Patrick Comerford
We are continuing in Ordinary Time in the Church and this week began with the Seventh Sunday after Trinity (Trinity VII).
Before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, for reflection, prayer and reading in these ways:
1, today’s Gospel reading;
2, a reflection on the Gospel reading;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
Matthew 11: 25-27 (NRSVA):
25 At that time Jesus said, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; 26 yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. 27 All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.’
This morning’s reflection:
I love the way this morning’s Gospel reading gives us so many contrasting pairs in the space of just three verses: heaven and earth, hidden and revealed, intelligent and wise, wise and intelligent, Father and Son, all things and no one, no one and anyone.
That something sacred may be both hidden and revealed is repeated throughout Scripture. In Saint Luke’s Gospel, Christ says: ‘For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light’ (Luke 8: 17).
Saint Paul tells the Colossians his mission is ‘to make the word of God fully known, the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints’ (Colossians 1: 25-26).
This contrast of the hidden and the revealed nature of what is sacred is first articulated when Moses summons the wandering people, reminds them how God has feed them from slavery, and has brought them into a covenantal relationship. He tells then: ‘The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children for ever, to observe all the words of this law’ (Deuteronomy 29: 29).
Charlotte Brontë once wrote: ‘The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, Whose charms were broken if revealed.’
Despite all my fretting and anxiety about my health and my ministry and myfuture, I cannot know the hidden will of God and I cannot see into the future. These events belong to God’s wisdom alone. Sometimes, it is only with the benefit of hindsight, as I reflect on what has happened and what has been that I think I may be able to discern what God’s will has been or where God has been leading me.
But so often, God’s will or God’s plans seem hidden or concealed.
Where is the hidden God to be revealed to us?
Of course, God is revealed to us in God’s word, and is experienced through living a life that is rooted in the two great commands to ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind’ and to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ (Matthew 22: 37-39), for on ‘these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets’ (Matthew 22: 40).
Secondly, God is revealed to us as we live out the sacramental life of the Church. The first and most basic ecclesiological principle at Vatican II is that the Church is a mystery, or sacrament. To say that the Church is a mystery, or sacrament, means, in the words of Pope Paul VI, that it is ‘a reality imbued with the hidden presence of God.’
In other words, the Church is not just a religious organisation to which we belong or which we serve. Rather, the Church is the corporate presence of God in Christ, with a unity created and sustained by the Holy Spirit.
There is a presumption or a conviction in much of today’s theological thinking and writing that language and images that depict transcendent rather than empirical reality are mere metaphors. They are ‘symbols’ in the modern, popular sense, which means they are mere ‘signs’ that point beyond themselves to something else.
To early theologians in the Church, on the other hand, words and images are genuinely symbolic: they actually participate in the reality they depict. They have the capacity, under the right conditions, to take part in the very existence of the person, object, event or promise to which they refer. It is this capacity that enables words and images to become vehicles of divine revelation.
This understanding of the symbolic character of words and images is basic to Orthodox Christianity, according to the Orthodox theologian Father John Breck, who was Professor of New Testament and Ethics at Saint Vladimir’s Seminary and Professor of Biblical Interpretation and Ethics at Saint Sergius Theological Institute, Paris.
Because of their symbolic quality, they do more than simply point beyond themselves to some future reality – they actually participate in that reality, share in it and bring it to completion.
The Church as the Body of Christ recapitulates and fulfils the covenant relation God had already established with the people, and in Christ God reveals his presence and purpose within the realm of human history, the realm of our daily life.
To understand this, he says, there are two basic truths: that the ‘ineffable, inconceivable, invisible and incomprehensible’ God actually reveals himself in human history, in the framework of human experience; and that the mode of his self-revelation is essentially that of word and image.
Theological language always points beyond itself and beyond the limits of our understanding and experience. Behind every creedal confession, as behind every Gospel account or apostolic exhortation, there lies ultimate, unfathomable mystery, hiddenness.
As this morning’s Gospel reading reminds us, God reveals himself and makes himself known in the person of Jesus Christ. To a limited extent, words and images can capture that self-revelation and present it to us in language that we can understand. Behind the language, verbal or graphic, however, there lies an incomprehensible realm of being, power and glory that the human mind cannot begin to fathom, much less express.
God reveals himself, yet he remains essentially hidden. God calls us to use our intellects to search the Scriptures and to perceive, to understand, his presence and purpose within history and within our lives. Yet God remains mystery, inaccessible to thought and inexpressible by means of words or images, but experienced when we love God and love one another.
Today’s Prayers (Wednesday 17 July 2024):
The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Advocacy, human, environmental and territorial rights programme in Brazil.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday by the Revd Dr Rodrigo Espiúca dos Anjos Siqueira, Diocesan Officer for human, environmental and territorial rights in the Anglican Diocese of Brasilia.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (Wednesday 17 July 2024) invites us to pray:
We pray for activists and human, environmental and territorial rights defenders who are under constant threats to their lives and families.
The Collect:
Lord of all power and might,
the author and giver of all good things:
graft in our hearts the love of your name,
increase in us true religion,
nourish us with all goodness,
and of your great mercy keep us in the same;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Post Communion Prayer:
Lord God, whose Son is the true vine and the source of life,
ever giving himself that the world may live:
may we so receive within ourselves
the power of his death and passion
that, in his saving cup,
we may share his glory and be made perfect in his love;
for he is alive and reigns, now and for ever.
Additional Collect:
Generous God,
you give us gifts and make them grow:
though our faith is small as mustard seed,
make it grow to your glory
and the flourishing of your kingdom;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Yesterday’s reflection
Continued tomorrow
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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