Mercy

Monday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time C-2

Entrance Antiphon Cf. Sir 36:18 Give peace, O Lord, to those who wait for you, that your prophets be found true. Hear the prayers of your servant, and of your people Israel.

Collect Look upon us, O God, Creator and ruler of all things, and, that we may feel the working of your mercy, grant that we may serve you with all our heart. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever.

Scripture today: I Corinthians 11:17-26.33; Psalm 39; Luke 7:1-10

When Jesus had finished all his words to the people, he entered Capernaum. A centurion there had a slave who was ill and about to die, and he was valuable to him. When he heard about Jesus, he sent elders of the Jews to him, asking him to come and save the life of his slave. They approached Jesus and strongly urged him to come, saying, “He deserves to have you do this for him, for he loves our nation and he built the synagogue for us.” And Jesus went with them, but when he was only a short distance from the house, the centurion sent friends to tell him, “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof. Therefore, I did not consider myself worthy to come to you; but say the word and let my servant be healed. For I too am a person subject to authority, with soldiers subject to me. And I say to one, Go, and he goes; and to another, Come here, and he comes; and to my slave, Do this, and he does it.” When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him and, turning, said to the crowd following him, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” When the messengers returned to the house, they found the slave in good health. (Luke 7:1-10)

Mercy It is common for man across the ages to appeal to the gods (or to God) for help in meeting their needs. The Greek shrine of Delphi was famous for many centuries, and hosted large numbers of pilgrims and devotees who came to lodge their petitions. These requests were of numerous kinds, and often they were requests for sheer guidance. Ought we go to war – meaning, will war bring success for us? The oracle was notoriously ambiguous, satisfying any eventuality, but it kept up business for a very long time indeed. It was all based on the common religious instinct that there were higher powers to be accessed through recognizable mediators, and that these powers could be friendly to man. There was the felt need, and there was the conviction that the powers above could be of great help if they were induced to be on side, for they had the power. Broadly speaking, there was not much of a moral dimension to this – that is to say, the moral condition of the petitioner was not much of an issue. Nor was the moral condition of the deity at issue, as long as he or she had the relevant power and friendly disposition. If you were embarking on a sea voyage, Neptune would be the god to try to get interested. And so it has been for the generality of mankind – with this proviso, that in Revealed Religion the one God insisted on right moral living because he himself was utterly moral and holy. Be holy, for I am holy – he demanded. This being granted, the pattern remained that man appealed to the One above for aid, for he had the power. Throughout the Old Testament, Yahweh God was the Father and Protector of his people, for he alone was the Mighty One and without him the people would fall. So the scene we have in our Gospel today was all of a piece with this, the interesting detail being that we have a centurion who approaches Jesus for aid in his need. The Jews who interceded on his behalf did not say he was one of us – he clearly was not. He was not a proselyte to the Jewish religion, but he was friendly to it and assisted the religious life of the Jews of Capernaum (for that is where the centurion resided, we read). He was a good man, meaning that he was a moral man and he recognized in Jesus a most moral person. He himself paled before the moral grandeur of Jesus, such that he was not worthy to approach him. But he believed in Jesus’ power and mercy.

For one outside Revealed Religion, this was remarkable and was seen as such by Jesus himself. When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him and, turning, said to the crowd following him, "I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith." It is not absolutely clear just why the centurion thought himself not to be worthy to meet Jesus, but presumably it was because of his recognition (from close reports, for it seems that both he and Jesus resided in Capernaum) of Christ’s high holiness. By implication, he would have been conscious of his own sinfulness, one presumes. This is an impressive combination, and one lacking in the religious leaders of the nation who quickly became Jesus’ enemies. They were not aware of sin in themselves, and were not in awe of the holiness of Jesus. The non-Jewish centurion’s attitude was not unlike that of Simon Peter early on, who said to our Lord “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man”. Nor was it altogether unlike what St John the Baptist said to our Lord: It is I who should be baptized by you, and you come to me for baptism? The common element here seems to have been a real sense of sin, of what was operating in the prayer of the Publican praying in the Temple in our Lord’s famous parable: My God, have mercy on me, a sinner! The centurion was approaching our Lord, with something like a personal sense of sin, to ask for an exercise of his merciful power. The Publican in the Temple was also asking God for an exercise of his mercy, mercy for his sins. The centurion was asking for an exercise of the divine mercy, mercy for his sick servant. That centurion was, by his faith, implicitly on the way to what our Lord most desired to give, the merciful pardon of sins and a share in the life of holiness. I suggest that it is this which we ought especially advert to. Let the action of the centurion remind us of what Jesus Christ came to reveal and to bestow. He came to reveal the all-powerful mercy of God for man’s deepest and most destructive need, which is sin. As St Paul writes, sin entered the world through one man and with sin came death, and death has spread through the whole human race. The supreme problem and challenge, far beyond man or the world to overcome, was the presence and elimination of sin. How was it to be taken away? That was the real question before the universe. Only God could do it, and he had the boundless power and the boundless love and mercy to bring it about. All this was embodied and available in the wonderful divine person of the man Jesus Christ.

To a point, let that centurion represent each of us. Let us approach Jesus Christ, true God and true man, conscious of our sins and failings and our need to be pardoned of them and endowed with the life of the all-holy God. Jesus Christ our Redeemer and God offers this to us, for he is the revelation of the divine mercy. We must have a profound awareness of our true moral condition and need, and a high confidence in the loving mercy of the most holy Trinity, Father, Son and Spirit. Cardinal Newman, now beatified, wrote in the notes of one of his Catholic sermons that the prayer of the Publican in the Temple expressed the essence of true religion. That prayer, which we ought oft repeat, was, God, be merciful to me a sinner! Let that prayer become habitual, with our eyes above all on the holy and kind face of God. And what is God’s face like? The face of God is Jesus Christ. He is the image of the unseen God, and in seeing him we see the Father.

(E. J. Tyler)

--------------------------------------------------------------------

A Second Reflection: (1 Corinthians 11:17-26.33)

The Holy Eucharist Saint Paul explicitly tells us that the risen Jesus himself told him about the institution of the Eucharist. "For this is what I received from the Lord, and in turn passed on to you: that on the night that he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took some bread..." (1 Cor. 11: 17-26). St Paul was a contemporary of our Lord, and quite possibly he had heard of him while during his public ministry and perhaps too at the time of his passion and death. But it was only the heavenly, risen Jesus who had spoken to him, and he spoke to him at length. One of the many things he told St Paul was about the Eucharist, its institution and its meaning. At the end of the passage referred to above, St Paul gives the meaning of the Eucharist. He says that "Until the Lord comes, therefore, every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are proclaiming his death." Every time the Eucharist is celebrated, our Lord's death is made present, and proclaimed

sacramentally. Being made present, we are present sacramentally at Calvary, and, united with Christ at Calvary, we become equipped in our turn to proclaim his death in our everyday life.

Let us put the Eucharist at the centre of our lives, and thus allow the death of Jesus to be proclaimed, and together with that, the power of his resurrection in a life of holiness.

(E.J.Tyler)

------------------------