We do not presume

 ‘… I did not presume to come to you. .…’ (Luke 7:7)

Luke 7:1-10 (Year C: Trinity+1)

Listening

We are back to the gospel of Luke this summer and will remain there for the remainder of this liturgical year C.  Luke is strong on mercy, healing and inclusion. This Sunday’s gospel passage (unless you are marking Corpus Christi this Sunday but read on …) recounts an incident in which a foreigner, and a leading figure in the colonial Roman army at that, pleaded for healing for a servant he specially loved. By all accounts the Roman centurion was a good person who cared about those under his charge. But this is not the main point of the story. The story is revealing in so far as it locates the merciful work of God not only in the synagogue but in strange and surprising places and among strangers who do not belong to this tribe and cult.

Surprising allies

The attitude of the centurion is telling. According to Luke, he did not approach Jesus directly but through Jesus’ elders – those socially respectable figures of authority. Fair play to the Jewish elders because not only did they relay the message to Jesus as requested by the foreigner but they pleaded with Jesus to heal the sick slave. This demonstrates that they believed in the power of Jesus to heal and, furthermore, their loyalty to the tribe and the cult did not deter them from facilitating an outreach to foreigners – even members of an oppressive army. True, there may very well have been a large measure of calculated self-interest in helping out someone who had loved the Jewish people and help build the synagogue. This might be akin to being nice to the local landlord in 19^th century Ireland because he didn’t evict any peasants and gave generously to a fund to build a local Roman Catholic chapel!

There is something extraordinary in the response of the Centurion and remarked on by Jesus who ‘went with them [the Jewish leaders]’ to meet this benign and locally powerful foreigner. The centurion did not presume to demand anything of Jesus let alone see him. Moreover, he had a deep trust that Jesus could heal but he presumed and assumed nothing. He declared: ‘….for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof…’. Isn’t it ironic that these words of the centurion form part of the liturgy of holy communion for Christians today and, yet, having rolled off these words on our lips we proceed to exclude others not of our tribe or cult or standing in the community because in some way (we think) that would offend God or scandalise the community or compromise our system of ideas and notions of right and wrong.

Love beckons

There was a time when Christians of all hues and types approached the sacrament of holy communion only very occasionally and after careful preparation and times of penance. Thankfully we understand holy communion, these days, less as a ‘prize’ and much more as a means of healing and sustenance for lovable but strictly (all of us) ‘unworthy’ communicants.  Lets not try to rank each other on some scale of worthiness from 0-10! That said, of course, access to holy communion is within the disciplines of each community – local and universal. Just as we ought not presume to exclude others we ought not presume to include ourselves either. After all, love beckons and love does not insist on its way or its place at Table.

Oscar Wilde wrote beautifully in ‘De Profundis’ a century and half ago:

Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling, and Domine, non sum dignus (Lord I am not worthy) should be on the lips and in the hearts of those who receive it.

Indeed.

We do not presume

A saying attributed to St Augustine of Hippo is appropriate here:

Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.

‘We do not presume to come to this your table…’ is the opening words of a prayer very familiar to Anglicans the world over. It reads:

We do not presume to come to this your table, merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness but in your manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table. But thou art the same Lord, whose nature is always to have mercy. Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen. – (Book of Common Prayer, Church of Ireland, 2004)

It is sometimes called the ‘Prayer of Humble Access’. The anglican and Irish priest, Rev Patrick Comerford in his blog writes that (Returning to the Prayer of Humble Access):

The prayer appeared in the earliest prayer book, the First Prayer Book of Edward VI (1549). It is derived from a similar Latin prayer in the Sarum liturgy – and, like much of the Sarum use, was translated and adapted by Thomas Cranmer.

In the same article Rev Comerford went on to say:

At this stage of my life, conscious of hurt, betrayal, denial, and alienation, I am feeling particularly humble in the presence of God throughout each and every day and night. And this evening I was particularly captured by the beauty of the prayer. I can never receive Holy Communion because I am worthy – at all times I am unworthy, and I must come to worship God without any presumptions, never knowing what God has in store for me. The table I come to and invite others to is not my own, but the Lord’s, and this is the ever-merciful Lord God, without whose mercy there is nothing I could do…..

To which I can only add ‘Amen’ and me too.