The final stage of Our Lord's pre-Passion ministry
As the Passion approaches, Our Lord intensifies his formation of the Apostles, preparing them for the kind of lives they will have to lead when they are sent to teach, govern and sanctify the Church.
As the Passion approaches, Our Lord intensifies his formation of the Apostles, preparing them for the kind of lives they will have to lead when they are sent to teach, govern and sanctify the Church.
Editor’s Notes
The following mini-series deals with the incidents around the healing of the ten lepers, which is read on the 13th Sunday after Pentecost.
As Fr Coleridge explains in this brief introductory piece, they took place in the late Judæan/Peræan phase of his ministry, which ended in the Our Lord’s final journey to Jerusalem and the Passion.
At this time, Our Lord intensifies his formation of the Apostles and the other committed disciples. The immediate context includes the Parable of the rich ma and Lazarus, and it is shortly followed by the raising of Lazarus.
In this chapter, Coleridge comments on the events and teachings in Luke 17.1-19. This principally consists of:
The inevitability of scandal (“It is impossible that scandals should not come”)
The necessity of faith (“If you had faith like to a grain of mustard-seed”)
Our absolute dependence on God (“We are unprofitable servants”)
After these four topics, St Luke recounts the healing of the lepers, which provides Coleridge the opportunity to discuss the importance of gratitude in the Christian life.
Various Teachings and Counsels
The Preaching of the Cross, Vol. III
Chapter I
St Luke xvii. 1–19
Story of the Gospels, § 117, 118
Burns and Oates, London, 1888
Headings and some line breaks added.
Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Manner of St. Luke
After the parable or story of the rich man and Lazarus, St. Luke seems to throw together a number of sayings and instructions of our Lord, which belong, no doubt, to the period of His Preaching on which we are now occupied, but which may or may not have been actually successive in point of time as they are arranged by the Evangelist.
For St. Luke was free, if it seemed good to him, or rather if he was so guided, to follow an order of ideas and subjects rather than that of strict chronological sequence. As a general rule he does not do this, differing especially from St. Matthew in not doing it. But there might be occasions, in the composition of a work like his, in which the chronological order might well seem of inferior importance, especially when the details of the story are passing incidents, selected with reference to the order of thought which was at the time guiding his pen.
We have an instance in the Gospel of St. Matthew, immediately after the conclusion of the account there given of the Sermon on the Mount, in which the Evangelist has been guided to group together a beautiful series of miracles of various kinds, many of which we know to have been separated in point of time. St. Matthew does this for the sake of giving a summary view of the manner in which our Lord showed His Divine power over various kinds of disease, over the devils, and over the elements of nature themselves, in confirmation of His claim to faith and obedience as the long promised Messias.
We know already that it is the purpose of St. Luke in this part of his Gospel to give an account of the latest months of our Lord’s preaching, months which were spent mainly in Judæa and Peræa. St. Luke is the only chronicler of the greater part of this teaching, and it is not impossible that in discharging this office he may now and then have thought it well to group together the paragraphs of his narrative according to an order of his own.
His Gospel collected before written
We may think this all the more likely, from the fact that his Gospel was first of all in his mind long before it was committed to writing, and that he used his blessed stores concerning the sayings and acts of His Master for the purposes of instruction in the Churches through which he travelled, as the companion of St. Paul, before he finally arranged it in the order in which we now possess it.
There must have been in his mind a great many heads of teaching as to which it was not originally certain how they were to be arranged in his book. The portion of this Gospel to which these remarks apply, and in which we have his account of this later period of the Public Life, extends to the middle of the eighteenth chapter. Hitherto we have followed St. Luke without breaking in on the even flow of the narrative by additions from any other Gospel. But we shall soon have to insert some important chapters from St. John, which seem to find their right place before the last part of this contribution by St. Luke to the general history.
There is a likeness between these paragraphs of the third Gospel, inasmuch as they all relate to counsels which are more or less uniformly fitted for persons who have made considerable progress in the service of God. Such are the counsels, as they may be called, concerning the careful avoidance of scandal, or the continual and unwearied practice of forgiveness of our brother, or the exercise of intense faith, or the necessity of serving God as a Master Whose rights over us are perfectly sovereign and peremptory, or the duty of thanksgiving, or the manner of preparing for the advent of the Kingdom of God, or perseverance and self-humiliation in prayer.
Such are the chief subjects to which these instructions refer.
Various Teachings and Counsels
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