Holy Week at Southwark Address 2: Crucified by Religion

Religion should be a force for good in human life. It should ennoble us, give us stature and dignity, inspire and equip us to become the men and women God made us to be in his own image and likeness in the world. It should make us just and compassionate and kind. Above all it should be a liberating power in life and in society, for the truth should make us free. This is why we come to places like this cathedral, where through worship and prayer we glimpse how we could become better versions of ourselves, more whole. 

But what if religion goes bad, becomes instead a force that diminishes us, oppresses us, narrows our perspective, makes us domineering, judgmental or cruel? What if religion becomes a persecuting force that instead of imparting freedom starts denying it to its adherents or still more to those who follow different paths? What if it crucifies those who do not conform to its principles? All this can happen when religion turns in on itself, starts insisting on its own literal truth, becomes a rigid system that diverts it from being a means to a greater good into serving its distorted end? I’ve been reading a book called Dark Religion: Fundamentalism from the Perspective of Jungian Psychology*. No-one needs to be persuaded that dark religion is real enough in our world today. In my mind has been a famous poem of William Blake from his Songs of Innocence and Experience: 

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green. 

And the gates of this chapel were shut,
And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore. 

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

This Holy Week I’m exploring the different “worlds” in which Jesus is crucified. Yesterday we reflected on the city that Jesus arrives at on Palm Sunday. Tonight’s passage places us in the garden where Jesus has just been arrested, and straight away takes us into the first trial he must face, his interrogation by the religious authorities represented by Annas, and Caiaphas his son-in-law who was high priest at that time. 

Jesus is inside being asked, says John, “about his disciples and about his teaching”. At precisely the same moment, Peter is outside, one of the disciples the high-priest wants to know about, outside warming himself by the fire and denying that he knows anything about Jesus. Inside the religious organisation levels accusations against the Son of God; outside, personal faith fails comprehensively. It is not a good night for religion. 

We have come across Caiaphas earlier in St John’s Gospel. After the raising of Lazarus, he and the pharisees are concerned about Jesus’ growing influence: “if we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” You can hear the anxiety. This man must be guarded against, otherwise Israel’s sacred institutions are at risk. And Caiaphas, the spokesman of organised religion, is clear about the order of priorities. The shrine comes first, then the people. And he makes the kind of judgment institutional leaders often make when stability is put at risk. There must be a sacrificial victim. “Better for one man to die than for the whole nation to be destroyed.” It is Jesus’ death-sentence. And it is organised religion that signs it. 

We need to understand what “religion” is up to here. By themselves, the religious authorities had no power to put Jesus to death. Nor would the Romans be interested in the theological niceties of his claim to be the Son of God. Caiaphas had to demonstrate that Jesus was a threat to good civil order, that he subverted the authority of the Emperor himself. When it comes to public affairs in Judaea under the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate, this is how we need to read the passion narrative. Jesus dies as the political victim, a prisoner of conscience you might say. And if the priests and pharisees could lay responsibility squarely on Pilate and the empire he represents, so much the better. Religion must not have blood on its hands. 

I’m saying that before Jesus becomes the victim of politics, he is the victim of religion. All the gospels paint a picture of religious controversy surrounding Jesus from the very outset, arguments and debates that erupt into outright hostility. There is an ominous hint early on, when he has thrown the money-changers out of the temple. He is asked by what authority he does this. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” he replies, a highly enigmatic response calculated to baffle his audience. From then on, he is a watched man. And he himself is careful not to entrust himself to anyone, says John, for his hour has not yet come. And although in St John, Jesus frequents the temple more than in any other gospel, there is a wariness after this episode that Jesus knows people will not forget. He loves the native faith of his upbringing, practises it with a devotion unmatched in any other adherent, we can be sure. He is a loyal son of Abraham. And yet he is increasingly at odds with it, or rather, with what it has become. I think we can say that to Jesus in all four gospels, the temple represents both the best and the worst of organised religion. It symbolises the potential for divine transcendence but also the hardening of humans’ best instincts for kindness, charity and justice. When religion goes sclerotic, things can only end badly.

There is something deeply paradoxical about saying that religion crucified Jesus, that he was a victim of a dysfunctional way of believing. The paradox is magnified by the realisation that in history, some of the worst crimes against humanity have been perpetrated in his very name. Think of the Crusades and the slaughter of millions of Moslems. Think of the Albigensians, the Inquisition, the Wars of Religion in Europe, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France, all persecuting believers who wanted to follow Christ in their own way. Think of the German national churches that were complicit in the Nazi holocaust. You think this is all a matter of history in far-off places? Ask many women to tell you how they have experienced the church. Ask people of colour. Ask your LGBT friends. Ask the victims of clergy who have abused children. Some of these people will say that they too have been crucified. Ask yourselves whether dark religion is really a thing of the past, even among Christians. 

Please don’t think that I’m hostile to organised religion. Far from it. You can’t be a dean for twenty years without believing in the potential of institutions like cathedrals to do very great good. When institutions function well, when their leaders behave justly, when their members are treated fairly, when they exhibit justice and compassion in the public square, then their power to change the world is great indeed. If God loves humanity, then he must love human institutions too, for we cannot organise ourselves as societies and communities without them. 

And as I read the Hebrew Bible, I’m struck by how much it invests in the temple as an institution. When Solomon dedicated the temple he had built, he uttered a prayer that was as comprehensive as the world itself, beseeching the Almighty to make it a focus for God’s love, blessing, forgiveness and reconciliation. And when it was rebuilt after the exile, the new temple was to be called “a house of prayer for all peoples”. The temple was to be nothing less than a sacrament of Yahweh’s holiness, his sacred presence in the midst of the people he had chosen as his own. Which is why the prophets were scandalised when it failed to live up to that noble vision, why Jesus protests so vehemently at the way the authorities had poured the poison of injustice and corruption into its soul. 

How can a diseased institution be healed? How can organised religion in its many global manifestations be redeemed from the long shadow it casts? The answer, I think, lies precisely in the cross that it is capable of wielding so destructively. If we weaponise the cross, then its potential to cause damage to the human race is limitless. When the cross becomes a force with which to oppress others (the literal meaning of the word crusader), it reverts to its original function in the Roman state as an ugly instrument of cruelty. 

But St John’s image of the crucifixion is the direct antithesis of this. It is true, as we shall see on Good Friday, that in the Fourth Gospel, the cross is the great work Jesus has come into the world to complete. It is true that the cross is the throne where he reigns gloriously as king. It is true that the cross expresses God’s ultimate victory over all that would resist his reign of truth. All this is encapsulated in the last word Jesus speaks from the cross in St John: not a whisper of resignation but a cry of triumph. Tetelestai! “It is accomplished!” 

But all this has to be understood in the way John intends it. For him, the spirit of the cross lies in the act Jesus has performed for his disciples in the upper room the night before his death. In taking the towel, stooping down and washing their feet, Jesus takes the form of a slave, as St Paul puts it in one of his letters. “He emptied himself” says that famous passage, made the supreme sacrifice as we say of those who have laid down their lives for their friends. In that act of self-giving, kenosis, you have the most profound meaning that the cross carries. That is to say, it is the embodiment of love: the love that has nothing to give but itself, is empty-handed but for its infinite embrace of us all, the love that is capable of being endlessly refused and rejected and hurt, yet for all that is patient and kind, will wait an eternity if that is how long it takes to win the creation back to its Creator and reconcile all things to the God who out of love gave it its capacity to exist and be free. 

In Holy Week the cross faces us with all our flaws and failures and ambivalences. We know that it is the power of God for salvation, that if we walk in its way it will give us the strength to face our life-task and learn to live out of this love that is so precarious and vulnerable. And if institutional religion once crucified Jesus and still does, then it too needs to turn itself back to the cross and consider what it means to live in its kindly light. I believe that it is vastly more important that we cultivate being a cross-shaped church than a mission-shaped church. For a church that turns its back on triumphalism, knows its own vulnerabilities, glimpses how the love and forgiveness of the cross are the most transformative power the world has ever seen, and lives out these realities with the conviction that nothing could matter more - such a church will in its very nature be shaped as a sacrament of divine love. Such a church that lives and breathes the events of Holy Week will be the best invitation there could be for the human family to discover how “love is that liquor sweet and most divine / which my God feels as blood, and I as wine” as George Herbert puts it. 

Religion crucified the Lord of Glory. But his cross has borne its griefs and carried its sorrows. It can heal the church, renew it and set it free to become an agent of self-giving love in the world. That needs to be part of our praying through Holy Week as we bring to the cross our world, our church and our own deepest selves. 

John 18.12-14, 19-24

*By Didier, G. J. & Solc, V. 

Holy Week in Chester 6: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” (Good Friday)

Reading: John 13.36-14.7

“I am the way, the truth and the life.” In the last address, we met Thomas the doubter who would not, could not, believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Here he is again, in the upper room on the night before Good Friday. Jesus has been telling his disciples that he must go ahead of them to his Father’s house, where there are many mansions. “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” 

Thomas, interjects. “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” You can hear the rising anxiety in his voice, the panic of anticipated separation and loss on the part of a man who had once said, “let us go with him, even if we must die with him”. But now that the hour has come, the disciple panics – and who is to say that he wasn’t feeling for them all, giving voice to the fears that the others dared not utter? 

So the theme is the way: the way to the place Jesus will prepare, the way home, the way to the Father. It’s been introduced by another disciple’s anxious question. Simon Peter has asked Jesus, “Lord, where are you going?” And once more, Jesus replies enigmatically, “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterwards.” “Why can’t I follow you now?” demands Peter, always impatient. Impetuous too. “I will lay down my life for you.” “Oh yes?” replies Jesus. “I tell you, before cock-crow, you will deny me three times.” Already, it seems, the way is announced as problematic, beset with difficulties and temptations. The coming night will defeat Peter. How can he, how can any of them not stumble on this hard road of loyalty and faithfulness that it will take to reach the destination?

This clear focus on the way suggests to me that we haven’t got the translation of this famous saying quite right. Truth and life are, indeed, among the great themes of the Fourth Gospel. But here, right now, the focus is not on them directly but on the way. I think we have a Greek figure of speech here (called, if you want to know, a hendiadys). The second and third words are adjectival, describing the first and principal epithet which is way. A better version is, “I am the way that is true and living”. And that makes the dialogue clearer. To the puzzled question, “How can we know the way?”, Jesus responds by pointing to himself. Let’s paraphrase. “You ask how to find the way? Let me show you. It is I myself who am the true and living way. Choose this path, walk in and through me, and you will assuredly come to the Father. You have come to know me already. Therefore you will know my Father too, for in me you have seen him and touched him and begun to learn how to love him. And when you reach that point of finding and knowing him, you will realise that it was by me that you made this journey all along – whether you realised it or not”

Like light, the way is one of the great words you find in all the world faiths. I suppose this is because the idea of travelling, making the journey, walking the pilgrimage is such a basic metaphor of human life. You could say that the entire faith of the Hebrew Bible is founded on the image of the way, the journey made by the Israelites when they were led out of Egypt, across the Red Sea, out into the desert, and then over the Jordan into the land of promise. Some of the prophets said that this was the Hebrews’ golden age, when they were a people on pilgrimage, unencumbered by the burdens that go with occupying land, building houses, shrines and institutions, and living the settled life. On that journey, Israel, God’s child, came to know God as their king and be bound to him with an intimacy they would never know again. Maybe Jesus is recalling that era when he spoke about the true and living way which, when we walk it, leads us to God. 

It’s significant that he should use this image as he approaches the cross. We are familiar with the idea of following Jesus on the way of the cross: the via dolorosa in Jerusalem expresses this journey in which pilgrims accompany Jesus in his passion. A progress through the Stations of the Cross imitate this pilgrimage in every Roman Catholic church (and some Anglican ones), not least on Good Friday. To walk with Jesus on the road to Golgotha is to try to empathise with his loneliness and pain, share in his suffering, not because we can add anything to what he is carrying for humanity, but so as to glimpse the infinite cost of self-emptying love. 

This perhaps reflects an aspect of how the wisdom teachers of the Hebrew Bible spoke about the way. To them, life came down to the choices we make about which way we intend to follow in life. There is the way of folly that is enticing and seductive and offers easy pleasures but which ends up diminishing and eventually  undoing human character and virtue, what the psalms and proverbs call destruction. Then there is the way of wisdom that looks hard, narrow, steep, exacting. Yet this is the way that leads to enduring reward and satisfaction. that builds people up so that they realise their true humanity. “The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding” says the Book of Job. On Good Friday, we feel particularly starkly the force of the choices we must make between falsehood and folly on the one hand, and truth and wisdom on the other. It’s a life or death decision, in the terms the gospels put it.

To many people, the cross looks more like folly than wisdom. Why spend today gazing at the crucified Messiah when we could be out playing football or going shopping? Is this immersion in suffering good for us? That very question is faced head-on in St Paul’s letters to the Corinthians. He plays with what wisdom means, what folly means, and concludes that on the cross, we see both the power of God and the wisdom of God shown forth to the world: power in the powerlessness of the victim, wisdom in the folly of a crucified God. “The foolishness of God is wiser than men” he says, “and the weakness of God is stronger than men”. And that’s precisely the paradox of the way of the cross that we are walking today. By any human criteria, it makes no sense. But turn towards the crucified Lord and follow his way – and the journey of this season brings its own understanding and its reward. For this is not just any path but the true and living way. 

Because on Good Friday, the invitation is held out to find in him the answer to our human quest. This path of wisdom, this path to God is what every seeker after truth is drawn to. Carl Gustav Jung had a saying from classical antiquity placed over the lintel of the door that led his patients to his consulting room, “whether he is recognised or not, God is present here”. When we feel after God and find him, a voice tells us that we are walking this true and living way, this path of wisdom that pilgrims have proved trustworthy and life-changing. Like Israel of old, we experience the journey as asking of us everything we have, for as the hymn says, “love so amazing, so divine / demands my life, my soul my all”. It tries our resolve and tests our resilience. Of all the days in the year, today is the one when we recognise the cost of discipleship.

But we believe that this path we tread, this cross-shaped life we live, will open our eyes to wisdom and truth, and lead us to the Father. Through the cross and into the resurrection, we discover how God’s movement is always from dying to living, from imprisonment to release, from despair to deliverance, from the portal of the grave to the joyous gateway of resurrection and life. On this day we stand before “the wounded God whose wounds are healing mine.” Here, at the cross, the fugitive pieces of our lives are put back together once more, and new worlds open up before us. And if the path is rough and steep, and we wonder if we have the strength to complete the journey, nevertheless we willingly walk it for the sake of the One who will be our true and living way till travelling days are done.

Malcolm Guite’s sonnet on these words.

“We do not know… how can we know the way?”
Courageous master of the awkward question,
You spoke the words the others dared not say
And cut through their evasion and abstraction.
Oh doubting Thomas, father of my faith,
You put your finger on the nub of things
We cannot love some disembodied wraith,
But flesh and blood must be our king of kings.
Your teaching is to touch, embrace, anoint,
Feel after Him and find Him in the flesh.
Because He loved your awkward counter-point
The Word has heard and granted you your wish.
Oh place my hands with yours, help me divine
The wounded God whose wounds are healing mine.

(c) Malcolm Guite. With permission. 

Summer on Lindisfarne

Our readings on this summer Sunday are of St Peter whose festival is tomorrow. It’s moving to be here on this particular day. Tomorrow I shall have been ordained forty years, so it’s a special time of thankfulness. Also, this is my last sermon as Dean of Durham outside the Cathedral at an ‘away match’. Where else was I meant come but back here on my beloved Lindisfarne, Durham’s mother house? And today is significant for you because the monastic church that St Aidan’s successor Finan built here on this Island in the seventh century was dedicated to St Peter. So on this festival Sunday we celebrate the centuries there has been a church, a Christian presence, in this wonderful and numinous place.

And that is the first of three themes I want to mention today. Aidan’s monastery founded nearly fourteen centuries ago, and the Priory that was re-founded by the Benedictine monks of Durham in the twelfth century, were at the heart of this island community. As was this church of St Mary which has its own long story to tell. This building was here to serve the islanders, while the Priory served the monks and their mission across Northumbria and beyond. But they belonged together on this one holy site. Today, the one is a romantic ruin loved by tourists and sea-birds; but the other continues to do what it always has: be the home of a living Christian community and a sign of God here among us.

Great monastic churches were often dedicated to St Peter, or to Peter and Paul. Finan’s church would not have been large, but it was ‘great’ in its significance, for from here the mission of those Irish monks, and the native Saxons who joined them, spread far and wide, not only across Northumbria but across England. Canterbury may claim to be the mother church of English Christianity, but you and I know better, for Lindisfarne has a stronger claim. Its reach was right across England: the North of course, and the Midlands too, and East Anglia and as far south as Sussex. You can see how appropriate it was for the headquarters of a great mission enterprise should be dedicated to Peter. In our gospel, he is the first of the disciples to confess Jesus as the Messiah, God’s anointed one. He is the one, Petros the rock, on whom Jesus promises to build his church; he is the one he gives the keys of the kingdom of heaven to, charging him to take the gospel to the world and to bind and loose in his name. So we honour and celebrate the great apostle whose influence was so far-reaching, just as the influence of Lindisfarne’s own Apostle Aidan who perhaps took him as his model and touched countless lives six centuries later.  

But the Christian presence on Lindisfarne is about more than simply the life of the Priory and this parish church. Churches and priories, even when they are in ruins, stand for the truth that God is in the midst of the whole of our life, not simply the churchgoing part of it. We call it ‘common grace’, and we need to recognise it. It’s another of the Bishops of Lindisfarne, St Cuthbert, who symbolises it for me (and I can hardly come here from his shrine at Durham and not mention Cuthbert who is so cherished by us all). This is my second theme. What people loved in Cuthbert and remembered him for among many other things was his love of the natural world, his closeness to animals and birds, flowers and vegetation, the land, the soil and the deep salt sea. He was England’s St Francis, or rather, because he lived so many centuries before him, we should say that St Francis of Assisi was Italy’s St Cuthbert. For us who also love the seascape and landscape and natural history of this Holy Island, it is difficult not to be reminded of Cuthbert who loved these things as well.

Common grace means celebrating the presence of God in all creation, and in the life and activity of human beings. So your music festival in which this church is taking an active part is a way of honouring the goodness of God at the heart of things, and perhaps making it a little more conscious to us all so that we can give thanks for it. But there’s another aspect of common grace that comes to my mind this summer. Pope Francis has just issued his courageous encyclical on climate change and the threats it poses to all of life on our planet. It’s clear in the way he writes that he has St Francis very much in mind. He says, for instance, that we need to get away from the old idea that humankind exercises ‘dominion’ over nature, which has been taken as a licence to exploit it, and instead recover St Francis’s friendship with the natural world, his courtesy towards it, how he saw the good earth as a home to all living creatures, not just to the human race. Pope Francis could have said all this of Cuthbert too. So a festival that celebrates God in our midst helps create an environment, an ecology if you like, in which we are more open to seeing nature’s gifts for what they are and reverencing them, whether it is in the beauty of this island or the beauty of music and the arts, or the beauty of human character and community and our closest personal relationships.

My third point brings these two themes together. Today we are dedicating a new frontal for the Fishermen’s Altar in the north aisle. This aisle is a much-loved space within a much-loved church. It symbolises the sea that is all around us, and the lives of those who derive their living and indeed their very identity from the sea. St Peter was of course a fisherman, one of those Jesus summoned to leave their nets and follow him and become fishers of people instead. The Sea of Galilee plays a big part in the gospels just as the North Sea dominates life on Lindisfarne. You can’t get on or off Holy Island without taking account of the tides, a daily reminder of primordial rhythms that were familiar to every ancient society but of which most of us have become almost unaware in modernity. That too is one of Pope Francis’s pleas, to reconnect ourselves once more to the patterns of the seasons and the days, dusk and dawn, the phases of the moon and the ebb and flow of tides. Cuthbert, who regularly plied the sea between here and the Inner Farne, knew all about these. So should we who come after him.

So the altar in this sacred place with its beautiful frontal that we dedicate on St Peter’s Day joins it all together: God’s grace that abounds in nature and in human art and craftsmanship; this island community that is so dependent on the sea, and this ancient place of prayer at the heart of England’s Holy Island where all of life is offered to God in praise and prayer. We are here this morning to celebrate the eucharist. That word means thankfulness. It’s the most important word in any celebration and the greatest word in the life of faith: gratitude to God for his goodness and lovingkindness to us and to all people; gratitude to him for the redemption of the world through our Lord Jesus Christ, whose apostle Peter we celebrate today. And gratitude too for our life and work as a community on this island where we recognise in one another’s creativity, talents and dedication the God-given gifts that keep us alive and sustain what we are and do, and delight us with glimpses of the One whom the Gospel calls Immanuel, the God who is with us always in his risen and ascended Son.

Lindisfarne, 28 June 2015. Matthew 16.13-19