Holy Week in Hymns 9 (Good Friday): "When I survey the wondrous cross"

“They stood at a distance watching these things.” We’ve already explored that theme of watching, looking, contemplating, seeing into the mystery of the cross. And now we find it continued into our final hymn. Here is another contemplative who can only gaze on the cross in utter wonderment and gratitude, and write about it in an exquisitely beautiful poem. When I survey the wondrous cross.

Some would say it’s the greatest passion hymn ever written. Charles Wesley would have given a thousand of his hymns if only he could have written this one. Isaac Watts wrote it for his collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs that he published in 1707. A nonconformist, it is remarkable that this hymn was originally written as a devotion to be sung at the eucharist. What the poet is surveying is the mystery of bread broken and wine poured out on the table of the Lord where the worshipper sees the visible words of grace spoken from the wondrous cross where from his head, his hands, his feet, sorrow and love flow mingling down.

The text Isaac Watts has in mind is a saying of St Paul near the end of his letter to the Galatians. He is discussing things people find it worth boasting about. It brings out of him one of the noblest declarations in all his writings: “God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” To Paul, to the hymn writer, the cross is the pearl of great price you would sell everything to gain. It is a treasure of infinite worth. Nothing can be compared to it. You might as well hold up a candle to look at the sun. My richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride.

One of the psalms reflects on what we human beings tend to envy in others: their names and achievements, their wisdom, wealth or honour. But, says the psalm, don’t make yourself miserable by dwelling on those who boast of such things. In the face of our own mortality, we stand as equals because in the end we can’t take any of them with us. “Human beings cannot abide in their pomp: they are like the beasts that perish.” And St Paul, in a brilliant inversion of that psalm, says yes, death is the great leveller, and in particular, the death of Jesus. Whoever, whatever we are, when we survey the wondrous cross, all that we are proud of is put into the perspective of eternity, God’s perspective. There is nothing worth boasting about any more except this. Forbid it Lord that I should boast, save in the cross of Christ my God. All the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them to his blood.

The next two stanzas explore why the green hill of Golgotha is at the very centre of Christian faith and life. Where else do sorrow and love meet and mingle and flow down together like this? Those two words go to the heart of the paradox of Good Friday. Sorrow would be a natural enough response to this pain and suffering that we survey ­– our sorrow for the innocent victim, his sorrow as “a man of suffering and acquainted with grief”: “behold and see if there is any sorrow like unto my sorrow” – words that are familiar to us from the music of Handel’s Messiah.

But linked to the word love, sorrow takes on a more profound meaning. For if the love we see on the cross is nothing less than God’s, then so must the sorrow be too. Perhaps there is a clue in Jesus’s drawing near to Jerusalem when, say the gospels (and how striking this is), he looks down at the city and weeps over it. “if you had only recognised on this day the things that make for peace. But now they are hidden from your eyes.” So we imagine the cross as the everlasting sign of God’s sorrow for his world, the grief that pierces his heart of love, where divine tears are always shed because human beings have so signally turned away from the paths of goodness and truth, of reconciliation, healing and flourishing. Jesus is the archetypal innocent on whom cruel men have turned in their hatred of all that is beautiful and good. But he is also the sign of the heartbreak of God himself at our ignorance, destructiveness and folly.

Which is why the hymn needs to boast of the love that it sees flowing down from the cross. For when sorrow and love are joined together, sorrow is never desperate or hopeless. It has a redeeming aspect that speaks of God’s intent that this world should be remade, and within it, our own broken lives. Isaac Watts reminds us who is king here at Golgotha. The signs of royalty are in the thorns that press cruelly into the fragile flesh of this Man of Sorrows and compose so rich a crown, and in his dying crimson like a robe.  They tell of a suffering that is intended and is purposeful, and which, far from subverting the kingship of Jesus proclaim its inner nature.

The kingdom of God is not about the panoply of the powerful and proud before which subjects cower in trembling and fear. The fear and trembling we feel at the cross is altogether different. For God’s kingship is both infinitely more humble and infinitely more strong. It announces the power of love and this is what draws us here and makes us to look. The spiritual asks, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” And it answers that question by speaking of what goes through us when we say our yes: “Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble”.

The hymn writer draws the only possible conclusion. He goes back to St Paul: then am I dead to all the globe, and all the globe is dead to me. What is there to live for if not for the Lord of glory who is crucified before us? And his final verse captures what our response will be, can only be, on this Good Friday when we survey the wondrous cross. Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were a present far too small. Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all. So what do we do in the light of Golgotha where we see love so amazing, so divine?

I think the answer is both nothing and everything. The “nothing” is to recognise that we cannot add to what Jesus has done there. When, in our reading from the Passion, Jesus cries out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”, you hear not agonised despair but the trustful affirmation that Jesus’s living and dying have come to a good end, a resolution, and Jesus can offer himself to God as the servant and son who has been obedient to the suffering he was called to undergo. It is his work of redemption, not ours. And because this is a gift without price, nothing can possible equal it, not anything we can offer, not even the whole realm of nature – it would be an offering far too small in the face of God’s infinite sorrow and love.

But there is something we must do. We must say our wholehearted yes to the cross. We must be thankful. We must submit to this kingdom of love, embrace it, live it, give ourselves to it, recognise how it changes everything, for Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all. On this Good Friday, there is nothing we would not do for the Love that has searched us out and known us, offered itself for us so that we might live again and find our hope once more.

So this solemn day is not for mourning. It is a time for profound thankfulness, a time to be glad. We who walked in the darkness of Golgotha have seen a great light. It is a good day.

Wakefield Cathedral, Good Friday 2017
Luke 23.44-49

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When I survey the wondrous Cross,
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast
Save in the death of Christ my God;
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to his blood.

See from his head, his hands, his feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down;
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

His dying crimson like a robe,
Spreads o’er his body on the Tree;
Then am I dead to all the globe,
And all the globe is dead to me.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

Isaac Watts 1674-1748   

Having Nothing, Possessing Everything: St Paul on vocation

This is a strange month for me. On this summer solstice it is just 100 days until I retire and we say farewell. The nights gradually drawing in will have a poignant significance this year. June also marks the twentieth anniversary of my becoming a cathedral dean, and the fortieth of my ordination. When I lead the retreat for this year’s new deacons and priests and preach at their ordinations, I shall recall how I started out in public ministry all those years ago and think with amazement how swiftly this chapter of life is coming to an end.

St Paul too is looking back in that colourful passage we read as the epistle today. His matchless rhetoric brings four incomparable chapters in his second Corinthian letter to a marvellous climax. He has been speaking about the ministry of reconciliation that it has been his privilege to serve, proclaiming ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’. He has offered some glimpse of how fragile it all is, the risky way God is taking in making him known, entrusting to frail human beings this ‘treasure in earthen vessels’. He has explained how ‘knowing the fear of the Lord, we try to persuade others’,  which is what Christian mission means, how in all things we are ‘ambassadors for Christ since God is making his appeal through us’.

This vocation to be an apostle has brought him difficulty, frustration and pain. Paul catalogues his ordeals in today’s passage: afflictions, hardships, calamities... the list seems endless. Yet through it all, he has not lost his focus, his clear-eyed grasp of how ministry is God’s work, not our own. He lists the virtues he has coveted: ‘purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech and the power of God’. In all these things, he has told us earlier, he does not lose heart. It is a ‘momentary light affliction’ compared to the glory that is being revealed. If only all of us could look back on our decades of service in the church and say that!

But there is something Paul says that I want, indeed need to say too as I look back like him and ponder these forty years of public ministry. I hope you will not misunderstand the spirit in which I say this. ‘As servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way so that no fault may be found with our ministry.’ How do I have the temerity to identify with that claim? Paul is not, I think, claiming perfection in everything he has done and how he has done it. As I read this, my favourite of all Paul’s letters, I see a man courageously laying bare his own flaws as a human being, knowing how even the best that he can attain to is always compromised, always needs to be redeemed from the corrosive taints of self-interest, envy and the sin of pride.

And that applies not only to achievement and performance in ministry, but also – and especially – to our motives. To serve God well is to be keenly aware of our brokenness, the shame of not living up to the very ideals that inspired us to offer for ministry in the first place, the peril of hypocrisy or ‘play acting’ that can haunt even our best moments. Archbishop Michael Ramsey has a beautiful prayer about this: ‘Jesus, Lord and Master, who served your disciples in washing their feet; serve us often, serve us daily, in washing our motives, our ambitions, our actions; that we may share with you in your mission to the world and serve others gladly for your sake’. I doubt there is a priest in the church who does not pray that prayer often, if not in those words, then in their own. Motives are everything. They make all the difference to who and what we are, and whether or not we are trusted safely to undertake this project of ministry and hold the sacred charge laid on us in ordination.

Paul had taken the advice of the oracle at Delphi. Perhaps he had even visited it and seen for himself the famous words written there: gnothi sauton, ‘know yourself’. He knew where he was strong and where he was weak. He knew the tendencies in his own personality, his passion, his alacrity of spirit, his irascibility. He knew about the thorn in the flesh, whatever it was, that so disabled him. He knew how storms rush down unbidden upon our calm and placid seas and need to be stilled, as in our Gospel reading. And yet he still made this appeal to his readers to honour his integrity as an apostle. I think he means that in his heart of hearts, he has always wanted the best for the people, the churches and the God he is serving. I hear myself say ‘always’ and wonder if I am right. Did he want the best for poor John Mark over whom he had a fierce falling out with Barnabas in the Acts of the Apostles so that they could no longer work together? I happen to think that Barnabas was right and Paul was wrong in that dispute. Nevertheless, the matter that split them was precisely how the church and the mission should best be served; and if for a moment, Paul wavered, it is still true that he always longed that the church should flourish and that nothing must get in the way of God’s work of reconciliation.

Each of us in ministry can only speak for ourselves here. But here is my perspective on it. Despite my failures in ministry: the errors of judgment, the fallings-out, the mistakes, the compromises, the easy speeches, the lazy short-cuts, I hope we can always say that we longed, in Paul’s words, ‘to commend ourselves in every way’. I hope we can always say that despite everything, our motives have been honourable, and as pure in heart as we can make them, and that in this respect at least, ‘no fault may be found with our ministry’. It means having had God’s interests and the church’s interests at heart, not exploiting people, not acting out of self-interest. 

I was talking to someone last week who is researching what is called ‘dark personality’. This means Machiavellian tendencies, narcissism and psychopathy. It seems that people with such traits are often attracted to leadership. It made me think hard! Serious dysfunctions like these cause a lot of damage to people and institutions, as some of us know. But even when through cowardice, or dejection, or ill health, or lack of sleep, or sheer exhaustion we did not live up to our ordination vows, when some relief from this burden of ministry would have been welcome, I want to believe that we can say (in another echo of Michael Ramsey) that if we have not always wanted the best, we have at least wanted to want it. In that lie the seeds of forgiveness, redemption and the gift to begin again. During the past forty years of ministry, twenty as a dean, twelve as the Dean of Durham, how many times have I had to throw myself once more on the mercy and compassion of God, and his patient, kind, understanding and forgiving people!

As I near the end of this stage of the journey, I come back to Paul’s words and am strengthened by them. ‘As sorrowful yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything’ – this is how he sums up his apostolic career. This is what I pray will always inspire my colleagues here in this Cathedral and Diocese. This is what I want this year’s ordinands to know as they stand at the threshold of public ministry. Is there any other vocation more privileged than this – our apostolate as Christ’s ambassadors, bringing the gospel’s entreaty to all whom we serve, ‘be reconciled to God’?

This is not yet a farewell sermon. But retirement offers the chance to do some summing up, try to trace patterns and meanings in our life’s work. Ministry, like human life, is a work of art. We collaborate with God in designing and shaping it, co-creating something beautiful we can celebrate when it is done. Like Jesus on the cross in St John, we can never say tetelestai, ‘It is accomplished’ until our dying breath. But we can perhaps begin to see it for what it is.

On the score of his masterpiece The Dream of Gerontius, Elgar wrote: ‘this is the best of me’. I might wish in some grandiose way that my ministry had been a masterpiece. However, most of ministry is unspectacular, ordinary, workaday. It doesn’t draw attention to itself, nor should it. Yet as we see in this eucharist, God takes what is commonplace and makes something extraordinary out of it when it is offered with love. So, not a masterpiece. But before God and his church, I have still wanted it to be ‘the best of me’. It was all I had to give.

Durham Cathedral, 21 June 2015
2 Corinthians 6.1-13, Mark 4.35-end

St Paul: a tribute

Today, the 25 January, we celebrate the conversion of St Paul.  Caravaggio painted the scene and caught its sound and fury.  Paul is spread eagled on the ground, as if toppled by a seismic cataclysm, staring upwards out of his blinded eyes.  Above him rears a vast horse, rider-less, the one he has just fallen from.  Somehow that enormous horse overshadowing the man symbolises the immensity of what has trampled on his world, like the stage play Equus for the 1^st century: it’s as if only heaven itself can tame Saul’s huge animal energies.  Caravaggio’s biographer Helen Langdon says of this painting, ‘with its jagged shapes and irrational light which licks out details for their dramatic impact, it creates a sense of crisis and dislocation [in which] Christ disrupts the mundane world’. Such a man, if he ever recovered from this epiphany, would not be a comfortable conversation-partner or bed-fellow.  ‘Great men are meteors that consume themselves to light the earth’ said Thomas Hardy.  Struck by a thunderbolt from Jesus, Saul of Tarsus had no choice but to become one himself. 

 

Perhaps I was over-exposed to Paul in adolescence.  The Christianity that retrieved me from my lazy teenage agnosticism was thoroughly Pauline – or thought it was.  Paul was regarded as the early church’s theological organiser who laid down the definitive systematic template over the New Testament.  If you wanted to know what Christianity taught about sin, grace, atonement, faith, money, sex or power, you went first to Paul.  There is a logic to this, though not the one I was taught.  It is that the earliest documents of the New Testament are not the four gospels but Paul’s letters.  There is a case for reading the New Testament in the order in which it was written, overhearing how the early church evolved over the first two generations.  But this was not how I learned Paul.  To us students the Bible was more like a jigsaw puzzle whose disparate texts in the Old Testament, gospels and Acts had to be sorted and fitted into their allotted places so that a coherent picture emerged.  The bits you began with, the ones with straight edges that framed the image and determined where the others would go were the Pauline pieces.  

 

If I came fresh to St Paul now, what would I make of him?  Here are three aspects of his career that would strike me as reasons to celebrate Paul’s conversion today. 

 

First, there is St Paul the evangelist.  He was one of the great travellers of the ancient world bringing the Christian gospel to the known world. You know the roll-call of places from Sunday School when you learned to trace Paul’s missionary journeys: Asia Minor, Cyprus, Crete, Greece, Malta, Rome.  He would have gone to Gaul and Spain if he could, and who knows, even to this cold, rainy far-flung corner of the Roman Empire.  It required energy and courage, for he endured all kinds of hardship and opposition.  But his real achievement lay in the sense of purpose with which he set about his travels.  He preached in the towns and cities where influence mattered, along the great trade routes that were the communication lines of his age.  He stayed long enough in each place both to make sure that people were able to absorb the message and also to ‘grow’ local indigenous Christian leaders who would settle his young churches securely.  We should learn from this.  A book written a century ago by Roland Allen, Missionary Methods – St Paul’s or Ours? would help purge us of some of the nonsense that goes by the name of evangelism.  Paul can help us establish sound principles of faith-sharing and the nurture of Christian communities even in an era so different from his. Our church plants and ‘fresh expressions’ need to pay attention to the sound mission principles St Paul worked to. They have never been bettered.

 

Then there is Paul the theologian.  One of greatest minds in antiquity, for him risk-taking was not only a matter of persecution or physical danger but also of the intellect.  Conversion was not just a matter of heart and soul and strength, but also of the mind. In the ancient world of mystery religion, pagan cults and moralism, Christianity came like those shafts of sunshine in the painting, as enlightenment, an invitation to intellectual freedom, to think in wholly new ways about God, the world and our human lives. I mean proclaiming the gospel in a way that could be heard by the cultured Greek and Roman world beyond Judea, promoting ‘intelligent’ and ‘intelligible’ Christianity, we could say.  This meant, courageously, doing away with the age-old divisions of the human race and stating unequivocally that Christ was for all humanity and all creation. The idea that the gospel embraced gentiles was deeply subversive and large parts of the New Testament show how fiercely it was contested.  Paul’s greatness lies in that he understood how Christianity is truly universal.  The grace of God through faith in Christ is offered without condition to all people, whatever their race, gender, status or culture.  This lies at the heart of his truly radical vision of the church – and Paul is the New Testament’s great theologian of the church.  Our unity in Christ underlies this Week of Prayer for Christian unity. 

 

And thirdly, there is Paul the writer.  The letters of Paul are among the most cherished pieces of writing from the first days of the Church: 1 Thessalonians is probably the earliest New Testament document of all.  The Letters to the Romans and Galatians, setting out the meaning of faith in Christ; the Letters to the Corinthians cajoling a wayward church into living together as a community, the Letter to the Philippians with Paul’s acknowledgment of what the Christian journey has meant to him personally – what would the New Testament be without them?  These are remarkable documents with their skilful blend of theology, spiritual insight, pastoral sensitivity, honesty, humour (yes! or at least heavy irony), passion and well-grounded common sense.  They give us an unrivalled picture of the life of the early church and, as I have said, suggest principles by which we may order our own lives and that of our churches.  How impoverished we would be without these beautiful letters. In them, we hear the early church celebrating the joys and wrestling with the struggles of living together in these small fragile human communities that the gospel had given birth to. They are like a mirror held up to us as we try to live authentic Christian lives today. What we see is our own selves, in the complexity and mess of our unredeemed state, but also in the beauty of lives that Jesus Christ has touched and re-fashioned through his grace. We hear Paul challenging us to look at how we understand what it means to be human, inviting us to judge ourselves against the virtues that are his touchstone of authentic Christianity as he lists them in one of his letters: faith, hope and love.  

 

What do we do with St Paul today?  We need to recognise that he lived in his own times and spoke to his own contemporaries in the places he wrote to. But that voice from a distant past speaks eloquently into the present, our present. We should learn from the way he set about the vocation to Christian life that without warning confronted him on the Damascus Road, knocked him off that horse, pinned him to the ground, shut his eyes to the pain and persecution he had instigated and opened them to the gospel life that would shape his life from that day onward and launch him his extraordinary career as an apostle.  If only we could be as courageous and hope-filled! 

 

And our vision of the church should not be less universal than his, embracing people of all races, cultures and backgrounds. Today marks the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. I do not myself think that trying to achieve a structural convergence between the historic denominations is at the heart of this nowadays, though we should welcome it when it happens. I think we are far better at recognising the heritage each of our Christian traditions brings to the whole church as gifts to enrich it. What is harder is to create churches that are genuinely united communities of faith and hope and love. When St Paul writes in the Letter to the Galatians, that passionate, powerful statement of the non-negotiable values that lie at the heart of his gospel, he says: that in Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor gentile, slave nor free, but we are all one in Christ Jesus. My own community of Anglicans in this country has only just got round to opening up an equal space for women alongside men in the senior leadership of the Church of England, though it has been on this journey for the entire 40 years of my ministry. You were there decades before us; others are not even close to it. 

 

And that is only one of his criteria for a genuinely inclusive community of faith. We can add to his some of our own which are surely in the spirit of his letter: young and old, gay and straight, wealthy and disadvantaged, indigenous and incomer, conservative and liberal…. You see what a mountain we still have to climb. But it matters. It matters hugely. The human family is as bitterly divided in our day as it has ever been. We are in despair about the cruelties and hatreds inflicted by one group of human beings on another, and it is always the weak, the voiceless, those with no power or influence who are the victims. Radicalised Islamists behind massacres in Pakistan, Nigeria and Paris are in all our minds; yet they are only the latest symptoms of the cancers that eat away at the human soul. On Holocaust Memorial Day this week, we shall keep the memory of genocide alive and hold its victims in our prayers. In the light of man’s inhumanity to men, it is vital that we create communities of openness and trust, of friendship and care, communities that work away at the patient task of healing us of these fatal diseases.  This is the vision that lies behind the way St Paul speaks about the church. For him it’s a new creation, a new humanity in Christ, his cherished body, a place of reconciliation and wholeness and peace. Because of this, the church is something beautiful, good and even glorious. 

 

It will be costly to bear witness to the gospel as he did, having the courage to do away with discrimination and division; being communities of graciousness and generosity that show the love of God poured into our hearts.  But this is how we shall become churches of whom Paul would say, as he does in his letters, that he gives thanks constantly for us, rejoices in our faithfulness and bears us on his heart.  And in that, flawed yet always mighty, his heart will have spoken to ours. 

 

Waddington Street United Reformed Church, Durham

25 January 2015

For the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul

Acts 9.1-22