Walking on Water: an ordination retreat address

Last year I gave five ordination retreat addresses to the deacon ordinands in the Diocese of Newcastle. This year I was invited to be with them again to give their final retreat address on the day of their ordination as priests. In 2018 I took as my theme five of the "signs" of glory in St John's Gospel. I suggested that ordained ministry could be seen as a sign that bears witness to God's glory and love in the world in such a way as to evoke faith. This year I decided to continue that theme with an address on a sixth sign in St John where Jesus walks on the water. Here is my reflection.

A year ago it was my privilege to explore with you the signs of glory in St John’s Gospel. We looked at the turning of the water into wine at Cana, the healing of the Roman officer’s son, the feeding of the five thousand, the man born blind, and the raising of Lazarus. We asked how these familiar stories shed light on our ministry as ordained men and women, specifically as deacons.

You’ll remember that John bears witness to these signs because they disclose who Jesus is and what he has come to do. They are signs of glory because glory is John’s word for God’s giving of himself in love for the world in the incarnate Word in whom, he says, we see “grace and truth”. These are not events chosen at random out of hundreds of possibilities. John tells us at the end of the gospel what his method has been. “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” (John 21.30-31). Revealing God’s glory and bringing faith to birth – these are John’s aims.

How quickly a year flies by! When I was asked to come back and give an address on this Saturday morning of your ordination as priests, I thought, let’s return to St John’s Gospel and look at another of the seven signs that we didn’t study last year. Let’s ask the same question, how does this story speak to us on our ordination day, this time as we stand on the threshold of starting out on our life’s work as priests in the church of God.

So today let’s turn to the story in John 6.15-21 where Jesus walks on the water. I’ve often thought that ordained ministry is like walking on water. And that faith itself is walking on water. As clergy we are ministers of faith who not only speak about it but model ways of believing. We don’t pretend to cast-iron certainties but to faith in the spirit of the man in the gospels who said “Lord I believe! Help my unbelief!” This strikes me as hugely important in a world where everything is logic-based or evidence-led. The only evidence for Christianity that interests me is lives that are transformed by it. And to open ourselves and others up to the life-changing power of the risen Christ is to launch ourselves out on the deep, as Jesus says to Simon in St Luke. There is no shallow end in Christianity.

I’ve long treasured a saying of Soren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth century Danish philosopher and theologian. He says that if we think logic or evidence could lead us to grasp God objectively, then it wouldn’t be belief. “Precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith, I must constantly hold fast the objective uncertainty, so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.” That’s a lot of water. As ministers this is our natural habitat. I remember an ordinand saying once that he wanted to explore becoming a priest because he wanted a role in life where his feet wouldn’t touch the ground.

On your ordination day last year I asked you about your hopes and aspirations and expectations as you approached this great moment in your lives. “You wouldn’t be human if somewhere within, you didn’t tremble at this threshold” I said, recalling my own ordination more than forty years ago. Now that I look back, it felt a bit like the disciples going down to the sea, getting into a boat and setting off on their voyage. Even if the lake wasn’t rough to begin with, it was now, John points out, “dark”. Ahead of them an adventure beckoned. But there was so much that was unknown to them, so much that they couldn’t know. There is risk involved in launching out on to the deep at night, as they will tell you when you visit Galilee and learn about the storms and squalls that suddenly sweep down from Mount Hermon and churn up the water treacherously.

But I think the key question concerns what is going on inside us. Van Gogh said that the human heart is “very much like the sea; it has its storms, it has its tides, and in its depths it has its pearls too”. This is a metaphor they may not recognise in poor landlocked dioceses. But we here in Newcastle know the North Sea and its fickleness, the calm still days where barely a ripple laps the pristine white beaches of Northumberland, and the storms out of the north east that crash against the basalt rocks and lighthouses and breakwaters so violently that you wonder they are still standing. We know our own selves too. On the night before Thomas Merton was ordained priest in 1949, he confided to his journal The Sign of Jonas. “My life is a great mess and tangle of half-conscious subterfuges to evade grace and duty. I have done all things badly. I have thrown away great opportunities. My infidelity to Christ, instead of making me sick with despair, drives me to throw myself all the more blindly into the arms of His mercy.” He knew about treading water at seventy thousand fathoms.

Which is, not literally but metaphorically what the disciples experienced on Gennesaret that night. “The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing.” They had rowed three or four miles, says John, which can only mean that they were in the middle of the lake, out of sight of the shoreline. At the height of the tempest, they see Jesus coming to them, drawing near to the boat. “And they were terrified” says the text. You’d have thought they would already be frightened for their lives because of the storm. Yet it’s the apparition of Jesus that terrifies: that’s clear from the words Jesus speaks. “It is I; do not be afraid”.

As you know, the sea held many threats for Hebrews. They were not natural seafarers like the Philistines. To them the waters, necessary for life, necessary for flourishing, were to be respected, even feared. They harboured demonic powers that could overwhelm and destroy people. The psalms are full of references to the “dragons of the deep” and prayers for God to keep safe those who cried out from waters that were rising up to their neck. In Mesopotamian myth, creation came about because the god overcame the monster of the primordial ocean and brought forth order and safety, symbolised by the dry land. So to be exposed to wind and storm out on open water was one of the worst ordeals a Jewish disciple could imagine.

And walking over the storm-tossed waves Jesus comes. We mustn’t miss the significance of this. For St John it recalls the first day of creation when everything was tohu wavohu, “a formless void”, a chaotic “welter and waste and darkness over the deep” as Robert Alter translates it in his brilliant commentary on the Hebrew Bible. “And God’s breath was hovering over the waters.” The text is telling us that this Jesus is Lord over the deep, the One to whom sovereignty belongs because it was he who created it in the first place. St John is taking us back to the opening words of the Bible and the opening words of his gospel. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” “It is I; do not be afraid.” Or as we should translate it, I AM. Don’t miss the importance of that Ego Eimi. When we hear those two words, we know we are in the presence of the one who affirms of himself that he is none other than the embodiment of Israel’s God Yahweh who, you’ll recall, appeared to Moses and Elijah out of the storm cloud and bid his people to be loyal to his teaching and his covenant.

Why am I telling you all this on your ordination day? What does this sign of Jesus walking on water suggest to us about being priests in God’s church?

There are two connections I want to make. The first is to do with the nature of this sign. Recall that in the gospel, Jesus’ signs reveal God’s glory and evoke faith. Last year we saw that the signs in St John’s Gospel could suggest how ordained ministry is about precisely those same two things: revealing God’s glory and evoking faith. What are deacons and priests for if we don’t publicly represent God’s presence among us and invite other people to discover glory in their midst as they find faith for themselves?

We mustn’t lose sight of the simplicity of what we are about as clergy, I think. We say in the General Thanksgiving, and lead others in saying, “We bless thee for our creation, preservation and all the blessings of this life, but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world through our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace and for the hope of glory”. That says everything about glory and faith in relation to all of human life. Every sign of God unveils an aspect of glory, and knocks on our doors of perception to believe in a more profound way. And as ministers of God we are called to play our part of that movement of God’s love and grace towards his creation. A priest is a “walking sacrament” said Austin Farrer in one of his sermons. That means being “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace” according to the Prayer Book’s definition of a sacrament. This is what you pledge today for the rest of your lives.

Let’s pursue the story a little further. Let’s ask what effect the presence of Jesus has on those storm-tossed disciples, and his disclosure “I AM: do not be frightened”. The text says that “they wanted to take him into the boat”. Why not say that they simply received him into the boat? I think because in their initial terror at the apparition, their natural instinct is to protect themselves from this alien presence. But now that they know who it is who is coming to them, there is a change of mind and heart: they desire him, they need him to come in among them. Only that way does salvation lie. “Immediately they reached the land toward which they were going.” John doesn’t say that the storm is stilled. What matters is that navigation is restored. Direction is recovered. The voyage is safely accomplished.

Let me put to you the idea that priesthood is about bringing God-given direction and purpose to people’s lives. You’ve already begun to discover this during your deacon’s year. You have listened to enquirers who don’t know where they are as the voices of many beliefs and ideologies clamour for attention, and have helped them find faith in God. You have sat with those in distress and brought them comfort and hope in their troubles. You have guided the faithful in their prayers and pointed to ways in which they might deepen their spiritual lives. You have ministered to parishioners at the key transitions of life – baptisms, marriages, funerals – where they are open to exploring the deep meanings of human existence. You have preached about God’s wise and loving will for the world and for us.

All of this continues when you become priests but in a more focused, intentional way. As priests you are explicitly called to represent and hold together the wholeness of the church’s ministry when the Bishop presents you with the Bible. “Receive this book as a sign (there’s that word again!) of the authority which God has given you this day to preach the gospel of Christ and to minister his holy sacraments.” Bearing witness to glory and evoking faith – that’s what a sign is for. And that means, in the words of the collect, bringing order to the unruly wills and affections of us mortals. The ordinal is clear about this. “Priests” the Bishop will say “are called to be messengers, watchmen and stewards of the Lord; they are to teach and admonish, to feed and provide for his family in the wilderness of this world’s temptations, and to guide them through its confusions, that they may be saved through Christ for ever.” That’s the image of the desert rather than the sea. But the message is the same. When Jesus gets into the boat with us, our moral and spiritual compass is restored. We are safe because the voyage finds its direction again. We make landfall. There is order and stability once more.

The second connection I want to make between Jesus walking on the water and our ministry as priests arises out of the setting of this story in St John. It’s intriguing that this sign of glory is embedded in a story about another sign. Today’s narrative separates the account of Jesus feeding the crowd from his teaching about it. You need to read the whole of this chapter to get the connection. After Jesus has multiplied the loaves and the fragments have been gathered up, the crowd clamours to make him king, this “prophet who is to come into the world”. So Jesus withdraws from them, and disciples get into the boat to cross the lake to Capernaum. After their encounter in the storm, John takes us back to the crowd that has gone looking for Jesus. This is where he speaks about himself as “the living bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world”. This is John’s equivalent of an institution narrative where Jesus talks about “eating my flesh and drinking my blood”, sacramental language that took us directly to the eucharist and our celebration of it as the heart of the church’s life.

I’m saying that strange as it may seem, the sign of Jesus in the storm belongs with the sign of the bread of life. The Lord who feeds the crowd is the One who saves his followers from disaster by walking on water and getting into their boat with them. Which is to suggest that what I’ve called bringing safety is profoundly linked to the sacrament of the eucharist. On one day the disciples hear Jesus say in the tempest, “I AM: do not be afraid.” The next day they hear him promise: “this is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that we may eat of it and not die…Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever.” Salvation and sacrament seamlessly bound together in this story of two signs.

For all of you, to preside at the eucharist for the first time will be a day you will always remember. I’m sure you have prepared yourself for many weeks and months, offered it to God and asked to be worthy of this great and wonderful act you will be performing in the name of the crucified and risen Lord Christ whose table it is. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every eucharist recaptured the hungers and hopes we bring to our first! I’m sure that when you stand at the altar for the first time as a priest, you will echo Thomas Merton. “The greatest gift that come to anyone is to share in the infinite act by which God’s love is poured out on all humanity.” He describes how, in the joy of his ordination and first mass, “a new world has somehow been brought into being…full of sublimity and of things that none of us will understand for a year or two to come”. Or even after a lifetime, I think. He is speaking of every privileged occasion when we feel ourselves caught up in God’s mission to bring reconciliation and healing to the human family. And he says it of himself as a new priest who is deeply aware of his role in the eucharist, the focus of all that the church proclaims good news about the God who so loves the world, and who wants to bring about its redemption.

And that’s the link between these two signs which both bear witness to glory and evoke faith. As a priest at the eucharist, your vocation is to take, bless, break and give the living bread that is God’s pledge of eternal life, so that the world may be saved through Christ for ever. The story we tell and act out in the eucharist is the template of the redeemed life. In our disorientation and darkness, it resets our compass, gives us back our sense of direction, re-orientates us so that we travel safely and arrive where we should be. Precisely as Jesus does when he walks on the water and gets into the boat. As priests, you take your place in both these stories. You inhabit these signs in your own selves as ministers of grace and truth. As walking sacraments, you are ministers of God’s love who speak about it and live it out as the purpose and ground of all our being. In the name of your Lord, and as signs of his presence, you too have come so that people may have life, and have it in all its fulness.

“Who is sufficient for these things?” asks St Paul in his Corinthian letters. Not me, not you, not any of the men and women who will be ordained priest today and tomorrow. Knowing our frailty and fear, our ambivalence and uncertainty, the inner storms and tides Van Gogh wrote about, but knowing too the pearls and every other gift we have to bring, there is only one thing we can do. To pray Veni Creator, “Come Holy Ghost” so that we may be cleansed and inspired and equipped as only God’s Spirit can. And kneel humbly and open our hands to receive the living bread that God wants to give us. For we know that Jesus is in the boat with us, whatever storms we face on the journeys that lie ahead, however many fathoms deep are the waters we are launched on.

Which is why we are deeply, deeply thankful for all that has brought us to this point in our lives today. God be with you.

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 4: “I am the Bread of Life” (on Maundy Thursday)

Reading: John 6.32-40

In these Holy Week addresses we are looking at Jesus’ I AM sayings in St John: I am the Door, I am the Resurrection and the Life, I am the Light of the World. On Maundy Thursday, we come to “I am the Bread of Life”. The words are from St John’s story of the feeding of the crowd with the five barley loaves and two fish from a young boy’s basket. “When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world’.” Just as Jesus the bread of life feeds the crowd, “as much as they wanted”, so tonight, Maundy Thursday, bread is our focus we celebrate this sacrament, this supper of the Lord that feeds the faithful until time shall end. 

St John’s account of the last supper focuses on how Jesus washed his disciples’ feet and taught them about service and self-giving love. He doesn’t give us Jesus’ blessing over the bread and wine and the command to “do this in memory of me”. Instead, the author gives us the feeding of the five thousand and the teaching that follows it. Jesus explains how those material loaves that satisfied the people’s hunger represent “the bread of God which comes down from heaven and gives light to the world”. He tells them not to become enslaved to the sign itself, but to focus on what it points to. “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life which the Son of Man will give you.” “My flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.” That’s St John’s way of reframing the words of the institution narrative in the eucharistic prayer: this is my body, this is my blood. 

When Jesus fed the crowd, it reminded them of how God had fed the Hebrews in the desert. “Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat’”. One of the Psalms recalls the Hebrews complaining, “Can God spread a table in the wilderness? Yet he commanded the skies above and opened the doors of heaven; he rained down on them manna to eat, and gave them the grain of heaven. Mortals ate the bread of angels; he sent them food in abundance.” So St John imagines Jesus as a new Moses responding to the people’s need and giving them the food they craved. “I am the Bread of Life” – I am to you what Yahweh was to your ancestors in the desert. I give you what you ask for. Even if you do not know what to do with the truth that comes with this gift, for you have not yet learned how to recognise the Giver, not yet recognised that the bread with which I nourish you is nothing less than “God’s presence and his very self, and essence all divine”.

St John tells us that the feeding of the crowd took place near Passover time. The blessing and breaking of bread played a central part in the Passover meal, as did the sharing of wine. So when Jesus feeds the five thousand, he is symbolically reaching back to that Passover story of deliverance and redemption. Which is why he speaks repeatedly about God raising the dead and giving them eternal life, no longer coming under judgment but passing over “from death to life”. 

Maundy Thursday is inextricably linked in the calendar to the season of the Jewish Passover. These three days of the Triduum, Maundy Thursday evening to the Vigil eucharist when we greet Easter only makes sense if we grasp how the Passover underlies them and gives them meaning. For this journey from death to resurrection has its origins in that story our Jewish brothers and sisters recount every spring time, how an enslaved people were redeemed, given back their lives, were brought out into freedom as new possibilities opened up before them. 

All these layers of story and association are embedded in those simple words “I am the bread of life”, or as I think it’s better translated, “I am the living bread”. To eat of that bread is to be taken directly to the where Jesus’ body is broken on the cross, laid down for his friends, for us here tonight, and for all humanity. Tomorrow will take us to the place of the skull where we shall gaze once again on the spectacle of sacrificial love. But throughout the Passion, whether it’s tonight in the upper room or tomorrow at Golgotha, resurrection is always in view. “This is the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.” Which is why this meal is not only a last supper but a first. Even though it is overshadowed by the cross, it nevertheless looks forward to the banquet of God’s kingdom when the whole creation, liberated from bondage and pain, will feast before God in glad celebration. 

We have the symbol, but not yet the reality it points to. In a thousand different places of famine or warfare, the hungry still cry out for their food, just as the Hebrews did. “Where to get bread?” Will God, can God spread a table in these wildernesses? The answer this eucharist offers is, yes he can, and he will, but it is we human beings who must be the agents of his tender mercy. “Give us this bread always!” is the plea from that day to this. Our paschal celebrations that begin tonight only have integrity if we hear their cry. “Bread for myself is a material question” said Nikolai Berdyaev; “bread for my neighbour is a spiritual question.” The word Maundy comes from the Latin mandatum, a command. The command is that we love one another. At this last supper with its washing of feet, the risen Jesus is among us as one who serves. We eat and drink together, and he calls us his friends. But not without asking us what it must mean for us to be friends to those who still cry out for daily bread. 

Malcolm Guite puts it like this.

Where to get bread? An ever-pressing question
That trembles on the lips of anxious mothers,
Bread for their families, bread for all these others;
A whole world on the margin of exhaustion.
And where that hunger has been satisfied
Where to get bread? The question still returns
In our abundance something starves and yearns
We crave fulfilment, crave and are denied.

And then comes One who speaks into our needs
Who opens out the secret hopes we cherish
Whose presence calls our hidden hearts to flourish
Whose words unfold in us like living seeds
Come to me, broken, hungry, incomplete,
I Am the Bread of Life, break Me and eat.

(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