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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John 12.12-26 
Southwark Cathedral, Palm Sunday 2019 

Lifted Up

I want to say something briefly about the paragraph I put in the notice sheet today. There was never going to be a good time to tell you that Jenny and I will be leaving Durham when I retire later this year. It will be hard to say goodbye to all of you and all of this when September comes. But that is not for another 6 months, and that’s still two equinoxes and many festivals away. As we celebrate 12 years here this coming Friday, St Cuthbert’s Day, we are deeply thankful for all that it has meant to live and work among you. Thankfulness is what matters most. That’s why we are here at the eucharist. So let me press on with my sermon.   

‘So must the Son of Man be lifted up’ says the Gospel.

In the New Testament, height is exhilarating and it is ominous.  As an exhilarating word, it means victory, kingship, or simply being near to God.  Jesus ‘ascends’ to take up his throne; he reigns on high; he is ‘above’ all things.  He is transfigured on a mountain; he ascends to his Father from a hill top; he goes up into high remote places to be alone and pray.  The New Testament calls him our ‘high priest’ who has passed through the heavens and has the skies beneath his feet. As an ominous word, however, height can stand for anxiety, threat, even evil.  When the devil tempts Jesus, he takes him up a high mountain, and then up on to a pinnacle of the temple. He has to climb up to do battle with Satan and triumph over evil. One New Testament letter refers to the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places; today’s reading speaks about the ‘ruler of the power of the air’. In the gospels, there is a turning point when Jesus must leave Galilee and ‘go up’ to Jerusalem to face suffering and death.  In the Old Testament, the Hebrews always ‘went up’ to the city and its temple for the joyous pilgrim feasts. When you fly El-Al to Tel Aviv you are ‘going up’: that’s what the name means. But for Jesus at Passover time, ‘going up’ will mean not living but dying. ‘I was glad when they said unto me, let us go to the house of the Lord’. But for Jesus it will be his death sentence.   

In this morning’s gospel, Jesus uses the image of height in a striking way.  ‘As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up’. What is this ‘lifted up’?  Jesus goes on to hint at what it means. ‘The Son of Man must be lifted up so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…’  He gave. In St John, this means the incarnation, the Word made flesh. But it means more than that. It means giving to the fullest extent, loving ‘to the end’.  And if we still do not understand, we need only go to the next occasion Jesus speaks about being ‘lifted up’ when, St John adds: ‘he said this to indicate by what death he would die.’  To be ‘lifted up’ means being crucified. It means toiling slowly and painfully up another of those gospel summits, the hill of Golgotha.  It means being strung up in the sight of heaven and earth.  It means ropes and nails and mocking soldiers and sour wine.  It means the passion of the Christ, his dying and death.  The phrase comes three times in St John’s Gospel, just as three times in St Mark, the Son of Man must be betrayed to sinners and be put to death.  These are the things we begin to think about as on this Refreshment Sunday, Lent moves towards Passiontide as inevitably as Jesus moves toward the cross.

In the crucifixion, Jesus’ ‘hour’ has finally come. At one level it’s the ‘hour’ of disgrace, dishonour. To be lifted up on Golgotha is, paradoxically, to be abased, like humankind in the psalm becoming ‘lower than the angels’, so low as to share the fate of bandits, thieves and murderers; a suffering servant ‘despised and rejected by men’.  Yet in this terrible degradation St John sees something else.  He speaks of it as a kind of splendour, a transfiguration. It’s the paradox only the eyes of faith can discern.  Jesus is ‘lifted up’, he says, because in his humiliation he is exalted as a king on his throne, the one who reigns in triumph on the tree as the ancient passion hymns put it.  St John speaks often about Jesus being ‘glorified’ – and if we were to ask him where most of all we see the glory of the only begotten Son, full of grace and truth, he would not hesitate to answer: here, at the cross, where love is poured out, where God’s self-emptying, begun in the incarnation, is complete.  So the last word of Jesus from the cross is very different from the other gospels.  It isn’t the desolate cry of St Mark, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’; nor the trustful, obedient prayer of St Luke, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit’.  It’s a single word in Greek, tetelestai, ‘It is accomplished!’: a shout of victory, for the work of God is finished, and the salvation of the world is assured.

Today we stand near the threshold of Passiontide, and begin to contemplate ‘this thing most wonderful’, Jesus lifted up on the cross for the world.  What does God want of us as we tell once more this strange and wonderful story that will take us through Holy Week and on to the day of resurrection?  I think there is only one thing God wants of us. It is that we should recognise who and what we are by recognising who and what Jesus is.  I mean that we must acknowledge in a new way that we are the subjects of the Son of God who hangs there, and give him our allegiance as our king. Passiontide is a time to ask ourselves: what does it mean to be his disciples, to walk in the way of the cross, to bear witness to the man of sorrows? We need to recall the ashen cross on our foreheads at the beginning of Lent and how we were reminded to turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.  It’s time to look forward to renewing our baptism vows at Easter and reawaken the memory of how we were marked with cross when our Christian journey began.  As the earth is renewed at springtime, it’s time for us to renew ourselves as God’s people who belong to the King of love and truth.

We know that it was not the nails that kept him hanging on the cross, but only love. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.’ ‘Rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us’ says Ephesians of God’s infinite grace towards us. So love must beget love, his love drawing out of us our belief, our faith, and most of all our love for the One who first loved us: On Mothering Sunday, this rich language carries a particular association: the sheer cost of begetting and birthing and nurturing the bundle of life that is each of us. Our mothers carry all their lives the marks of what it cost to bring us into the world. Julian of Norwich knew this when she famously said: ‘Just as God is our Father, so God is also our Mother; I am the Light and the Grace which is love, I am the One who makes you love’. ‘Love’s endeavour, love’s expense’ is what good mothering means in both its agony and ecstasy. This is how God is, in the wideness of his mercy.

So we gaze on the One we have pierced, high and lifted up in majesty on the cross; we place our hands in his wounded side, and are thankful: for ourselves, indeed, but also on behalf of all humanity, this ‘world’ that God so loved. We shall hear in next week’s gospel how Jesus says: ‘When I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all people to myself’. One day that great expectation will be fulfilled. The cross seems a strange and lowly place to begin – or do I mean accomplish? - this project of salvation. But the weakness of God is stronger than mortals, his foolishness is wiser than our human wisdom.

For the love of God is broader

than the measure of man’s mind;
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.

Love has its reasons of which reason knows nothing but faith understands everything. For as Julian said, ‘Love awakens our desire, and then gives itself to us as its ultimate fulfilment and goal.’ And as we come to desire him with all our heart, we learn to be God’s people once again and give our life, our soul, our all to this ‘love so amazing, so divine’.

Durham Cathedral

Lent 4, Refreshment/Mothering Sunday, 15 March 2015 

Ephesians 2.1-10, John 3.14-21