The Wager: Religion is Worth It!

Tonight we read from the story of Joseph. Let me leap forward to the end where Genesis sums it all up. After all the twists and turns, Joseph speaks to the brothers who had done him so much wrong: ‘even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good’.  Until now, even though Joseph has been reconciled to them, the outcome is not yet clear. Will he, the powerful Egyptian officer of state, treat them as family or as vassals?  What will forgiveness mean for him and for them?  Joseph reaches a true ‘my Lord and my God’ moment. “You intended evil…. God intended good”. In conspiracy and catastrophe, God has done all tings well.  

When is it a true act of faith to say ‘it was for the best, and good has come out of it’, and when is it just a thoughtless cliché to make us feel better about the bad things that happen?  We don’t say it, and shouldn’t say it, when we hear of a child who has been abused, or bystanders blown to pieces by a suicide bomber, or a pensioner murdered in her own home.  We condemn wickedness, and we do what we can to help its victims, but we try not to theorise because we know that words can make things worse as well as better. In the face of what is wrong or just bewildering, we won’t try to guess what God intends in the perplexing, inscrutable events of human life.  

Yet the instinct to find meanings is also part of being human. And this is where Joseph helps us with an insight of faith into life’s meaning.  Faith tells a story of how God has been moving within the ordinary processes of cause and effect to work his wise and loving purposes in the world.  It is not always apparent from the evidence: it’s faith that makes the connections. It takes the long view where we can only see the foreground. That brings strength and hope. It’s possible to pick up the pieces and carry on. 

I was talking once with a distinguished astronomer. ‘Where is the ground for your beliefs?’ he asked.  I said it was as much a matter of the heart as the head, for the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.  I went on to say that I had a strong instinct what my life would have become if I had not been a Christian. I would have been only half alive, and served the wrong gods.  Now I have been a Christian for fifty three years and a priest for more than forty, I have staked my whole adult life on Christianity being true.  As my retrospect lengthens, I echo Joseph’s words. God did indeed intend it for good.  But they are still said in faith.  Suppose Christianity turned out to be a fantasy?  Would my life have been wasted?  I have only this one life to live. I can’t go back and start again, choose a different ladder to climb up on. We stake our lives on the beliefs and values that matter to us.  Pascal’s Wager taught us how much of an act of trust faith is.

You may recall, a few years ago, the slogan on London buses: ‘There is probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’.  The word ‘probably’ is the clue.  It tells us that atheism is not so much a cool decision of unbiased reason as a true act of faith. It’s a wager: weigh up the evidence, then stake your life on it. Worry is only for religious people. But what if it said: ‘God may exist, so stop being frivolous and start living well’? I can only speak for myself. I concluded years ago that I would rather have lived as a Christian and tried to make a difference in the world than serve the gods of money, power, ambition and self.  The wager is that Christianity is true.  Even if it turned out not to be, the Christian life would still be worthwhile. It would still add to the sum of human happiness including my own. 

Faith doesn’t mean knowing for certain. If only we could!  It’s trusting that this is good news worth investing the whole of life in, a wager that makes sense because of the man who calls to us to follow.  Two thousand years of Christian experience tell us about the life-changing power of goodness.  My scientist conversation partner had a lot to say about how religion divides and demeans people.  He is right: debased religion is mad, bad and dangerous to know.  But, I said, why not judge religion as you judge science, not at its worst but at its best?  For me, it is the goodness and integrity of so many Christians I have known that makes Christianity not only attractive but believable.  

On this first day of the week we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.  He is God’s pledge that our hope in this good news is well placed. If ever it was true of an event that ‘you meant harm but God meant it for good’, it is the crucifixion. Who’d have thought it on Good Friday? Yet Easter makes it both possible and believable.  It is not the certainty we crave. Faith still has to be faith. “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” There is still a wager  in entrusting ourselves to Jesus and his kingdom. How can we know where it will lead? But to construct our life on this rock gives us stability amid shifting sands.  With the years the conviction grows that it was a wise decision. It was worth believing that “God intended it for good”, that ‘love is his meaning’. In that faith we can both live and die. 

Haydon Old Church, 28 July 2019

Genesis 42.1-25

Holy Week at Southwark: Good Friday

I THE PRAETORIUM – PLACE OF HUMANITY
John 19.1-6

The Praetorium, Pontius Pilate’s headquarters in Jerusalem, is a place of truth in St John’s Gospel where the archetypal encounter between truth and falsehood is played out. Inside, Jesus speaks to Pilate about bearing witness to the truth, and Pilate asks contemptuously, “What is truth?” For St John, truth is at stake in his story of the crucifixion. In one way, truth itself is crucified in the passion, just as truth is always the first casualty of war. 

But precisely because it is truth that is on the cross, Good Friday is the day when truth is displayed before the world as never before: the truth about passion and pain and man’s inhumanity to man; the truth about this innocent victim who has proclaimed himself as the Way, the Truth and the Life; the truth about how his suffering turns out to be redemptive; and above all, the truth of Jesus’ reign that demonstrates to the whole creation how God so loved the world. 

“So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, ‘Behold the man!’” Ecce Homo, the subject of hundreds of paintings and sculptures from the middle ages to the present day. In the bombed-out ruins of Coventry Cathedral where I once worked, there is a colossal marble statue by the great twentieth century sculptor Jacob Epstein, showing Christ at this moment of the passion, being brought out of the Praetorium. “I wished to make in Ecce Homo a symbol of a man bound, crowned with thorns and facing with a relentless and overmastering gaze of pity and prescience on our unhappy world.” Epstein’s parents were Jewish refugees from Poland. When he carved the piece in the 1930s, he was not to know what would become of Polish Jewry during the Nazi holocaust. But it seems to be etched into Jesus’ face, this solidarity with every victim, this determination that suffering will not have the final word. 

“Behold the man!” To Pilate, he is no man in particular, any man who happens to get in the way, one of the many fools who try to disturb the elegant ordered world of Roman imperial politics. But St John capitalises the word “Man” as if to surround Jesus with a halo. Behold – not any man but every man, behold the embodiment of the family of man, behold the one in whom our humanity is displayed in its perfection. O yes, his is a broken humanity, a mortal humanity, a crucified humanity. Jesus knows where the scourging and the mocking and the purple robe and the crown of thorns will lead. When Pilate leads Jesus out to the crowd and announces Ecce homo, they both know that the his destiny is inevitable. 

But John’s portrait of the Man outside the Praetorium moves us, not only for its sadness but for its infinite nobility. St John wants us to recognise and respond to the dignity of Jesus in his passion, from his arrest in the garden right up to the moment of his death when he acclaims that he has finished the work he came to do. And on this solemn day, faith sees in the crucified Jesus the Man who was loyal to his Father’s will, the Man who lived for others, the Man who emptied himself and loved to the end. In him we see our own humanity exalted, literally “lifted up” so that we can see once again what it is that we are called to be and do in the world of today. And we glimpse how we can be part of God’s reconciling purpose for humankind for whom the cross stands for all time as the sign of grace and truth and everlasting love. 

II THE PAVEMENT – PLACE OF KINGSHIP
John 19.13-16

A pavement doesn’t sound a very evocative place. But like the Praetorium, its name Gabbatha stood out for St John because of what Pilate said there. The first time it had been Ecce Homo, “Behold the Man!” This time it’s another “behold!”, an even stronger one. Ecce Rex Vester, “Behold your King!” 

Does Pilate mean this ironically, no more believing him to be a king than the crowd? Or is he recalling those baffling conversations in the Praetorium where he had interrogated Jesus about his being a king, only to be told that “my kingdom is not from here”? What we can say is that each time, Pilate is speaking beyond the words he utters. “Behold the man!” – but not just any man. “Behold your king!” – for the purple robe and crown of thorns proclaim him to be a King indeed. And although Pilate cannot know it, and the crowd cannot know it, and even his faithful followers can no more than glimpse it, we know, because we have read this far in St John’s Gospel, that the cross where he will be lifted up is nothing less than his enthronement. 

There is a great mystery here. Crucifixion was an execution reserved for the worst criminals who even at the hour of their death were permitted no dignity, no final act of clemency. Yet in the spectacle of this condemned man who is led out to die, harried and mocked by soldiers and the crowd, John dares to claim that we are gazing upon royalty. The quiet nobility of his bearing, the dignity with which he takes the insults hurled at him, there is a presence about him that is nothing less than transfiguring. At Gabbatha and Golgotha, there is one kingship, one glory, one grace and truth.

In this scene at the Pavement, I seem to be witnessing a drama of universal significance. “Behold your King!” Whose king? I think St John is saying that he is King not only to his own community but to the entire human family. More than that, I seem to see him brought forth before the entire world, the created order of which he said, “all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” - this cosmos in its glory and splendour, its brokenness and potential, all that already is and all that is yet to be. He will bring all things to their Omega Point, the consummation at the end of time. And because the cross gathers up the fragments of the whole of life so that nothing is lost, it is the cross that sets forth his reign of triumph before the cosmos. 

Back to the Pavement. You would expect this King who is led out to his people to be greeted with acclaim, like he was on Palm Sunday. But a shadow has fallen across this crowd. When they see him they shout “Away with him! Crucify him!” “He came to his own, and his own people did not accept him”: in those words, the crowd speaks for a human race that has turned away from the light. “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.” Can it be that the light will go on shining in the darkness, and the darkness not overcome it? 

St John says to us on Good Friday: yes it can! Because the cross where Jesus reigns is an immortal throne built on grace and truth. The light that shines out from it never fades. The life it gives birth to never dies. He is lifted up in glory and draws all people to himself. As God’s redeemed crowd standing at the cross today, we acclaim him. “Love so amazing, so divine / demands my soul, my life, my all.” Behold our King!

III THE SKULL – PLACE OF DEATH
John 19.16b-19

If you had to invent a name for the place where death reigns, you couldn’t do better than Golgotha, “The Skull”. Those hard semitic consonants echo the hardness of this site outside the city wall, named not because of its shape so much as its fearsome reputation as a place of execution and death. St Matthew says that the cross was visible from a distance, the “green hill far away”. But green feels too gentle, too kind. You need to imagine it as a barren bleak place red with blood, strewn with bodies and bones and the machinery of torture and death, the detritus of Rome’s way of carrying out efficient capital sentences. On this hill there is no dignity and no mercy. 

On Good Friday we shouldn’t gloss over the particularities of death. One way of viewing the cross is to see it as an emblem of human suffering and pain, a sign that even the eternal God himself knows what it is to be cruelly used and to die. “Every man’s death diminishes me” wrote John Donne. We gaze upon this landscape of death that even Jesus was subject to, and are silenced, made to ponder our human condition, our own mortality, and all the other crucifixions we see acted out where inhumanity is a fact of life, and life itself is cheap. You look at Grünewald’s famous crucifixion painting in the hospital at Colmar, and you realise how for him, the cross is a universal image of suffering humanity designed to move all who saw it to pity. 

We ask what meaning can there be in suffering when want to believe in a God whose purposes are wise and good? I think suffering is simply a fact of the world as it is, the risk inherent in any creation worth worth living in. What we must do is to care about it, respond compassionately, try to alleviate it as best we can; and where it is the result of human cruelty or neglect, recognise its causes and put them right. On this holy day we gaze on Christ crucified and learn to be sensitised to this, to act in God’s name to help build a gentler, kinder world.

And to act in God’s name brings us close to what St John wants us to grasp in the passion account. In the Gospel, Jesus is revealed to us as God’s beloved Child, God’s own self in our midst, the sign of what God wants for the world he loves. On Good Friday, we see in Jesus’ suffering a vision of how God himself suffers on the cross, how God knows what it is to be abused, to be in pain, to die. Our crucified God is truly a god of compassion, suffering-with, because of his suffering-in the tortured body of his Son.

Golgotha is a profound paradox. For St Mark it’s a godforsaken place of absence. In the desolation and darkness, Jesus cries out in agony and despair “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” But for St John, it’s a hill of profound presence. He has no dark, no desolation, only a marvellous radiance, because God has been in this all along. Yes, the cross should disturb and disquiet us. Yet it’s also the source of all our consolation and hope because this is where God proclaims that he is love, and that he is with us in all our ordeals and suffering and pain. His is a heart that aches for his hurting world. Was there ever a more moving symbol of it in our time than the cross hanging so nobly in the burnt out shell of Nôtre Dame this week? It was glimpse of transfigured night.

At Golgotha we behold the Man. And we behold the King in whom we recognise – and bless - our God of pain and mercy, the Saviour of the World, our God of tender love.

                     IV THE CROSS – PLACE OF ACCOMPLISHMENT

                                                                     John 19.25b-30

So the Cross stands for the suffering of humanity and God’s involvement in it. But John tells us that God suffers not only with us but for us. For him it’s all contained in that last single word Jesus cries from the cross in his passion story: “It is accomplished!” We might imagine it was more natural to think of Good Friday as a day of despair or resignation as the other gospels do. St John stands out for his sense of completion, something accomplished, brought to its conclusion. “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work” Jesus had said. On the way to the cross he had prayed, “I glorified you by finishing the work you gave me to do”. Tetelestai! It is done.

Endings and beginnings seem to meet at Golgotha. The cross feels like a great full stop, a closure, an end. We hear in Jesus’ words an unmissable tone of satisfaction, fulfilment, even triumph. Perhaps that takes us by surprise? Not if we’ve been paying attention to the way St John has told his story. This end is not, for him, the petering out of a life that began so well. It is not the tragedy of a wasted career, the snuffing out of a guttering candle flame. Rather, it’s the great light that has never shone more steadily, more brightly than at Golgotha. This is Jesus’ moment of culmination. His life, said Jesus speaking of himself as the good shepherd, was not taken from him. He laid it down of his own accord.  On the cross he draws all humanity to himself. On the cross there is vindication of all that he came among us to be and to do. On the cross his work of love is accomplished. He is bound to the cross not by the nails but by love alone. He reigns over us as the king of love. This is where we recognise glory, full of grace and truth, where we understand what it is to say that he loves us to the end. 

If this is what he is in his incarnation and his resurrection, then this is what he has always been. In particular, this is what he is in his death at Golgotha. How can God suffer and die? we ask ourselves. Other faith communities find this the most baffling question Christianity poses. There are those for whom Good Friday is a real stumbling-block. A crucified man like Spartacus we can make sense of, even if he is innocent or even heroic. A crucified God is another matter altogether. I doubt we could ever reason it out. But faith takes us to a place where I believe we do see how love drives God to embrace the cross and in doing so, embrace his whole creation in a supreme act of self-giving, what Jesus calls laying down his life. If God is not crucified, there is no God as Christians understand him.

I imagine the cross as St John’s burning bush. It’s the place of transfiguration where we take off our shoes because we are on holy ground. We look into this sacred fire, and listen to the voice that speaks out of its midst. What do we see? The flame of love, its glory and its light blazing with divine passion for the world, for the human race, for each of us. And what do we hear? The word that says: I am what I am, all that it means to be God. Here at Golgotha are revealed his nature and his name. I am all that love means, he seems to say, all that meets our longings, hungers and hopes, than which nothing greater, nothing more glorious could ever be conceived, the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end of all light and life and love. 

“It is accomplished.” In my end is my beginning. We gaze on the burning heart of God and sense that the sun is rising on another world. There is a new creation. The day breaks and the shadows flee away. After this long and gloomy winter, spring has come at last. 

V THE GARDEN – PLACE OF REST
John 19.38-42

St John’s passion narrative begins and ends in a garden. It’s in a garden that Jesus is betrayed and arrested. It’s in a garden that his body is laid to rest. And at dawn on Easter Day, it will be in the garden that his tomb will be empty. The garden is the link between suffering and renewal, passion and resurrection, living and dying and living again.

We’ve reflected on Jesus’ cry from the cross tetelestai! “It is finished.” There is nothing left to do. He has loved the world to the end. It’s a magnificent resolution of the conflict that has run through St John’s story. But we need to be brought back to a quieter place where we can gather up the events of Holy Week. The body of Jesus needs to rest and so do we. The garden and its tomb is that necessary place. Here the friends of Jesus lay him. It was the day before Passover, the day of Preparation, like this year - Passover begins at sunset tonight, and we wish all our Jewish family and friends Chag Sameach, a joyful festival. And preparation is what this garden breathes – preparation for resurrection, for new life, for how all of history will be turned in a new direction because of Easter. 

But we must stay with St John in the garden. For it’s here that we glimpse how this finished work, this end, is also a beginning, a threshold across which a new world is glimpsed, a door held open to us that no-one can shut, a gateway to possibilities we only dared to dream about. It’s like the mythological garden God planted at the beginning of time and placed our first parents in it. Beyond the full stop of today’s “it is finished”, another sentence begins, opening up the promise of redemption, healing and reconciliation. That word paradise simply means “garden”. The Elysian Fields of mythology tapped into the longing for a paradise of peace and rest. Like singing “Somewhere over the rainbow”, an end to trouble and the fulfilment of our dreams. We mustn’t dismiss these primordial hungers of the human soul.

“In my end is my beginning” was Mary Queen of Scots’ motto, embroidered on a cloth before her execution. T. S Eliot plays with it in his poem East Coker. It starts out with a gloomy recognition of how things are, “In my beginning is my end”, echoing the Prayer Book funeral sentence, “In the midst of life we are in death”. Yet from there Eliot finds his way to a place of expectation: in the midst of death, we are in life. St John would recognise it that way round. If Good Friday is an end, then it brims with hope and possibility. Love is not eclipsed by suffering, nor its glory by death. Jesus’ death is both the end but not the end. So the grave has lost its victory and death has lost its sting. 

And this joining up of ends and beginnings makes the garden a tender place, a point of rest where we look back and look forward, and take in the cross and resurrection as Love’s work. One work because the Love that lays down its life is for that very reason unconquerable. So it is raised up in triumph. One day Love will reign across the universe, over every creature, over our broken world and in the heart of every human soul. Love is his meaning and will be to the end of time. We celebrate the Love that gives us back our humanity, heals our wounds, sustains us in life and comforts us in the face of death. 

This is my friend / in whose sweet praise / I all my days / could gladly spend. Our Friend indeed, our beginning and our end. This Friday of the Cross is a Good Friday. It is right to give our thanks and praise, and celebrate this solemn day. For Love has done its work.

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.

********

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 

Holy Week in Chester 8: “I AM: The Burning Bush, Ends and Beginnings”

“It is accomplished” cries Jesus from the cross, his final word in St John’s passion story. It’s natural to think of Good Friday as a day of despair or resignation as the other gospel writers do. St John stands out for his sense of completion, something accomplished, brought to its proper conclusion. “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work” Jesus has said near the beginning of the gospel. As he turns his face towards the cross he prays, “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do”. Tetelestai! It is done.

Endings and beginnings seem to meet at Golgotha as we hear John’s great narrative. The cross feels like a great full stop, a closure, an end. We hear in Jesus’ words an unmissable tone of finality, even triumph. Perhaps that takes us by surprise? Not if we’ve been paying attention to the way St John has told his story. This end is not, for him, the petering out of a life that began so well. It is not the tragedy of a career that has been wasted, brought to nothing. It is not the extinguishing of a guttering candle flame finally overcome by the darkness. Rather, it’s that this great light has never shone more steadily, more brightly than at Golgotha. Far from representing the waste of a man’s career, this is its moment of culmination. His life, said Jesus speaking of himself as the good shepherd, was not taken from him. He laid it down of his own accord.  On the cross he draws all humanity to himself. On the cross there is vindication of all that he came among us to be and to do. On the cross his work of love is accomplished. What binds him to the cross is not nails but love. He reigns over us as the king of love, a kingship that is not from here but from another place  entirely. This is where we recognise glory, full of grace and truth, love’s endeavour, love’s expense, love to the very end.

Therefore, this finished work, this end is also a beginning. It’s a threshold across which a new horizon is glimpsed. It’s the door "held open to us that no-one can shut, the gateway to possibilities we only dared to dream about. The story of the crucifixion ends with Jesus’ body being laid in a tomb by those who loved him – in a garden, precisely where the resurrection story begins, at the break of day, on the first day of the week, like the garden that God planted at the beginning of time when he created this good earth and placed our first parents in it. Beyond the full stop of today’s “it is finished”, another sentence is launched, a new one whose words open up for all humanity a paradise of promise, healing and reconciliation. 

“In my end is my beginning” was the motto of Mary Queen of Scots which she embroidered on a cloth just before her execution. Perhaps she was inspired by the salamander, the symbol of her grandfather-in-law Francis I, the creature that in myth was supposed to self-ignite at death in order to be reborn out of the ashes, young and new and strong. T. S Eliot plays with that motto in his great poem East Coker. It starts out as a pessimistic reversal of Queen Mary, “In my beginning is my end”, an echo perhaps of the Prayer Book funeral sentence, “In the midst of life we are in death”. Yet from there Eliot finds his way to a place of expectation and hope, as if to affirm: in the midst of death, we are in life. St John would recognise it that way round. “In my end is my beginning.” If Good Friday is an end, then it is pregnant with hope and possibility. For love is not eclipsed by suffering, nor its glory by death. And if Jesus’ death is both the end but not the end, then the grave has lost its victory and death its sting. 

This Holy Week in the Cathedral, we have been looking at the seven sayings of Jesus in St John that begin with the words I AM: “the door”, “the resurrection and the life”, “the light of the world”, “the bread of life”, “the true vine”, “the way, the truth and the life” and “the good shepherd”. Those words “I am”, so emphatic in the Greek, take us back to the book Exodus. There Moses is confronted by the sight of a bush that burns but is not consumed. He is overawed. Then he hears a voice addressing him out of the fire. “I am that I am” it says mysteriously. It’s nothing less than the sacred name of God whose nature can only be explained in terms of itself, for God will not be likened to anything we can see or handle. “I am”, that is, the ground of all existence, all life, all consciousness, all thought. And this is the divine name with which Jesus associates himself in St John. “Before Abraham was, I am” he declares, the eternal One who is in the world yet beyond it, the great I AM who is the source and end of all that has been, and is, and ever shall be. So the risen Christ says of himself in the book of Revelation, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end”.

This is how St John portrays the majestic figure who is enthroned in the cross at Golgotha. How can God suffer and die? we ask ourselves. Other faith communities find this the most baffling question Christianity poses. If you want to see a display of naked power, a crucified God makes no sense. If you want to hear fine wisdom, a messiah nailed to a cross is not for you. There are many for whom Good Friday is a real stumbling-block. And yet... there is power and there is wisdom at the cross, a divine wisdom and a divine power that change lives, heal brokenness and bring great hope. Faith takes us to a place where we see how love drives God to embrace the cross and in doing so, embrace his whole creation in a supreme act of self-giving, what Jesus calls laying down his life. If God is not crucified, there is no God as Christians understand him and no Christianity worth following.

I imagine the cross as St John’s burning bush. It’s the place of transfiguration where we take off our shoes because we are on holy ground. We turn aside today to look into this sacred fire, and open our ears so that we can hear the divine voice that speaks to us. What do we see? The flame of love, its glory and its light blazing with divine passion for the world, for the human race, for each of us. And what do we hear? The word that says: here is the essence of all that it means to be God. Here at Golgotha we see his nature and his name. I AM utters that voice, I am all that love means, all that meets our hungers and hopes, that than which nothing greater, nothing more glorious can be dreamed or conceived, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the origin and destiny of all that is, our light, our life, our love. 

“It is accomplished.” In my end is my beginning. We gaze on the burning heart of God. We sense that in these holy days of the paschal season, the sun is rising upon us. There is a new creation. The day breaks and the shadows flee away. After a long and gloomy winter, spring has come at last. 

Holy Week in Chester 7: “I am the Good Shepherd” (Good Friday)

Reading: John 10.11-18

The good shepherd is perhaps the best-loved of all Jesus’ I AM sayings in St John’s Gospel. There isn’t a more tender image in the gospel than this, linked as it always is in our minds with the 23^rd Psalm. “The Lord is my shepherd; therefore shall I lack nothing”. It’s the kind of language that elicits our trust and confidence. We feel we could go anywhere, do anything with the Good Shepherd by our side. 

Of all the sayings we have been looking at in Holy Week, this one brings us closest to Good Friday and Easter. No fewer than five times in these few verses, Jesus speaks about “laying down” his life. He lays down his life for the sheep, just as later on, in the upper room, he will speak of laying down his life for his friends. It’s important to catch the decisiveness inherent in these words. Jesus’ death is not an accident, not even something that happens to him. He is in control of events, and his dying is an act of will, in obedience to his Father. “No-one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.” 

This saying is closely linked to one we looked at earlier this week, “I am the gate for the sheep. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture.” I said then that we need to imagine the sheepfold as a circular stone enclosure with an open gap on one side for the sheep to pass in and out. It’s said that shepherds in Jesus’ day would themselves lie across the gap at night to close the circle and protect the sheep by keeping out bandits and wild animals on the prowl for the precious sheep. This was, in an almost literal sense, to “lay down” your life for the sheep both as gate and shepherd. 

Like all the other images we’ve explored this week, the good shepherd has a long history in the Hebrew Bible. We need to know that the shepherd was a familiar way of speaking about authority and kingship, both human and divine. God is called “the shepherd of Israel” in the Psalms, while the kings of Israel and Judah who ruled on his behalf were also familiarly known as shepherds. (Given the disdain with which shepherds were regarded in ancient times, this is a title worth pondering.) The shepherd’s role was to tend the sheep, feed and nurture them, and above all protect them from harm. 

And these were precisely the things that the kings of Israel did not do. The people were likened to sheep that had no shepherd: uncared for, undefended, wandering about as easy prey for predators and villains. The prophets roundly accused the kings of being self-serving in scattering God’s flock and driving them away. By contrast, God himself would come as the true shepherd who would search for his sheep, gather them up, protect them and look after them. “He will feed his flock like a shepherd, he will gather the lambs in his arms and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.” Which is to say, that where human kings had failed, God himself would come as the king and lord whose just and gentle rule would mean, at last, the freedom and flourishing of his beleaguered people.

This is why Jesus has so much to say about the thief who comes “only to steal and kill and destroy” – and the hired hand who sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. Beware of false messiahs, he says elsewhere, establish the credentials of those who claim authority over you, who promise good things without the power to deliver them, who are, in his own words, “wolves in sheep’s clothing”. What is the test of the true shepherd? How would we recognise the one who has our interests in his heart? That he is willing to do anything to keep you safe, even if it means laying down his life for you. 

This is what we commemorate on Good Friday. No, I want to go further and use an even stronger word. This is what we celebrate today, this “greater love” with which the Fourth Gospel overflows. For into our world of fantasy and illusion, false hopes and failed promises, into our midst to live and die among us the Good Shepherd comes. We hear his voice and we recognise him, for even if he comes to us as one unknown, we sense that he knows us and loves us and asks us to know and love him in return. We gaze at the cross today and viewing it through the lens of St John, we see not the helpless victim of human cruelty, not the subject of a terrible tragedy, not bright hopes dashed against the rocks of abject failure and calamity. What we see is the shepherd-king who has chosen to lay to down his life because that is what he came to do. And precisely because he was obedient to his calling to love the world in all its chaos and confusion, we say of him that he reigns there on the cross of Golgotha. We acclaim him as our king, and as the world’s king enthroned in glory. We behold his glory, full of grace and truth, the truth and grace of the only power that he knows, the power of a life laid down, the power of self-giving love. 

Celebration, not lament, is the tone of a Johannine Good Friday. You could not get it more wrong than the hymn we used to sing when I was a child, “O come and mourn with me awhile”. At least, not when we read John’s passion narrative. There is a kind of piety that makes us feel sorry for Jesus in his suffering. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t walk a via dolorosa today, or sing a Stabat Mater in recognition of the pain that lies at the heart of mercy. Love is always costly because it demands so much of us. For God who so loved the world that he gave his only son, it cost not less than everything. 

But I think we need to look deeper into the movement of divine love that we honour on this holy day. What strikes us about St John’s vision of the cross is its sheer generosity. Its scope is nothing less than global. “Other sheep I have that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.” Who are these other sheep? Our companion Christians from other traditions? That gives us a ecumenical vision of a church brought back into union through the shepherd’s tender care. Jesus prayed that we might all be one. 

But we should think in even larger ways, I believe. When Jesus says of his death that “I, when I am lifted up, will draw all people to myself”, it is all humanity that is at least potentially in his mind. So here. As the Good Shepherd exercises his rule of love and peace, it has a benign effect on all who feel after God, all who long to find happiness and contentment – which, at some time or other, surely means the entire human family, each of us. So the cross has the whole of humanity in its sights, because God’s love is offered without limit. The only constraints we put on it are of our own making. The shepherd’s arms extended wide on the cross are an invitation to all humankind to recognise love, embrace it, receive it, a summons to find there a hope and a promise that is global in its scope. If ever our world needed to hear good news like this, it is now. 

Can we glimpse today, with the help of St John, that Golgotha really is a place of promise and hope for the world? Because love is its meaning, and Amor vincit omnia, love overcomes all things. “King of love my shepherd is.” And it is this hope and this promise that carry us safely through Good Friday towards Easter. For the power of love does not end with death. Listen again to the words of Jesus. “I have power to lay down my life, and I have power to take it up again.” Our perspective on this day is from the other side of Easter where we already know that it is the risen Jesus who walks among us and knows us, who calls us by our name, whose voice we recognise and whose love is shed abroad in our hearts. He speaks to us of a shepherd’s tender care. He tells us that we can have a good hope because of his word. He inspires us with the prospect that one day humanity will be healed and reconciled because he laid down his life. As the human family gathers before the cross today in all our need and pain and brokenness, we cry out to him: “restore us; call us back to you by name, / And by your life laid down, redeem our shame.” And the good shepherd replies: “You are my friends. Be of good courage: I have overcome the world”.

Here is a final sonnet by the poet Malcolm Guite.

When so much shepherding has gone so wrong,
So many pastors hopelessly astray,
The weak so often preyed on by the strong,
So many bruised and broken on the way,
The very name of shepherd seems besmeared,
The fold and flock themselves are torn in half,
The lambs we left to face all we have feared
Are caught between the wasters and the wolf.

Good Shepherd now your flock has need of you,
One finds the fold and ninety-nine are lost
Out in the darkness and the icy dew,
And no one knows how long this night will last.
Restore us; call us back to you by name,
And by your life laid down, redeem our shame.

(c) Malcolm Guite. With permission.

Holy Week in Chester 5: “I am the True Vine” (Good Friday)

Reading: John 15.1-11

This Holy Week we’ve been exploring the I AM sayings in St John’s Gospel: “I am the door”, “I am the resurrection and the life”, “I am the light of the world”, and last night, at the Lord’s Supper on Maundy Thursday, “I am the bread of life”. 

Today I want to take the three sayings that remain and reflect with you these pictures, these metaphors help us approach the cross of Jesus on this solemn day. But at the outset I want to remind us of one of the insights we have been learning from St John that makes a real difference to how we observe this day. It’s that as St John sees it, Good Friday and Easter belong together, are of a single piece. Throughout the forty days of Lent we have been preparing for this celebration of the Lord’s Passover, the festival that marks how we have passed from death to life. It’s not that today is for mourning a terrible disaster while Easter is the happy ending. St John would say that in Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, God is glorified because his Son has finished his work and is going to the Father. 

So I invite you, in this first part of our Three Hour observance, to join me in meditating on this great mystery that lies at the heart of Christian faith, We shall be reflecting on Jesus’ words “I am the true vine”, “I am the way, the truth and the life” and “I am the good shepherd”. Finally, during the liturgy of the day, when the gospel reading records Jesus last word from the cross, “It is accomplished”, I  shall draw together these seven I AM sayings by one that is found in the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, “I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end”. 

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“I am the true vine.” We are back in the upper room at the last supper. It is the night of betrayal. Ahead lies Golgotha and the cross. Judas has already gone out into the night to do his work. And yet, this is a beautiful feast, this intimate gathering of Jesus with his disciples whom he now calls friends. The talk has been all about service after the example of Jesus who has washed their feet, about loving one another as he has loved them, about the peace he will bequeath to them when he has gone away. And then Jesus introduces this new image. “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine-grower.” 

I said it’s a new image. It isn’t, really. We are meant to recall how the Hebrew Bible plays with the theme of the vine. The vineyard was a familiar picture of God’s people. Isaiah tells a parable about a vineyard that should have produced a rich harvest, but instead proffered only shrivelled up “wild grapes” good neither for man nor beast. What had the owner not done to make sure the beloved vineyard flourished? But it proved to be fit only for destruction. “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel” says the prophet. One of the psalms we sing in Passiontide takes up the picture of the vineyard in trouble. “You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it…Why then have you broken down its walls? Turn again, O God of hosts, look down from heaven and have regard for this vine that your right hand has planted.” 

So when Jesus speaks of himself as the vine, he is drawing on a long history of disappointment and failure. But what a contrast he brings! Where once, the vine was a symbol of judgment, on the lips of Jesus it’s become a sign of life and love, promise and renewal. As the true vine, he fulfils all that was expected of God’s vineyard; where once, the people failed their God (a powerful theme in St John’s Gospel), Jesus is the obedient Son who perfectly fulfils the vocation God has laid on him. It’s true that the vine-grower must act decisively, harshly even, if branches of the vine prove unproductive. But that is only so that it may bear more fruit. And that happens as we “abide” in him, says Jesus, live in the closest possible relationship with him, hide ourselves in him if you like. We are to abide in his love as intimately as he himself abides in the Father’s love. In that way we become organically joined to his life among us, just as the branches draw their life and fruitfulness from the root and stem and sap of the vine. We draw the very life of God into ourselves at the same time as we ourselves are taken into the heart of his divine life.

Why am I telling you all this on Good Friday? Because of how the symbolism of wine poured out and blood shed runs right through the Fourth Gospel. The vine and the branches take us straight back to where Jesus began his public ministry and performed his first sign. At Cana of Galilee, he was a guest at a wedding, and turned water into wine. It was there, says St John, that he “revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him”. Jesus goes on say in the passage about the Bread of Life, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink”. To “abide” in him, to receive into ourselves his flesh and blood is to become one with the crucified and risen Lord, just as the vine and the branches are one organism. 

This is why the end of John’s passion story makes so much of what happened when the soldier pierced the side of the crucified Jesus. “At once, blood and water came out. He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth.” The Christian spiritual tradition sees a universe of meaning in those words. It sees in them how the salvation of the world was achieved at the cross, our race reconciled to God because of the blood and water that flowed out to embrace every human child. Water of baptism, blood of communion, together bearing witness that in Jesus, God so loved the world. “Blood of my Saviour, bathe me in thy tide, / wash me with water flowing from thy side” says the passion hymn based on the prayer Anima Christi. It goes on: “Deep in thy wounds, Lord, hide and shelter me, / so shall I never, never part from thee’. That’s what it means to “abide” in Christ and find in his cross the source of all that it means to be truly alive. In one of his poems, “The Agonie”, George Herbert concludes a reflection on the cross with a marvellous couple of lines: “Love is that liquor sweet, and most divine / Which my God feels as blood, but I as wine”. There’s nothing we can add.

Except this, perhaps. Today sets before us what our next hymn is right to call “the wondrous cross”. We come to Golgotha to contemplate what it means to respond as best we may to this emblem of the love that loves to the end. The blood that is shed there is our invitation to come back to Christ the true Vine, to find in him our forgiveness and salvation, our lives healed and mended, reconciliation promised for all the world. We abide in his wounded side because our lives depend on him, for he is our life and love. 

But that is more than the truth of Good Friday alone. It’s the truth of Easter too. When in Eastertide, Jesus came to Thomas the doubter and invited him to place his hand in his wounded side, it was to affirm that abiding in him is how people of faith are to be, who believe that he is risen from the dead and who entrust their lives to that truth. On the other side of Easter, it’s the risen Christ we hear promising us, reassuring us that “I am the true vine”. In him we see God’s love summoning us, beckoning to us to find the place of safety and sanctuary where we can “abide” forever in him, find in him the eternal life he promises throughout St John’s Gospel. As we abide in the cross and resurrection, we see the fulness of God’s glory that tells us that all along, “love was his meaning”, “such rich love as makes the poor heart glad”.

Seen this way, Good Friday calls us back from a religion of duty to a living faith in which we discover how our lives are hidden with the Christ in God. This is what the risen Christ the true Vine wants of us and all who follow him: that we bring to the cross our hunger and our thirst, our longing for contentment and happiness, our wish that if only life could begin again. Golgotha proclaims that this is precisely what is ours in this Love laid down, this water and blood that flowed from the side of this life-giving Vine of God. We have only to reach out, drink from the cup that is held before us, and be thankful.

A sonnet by Malcolm Guite once more.

How might it feel to be part of the vine?
Not just to see the vineyard from afar
Or even pluck the clusters, press the wine,
But to be grafted in, to feel the stir
Of inward sap that rises from our root,
Himself deep planted in the ground of Love,
To feel a leaf unfold a tender shoot,
As tendrils curled unfurl, as branches give
A little to the swelling of the grape,
In gradual perfection, round and full,
To bear within oneself the joy and hope
Of God’s good vintage, till it’s ripe and whole.
What might it mean to bide and to abide
In such rich love as makes the poor heart glad.

(c) Malcolm Guite. With permission.

Holy Week in Chester 3: “I am the Light of the World”

Reading: John 9.1-12

In our Holy Week journey through the I AM sayings of St John’s Gospel, we have looked at the Door, and at the Resurrection and the Life. Tonight, we come to “I am the Light of the World”. 

Light is a universal word we find in all the world’s religions. And like last night’s life, light is one of the great words of St John. The two are linked together in the very first paragraph of the gospel that we read at Christmas time, “In him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it”. That passage in turn looks back to the creation story in the Book of Genesis where the first words God speaks are “Let there be light!”  “And there was light” the text says, “and God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. The light he called Day, and the darkness Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

In Genesis, light and darkness, day and night aren’t yet distinguished by moral or spiritual values. Light is to see by, and the daily rhythm of light and darkness is given in order to structure time. But in St John it is very different. Night time and darkness are dangerous and risky. When Judas left the upper room to hand Jesus over to the authorities, he “went out”, says John, “and it was night” – an observation left hanging in the air as its own commentary on the darkness that had overtaken the betrayer’s soul. “And this is the judgment” says Jesus earlier, “That the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” Or as he says on the very threshold of Holy Week, “the light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light so that you may become children of light.”

All of which heightens the significance of Jesus’ saying, “I am the light of the world.” He has already spoken these words in the previous chapter and added: “whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life”. But now, Jesus embeds those same words in the important story of the healing of the man who was born blind. Like the raising of Lazarus last night, this sign is another disclosure of God’s activity in the world, his “works” as John calls them. “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 

But light has its different aspects. In St John, the Light of the World enables us to see in things in new ways. C. S. Lewis famously said that he believed that the sun had risen, not because he gazed directly at it but because by its light he could see the world, other people and himself. Illumination is a key stage in the classic spiritual path. Not for nothing did our eighteenth-century forebears speak about enlightenment as an event (God-given, some said) in the journey of scientific method and intellectual self-awareness. But if you were the poet William Blake, you would describe looking into the sun as gazing at angels. So you did that with great care, knowing how risky it is to expose yourself to such a fierce, unforgiving light. Indeed, one of the Psalms talks about God wrapping himself in light as in a garment, an idea taken up in the hymn Immortal, invisible, God only wise, In light inaccessible hid from our eyes. ’Tis only the splendour of light hideth thee it goes, verses rich in theological wisdom. The paradox is that light conceals as much as it reveals. Moses prayed, “Lord, show me your glory”, but is warned to protect himself in the cleft of the rock because if he so much as glimpses Divinity as he really is, it will kill him. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality” says T.S. Eliot, least of all when that reality is God. 

St John plays with some of these themes in the course of his gospel. In particular, he takes us back to Moses in the prologue we keep returning to. Where Moses had asked to behold God’s glory but had needed to be shielded from experiencing its fulness, John tells us that in the Word made flesh who lived among us, “we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth”. His claim is as high as it could possibly be. And to underline it, as he embarks on telling the story of Jesus’ works among humankind, the great “signs” he performs, John says that he “revealed his glory and his disciples believed in him”. 

And it is not long before Jesus begins to speak of the destiny that awaits him, his own suffering and death. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” he says; and later, in his prayer on the very threshold of his passion, “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do”. We know where it is that Jesus finishes his work, for he tells us so in his last word from the cross: “It is accomplished”. If you had asked St John, where do we see God’s glory most clearly, where do we see his light shining most steadily, he would answer, at Golgotha, at the cross where love’s work is completed, where the crucified Lord lays down his life for his friends, where the Son of Man is enthroned as the king who is lifted up so that he may draw all people to himself. In the Fourth Gospel, the cross, the last and greatest sign of glory, represents not defeat but God’s work achieved, completed, victorious.

It’s worth lingering on this point about the Johannine cross. It seems perverse to use words like light and glory of that darkest and cruellest of places, Golgotha, the “skull”. But that paradox, seeing glory in a place of ignominy and shame, light in the midst of darkness and desolation, is precisely John’s point. “There is in God a deep and dazzling darkness” says one mystical poet. It’s not far from St Paul’s language about seeing God’s wisdom in the folly of the cross, his power in its weakness. “It is accomplished” proclaims Jesus in the last word from the cross in St John. Throughout the gospel, he emphasises how Jesus has come into the world to do the work of God and complete it, or as he says of Jesus in the upper room, to love to the very end. So tetelestai, “it is finished”, is the most important word in the Passion narrative. 

On Good Friday, Bach’s St John Passion will be performed in the Cathedral. I wonder how Bach’s setting of that last word will be sung by the bass who takes the part of Christus. It’s a falling line in Bach’s music, Es ist vollbracht.  I hope it will be with firmness and confidence, not resignation and defeat. I have a theory that just as the last words from the cross in the other gospels are quotations from the Psalms, John’s “it is finished” refers to the conclusion of the Passion Psalm 22. Matthew and Mark tell how the dying Jesus quotes the first line, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Could it be that St John alludes to the triumphant last line of that Psalm that moves from utter despair to gratitude and praise: “future generations will proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it”. He has performed it. All is done. Tetelestai. That’s glory.

And because it is done, the cross inevitably points beyond itself to the new day that begins at Easter. As we saw last night in the story of the raising of Lazarus, throughout John’s gospel, resurrection seems to be enfolded into the passion and crucifixion in a single movement that the author describes as Jesus’ “going to the Father”. When the Easter story begins and Mary goes to the tomb, it is still dark. I think it’s meant to point up the contrast between what she and the disciples don’t yet know, can’t yet grasp about the empty tomb, and what the emerging light of day will reveal to be the dawn of a new glory, that Jesus is risen and is present to his people until he returns to his Father. 

So the Light of the World gives sight not only to the man born blind, but to the whole of creation, for “the true light which enlightens everyone was coming into the world”. For St John, the incarnation, the signs, the crucifixion, the resurrection are like the seamless robe for which the soldiers cast lots in his passion story. They all disclose the glory that is revealed as the Light of the world that he loves, says John, “to the end”. This Holy Week we celebrate the great light that shines into the shadowy places of life, brings warmth and vitality to a cold dark world, and shows us the way back to him so that we can learn to be God’s people once again.

Here is how Malcolm Guite puts it in his sonnet on the Light of the World.

I see your world in light that shines behind me,
Lit by a sun whose rays I cannot see,
The smallest gleam of light still seems to find me
Or find the child who’s hiding deep inside me.
I see your light reflected in the water,
Or kindled suddenly in someone’s eyes,
It shimmers through the living leaves of summer,
Or spills from silver veins in leaden skies,
It gathers in the candles at our vespers
It concentrates in tiny drops of dew
At times it sings for joy, at times it whispers,
But all the time it calls me back to you.
I follow you upstream through this dark night
My saviour, source, and spring, my life and light.

(c) Malcolm Guite. With permission