The Flight into Egypt

Luc-Olivier Merson’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1879) reminds us of the stark reality of the hardship and deprivation suffered by a family on the run

Patrick Comerford

Isaiah 63: 7-9; Psalm 148; Hebrews 2: 10-18; Matthew 2: 13-23.

In the name of the + Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

After Christmas, most people want some rest and quiet.

For some families, the loss of a loved one at Christmas time, a dear family member, has made celebrating Christmas a very difficult if not impossible task. But for the vast majority of people in this city, there has been too much shopping, too many parties, too many sales, too many visitors and too much to eat and drink. Lethargy has settled in among many families, and for them the New Year celebrations tomorrow night will come as a welcome relief from the tedium.

This is only the sixth day of Christmas. But by the time the 12 days of Christmas have passed, many will be tired of the seven swans a-swimming, the six geese a-laying … and only too happy to get back to work, and to begin looking at the summer holiday brochures.

However, our Gospel reading this morning reminds us that it was not like this for the Holy Family in the days after their first Christmas. That first Christmas was not one filled with tedium and boredom. They were not looking forward to the release of the holiday brochures for the Mediterranean sun. Instead, their first Christmas was the very opposite of our comfortable holiday season in Northern Europe.

Who among us would swap the tedium and boredom of the coming week for that time Mary and Joseph had with the Christ Child? Harried by Herod’s army, they barely escaped a maniacal plot for mass murder, and ended up in exile where their ancestors had once been slaves, seeking succour and refuge with the Jewish diaspora by the Nile and the Pyramids.

The Flight into Egypt was no bargain package holiday. Rather, it was an ordeal that inspired artists throughout the centuries. It has been painted by Fra Angelico, Giotto, Carpaccio, Durer, Claude Lorrain, Tintoretto, Barbieri, Tiepolo … the great Dutch and Italian masters, indeed most of the great Western artists.

Matthew’s unique account of this event had many resonances for his first readers: it is a powerful restructuring of the story of Joseph forced into exile in Egypt because of the evil plots hatched against him. And the exodus from Egypt in later, safer, days, would point anew towards redemption from slavery and sin and offer the hope of imminent salvation.

Later legends surrounding the Flight into Egypt include the family hiding in a cave and being protected by a spider’s web, the beasts of the desert bowing in homage to the Christ Child, an encounter with two thieves who would be crucified beside Jesus on Calvary, and palm trees bending in reverence as Mary and Joseph passed by with the Child Jesus.

But there is a painting in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts by the French artist, Luc-Olivier Merson, Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1879), that reminds us of the stark reality of the hardship and deprivation suffered by a family on the run.

A tired and weary Mary languishes between the front limbs of the sphinx, cradling the Child Jesus on her lap, both unable to sleep because of their plight and because of what they have witnessed; an exhausted Joseph is stretched out on the sands as he tries to doze off; and the donkey, that little donkey, worn out from the journey from Bethlehem, scavenges in the dark in the desert soil, seeking what few blades of grass he can find to eat.

Legend says that when they found shelter on the banks of Nile the Holy Family lived in an area known as Babylon in Egypt, where there was a long, continuous Jewish presence. Although those stories of flight and exile are unique to Matthew’s Gospel in the New Testament, they also appear in the Quran, and are part of the way Muslims come to own the story of Jesus within their own religious traditions.

On various visits to Egypt, I was aware that the stories of the flight into Egypt, the refuge, the welcome and the asylum offered to the Holy Family there, are stories shared and definitive for all Egyptians, including Muslims, the large Christian community, and the dwindling but ancient Jewish community.

Many shrines and churches are claimed as places where the family rested or dwelt, none more so than Abu Sergha or the Church of Saint Sergius and Saint Bacchus, one of the oldest Coptic Churches in Egypt, and the place where many Patriarchs of Alexandria or Coptic Popes were elected.

Every Egyptian today – Jew, Christian and Muslim – identifies with both the Holy Family and those who offered them asylum. But who would we here in Ireland identify with if you and I were hearing this story of mass murder and enforced exile for the first time?

Would I have been among the innkeepers who first refused them a welcome at my inn or hostel in Bethlehem?

Would I have been willing to work with the political apparatus around the Herod of my day, holding onto power and privilege, inspiring fear rather than respect and loyalty, no matter who had to be trampled on, no matter who suffered, no matter how the innocent would be counted among the victims?

Would I have had the courage of the wandering Magi, not only to seek truth, even if it is outside my own area of learning and knowledge, but also willing to take the risks involved in refusing to respect the immoral demands of those holding the reins of power when they are lawful but patently immoral?

When was I last like Joseph, realising that God’s promptings are not idle dreams but that they demand discipleship and action, even if this puts my personal security at risk?

When did I listen to the voice of today’s Rachels, the weeping mothers and widows, whether at a local level it was listening to the grief of someone who has lost a dear family member at Christmas time, or at a global level it was listening to those who are weeping in grief in Bosnia or Serbia, Pakistan, Burma or Rwanda?

Would I be among those Egyptians – of whatever religious or political background – who could offer asylum to refugees from political persecution?

If things have changed in Ireland as a direct consequence of the success of the “Celtic Tiger” in the last decade or two, then the story of Herod’s jealous plot, and of the Flight into Egypt have radical relevance to us today.

We cannot be open to the plight of the fleeing Holy Family unless we are open to the plight and needs of the families who have come to live among us in Ireland in recent years – whatever their political, social or ethnic backgrounds may be.

We cannot understand the plight of families who saw the hope of future generations sacrificed in the interest of political greed unless we too are willing to stand against political and personal greed today.

We cannot praise the disobedience of the Magi unless we are willing to say regularly that morality in politics must overrule the personal interests, gain and profit of those who hold office.

We cannot rejoice in the welcome the Egyptians gave to Mary, Joseph and the Baby Jesus, unless we are also willing to rejoice in every initiative, every stage in the process of dialogue that brings Jews, Christians and Muslims together in our own country: We have 20,000 to 40,000 Muslims living in Ireland today, and they have more to offer our society – culturally, intellectually, socially and politically – than we have yet had the courage to acknowledge and accept.

We cannot pity the plight of that family in exile unless we can acknowledge the needs of the new families living among us today. How can a family waiting for adjudication on its refugee status survive with dignity on direct provision with less than €20 a week and no right to seek work?

A year before his death, the great missionary bishop in Zanzibar, Bishop Frank Weston, declared in 1923: “You have begun with the Christ of Bethlehem, you have gone on to know something of the Christ of Calvary – but … it is folly – it is madness – to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the Throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children. It cannot be done.”[1]

To paraphrase Bishop Weston, if we cannot realise the presence of Christ among us in the refugee, the asylum seeker, the immigrant and the person of another faith, that Christ who identifies with those who suffer and are persecuted as brothers and sisters, [Hebrews 2: 10-18], how can we be aware of his presence among us in Word or Sacrament?

May you have a Happy New Year.

In the name of the + Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation at the Church of Ireland Theological College. This sermon was preached in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, at the Cathedral Eucharist on Sunday 30 December 2007.

[1] Frank Weston, “Our Present Duty,” Report of the Anglo-Catholic Congress (1923), pp 185-186.

Love came down on Christmas Day

A Christmas sermon

by Patrick Comerford

Isaiah 9: 2-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2: 11-14; Luke 2: 1-14 (15-20).

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

I suppose you’re all “carol-ed” out at this stage.

For me, they all began with the Advent Carol Service for the theological college at the beginning of the month in Zion Parish Church. But for many of there have also been the parish carol services, the school carol services, the cathedral carol services, and the carol service in Marlay Park on Saturday afternoon. There have been carols with Pat Kenny, Joe Duffy, Ryan Tubridy and every other broadcaster.

To add to them all, one evening last week we also went to the Carol Service in Orlagh, the Augustinian retreat house in the hills just above Ballycullen and Knocklyon.

It was a cold and crisp but bright and beautiful night. The stars filled the night sky as I peered out the chapel window.

And as I looked out over the city, those words of the Prophet Isaiah came to life, “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” [Isaiah 9: 2]. It was as though the lights right across Dublin City and Dublin Bay were their own star-filled galaxies spreading across one more beautiful part of God’s whole creation, from the Dublin foothills, across the bay to Howth Head and perhaps even – if I let my imagination run away a little that starry, starry night – as far as the Mountains of Mourne in Co Down.

We are partners in God’s creation, and I felt that evening, that I was living somewhere very beautiful within God’s wondrous cosmos.

That beautiful vision from the hills across the star-filled sky and above the light-filled city filled me with a sense of the beauty of the Kingdom of God.

But then, for a moment, I wondered about another star-filled night. It was one of the carols that made me think of the shepherds who sat in the dark on the hills above David’s Royal City, Bethlehem. As they looked across the city lights that night, why were they terrified [Luke 2: 8-10] rather than being filled with wonder and awe? And then, once the angels had spoken, did they see the city and the world beneath them in all their beauty? Were they already waiting in hope – a hope that lets all of us know that we when we are welcome at the Christ-child’s crib in the stable in Bethlehem, and we are equally welcome before the throne of Christ in his kingdom? [Titus 2: 13.]

When we are called to knell before Christ the Child we are also called to knell before Christ the King.

On the first Christmas, the first visitors to the place where Jesus was born were shepherds and Magi. Not the Mayor of Bethlehem or King Herod from neighbouring Jerusalem … if the first visitors were going to be local people, they were going to be shepherds. They were local Jewish people, but they were on the margins of society, manual labourers, shift-workers, out on the edges of the city, poorly paid and kept in the dark. If the first visitors were going to be powerful kings or wise scholars, then they were not going to be the king in his palace in Jerusalem or worldly-wise Sadducean priests from the Temple, but once again people from the margins, magi from the east, where the Children of Israel had been exiled and had suffered a few generations earlier; people whose religious views and practices were suspect and superstitious.

Those first visitors represent the ignorant and the wise, the religiously naïve and the religious sophisticates. They are manual labourers and the bookish scholars, they are Jews and Gentiles, they are the poor and the rich. They continue to remind us today that Christ came to all and to everyone, to be a “great joy” for the whole world. “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all” [Titus 2: 11].

Christ’s coming brings with it is a promise of hope not just for you and for me, not even for those who share our beliefs and values, not even for the whole world, but for the whole of God’s created order.

As an item on Sky news reminded us last night, both Saint Mark’s Gospel and Saint John’s Gospel are without any Christmas story. In those two Gospels, there are no stars above Bethlehem, no shepherds on the hillside, no three wise men following a star. However, Saint John’s Gospel keeps our focus on what really is at the heart of the Christmas message. He tells us that God so loved – not me, not us, not the church, not even humanity, not even (as too many of our Bibles translate it) that God so loved the world … but God so loved the cosmos, that he sent his only son …

God’s love is bigger than us. God’s love is bigger than the Church. God’s love is bigger than our world. God’s love is sent in Christ this Christmas morning to fill the whole created order, the whole cosmos, with love.

And as I sat looking out over the hills and the city and up into the starry sky and that great cosmos, I was brought back down to earth when someone read a lesson that was a parody on a well-known New Testament passage on the centrality of Christian love and Christmas love.

This Christmas version of I Corinthians 13 was received by the Augustinian community at Orlagh by email, and the source is unknown. But it was a good reminder of how love must be at the heart of all we do in our families this Christmas:

If I decorate my house perfectly with holly and ivy, strands of twinkling lights and shiny silver balls,
but do not show love to my family,
I’m just another decorator.

If I slave away in the kitchen, baking dozens of Christmas cakes and mince pies, preparing gourmet meals and arranging a beautifully adorned table for the Christmas dinner,
but do not show love to my family,
I’m just another cook.

If I work in the Simon shelter or soup kitchen, sing carols in the nursing home and give all I have to charity,
but do not show love to my family,
it profits me nothing.

If I trim the Christmas tree with silver angels and pretty little snowflakes, attend a myriad of office holiday parties, and sing carols with the choir,
but do not focus on Christ,I have missed the point.

Love stops the cooking to hug the child. Love sets aside the decorating to kiss the husband or wife. Love is kind,
even if it is harried and tired.

Love doesn’t envy another’s home that has co-ordinated Christmas china, table runners and place mats.

Love doesn’t yell at the kids to get out of the way,
but is thankful that they are there to be in the way.

Love doesn’t give only to those who are able to give in return,
but rejoices in giving to those who can’t.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things;
Love never fails;
The X-Box and video games will break, pearl necklaces will be lost, golf clubs will rust;
But giving the gift of love will endure.

Happy Christmas, and lots of love to you and all yours.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation at the Church of Ireland Theological College. This sermon was preached on Christmas Day, 25 December 2007, at the Parish Eucharist in Whitechurch Parish, Rathfarnham

Advent: a time of waiting

+ May I speak to you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen

One night last week, we were driving through Dundrum village, and I commented on the Christmas lights and decorations. I thought they were tasteful but a little early. After all, we haven’t yet moved into the Season of Advent.

It was naïve of me. Already, the Christmas shopping brochures have gone out, even from our mission and development agencies and from the charities; the jingles are being broadcast with increasing frequency; even the travel agencies appear to be booked out for most of the post-Christmas skiing packages.

It seems that once the clocks go back, we start looking forward to Christmas.

But without Advent, and the preparation for Advent, without a proper period of waiting and watching in the Church for Christmas, then our images of Christmas, our ideas of what it’s all about, our expectations of what we should hear as being at the heart of the Christmas message, will lack fullness and promise.

Advent is a time to prepare for the coming of Christ, but not only as a little baby. If Christ remains merely an object of sentimentality in the Christmas crib and on the Christmas cards, then he is reduced to having no more significance and being no more challenging than Santa Claus, the Snowman and the jolly Dickensian characters carolling and carousing in their top hats and frock coats.

If all we are looking forward to at Christmas is the warm glow that comes with mulled wine and mince pies, then of course Advent is just a good commercial opportunity. But if the coming of Christ is not to be relegated to a sentimental seasonal interlude, then we have to recover a true sense of Advent.

The lectionary readings for the Sundays before Advent provide us with opportunities to prepare for a meaningful Advent so that, in turn, we can prepare for a meaningful Christmas.

In our readings this morning, we are called to prepare for the coming of Christ not just as a cuddly, Christmas-card baby, but as Christ the King. And so we are being reminded that Christ comes at Christmas in three ways:

* The Christ Child who reminds us that God-in-Christ takes on our flesh: God makes us in his image and likeness, and then at the incarnation takes on our image and likeness.

* Christ who calls us to be his Disciples: Discipleship, being a Christian, is not just about taking on a label, but about living out the Gospel.

* And Christ who comes at Christmas as the Christ of the new Creation, with the fulfilment of God’s plans for all creation.

Preparing for the Coming of Christ should not be reduced to shopping for presents in the shopping centres, being caught up in the materialism and consumerism of our age. Our reading from the Prophet Isaiah this morning [Isaiah 65: 17-25] reminds us that there’s more to Christmas than all the shopping experiences a Dundrum Town Centre can offer.

That second coming of Christ brings the promise of a new earth, a new Jerusalem. It is much, much more than the promise of yet another new pair of socks or a new golf accessory can offer me. That vision of health and wholeness and long-life is in sharp contrast to the second-rate promises of health and long life we offer people today with our two-tier health care and hospital services.

But if we believe that the prophetic and beatific visions in our reading from Isaiah are more than mere idle dreaming, that the promise of the coming Kingdom of God is more than a clever ploy to postpone attending to the needs of humanity today, then we will wlecome the wake-up call issued by the Apostle Paul in our Epistle reading [II Thessalonians 3: 6-13].

Being a Christian, being a disciple, being one who looks forward to the coming of Christ as King, means we cannot sit back and be comfortable about our Church membership and our faith. When the Apostle Paul upbraids those who are content with a passive faith, he compares them with lazy people who are happy to eat other people’s bread and spend other people’s money.

The faith we have today came to us through the hard work, the labours and the endeavours of the saints of the past. This church, Saint John the Evangelist, was built over a century and a half ago by people who had a vision for a particular witness within the Anglican tradition. Moving on into the future with hope, and with relevance, may mean not just preserving what we have inherited but also discovering its fresh application and relevance to society’s needs today, even tomorrow.

In the midst of the crass commercialism of today – when patients in hospitals are reduced to being consumers, and when choice means offering you two or three ways of spending your money rather than asking about your needs and your values – then a rediscovery of the values packed into the call to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness offers new hope in exploring how we can give people a taste of the promises of the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Our Gospel reading [Luke 21: 5-19] this morning may sound frightening at first. With all its talk of being led astray, of wars and insurrections, of earthquakes, famines and plagues, trials and persecutions, it sounds gloomy on first reading. But has this not been the way of the world throughout the ages? Is this not the story of the church throughout the generations? There have been divisions in the past, there will be divisions in the future. Not only is the present crisis in Anglicanism not a new experience for the whole Church, it is not new even within the Anglican Communion.

Some bishops are saying they will not go to the next Lambeth Conference unless there is complete agreement by all the bishops beforehand. On that basis, there would never have been a council of the Church in the past. Peter and Paul disagreed thoroughly at the Council of Jerusalem. If there had been no disagreement among the bishops of the early church, there would have been no need for the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople, and today we would have no creeds.

When there are disagreements in the Church, we must disover the space that allows the Holy Spirit in to lead us. Then those disagreements can turn to creative tension ... and creative tension in turn can open us to new understandings of our calling and our discipleship and provide new insights into the kingdom of God.

No-one said that being a member of the Church was going to be easy and cheap. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s great work, in the midst of times of trail and tribulation, was not Oh for an easy life of Discipleship, but The Cost of Discipleship. Jesus tells his disciples in our Gospel reading this morning that in the future they may find the going is rough and the going is tough. But despite rejection and hatred, he promises, they will find words and wisdom and will find the endurance that leads to souls being saved, to more people responding to the call to discipleship.

The Church may face divisions and disputes throughout the ages. Some of them may be petty and some of them may be over-powering. But we have the promise of wisdom – the gift of the Holy Spirit. An uncertain future is not a comfortable message at Advent. But it is a reminder that we should not be too worried about our own immediate future but should always keep our minds fixed on the coming of Christ and the coming of his kingdom. If we do that, then the Church can be a sign, a symbol, a sacrament, of the coming Kingdom, a taste of the heavenly banquet.

And I’d rather have that Advent vision any evening than all the lights and all the baubles in the weeks before Christmas. And so, keep heart, keep faith, keep the vision – for Christ has better plans for us than we can ever know.

And now may all our thoughts words and deed be to the glory of God, + Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

This semon was preached at the Sung Eucharist in the Church of Saint John the Evangelist, Sandymount, Dublin, on Sunday 18 November 2007.

Sermon for Remembrance Day, 2007

Luke 20: 27-38


+ In the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen

Some years ago, back in the early 1990s, Barbara and I with our two sons, Jamie and Joe, were visiting what was then known in a politically incorrect way as a maiden aunt. Margaret lived alone in my grandmother’s house in Terenure, her widowed half-sister having died over two decades earlier.

Over the years, my Aunt Margaret had been very generous in sharing stories about the Comerford family, who we were, where we had lived, what we had done over the generations.

There was great excitement among two young boys as she solemnly handed over a sword, a family heirloom dating back to 1798. And then she quietly took out an old box of photographs, going through them one-by-one as she made sure we had photographs of my uncles and aunts, my grandparents, two of my great-grandfathers, and even one of my great-great-grandfather … the man who owned that sword in 1798.

The solemnity of that occasion cannot be under-estimated. She knew she was growing old, and that she was going to die without children to whom she could hand on the family memorabilia, the family traditions, the family stories, the family memories. She was handing them on to her nephew and his children, to the next generation and to the generation after.

As she went through those old, fading sepia photographs carefully, one-by-one, one photograph seemed to very precious as she withdrew it from the pack and turned it upside-down, out of vieew, away from our inquisitive, inquiring eyes.

It was indelicate, insensitive, of me to ask to see it. She left it turned down. “No-one you would know,” she said dismissively, and she went on trying to retrieve some more photographs, but perhaps a little more furtively now.

That one mysterious photograph remained on its own, turned face-down. When she stood up from the table and left the room briefly, we wondered whether she really wanted us to see that one, single photograph, without embarrassing her with any questions she was going to find difficult to deal with.

Yes, she was giving us that time. We turned it over slowly and respectfully, and there was a photograph of a dashing, handsome young man in his uniform. We turned it back over. We didn’t ask any more questions, and she never had another opportunity to provide any answers.

We can only imagine. We can only imagine her as a young woman who had many hopes, and many dreams; many hopes and many dreams that were shattered by the awful turn of events during World War II.

Perhaps the memories were bitter-sweet, too difficult to speak of. Perhaps she was thinking as she handed over the photographs and the sword that had the course of events been slightly different, she might instead have been handing over the sword and those photographs, along with the traditions and the memories, to her own sons or grandsons.

Perhaps her memory had been triggered, and she had recalled her own father coming back home from Thessaloniki in the middle of World War I, physically weary and mentally shattered by the evacuations from Suvla Bay and Gallipoli, the battles in northern Greece and southern Serbia, and what would eventually prove to be a deadly bout of malaria picked up in Thessaoliniki in the summer of 1916.

These were the hidden stories of my grandfather’s life and eventually his lonely death in hospital that were never passed on by his widow, my grandmother, or by his children, including that aunt. My father was too young at the time of my grandfather’s death to have remembered how he died.

My aunt’s stories were the hidden stories of a young Irishman who went out to battle, but whose very name is now forgotten, never been passed on. She died without ever telling us who this man was, this man who I now imagine might one day have been my uncle had he returned home.

And so my widowed grandmother, and her daughter, lived on in that house, sold eventually after Margaret’s death over 12 years ago in 1995.

What hopes had these women once had, one for her husband the other for a boyfriend? What hopes had they that were shattered by war. How did they feel as old soldiers paraded out, with their medals and poppies, and as politicians pledged: “We will remember them.”

The way to remember my grandfather would have been to provide him with proper medical care and attention. But he died a lonely death and is buried in a small country churchyard. The way to remember him might have been to see that his widow and children were well looked after. Instead, it was left to charities like the British Legion, Toc H (named after Bishop Talbot’s son) and the Earl Haig Fund to look after those shattered and broken lives.

The best way to look after him was to endeavour to abolish all wars. World War I was supposedly the war to end all wars. But look at the world today, look at the horrors in Europe in the last few decades that we have euphemistically labelled “ethnic cleansing,” look at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan today, and we have to ask if the concept of a “war to end all wars” was just a dream that kept hope alive on the beaches of Suvla and in the trenches in France.

When I listen to General Sir Michael Jackson and some of the other generals who have been through the horrors of war, I deeply respect their commitment to ending war, their commitment to their soldiers and their soldiers’ lives, and agree with their judgment that war is the failure of diplomacy and politics.

And when diplomacy and politics fail, the victims are not just the soldiers who die on the battlefield or who return home battered and beaten, waiting to die. The victims include the widows who are left to fend and to parent on their own, the young children like my father who grow up without knowing their own fathers or having a role model when it comes to being a parent. And the victims include those whose dreams and hopes are shattered, like the young woman whose hero never comes home.

The woman in our Gospel story this morning reminds me so much of the many forgotten women who are the hidden victims of so many wars.

The Sadducees are interested in point-scoring. They typify the politics and diplomacy of failure. They come to Jesus as the great point scorers of their day. They pose great political and theological dilemmas that seek to make Jesus captive to one theological or political position of the day.

If Jesus could only answer their interesting conundrum about this woman, then they could decide where he stood politically and theologically. Is he one of us? Or is he one of them? On the one hand, if he frequents the Temple so often, he must be a Sadducee, a supporter of the priestly caste. And the political implications of that are that he supports the political status quo and accepts, however reluctantly, the Roman occupation. On the other hand, as he frequents the synagogues so often, he must be a Pharisee, one of the rabbis, who seeks a purer nation, free and undefiled by the heathen occupiers.

And they bring the sad example of a widowed, childless woman to trap him, to corner him, to box him into one or other of two sides. Is he in the blue corner? Or is he in the red corner?

What is shocking for Jesus here? He was comfortable both in the Temple and in the Synagogue. He knew the traps and snares of both the priests and the Pharisees. And if he limited the importance of his message to one or other party, how could his message be relevant not only to the whole nation, but to the whole world, to the whole created order, the cosmos? And in their efforts to trap Jesus, this sad woman’s story is posed as some sort of legalistic and theological conundrum.

But in using the woman’s story, his inquisitors are abusing this woman. Where is their compassion for her? Had anyone considered what the future looked like for a woman whose husband had died leaving her childless? Instead of having compassion for her, they were seeing her as a negotiable commodity. Without children, she was dismissed as a failure. And without children, there was the fear that the family property would pass, after her eventual death, to her side of the family. She was a threat to the financial, social and economic stability of her in-laws. Her only value was as a negotiable item. For those priests, their only concern was to make sure that the dead man’s family could hold to the dead man’s property.

No one considered that the death of husband before she ever had children deprived this woman of love, took away her hopes for the future, shattered her confidence, left her lonely and feeling forsaken. As she heard the religious leaders of the day using her case as a means of entrapment, as a little in-joke among the religious leaders of the day, would it be surprising at all, if her religious faith, her faith in God, had been shattered too?

In his answer, Jesus affirms the value of every life. Long after the memories of the dead have faded away, and their grandchildren have forgotten them, long after their names are forgotten among those to whom they might have been uncles or aunts, long after politicians and diplomats have doled out their limited dollops of compassion and have allowed old soldiers and old widows to die and fade away, they will be like angels and children of God, children of the Resurrection, and to God all of them shall be alive.

The inquisitors of Jesus in this morning’s Gospel story are caught showing no charity and no love, no understanding of hope and the need for hope. And they are exposed, therefore, as totally lacking in faith.

The test of our faith lies in how we exercise the gifts and faith, hope and love. The test for any society of its core values must be in how it respects and meets the needs, cares, for its most vulnerable members, especially needy children, and elderly people like our widows. The trumpet call at Remembrance Day must not just be about remembering the dead, but remembering the living too. Do we use those on the margins as political footballs, or perhaps even totally forget them? Or do we realise that they too need our compassion, need the fruits of our gifts of faith, and of hope, and of love? For by our actions we will show whether or not we believe in God who is the God of the living, and who sees us all as children of the Resurrection.

+ And now may all praise, honour and glory be to that eternal God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

This semon was preached in Whitechurch Parish, Rathfarnham, Co Dublin, on Remebrance Day, Sunday 11 November 2007.