• What the weight actually was
• Three questions and three jobs
• The word, and where it usually gets aimed
• What our own record shows
• The loading bay
• The man in the prayer
• The older list

We might have been burdensome. Sit with the accounting in that, because Paul is doing sums in public and every figure is in one column.

He has just listed what he did not take. Not the speech of flattery. Not an occasion of covetousness. Not glory of men, neither of you nor of others. Three refusals in two verses, and then the line that gathers them up: we might have been burdensome to you, as the apostles of Christ.

The clause is a confession of capacity. He is telling them what was available to him, and the availability is the point. We might have been burdensome is a sentence only a person with standing can say. Nobody without power has ever had to rule that out.

Notice where the word lands. The Lesson does not say the Thessalonians were burdensome, and it never comes close to saying it. The weight in that sentence belongs to the apostle, and it is a weight he could have set down on them and chose not to.

That is the whole grammar of the morning and it is worth slowing over. We might have been burdensome, and the burden under discussion is the minister, not the congregation.

What the weight actually was

So what would it have looked like if he had used it? Paul is specific, and none of his three items is dramatic. We might have been burdensome does not describe a scandal. It describes three ordinary habits.

Flattery first. That is the small daily transaction where the person with standing tells the room what it wants and the room supplies the warmth back. Nobody is defrauded and everybody is slightly worse off. We might have been burdensome, and this is the cheapest way it happens.

Covetousness second, which the Douay calls an occasion rather than an act. He is not denying that he took money. He is denying that he arranged any of it so that money could arrive. We might have been burdensome, and the occasion is the thing he refused to build.

Then glory of men, neither of you nor of others, which is the one I find hardest to shake. He rules out the admiration of the people he served and the admiration of everybody watching him serve them. We might have been burdensome, and being admired for not being is still being.

Three refusals, and every one of them is a way of making the people in front of you produce something for you. That is what the weight was going to be. We might have been burdensome means, in plain English, that we could have made this cost you, and we did not.

And the alternative he names is not a lighter version of authority. It is a different posture altogether: we became little ones in the midst of you, as if a nurse should cherish her children. Not the height reduced. The height abandoned.

Then the verse that overshoots everything: we would gladly impart unto you not only the gospel of God, but also our own souls. We might have been burdensome, and instead the account runs the other way, out of him.

Three questions and three jobs

Now the Gospel, which is doing the same work from the far side.

Christ asks Simon Peter the same question three times. Lovest thou me. And on the third asking the text stops to record something the Gospel did not have to record at all: Peter was grieved.

He is not grieved because the question is hard. He is grieved because it has been asked again. We might have been burdensome, says the Lesson, and here is a man feeling the weight of being asked to account for himself once more than was comfortable.

Watch what happens after each answer, because the pattern is the argument. Peter answers, and he is given a job. Feed my lambs. He answers again, and he is given the job again. Feed my lambs.

He answers a third time, from somewhere further down, and the job comes back a third time. Feed my sheep. We might have been burdensome would describe a master who made the third answer buy something the first two had not.

There is no interval anywhere in it. We might have been burdensome would have looked like a probation, a waiting period, a term of proving before the work was handed over. We might have been burdensome would have been the easiest thing in the world here, and the Gospel simply does not do it.

And look at Peter’s third answer, because he stops arguing his own case in it. Lord, thou knowest all things: thou knowest that I love thee. He has run out of ways to vouch for himself and hands the question to somebody who already has the answer.

That clause sits right beside this morning’s Gradual, which says of God, in the middle of a psalm about speaking out, O Lord, thou knowest it. Twice in one Mass a man declines to be his own evidence. We might have been burdensome is what it would have looked like to make him produce it anyway.

We have heard this same exchange once before, though not like this. In December it came to us as the condensed antiphon of a pope’s Mass, four clauses at the door of the liturgy. Today the Church reads the whole dialogue, grief and all, and the grief is the part the antiphon could not carry.

The word, and where it usually gets aimed

Here is the turn, and I would rather make it plainly than let it sit implied.

Burdensome is not a neutral word in ordinary English. It is one of the standard words for a person whose care costs somebody something, and it gets aimed with a good deal of accuracy. So I am naming disabled people and chronically ill people this morning, and I am naming them on the word itself.

The teaching I mean is the burden calculation: the quiet arithmetic in which a life is priced against what it takes to sustain, and the person living it is expected to feel the shortfall and apologise for it. It is rarely stated. It arrives as a sigh, as a discussion held in the third person while the person is present, as gratitude required at a volume nobody would ask of a paying customer. We might have been burdensome is the sentence that will not sit beside it.

Today’s Lesson will not carry that arithmetic, and the reason is grammatical rather than sentimental. We might have been burdensome puts the word on the apostle. In the only sentence in this Mass where the word appears, the possible burden is the one with the power, and the people are simply the people.

Let me shut one door before it opens, because this language can be misheard. Nothing here says that a body is a weight, or that needing care is a debt somebody is running up. The Lesson is not weighing anyone. It is describing what one man declined to place on a room, which is a fact about him.

This is a different claim from the ones we have made recently, and I want the difference on the record rather than assumed. In August we named the same people on worth, and again on being treated as children, and on Monday on what a constrained life can produce. Today is none of those three. Today is only about who the word gets attached to, and the Lesson answers that in four words: we might have been burdensome.

What our own record shows

Put the fruit test to it, on our own record, which is the only record this ministry is entitled to examine.

Christianity has produced hospitals, orders founded to nurse people nobody else would touch, and centuries of ordinary parishioners driving other people to appointments. That is real and it is not a small column. It has also produced ramps that were discussed for years, sacraments withheld until somebody was satisfied a person understood them, and a habit of praying for people in their hearing as though they had left the room.

A faith judged by what it grows does not get to keep only the first column. Both grew in the same soil. We might have been burdensome is the sentence that sorts them, because it asks who was made to feel the weight of the arrangement.

And notice that the correction needs no theology whatever. If the help you give arrives with an invoice attached, payable in gratitude, deference or visible improvement, then it was never quite help. We might have been burdensome is a plain ethical test and it survives the removal of every religious word in it.

The loading bay

There is a story sometimes told of a man who drives a van two mornings a week, and who is behind a supermarket by twenty to seven while the tarmac is still wet.

The roller shutter goes up and the crates come out. We might have been burdensome has no purchase at that hour. Short-dated bread, boxed produce, occasionally a pallet of something nobody could shift. He counts crates, marks a sheet on a clipboard, loads, and drives to three drops: a hall, a hostel, and a stairwell in a block of flats where somebody meets him at the door.

The whole run takes under two hours and he is at his own work by nine. We might have been burdensome describes a great many charitable arrangements, and it does not describe this one.

A newer volunteer asked him once how they make sure the people taking the bread actually need it. He said they do not check. The food is bought, paid for and already on its way to a skip, and asking a person to demonstrate need is charging for it a second time, in a currency they have to produce on the spot while somebody watches.

I have turned that answer over for a while, and I do not think it was carelessness. He had found, with no vocabulary for it, the exact thing Paul is describing. We might have been burdensome, and the second price is where the weight would have gone.

The other detail worth having is that he does not stay for the handing out. He unloads and leaves. We might have been burdensome covers the man who stays to be thanked, and it is a small distance from the door to the van, and it is the whole distance.

We told a story about the unhoused in August, and that one was about a person standing on level ground with everybody else. This one is aimed elsewhere. This one is about the giver, and about the tax a giver can levy without ever putting a hand out.

The man in the prayer

Which brings us to the name inside today’s Collect, and to a life that fits the day better than most.

The record of his life gives Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto, born on the second of June, 1835, at Riese in the province of Treviso. His father Giovanni Battista Sarto was a postman and died in 1852. His mother Margarita lived to see her son made a cardinal.

He was ordained in 1858 and spent nine years as chaplain at Tombolo, where, the pastor being elderly, he took on most of the functions of a parish priest. And in those nine years he established a night school for adult students. We might have been burdensome was available to him then as much as later, and what he did with the evenings was teach people who worked in the daytime.

Stay on that, because it is the least impressive thing in the article and the most useful. A night school is not a monument. It is a room, a set of hours nobody else wanted, and a decision to meet people at the only time they were free rather than at the time that suited the teacher. We might have been burdensome is what the other timetable would have been.

After that the offices arrive in order. Arch-priest of Salzano in 1867, canon of Treviso in 1875, Bishop of Mantua in 1884, Patriarch of Venice in 1893, and elected pope on the fourth of August, 1903. The Collect this morning asks that we follow his teachings and examples, and the examples are allowed to include a night class.

His motto was to restore all things in Christ, taken out of the first chapter of Ephesians. Set that beside the Lesson and it stops sounding like a programme of grand repair. We might have been burdensome, and a restoration that begins by not leaning on anybody is a slower and better one.

The older list

One more thing, because this Mass has a twin in our own recent memory.

Peter, who is asked the three questions today, later wrote his own list for the men who would hold charge over other people. We read it in November: feed the flock of God, not by constraint, and not for filthy lucre, and not as lording it over anyone. Three prohibitions, exactly like Paul’s, and aimed at exactly the same person.

So we now have the older apostle’s version of the same list and the younger one’s, and they agree without overlapping in a single word. We might have been burdensome is Paul’s way of saying it, and not by constraint is Peter’s, and neither of them ever puts the conditions on the flock.

That is a striking thing for a Church to read on a pope’s feast day. Twice, in two Lessons, the office is defined by what it is forbidden to extract. We might have been burdensome, and the whole of the authority in question is the authority to have made this cost you, unexercised.

So take the sentence into whatever you are actually responsible for. If you hold anything over anyone, a rota, a wage, a diagnosis, a door, the question the Lesson puts is not whether you were kind about it. It is whether the people underneath it had to pay you in something. We might have been burdensome is a test you can run on yourself tonight, and the answer will be in their behaviour rather than in your intentions.

And if you are the one currently being helped, take the other half of it. Peter got the job three times without once being made to prove he had earned it back. We might have been burdensome was never the arrangement, and nobody is entitled to charge you for what you have received.

↑ The order resumes below.