Standing Under the Scriptures
February 8, 2009

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

Our readings for this Sunday are:

1 Corinthians 9.16-23: Paul speaks of his acting not for any reward but out of obedience to the charge that God has laid upon him.

Mark 1.29-39: Jesus, even when embarking on his ministry of preaching and healing, takes time to pray.

This is the Sunday when the Rev. Dr. Peter Walker of Wycliffe Hall in Oxford will be at All Saints’ and will lead our class, putting his own stamp on our discussion. I believe you are all aware of the potluck for him at the Beckwiths starting at 5:00 that afternoon and of the need to coordinate with Melissa if you are coming (tel. 301 983 2997).

Exciting as this Sunday will be for us, we still might look back at last Sunday’s class discussion. For it left me with the feeling that we did not get as deeply into our readings as we might have. Both of them may be said to concern the presence of the Lord among us in our humanity and our human response to it, than which there is scarcely anything more significant. Some absent class members might have got us farther along our way. But the main deficiency was necessarily mine.

Our first reading (Deuteronomy 18.15-20) is a section of Moses’ extended sermon to the Israelites on the eve of their entrance into the Promised Land (into which he could not go). In it he speaks of the Lord raising up a prophet like him in his place. The prophet like Moses will mediate between the people and the fire and thunder of the Lord such as they experienced at Sinai/Horeb, and any more of which they feared would do them in. But the people will not be insulated from the Lord even so. The prophet will be charged to speak whatever word the Lord gives him to speak. At the same time anyone speaking a word which the Lord did not give him as if it came from the Lord will die.

The passage reflects the distance between us in our humanity and the Lord, not only in power but also in holiness. Indeed, the closer we approach to the holy, the more aware we become of our unworthiness. (T.S. Eliot’s phrase for it was, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”) The distance is such that a mediator is required. The Old Testament prophets, raised up after Moses, may be considered to have performed a mediatorial role such as he spoke of. They could do so only to a limited extent, however. Only the Christ could truly mediate. So Moses might be considered to have anticipated his coming, as the prophets in their turn did. This in fact was evidently the view of the New Testament church. For in Acts it appears in two particularly significant places: Peter’s first post-Pentecostal address to the people (3.22) and Stephen’s self-defense just prior to his stoning to death (7.37). We may thus take God’s sending of the prophets and finally his own Son as mediators for us to be an instance of his mercy towards us.

In a minor way, all who preach and teach in the church are mediators, undertaking in some fashion to speak God’s word. Our Deuteronomy passage is relevant here too: what he has given them, to the best of their discernment they must speak. But what he has not actually given them they must in no way speak.

Our Gospel reading, Mark 1.21-28, was relevant to Epiphany in that it concerned Christ’s manifestation to the world, that is, in the synagogue at Capernaum. As such it is also concerned with the presence of the Lord among us in our humanity and our response to it. For Jesus is the Lord’s presence, and in the synagogue there were responses, two sharply different ones, to his teaching.

The first was that his was a new teaching, with authority and not like that of the scribes. Here the element of the divine is discerned even if only dimly. But it is tolerable, unlike the fire and the thunder on Mount Sinai. As for why, God has sent his Son in human form in the Incarnation, so that he can be alongside us as well as above us. And as the perfect mediator he is able to speak God’s word truly to us without destroying us. In him the distance between God and his people, in holiness as well as power, is overcome.

In the synagogue there is also a man with an unclean spirit. And he cries out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” Here we have a case not of acceptance of Jesus, as above, but of utter opposition. This is worth reflecting on, the more so as unclean spirits or demons do not accord with our modern way of thinking. It is noteworthy that in the synoptic Gospels the demons consistently recognize Jesus for who he is whereas most people do not. Even the disciples are slow on this point. Further, the demons are invariably hostile to him. What is going on here? Without quite adopting the ancient terminology we may think of two force fields, the one perfectly ordered in accordance with God’s order and the other reflecting the disorder of the primeval formlessness and non-being against which God stood. When they come into contact with each other they are necessarily aware of each other in their opposition to each other. And in the nature of things the first must prevail, for it stands in judgment over against the second, showing it for what it is. Hence the threat of destruction that the second feels. And hence the destruction that the unclean spirit in the Capernaum synagogue underwent, first convulsing the man and causing him to cry out as it came out of him.

But what, we may ask, has this to do with us? Actually we are neither altogether like the people of the Capernaum synagogue purported to be nor altogether like the man with the unclean spirit. We are somewhere in between, having elements in us both of the divine order (albeit by grace rather than as our own possession) and of the disorder inherent in the sin which is the expression of non-being. The critical question, though, is whether we recognize the latter elements. For if we do, we are not lost. For in our acknowledgement of them we can turn to the Lord, knowing that he will accept us even in our disorder and sin. As explained in last week’s notice, this supreme privilege is the message of the Rite I liturgy that we use here at All Saints’. And it comes not only from God in Christ being our judge but also from his having entered into our human condition and taken it and its sinfulness upon himself, thereby freeing and restoring us.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted