This week’s Collect and the Epistle reading offer excellent opportunities for understanding doctrines of the Christian Faith. The Gospel reading provides opportunity for increasing onw’s knowledge of historical events described in the Gospel of Luke. I am going to depart somewhat from the usual format by offering interpretation of both the Collect and the Epistle by Anglican clergyman and scholar Massey Shepherd, from his Commentary on the 1928 Book of Common Prayer published in 1950.
The Collect was adapted by Archbishop Cranmer from the Gelasian Sacramentary:
Let thy merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of thy humble servants; and, that they may obtain their petitions, make them to ask such things as shall please thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Shepherd offers the following helpful interpretation, in comparing it to another earlier Collect from the Leonine Sacramentary:
“It says in a somewhat different way [than the Leonine Collect], that God answers our prayers when we ask of Him according to His will. Put in other words, when our wills are conformed to His will, our prayers and petitions are acceptable to Him.”
The Epistle reading, 1st Corinthians 12:1-11, is St. Paul’s detailed lesson on the meaning of “spiritual gifts,” which he offered to help the formerly-pagan Corinthians understand the different between things which happen according to the true will of the Holy Spirit, one of the three divine persons of the Holy Trinity we celebrate during Trinitytide and the often impulsive and self-serving passions of the gods of the pagan era. Much of Paul’s correspondence with the congregation he founded at Corinth in similarly involved in corrections of incorrect pagan thinking and interpretation of events.
The Gospel reading, Luke 19:41-47a, as noted earlier the seventh reading during the period beginning on Whitsunday, includes two parts, The first is Jesus’ prophecy of the Destruction of Jerusalem, also commonly known as Jesus weeping over the fate of Jerusalem. It differs from the earlier reference in Luke 13:34, which describes events which had already happened. The second is part is Luke’s short account of Jesus driving out the money-changers from the Temple, including the famous line, “My house is the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves” (KJV text; see also Matthew 21:13; Mark 11:17). Jesus’ account accurately describes the method of the systematic destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Romans in 70 A.D. The prophecy was vividly illustrated in the Gospels of Otto III, produced at Reichenau, Germany, around 998 A.D. The image was used as Illustration No. 93 in the AIC Bookstore Publication, The Gospel of Luke: Annotated & Illustrated. The book is available through my Amazon Author Central page, with more information on the AIC Bookstore page. The Gospels of Otto III also includes a image of the driving out of the money-changers. The Gospel reading was discussed in Episode Five in our Bible Study video series on the Gospel of Luke, linked from the Digital Library page. The homily for the occasion is linked from the Podcast Homilies page.
As always, thank you for your interest and support. Glory be to God for all things! Amen!
Anglican Internet Church 
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