Commonplace Holiness
There are times when God seems absent. It seems that direction and blessing are gone. We have no sense that our prayers are being heard. We may be in a time of stress and trial, where there seems to be no relief in sight. Service that formerly brought us joy becomes dry and unrewarding. And we ask: Why?
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Forgiveness — the pardon of sins — is a central issue in Christianity. Jesus has made it so — and has taught us to pray: “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”
Yet, it is also such a difficult issue. When there is a deep wound, the pain is still there, and the anger still arises. In times like this, we wonder: do the words mean anything? When time and time again, you have to pray “Lord, give me the grace to forgive my enemy” you have to wonder if there is ever hope for you. There have been many times, when I have wondered this about myself. And, I know I’m not alone in having this problem.
Those people who have done things that have caused wounds — especially those who have done it quite deliberately and knowingly — are hard to forgive. Many people have been treated unfairly and unjustly. People have been abused. And, the problem with forgiveness is that it seems to say that all that was okay. To let go of the anger and the outrage seems to give in to injustice — to give permission for the abusers to do it again.
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I’ve said something about my usual habits in reading the Psalms here: Praying the Psalms. Briefly stated, my usual procedure in reading, meditating and praying with the Psalms is to read consecutively and slowly. For this purpose I use an Interlinear (Hebrew with English below) edition of the Psalms.
Usually this approach works very well. But, when I first got to Psalm 106 this didn’t work. With Psalm 106 it was necessary for me to see the opening verses of praise (vv. 1-5) in the light of their larger context. When I began to read and meditate on the Psalm, I was struck by the language of praise and worship in the opening verses (though they were similar to verses found elsewhere in the Psalms), but then I got “stuck” (from verse 6 onward) in a long section that recounts the sins of the nation of Israel (verses 6-46) and God’s unfailing commitment to them in spite of all that. This forced me to go back to the beginning and read it over again.
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I love the way this passage in the Gospel of Luke combines the call of the first disciples with the story of a miraculous catch of fish. There is so much evocative symbolism in this account. For some reason this time, my mind is drawn to that image: launch out into the deep. It is an image which is distinctive to Luke’s Gospel.
The parallel synoptic accounts are: Mark 1:16-20 and Matthew 4:18-22. They are both shorter and contain less detail. So, that makes Luke 5:1-11 distinctive enough that it’s a great text for preachers.
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