Asperges

 

Musings for the Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Quinquagesima), the 27^th of February 2022. Pew Notes, St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne. 

Asperges is about the first experience we have during most of the year when we gather for High Mass worship at St. Peter’s. The words of Psalm 51 settle us into the worship; they also set the reality of our being there. Because this is not just a case of ‘come as you are’, which is anyway a given. Sometimes we ‘come as we aren’t’, full of illusions and quiet desperation and self-interest before all else. The words speak to the state we are in, our need for forgiveness, our varied messiness or pride or unhappiness or whatever. They gently but firmly ask for mercy, with the belief that genuine repentance can bring relief. When our sin is ever before us, our deepest need is restoration to life, even fullness of life. It is a call to become more than just who we are now. Psalm 51 is a prayer for transformation. 

The Gospel is heard at every service of the year and today’s three sayings are fairly direct awakenings to the fact that we are not all we think we’re cracked up to be. No one wants to hear that modern life is a case of the blind leading the blind. Jesus the teacher is explaining how we become more like him, our blindness cleaned up, our illusions overcome, the more we follow his way, as distinct from heading happily into some pitfall or other. His way is that of love and forgiveness. The hard, yet simple, process of transformation is possible. He has a way of saying it that makes us listen. 

Even if we are thick as two short planks, we see Jesus’ joke about the speck in someone else’s eye. He does not exaggerate when he says that the object in our own eye may be so big we cannot see it for looking. The beam (Greek: dokon) is the largest piece of timber in house construction, a measure of the immense difference between us in our mansion and those who have next to nothing to own, a mote of sawdust. As Psalm 51 has it, “a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” 

More arrestingly still, Jesus challenges us with what is in our hearts, whether of good or evil, “for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.” It’s not a case of one or the other. Each of us lives with choices in our knowledge of good and evil. For the Psalmist, the choice is to “teach me wisdom in my secret heart,” to ask God to “blot out all my iniquities.”

Philip Harvey