Holy Week in Chester 8: “I AM: The Burning Bush, Ends and Beginnings”

“It is accomplished” cries Jesus from the cross, his final word in St John’s passion story. It’s natural to think of Good Friday as a day of despair or resignation as the other gospel writers do. St John stands out for his sense of completion, something accomplished, brought to its proper conclusion. “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work” Jesus has said near the beginning of the gospel. As he turns his face towards the cross he prays, “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do”. Tetelestai! It is done.

Endings and beginnings seem to meet at Golgotha as we hear John’s great narrative. The cross feels like a great full stop, a closure, an end. We hear in Jesus’ words an unmissable tone of finality, 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 career that has been wasted, brought to nothing. It is not the extinguishing of a guttering candle flame finally overcome by the darkness. Rather, it’s that this great light has never shone more steadily, more brightly than at Golgotha. Far from representing the waste of a man’s career, this is its 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. What binds him to the cross is not nails but love. He reigns over us as the king of love, a kingship that is not from here but from another place  entirely. This is where we recognise glory, full of grace and truth, love’s endeavour, love’s expense, love to the very end.

Therefore, this finished work, this end is also a beginning. It’s a threshold across which a new horizon is glimpsed. It’s the door "held open to us that no-one can shut, the gateway to possibilities we only dared to dream about. The story of the crucifixion ends with Jesus’ body being laid in a tomb by those who loved him – in a garden, precisely where the resurrection story begins, at the break of day, on the first day of the week, like the garden that God planted at the beginning of time when he created this good earth and placed our first parents in it. Beyond the full stop of today’s “it is finished”, another sentence is launched, a new one whose words open up for all humanity a paradise of promise, healing and reconciliation. 

“In my end is my beginning” was the motto of Mary Queen of Scots which she embroidered on a cloth just before her execution. Perhaps she was inspired by the salamander, the symbol of her grandfather-in-law Francis I, the creature that in myth was supposed to self-ignite at death in order to be reborn out of the ashes, young and new and strong. T. S Eliot plays with that motto in his great poem East Coker. It starts out as a pessimistic reversal of Queen Mary, “In my beginning is my end”, an echo perhaps of 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 and hope, as if to affirm: in the midst of death, we are in life. St John would recognise it that way round. “In my end is my beginning.” If Good Friday is an end, then it is pregnant with hope and possibility. For love is not eclipsed by suffering, nor its glory by death. And if Jesus’ death is both the end but not the end, then the grave has lost its victory and death its sting. 

This Holy Week in the Cathedral, we have been looking at the seven sayings of Jesus in St John that begin with the words I AM: “the door”, “the resurrection and the life”, “the light of the world”, “the bread of life”, “the true vine”, “the way, the truth and the life” and “the good shepherd”. Those words “I am”, so emphatic in the Greek, take us back to the book Exodus. There Moses is confronted by the sight of a bush that burns but is not consumed. He is overawed. Then he hears a voice addressing him out of the fire. “I am that I am” it says mysteriously. It’s nothing less than the sacred name of God whose nature can only be explained in terms of itself, for God will not be likened to anything we can see or handle. “I am”, that is, the ground of all existence, all life, all consciousness, all thought. And this is the divine name with which Jesus associates himself in St John. “Before Abraham was, I am” he declares, the eternal One who is in the world yet beyond it, the great I AM who is the source and end of all that has been, and is, and ever shall be. So the risen Christ says of himself in the book of Revelation, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end”.

This is how St John portrays the majestic figure who is enthroned in the cross at Golgotha. How can God suffer and die? we ask ourselves. Other faith communities find this the most baffling question Christianity poses. If you want to see a display of naked power, a crucified God makes no sense. If you want to hear fine wisdom, a messiah nailed to a cross is not for you. There are many for whom Good Friday is a real stumbling-block. And yet... there is power and there is wisdom at the cross, a divine wisdom and a divine power that change lives, heal brokenness and bring great hope. Faith takes us to a place where we 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 and no Christianity worth following.

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 turn aside today to look into this sacred fire, and open our ears so that we can hear the divine voice that speaks to us. 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: here is the essence of all that it means to be God. Here at Golgotha we see his nature and his name. I AM utters that voice, I am all that love means, all that meets our hungers and hopes, that than which nothing greater, nothing more glorious can be dreamed or conceived, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the origin and destiny of all that is, our light, our life, our love. 

“It is accomplished.” In my end is my beginning. We gaze on the burning heart of God. We sense that in these holy days of the paschal season, the sun is rising upon us. There is a new creation. The day breaks and the shadows flee away. After a long and gloomy winter, spring has come at last. 

The Grapes of Wrath

It’s a rather bloody matins today.  Forget about Christmas trees, baubles and The Snowman played in a thousand shops while we are at worship this morning.  This is more the grim world of John Steinbeck's dust bowl.  Prepare to be startled, even shocked. Here is Advent in all its seriousness and with the blood flowing freely: death, judgment and hell, laid out for us in two magnificent but perplexing readings.

The Book of Revelation is better called the Apocalypse.  It means the unveiling of what is hidden, kept under wraps until the time is right. It is a familiar genre in the scriptures: the Book of Daniel is its counterpart in the Hebrew Bible. In each case what is ‘unveiled’ is secret knowledge about the future.  But not just any future.  Apocalypse concerns the specific future of the people of God: Israel in the Old Testament, the Christian Church in the New. Ask yourself when the future matters most to us.  The answer may be, when it is uncertain, when we have reason to be afraid of it. Apocalypse comes into its own when life is frightening and fragile, threatened by nuclear holocaust, global warming, terrorism, or more personally, terminal illness, death, bereavement. At times like these we want to know whether we shall survive, still be here tomorrow.  To the apocalyptic writers, the threat that promised to overwhelm their communities was persecution.  Whether it was the Seleucid kings at the time Daniel was written, or the Roman emperor Domitian in the days of Revelation: these books are meant to open up a future that puts a question against pain, suffering and mortality.  By affirming that it lay in God’s hands, it aimed to bring strength and hope to the persecuted and afraid.

Apocalyptic uses the literary device of putting these visions on the lips of well-known prophets or seers from the past, those who had proved trustworthy in predicting the future. It reads as if everything that is taking place now was foretold ages ago.  But it was dangerous for the persecuted to speak too openly about their faith. They risked torture and death, as the stories in the apocryphal books of the Maccabees from Daniel’s time tell us. So they adopted elaborate codes, complex systems of symbols and images drawn from the scriptures and elsewhere with which to cloak their visions. ‘Unveiling’ it may be, and perhaps was for those with eyes to hear.  To us, the imagery seems to wrap the text in still deeper obscurity. One of the best and most learned of all Bible commentators, the great John Calvin, professed himself so bewildered by the Book of Revelation that he gave up trying to write a commentary on it. In the 1662 Book of Common Prayer lectionary, you will see that while the gospels, Acts and epistles are read twice through at Morning and Evening Prayer, Revelation is read only once, during Advent and Christmas where today’s baleful reading from chapters 14 and 15 are set, of all days, for Christmas Eve.   

With that background, what do we make of this tough text?  We can at least understand why it has been chosen for Advent Sunday. This season is meant to turn our minds towards the future that is coming upon the world, what theologians call eschatology.  And happy is the church that sustains this powerful theme without distraction all the way to sundown on Christmas Eve. Today we begin this Advent journey by considering the grand sweep of the eternal purpose for the cosmos, for our world, for humankind and for ourselves personally. This purpose contains the old Advent themes of death, judgment, hell and heaven, the four last things that provide such rich resources for our meditation at this time of year.  This passage faces us with all these, but especially with the unwelcome but inescapable fact of divine judgment. I spoke earlier about crisis.  It literally means ‘judgment’ which is when we think about it what every crisis presents us with: a judgment on how we shall respond, what our motives will be, whether the easy speeches about loyalty, goodness, obedience and trust that we make in good times will still be on our lips when things become almost unendurably hard.   

The image of judgment is the ripened harvest.  It is reaped by the Son of Man with a golden crown and a sharp sickle in his hand. The picture is borrowed from our Old Testament lesson in Joel, but which is also present in the ‘little apocalypse’ in the gospels where Jesus says that when the powers in the heavens are shaken, all will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with power and great glory, who will send out his angels to gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of earth to the ends of heaven (Mark 13.25-27). The wicked of the earth are always a preoccupation of apocalyptic where they are contrasted to the remnant of the righteous few.  The bloodbath that occurs when the terrible sickle is wielded is likened to the harvested grapes that are thrown into the great winepress of the wrath of God.  There comes a day when evil is openly named for what it is, when in the imagery of our passage, the Warrior gathers the nations to claim his victory and a river of blood spreads its crimson stain across the land. You can see how this image (this time from Isaiah 63) would comfort those undergoing fierce persecution.  Those with no hope whatsoever in this world could only throw themselves on the mercy of God to intervene spectacularly, wind up history, banish wickedness to its place and redeem the his faithful.  The redeemed could then look forward to resurrection and immortality, singing Moses’ song of liberated slaves that we heard at the end of the reading.

But there is another dimension enfolded in this Christian apocalypse; we could miss it if we did not look for it. ‘The wine-press was trodden outside the city’ says the seer.  We know from the New Testament that the shdding of blood ‘without a city wall’ carries a deep significance.  For blood that is shed in that place proves to be not only judgment upon evil but also the redemption of the world. God’s strange work at Calvary, says St Luke,  embraces those who ‘know not what they do’. The cross turns out to be the work of Love where love conquers all things.  At the end of Revelation, the river of blood that issues from the place of the skull is transformed into a river of the water of life that flows from the throne of God and of the Lamb. The essence of judgment is revealed.  When ‘the wounded surgeon plies the steel’, the sickle that cuts into our flesh and bone hurts.  It exposes all that needs to be cut out if the body is to live, for the pain of judgment purifies us from the cancerous corruption that threatens destroy us.  But it saves us from ourselves. 

If we are serious about Advent, this purifying of aspiration and motive is a good task to set ourselves: not as an effort or a work, but as a God-given discipline or ascesis.  It will prise us open more and more to God’s generous, forgiving grace. It will help us to see clearly, mend our broken spirits, strengthen us to become holy and wise once more. Love was, love is always, his meaning. I am not going to tell you in Advent 2012 that this theme of judgment no longer matters.  It does, as anyone who knows the fallibility and corruption latent in the human heart knows well.  So at the core of our Advent longing, before we get to the manger of Bethlehem, must be the realisation that God must act in judgment to root out evil and vindicate whateverall that is true and honourable and just and pure. 

‘In wrath remember mercy.’ Whatever we read in the law and the prophets, in wisdom and apocalyptic is summed up simply in this:  ‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’.  That is the clue to the heart-work we must do in Advent, Love’s work that God does in us at every moment.  Don’t linger on the intoxicating images of Revelation.  Simply pray the Lord’s Prayer each day.  And add this: ‘Amen. Come Lord Jesus!’

Advent Sunday 2012
(Joel 3.9-end, Revelation 14.13-15.4)

Hope and the Death of Death

It’s good to be with you on All Saints Sunday and to be launching this sermon series on hope. There is an evocative aspect to this time of year as autumn dies into winter, when the light is eclipsed and the first frosts come.  It can be a forlorn season when spirits are low and summer a beautiful but fading memory.  The solstice beckons, and dark times, and perhaps forebodings about what another year may bring: for our world, for our society, for ourselves. 

Yet we know within ourselves that the turning of the year tells a truth about the transience of things, the necessity of dying, our own mortality. The Christian and civic calendars echo this time of fall and of loss with the commemoration of the dead on All Souls’ Day followed by Armistice Day not long after.  Yet the liturgy lays over it a quite different way of construing winter: with the joyful celebration of All Saints, and with the exquisite season of longing and expectancy which is Advent.  Liturgical winter is not only a time for the burning of the leaves but for the rising of the sap; of light penetrating the darkness of this world, of grace and truth ordering our wayward human lives, of love everlasting transfiguring our loneliness, struggle and pain.  It is a time to rediscover hope.

I am sure you agree that hope is in short supply right now.  Like the colliding weather systems that made Hurricane Sandy such an awesome and destructive power across the Caribbean and North America, it is as if many different kinds of turbulence have come together in this decade to make things appear even more precarious than they were before.  I am thinking of the economic chaos whose millions of victims are the voiceless poor and those with least resources to withstand its angry shocks; and of the recognition of how close we are to irreversible climate change; and of the relentless conflicts tearing apart the Arab world; and of the failure of powerful wealthy nations to make lasting inroads into global poverty. I could go on.  If the church can speak a single word into this state we are in, it must surely be hope: daring to look both into ourselves and beyond ourselves for the power to give us back our dignity, rebuild fragmented societies and mend a broken world.

And if hope is needed to transform the big story of the world and its future, it is also needed to transform the little stories of our personal lives and relationships.  I say little: but they are not little to us. Each day many face fightings within and fears without that constitute a powerful undertow dragging us away from the light and immortality for which we were made. Physical or mental illness, ageing, misfortune, broken relationships, addictive behaviour, unhealed memories, loss: these are our personal equivalents of the global threats that on good days we try to pretend are not as bad as we had feared, and on less good days have the capacity to paralyse us with the thought that one day this little light of ours will be put out for ever.

This makes All Saints’ tide all the more of a gift.  At this time of year, the liturgy invites us to celebrate those who were and are lights in the world.  It says to us: notice what fills the pages of history and what is all around you today: the goodness, the graciousness, the joy, the perseverance, the charity of the people we call saints.  Sainthood is not the sentimental whitewashing of a human life to make it seem something that it isn’t.  Nor is it often heroic, as if the only way of holiness is to scale Himalayan peaks of faith, discipline and good works.  The secret lies in the ordinary, the commonplace, the everyday.  Pusey said that sanctity doesn’t mean doing extraordinary things, but doing ordinary things in extraordinary ways.  ‘Extraordinary’ means doing them for God, making drudgery divine:  The saints are emblems of hope: because they light little fires in dark rooms and inspire us to go on believing, trusting, hoping against hope in the God who makes all things new as our reading puts it.. 

One of these is death itself, the last enemy that we have faced on All Souls’ Day.  Today’s gospel tells of how Jesus raises Lazarus back to life.  Bethany where Mary, Martha and Lazarus lived was a favourite place for Jesus.  There he found what he had had to renounce for the sake of his ministry: friendship, family and foyer, the warmth of care and affection, a place to call home.  So Lazarus’ death is a blow not just for his own family but for Jesus too: ‘see how he loved him’ they say.  St John uses this story as an introduction to his account of the death and resurrection of Jesus that makes up the rest of the gospel.  It’s a kind of visual aid: the man who died and came back from the dead announces what Jesus himself is about to do, only more gloriously, for when Jesus comes back from the dead, all things will begin to become new for he will be alive for ever.

But this beautiful story doesn’t simply illustrate a truth about Jesus crucified and risen in history.  It gives us a picture of what we ourselves are in him: those who have been brought back to life through the power and grace of God.  We are Lazarus, once held by our grave cloths as people who were not yet truly alive, emerging blinking and bewildered out of our tombs into the strong light of day into which the risen Saviour has led us. We are Lazarus, sought out and found by the searching loving grace of God that rolls away the stones that imprison us, opening up amazing new doors of possibility: new life, new purpose, new meaning, new joy, new hope.  This is St John’s message.  It is about how Jesus transforms our lives: like the man born blind who comes to see; like the woman at the well whose thirst is quenched; like the water turned into wine and the bread multiplied on the hillside.  It’s the light shining in the darkness as we shall soon hear in the Christmas gospel, and the darkness never again being able to overcome it. 

And this, I think, is what St John would mean by sainthood.  To be a saint is to live the new life God offers us in Jesus, to find that the ordinariness of work, leisure and relationships becomes something extraordinary because we learn to see God and bless him in it all.  So All Saints is about who and what we are as the people of God, faithfully following Jesus, speaking his words of truth and love, living in the strength of God as points of inspiration and challenge in a world that has so little time for him. The secret is to live out of gratitude for the love of God that made us and redeems us and sustains us. 

At All Saints’ tide, I think of the men, women and children who have lived that way in past ages and have completed their journeys and are now at rest.  I think of those who have loved me into life, influenced me, touched me in important ways, but for whom I would not be here now as a priest, a Christian and a man.  Like Lazarus, who was no-one in particular, simply a friend of Jesus in whom the life-changing power of God made all the difference.  That is why we celebrate that great multitude no-one can number who were faithful unto death, and have now received the crown of life, and in whose company, God willing, we shall one day find ourselves sharing in the vision of God when death shall be no more, neither mourning nor crying nor pain, for the first things have passed away, and the One seated on the throne says: ‘behold, I am making all things new.’. 

Blackburn Cathedral

4 November 2012

(Revelation 21.1-6a, John 11.32-44)

The first in a series of sermons at the Cathedral on the theme of hope.