Category Archives: Lent

The silence of the tomb

11 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by in Atonement, Faith, Lent

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Pathways

 

It is the darkest time of the Christian Year. The silence of the tomb envelopes the crucified Jesus. The spear that pierced His side also pierced the heart of His mother; it was not just Jesus on the Cross who felt the pain of abandonment. To those who had watched and who had taken his broken body to the tomb, He was now beyond human emotions; but they were not.

Their loss was total: the hopes invested in His words and His person were dashed; it was over. We cannot reconstruct their state of mind, but from what the Bible tells us of the Disciples hiding away, we know they were afraid. Grief, mixed with fear, are bad partners. The death of Jesus was the death of hope. Peter, who had denied his Master after Gethsemene, John, to whom the Blessed Virgin had been entrusted, and the rest of the Disciples went into hiding; the one exception, Judas, hanged himself. It was over. There was only the silence of the tomb. Hope had dwindled. To get out of Jerusalem alive would have to suffice.

The grief of Mary can hardly be imagined. To have watched her beloved Son die in the cruellest manner was the latest of the sacrifices demanded of her by God; always she had abided by His will; but this was asking all she had. As she heard those words asking why God had abandoned Him, it is not fanciful to suppose that she must have empathised with her Son’s anguish. Silence was a relief from the tears and the fears; but every knock at the door, every hurried footstep would have reignited both.

For us, this year, there was neither a chance to kiss the Cross on Good Friday, nor any leaving the Church in silence. But there was plenty of fear, and being confined to the house. The usual rythmns of that day were absent. In that absence we were forced to find our own way of marking the day that hope seemed to die.

For my own part, I found the Stations of the Cross at Shrewsbury moving, as I did the service at St Bartholemew the Great in London, where Fr Marcus Walker had had the foresight to prepare something for the eventuality that the Church would be closed on Good Friday. The reflections offered by the Bishop of Oxford, Stephen Croft, I found especially useful in meditating on the mysteries of this time, not least these words from his reflection on Peter’s denial:

We come with our doubts and our betrayals and our denials. We come conscious that we may be tested and found wanting in the present crisis. We bring the darkness in our hearts and our love of darkness. We do our best to bring these things into the light: to open our lives afresh to the deep grace of God. We come remembering this Jesus who invites us into the light, offers his life that we might be forgiven, loves us beyond our understanding and longs to restore us in his service, however far we have fallen.

For we know, as Mary and the Disciples did not, what comes next. We know that the darkness did not extinguish the Light of the world; we know that if Hope had died, it was so He would rise again on the third day. He died that we might be forgiven. We are not commanded to believe. We are invited to believe. The choice is ours, and we can behave as Judas did, or we can follow the example of Peter. Both men betrayed their Lord; only one repented and believed.

Our failures and shortcomings can be laid at the foot of the Cross in the sure knowledge that God forgives those who confess their sins and restores those who are penitent. May our sins lie in the silence of that tomb, and may they die that we might rise with Him and be made whole.

Closed for business?

09 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Faith, Lent, Prayers

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Britain is in lockdown except for “essential services;” these, apparently, do not include those of the Church of England and the Catholic Church. For many this is not only counter-intuitive, it runs contrary to the priestly duty to be with those in need; the result has been a good deal of criticism of the “leadership.” Knowing, in my own limited sphere, how easy it is to criticise “leadership,” I pause for thought before going in that direction.

I can imagine how hedged about with caution from “legal” and “HR” the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Nichols are. Imagine the outcry if a Church service led to the spreading of the Coronavirus, or even if a Church left open for private prayer were to do so? Unlikely? Perhaps. Impossible? Would you bet your life and reputation on it? Hence, I am sure, the advice offered to priests. But, even if one takes the harsh view that Church leaders have failed to lead, nothing should be allowed to detract from the efforts they, and all bishops, are making to ensure that the Churches are there, virtually, for people.

The former editor of the Catholic Herald, Luke Coppen, has a piece in the current edition of the Spectator on the subject of whether the closure of Churches will have an adverse effect on Christianity in this country. It is easy enough to imagine why it might.

Once out of the habit of going to Church, will people go back to it? Catholics, who have always been told that missing Mass is a sin may, seeing a dispensation granted so readily, decide that it can continue post Coronavirus. But, on the other hand, there has been an upsurge in online searches for “prayer,” and, not that you’d know it from the press, but the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Facebook page has an excellent series of talks on the subject, whilst he, Cardinal Nichols and Rabbi Mirvis have an excellent and thought-provoking discussion here. No doubt there will be those who will reach for the smelling salts at such news, but if they would stop and listen, they might learn something.

On this, a Maundy Thursday like no other, when we commemorate the institution of the Holy Eucharist, and when we remember Jesus washing the feet of the Apostles, we are drawn, ineluctably to His command of love and service. At this time, when our Churches are closed, we can still come together in prayer and remember, that for all Catholics, where Mass is celebrated Christ is present, and so is the community of believers.

So let us pray for all priests and religious, not least for our leaders whom it is easy to criticise. All do God’s work as they can. And I hope that a former Anglican might be forgiven for invoking the General Confession from the Book of Common Prayer:

ALMIGHTY and most merciful Father;
We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.
We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.
We have offended against thy holy laws.
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done;
And we have done those things which we ought not to have done;
And there is no health in us.
But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders.
Spare thou them, O God, who confess their faults.
Restore thou those who are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesus our Lord.
And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake; That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

Good Friday meditation

19 Friday Apr 2019

Posted by in Easter, Lent

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As I said on my blog earlier this week, Eastertide is one of those times when I think of absent friends and family, whyever they are absent. One of the people I miss, of course, is Jessica, the founder of this blog. Some things are not in our hands, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t remember what we have learned from them. Back in 2013, Jessica wrote a meditation on Good Friday for NEO that I found very moving. Some of you may not have seen it, and reading it again will hurt none of us, so here it is. [Neo]

We call it ‘Good Friday’. The altar in my church is stripped bare, and the crucifix is covered, and we leave with the smoke from the extinguished candles filling the gloom of an English spring afternoon; with temperatures stuck next to freezing, the shivers could have a number of causes; but meditating on the Passion of Our Lord is enough.  The sense of sorrow is an echo of that first Friday at Calvary, and it is hard to know, at that moment what is ‘good’ about it.

But when we stop in prayer and think, we can see precisely what is good.  It is the day on which all our sins are loaded on the Lamb of God, when He takes upon His shoulders your sins and mine. What wonder is this? What have we done to be so rewarded? How can this be? What wondrous love is this? Good? Yes, the best news mankind ever had or ever will have. Whatever confessional allegiances divide us, I like to feel on this day of all days, the Cross of Christ unites us.

I leave it to all the clever men to explain what in my heart I know is simple. Christ loves me. He loves us all. He did what He did, He suffered what He suffered willingly. He knew if would be terrible, and He would have preferred it if it had been otherwise; but that makes it all the more precious.

The American expression ‘when the rubber hits the road’ comes to mind. This is where our salvation was earned, and not by us. With every nail that was hammered in, as with every stripe He bore for us, we are being saved. If we find those sufferings horrible, we should know that is how God finds our sins; God did something about it – what are we doing?

It was through the breaking of that body on the Cross, and the spilling of that blood that we see what He meant on the evening of the Last Supper. His Body was broken for us; His blood spilled for us. Some of us believe that at the Eucharist we receive His Body and Blood as He said; others that it is in memory of Him. Well, Good Friday is no time to rehearse what divides us – yet more stripes we apply to His back. It is a time for prayer and contemplation.

Mine is that for all of us, the Spirit of Christ may be with us this Easter, and that we may know Him as Lord, and worship Him and be thankful for what He has done for us. What did we do to earn it? Nothing. What can we do to be worthy of it? Just heed His call to repent and follow Him in belief that He is the Christ.

In the shadow of the Cross we kneel and pray and give thanks – we are redeemed through His suffering. As the ancient hymn has it, let all mortal flesh keep silent. He has saved us. It is Good Friday – be sad and yet rejoice.

Of your charity

17 Saturday Feb 2018

Posted by in Church/State, Faith, Lent

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One of the things those of us with any disposable income try to do, is to give it to good causes. About once a year I review who receives what I give. There are some obvious stalwarts: my old College, which is not one of Oxford’s richest, and gave me so much, that I want to give something back to each new generation; and then a series of charities. Some of these are secular charities, but the majority are religious ones. It was, therefore, sobering, to put it mildly, to see the news about Oxfam. As my friend Neo has written elsewhere there is a very considerable iceberg underneath this tip.

That aid agency staff commit abuses seems further proof of the axiom that bad people will find a way of working with vulnerable people. We see it in every Church. This leads those with an agenda to criticise my own Church, or someone else’s church; for believers in original sin, that seems a culpably blind attitude. Some of the things described in Neo’s piece are heart-breaking. For the Director of Oxfam to say ‘it isn’t as though we murdered babies’, shows, alas, that he still fails to grasp the scale of the outrage. His detailed excuses as to why they behaved as they did once they knew the details of the scandal, shows a concern with preserving the institution at all costs. As an expert on disaster management, he should have consulted an expert in media relations on when not to bring a mechanical digger to a hole-making party.

Charities have become big business, but unlike other businesses which pay their CEOs a fortune, this business does not make anything or sell anything, it raises funds and then tries to spend them in the best way possible. It is a business that relies on reputation. The Charity sector is not coming well out of this, or indeed, other investigations, such as phone fund-raising. There is something deeply disturbing about the pattern of behaviour being revealed. I stopped one long-term donation because a phone fund-raiser aggressively tried to make me increase the amount I had given. He seemed oblivious to my argument that I gave to a number of charities and had worked out what I could afford to give to each; the result was he managed to lose his charity a regular amount, plus a legacy. Of course, he did not work with the charity, he was a professional fund-raiser paid by results. I hope he was not on a bonus.

In all this sorry story, it is good to recall some charities do work no one else would. The Aid to the Church in Need charity is one. The work it has done with the victims of ISIS/Daesh is exemplary. In places no one else goes, ANC goes. It is helping thousands of Christian who feel abandoned by the UN charities working in Jordan. £3.6 million has just been given to Iraqi Christians to help rebuild houses in the Nineveh Plain. This is something no one else would do. NGOs tend to take a relentlessly politically correct line, which in places like Jordan means that Christians are at the bottom of the list. A quarter of Iraq’s Christian have now returned to their homes. This is real charity. It is not about trying to help make the refugee camps more permanent, but about making them unnecessary. So far, £28million has been given to Christians in Iraq.

But ANC is in the Sudan, Russia, Syria, and raising the alarm wherever Christians are persecuted. At Lent we are encouraged to give of our charity. I have made my decision, and hope that, despite the scandal engulfing the ‘charity sector’, charities like ANC will continue to be supported.

Into Lent

14 Wednesday Feb 2018

Posted by in Faith, Lent

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We are told that immediately after his baptism, Jesus was driven out into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit. We do not often ponder how odd this phrasing is. Here, at the start of the mission, we see the Spirit leading Jesus into the wilderness; and as anyone who has been there will tell you, beyond the Jordan it really is a wilderness; by day the sun scorches and the scorpions threaten, and by night the cold freezes the body, and the howls of wild animals the blood. It was there that Jesus was tested.

The wilderness is a rite of passage, a test, throughout the Old Testament; it is there that those chosen by God are tested: Abraham is commanded to go into the wild places to sacrifice Isaac; the children of Israel are led through the wilderness by Moses for forty years; it is in the wilderness of Sinai that God gives Moses the tablets of the Law after he has fasted and prayed for 40 days; Elijah is is also led into the wilderness and sustained there by God for 40 days. Jesus follows this pattern.

By contrast Adam, was placed in the Garden of Eden. His life was set beside still waters, and all that he wanted, even a companion, was provided by the will of a beneficent God. But that was not enough for Adam and Eve. Having all they could wanted, they found, as we, their descendants do, a new want. They wanted to be as wise as God. They could bear nothing less than equality with God. Satan appealed to pride and self-will in setting before them the idea that God wanted to keep them in subjection and that if they would but reach out their hands, they could soon be like God, equal with Him. Adam and Eve succumbed to this, despite the felicity of their surroundings. Now we see the second Adam, Christ, undergo the second temptation of man in a wilderness symbolic of that in which mankind had lived since the fall. Paul tells us: ‘For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.’ Here we shall see the Tempter defeated, where once he was victorious.

Satan’s methods are the ones which worked for him of old; they work on us now. He tempts us to take a course of action which, in itself, seems harmless enough – in the case of Jesus, that he should feed himself by turning stones into bread. But that would have been to place our will before that of God. Hence  Jesus replies that we live not just by bread, but by the word of God. We, of course, knowing that Jesus is that Word, see a deeper meaning than the Devil could; if we allow ourselves to be guided by the things of this world, we too shall fail to see that the ‘Light which lighteth the world’ has come into it.

That Jesus was tempted reminds us of His true humanity. He triumphs not by the assertion of his own will, real though that is. He does so by renouncing his will and doing that of His Father in Heaven. Luke tells us that he was filled with the Spirit, and he relies upon the strength that gives Him; unlike Adam, he does not think that the exercise of his will is the way to respond to the promptings of the Devil. Paul tells us that Jesus came to overthrow the Evil One who holds us captive:

 Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil

Jesus rejects the Devil’s offers of glory and power and embraces, instead, the will of the Father – and the path that will lead Him to the agony of Gethsemene and the sufferings of Golgotha. He who was without sin, He who resisted the Tempter, was ‘made sin’ for us so that through his sacrifice we might be made righteous. It is through Jesus that we are saved. His obedience does that which our own efforts never could do – they make us right with God. As all fell in Adam, so, if we embrace Him, will all rise in Jesus.

So, as we go through this Lenten season, may we so conform our will to His, that we may take His obedience to the will of the Father as our example. May we, through the Spirit, be delivered from temptation. As He rises, may we rise with Him, and in Him, and through Him.

As Lent approaches

11 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by in Bible, Catholic Tradition, Faith, Lent

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Lent is a chance to reassess where we are; a time of penance.

If press of business at work was the primary reason to refrain from blogging, there was a secondary one. It seemed impossible to blog and remain spiritually calm. The invasion of modern culture wars into the realm of religion was inevitable, but becomes wearing to one who finds it difficult to define himself in those terms.

At the heart of my own faith is the encounter with Christ in the Eucharist. That is the Christ who I encounter in the Holy Scriptures, who tells us that we will eat of His body and drink of His blood, and that He is the Way, the Truth and the Light. Were that not the case then there would be a disconnect between reason and experience, and my own Christianity rests on those two pillars- reason and experience. But these two are mediated through the Church and its traditions. I do not understand these things solely by the light of my own reason, although I constantly test them against it; I am part of a living tradition. I am but one of a great cloud of witnesses.

The spoken Word matters to me a great deal. Without Scripture I would be lost. But to interpret it by the sole light of my own reason would also be to risk becoming lost. Christ became man so that I, like other sinners, might receive life, and life eternal. My experience tells me that the Christ of Scripture is the one I encounter at the Eucharist; the Church reinforces that and provides me with a sacramental understanding of what, and who, I have received; it is a memorial of His saving Passion; but it is Him too not simply a memorial. I know this through what I feel; but I find reinforcement and validation for what I feel in the tradition and teaching of the Church.

Modern critical theorists of Scripture made the attempt to make it conform to their own limited, non-sacramental understanding of the world; ruling out miracles on the a priori ground that they could not exist. That was to insert one’s own understanding in place of that of the Church, which has always had the humility to accept what the Scripture it received described; it does not attempt to know better than the eye-witnesses. One’s unaided understanding might lead one astray. Had the Lord Jesus wished us to get our teaching about Him from a book alone, then undoubtedly He could have written that book. Instead He inspired His followers to write and collect what was written, providing, through the Church He founded, an infallible interpreter in cases of doubt.

In all of that, there is for me, only one culture war – that of the World against that of the Church. Of the mystery of the existence of many churches, I have no opinion. I have met better men and women than myself in many other Churches, and I leave any verdict on their ultimate fate where it belongs, with the Only Just Judge. I observe, with no further comment, that there are Anglicans and Orthodox with whom I have more in common than some Catholics I know. We share the characteristic of trying to balance faith, reason and tradition, and of not trying to give priority to whatsoever might be novel, whilst, at the same time, not turning our face against the fact that Spirit is at work in the Church

As I prepare for Lent, I am drawn back to this place and to the fellowship it provides.

A return to arms

09 Friday Feb 2018

Posted by in Blogging, Faith, Lent, Politics

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newman_john_everett_millaisThere has been much else to occupy my time this last eighteen months, and, as explained in my last posting here, the press of business in my new vocation has been such that it would have been unfair to my university to have offered it less than 100% of my time. But evenings and week-ends still exist, and as we approach Lent, I want to use some of that time to return to the themes of this blog.

At its best it has offered a voice not heard elsewhere. It has been too reactionary for the liberals, and not reactionary enough for the reactionaries. I don’t take that as a sign that the positions taken here are, therefore, in some way ‘right’, but simply that they are a voice worth the speaking.

There is much to be gloomy about. I do not suffer from what has been called ‘Trump derangement syndrome”, which is common in the circles in which I usually move. I am a fan neither of the man, nor his style, nor, in so far as he has them and I understand them (both great caveats) of his policies; but nor do I see him as a species of anti-Christ for those who need one. If he is anything, he is a symptom of a political system where the insiders had long given the impression that they regarded the mass of the population as ‘deplorable’; Mrs Clinton simply said what had, until then, been unsaid. I take rather a similar view on Brexit. Give the electorate the impression you regard them as uneducated idiots and then give them the chance to vote in a way that allows them to give you a kicking, and then express surprise. It could only happen in a democracy where the ties that bind are already loosening.

That is my main worry. Whatever it is fashionable to believe, the basic values on which Western Civilization were founded we Christian ones; explicitly so. We believe in the value of each individual not because of some abstract theory of “rights” – that came later – but because each individual is a child of God; it is that sense, and that sense alone in which we are “equal”. It is that sense alone which matters. It matters because it means we never can, nor should, instrumentalise the human person. Whether it is turning people into cogs in a machine in work-setting, or killing the unborn or the elderly for being “useless”, Christianity rightly rejects such an approach to the human person. The princes of this world, under any system of government or economic system, have a tendency to do this, and one of the great gifts of Christianity is to have rebuked them for it. It is unclear who will do this in the absence of a Christian presence.

There is a deep irony in a leading Catholic Churchman appearing to tell us that China is an exemplar of Catholic Social teaching. One of my colleagues has said all that needs to be said on this egregious nonsense here.  To use his words:

Catholic social teaching demands freedom of conscience, freedom of association and the protection of life from conception until natural death. These are not optional extras and nor are they part of the moral teaching of the Church outside its social teaching. These aspects of the Church’s social teaching are fundamental because they have an impact on education, healthcare and the whole structure of political and civil society as well as on economic and social relationships.

That is true of Christian social teaching; there is nothing in that with which Archbishop William Temple and Anglicans of his hue would have disagreed.

We live in a world where on all sides these freedoms are being questioned in the name of identity politics. The idea, once risible, that one should be able to call for another to be silenced because they offended you, is now commonplace. For some of us, this was where we feared that laws prohibiting certain types of speech might lead. There is no satisfaction in having been proven right.

In a Society where people have been schooled to think that truth is relative, it is only natural that individual feeling should have become elevated into the standard by which to judge others. There is not truth, except that all truth is relative, says modern man and (naturally) woman. But for the Christian that cannot be true. There is a Truth, and it is a person, not a concept. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Light, and we cannot (though we often do) relativise that.

We are all sinners. We are all children of God. We are all fallen. In Him all can rise. The old Adam (and if you must, Eve) is rampant in us all. We all of  us do not what we will, but what we often do not will. For this there is but one remedy: Christ Jesus. He reaches out to each of us where we are. each of us comes to Him as we have the Grace so to do.

As the clouds lower over us, amidst th’encircling gloom, as the Blessed John Henry put it, we have but on Kindly Light. Let us pray that He illuminates our hearts, mind and spirit, in the Lent that approaches.

Marys at the Cross?

10 Monday Apr 2017

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As we enter Holy Week, some reflections on those close to Jesus, might be in order. I begin with the question of the identity of the ‘other Mary’ in the Gospel stories of the final week of Jesus’ earthly life.

‘Miriam’, or as we Anglicise it, “Mary’ was one of the most common names in the Holy Land in the times of Christ, and it can confuse us at times. The Virgin Mary is the best known, and Mary Magdalen bids fair in our time to rival that (though not for reasons which would have pleased her), but who is this other Mary who gets mentioned at Golgotha and at the Tomb? SS Matthew, Mark and John use different designations, but scholars are agreed they are talking about the same Mary. Matthew calls her the ‘other Mary’, Mark, ‘Mary the mother of James’ and John ‘Mary the wife of Clopas’. As so often in history, this woman is defined by her husband and her children. ‘James’ is the Apostle, James the less, the first bishop of Jerusalem (to distinguish him from St James the son of Zebedee and brother of St John)) who is identified as the son of Alphaeus. St. Jerome identified Alpheus with Cleophas who, according to Hegesippus, was brother to St. Joseph (Hist. eccl., III, xi). That would have made Mary of Clopas the Virgin Mary’s sister in law. St Luke tells us that Clopas was one of those to whom the Lord appeared on the road to Emmaus. That would make one of the first men to see the Risen Christ the husband of one of the women who stood by the Cross on Golgotha – and his uncle according to the flesh, and therefore quite possibly his step-father after the death of Joseph – in other words not some obscure person. It may well be that he was the source of the story which Luke alone tells. According to Eusebius (Chapter 11) Simon (Simeon), the brother of James the less, succeeded James the Just as bishop of Jerusalem. So Mary had three sons, James the Less, Simon and Joses. We are told that the ‘brothers of the Lord’ were ‘James, Joses (or Joseph) Simon, and Judas (or Jude). If, as appears probably, Clopas looked after his sister-in-law and her son, then it is easy enough to see why the locals would have called Mary of Clopas’ children ‘brothers of the Lord’. In the fourteenth century, Russian travellers to Constantinople reported seeing the incorrupt body of Mary of Clopas in one of the many monasteries there, which may or may not spoil the medieval legend that she and Mary Magdalen went to France by ship after the Ascension. As that gets us into mad Dan Brown territory, it would be satisfying to think that the Russians were right. In fact we do not know what became of Mary of Clopas, but we can see from this short sketch that she was part of what was actually quite a close-knit family which stood with Jesus to the end – and beyond.  We sometimes think of the Holy Family in terms of our own nuclear families, but it was not like that at all. Jesus had close family, at least two of whom wrote Gospels and at least two of whom were bishops of Jerusalem. But that was not all, as we shall see, other Apostles also had close family links with Jesus.

The Feast of the Annunciation

25 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by in Bible, Lent, Marian devotion, Salvation

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The earliest English text on the Annunciation was by the Venerable Bede, and to celebrate today’s Feast of the Annunciation, let us spend some time in his company, meditating on this great event which truly changed history. The text in bold is the Magnificat, the commentary by Bede himself:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.

The Lord has exalted me by a gift so great, so unheard of, that language is useless to describe it, and the depths of love in my heart can scarcely grasp it. I offer then all the powers of my soul in praise and thanksgiving. As I contemplate his greatness, which knows no limits, I joyfully surrender my whole life, my senses, my judgment, for my spirit rejoices in the eternal Godhead of that Jesus, that Saviour, whom I have conceived in this world of time.

 

The Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

Mary looks back to the beginning of her song, where she said: My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord. Only that soul for whom the Lord in His love does great things can proclaim his greatness with fitting praise and encourage those who share her desire and purpose, saying: Join with me in proclaiming the greatness of the Lord; let us extol His name together.

Those who know the Lord, yet refuse to proclaim His greatness and sanctify His name to the limit of their power, will be called least in the kingdom of Heaven. His name is called holy because in the sublimity of his unique power He surpasses every creature and is far removed from all that He has made.

He has come to the help of His servant Israel, for He has remembered His promise of mercy.

In a beautiful phrase Mary calls Israel the servant of the Lord. The Lord came to his aid to save him. Israel is an obedient and humble servant, in the words of Hosea: Israel was a servant, and I loved him.

Those who refuse to be humble cannot be saved. They cannot say with the prophet: See, God comes to my aid; the Lord is the helper of my soul. But anyone who makes himself humble like a little child is greater in the kingdom of Heaven.

The promise He made to our fathers, to Abraham and his children for ever.

This does not refer to the physical descendants of Abraham, but to his spiritual children. These are his descendants, sprung not from the flesh only, but who, whether circumcised or not, have followed him in faith. Circumcised as he was, Abraham believed, and this was credited to him as an act of righteousness.

The coming of the Saviour was promised to Abraham and to his descendants forever. These are the children of promise, to whom it is said: If you belong to Christ, then you are descendants of Abraham, heirs in accordance with the promise

Thus wrote Bede more than 1400 years ago. How sad, then, that now there are some who claim the name of Christian who make the claim that Mary had no choice but to accept God’s fiat. What image of God do such people possess? It is that akin to the old gods of Greece and Rome who impregnated human women with out their consent. It is not, perhaps, then, so strange that they should fail to perceive this massive beam in their own eye whilst claiming with great shrillness that our veneration of Mary is a form of goddess worship. Christianity began with Mary’s ‘yes’ and through her heroic virtue, the Christ became incarnate and the miracle of our salvation was begun. On this day, holy to our ancestors, we celebrate, with a ‘great crowd of witnesses’ the actions of Our Lady and pray, through her, to God, that His will be done here on earth, as it is in heaven.

https://richardnye.info/annunciation.html

 

‘And thanne mette I with a man, a myd-Lenten Sonday’

12 Sunday Mar 2017

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A Clerk of Oxford reminds us of the timeless themes of our faith, especially in Lent. And so it is here, where she brings forward one of the classics of the English language and faith, Piers Plowman. As always, she gives us the middle English, which is fascinating, but difficult for many of us to decipher, so I will simply give her translation.

And with that I awoke, and rubbed my eyes,
and after Piers the Plowman peered and stared about;
eastwards and westwards I looked for him,
and went forth like a fool, searching the region
for Piers the Plowman; many a place I sought.
And then I met with a man, on mid-Lent Sunday,
as hoary as a hawthorn-tree, and Abraham was his name.
I asked him first whence he had come,
and where he was from, and where he was going.
“I am Faith,” said that man, “it befits me not to lie;
a herald of arms in Abraham’s household.
I seek for a man I saw once,
a most bold knight – I knew him by his blazon.”
“What does that warrior wear,” I asked, “as bliss betide you?”
“Three figures in one person, none larger than another,
of one degree and power in length and in breadth.
What one does, all do, and each does alone.
The first has power and majesty, maker of all things:
Father is his proper name, a person in himself.
The second of that lord is Truth, the Son,
guard of all who have wits, who ever was without beginning.
The third is called the Holy Ghost, a person in himself,
the light of all that live on land and on water,
comforter of creatures – of him comes all joy.
So three attributes belong to a lord who lordship claims:
might, and the means of expressing his might,
his own and his agent’s, and what sustains them both.
So God, who never had beginning but what seemed good to him,
sent forth his Son, to be servant for a time,
to labour here until issue was brought forth –
that is, the children of charity, with Holy Church the mother.
Patriarchs and prophets and apostles were the children
And Christ and Christendom and all Christians are Holy Church…’

[He goes on to discuss the Trinity further, and tells some of Abraham’s story.]

I wondered at his words, and at his voluminous clothes –
for at his bosom he bore something which he kept blessing.
And I looked within his cloak: a leper lay there,
among patriarchs and prophets playing together.
“What are you waiting for?” he asked, “and what is it you want?”
“I want to know,” said I, “what is in your cloak.”
“Look,” he said, and let me see. “Lord, mercy!” I said.
“That’s a precious gift; for what prince is it intended?”
“It is a precious gift,” he said, “but the devil has seized it –
and me, as well,” said that one, “and no ransom may redeem us,
nor can anyone pay our bail or free us from his power;
no payment of surety can take us out of the devil’s prison,
until the one comes whom I speak of: Christ is his name,
the one who shall deliver us, some day, out of the devil’s power,
and pay a better price for us than we are all together worth:
that is, life for life. Else we would lie thus for ever,
lolling in my lap, until such a lord saved us.”
“Alas,” I cried, “that sin so long should hinder
the might of God’s mercy, which might us all amend!”
I wept for his words.

The Clerk reminds us that, “The image of the dead, those who had died before the coming of Christ, resting in the bosom of Abraham comes from the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. It was a popular subject in medieval art; here, the combination of the idea with Abraham’s explanation of the nature of the Trinity strikingly echoes an image found in medieval English alabaster,” such as the one that heads this article.

Bourges Cathedral

I’m not sure that I have anything to add to this, the poet, as brought to us here, seems pretty clear to me, so I’ll simply leave you with this, as did the Clerk.