Pope
Francis inaugurated a Year of Mercy in December 2015. As an Anglican I have
been pondering his inspiring call to reflect on mercy. In this piece I want to
do that through re-reading the distinctively Anglican prayer known as the Prayer
of Humble Access and its characterisation
of God as full of ‘manifold and great mercies’. At the end I have included a
contemporary rendering of the prayer.
The Prayer of Humble Access is widely
disparaged – the ‘humble crumble’ – as a totem of a residual, nostalgic, Book
of Common Prayer (BCP) sensibility and culture. It appears to be unremittingly
negative about the body, soul and spirit.
I did not
grow up with the Prayer of Humble Access
in its BCP form, but a bowdlerised version
in the Alternative Service Book 1980.
The prayer is not a nostalgic one for me but has connected with me quite
recently as a personal prayer of preparation before receiving Communion. Why do
I think that?
The question
of unworthiness is a tricky one. How can I be unworthy if the forgiveness of my
sins has been declared in my baptism, the Sacrament of Reconciliation and the
general confession at the beginning of the Eucharist? A sense of unworthiness
before God and other people can be crippling. It can also be enabling. For
example, Moses, the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, Jonah and the Blessed Virgin Mary,
are all aware of their unworthiness in the face of what God calls them to do.
They respond to God in the face of the inadequacy: Moses’ inarticulacy (Exodus
6.12); Isaiah’s unclean lips (Isaiah 6.5); Jeremiah’s youth (Jeremiah 1.6); Jonah’s
sense of unworthiness was marked by flight from God’s call (Jonah 1.3); Mary’s
wonder at what was being asked of her (Luke 1.34). There is such a thing as a
healthy sense of unworthiness. It acknowledges the capacity to receive the
worth that God gives each of us created in God’s image and likeness (Genesis
1.26).
More than
unworthiness the prayer calls us away from an overblown sense of our own
righteousness like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable (Luke 18.9-14). Un/worthiness
and un/righteousness is overhauled by God’s ‘manifold and great mercies’, the
God whose nature, ‘is always to have mercy’. I become more and more aware that
trusting in my own righteousness is entirely wrong way to approach God and my
neighbour. The Pharisee approaches the holy place trusting in his own
righteousness, the publican ‘[does] not presume’ to trust in anything other
than God’s mercy.
Daniel
prays, ‘we do not present our supplication before you on the ground of our
righteousness, but on the ground of your great mercies’ (Daniel 9.18b). A
deeper understanding of the rich Biblical seam of mercy is very timely. What do
we mean when we say, ‘Lord, in your mercy,
hear our prayer’, ‘Merciful Father,
accept these prayers…’ or ‘Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison (Lord, have mercy,
Christ, have mercy)? How do we articulate the Christian understanding of the
‘merciful Father’ to Muslims who know God as Compassionate and Merciful? (See also James. 5.11b).
The momentum
of the prayer is one of approaching: there is a forward trajectory. It evokes
Moses approaching the bush that was on fire but miraculously not consumed, and
the LORD told him, ‘remove the sandals from your feet for the place on which
you stand is holy ground’ (Exodus 3.5).
The sandals
of our vanity and egoism are what we take off as we approach God in the
Sacrament. In vivid language the prayer expresses our unworthiness – much as
the publican – but the abject language grates for many. Why do we have to say
that we are not worthy, ‘to eat the crumbs from under thy table’? The
Syro-Phoenician woman got it (Matthew 15.21-28; Mark. 7.24-30) – ‘woman, great
is your faith’ – after first approaching Jesus saying, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord,
Son of David’ (Matthew 15.22).
Left there
the prayer outright denies the rich language of the declaration from God that
in Christ, we are profoundly worthy. By baptism we are his Body before we share
in his broken Body of the Sacrament.
After we
acknowledge the disabling and dissembling character of ‘our own righteousness’ which
frustrates God’s loving purpose, the prayer changes gear. There is new
trajectory. The Lord’s property is to
have mercy, that is to act kindly and justly and consistent with the purpose
that we, believing in him, ‘should not perish’ and that Christ does not come to
condemn (John 3.16-17).
The approach
we make is to share God’s life. We are not spectators like Moses, but partakers
in the Divine Glory. Like the Bush, we are set on fire in the Spirit but are
not consumed. Boldly, Peter declares that when we set the corruptions of self
and the world, we become ‘participants of the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1.4).
So we
approach, prompted by God, ‘the Father of Mercies’ (2 Corinthians 1.3) to share
at his table where we are not just worthy to be, but invited.
This is where
another layer of biblical allusion is added. We need to go to the sixth chapter
of St John’s gospel where we find this vivid language of Christ’s Body and
Blood. Jesus speaks of the bread, the manna, which the Israelites ate in the
wilderness. It sustained them only a day at a time (John 6.49). The Living
Bread that comes down from heaven will feed, sustain and give eternal life: eat
it and you will never die. But Jesus moves us on from thinking that this is
simply bread or perishable manna; it is his flesh. As it was for many of his
first hearers, this is a stumbling block to so many (John 6.60).
In the
prayer this fleshly language continues, ‘that our sinful bodies may be made
clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood’. In a
time when we are so alert to the corrosive effect of low self-esteem and poor
body image to speak of ‘our sinful bodies’ seems beyond the pale. Where is any
sense of valuing the human body, which is, ‘a temple of the Holy Spirit within
you’ (1 Corinthians 6.19)?
It comes
back to a profound honesty about who we are, and, actually, the great dignity of
not being abandoned. It is the lost sheep who is sought out and brought back by
the Good Shepherd; the lost coin sought out by the woman; the wayward son
welcomed back by the father (Luke 15).
To say ‘our
sinful bodies’ acknowledges that they are in need of repair, healing and
redemption and can be made clean and whole by God’s grace. After all, the woman
in the parable swept and made clean her house as she searched for the lost coin
(Luke 15.8). This is the redeemed washed in the blood of the Lamb (Rev. 7.14).
The prayer
is about much more than any sense that it’s only about me sorting myself out.
As Pope Francis reminds us, drawing from the Fathers, ‘The Eucharist, although
it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a
powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.’ (Evangelii Gaudium §47, p. 29). It seems to me that the prayer makes
that clear.
It is God
who makes me a worthy recipient of his grace in the Sacrament: he first loved
me (1 John 4.19) and all my life is about catching up with that reality.
That
reality, and human-divine interplay, is total in Jesus Christ and is the source
and summit of my life. The prayer ends with a great restatement of human
worthiness in Incarnation of the Word, that, ‘he may dwell in us and we in
him’.
A contemporary version of The Prayer of
Humble Access
Most
merciful Lord,
your love
compels us to come in.
Our hands
were unclean,
our hearts
were unprepared;
we were not
fit
even to eat
the crumbs from under your table.
But you,
Lord, are the God of our salvation,
and share
your bread with sinners.
So cleanse
and feed us
with the
precious body and blood of your Son,
that he may
live in us and we in him;
and that we,
with the
whole company of Christ,
may sit and
eat in your kingdom.
Amen.
Text of the prayers from Common Worship © Archbishops' Council 2000
© Andrew
Bishop 2016
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