Saturday, March 21, 2015 (Thomas Cranmer)

Saturday, March 21, 2015 (Thomas Cranmer)

Psalm 143

     The psalms have an unparalleled power within scripture to speak directly to the reader/hearer as a reflection of one's personal emotional state; indeed the whole of the human condition, the good the bad and the ugly, finds representation within them. This may be encouraging (such as when we read that the Lord is our Shepherd and we therefore shall not want), or even disturbing at times (such as when we read about children's heads being dashed against the rocks), but the psalms are consistent in articulating our tumultuous relationship with ourselves and with God. 

    Psalm 143 is a fine example of this, giving voice to the inner anguish we experience in moments of marginalization, victimization, and persecution at the hands of others. It becomes particularly useful as a catalyst for self-reflection when we place its words, not on our own lips, but on the lips of those whom we would seek to marginalize or victimize or persecute. It offers us insight into the plight of those whom we would make "live in the dark places" (or return to dark places as the case may be), whose hearts we would make desolate, whose spirits we would make faint. Today we celebrate the Commemoration of a man who was both persecuted and a facilitator of marginalization and indeed persecution himself: Thomas Cranmer.

    Psalm 143 has a Cranmerian resonance to it. It is not hard to imagine the martyred Archbishop ‘remembering time past’ as he stretched out his right hand to God (the hand he had used to sign false recantations in self-preservation) and gave it first to the flames that would eventually consume him. He was a man who had spent his life and public career trying to discern God's ‘hidden face’ in an effort to avoid the fate of those whom he (rightly or wrongly) feared would ‘go down to the pit’; a man who ever endeavored to find the ‘road that he (and his people) must walk’ so that they might lift their souls to God. And despite the almost protean nature of his theological positions, or the rivers of blood that stained his hands by association (as the hands of every soul who fought for and against the English Reformation were stained) Cranmer was led by the Good Spirit of God to provide the ideological foundation for a movement which has ever sought to rest itself upon balanced and 'level ground'.

   As one of the principle architects for what would eventually become known as the “middle way” between Protestantism and Catholicism, Cranmer's life and legacy offer us a methodology for 'bringing our foes to naught' as the Psalmist seeks to do in the final verse of Psalm 143. Like Cranmer we may seek to not only understand the positions held by our foes, but to allow those positions to inform our own, and in doing so we may come to understand that the gulf separating us from our enemies is not deep enough to warrant considering them enemies at all; but co-travelers on a level middle ground.

- Kenneth Mcclure

[Kenneth Mcclure is a student in the M. Div. program in the Faculty of Divinity at Trinity College]