‘IT IS NO SIN TO LIMP’

Abstract

TODAY IS one of those recurrent Sundays in the calendar of University Sundays when things inevitably fall a bit flat: this day is not dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary or the Grace of Humility or the Sin of Pride or Remembering the Fallen. There are more, of course, of these plain days than specially dedicated ones. And the unadorned plainness of the day makes it very like those great stretches of the Christian Year—Low Sundays, so to say—when nothing particular, not much specially exciting, is expected to happen. It's just another Sunday. Greater glories are scheduled for later— Advent, or Easter, it might be. And very special days there certainly have been. But they're over, and today is just one of the ordinary many—the Two and Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, it might be; nearly anonymous days of that kind. It's one of those days that feel belated, in fact, sort of lame, limping even. And it's on such days—types of ordinary Christian and religious experience, I fancy—that one's thoughts turn, and I hope with some profit, to Old Testament Jacob—a type of the Christian that Charles Wesley takes as the model for himself in the hymn we just sang, 'Come, O Thou Traveller Unknown'. Here's Jacob in Genesis, 32: 22-32: 1 And he rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two women servants, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok. And he took them, and sent them over the brook, and sent over that he had. And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob. And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.