s own use, a garden which no man can enter, or should presume to enter, because God’s Holy Spirit came to this garden to overshadow it and engender in the garden of Our Lady’s womb the seed that would be the second Adam, the one that would help us all find our way back to paradise, to the garden of harmony with God. This idea is foreshadowed in the prophesies of Ezekiel, where he speaks of the Eastern Gate of the Temple as being permanently shut- (Ezek 44 ii)- because God once entered through it: “for the Lord the God of Israel has entered by it, therefore it shall remain shut”. Again, the Fathers of the Early Church were clear that this referred to Our Lady’s perpetual virginity, and so this title, the Shut Gate, Porta Clausa, was also used of Our Lady. I think that in this passage in Ezekiel there is a prediction if you like of what we are doing today, of the great devotion that would come in later centuries to Our Lady, the garden in which God planted his seed. I end with this verse (Ezek 46 iii): “The people of the land shall worship at the entrance of that Gate before the Lord”. We are your people, Lord Jesus, and here we are in your presence, and we feel the presence close to us of your holy Mother whom we honour today, we venerate her as the Garden and as the Gate, the Gate through which you passed as you came into our world. Let us always worship at the entrance of that gate. Amen.
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