Faith from fury

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed via this link. 

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Today’s gospel (Luke 7:1-10) is full of movement. There is the movement of the Jewish elders who bring to Jesus the message from a Roman centurion that his servant is in need of healing. There is Jesus’ movement, walking in the direction of the centurion’s residence. There is the movement of the belated messengers, who intercept Jesus on the way with a message whose sentiments so inspired the early Church that they became an integral part of the Eucharistic liturgy: I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof . And indeed, the movement of Jesus’ heart, elated by the faith of this gentile. All these movements are in a way redolent of the movement that the centurion himself goes through as he passes from his Roman religion to faith in the living Christ.

When he begins that journey, his religion is one of exchange and trade, like so many religions in which people entered into a kind of commercial arrangement with the gods. Before we get too snooty about such a pragmatic form of religion, we should of course recall that we are all too prone, consciously or unconsciously, to indulge in our own kind of trade with God – for what we will or will not do for Him if He does this or that for us. Accordingly, it is entirely possible that the centurion’s building of the local synagogue was done in this frame of mind, a barter with the local deity, although of course it is also possible that paying for the synagogue to be built was a hearts-and-minds operation – a Roman way of trading for the goodwill of the local people. One cannot always rule over others simply by force.

So, how, we wonder, did his journey in faith begin? Did he find in his trade with Jupiter and Mars some kind of preparation for the gospel? Did the bartering of slaughtered animals and grains of incense with the gods of the Roman imagination bring him, as it were, some sense of the God who really did exist? Some say that all religions are a path to God but in the case of this Roman centurion, it is his military experience that provided a pattern through which he could understand the empire of the God of all gods. For he understood authority like an officer who says ‘go’ to one and he goes: the docility of lower powers to higher powers. This was the message that was brought to Jesus by the second group of emissaries the centurion sent, probably after pacing the floor of his house wondering how his first message would be received. If, at the beginning of this faith journey, he was still remotely interested in the free trade of favours between the heavens and the earth, as its conclusion approached, he was persuaded by a faith that had given birth to humility, to a very un-Roman sense of indignity: Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, nor indeed even to loosen the strap of His sandal.

The importance of the centurion in a theological sense is that he was a gentile. The centurion foreshadows the fact that the terms of the new covenant that Jesus was about to write in His blood would also encompass the Roman world and beyond. But such theology holds the deepest spiritual significance for us because this Jesus, who brings peace and justice but not as the world dreams of them – indeed, not really as any other religion dreams of them – this Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. It was not by becoming more deeply pious within the frame of his Roman religion that the centurion approached God, although his Roman sense of order and indeed virtue perhaps placed him and others a step ahead of some cultures. The seeds of the Word fall where they will, even among the violent structures of a humanly almighty military power. Jesus rejected the advances of Herod Antipas and tongue lashed the Pharisees, but he welcomed two sets of messengers from a bloody Roman occupier. In this gospel, we see more faith in Jesus emerging paradoxically from a culture of furious force and cruelty than from all the pompous pieties and deceptive doctrines of a thousand panjandrums. Our centurion glimpsed the kingship of Christ through the machinery of an Empire that the centurion had thought was above all others.

O Mary, teach us to say ‘yes’ with the centurion to the empire of Jesus, the reign of the Father and the Spirit with Him, over our hearts, our community, and our country.