Patrick Comerford
We are continuing in Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar. This week began with the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity (Trinity XV, 28 September 2025) and today the calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship remembers Saint Jerome (420), translator of the Scriptures and teacher of the faith (30 September).
This morning, before today begins, I am taking some quiet time to give thanks, and 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.
Luke 9: 51-56 (NRSVA):
51 When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. 52 And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; 53 but they did not receive him, because his face was set towards Jerusalem. 54 When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, ‘Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?’ 55 But he turned and rebuked them. 56 Then they went on to another village.
Father Andrew Louth speaking at a conference in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge … love is an all-pervading theme in the theologians he portrays in ‘Modern Orthodox Thinkers’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)Today’s Reflections:
I was walking through Cambridge late one summer afternoon, after taking part in a conference on mission. I had visited some colleges, and had spent some time – a lot of time – browsing and rummaging in some of my favourite bookshops.
In the warm afternoon sunshine, I was feeling relaxed, and easy-going. And there, in front of Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge, a large crowd had gathered in a circle in the open space on the corner of Market Street and Sidney Street.
Some people in the crowd were visibly amused, some were angry, some were heckling. They were watching and listening to a group of street preachers of the old-fashioned sort, the sort I thought had gone out of fashion many years ago, many decades ago.
And I can quote some of their posters and placards:
‘Cursed is the nation whose God is not the Lord’ … ‘Woe to them who call evil good and good evil’ … ‘Hate crime: to let sinners go to hell with no warning’ …
When people in the crowd asked questions, they were belittled and derided. Within a short time, I had lost count of the number of times people were told they were being disrespectful of God and God’s word, the number of times people were told they and their souls were going to burn in Hell for eternity.
Not once did I see the speakers smile, not once did I hear them speak words of compassion, let alone speak of love.
Is it any wonder that people turn away when they hear people like this claiming to represent Christ, Christianity, the Christian message and the Church?
There was a much more inviting message in the vision or slogan of the church behind them: ‘Come to Christ, Learn to Love and Love to Learn, in Cambridge and beyond.’
When people respond to preachers like this by saying ‘I don’t believe in God,’ I want to respond by saying, ‘I don’t believe in the God you don’t believe in either.’ Think about what the disciples want to do when they get a whiff of difference, an inkling of rejection.
A whiff of difference creates a whiff of sulphur. They want to burn the Samaritan village to the ground.
What have they been learning from Jesus so far about basic, fundamental Christian beliefs and values being expressed in how we love God and love one another?
What had the disciples learned from Jesus about compassion, tolerance and forbearance in the immediate weeks and months before they arrived in this Samaritan village?
How embarrassed they must have been if this was the same Samaritan village that Christ visits in Saint John’s Gospel (see John 3: 4-42), where it is a Samaritan woman, and not the disciples, who realise who Jesus really is. She is a Samaritan woman of questionable sexual moral values. But it is she, and not the disciples, who brings a whole village to faith in Christ; it is she who asks for the water of life; it is she who first suggests that indeed he may be, that he is, the Messiah.
How embarrassed they must be a little later when Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan (see Luke 10: 29-37). The one person I want to meet on the road, on the pilgrimage in life, is not a priest or a Temple official, but the sort of man who lives in the very sort of village I have suggested, because of my religious bigotry and narrow-mindedness, should be consumed with fire, burned to the ground, all its people gobbled up.to follow on their own terms.
In the Orthodox Liturgy, the priest introduces the Creed with the words: ‘Let us love one another, that with one mind we may confess.’ In other words, our statement of belief, in ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Trinity consubstantial and undivided,’ is confirmed, realised and lived out in our love for one another.
To love our neighbour as ourselves means to love them as we are ourselves, as being of the same substance – created in the image and likeness of God. The Church Fathers teach that we find our true self in loving our neighbour, and that love is not a feeling but an action.
Two books I once had on an easy-to-reach shelf are I love therefore I am, by Father Nicholas V Sakharov (Crestwood NY: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), and Father Andrew Louth’s Modern Orthodox Thinkers (London: SPCK, 2015).
Father Nicholas is a monk in Tolleshunt Knights, and his great uncle, Father Sophrony, was the saintly founder of the monastery. Father Sophrony talks in La Félicité (p 21) about ‘the absolute perfection of love in the bosom of the Trinity’ and he says: ‘Embracing the whole world in prayerful love, the persona achieves ad intra all that exists.’
In Father Andrew’s book, love is an all-pervading theme in the writings of each of the 20th century theologians he portrays. For example, he summarises Mother Maria of Paris as saying that it is all too easy to sidestep the demands of love, to seem to be loving, when really love itself has been set aside, or turned into a means to an end.
Mother Maria says there are two ways of loving to be avoided: one which subordinates love of our fellow humans to love of God, so that humans become means whereby we ascend to God, and the other of which forgets love of God, and so loves our fellow humans in a merely human way, not discerning in them the image of God, or the ways in which it has been damaged or distorted.
Yet, despite all this, I find a more difficult commandment is the third and great neglected commandment: to love our enemies (Matthew 5: 44). We all have a good idea of who our neighbour is; but when do we ask: ‘Who is my enemy?’
Do I define who my enemy is?
Or does the other person define me or himself, or herself, as the enemy?
Today’s Prayers (Tuesday 30 September 2025):
The theme this week (28 September to 4 October) in Pray with the World Church, the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘One Faith: Many Voices’ (pp 42-43). This theme was introduced on Sunday with Reflections from Rachel Weller, Communications Officer, USPG.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (Tuesday 30 September 2025, International Translation Day) invites us to pray:
On this day, we pray for all those dedicated to the work of Bible translation and the preservation of Indigenous languages. Lord, bless their efforts so that more people may hear and understand the good news of Jesus Christ in their own language.
The Collect of the Day:
God, who in generous mercy sent the Holy Spirit
upon your Church in the burning fire of your love:
grant that your people may be fervent
in the fellowship of the gospel
that, always abiding in you,
they may be found steadfast in faith and active in service;
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:
Keep, O Lord, your Church, with your perpetual mercy;
and, because without you our human frailty cannot but fall,
keep us ever by your help from all things hurtful,
and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Additional Collect:
Lord God,
defend your Church from all false teaching
and give to your people knowledge of your truth,
that we may enjoy eternal life
in 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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