Four Addresses in Santiago: 1 Pilgrimage and the Offering of Life

This week I’d like to offer four Bible readings on the theme of pilgrimage. That sounds a bit obvious, given that we are here in Santiago, one of the world’s greatest pilgrim destinations. While we are here, we shall I’m sure learn a lot about the significance of the Camino and the pilgrimage to Compostela. But what’s particular to this and every other pilgrimage also represents what’s true of our human existence as a whole, which is why the symbolism of life as a journey or pilgrimage is universal.

Something of this is what I’m hoping we shall explore through the biblical texts I’ve chosen. They will, I hope, help us to reflect on pilgrimage in its relation to different aspects of life. Tomorrow I want to look at our search for meaning and truth, how pilgrimage represents “faith seeking understanding” as we try to make sense of the world’s life and our own. Next day we shall explore the ways in which pilgrimage takes us into dark places of suffering and pain, and how the actual or metaphorical journeys help us to respond to these acute questions life throws at us. Finally on Thursday, I’ll say something about recognition and hope, how pilgrimage brings disclosure, expresses God-given hungers and longings - for fulfilment, for illumination and for God.

As we are travelling through the Year of St Luke, I’m taking as the basis passages from that gospel. Of all the four, Luke is most clearly organised around the theme of the journeys Jesus makes – as a child, as the Son of Man, as the risen Lord. Indeed, I want to suggest to you that Luke’s image of Jesus is that of the archetypal pilgrim. I hope passages in the Hebrew Bible will shed light on Luke’s story. We shall use these readings in the daily offices before my talks.

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Let’s begin by looking briefly at our readings at evening prayer. My reflection is that pilgrimage is transformative because at its heart it is about the offering of life to God. And the offering of life has two outcomes: a deeper wisdom, and a renewed reverence that translates into our commitment to walk before God in our own life and immerse ourselves in the world’s life not as bystanders but participants.

In that snippet of liturgy from Deuteronomy, the worshipper is instructed to bring the offering of first fruits to “the place that the Lord your God will choose”, the text’s way of referring to the central shrine of Jerusalem where the people were commanded to journey at the three pilgrim feasts every year. It’s a symbol of acknowledging the source of all that is good about the land they have inherited, and recognising God’s mighty acts of deliverance and protection. They have made a safe journey, like we have today, and their first duty is to demonstrate their thankfulness by making this symbolic offering that stands for the good earth on which they stand, their life together in this place, the memory of how they got there, and their acknowledgment that God is the source and end of it all. The offering of life is the offering of everything that we have and are and aspire to be. No doubt all this is enfolded in the acclamation at the start of the pilgrim psalm we recited: “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’”.

Going to the house of the Lord brings us to our reading from St Luke. The pilgrim feast this time is Passover and the holy family are doing what the Torah commanded and going up to Jerusalem. This isn’t Jesus’ first visit to Jerusalem, Luke tells us – his parents have already brought him to the temple to be presented after his birth. Then, the infant of forty days is compared to those two people of great age, Simeon and Anna, who receive him so gladly. Now he is twelve, and here he is again in the same place with others who are his seniors, “sitting among the teachers listening to them and asking them questions”.

Like the other pilgrim feasts of first fruits or Pentecost, and Tabernacles, Passover is a celebration of God’s words and works whose story brings memory into the present and transforms the future. In all three, the whole of life is gathered up and offered in gratitude and hope. I wonder whether this isn’t part of what Luke is getting at when, alone among the gospels, he gives us this precious narrative of Jesus’s childhood, this unique window on what one writer called “the hidden years”. Spanning as it does the interval between Jesus’ birth and his baptism, is Luke telling us something about the vocation of Jesus to be in his Father’s house as the representative human being who is already acknowledging that his life is not his own but must be offered up? Is Luke inviting us and all humanity to find our welfare and peace by following Jesus in that journey, that sacred pilgrimage into God’s very presence?

For Luke, Jesus is the emblematic man who realises the destiny we were created for in God’s image. This is why he concludes this episode in the same way that he concludes the Presentation story just before it, by recording that “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in divine and human favour”. He might have said that the divine image went on being formed in him, not only as Son of God who must be about the things of his Father” (another way of translating “being about my Father’s house”), but as Son of Man too, the archetypal human being who is exalted in the vision of Daniel. And in the flow of the narrative, this embodiment of wisdom, stature and favour will be put on open display before God and humanity in his baptism, and then driven out to be tested in the wilderness. We’ll come to that tomorrow.

For now, and with the sense of still having only just arrived here in Santiago after our long journey, let’s stay with the image of Jesus himself arrived at the temple as the destination of that childhood pilgrimage. It would have been lovely if we could, so to speak, have recaptured our own childhood as we walked up the steps and entered the Basilica of Saint James through the Portico of Glory for the first time. I don’t know of any other church with such a marvellous sense of arrival. I was in tears the first time I came here. It was as if this mighty pilgrimage church was welcoming me home with its doors wide open, like the father’s arms open to his prodigal son, and inviting me to find my true self in God once again. I say “it would have been lovely”, because alas much of the Cathedral is under scaffolding at present and we can’t get inside through this great entrance. We’ll have to imagine it from the photos we’ve seen. But as we do, let’s also imagine the young Jesus coming into his Father’s house at that stage of life where he is becoming aware, can begin - I won’t say to find himself but certainly - to understand himself and articulate his own vocation. And to offer his life to God and glimpse how his destiny would come to be shaped as the Child and Servant and Pilgrim of God.

This, I’m sure, is the spirit in which we’ve come on pilgrimage to Santiago: like Jesus, to offer our lives afresh, to become more aware of the presence of God, how he is shaping our lives and destinies, discern and even begin to articulate the journey he invites us into and what he asks us to be and do. This is what we wish and pray for one another as we greet one another in the words of the ancient pilgrim road: Buen Camino! Ultreia!

Santiago, 13 May 2019
Psalm 122, Deuteronomy 26.1-11, Luke 2.41-52

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 3: Crucified by Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John 18.33-40

Holy Week 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

The Cup of Pain and Mercy

This is the second in our Lenten series of sermons on the Passion Narrative in St Mark’s Gospel, Christ our Passover. Today we find Jesus in the upper room eating the Passover meal with his disciples, and afterwards, in the garden of Gethsemane where, as he faces his last ordeal, he prays to his Father. This part of the story is framed by two of Jesus’ most portentous sayings. Last week’s passage ended: ‘the Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that one by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that one not to have been born’. Now, the same word shatters the silent agony of Gethsemane, when the disciples are heavy with sleep. ‘Arise, let us be going. Behold, my betrayer is at hand.’

We heard last week how at supper, Jesus foretells that one of his friends will betray him. This word has already featured in Mark’s Gospel near the beginning, when Judas Iscariot is introduced as a disciple. Literally it means ‘hand over’. It is not by itself a sinister idea: in Greek, paradosis simply means that which is ‘delivered’ or ‘handed on’, the same as the Latin traditio: the church’s ‘tradition’ is what is received from others and passed on to the next generation. In St Paul’s own account of the last supper, he uses the same word: ‘I received from the Lord what I am handing on to you’.

However, in the passion narrative, two things give this innocent word a darker nuance. The first is that it is now carrying the sense of Jesus being passed over from one kind of power to another. Up to now, he has been obedient to his Father’s purpose as the one announced in his baptism and then his transfiguration as God’s Son, the beloved. In his freely-chosen submission to God, he lives out the prayer he has taught his followers: ‘your will be done on earth as in heaven’. But now he is handed over to a different authority, the ‘principalities and powers’ of this age who have quite other purposes in mind for the Son of Man. He becomes the passive victim, no longer the agent who goes around doing good, but now one who is ‘done to’ by others. And the first act of these others, as we shall learn next week, is to arrest him, not with the weapons of truth and justice but with violence, seized by bandits who are armed with swords and clubs.

But there is a bigger context here. For St Mark sees paradosis, this ‘handing over’ as nothing less than the act of God himself. Three times in the gospel Jesus has foretold that the Son of Man ‘must undergo great suffering, and be rejected… and after three days rise again.’ Why this necessity? This is the great mystery the Passion Narrative draws us into. The sheer length and detail of the story in all four gospels tells us that the evangelists saw the crucifixion as inescapably central to the gospel. It was not an accident. It was not mischance. It was intended all along within God’s purpose of redemption. ‘The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ says Jesus earlier. In the upper room, the cup of wine that is ‘my blood of the covenant poured out for many’ is the way to the promised future he has taught his disciples to pray for. ‘Your kingdom come.’ ‘I shall never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.’ In the gospels, without the cross, there can be no kingdom, no future when God’s passover people will be freed from all that enslaves them. He must suffer. Es muss sein.

This cup of destiny features in both parts of today’s text. At the last supper, the cup of wine, along with the broken bread, is a living symbol of a death that is like the passover lamb. It heralds the day of salvation in which a redeemed people ‘pass over’ from death to life. It is both a memory and a future promise. It looks back with gratitude for a redemption that has been won, and looks forward to the kingdom of peace, that messianic banquet where people will sit and feast in the presence of God himself. At the passover meal, the cup is a symbol of a people’s destiny. And this is the destiny Jesus takes upon himself as the true Israelite looking forward to the long-promised day when God acts, and he drinks it anew in his kingdom.

And the same is true in the garden. After singing the passover hallel psalms of redemption, they go to a place whose name means ‘pressure’, Gethsemane where olives grew and their oil was crushed out of them. Here the life of Jesus begins to be pressed out of him as he faces the inevitable end that he has spoken about for so long. ‘Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I will but what you will’. I said just now that for Mark, for Jesus, there is no question but that the passion is intended by God all along. And this is both the reason for his agonised prayer and the answer to it. Jesus does not dispute who it is who holds out this cup to him. Did he have in his mind Psalm 75: ‘In the hand of the Lord there is a cup with foaming wine, well mixed’. These are the grapes that are crushed in the vineyard of the wrath of God. ‘He will pour a draught from it, and all the wicked of the earth shall drain it down to the dregs.’

Can this be what his Father is holding out to him commanding him to drink it and die? No wonder he begs God to take it away. St Mark will tell of how on the cross, Jesus prays Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, ‘my God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ Gethsemane is the first stage of a terrible godforsakenness. Jesus takes upon himself the fate of the wicked of the earth from whom God turns his face away. They and he have no choice but to drink. As St Paul says, Christ became a curse for us. It is the hour of darkness. Nevertheless, in the midst of this mental and spiritual agony, Jesus’ obedience does not waver. He hears the echo of his own words: he must undergo this. ‘Not what I will but what you will.’ Once more it is the language of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘your will be done on earth as in heaven’. What he prays, and teaches us to pray, he himself lives out in his steadfast obedience. If ever the words of this prayer were fulfilled, it is here in Gethsemane: ‘lead us not into temptation’, or rather, ‘save us from the time of trial’, peirasmos, that ordeal at the end of days that makes or breaks the human sufferer.

In Gethsemane, Jesus tells his disciples: ‘sit here while I pray’. I see in this an echo of the story in Genesis that the evangelists will have had in mind as they told of the passion of Jesus. When God commands Abraham to take his beloved child Isaac and sacrifice him on a mountain far away, he tells his young men, ‘Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.’ Here is Jesus walking away from his young men, his disciples with only his trusted intimates. Does he hope against hope, does he pray that like Isaac, he will avert the fire and the knife while a ram caught in a thicket is offered instead? Here in Gethsemane, he learns that there is no escape. He too is a Son like Isaac, an only Son of a Father’s love yet that makes a terrible claim upon him. He too must ascend a mountain, Golgotha, be offered on that altar and submit to the will of the Father who requires this awful act of obedience.

So the cup means both pain and mercy. In being ‘handed over’ by God and man, by his submission to his Father’s will, by drinking of the foaming wine and becoming a curse, by his cry of despair in the darkness, by all that he endured, we are ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven. Because he does not refuse the cup the Father offers him, it passes from us. And yet, a cup is still held out to us. We remember it at every eucharist. Only now, it is gift. It is salvation. It is life. It is the promise of the kingdom. And even when the cost of walking the way of the cross is that we shall undergo our own Gethsemane ordeals, we know that they are endurable because Jesus has walked this via dolorosa before us and transformed the cup of destiny. George Herbert gives us the words in a meditation called ‘The Agonie’. It looks on the cross as the place where the cup of pain and mercy is filled to the brim and offered.

Love is that liquor, sweet and most divine
Which my God tastes as blood, but I as wine.

Durham Cathedral, Lent 2, 1 March 2015 (Mark 14.22-42)

For Holocaust Memorial Day

Tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.  It’s a day to remember the millions who perished at the hand of the Nazis and in the other genocides and acts of ethnic cleansing of modern times.  We need it to strengthen our resolve to build a more peaceable world in which every member of the human family is equally valued and where prejudice has no place.  We need it to reinforce our prayer that what happened in Armenia, in Germany and in Europe, in Cambodia, Uganda, Rwanda and Bosnia and is still happening in Southern Sudan, the Central African Republic, in parts of the middle east will not happen again, anywhere, ever. 

In the Nazi holocaust, two thirds of all the Jews in Europe perished. Survivors carry the physical and emotional scars with them in memories that can never fully be healed.  It is part of my own psyche too, as a ‘second generation survivor’ as we are called.  Almost too late, my grandparents got my uncle and my mother out of Germany before the borders were closed.  But for that, they would have been transported to Treblinka, Dachau or Auschwitz with other members of the family.  This country took them in. Thank God for British kindness to the stranger, the refugee, the asylum-seeker.

The holocaust was and is a defining experience in the life of Jewish people today, and probably always will be. It has become part of the long story that defines that community and its capacity to survive extreme persecution. The Passover haggadah tells of how the Hebrews were resident in Egypt. Pharaoh made slaves of them, piled on the oppression until they managed to flee for safety across the Red Sea at the hand of Moses and Aaron. Escaping to a land of safety across the water was precisely my mother’s experience. The Festival of Purim recalls how Queen Esther, the Jewish consort of a pagan king, acts with supreme courage to save her people from extinction.  Yet another feast, Hannukah, commemorates a fierce persecution of the 2^nd century BC when a Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes desecrated the temple in Jerusalem and exacted a terrible price on Jews who would not bow to his will and abandon their covenant. This time it is Judas Maccabaeus, the ‘hammer’, who saved them. These are not the only holocausts written into the history of Judaism.

This background helps us to see why ‘holocaust’, Sho’ah, literally a whole burnt offering of flesh, stands as a symbol of genocide.  Our question must be: what do we say and do in the face of it? I don’t mean the Jewish holocaust only, but every genocide where the same story gets acted out in new places and new ways. The inventiveness and dark imagination of evil seems to know no limit. 

In the Hebrew Bible, the ‘Old’ Testament as we call it, many texts try to grapple with the question of why human beings suffer. The greatest of them is the Book of Job. It tells of a devout, religious man who finds himself progressively afflicted with terrible diseases, has his house and home destroyed, loses all his children. Mrs Job asks why how this could possibly have come about. ‘Curse God and die!’ But this is precisely what he will not do. He is baffled, like she is, but he chooses to stay with the unanswerable questions while all along knowing that he has done nothing to deserve this personal holocaust of his. And then, says the story, his friends come along to keep him company as he sits among the ashes. Although they will utter plenty of thoughtless nonsense later on, they are at least wise enough to stay silent to begin with, not just for a few minutes but for an entire week, ‘for they saw that his suffering was very great’. 

There is something we can learn in that picture of friends standing by silently. When we are in the presence of suffering, it’s not that the words fail us, or not only that. It’s how best we stand in solidarity with suffering human beings, honour them in their ordeals.  Silence is not passivity.  When we go to the site of a terrible atrocity, we know that we are not simply onlookers, sightseers of history. There is ‘work’ to be done here: mental, heart-work, spiritual work that should change us, transform our attitudes to suffering and injustice, empower us to act for the victim, the voiceless and the weak. 

A few years ago my wife and I went to the Bay of Naples to visit Pompeii, the Roman town destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79. It was a human disaster on a vast scale. To see the moulds taken of men, women and children found in the rubble, showing them bracing themselves helplessly against a relentless, unpitying, power is deeply moving. But with millions of people visiting the site each year, you now have to run the gauntlet of a ‘shadow’ money-spinning city of fast food outlets, hawkers of tacky souvenirs, lurid entertainments of every kind that has grown up outside the gates. It does not prepare you to visit the site of a tragedy. Our guide took us round in an irritating jokey way that was far more interested in erotic paintings inside the prostitutes’ house than in human suffering and grief. We wanted somewhere to be silent, like Job’s friends, try to take in what a momentous place it was, this arena of suffering and grief. The least we could do was to remember silently.

As we commemorate the victims of holocaust today and tomorrow, I hope we can find some way of being reflective and thoughtful, perhaps, if we are people of faith, saying a simply prayer like kyrie eleison, ‘Lord have mercy’, or the Lord’s Prayer, ‘save us from the time of trial and deliver us from the evil one’. If our nation could be quiet, like it is on Armistice Day, if we could collectively stand alongside the victims of every place, it would help us to act with more compassion and justice in the future, to speak out for the voiceless, to take in those who flee from terror like my mother, do all we can to make this world a better place for our children and grandchildren.

The gospel reading spoke about how Jesus began his public ministry by calling people to repent, to turn away from what was dark and destructive and turn towards the light of grace and truth dawning on the world. He spoke of it as the kingdom of heaven drawing near. He called people to follow him, say yes to this world made new. Perhaps those who felt the heavy hand of imperial Rome crushing the life out of them found a new hope rising up before them. And we say: if only those who still harbour cruelty in their hearts could hear this, could feel the stirrings within of another, better, kinder way to live!  

At the end of St Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus prays from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’  That is the agonised cry of so many who sufferer, not least those who like him are victims of other peoples’ cruelty. But St Luke tells the story differently. He has Jesus utter one of the most extraordinary prayers ever breathed.  While he hangs there, mocked and ridiculed by his persecutors, by the bystanders, even by the man dying on the cross next to his, he prays: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’.  Face to face with death, another voice, kind and merciful, invites us to turn back towards the light. There is light and hope for those who sat in darkness, a redemption so universal in its scope that includes even the perpetrators of evil who sit in the darkness of their own making. And we who stand in silent solidarity with victims bearing witness to all that is wrong need to be fortified by the announcement that the kingdom of heaven is near. Faith says that the long-awaited dawn the prophet foretold is breaking. The Saviour, Christus Victor, has overcome the world.  

St Chad’s College Durham, 26 January 2014
Isaiah 9.1-4; Matthew 4.12-22