Attention and silence

 A recording of today's gospel and blog can be found here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 14: 1-6) recounts another episode in which Jesus once more breaches the rules of the Pharisees and heals on the Sabbath. Once more, one poor suffering soul is the object of Jesus’ mercy and the object of the Pharisees’ cold calculations. Once more, Jesus asks a question of the Pharisees that they cannot answer; a question that only shows up the fact that it is not their legalism that causes the problem but their sheer hypocrisy in wanting to apply one rule to Jesus and a different rule to others. And they could not reply to these things, the gospel concludes.

The French philosopher Simone Weil, who came to the doors of the Church but remained on the threshold, argued that prayer was nothing other than a kind of attention. But one thing that is so striking about this very short passage is that nobody could deny the attention of the Pharisees was focused on Jesus. One Sabbath, when Jesus went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully. They continue gazing as Jesus responds to their complaints about Him, but they remained silent, says the gospel.  

So, what is the difference between what the Pharisees are doing and the action of prayer? Quite simply the difference is that prayer is attention in humility. He must increase and I must decrease. The seventeenth-century religious sisters of Port Royal-des-Champs in Paris, who believed in the errors of Jansenism, were said to be as pure as angels but as proud as demons. Nobody would have questioned their attention or their silence; it was the uprightness of their hearts that was at stake.

The amazing thing is that despite it all – despite the pride of the Pharisees and their hypocrisy – Jesus still goes among them, reaching out even as His hand is slapped away. He had driven them to silence, but it is they who must surrender themselves. There is no other way. His power to cure the burdens of His people was proven a thousand times over; nobody who had already seen him perform a miracle could have doubted what would be the outcome of that scene in the Pharisee’s house.

And, so here now is Jesus attending to our prayer, and we attending to Him, but our attention is not enough. If the Pharisees’ case is anything to go by, we must strive to ensure that our approach to the Lord is paved not with self-acclamation, not with thoughts of what we might achieve or deserve in the process, nor with movements of the heart that anticipate our own self-gratification, that subtle stuff that creeps through our religion like rising damp. Rather, it must be paved with faith – faith in the One we are speaking to; in His majesty and in His tenderness – and humble and contrite recognition of who we are, the health-giving bread of self-knowledge that reminds us we are rebels, merchants of imperfection, at best publicans who kneel in the shadows of the Temple to pour out our hearts to God, not Pharisees notching up another supposed spiritual conquest on the end of the bench.

In the end, evil doers from the devil down ape the actions of God and ape God’s servants. If like them we watch Jesus carefully and remain silent before Him, let our watching be full of love and our silence be full of reverence and humility. For we are meant to be the anawim of the Lord, the little ones who gather like Mary around the throne of His heart where dwells the majesty and mystery of His abiding love.