Daily prayer in Ordinary Time 2024: 161, Saturday 19 October 2024

‘Before you pray, forgive’ … words attributed to Shakespeare in a restaurant in Leicester (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

We are continuing in Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar, and tomorrow is the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity (Trinity XXI).

The Calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship today remembers the life of Henry Martyn (1812), Translator of the Scriptures, Missionary in India and Persia. Today is also the Feast of Saint Frideswide, Abbess and Patron of Oxford, a woman of vision and courage.

I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, and for reflection, prayer and reading in these ways:

1, today’s Gospel reading;

2, a short reflection;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;

4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.

‘Father Forgive’ … the challenge of forgiveness in Coventry Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Luke 12: 8-12 (NRSVA):

[Jesus said:] 8 ‘And I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God; 9 but whoever denies me before others will be denied before the angels of God. 10 And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. 11 When they bring you before the synagogues, the rulers, and the authorities, do not worry about how you are to defend yourselves or what you are to say; 12 for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what you ought to say.’

‘Can You Forgive Her?’ … two volumes of Trollope in an antiquarian bookshop in Bloomsbury (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Reflection:

In this morning’s Gospel reading at the Eucharist, Jesus warns sternly that ‘whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.’

I have long had a problem with how ‘the sin against the Holy Spirit’ is explained in some evangelical thinking. But I also have a problem in thinking about and discussing what can and cannot be forgiven.

Throughout Saint Luke’s Gospel, forgiveness has a significance that is impossible to ignore. Forgive. Forgive it all. Forgive it now. Forgive it for any reason you want. Forgive for the right reason. Forgive for the wrong reason. Forgive for no reason at all. Just forgive.

Remember, Saint Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer includes the helpful confusion: καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν, καὶ γὰρ αὐτοὶ ἀφίομεν παντὶ ὀφείλοντι ἡμῖν: καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν (‘and forgive us our sins for indeed we ourselves are forgiving everyone who is [monetarily] indebted to us’) (Luke 11: 4) – the monetary indebtedness is obvious in the original Greek.

We pray it, but do we put it into practice?

The arrival of the Kingdom of God is no occasion for score-keeping of any kind, whether monetary or moral.

Why should I forgive someone who has sinned against me, or against my sense of what is obviously right? I don’t have to do it out of love for the other person.

I could forgive the other person because of what I pray in the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday if not every morning.

I could forgive because I know I would like to be forgiven myself.

I could forgive because I know what it is like to be me when I am unforgiving.

I could forgive because I am, or I want to be, deeply in touch with a sense of Christ’s power to forgive and free someone just like me.

Or I could forgive because I think it will improve my life and sense of wellbeing.

It boils down to the same thing: deluded or sane, selfish or unselfish, there is no bad reason to forgive.

Extending the kind of grace God shows me in every possible arena – financial and moral – can only put me more deeply in touch with God’s grace.

We who have the experience of real grace, we who have been invited to the Heavenly Banquet, we who pray in the words of the Psalm, ‘Remember not our past sins; let your compassion be swift to meet us’ (Psalm 79: 8), we who believe, as the Apostle Paul says, that Christ ‘gave himself a ransom for all’ (I Timothy 2: 6) – we have a better reason than most people to forgive.

The sculpture ‘Reconciliation’ by Josephina da Vasconcellos in Coventry Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Prayers (Saturday 19 October 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), has been the ‘Mission hospitals in Malawi’. This theme was introduced on Sunday with a programme update by Tamara Khisimisi, Project Co-ordinator, Anglican Council in Malawi.

The USPG Prayer Diary today (Saturday 19 October 2024) invites us to pray:

Lord, help the mission hospitals as they provide healthcare services to people who are vulnerable and face the challenges of poverty.

The Collect:

Almighty God,
who by your Holy Spirit gave Henry Martyn
a longing to tell the good news of Christ
and skill to translate the Scriptures:
by the same Spirit give us grace to offer you our gifts,
wherever you may lead, at whatever the cost;
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.

The Post Communion Prayer:

Holy Father,
who gathered us here around the table of your Son
to share this meal with the whole household of God:
in that new world where you reveal
the fullness of your peace,
gather people of every race and language
to share with Henry Martyn and all your saints
in the eternal banquet of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Collect on the Eve of Trinity XXI:

Grant, we beseech you, merciful Lord,
to your faithful people pardon and peace,
that they may be cleansed from all their sins
and serve you with a quiet mind;
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.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

Today is the Feast of Saint Frideswide, Abbess and Patron of the Diocese of Oxford … a stained-glass window in Saint Mary’s Church, Shenley Church End (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

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

New claims that Christopher Columbus was a Sephardic Jew create historical irony

The tomb of Christopher Columbus in Seville cathedral … was a Sephardic Jew from Spain rather than being from Genoa? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

So it turns out that Christopher Columbus may have been a Sephardic Jew from Spain rather than being from Genoa.

The conclusion was reached last week after 20 years of DNA and genetic tests on part of his remains that are said to be held in a tomb in the Cathedral in Seville, and the claims seem to have turned the conventional historical narrative on its head.

The claim raises the intriguing prospect that the man who played a central part in the creation of Spain’s mighty empire came from the very community that his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, expelled from Spain in 1492 – the same year Columbus reached the Americas.

The findings were announced last Saturday night (12 October 2024) in a special television programme shown on the Spanish national broadcaster, RTVE, to mark Spain’s national day, which commemorates the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World on 12 October 1492.

Dr José Antonio Lorente, a forensic medical expert at the University of Granada, led the research. He said his analysis had revealed that Columbus’s DNA was ‘compatible’ with a Jewish origin.

‘We have very partial, but sufficient, DNA from Christopher Columbus,’ he said. ‘We have DNA from his son Fernando Colón, and in both the Y [male] chromosome and mitochondrial DNA [transmitted by the mother] of Fernando there are traces compatible with a Jewish origin.’

Dr Lorente acknowledged that he had not been able to pinpoint Columbus’s place of birth. But he said the likelihood was that he had come from the Spanish Mediterranean region.

‘The DNA indicates that Christopher Columbus’s origin lay in the western Mediterranean,’ he said. ‘If there weren’t Jews in Genoa in the 15th century, the likelihood that he was from there is minimal. Neither was there a big Jewish presence in the rest of the Italian peninsula, which makes things very tenuous.’

Given that there were no solid theories nor clear indications that Columbus could have been French, Lorente added, the search area narrowed still further.

‘We’re left with the Spanish Mediterranean area, the Balearic islands and Sicily. But Sicily would be strange because then Christopher Columbus would have been written with some trace of Italian or the Sicilian language. That all means that his most likely origin is in the Spanish Mediterranean area or the Balearic islands which belonged to the crown of Aragón at the time.’

RTVE said Dr Lorente’s findings have put an end to 500 years of speculation over Columbus’s birthplace and nationality. Other suggestions in the past have included Genoese, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Portuguese or even Scottish origns. After analysing 25 possible places, then focusing on a shortlist of eight, Lorente plumped on western Europe.

However, his conclusions have been met with caution by his peers, who point out that it is not possible to evaluate the claims because they no data from the analysis has been offered, the documentary did not show Columbus’s DNA and the findings were shared without prior peer scrutiny within the scientific community.

The revelations on Spanish television last Saturday came two days after Dr Lorente and his team said that DNA analysis of the remains of Columbus, his son Fernando and his brother Diego ‘definitively confirmed’ that the partial skeleton kept in a tomb in Seville Cathedral was that of Columbus.

Columbus died in Valladolid in 1506, but he asked to be buried on the island of Hispaniola, shard today by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. His body was taken there in 1542, moved to Cuba in 1795, and then brought to Seville in 1898 when Spain lost control of Cuba after the Spanish-American war.

Columbus and his son Diego are now buried in Seville cathedral, as are Cardinal Juan de Cervantes and Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza Quiñones. The royal chapel in the cathedral holds the tomb of the city’s conqueror, King Ferdinand III of Castile, his son and heir Alfonso the Wise, and their descendant, King Peter the Cruel.

The Columbus Monument (Monument a Colom) – a 60 metre high seafront monument at the lower end of La Rambla – was erected in 1888. It is a reminder that after his first journey to the new continent in 1492, Christopher Columbus reported to Queen Isabel of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon in Barcelona on 15 March 1493.

If Columbus was a Sephardic Jew, his identity would be a major historical irony. His arrival in the Americas paved the way for the rise of Spain’s rich and powerful American empire. But Ferdinand and Isabella, who sponsored his voyages, expelled Jews from in 1492, when the Jews of Spain was offered the choice of being forced into exile, forcibly converted to Catholicism or burned at the stake.

Spain sought to atone for the expulsion in 2015, offering Spanish citizenship to the descendants of Jews who were expelled at the end of the 15th century. About 132,000 people of Sephardic descent applied for Spanish citizenship before the offer elapsed in 2019. More than half of those who applied were from Latin American countries including Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, Panama, Chile and Ecuador.

The year 1492 was regarded as the annus mirabilis by many in power in Spain, who associated the year with four events: the introduction of the Inquisition, the conquest of Granada; the unification of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabel; the expulsion or forced conversion of Spain’s large Jewish population; and Christopher Columbus sailing west to the New World.

Columbus himself, in the prologue to his diary dedicated to Ferdinand and Isabel, links his voyage to the expulsion of Jews from Spain. Yet there were many conversos on the expedition, and many found safer climes in the New World. Although the Inquisition arrived in Lima and Mexico in the 1570s, many could escape forced baptisms and form communities that were cohesive for generations. In this New World, these peregrino could sow the seeds that would lead to a rebirth of Sephardic Judaism in the decades and centuries that followed.

During a webinar lecture in 2020, organised by the Sephardi Academia programme at Bevis Marks Synagogue, Professor Ronnie Perelis of Yeshiva University, New York, spoke about ‘Early Modern Crypto-Judaism in its Transatlantic Context.’

He spoke, in particular, of the Carvajal family of Portuguese and Spanish origin, and how these conversos had suffered at the hands of the Inquisition in Mexico at the end of the 16th century. The new claims in the past week about the Sephardic identity of Christopher Columbus seem to compound so many historical ironies.

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום

The Columbus Monument in Barcelona … Christopher Columbus was welcomed back to Spain by Ferdinand and Isabel in Barcelona (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)