Holy Week at Southwark Address 4: Crucified by the Crowd

There’s a word that St John might have liked in connection with his passion narrative. It’s ochlocracy, mob rule, the sway of a crowd. More than any other gospel, John’s underlines the role of the throng in deciding the fate of Jesus. They plead, they shout, they threaten, they argue, they mock, they sneer. And they kill, short only of hammering in the nails and pressing down the thorns. It is the crowd that secures Jesus’ arrest, screams for Jesus’ crucifixion, plays into Pilate’s fear of the emperor’s displeasure, convinces itself that its real king is Caesar and not God, taunts the Son of God and clamours for the release of a murderer. The turbulent atmosphere, electric with pent-up rage acts as a foil for the majestic figure of Jesus as he moves through the story towards his death.  

Listen to some of their lines, so memorably set to music in the fierce crowd scenes of Bach’s St John Passion. To Pilate’s question, “Shall I release for you the King of the Jews? they cry “Not this man but Barabbas!” – the robber, the murderer, the bandit. To his Ecce homo, “Behold the man!” they clamour “Crucify him! Crucify him!”. When Pilate tries to reason with them, they answer, “We have a law, and by that law he ought to die because he made himself the Son of God”. When he tries vainly to let this innocent man go free they ambush him: “If you release this man you are no friend of Caesar. Everyone who claims to be king sets himself against the emperor”. Pilate presents Jesus to them a second time. No longer “Behold the man” but now “Behold your king”. And they cry: “Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!”. “Shall I crucify your king?” he asks. To which they reply, in the ultimate blasphemy for a people who since their wilderness days had called on Adonai as the Lord. “We have no king but Caesar!” 

The power of the crowd is the engine that drives much of the narrative along. The crowd is a major player in St John’s passion story, as essential indeed as the chorus in a Greek play. But whereas in Greek tragedy the chorus is there to comment on the action, interpret what is happening, suggest how the audience might respond, in the Fourth Gospel it is on the stage in its own right as a relentlessly hostile character. In the crisis of the passion I spoke about yesterday, John depicts the mob as the implacable enemy of the truth Jesus has come to bear witness to. They swallow all the falsehoods fed them by their corrupt leaders whether religious or political. Not once is there a glimmer of sympathy for Jesus in his plight, any hint that there might be more than one side to this drama they are instrumental in seeing played out to its bloody outcome. Leaders with no self-doubt should always worry us. When a crowd is like that, we should be deeply afraid.

No doubt there were good people in the throng who were also watching to see what would become of Jesus. We know that his mother and her sister were there, with Mary Magdalene and the disciple whom Jesus loved. Maybe Nicodemus who first came to see Jesus by night and who would bring spices to anoint his body, and Joseph of Arimathea the secret disciple who was afraid, who would bury Jesus and be the last person in this life to honour his sacred body. But if they were there that Friday afternoon, they remained hidden in the crowd, afraid to show their faces to a mob baying for death. Who can blame them? Would we have had the courage to behave any differently, for all that we had also been there on Palm Sunday to wave our palm branches and shout hosanna to the coming king? 

The religious authorities know how to work a crowd. They play on its fickle emotions like a musical instrument. You can hear the hatred behind every refrain. Pilate, instead of restraining the mob simply gives into it out of fear, and that has the effect of escalating the violence. But what is it about the power that the crowd finds it has? Why is its hold over individuals so strong?

This was a theme that fascinated the 19^th century Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard. He identified the frightening ease with which people lose touch with themselves, lose themselves in the pack and start behaving in ways that are unpredictable, irrational or even evil.  He wrote that “one can only say of people en masse that they know not what they do… A demon is called up over whom no individual has any power”. He never tired of pointing out that it takes huge courage for someone to emerge from the hiding place the crowd provides and become an individual making decisions on the basis of conscience and belief. It took great courage for individuals in Nazi Germany like Sophie Scholl, Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to stand for truth and conscience against the lies of the mob. I guess every atrocity in history has only been able to happen because of good people who stood by and watched the crowd and did nothing, or people who at any other time could never have imagined themselves doing harm to their neighbours and friends. Such is the coersive force of the crowd. We’ve seen it played out in our own day in the rise of populism across the world, in the bullying that is the new normal on social media, in the upsurge of nationalisms that wouldexclude the immigrant and asylum seeker and the stranger in our midst. 

Where does the cross belong in this landscape?

I want to go back to that notorious saying of Caiaphas I’ve already quoted a couple of times: “It is expedient that one man should die for the people so that the whole nation may not perish”. We’ve seen how the politics of expediency leads quickly into a politics of negligence which in turn gives birth to a politics of cruelty. What was never the conscious intention to begin with simply “happens” because of the dynamic of events and of participants in them. In particular, the need for the crowd to find someone to blame for the disturbance that threatens its safety and stability, the disaster that overtakes a society and risks destroying it. First century Judaea was part of a particularly febrile Roman province, that of Syria. We know that it was unstable, fragile, prone to messianic eruptions of violence and rebellion, yet always overshadowed by the imperial power that at any moment could sweep in and destroy it, as happened at the hands of Titus in the generation after Jesus when Jerusalem was overrun and the temple destroyed and what Caiaphas had most feared came to pass, and the nation perished.

Jesus sees through these fears that are driving Caiaphas and Pilate and the crowd. His is a kingdom not from this world, whose values are based on the truth that he has come into the world to bear witness to. He is no more interested than Pilate in the advent of some heroic deliverer who will redeem the people and set them free. He does not believe in this for a moment. For all the hosannas of Palm Sunday, his is not a messianic kingdom, for the truth he speaks about is not like that. And precisely because he will not base his witness on the vain hopes and false assumptions of the people, precisely because he will not accept and own the projected expectations they have of him, he becomes progressively isolated from them. And because nothing so fuels hatred as disappointed hope (which is one way of reading the story of Judas the betrayer), they turn on him. He must be driven out, banished, and must symbolically carry with him all the frustrated longings, the pent-up violence, the false ambitions he has been carrying all this time. It is not only expedient that he should die. It will be cathartic, cleansing, clarifying. So they shout “Away with him! Crucify!”

None of this happens consciously. Crowds have a mind of their own, but they often aren’t aware of why they behave as they do. Yet this kind of behaviour is familiar to all of us. The “othering” of people because they are female, or transgender, or black, or Jewish, or Moslem, or disabled, or gay; the subtle, then more overt ways in which they are separated from the group, marginalised, excluded from favour or full participation, even persecuted. My mother’s Jewish family were victims of the holocaust in Nazi Germany. They knew what it was to be blamed for the collective ills of a society, punished for it, banished either to another country (the fortunate ones like my mother) or to the death camps. But even in the school playground this dynamic can be acted out as many of us can remember; even in the workplace or local church or our own home. It may be in microcosm. But it is painful because it is a kind of crucifixion. The memories never go away and healing can take a lifetime.

The French philosopher René Girard has written about violence in religion. This is an aspect of the “dark” religion I spoke about on Monday, the shadow in which destructive forces can lurk. We are familiar with what happens when a crowd that is fuelled by religious passion decides to turn on some innocent victim. Girard’s image is that of the scapegoat, the innocent animal that in the Levitical code of the Hebrew Bible symbolically took the sins of the people upon it and was driven out into the wilderness to die. You may recall the bleak painting of this scene by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Holman Hunt. This ritual was prescribed on the Jewish Day of Atonement as an act of cleansing and purification. It’s a key theme of the passion, Jesus being driven out of Jerusalem to be crucified at Golgotha among the unwanted human detritus of every city – its bandits and abusers and murderers, crucified on that “green hill far away / without a city wall” as the hymn says, far enough away for eyes to be safely averted lest the sight of shed blood pollute a civilised society. 

It’s one of those “but fors” of history. But for the crowd that is so large a character in the passion story, there would not have been a crucifixion, for there might not have been a critical mass of violence and hatred. The paradox for us in Holy Week is that this “but for” means everything. For in Jesus’ casting out and ignominious death we see nothing less than redemption. Glory is how St John speaks of it, this Place of a Skull that turns out to be precisely where Jesus accomplishes his work of self-giving love and is enthroned as Lord and King. Christian theology speaks of the atoning sacrifice once for all, the Lamb of God who “takes away” – key words in the light of what I’ve been saying – who takes away the sins of the world and whose precious memory is invoked at every eucharist of his broken body and shed blood when we sing Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. Have mercy indeed: on this world that is so addicted to violence, on us who know the violence that lurks in our own hearts. Have mercy on our broken humanity, and grant us peace while there is still time to learn to be God’s people once again, to turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.

There are two consequences I want to draw out before I conclude. The first issue for any of us who covet spiritual intelligence is how we are going to emerge from the crowd – whatever crowds we populate - and free ourselves from the unconscious forces that control us or threaten to, so that we can become truly human again, the individual men and women God meant us to be. This is one gift of the cross, one dimension of what it means to be redeemed, because the man who was crucified, whose life of truth and love has led to him to hang there for us, has come, he said, that “we may have life and have it in all its abundance”. The passion of Jesus is to remake us in the image of God that he himself embodies. To achieve what’s known as individuation, becoming the unique individual human being we were meant to be should be the lifelong goal of our human journey. It means discovering what it is  to be our best and truest and most authentic selves. The cross and resurrection will be at the heart of this transformation that enables us to follow Jesus in living cross-and-resurrection-shaped lives.

The second consequence is about our common life. We’ve seen how dangerous, destructive, even demonic, the crowd can be, how it can create innocent victims and then turn on them in vengefulness and hatred. What could it mean for the crowd to be redeemed so that it becomes not only a safe place but also a joyful one where people can flourish and find their truest selves? It may be fanciful to speak about the church as a redeemed mob, but as the people of God, his new humanity, isn’t that what it’s meant to be? 

Earlier in the Gospel Jesus has said, “If I am lifted up, I shall draw all humanity to myself.” In being drawn closer to him, we are drawn closer to one another as a community and  in relationships of grace and truth and love. This crowd of humanity is making the journey from the malign to the benign, from self-serving to self-giving, from cruelty to kindness. In John’s Gospel this society of friendship is born in little ways. It is found in the upper room where it learns to how to  love to  wash feet and to serve. It’s found again gathered round the cross, the mother and the beloved friend who are bequeathed to each other and who will care for each other once Jesus has gone.

This is the power of love that changes crowds, changes each of us, changes everything. In Holy Week we gather in this sacred space that exists for the coming together of God’s people. Here we tell the story of God’s great acts that make us the first fruits of a new humanity. I love to think that a crowd intent on crucifixion can become a crowd acclaiming a resurrection. In the light of this transformation, can we, the church, begin to grasp how the power of the crowd could be turned to good and noble ends in the service of God? “See how these Christians love one another!” We  are never more truly ourselves than when we offer ourselves to the crucified and risen Lord, this King whose reign of truth and love we gladly make our own.

John 19.13-16

Holy Week at Southwark Address 3: Crucified by Politics

Last night, while I was speaking to you in this Cathedral, another Cathedral was on fire. It was shocking to come out of evensong to be confronted by images of Nôtre Dame engulfed by a catastrophic blaze.

That great church is, to millions of people (and not only francophiles like me), the mystic heart of France. It’s the emblem of a nation’s soul. It’s been movingnti watch how this disaster has been felt so deeply by people of many faiths and no faith at all, as well as by Christians across the world. That it should happen in Holy Week heightens the sense that something very terrible happened last evening to this ancient place of pilgrimage and prayer.

Today we try to express the solidarity we feel as fellow Christians especially as those who love these great cathedrals like the one we are sitting in now. We reach out to the people of France in their grief - a sorrow we share as fellow Europeans and her nearest neighbours and friends on this continent.

In the past hours, everyone has been clear that Nôtre Dame will rise again. Of course it must, of course it will, as certainly as we shall celebrate the resurrection this coming Easter morning. Meanwhile, we pray for the people of France as together we continue on our journey through these days of Holy Week, towards the resurrection that beckons to us from the other side of the cross.

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The story of the crucifixion is deeply political. We can’t get away from the way politics and religion are intertwined in the passion narrative. Yesterday we looked at the world of religion before which Jesus was crucified. We saw how “dark” religion could resort to coercion and violence to achieve its ends, in this case, Jesus’ death. Tonight I want to look at the way St John shines a light on the politics of the passion story, shows us that when Jesus Christ stands before Pontius Pilate, it’s nothing less than two kingdoms, two world orders, two civilisations that are encountering each other.

We are inside the Praetorium, the seat of Roman authority in the province. The religious authorities have handed Jesus over to Pilate, to the only jurisdiction competent to try him and condemn him to death. As I said yesterday, religion, theology, the idea that Jesus might have committed blasphemy by claiming to be God’s Son was of no concern to Romans. What did concern them was any movement that would undermine the authority of Rome, for instance by denying to the emperor the absolute loyalty that was due to him on the part of all who were his subjects. Hapless Pilate was the local guarantor of Roman order. It was a shrewd move on the part of the temple authorities to construe Jesus’ offence not as religious in character but political.

What kind of man was Pontius Pilate? I know no better words to sum up his character than these, from a sermon by the Victorian preacher F. W. Robertson. “Pilate had been a public man.  He knew life: had mixed much with the world's business and the world's politics: had come across a multiplicity of opinions, and gained a smattering of them all.  He knew how many philosophies and religions pretended to an exclusive possession of Truth: and how the pretensions of each were overthrown by the other.  And his incredulity was but a specimen of the scepticism fashionable in his day.  The polished scepticism of a polished, educated Roman, a sagacious man of the world, too much behind the scenes of public life to trust professions of goodness or disinterestedness, or to believe in enthusiasm and a sublime life.  And his merciful language, and his desire to save Jesus, was precisely the liberalism current in our day as in his - an utter disbelief in the truths of a world unseen, but at the same time an easy, careless toleration, a half-benevolent, half-indolent unwillingness to molest poor dreamers who chose to believe in such superstitions.” 

What is at stake in the Praetorium is power, and how it is wielded. As St John presents it, this dialogue between Jesus and Pilate is the archetypal clash of civilisations. Pilate is the spokesman of one kind of civilisation, the city that is, many would say, the crown of human achievement. Who does not admire Roman civilisation with its hierarchies of authority, its love of order, its legal system, its arts and letters, its politics? Whether you walk the Roman Forum or the camps and townships of the Roman Wall where I live, you cannot but celebrate “the glory that was Rome” and like St Benedict and St Bede, reflect on the benefits it brought as it shaped European civilisation down the centuries. 

Yet all this belongs to a kingdom of this world, a civilisation that for all its splendour was destined to crumble into dust. Civilisations, like human beings, are mortal. World empires have their day, and then, maybe wasting away over centuries or perhaps quite suddenly through some dog-leg in history no-one could foresee, they dissolve leaving behind them only artefacts and tombstones and texts to remember them by. And although Pilate’s imperial Rome had four centuries left to run, and the best emperors like Trajan and Hadrian and Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius were yet to come, this kingdom would fall one day, all “pride of man and earthly glory”. 

Contrast the kingdom Jesus speaks for as he faces his accuser in the Praetorium. His replies to the agitated Pilate are amongst the noblest words ever uttered. “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Fighting, not only with physical weapons as Peter has already tried to do at Jesus’s arrest in the garden, but the armoury of rhetoric and resistance we resort to when we are threatened. This king only has one weapon, as he goes on to tell Pilate. “You say that I am a king. For this was I born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” This is the language, not of the coercive power that Pilate knows about, but the different kind of power that belongs to this kingdom Jesus is speaking of. It is the power of truth. 

Politics is often as uninterested in truth as Pilate was when he tossed the question into the air, “What is truth?” and left without waiting for the answer. But truth is everything in life, not simply truth-telling but truth-living, truth that means integrity, authenticity, trustworthiness. When the prologue to the Fourth Gospel says of the incarnate Word that “we beheld his glory, as of the only-begotten of the Father”, he is affirmed to be “full of grace and truth”. Or as he himself has said only hours before when he was with his disciples in the upper room, “I am the way, the truth and life” or as we might translate it, “the way that is the living Truth”. What confronts Pilate in the Praetorium, if only he could see it, is living Truth embodied before his very eyes, living Truth that has walked this earth and befriended humanity, living Truth that unveils the mystery of God, the mind and heart of Divinity. 

Pilate has no understanding of any of this, though I dare say he was perhaps haunted, if not by old tales of gods who disguised themselves as human beings, or if not, then by his own uneasy conscience. It’s true that Pilate half-believes that Jesus is innocent, sees through the protestations of the crowd, knows what his duty is. It’s also true that Pilate did not plan any of this, did not personally wish Jesus harm. Which only makes him all the more guilty, I think, of the terrible betrayal he commits in handing him over to be crucified. A better man than he, less compromised by his office, less inclined to please the mob, less afraid of the circumstances he finds himself caught up in would have acted differently. He would have acted not out of expediency but principle, not out of fear but justice, out of care and respect, even, for a fellow human being. 

“It is expedient that one man should die for the people so that the whole nation may not perish.” Those words taint the memory of Pilate as much they do of Caiaphas who uttered them. Between them, Caiaphas and Pilate, the emblems of religion and politics are the vice that hold Jesus tightly in their grip until he is nailed to the cross. It’s as true to say that politics crucified him as much as religion did. But it’s differently true. From early on in the gospels, faith leaders have had the consistent intention of having Jesus put to death because he is too great a risk to keep alive, this man whose words and works have threatened to bring the architecture of organised religion crashing down. 

With Pilate and the political system he represents, it’s more a case of events and how they conspire to bring about Jesus’ death. If you had heard Pilate’s account of what took place it might have gone something like this. Passover is always a volatile time. With myriads of pilgrims surging through the narrow streets of the city and emotions running high, you can never predict what is going to happen next. It took just a few hours for the mood of the crowd to turn ugly, egged on by religious leaders who were baying for blood. Events happened at a speed that took people by surprise. Politics calls for swift decisions at times like these, and because the stability of the body politic is at stake, it’s not principle but expediency that rules. What has to give in order for things to quieten down? A life has to give: that’s the answer, given up, laid down, offered on behalf of the people. And all in the interests of solving today’s problem as efficiently as possible.

Sometimes innocence is up against the politics of wickedness. I recently read the war photographer Don McCullin’s autobiography. You can see his shattering images at an exhibition at Tate Britain that is on at the moment. They make for difficult viewing, and the book for difficult reading. You are exposed to so much pain, so much needless suffering, so much that human beings have wilfully inflicted on one another in places like Viet Nam, Biafra, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq. These are among the contemporary places of crucifixion. McCullin speaks of photography as “bearing witness” to human atrocity, seeking in his own way to uncover the truth of things. He writes about how he can never “un-see” sights that will haunt him for the rest of his days. Which is why he has taken to photographing Somerset landscapes to calm his troubled soul and find peace in his old age. 

More often, I think, innocence is up against the politics of muddle and confusion. A crisis happens. Leaders have to respond. With what insight, what capacity to think beyond the short term, resist the temptation of expediency and consider the larger narratives of history, that is the question every wise leader ponders. Failure to do this results in crucifixions beyond number. The fact that they are the result of negligence rather than ill-will does not make them less terrible to those who suffer them, or less culpable on the part of those who bear responsibility and hold the lives of others in their hands. The politics of our time are branded with this casual irresponsibility about consequences. Take Brexit. Take the proliferation of food banks and the rising tide of homelessness on our streets. Take the threats to the planet posed by the climate emergency and the alarming collapse of the world’s biodiversity. Muddle, confusion and negligence are written all over these crises and our lack of collective will to address them. 

The word crisis literally means “judgment”. It’s a word often on the lips of Jesus in St John, meaning not so much last judgment as the choice we must all make between standing for truth or for falsehood, light or shadow, wisdom or folly. “I came into this world for judgment” he says, “so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind”. And this is precisely what we see when we watch Jesus being interrogated by Pilate – or is it the other way around? - this clash of civilisations, this collision of two cities, this eternal drama of falsehood and truth. Pilate does not know it, but this crisis of the crucifixion is God’s judgment on him and on the politics of negligence he stands for. It is God’s judgment for all time on our great refusals when it comes to taking decisive action for the good of our neighbour and the future of our race and our planet. “I said you are gods” says the Psalm about failed human leaders, quoted by Jesus earlier in this gospel. “I said you are gods; nevertheless you shall die like mortals.” That day has come. It is here, at Golgotha. “Now is the judgment of the world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.”

I said yesterday that the cross is God’s judgment on the kind of religion that oppresses and destroys people. Today we see how it is also a judgment on the politics of wickedness and the politics of negligence. But judgment does not stand alone in God’s dealings with the human race. In the Praetorium, the judgment-hall, Jesus tells Pilate that he is bearing witness to a kingdom “not of this world”, that he has come into the world “to testify to the truth”. We are back to the grace and truth we behold in the Incarnation as we gaze upon the face of the Son of God. Back to tenderness and self-giving love. They too are a judgment upon us insofar as we refuse to contemplate a life based on those values. Could there be a politics based on grace and truth, on tenderness and self-giving love? 

That’s the question the cross puts to us in Holy Week. The future of the planet, the future of the human race depends upon it.  

John 18.33-40

Holy Week at Southwark Address 2: Crucified by Religion

Religion should be a force for good in human life. It should ennoble us, give us stature and dignity, inspire and equip us to become the men and women God made us to be in his own image and likeness in the world. It should make us just and compassionate and kind. Above all it should be a liberating power in life and in society, for the truth should make us free. This is why we come to places like this cathedral, where through worship and prayer we glimpse how we could become better versions of ourselves, more whole. 

But what if religion goes bad, becomes instead a force that diminishes us, oppresses us, narrows our perspective, makes us domineering, judgmental or cruel? What if religion becomes a persecuting force that instead of imparting freedom starts denying it to its adherents or still more to those who follow different paths? What if it crucifies those who do not conform to its principles? All this can happen when religion turns in on itself, starts insisting on its own literal truth, becomes a rigid system that diverts it from being a means to a greater good into serving its distorted end? I’ve been reading a book called Dark Religion: Fundamentalism from the Perspective of Jungian Psychology*. No-one needs to be persuaded that dark religion is real enough in our world today. In my mind has been a famous poem of William Blake from his Songs of Innocence and Experience: 

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green. 

And the gates of this chapel were shut,
And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore. 

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

This Holy Week I’m exploring the different “worlds” in which Jesus is crucified. Yesterday we reflected on the city that Jesus arrives at on Palm Sunday. Tonight’s passage places us in the garden where Jesus has just been arrested, and straight away takes us into the first trial he must face, his interrogation by the religious authorities represented by Annas, and Caiaphas his son-in-law who was high priest at that time. 

Jesus is inside being asked, says John, “about his disciples and about his teaching”. At precisely the same moment, Peter is outside, one of the disciples the high-priest wants to know about, outside warming himself by the fire and denying that he knows anything about Jesus. Inside the religious organisation levels accusations against the Son of God; outside, personal faith fails comprehensively. It is not a good night for religion. 

We have come across Caiaphas earlier in St John’s Gospel. After the raising of Lazarus, he and the pharisees are concerned about Jesus’ growing influence: “if we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” You can hear the anxiety. This man must be guarded against, otherwise Israel’s sacred institutions are at risk. And Caiaphas, the spokesman of organised religion, is clear about the order of priorities. The shrine comes first, then the people. And he makes the kind of judgment institutional leaders often make when stability is put at risk. There must be a sacrificial victim. “Better for one man to die than for the whole nation to be destroyed.” It is Jesus’ death-sentence. And it is organised religion that signs it. 

We need to understand what “religion” is up to here. By themselves, the religious authorities had no power to put Jesus to death. Nor would the Romans be interested in the theological niceties of his claim to be the Son of God. Caiaphas had to demonstrate that Jesus was a threat to good civil order, that he subverted the authority of the Emperor himself. When it comes to public affairs in Judaea under the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate, this is how we need to read the passion narrative. Jesus dies as the political victim, a prisoner of conscience you might say. And if the priests and pharisees could lay responsibility squarely on Pilate and the empire he represents, so much the better. Religion must not have blood on its hands. 

I’m saying that before Jesus becomes the victim of politics, he is the victim of religion. All the gospels paint a picture of religious controversy surrounding Jesus from the very outset, arguments and debates that erupt into outright hostility. There is an ominous hint early on, when he has thrown the money-changers out of the temple. He is asked by what authority he does this. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” he replies, a highly enigmatic response calculated to baffle his audience. From then on, he is a watched man. And he himself is careful not to entrust himself to anyone, says John, for his hour has not yet come. And although in St John, Jesus frequents the temple more than in any other gospel, there is a wariness after this episode that Jesus knows people will not forget. He loves the native faith of his upbringing, practises it with a devotion unmatched in any other adherent, we can be sure. He is a loyal son of Abraham. And yet he is increasingly at odds with it, or rather, with what it has become. I think we can say that to Jesus in all four gospels, the temple represents both the best and the worst of organised religion. It symbolises the potential for divine transcendence but also the hardening of humans’ best instincts for kindness, charity and justice. When religion goes sclerotic, things can only end badly.

There is something deeply paradoxical about saying that religion crucified Jesus, that he was a victim of a dysfunctional way of believing. The paradox is magnified by the realisation that in history, some of the worst crimes against humanity have been perpetrated in his very name. Think of the Crusades and the slaughter of millions of Moslems. Think of the Albigensians, the Inquisition, the Wars of Religion in Europe, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France, all persecuting believers who wanted to follow Christ in their own way. Think of the German national churches that were complicit in the Nazi holocaust. You think this is all a matter of history in far-off places? Ask many women to tell you how they have experienced the church. Ask people of colour. Ask your LGBT friends. Ask the victims of clergy who have abused children. Some of these people will say that they too have been crucified. Ask yourselves whether dark religion is really a thing of the past, even among Christians. 

Please don’t think that I’m hostile to organised religion. Far from it. You can’t be a dean for twenty years without believing in the potential of institutions like cathedrals to do very great good. When institutions function well, when their leaders behave justly, when their members are treated fairly, when they exhibit justice and compassion in the public square, then their power to change the world is great indeed. If God loves humanity, then he must love human institutions too, for we cannot organise ourselves as societies and communities without them. 

And as I read the Hebrew Bible, I’m struck by how much it invests in the temple as an institution. When Solomon dedicated the temple he had built, he uttered a prayer that was as comprehensive as the world itself, beseeching the Almighty to make it a focus for God’s love, blessing, forgiveness and reconciliation. And when it was rebuilt after the exile, the new temple was to be called “a house of prayer for all peoples”. The temple was to be nothing less than a sacrament of Yahweh’s holiness, his sacred presence in the midst of the people he had chosen as his own. Which is why the prophets were scandalised when it failed to live up to that noble vision, why Jesus protests so vehemently at the way the authorities had poured the poison of injustice and corruption into its soul. 

How can a diseased institution be healed? How can organised religion in its many global manifestations be redeemed from the long shadow it casts? The answer, I think, lies precisely in the cross that it is capable of wielding so destructively. If we weaponise the cross, then its potential to cause damage to the human race is limitless. When the cross becomes a force with which to oppress others (the literal meaning of the word crusader), it reverts to its original function in the Roman state as an ugly instrument of cruelty. 

But St John’s image of the crucifixion is the direct antithesis of this. It is true, as we shall see on Good Friday, that in the Fourth Gospel, the cross is the great work Jesus has come into the world to complete. It is true that the cross is the throne where he reigns gloriously as king. It is true that the cross expresses God’s ultimate victory over all that would resist his reign of truth. All this is encapsulated in the last word Jesus speaks from the cross in St John: not a whisper of resignation but a cry of triumph. Tetelestai! “It is accomplished!” 

But all this has to be understood in the way John intends it. For him, the spirit of the cross lies in the act Jesus has performed for his disciples in the upper room the night before his death. In taking the towel, stooping down and washing their feet, Jesus takes the form of a slave, as St Paul puts it in one of his letters. “He emptied himself” says that famous passage, made the supreme sacrifice as we say of those who have laid down their lives for their friends. In that act of self-giving, kenosis, you have the most profound meaning that the cross carries. That is to say, it is the embodiment of love: the love that has nothing to give but itself, is empty-handed but for its infinite embrace of us all, the love that is capable of being endlessly refused and rejected and hurt, yet for all that is patient and kind, will wait an eternity if that is how long it takes to win the creation back to its Creator and reconcile all things to the God who out of love gave it its capacity to exist and be free. 

In Holy Week the cross faces us with all our flaws and failures and ambivalences. We know that it is the power of God for salvation, that if we walk in its way it will give us the strength to face our life-task and learn to live out of this love that is so precarious and vulnerable. And if institutional religion once crucified Jesus and still does, then it too needs to turn itself back to the cross and consider what it means to live in its kindly light. I believe that it is vastly more important that we cultivate being a cross-shaped church than a mission-shaped church. For a church that turns its back on triumphalism, knows its own vulnerabilities, glimpses how the love and forgiveness of the cross are the most transformative power the world has ever seen, and lives out these realities with the conviction that nothing could matter more - such a church will in its very nature be shaped as a sacrament of divine love. Such a church that lives and breathes the events of Holy Week will be the best invitation there could be for the human family to discover how “love is that liquor sweet and most divine / which my God feels as blood, and I as wine” as George Herbert puts it. 

Religion crucified the Lord of Glory. But his cross has borne its griefs and carried its sorrows. It can heal the church, renew it and set it free to become an agent of self-giving love in the world. That needs to be part of our praying through Holy Week as we bring to the cross our world, our church and our own deepest selves. 

John 18.12-14, 19-24

*By Didier, G. J. & Solc, V. 

Holy Week at Southwark Address 1: Crucified by the City (Palm Sunday)

My question to us all this Holy Week is simply this. What does the cross of Jesus Christ mean for us in the year of our Lord 2019? What does Golgotha represent in the concentric worlds we live in – our communities of faith, family and friendships, in our places of daily work and activity, in the arenas of politics, society and nation, and in the largest of environments that we inhabit: our planet itself, indeed, the very cosmos? What does it stand for on the stage where the great public dramas are played out that govern the tides of history, a question that’s perhaps especially pertinent at this time in our nation’s life. And what does it stand for in the intimacy of our personal lives and relationships, how we are being shaped as human beings, as men and women of God? 

I put the question this way because I’m convinced that in Holy Week, we need to prise open our perspectives beyond our immediate concerns as people of faith. It’s natural to want to ask what it means for each of us to claim that “Jesus died for our sins”, a truth we gladly embrace not only at this time of year but every day of our lives. But that’s not all there is to Holy Week. As the best-known verse in the Bible affirms, the larger truth is that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son”. The world, kosmos in Greek – the whole creation - nothing less, says St John, is the sphere of God’s activity giving himself in love. 

So I want to explore with you how we might “read” aspects of the cross in these concentric worlds that we live in, from the personal to the cosmic and everything in between. I’m going to do this by reflecting on St John’s passion narrative, this story that takes up almost half of the Fourth Gospel. How St John depicts the passion story as moving in and out of different settings and contexts is very striking. Some are huge and public, some are personal and intimate. All are essential to the story. All are necessary for us. 

Perhaps I should add that I came to faith as a teenager more than half a century ago when I sang with the school choral society in a performance of Bach’s St John Passion. So this narrative has immense personal significance for me. I offer this week’s reflections in the hope that the cross may draw us into its heart of love so that we worship the King of Glory and the King of Peace who suffers and is enthroned there.

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On Palm Sunday, we enter the first of this series of worlds, the city. Jesus arrives at Jerusalem, the destination that has been in his sights all through his ministry. Or we should say, in St John, arrives back in the city, for this is not his first visit. As a devout Jew he would “go up” from Galilee to the pilgrim feasts, and on one of them, Passover, memorably turned the traders out of the temple. This gives the Fourth Gospel a distinctively urban feel. This Jesus is not the Jewish Mediterranean peasant so much as the poet and prophet who calls out in the public quarters of religion and trade and politics, who walks the streets and squares of the city in search of people who might be open to life-changing encounters.

As in the other gospels, Palm Sunday means crowds and hosannas. The passion is inaugurated with the man on the donkey being acclaimed as King of Israel and blessed in the name of the Lord. “See, the world has gone after him!” Cities are places where enthusiasms flourish and things “trend”. Today the moment belongs to Jesus. But even on this festive day, there’s an

undertow, a sense that all is not quite what it seems. Jesus starts speaking about his “hour” that is coming, about being “glorified”, about the grain of wheat that must fall into the ground and die, about not loving your life so much that you aren’t willing to lose it. The crucifixion is already anticipated in this story. In the midst of life we are in death. 

Holy Week tells us a story about how the Son of Man comes to his city to die. Here he will be tried, condemned, mocked, ridiculed, led out to crucifixion. In another gospel he weeps over Jerusalem: its pain is his pain, God’s pain. In St John the emphasis is on the city’s great refusal: “he came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him”. He portrays the priests, the crowd, the lawyers, the soldiers as relentlessly hostile, determined to push an already sceptical Pilate into putting Jesus to death. Cities can be like that. One moment it’s cries of acclaim to the coming King. The next it’s “We have no king but Caesar”. One moment hosanna. The next, crucify!

You could say that in St John, it’s the city that crucifies Jesus. For all that they are places of civilisation, wealth and progress, cities also harbour secrets and lies, the collusions that protect people from even knowing much of the time that they are doing harm. Cities are hiding places for the unjust who care nothing for truth. It’s not that injustices and atrocities don’t happen anywhere else. But all that makes a city a marvellous convergence of good energies, a pinnacle of human achievement, also enables falsehood and wrong to achieve a critical mass. The good always has a shadow. And that shadow falls across Jesus as men of the city converge on him to thrust him out like the scapegoat. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people” says that calculating, world-weary, ice-cold man of the city, the high priest Caiaphas. 

Although I now live in remote and rural Northumberland, I am a Londoner by birth and upbringing. I love cities and I love London. I believe in cities, and want to say that God believes in them too, and loves them – Jerusalem, Babylon, Athens, Rome, London. Cities should be good places and are for many people. So when a city becomes a place of violence, when politics are corrupted, when people are forgotten or neglected, when governance is stubborn and self-serving, when God’s poor are not heard and suffer at the hands of the privileged, when the blood of innocents is shed, when the city aggrandises itself and sucks all wealth and power into itself and away from the weak, well then, God weeps over it. God weeps for every moment when it crucifies Jesus afresh, when once again in any age he suffers in those he calls in St Matthew “the least of these my brothers and sisters”. 

Palm Sunday is the Sunday of the Cross. This afternoon our focus moves from the celebrations of the morning to the destiny that awaits this King. Our hearts are heavy with impending betrayal, suffering and passion. And yet we also come with lightness in our hearts because Good Friday is not only for sorrow but also, and especially, for forgiveness, release, promise, new life. I wonder if we can, in our imaginations, walk out of the city to Golgotha not only as men and women looking for reconciliation but also as citizens, people of the city who bring the city with us, its triumphs and disasters, its glory and its shadow, its promise and its pain, all that makes it good and all that is corrupt and compromised. Perhaps we can come to this place where God has finished the work of redemption and glimpse how the city could be reframed, reimagined, redeemed, how it could begin to glow with the reflected light of celestial city of peace, Jerusalem the golden. 

Yes, the city has crucified Jesus and we are part of it. But that is not the end of the story. 

John 12.12-26 
Southwark Cathedral, Palm Sunday 2019