 |
| Portrait of Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, from the collection at Lambeth Palace. |
Where power and mercy
are combined, there is God manifest; where we see righteousness or love, we see
the character of God; where we see these triumphing, there we see God in
action; where we see them achieve their purpose despite all calculable
possibilities, there we acknowledge God signally self-revealed.—William
Temple, Nature, Man, and God
Today is the day we remember the life of Archbishop of
Canterbury William Temple, who died in 1944 after a brief two years as the
Archbishop of Canterbury. He was Archbishop of Canterbury during the depths of
World War II, but although he did not live to see the end of that conflict, he
had already begun advocating for a post-war society in which the Church
advocated that power and mercy work to create a society in which the welfare of
the people was paramount. Archbishop Temple’s leadership was inspirational at a
time in which unimaginable evil had attempted to take the world by the throat,
when power had been wedded instead to a culture of death and oppression. In the
midst of this, William Temple spoke hope and possibility to a people engaged in
one of the greatest struggles of the 20th century. He dared to believe in
miracles and the power of God’s love even in a desolate place filled with cries
of mourning.
I thought of Archbishop Temple’s life and work when reading
the gospel for this morning. The gospel for today’s daily office readings is
Matthew’s account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Our gospel story is also
set in desolation and mourning. Jesus demonstrates power and mercy
nearly from the outset. He had withdrawn to a desert place after learning of
the death of John the Baptist, to be by himself for a while, to grieve. Yet the
crowds followed him anyway. Rather than turn the crowds away, Jesus “had
compassion on them and healed their sick.” Jesus, moved by mercy, used his
power for healing among those who were so desperate that they were willing to
go far off into a desert place on the chance that they could be healed. Power
and mercy combined, and God was revealed indeed, especially to those whose life
was restored to them. In a place of desolation, Jesus’s compassion makes people
whole.
But Jesus was not finished. Recognizing the hunger of the
crowd, Jesus has them sit down, and feeds a crowd of five thousand men and
their families from five loaves and two fish. “Bring them to me,” Jesus says,
and then he once again gives the crowd more than enough to satisfy their
hunger. The echoes of this miracle resound every time we gather around the
altar, God’s table, to give thanks through the Eucharist, just as Jesus lifted
up his eyes to heaven and multiplied those loaves. Each time we gather around
the altar, especially, the miraculous love of God is revealed to us just as it
was to that crowd on the west shore of the Sea of Galilee, power and mercy
combine to show us and recall to us the greatest force in the world: love.
Jesus continues to feed us, to recognize our needs and
respond to us in love just he did to that crowd. We are fed so that we can go into our lives
after we depart from that altar, and carry the power and mercy of Christ into a
world that is just as famished—and even more besides, perhaps—than that crowd
was. In Fellowship with God, Archbishop Temple remarked, “We know that our
great need in our everyday discipleship— in office, or factory, or shop, or
school, or in our own homes— is spirit and life; and we know that we have received
these in the sacrament of the Body and Blood of the Son of Man.“
Let us sit down before Christ, and be fed by Him, and then, transformed by the power and mercy, the spirit and life, that draws us together before God, serve God this day, as William Temple and all the saints we sang about just last Sunday continue to try to do.
(This was first posted at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on November 6, 2015.)
No comments:
Post a Comment