Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Sunday of All Saints of Rus’-Ukraine, Tone 3; Our Venerable Father Thomas of Maleum; and Acacius mentioned in The Ladder of Divine Ascent of Saint John Climacus
Read
Romans 6:18-23; Romans 8:28-39
Matthew 8:5-13; Matthew 5:1-16
Take a guess how many times we sing “Lord, have mercy” in the Divine Liturgy. Excluding the preparatory prayers of the clergy and any added petitions after the Gospel, the usual parish will sing it 44 times in each Liturgy. 44 times. Some have come to me as their pastor and asked, “Father, why do we have to sing “Lord, have mercy” so many times? Doesn’t the Lord hear us the first time?”
Their assumption that the Lord hears the first time is correct. We have heard in today’s Gospel that when the Gentile centurion but asked once for the Lord to heal his slave, the Lord started to move towards his house to heal him (despite the norm that a pious Jew would never enter into the house of a Gentile). In the same way, the Lord moves to answer our petition when we make it. Here’s the question: do we have the same faith as the centurion?
We sing “Lord, have mercy” so often not because the Lord is deaf to our petitions. Rather, it is so that we may grow in faith. It is so that we may come to a faith whereby we ask once with absolutely complete trust in the Lord, a faith like the centurion’s.
As Dmitri Royster has noted, St. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote about the centurion’s faith and his approach to the Lord as an example for us all: “Wherefore we must purify ourselves first, and then approach this converse with the Pure … be like the Centurion who would seek for healing, but would not, through a praiseworthy fear, receive the Healer into his house. Let each one of us also speak so, as long as he is still uncleansed, and is a Centurion still, commanding many in wickedness, and serving in the army of Caesar, the World-ruler of those who are being dragged down; ‘I am not worthy that thou shouldest enter under my roof’” (Oration on the Holy Lights, 9).
Let’s keep singing “Lord, have mercy” until we get it – a centurion’s faith.