|
Homilies
Back
to Homilies menu
The Gift of the Reformation
Both of our readings today (Job 2 and 1 Peter 4) have to do with suffering. The suffering of Job has become proverbial, leading the author of the Letter of James to refer to Job’s “patience,” as he exhorts his community to endure persecution (5:11).
Job’s suffering is particularly painful because of the commonly accepted belief at the time that suffering was the fate of the wicked. Why, then, should Job be afflicted so cruelly by the God whom he counted as his friend? His wife urges him to “curse God and die” (Job 2:9), and, indeed, it is God who is responsible for Job’s suffering for having entered into a wager with Satan, who is certain that by afflicting Job with loathsome sores (v. 7) he will make him curse God to his face (v. 5).
When Job’s three friends arrive on the scene to comfort him (v. 11), they keep, at first, a prudent silence (v. 13).
“The fiery ordeal” mentioned in our second reading (1 Peter 4:12) is the suffering of persecution, which was the fate of the infant church, as it was also the fate of the Church of England during the dreadful reign of Mary Tudor, known to history as “bloody Mary.”
This year we are observing the 450th anniversary of the death of the most celebrated martyr of the English Reformation, Thomas Cranmer. The story has often been told how Cranmer dramatically turned the tables on his persecutors on the morning of his execution, by making a passionate confession of his faith in Christ before he was dragged through the streets by enraged officials.
At the stake, as the fire began to take hold, Cranmer stretched out his right hand, the hand which had signed his earlier recantation, so that it would be the first part of his body to feel the flames.
There is a saying, “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.” No one could have guessed on the day of Cranmer’s martyrdom that within three years there would be a new Queen of England, Elizabeth I, who would rebuild on a more secure basis all that Cranmer had labored for. His death had a far greater impact on the future direction of the English Church than if he had been granted a full life span.
But what is the legacy of the Reformation today, in our ecumenical environment, when the violence perpetrated by Catholics and Protestants alike during the 16th century is a cause for shame and embarrassment to both sides? I believe that the Reformation’s gift to us today is that it empowered every baptized Christian to read and appropriate the sacred scriptures for him- or herself.
To be sure, in rejecting the authority of an infallible interpreter of the Bible, the Reformation set the stage for all the dissensions within the Protestant fold, which have been as bloody and violent as the hostility between Catholics and Protestants. Our own divisions over the same sex issue and the imminent break-up of the American Episcopal Church, in which I was baptized, are the price we are paying for the privilege of reading and interpreting the Bible without an external authority to guide us.
But I would cite the words of the great saint of the Roman Catholic Counterreformation, Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, in which I spent 30 happy years: the individual “may find, by personal reflection and reasoning, something that will make it [supply ‘the Bible’] more meaningful for him or touch him more deeply, through the enlightenment of his understanding by divine grace. For it is not an abundance of knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul but rather an interior understanding and savoring of things.”
October 8, 2006
back
to top
|
