… is part of the Prayer of Humble Access, an optional phrase said by the congregation in an Anglican Church as part of the preparation in a eucharistic liturgy.
I’ve often pondered this phrase and what it says about us (and me). And struggle with it.
It’s not that I don’t understand the point that’s being made. I do. We are not “inherently worthy”. It’s just that I disagree with the need to emphasise this point. Each week.
The passage of scripture on which this is based comes from Mark Chapter 7 where Jesus encounters a non-Jewish woman who asks for healing for her child…
From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.
He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go – the demon has left your daughter.” So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
Mark 7:24-30 (NRSV)
Even a cursory reading shows that the point of this story is that the woman is actually worthy to be helped! Although Jesus takes the opportunity to explain that she’s not one of the chosen ones to whom he’s been sent, with the implication that he can’t help, her answer (of which he approves) results in a commendation of her faith and the healing of her child.
So for the liturgy to make us repeat the phrase “we are not worthy” is not just highly ironic but increasingly feels outrageous to me – she was worthy! It’s often said that the kingdom of God is upside down. It usually is in the case of Jesus’ life & teaching, and so it is here with him, as a Jewish Rabbi, providing assistance to a gentile woman.
But it seems to me that this portion of the liturgy is trying to invert Jesus’ teaching and turn it “right side” up again. And by making the congregation repeat it weekly, there is a clear intention to ram home a certain (very negative) view of what it is to be human.
In fact, surely if we want to bring to mind the core of Jesus’ teaching here wouldn’t it be more appropriate to repeat “we are worthy to gather up the crumbs under your table” each week? It would certainly make a nice change. And it might even provide a suitable shock to people (overly) familiar with the opposite view.
This is not to deny that there’s something wrong with human nature. But I guess I’m fed up with the relentless “glass half empty” view as typified in the Western Christian tradition – look at what we’re not. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Our glass is also half full, by virtue of our being made “in the image and likeness of God” (Genesis 1:26-7). And it’s the frequent reminders of this (and some of its wonderful implications) that I find often emphasised in the writing of the Eastern Fathers of the Church.
I was delighted to come across a paper by the late Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware who quotes a Rabbinic saying to highlight the need to balance the reality of human frailty with the beauty of our being made “in the image”…
Let me in conclusion quote a third Jewish text that exactly sums up our human condition as persons in the divine image.
“Rabbi Bunam said to his disciples: Everyone must have two pockets, so that he can reach into the one or the other, according to his needs. In his right pocket are to be the words: ‘For my sake was the world created,’ and in his left: ‘I am earth and ashes.’ ”
Such is indeed the human paradox. As persons we are a strange mixture of glory and frailty, of infinite possibilities and actual failure; in the words of St. Gregory of Nazianzos (d.ca. 389), We are “earthly, yet heavenly… midway between majesty and lowliness…. both spirit and flesh.”
K. Ware, “In the Image and Likeness”: The Uniqueness of the Human Person in J. T. Chirban (ed.), Personhood: Orthodox Christianity and the Connection Between Body, Mind and Soul (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1996), p.11
It’s this balancing act that I think the contemporary Western Church is in desperate need of rediscovering in its liturgy, hymns and preaching. Because right now I think there are an awful lot of people with their left pockets full of earth and ashes and pretty much nothing in their right.
For some suggested texts to print out, place in your right pocket and bring to your next Eucharist, try the writings of St Gregory of Nyssa and especially the inspirational things he says about the image of God in Humanity.