When the Cathedral was built in 1962, thousands queued to get in and see it. I was among them: my parents thought we should make the journey. For me as a boy, driving up the newly opened M1 was the real excitement of the day. Yet I vividly remember going into the Cathedral, taking in its light-filled space, gazing at Graham Sutherland’s tapestry of Christ in Glory and at John Piper’s kaleidoscopic baptistery window, and seeing my reflection staring up at me in the jet-black polished marble floor. I recall that I sat in the centre of the nave on my own while the crowds swirled round the periphery. I felt as though I had the Cathedral to myself. Ever since, I’ve reckoned that large naves are the best places to sit, ponder and pray in.
Coventry is one cathedral in two
buildings. The shell of the old
cathedral bombed in 1940 is as eloquent as any ruins in England. It speaks poignantly of ‘war and the pity of
war’, Wilfred Owen’s words quoted by Benjamin Britten in the War Requiem, commissioned for the
Cathedral and first performed there 50 years ago this week. But the ruins don’t only speak of sacrifice
and death. They speak powerfully of life. At open-air eucharists in the early morning
on Easter Day and Whit Sunday, it was as if the skeleton of that beautiful 15th
century church reached for the sky, a striking metaphor of resurrection as if
we were in some great empty tomb. It
reminded me of Ezekiel’s dry bones: arid, dead, lifeless things which the
Spirit brings back to life again.
The focus of Coventry’s
ministry ever since the war has been reconciliation. Beginning with the rebuilding of friendship
with Germany, this work has spread to many places of conflict across the
world. On Friday the Archbishop of
Canterbury preached about it. He began with John Cosin’s hymn ‘Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire’ which children from a local
school had danced to while it was sung. Enable with perpetual light the dullness of
our blinded sight. Reconciliation,
he said, always involves seeing the
other person or community in a new way. The Cathedral building helps us do
this. You walk up the nave towards the image of Christ on the tapestry. Then you
turn round and see the array of colour in the aisle windows that were concealed
from you as you walked towards the high altar. At the west end you are aware of
the Hutton glass screen with its angels and saints. Beyond that you see the ruins, symbol of the
wreckage and pain of humanity. This, he said, is how Christ on the tapestry
sees the world: not as a lost and hopeless place but transfigured by God’s
mercy symbolised in the coloured windows and the angels and saints on the
screen. He drew attention to the diminutive figure of the human being held
between Christ’s feet. From that safe place, held by Christ’s love, that figure
is also looking out on the ruins, seeing it as Jesus sees it. This is you and
me. If we see the world like this, reconciliation happens.
One of the meanings of
Pentecost is that it promises the transformation of the whole of life, even in
its darkest, most broken passages. The face of Christ has a gaze that seems to
know you in a profound way, draw you upwards, put to you God’s questions, speak
compellingly about grace and truth. Above him a shaft of light streams down on his
head as if he were being baptised by a glow that pours over him from a window
in the sky. And right at the top is the
origin of that light: a dove. She is
descending on that sunbeam towards Christ and towards us: the Holy Spirit of Christ
the risen Head who animates the body of his church, the community of the
baptised, the faithful of every age and the faithful of today. Us.
The tapestry gives us an image
of our reading from St John. There, the resurrection and the giving of the
Spirit happen on the same Easter Day. For
John, the Spirit is the clue to Jesus’s public ministry. At his baptism, John the Baptist quotes
Jesus: ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who
baptises with the Holy Spirit.’ In the
temple he invites all who thirst to ‘come to me and drink… Out of the
believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water’ and John adds that he says
this of the Spirit which believers would receive. And at the end of gospel, the risen Christ
announces peace to his disciples and confers on them the gift of the new
creation: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’. But
we must not miss what comes next. ‘If
you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any,
they are retained.’ He is saying that the
Spirit comes into the world to do work, God’s work. We heard last week in St Luke how Jesus begins
his ministry by announcing that ‘the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he
has anointed me…’ For what? ‘To bring good news to the poor, to proclaim
release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the
oppressed go free.’ It is his calling
and ours: the Spirit anoints the church so that we can continue God’s work of
re-making the world, bringing justice, reconciliation and hope to all humanity.
This is part of what John means by his language of forgiving and retaining
sins: making real in human lives the grace and truth of Jesus and putting to
the world the inescapable demand and invitation that the truth presents us
with. ‘As the Father has sent me, so I
send you.’
Let me go back to Coventry. I
have a memory I cherish. In 1990 the city marked the 50th
anniversary of the Luftwaffe air-raids codenamed ‘Moonlight Sonata’ when incendiaries
rained down on the city and burned its heart out, destroying the cathedral with
it. One day an elderly man came into the ruins, and walked slowly up the length
of the nave to the stone altar in the apse, tentative as though he was not sure
if he should be there. He stood for a
long time gazing at the charred cross and at the inscription on the wall behind
it, ‘Father, forgive’. And then he began
to sob: not in a self-dramatizing way, but with the honesty of a child who has
been confronted with some personal truth that is too overwhelming for words.
The Provost embraced him and they held on to each other for some considerable
time. That man had been a Luftwaffe
pilot on that terrible bombing raid of 14 November. In 50 years he had never been able to bring
himself to visit the city. But now he
wanted to come before he died, and face the truth of what he and his comrades
had done so many years before, the truth of ‘war and the pity of war’. It felt like a moment of life-changing
forgiveness and reconciliation.
On Whit Sunday, white with
the brilliance of God’s light and love, we should ask ourselves if we are
genuinely Pentecostal Christians. Not that
we speak with tongues, or prophesy, or understand mysteries, or give away all
that we own or even have faith to move mountains. St Paul tells us that there
is one first-fruit of the Spirit’s harvest that we must covet above all others.
Caritas is that fruit. Love is the
only thing that matters: love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes
all things, endures all things, love that never ends. It is love makes us Pentecostal as we are
illuminated by the Spirit, brought back to life by the Spirit, as we join in
God’s mission to bring reconciliation to his world. The dove descending on that
sunbeam on the tapestry reminds me why I am here: to learn how to see in a new
way, and then to act on what I see. And then I know that in the power of God’s
risen Son and his life-giving Spirit, anything is possible.
Durham, Whit Sunday 2012
(Ezekiel 36.22-28; John 20.19-23)
My book on Graham Sutherland's tapestry: A Picture of Faith: a meditation on the imagery of Christ in Glory (Kevin Mayhew, 1995)
No comments:
Post a Comment