Sunday/Sparrows

                               Sunday/Sparrows

Today's gospel is the Sparrow gospel where Christ presents some serious concepts.
"Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father."
Here is the oneness of Nature and the interest in God in its minute workings. No watchmaker He.
Shakespeare was impressed. So Hamlet says:
 "There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come - the readiness is all."
Christ may well have been smiling when He said this. A sparrow is a noisy bird without a song. As we may be.

 Bede wrote a history of the Anglo-Saxons and this text is Bede's account of the Anglo-Saxon's religious beliefs around the year 627 A.D. as they debated the merits of this new Christianity:
  Another of the king's chief men signified his agreement with this prudent argument, and went on to say: "Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter's day with your thegns and counselors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside, the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he   Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing. Therefore, if this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it." The other elders and counselors of the king under God's guidance, gave similar advice.