Standing Under the Scriptures
August 17, 2008

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

Our readings for this Sunday (from the Revised Common Lectionary instead of the Prayer Book) are:

Genesis 45.1-15: This is the dénouement of the Joseph story, among the most beguiling in the Old Testament, which you will want to read in its entirety (chapters 37 to 47).

Matthew 15.10-28, Jesus, in addition to pointing to what comes out of our hearts as the critical factor, heals the Canaanite woman.

Last Sunday our first reading, Romans 10.5-15, was a part of the section of the letter (chapters 9-11) in which Paul deals mainly with the relation of Jews to the gospel. He makes no bones about the fact that the matter is close to his heart. The chapter begins with, “Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them [the Jews] is that they may be saved.” Our reading is distinctive in the extent to which it draws on Scripture, i.e. the Old Testament. We supposed that he had Jewish readers in mind when he did this. At the same time the verses he quoted were likely of particular importance to him personally. For they would have conveyed his own excitement on finding that the gospel was not external, like the law as he had experienced it, but instead was within him, having been implanted by the Holy Spirit. Moreover they conveyed it in terms of the tradition out of which he like other Jews had come but which he now saw as having a new and very different light.

“Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven’ (that is, to bring Christ down) or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But… ‘The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart’ (that is, the word that we preach).”

To be sure, the Deuteronomy verses that Paul is quoting (30.12-13) speak of the “commandment,” meaning the law. But by virtue of being caught up in Christ, he hears them in terms of the gospel. Whether or not his quotations impressed non-believing Jews, they must have impressed the believers among his readers, and they can scarcely fail to impress us, with his personal commitment.

We saw that the word of faith is not only interior, it is also beautiful. Our attention was caught by the concluding verses of the reading.

“But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how can men preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach good news!’”

There seemed to be a causal sequence here, albeit negatively expressed. Men call because they believe, they believe because they have heard, they hear because they have been preached to, and they preach because they have been sent. But the question of how they are sent, or who does the sending, is answered only by, “How beautiful are the feet… “(from Isaiah 52.7). The suggestion was made that the Holy Spirit sends them. In that case the beauty of their feet derives from the Spirit, through the message entrusted to them. This is reasonable in that beauty, as well as goodness and truth, must have its source in him.

But regularly we fail to recognize the word’s beauty or even its presence. In fact we may take it to be the opposite of what it is. Our second reading (Matthew 14.22-33), Matthew’s account of Jesus walking on the sea, is relevant here. I prefaced our discussion of it by saying that with regard to this as well as to Matthew’s immediately preceding account of the feeding of the 5,000, the question of factuality could be raised. I spoke of my own early struggles with it and of having found myself, eventually, concluding that this was not the real question. The real question is instead, what is God saying to us in the account as it has come down to us? Our part is to focus our attention, all of it, on listening for this. Nor is the suppression of our critical faculties required; in fact the opposite is true. For to understand fully what the Scriptures mean for us, we need to work out as far as possible what they meant for the community of faith, the church, for whom they were first written down, in the situation in which its members found themselves. And to do this we need to draw on our critical faculties, along with the findings of biblical criticism, to the full

In our second reading, Jesus’ walking on the sea may already make the word seen far off rather than within us. But we need to realize that this was not just a raw display of divine power. For God does not compel our faith, as would then be the case. Instead it was for our sake, to assure us that Jesus comes to us even in the most difficult of circumstances, where we would not expect him, where we feel the farthest from him. As we saw, Jesus had sent the disciples on ahead in the boat, while he remained on land to pray. They encountered a strong headwind, which as boaters and also cyclists know can be deeply vexing. To the Christians of the latter first century this would have spoken of their own situation: the physical absence of Jesus, the difficulties which they as a church encountered. (The association of the church with a boat can be seen in the use of the word nave [from the Latin for boat] for the main part of a church building.) Then in the fourth watch of the night---the wee hours of the morning when their physical and spiritual forces were at their lowest ebb---Jesus came to them, “walking on the sea.” But instead of rejoicing at his appearance they took him to be an apparition, crying out in fright. We too regularly fail to recognize the hand of the Lord in what befalls us when it does not conform to our expectations, when it appears as God’s opus alienum that we have been hearing about. Jesus’ response is, “Take heart [the Greek tharsete has itself a reassuring sound], it is I [ego eimi in the Greek translation of the Old Testament and also in John’s Gospel is the sign of the divine speech], do not be afraid [Jesus’ recurring injunction to his hearers]. From this we too can take heart, when our difficulties make us feel that God has forsaken us.

Mark and John have parallel accounts of Jesus’ walking on the sea. Only Matthew has the part about Peter. In it we can see him acting with his usual impetuosity. The prime example is his undertaking never to deny Jesus but then denying him three times after he has been arrested. Here he has Jesus bid him to come to him across the water, starts out boldly, but begins to sink when he notices the wind. (The fine Greek word, katapontizesthai, has the connotation of drowning, considered by the ancients to be a particularly horrible fate.) And he then cries out, “Lord [Kyrie], save me.” To this may be joined our own liturgical expression, Kyrie eleison. A less obvious but also compelling a parallel is in Psalm 22.11: “Be not far from me, for trouble is near and there is no helper.” Jesus immediately catches him but not without saying, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?” So there is an element of judgment in Jesus’ compassion, despite what we have heard about its undesirability.

It should be noted that Peter was not wrong to undertake to walk on the water to Jesus, or even to undertake not to deny him in his critical hour. What was amiss was his reliance on his own strength, which inevitably was insufficient. In the wake of the resurrection, however, Peter no longer fell into this error. Instead, as recorded in Acts, he put his whole trust in Jesus as his Lord, as we should too.

The account ends with Peter and Jesus getting into the boat, the wind which has caused all the trouble ceasing, and the disciples in all these things recognizing Jesus as God’s Son. We can see how they spoke to the early Christians of their own experiences: of the critical difficulties that they faced as a church confronted by the harshness of the Roman Empire, of their being at times overwhelmed by them, and of the Spirit of Jesus delivering them after all. And they can speak similarly to us, not only as individuals but as a church, indeed these days especially as a church in the light of the current state of the Anglican Communion.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted

P.S. I am not scheduled to celebrate at 8 o’clock this Sunday and so should be more relaxed in our class---apart from driving to Long Island and back in the meantime.