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.

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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 

At the Ordination of Deacons in Newcastle

I would have the words of John the Baptist emblazoned on the vesture of every newly ordained deacon, priest and bishop. “'I am not the Messiah!” he says, and doesn't not deny it when people want to know. “Are you Elijah? Are you that Prophet?” And he answers “No”. “Who are you then? What do you say about yourself” And John replies: “I am simply the voice of one crying out, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord’”. Not the Messiah who brings in the kingdom. Not Elijah with his earthquake, wind and fire. Not that Prophet like Moses storming down the mountain with the tablets of the law. Just a voice crying out in the wilderness, preparing for the Lord’s coming.

And a wilderness it may seem like at times. Who wants deacons these days? Who needs clergy other than to lend tone or make fun of? Why be ordained at all when the tides of secularism sweep all before them? Well, look back to John the Baptist on your ordination day. Things were scarcely more auspicious then. His ministry baffled some and offended many more. He spoke truth to power and paid for it with his life. You could hardly call it a successful career. And yet he bore witness. That’s what matters – bearing witness. “In the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord.” “But”, some might reply, “of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight was ever made” as Immanuel Kant put it. Maybe he was right. Nevertheless, it matters that we point to the promised justice and reconciliation and truth that will one day break into our world.

For you who are becoming deacons this afternoon, “pointing” in words and deeds to the reality of God is what ordination means. Of course every baptised Christian does this day in, day out, if we take Christianity seriously. But what marks clergy out is that you are public representatives of God and his church, witnesses before the world of what the gospel promises to all who welcome it and embrace it. You are not the Messiah, however much people may wish that you were and sometimes even build pedestals for you to try to make you one. You are not Elijah, and not the Prophet. You are you, and your calling to is point to the Messiah in what you say and what you do and what you are. That makes you a public witness to the gospel. It confers on you the authority of the church. You become, as Austin Farrer famously said, a “walking sacrament”, a living symbol of God’s love. He was speaking of priests but it’s true of all who are ordained, because we are “outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace”, which is how the Prayer Book defines a sacrament.

Once, when I left a cathedral I’d served for eight years as dean, the Bishop said at my farewell service: “what matters in ministry is to know your place”. He used that phrase half a dozen times: knowing our place. I have often thought about it in the twenty years since then. Knowing your place is close to knowing yourself, and in public life, there is nothing more important than to know ourselves inside as well as out. In the church’s ministry, as in any other institution, it’s what gives leaders authenticity, integrity, emotional and spiritual intelligence, empathy, influence. You look at Jesus in the gospels and you’re struck by how powerfully he lived out these qualities. And because he knew how essential it was to nurture them, he went up mountains to pray and find solitude and nourish his relationship with his Father. He knew himself and he knew his place as God’s Son and servant. And John the Baptist knew his place too, as not being the messiah, or any messiah but simply a seeker after truth who bore witness and pointed to the One who was to come.

In our retreat at Alnmouth Friary this week, I’ve shared some reflections on Jesus as he is portrayed in St John’s Gospel, from which our reading today was drawn. In the Gospel Jesus performs a number of signs that act out different aspects of his coming among us as God’s Son. St John says that in these signs he reveals God’s glory. He turns water into wine. He heals a child. He feeds the hungry crowd. He gives sight to a man born blind. He raises Lazarus from the dead. In these five ways he brings joy, and wholeness, and nourishment, and light, and life. In my addresses I’ve suggested that we as deacons are called to perform works like his that visibly draw attention to God’s love that is always at work in the world. We too are signs of joy, signs of wholeness, signs of nourishment, signs of light, signs of new life and – yes – signs of glory, God’s glory, the God who loves the world, who is at work in human lives, whose glory is revealed even – if you can believe it – in the words and actions of ordinary people like us whom he calls to the office and work of a deacon.

An American church bulletin recently reported on a deacons’ ordination with the headline in big letters, “Not to serve but to be served”. Oh dear. Maybe you don’t always say what you mean, but you do mean what you say. “Being served” is precisely how some people view the clergy, and some clergy see themselves. So it matters, it really matters, that we are not going to be grand or self-important. We are going to wash the feet of others and prepare the way of the Lord. John the Baptist shows us the spirit in which we shall do this. For him, everything is looking forward to the Messiah who is to come. His words are charged with an unshakeable, radiant hope in the promises of God. And later in this first chapter of the Fourth Gospel, here is the Messiah himself, the promised one of whom John says, “see the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world…This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me…I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”

And all the signs Jesus performs are a fulfilment of what John has looked forward to so keenly, that God is now among us, and we see his glory full of grace and truth. It takes hope to do what John the Baptist did, what Jesus himself did, what we must do in his name. If we don’t have hope in God’s coming among us, why are we here today in this holy place, pledging ourselves to a life of service in the company of friends with whom we break bread? If we don’t have hope, if we don’t truly believe through our ministry God will touch the lives of others, how can we be good witnesses of the gospel that the church calls us to be? If we don’t ourselves minister and live by hope, what hope can there be for the church? For the world? For any of us?

You are here to bear witness. You are here to bring hope. You are not the Messiah or Elijah or the Prophet. But you are witnesses of grace and truth in our midst, and you will speak of them in the words you utter and the service you give. You too will perform signs of glory that imitate the works of Jesus. In his name, you announce the coming of the Lord, you prepare his way, and you point to the hope he brings. Your ordination today is a sign of the hope God has set before us. May the God of hope be with you all.

Newcastle Cathedral, 30 June 2018
John 1.19-23

The Parting of Friends: a sermon on Ascension Day

How our hearts go out to those disciples, gazing at the empty sky into which Jesus has disappeared! One moment he is here among them, their Lord, their beloved, their friend. The next he is gone, taken from their sight says St Luke, and it is not only the sky that is empty but the whole world too. When Jesus had told them in the upper room that he must go away, their hearts were already heavy. Now the day for farewells has come when, in the picture language of ascension, he is taken up from them, and the cloud closes behind him like a door, and he is gone. It is a real parting of friends.

That’s not all there is to Ascension Day, of course. I’ll say more on Sunday. For now let’s stay with the image of the Christ who takes his leave of us and disappears. Because the gospels want us to learn the most important lesson of religion we can ever grasp: how to know, how to love, how to follow a God we cannot see, who comes to us as one unknown, who if he is among us at all is elusive and mysterious. St John tells of the disciple who was not with the others when the risen Lord appeared to them. Thomas has to discover what it means to be one of those who have not seen yet believe. St Luke’s way is to tell a story of ascension. The message is the same. How do we go on believing when there is nothing to see and no one to hear or touch?

The absence of God is a powerful and disturbing experience. I think we feel it collectively in a society that has largely lost its hold on public faith and has lost confidence in the church to put us back in touch with it. Last month I listened to a sociologist speak about the collapse of religious belonging and how people are finding new paths of spirituality and mindfulness to fill the void Christianity once occupied. And even for us who are a kind of remnant of belief in a secular age, faith is perhaps more difficult and challenging today than it once was. We look back across history and wonder nostalgically where the confident belief of earlier times could have gone, where the sunny uplands of religion vanished to.

Well, faith is not less faithful because it is more tentative. On the contrary: it’s precisely this absence of God, religion’s “melancholy long withdrawing roar” as Matthew Arnold put it, that allows faith to be faith rather than habit, custom, culture or just beautiful feelings. That’s why Ascension Day is important. For the story places us alongside the disciples staring wonderingly at an empty sky. It asks us, now that he has gone, what does it mean to believe that God is still with us, that the risen Christ is among us? How can being Christian today be not only a plausible life choice but the most important decision we can ever make in our lifetimes?

When I was a young parish priest 35 years ago, I used to get despondent at people’s lack of curiosity about God. Why didn’t parishioners “feel after God and find him” as St Paul says, for surely nothing matters more than to be a seeker after truth? What I had to learn was that to most people, especially those “just about managing” or not managing at all, getting through the day was enough to contend with. If I asked where they thought God was in daily life, I got answers like, “Why does he conceal himself so much? Why does he keep us guessing? Why won’t he show himself when there are so many suffering people who cry out to him?” They weren’t hostile to religion, mostly; they wanted the church to be there to celebrate the festivals and mark the great events of their lives at birth, marriage and death. But it did seem to them that God was far off, not a fact of everyday life let alone the ultimate reality we must reckon with. “Truly you are a God who hides himself!” said Isaiah.

One Ascension Day I felt it for myself, brutally. On that glowing morning, a church member I knew well, Joan, was killed in a car crash on the A1. We were shocked to learn about it as we came out of the eucharist. It felt as though God had taken leave of us, mocked his own bread and wine with which he had nourished us minutes before. What do you make of a God who isn’t there when your world breaks apart? I started reading the twentieth century Welsh poet-priest R. S. Thomas. He helped me to see that absence can be as overwhelming as presence, and as religious in its quality, charged as it is with memories and possibilities, and longings that aren’t afraid to hope against hope. He has a poem “The Absence” that I always associate with the Ascension.

It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter
from which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.

I love that tough poem because it asks me to be honest about my faith. To me it fits the mood of this day when the story looks up and down and backwards and forwards all at the same time. It pictures the world as a room someone has just left, that slight rustling of the curtains, the scent of a friend hanging in the air. But it’s also a threshold waiting for someone to be welcomed across, expected, looked out for but yet to arrive. I picture the disciples staring up and wondering about Jesus coming and going, and how faith would be different when their Lord was no longer with them. It must have felt as though they were about to take another big step of faith – as indeed they did when they went back to the city to wait for Pentecost, for what God would do next.

Perhaps this is where many of us are on the journey of faith – wondering where God is when the world needs him so much. Yet on Ascension Day of all days, we want to trust that despite the heartache and confusion, the fears and burdens our world is carrying in these times, his purposes are wise and good. We want to say with Mother Julian whose feast it was on Monday, “All shall be well”. We want to pay attention so as not to miss the signs of what God may yet do. To be aware of his comings and goings, to stand with people for whom his absence is the hard and painful fact of life, can help make us more aware, more compassionate, more responsive.

And more open to the sunbursts of hope and joy with which God surprises us. I like to think that on that bitter-sweet farewell day, the disciples were amazed that far from carrying heavy hearts back to Jerusalem, they left the mountain of the ascension with hopes high and a radiant sense of blessing for what they had seen and heard, and for all that was yet to be.

Beltingham Church, Ascension Day 2018
Acts 1.4-11, Luke 24.44-end

Citizens of Nowhere, Citizens of Everywhere, Citizens of God - Address 2

The second of two Bible readings given at the Abbey of Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer to the annual Synod of the Archdeaconry of France in the Diocese of Europe

“You would have no power over me, unless it had been given you from above” John 19.1-16

Yesterday we explored how St John’s passion narrative opens up the question, “What is truth?” in relation to our loyalties and our belonging. Today I want to look at citizenship in relation to power, and particularly its shadow side. 

In the passion, different kinds of power collide: imperial, coercive, brutal power, and the naked defenceless power of love. These forces act on Pilate like a vice.  In the conversation between the man of Rome and the man of God, Pilate is more and more helpless, tossed this way and that like grain in a sieve, half wanting to set free this prisoner who speaks about truth, half needing to appease the crowd who are thirsty for blood.

The shouts of “crucify!” rattle Pilate. But not half as much as when he goes back inside the praetorium and asks Jesus, “Where are you from?” Jesus is silent. And this has the effect of unnerving Pilate all the more. Not knowing where this extraordinary dialogue is leading him, he blunders on, returning to his favourite theme of power because it is all he knows.  “Do you refuse to speak to me?  Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?” It’s the speech of a desperate man.  Jesus’ reply is the last thing he says before he reaches the cross. “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above”.  And perhaps it begins to dawn on Pilate that this kingdom that is “not from here” is different in every way from that of imperial Rome. Yet the power Jesus acknowledges in Pilate to crucify and set free comes from the same source as his own, the power to lay down his own life and to take it up again, as he has said earlier in the gospel. That is to say, it comes ultimately from God.  

This is not to give divine legitimacy to the human political system that has Jesus in its grip.  Jesus’ point is neither to affirm the political system Pilate represents nor to subvert it.  It’s simply to acknowledge that it’s a temporal, derivative power.  Every Roman governor knew that the only power he held was like that.  He was merely the local representative of the emperor, a servant of Rome.  In particular, governors of Judaea were under no illusions about the significance of their patch.  This remote unloved outpost of empire was no Gaul or Spain, or even Britannia. 

Instead, Jesus turns Pilate’s riposte about power into a theological reflection on the divine origins of all human authority.  That is to say, whoever we are, whatever we are, our power - hard power, soft power, collective power, individual power - comes “from above”.  To recognise this is to learn how to handle power wisely and responsibly.  Not to recognise this, to imagine that power is autonomous, is to become corrupted and destroyed by it. The demonic principalities and powers Paul writes about are destructive precisely because they think they are supremely autonomous and do not acknowledge where they themselves ultimately come from.  “Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice” said Simone Weil. This is Pilate’s dilemma.  

Christian faith commits us to name accurately where power belongs and to confront its abuse by speaking truth to it. As we saw yesterday, this means taking the side of truth against the lie.  It calls us to stand with victims who are exploited and abused, because unlike Pilate, they have no power of any kind, whether their own or given to them from somewhere else. There are Pilates in every walk of life, men and women whose judgments are governed not by what is right but by what others will think of them, what the majority want, what their superiors tell them to do, what will be in the pragmatic interests of their institution. I have suggested that one way of reading the Passion Narrative is as a judgment on Pilate and what he stands for: the cowardice that breeds confusion and mistrust by walking out on truth.  No wonder Pilate was “more afraid than ever”.  When fear dominates our motives to the extent that we are incapable of acting according to principle, we have lost our moral bearings.  

I say we. Anyone who undertakes public office knows that they put their integrity on the line, whether in politics, business or the church.  All of us start out committed to upholding the standards I mentioned yesterday like trustworthiness, accountability, integrity, transparency and selflessness. But if our high ideals are not to be a fantasy, we need to know ourselves, and this includes our propensity for self-deception.  We know how easily the vision we start out with can become dulled with time.  Our choices begin to lose their moral edge and spiritual integrity.  It isn’t that all our good motives are discarded overnight, just that they are eroded bit by bit as the years go by.  The little compromises that smooth the path of daily existence, the courage it takes to stand up for an opinion that may be unpopular but is probably right, our disinclination to take risks, our wish to please other people or be liked, our being satisfied just to be compliant – “doing things right” at the expense of “doing the right thing” - or simply the wearing-down effect of tiredness or boredom – all of this goes into making a Pontius Pilate. These words of Jesus offer a reality-check.  They trace the authority of every institution and every individual back to its proper source in God himself.  To know where our power comes from, as leaders and as citizens, is vital for our self-understanding. Only then do we understand that all work is both his and ours. 

The church has a particular responsibility in the way it orders its life, not only for what it models to the world but especially for what it should be in itself. In the Fourth Gospel, the church is not an institution constructed around power-relations; rather as I said yesterday, it’s a community of truth and love where leadership means washing the feet of other people and laying down your life.  As Meurig said on our first evening, last month’s child abuse hearings in London that focused on the Church of England were painful precisely because they drew attention to how easily, even in the best institutions, what masquerades as benign power can quickly be distorted into power of the most malign and destructive kind. Yet there is no quick fix, no easy path to servanthood. Our transformation from people fascinated by power into servants who wash feet doesn’t happen just because we act it out on Maundy Thursday. It begins when we pay attention to the example of Jesus and make it our daily prayer to imitate him.  Only then do we acknowledge that to live as Jesus did can never be the result of human effort.  It depends on charisms, grace-gifts that empower us “from above”, so that we can become what we are incapable of being by ourselves.   

I want to connect our citizenship of this kingdom that is from above, with the Christian virtue of humility. You can define it in different ways, but fundamentally, humility is to “know our place” in the divine scheme of things, and understand that whoever and whatever we are comes from the power and authority of God.  St Benedict recognised this when he wrote his Rule for Monks.  Humility is the theme of one of the longest and greatest sections of that remarkable book.  It comes early on, for if a brother or a sister hasn’t begun to know their place in the monastery, how will they ever know it before God?   The monastery is a “school for disciples” – this is why Benedict wrote the Rule.  It’s tantamount to saying that it’s a training-ground in humility, for humility is learned through obedience.  So the first of Benedict’s twelve rungs on the ladder of humility is to know that we are always under divine scrutiny; all our actions “are everywhere seen by the eye of God’s majesty” (chapter 7).  To put it simply, humility is the renunciation of power as humans tend to understand, in other words, to embrace the wholly other kind of power that is to embrace truth and love. 

To find that his power under this kind of scrutiny is precisely what is happening to Pilate.  Everything that he has ever been has come under the gaze of Jesus.  Jesus has cut him down to size. “You are what you are because of God”.  What Jesus says to Pilate he says to all of us.  Our human capability and potential, our “power” is given “from above”.  That phrase, as I said yesterday, reminds us of the conversation Jesus has had earlier with another man who knew about power, the Jewish leader Nicodemus. I reminded you that in St John, the two words kingdom and from above occur side by side both in that conversation (3.1­­­­­­­­­–8), and here in the Passion Narrative.  Jesus tells Pilate that he must look beyond himself to understand the source of his power, just as he told Nicodemus that the only way he would see the kingdom of God was by being “born from above”.  “Can you enter your mother’s womb and be born a second time?” asks Nicodemus.  The other gospels say that we must indeed become like little children. What Jesus is telling Nicodemus and Pilate is that the journey of humility begins and ends in God.  Without him, we shall never find it, and therefore never “know our place” in the world. Which is the same as saying, we can never become good citizens in the human sense, let alone the divine, we can never hold and use our power wisely until we know our place.

****

Jesus does not stop there, though he might have done.  But there is more to say about power and its abuse. “Therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin”.  Who or what is Jesus referring to? 

Pilate has already stated the facts himself, and has used the very word Jesus now picks up: “your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me” (18.35).  But the process of “handing over” didn’t begin with them.  As in all the gospels, John is in no doubt about where it originated.  He uses the same word to refer to Judas Iscariot whose shadow has fallen across John’s Gospel from early on after the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus spoke about the one who would betray him. We have known all along about the central part he will play in delivering Jesus to his destiny.  Yes, technically it was the high priest, not Judas, who delivered Jesus to Pilate. But Judas’ role has been symbolically much more significant.  So Jesus acknowledges that without Judas, he would not now be standing in the praetorium facing judgment.  

It is not only Judas and the Jewish authorities who are engaged in “handing over”.  The word turns up again in the sentence which rounds off the long Pilate episode. His final act, John tells us, is to “hand him over” to be crucified. In the deadly game of relay that culminates in the death of an innocent man, many different players are involved.  John sees the judicial murder of Jesus as a collusion whose central act is one of “handing over”: Judas to the priests; the priests to Pilate, Pilate to the crowd.  But we need to notice how the word reappears one last time at the cross itself.  There Jesus bows his head in death and “hands over” his spirit (19.30).  Ultimately, what Judas, the priests, Pilate and the crowd do without knowing it is to “hand over” the spirit of Jesus for the world’s salvation.  That is to reflect theologically on how human events unwittingly fulfil a divine purpose.  Perhaps it recalls the words of Joseph to his brothers when they are reconciled: “even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today” (Genesis 50.20).

Sometimes a writer changes forever the way you see things. W. H. Vanstone is one of these for me, in his two books Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense and The Stature of Waiting. That second book has shown how the word “betray” is used as a marker in the gospels.  It indicates a transition in Jesus’ career.  Up to the passion, Jesus is the active agent in events: teaching, doing good, bearing witness to the kingdom of God.  But once he is “handed over”, his role becomes passive.  Out of the very power that is his by right, he chooses to renounce power.  He becomes the one who is “done to” by others, culminating in his suffering and death. The true significance of Judas’ act, says Vanstone, is that he is the means through whom Jesus has become the victim, his destiny no longer lying within his own control but in the hands of others. 

This helps us to see the connection between what Jesus has just said about Pilate’s “power” over him and Judas’ guilt in “handing over” Jesus to Pilate.  Throughout St John, Jesus has exercised power - as the bringer of light, life and love, he acts with the authority and power of God himself.  But now, instead of being in control of his own destiny, he is subject to the power of someone else, Pilate who can crucify or release him at will.  That the Son of God by whom worlds were made should now have become the object of someone else’s power marks a new phase in his abasement. And because of Judas’ key role in this, he is guilty of a “greater sin”. 

John is unsparing in his judgment on Judas, whom he calls “the son of destruction”.  More than anyone else, he is the man who has used power for evil ends; or, we might say, been taken over and possessed by an evil power intent on destroying truth and goodness. “The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him” says John (13.2). At the last supper, “Satan entered into him....So after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night.”

What does John find so unforgivable in the career of Judas that he uses the dramatic image of the night to symbolise his inner condition?  It goes back to how he pictures the church as an upper room community.  I think we can say that the sin of Judas as John sees it is a sin against both the truth and the friendship of that room. There, Judas is portrayed as the direct antithesis of the disciple “whom Jesus loved”.  When Jesus predicts that one of them will betray him, it’s the beloved disciple next to Jesus at table who asks him who it is.  Jesus answers with an action of friendship, by giving Judas a piece of bread.  The word companion literally means someone with whom we break our bread: here in France children’s friends are their copains.  Yet Judas abuses the privileged position friendship gives.  He throws the gesture of intimacy back into Jesus’ face and leaves the table.  There’s a pointed contrast here for St John. As the one abandons Jesus, another, the beloved disciple, stays with him all the way to the cross: loving ‘to the end’ just as John tells us that Jesus loved his disciples to the end.

We can speculate about what John thinks drove Judas to hand Jesus over.  Traditionally it comes down to envy or greed. But the Fourth Gospel probes the psychology of Judas more deeply.  As I’ve said, the first references to Jesus being ‘handed over’ occur immediately after the story of the feeding of the crowd, when Jesus foresees that people want to take him by force to make him king (6.15): here, at last, is the messiah who will rid Israel of Rome and give her back her freedom!  This suggests that Judas is not the envious or greedy disciple so much as the disappointed friend.  As the gospel unfolds, it becomes clearer that what he has hoped for in Jesus is not going to be realised.  The delicate irony in John’s use of the friendship-symbolism of bread points to these failed expectations.  Jesus begins by multiplying loaves and hopes of kingship are high.  But they are progressively dashed as Jesus’ meaning becomes clear, and by the time we reach the upper room, all he gives Judas is a single morsel of bread.  The kingdom is not going to come; or as we know by now, it is not going to come in that form.  Maybe Judas thought that Jesus’ arrest would force the issue, but that is to speculate beyond what the gospels tells us. 

But in the Fourth Gospel he is not simply the lonely, isolated erstwhile friend whose destiny is to become the most tragic individual in history destined, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, to be chained forever at the icy centre of hell with those other two great traducers, Brutus and Cassius.  He stands for an entire community that has turned against Jesus and made him the object of their hatred. This is the shadow side of citizenship that, as John sees it, sets itself up against the kingship that Jesus has come to bear witness to. John has underlined this collective rejection of Jesus at the very outset of his book.  “He came to his own, and his own people did not accept him” (1.11).  The theme of how his mission results first in misunderstanding and then in open hostility is present in all the gospels, but in St John it features from the start.  Subsequent episodes in the Gospel flesh out that initial statement about the man who was not welcome in his own community.  In a long and bitter debate about his messiahship in John 8, Jesus rounds on the religious leaders and accuses them of being from the devil (8.44).  And when Jesus tells Pilate that the hander-over, the traditor, is guilty of a greater sin, we can’t avoid the conclusion that St John sees an entire community implicated in his action. ‘Judas’ is not only the individual man.  His name in Greek means “the Jew”. 

****

This is hard to say for someone like me who is Jewish by birth and whose mother was a holocaust survivor.  The anti-semitism that has poisoned Christian attitudes to the Jewish community for centuries has found St John’s Gospel a text that has fed its hatreds.  There is no getting away from the disparaging references to “the Jews” throughout the story John tells. Instead of asking for the release of an innocent man, they clamour for a murderer and thug.  Despite their hatred of the Romans, they appeal to Pilate to crucify Jesus on the disingenuous grounds of loyalty to the state.  And worst of all is their response to Pilate’s question, “shall I crucify your king?”  They cry out in a terrible unison, “We have no king but the emperor”.  There is not a trace of hesitation or doubt in that cry.  It’s the ultimate surrender of their birthright, the betrayal of their identity as the people whose king is God alone.  

We can’t gloss over how the Passion Narrative was exploited by Christians early on to blame Judaism for the death of Jesus.  And the first thing to acknowledge is how late in the day official Christian recognition of these facts has come, together with the first serious attempts to address it as an issue in Jewish-Christian dialogue. We are learning as we read and handle texts to be careful about the historic resonances they carry for different communities, especially for those that have been or still are voiceless, without power, made victims in some way. Women, people of colour, the LGBTI community, those with disability, people who are stigmatised, immigrants, abuse survivors and many others know what I mean. As we learn to sensitise ourselves to how discrimination has been justified by recourse to familiar texts, we must go back to the scriptures and ask whether we have unwittingly (or even willingly at times?) colluded in readings that can exercise a destructive power over some groups and individuals. I see this as especially urgent when antisemitism is once again raising its head today, as we have seen in the alarming increase in attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions in Europe in recent years (including France). You could call this being humble before the text, knowing our place in relation to it.

Historians tell us that how a society treats its Jewish minorities has often proved to be the bellwether of how that society upholds the virtues of civilisation such as honour, respect, kindness, toleration and human rights. As we know, the assimilation of Jews into the mainstream of the historically Christian European nations was not a straightforward process. My grandparents, living and prospering in a middle-class suburb of Düsseldorf in the early 1930s, did not see the signs of regression until it was almost too late. They could not believe that the hard-won integration of the Jewish community over two centuries into German society, including fighting for their country in the Great War, could ever be reversed. What the rise of Nazism should have taught us is that so-called progress is never irreversible. Which means that our societies have to maintain constant vigilance against the inequality and discrimination that pave the way towards racial hatred and the violence it begets. Antisemitism among the far-right of Germany, a nation acutely aware of the burden it carries because of its twentieth century history, should worry us greatly. And where there is antisemitism, there are always other expressions of hostility based on race, colour, political opinion, religious belief, gender and sexuality. It was not only Jews who ended their days in the Nazi death camps. 

“You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.” You can see how, in a society that was already looking for a scapegoat in connection with Jesus’ death, St John’s telling of the story about Judas the representative Jew would provide a ready candidate on whom to project anti-Semitic tendencies. I mentioned the key work of the anthropologist and theologian Rene Girard in that connection yesterday. This is why I’ve been talking about how we affirm good habits of reading that allow the text to speak into our political and social situations in ways that offer resources for the mending of all that disintegrates and destroys in human life.

However, Jesus’ words to Pilate must not be read in isolation from all that he has said up to this point. I’m thinking of sayings like “I have come that they may have life, and have it in all its abundance”; and “I, if I am lifted up from the earth will draw all humanity to myself”. And most of all, his prayer that “they may all be one: as you, Father are in me, and I am in you, may they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me”. I know that in their strict sense, these sayings apply to those whom Jesus has called to him, the society of friends that is St John’s way of speaking about the church. But the scope of his gospel forbids us from the narrow reading of these texts. From its opening words “in the beginning” to its vision of the cross as a cosmic event, there is what I would call a tendency towards convergence in St John, towards the integration of all that is split off and at risk of being scattered. Alone among the gospels, it’s John who quotes Jesus’ saying, after he has fed the five thousand, “gather up the fragments so that nothing may be lost”. This, it seems to me, is the work of the grace and truth we see in the glory of the only-begotten from the Father. That is the ultimate power of love about which St John has so much to say, the love that binds all things together and remakes the world as God intended it to be. And such is its power that even the “greater sin” Jesus speaks of to Pilate is capable of forgiveness and reconciliation, that transformation in the life of communities and individuals that the gospel is about. 

This is why I believe that these chapters of St John speak into our dilemmas about peoplehood, nationhood, belonging and citizenship. I believe we are at a profoundly significant moment in the history not only of Britain and Europe but of the world. Maybe every generation feels this about the times they live in, but not since the Cuba Missile Crisis have I felt such a loss of hope for the future of humanity. Wherever we look, the threats posed by climate change, the hardening of extreme political views, endemic violence and the fragmentation of former alliances, not to mention the fractiousness of public debate and the sidelining of basic human virtues like generosity, kindness, collaboration, sympathy, respect, tolerance and the love of goodness, truth and beauty. Maybe getting old is making me grumpy?

I’m afraid that the outcome of the EU referendum was to me a symbol of just such a walking away from the covenants and alliances that have served us so well, imagining that it’s better to be isolated than together, regarding sovereignty as something to be grasped at rather than shared, demeaning the common good across our continent and beyond, tolerating the rhetoric of closing our borders to immigrants who contribute so much to our country. I’m not of course saying that the Referendum created these attitudes. Rather, it forced them into the open by putting to the electorate a simple, binary question about being in or out of a family of nations and peoples. The exposure proved toxic. We all know how ugly the discourse has become. And that was perhaps something we did not expect.

But I believe that the way John explores the questions of power and citizenship speaks into our current dilemmas. Pilate and Judas are I think symbols of institutional self-interest, the kind of citizenship that serves its own ends. It feeds on the collective myths about privilege, power and destiny that are only too familiar to us who contemplate the populist nationalisms all over the world today. Phrases like “America first”, “Take back control”, “What’s in Britain’s best interests” elevate the nation-state into an entity that risks becoming an absolute, an end in itself. This seems to me to fly in the face of the kind of citizenship John is talking about, where friends associate as a community of love and truth, and serve one another by washing feet. 

It’s not that a Jew ceases to be a Jew, or a Roman a Roman. It’s not that we don’t love our country and are privileged to be its citizens. But when we meet as friends of Jesus Christ and citizens of his kingdom, we always know that we are subjects of the same rule and authority, and this transcends all other kinds of belonging, whether it’s the tribe, the race or the nation. To me, the EU symbolised the capacity of nations not to give their own cherished national identities absolute status but to go beyond them by building a coalition of reconciliation, peace-making, protecting the environment, defending human rights, and promoting the common good. (These are purposes we did not, and still do not hear nearly enough of in the Brexit debate.) We achieved this hard-won position by pooling our sovereignty, the power we have to change things. Perhaps God’s kingship, the kingdom that is “not from here” is more like pooled sovereignty than it is about “taking back control”. For in God’s scheme of things, power is not coercive but collaborative, God working in and through our human agency with all the freedoms we continue to have as men and women created in his image and exercising responsibility within the created order. “Build bridges, not walls” says Pope Francis. Instead of pulling up drawbridges, we need to reach out to one another in truth and friendship, celebrating the citizenship we have in common both within the human family, and as brothers and sisters under God. This is what I think we see prefigured in the passion story. 

Which is why it’s not comfortable reading.  It’s a searchlight that probes both our outer and our inner worlds, scrutinises our collective and personal motives, exposes our ambivalence about the moral good.  It can seem as though there is no mercy in this pitiless exposure of who and what we are.  But if we stay with it, we discover that it is about grace as well as truth, which turns out to be the power of love.  The cross’s judgment upon us is also our salvation: the light that scrutinises us also brings hope.  We bring to it our shadows and our distorted vision, and discover that it this light of truth and grace flows from an open door.  Our great refusals don’t have the last word after all. By grace we can become citizens of God, and therefore, citizens of the whole world, of all humanity. That will teach us how to understand our citizenship within the human circles of belonging I spoke about at the outset. For that open door is nothing less than the invitation to come back in out of the night, be welcomed at God’s table, have our feet washed by the suffering Servant, and in that humane place of warmth and trust, to learn to love one another once again.