Holy Week at Southwark Address 5: Crucified Before Friends (Maundy Thursday)

This Holy Week we’ve been reflecting on the cross in the various “worlds” in which Jesus is crucified, the stages on which the passion is acted out in front of its different audiences. So far, they have been big and public: the worlds of the city, of religion, of politics, of the crowd. In all of them there has been tension and hostility, chaos and confusion as we are pulled this way and that by a narrative whose pace can leave us breathless. Tonight’s world is in complete contrast: a quiet, peaceful, hospitable world in which friends gather to be together in intimacy and share food and drink as a sign of the love they have for one another.

“A new commandment I give you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also must love one another.” Jesus’ words give us the name by which we know Maundy Thursday, the day of the mandatum novum, the great command to love. It is love that sets the tone of this Paschal Triduum, these great days that begin tonight and take us through to Easter. Love is its meaning, love is his meaning; it always was and always shall be. 

Where do we first learn love? As infants at the hands of our parents and our siblings, in the circle of intimacy we call home. This is why those who have not been fortunate enough to have received “good enough parenting” can find it difficult to love and to trust later in life. And so on the night before he dies, Jesus gathers his disciples, his friends, into the intimacy of an upper room, a family foyer to call home for a while as together they perform the ancient ceremonies of Passover time, and tell the story of redemption and speak about the love that has brought them here and welcomed them.

This upper room is not only a place to speak about love but to express it, act it out. The work of love comes first, and only then the words. In an action that has become so familiar to us but which must have startled the disciples at that last supper, Jesus girds himself with the towel and performs the foot-washing. There is so much that he wants them to learn: about courtesy, about humility, about relationships, about service. But more than anything else, this is an enacted parable about love: what it is, where it comes from, how we recognise it, what it is for.  

There is only one test of love, he says; and it is this: to honour it as covenant, to keep it with integrity and loyalty, to be self-forgetting, and as he will shortly say to his disciples in this same upper room, to lay down your life for your friends. This is far more than emotions. It is a decision we make to love like this, an act of the will.  If you can’t contemplate dying for someone, it’s arguable that you haven’t truly begun to love them.  

It’s worth reflecting whom we would dare to die for, what would impel us to give up our lives for someone else.  For most, it is those whom God has given us to be intimate with: family, close friends.  These loves have clearly defined human faces.  For some it is love of nation and homeland: ‘the love that asks no questions, the love that stands the test’ as the hymn puts it, in words that are questionable but are deeply meant for all that. For others again, it is a genuinely altruistic love for the weak and vulnerable of our world who have little hope in life other than because of those who, literally or figuratively, lay down their lives for them in love and service.  Whichever it is, this is the test Jesus applies.  To love is to be committed to going wherever it leads, loving even to the point of death.  “As I have loved you” says Jesus. 

And the point of this is, as I’ve said, that Jesus not only speaks about love but embodies it. The criterion of love he first applies to himself, as John puts it, loving ‘to the end’. St Paul says that he lays aside his glory in order to take the role of a slave; self-abasement, self-emptying, the ultimate act of self-giving we call kenosis. In a few hours he will be arrested and tried and led out to die a criminal’s death.  And all for us, every human child: that is the measure of love that it goes right to the end.  It is cruciform, has the shape of a cross.  St Paul puts it like this: ‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us’.  Tomorrow we shall bear witness to how this takes place in the sight of earth and heaven. Tonight, in the foot-washing and in the gifts we lay on the altar of this Last Supper, we bear witness to it as the intimate circle of Jesus’s friends, his companions, literally those who break the bread with him.

What Jesus is saying is that love is always sacrificial, always giving its all, always giving it to the end.  ‘Love’s endeavour, love’s expense’ is that it withholds nothing, lays itself down for the sake of others. We don’t need to be told when we are loved like this.  We know it whether it is in our marriages, partnerships and friendships, or in the care we received when we most needed it.  We know it when we observe how the commitment and generosity of good people takes them to the most dangerous and risky of places, to the most vulnerable people in our society, to the most desperate in our world, the people we shall especially hold in our hearts and prayers in the great intercessions from the cross on Good Friday.  Above all we know it when we gaze upon Jesus on the cross and find ourselves looking straight into the face of God. 

God’s love is always moving among and between us and bathing this world in its light. As Julian of Norwich said, we only exist at all because God loves us: creation is the evidence that God is love because he steps back, so to speak, out of hospitality as he opens the door to us and gives us space to be. In all our personal stories, we glimpse how God so loved that he gave, and so loves that he goes on giving, laying down his life for his friends which is how he meets and embraces us. 

It happens in every act of healing care and compassion we know.  It happens when reconciliation brings together broken peoples and communities and mends them.  It happens when our hearts are glad because some beautiful piece of music or a poem or painting has touched us.  It happens in the birth of a child and the greeting of a friend and the touch of someone we love.  It happens at deathbed farewells to those who are dear to us, and at the graveside where we entrust them to the earth for cherishing. 

And it happens at the altar in the visible words of love: bread and wine, taken, blessed, broken and given.  In all these ways, and a thousand others, each moment, each hour, each day, love comes to us. She bids us welcome, invites us to her banquet, compels us to sit and eat. And then we are close to glimpsing what lies at the heart of creation. We know that despite everything, love is its meaning, God’s meaning.  

And God’s meaning is the cross-shaped love that is symbolised in the foot-washing and in the bread and wine of eucharist: self-emptying, self-giving, unwavering, unfaltering, persevering to the end. In the intimacy of the upper room, in the sight of friends, the love of Good Friday is already being made visible, poured out, demonstrating its credentials as the greatest power there is in all of life. 

It may not always seem like it as we look around us at a world of pain. But we do not lose heart. Amor vincit omnia says the old tag, love overcomes all things. God has plenty of time to finish his work. We wait for it with a hope that rises like sap in this springtime of grace and peace. And we wait together as loving friends. In these holy days our crucified and risen Lord is showing us the most profound truth of all, the truth for which we would gladly live and die. He is showing us “how grandly Love intends / to work till all creation sings / to fill all worlds, to crown all things”.*

Maundy Thursday 2019 (John 13.1-17, 31-35)
* Hymn by Brian A. Wren, “Great God, your love has called us here”.

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 5: “I am the True Vine” (Good Friday)

Reading: John 15.1-11

This Holy Week we’ve been exploring the I AM sayings in St John’s Gospel: “I am the door”, “I am the resurrection and the life”, “I am the light of the world”, and last night, at the Lord’s Supper on Maundy Thursday, “I am the bread of life”. 

Today I want to take the three sayings that remain and reflect with you these pictures, these metaphors help us approach the cross of Jesus on this solemn day. But at the outset I want to remind us of one of the insights we have been learning from St John that makes a real difference to how we observe this day. It’s that as St John sees it, Good Friday and Easter belong together, are of a single piece. Throughout the forty days of Lent we have been preparing for this celebration of the Lord’s Passover, the festival that marks how we have passed from death to life. It’s not that today is for mourning a terrible disaster while Easter is the happy ending. St John would say that in Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, God is glorified because his Son has finished his work and is going to the Father. 

So I invite you, in this first part of our Three Hour observance, to join me in meditating on this great mystery that lies at the heart of Christian faith, We shall be reflecting on Jesus’ words “I am the true vine”, “I am the way, the truth and the life” and “I am the good shepherd”. Finally, during the liturgy of the day, when the gospel reading records Jesus last word from the cross, “It is accomplished”, I  shall draw together these seven I AM sayings by one that is found in the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, “I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end”. 

********

“I am the true vine.” We are back in the upper room at the last supper. It is the night of betrayal. Ahead lies Golgotha and the cross. Judas has already gone out into the night to do his work. And yet, this is a beautiful feast, this intimate gathering of Jesus with his disciples whom he now calls friends. The talk has been all about service after the example of Jesus who has washed their feet, about loving one another as he has loved them, about the peace he will bequeath to them when he has gone away. And then Jesus introduces this new image. “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine-grower.” 

I said it’s a new image. It isn’t, really. We are meant to recall how the Hebrew Bible plays with the theme of the vine. The vineyard was a familiar picture of God’s people. Isaiah tells a parable about a vineyard that should have produced a rich harvest, but instead proffered only shrivelled up “wild grapes” good neither for man nor beast. What had the owner not done to make sure the beloved vineyard flourished? But it proved to be fit only for destruction. “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel” says the prophet. One of the psalms we sing in Passiontide takes up the picture of the vineyard in trouble. “You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it…Why then have you broken down its walls? Turn again, O God of hosts, look down from heaven and have regard for this vine that your right hand has planted.” 

So when Jesus speaks of himself as the vine, he is drawing on a long history of disappointment and failure. But what a contrast he brings! Where once, the vine was a symbol of judgment, on the lips of Jesus it’s become a sign of life and love, promise and renewal. As the true vine, he fulfils all that was expected of God’s vineyard; where once, the people failed their God (a powerful theme in St John’s Gospel), Jesus is the obedient Son who perfectly fulfils the vocation God has laid on him. It’s true that the vine-grower must act decisively, harshly even, if branches of the vine prove unproductive. But that is only so that it may bear more fruit. And that happens as we “abide” in him, says Jesus, live in the closest possible relationship with him, hide ourselves in him if you like. We are to abide in his love as intimately as he himself abides in the Father’s love. In that way we become organically joined to his life among us, just as the branches draw their life and fruitfulness from the root and stem and sap of the vine. We draw the very life of God into ourselves at the same time as we ourselves are taken into the heart of his divine life.

Why am I telling you all this on Good Friday? Because of how the symbolism of wine poured out and blood shed runs right through the Fourth Gospel. The vine and the branches take us straight back to where Jesus began his public ministry and performed his first sign. At Cana of Galilee, he was a guest at a wedding, and turned water into wine. It was there, says St John, that he “revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him”. Jesus goes on say in the passage about the Bread of Life, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink”. To “abide” in him, to receive into ourselves his flesh and blood is to become one with the crucified and risen Lord, just as the vine and the branches are one organism. 

This is why the end of John’s passion story makes so much of what happened when the soldier pierced the side of the crucified Jesus. “At once, blood and water came out. He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth.” The Christian spiritual tradition sees a universe of meaning in those words. It sees in them how the salvation of the world was achieved at the cross, our race reconciled to God because of the blood and water that flowed out to embrace every human child. Water of baptism, blood of communion, together bearing witness that in Jesus, God so loved the world. “Blood of my Saviour, bathe me in thy tide, / wash me with water flowing from thy side” says the passion hymn based on the prayer Anima Christi. It goes on: “Deep in thy wounds, Lord, hide and shelter me, / so shall I never, never part from thee’. That’s what it means to “abide” in Christ and find in his cross the source of all that it means to be truly alive. In one of his poems, “The Agonie”, George Herbert concludes a reflection on the cross with a marvellous couple of lines: “Love is that liquor sweet, and most divine / Which my God feels as blood, but I as wine”. There’s nothing we can add.

Except this, perhaps. Today sets before us what our next hymn is right to call “the wondrous cross”. We come to Golgotha to contemplate what it means to respond as best we may to this emblem of the love that loves to the end. The blood that is shed there is our invitation to come back to Christ the true Vine, to find in him our forgiveness and salvation, our lives healed and mended, reconciliation promised for all the world. We abide in his wounded side because our lives depend on him, for he is our life and love. 

But that is more than the truth of Good Friday alone. It’s the truth of Easter too. When in Eastertide, Jesus came to Thomas the doubter and invited him to place his hand in his wounded side, it was to affirm that abiding in him is how people of faith are to be, who believe that he is risen from the dead and who entrust their lives to that truth. On the other side of Easter, it’s the risen Christ we hear promising us, reassuring us that “I am the true vine”. In him we see God’s love summoning us, beckoning to us to find the place of safety and sanctuary where we can “abide” forever in him, find in him the eternal life he promises throughout St John’s Gospel. As we abide in the cross and resurrection, we see the fulness of God’s glory that tells us that all along, “love was his meaning”, “such rich love as makes the poor heart glad”.

Seen this way, Good Friday calls us back from a religion of duty to a living faith in which we discover how our lives are hidden with the Christ in God. This is what the risen Christ the true Vine wants of us and all who follow him: that we bring to the cross our hunger and our thirst, our longing for contentment and happiness, our wish that if only life could begin again. Golgotha proclaims that this is precisely what is ours in this Love laid down, this water and blood that flowed from the side of this life-giving Vine of God. We have only to reach out, drink from the cup that is held before us, and be thankful.

A sonnet by Malcolm Guite once more.

How might it feel to be part of the vine?
Not just to see the vineyard from afar
Or even pluck the clusters, press the wine,
But to be grafted in, to feel the stir
Of inward sap that rises from our root,
Himself deep planted in the ground of Love,
To feel a leaf unfold a tender shoot,
As tendrils curled unfurl, as branches give
A little to the swelling of the grape,
In gradual perfection, round and full,
To bear within oneself the joy and hope
Of God’s good vintage, till it’s ripe and whole.
What might it mean to bide and to abide
In such rich love as makes the poor heart glad.

(c) Malcolm Guite. With permission.

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

Holy Week in Chester 3: “I am the Light of the World”

Reading: John 9.1-12

In our Holy Week journey through the I AM sayings of St John’s Gospel, we have looked at the Door, and at the Resurrection and the Life. Tonight, we come to “I am the Light of the World”. 

Light is a universal word we find in all the world’s religions. And like last night’s life, light is one of the great words of St John. The two are linked together in the very first paragraph of the gospel that we read at Christmas time, “In him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it”. That passage in turn looks back to the creation story in the Book of Genesis where the first words God speaks are “Let there be light!”  “And there was light” the text says, “and God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. The light he called Day, and the darkness Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

In Genesis, light and darkness, day and night aren’t yet distinguished by moral or spiritual values. Light is to see by, and the daily rhythm of light and darkness is given in order to structure time. But in St John it is very different. Night time and darkness are dangerous and risky. When Judas left the upper room to hand Jesus over to the authorities, he “went out”, says John, “and it was night” – an observation left hanging in the air as its own commentary on the darkness that had overtaken the betrayer’s soul. “And this is the judgment” says Jesus earlier, “That the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” Or as he says on the very threshold of Holy Week, “the light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light so that you may become children of light.”

All of which heightens the significance of Jesus’ saying, “I am the light of the world.” He has already spoken these words in the previous chapter and added: “whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life”. But now, Jesus embeds those same words in the important story of the healing of the man who was born blind. Like the raising of Lazarus last night, this sign is another disclosure of God’s activity in the world, his “works” as John calls them. “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 

But light has its different aspects. In St John, the Light of the World enables us to see in things in new ways. C. S. Lewis famously said that he believed that the sun had risen, not because he gazed directly at it but because by its light he could see the world, other people and himself. Illumination is a key stage in the classic spiritual path. Not for nothing did our eighteenth-century forebears speak about enlightenment as an event (God-given, some said) in the journey of scientific method and intellectual self-awareness. But if you were the poet William Blake, you would describe looking into the sun as gazing at angels. So you did that with great care, knowing how risky it is to expose yourself to such a fierce, unforgiving light. Indeed, one of the Psalms talks about God wrapping himself in light as in a garment, an idea taken up in the hymn Immortal, invisible, God only wise, In light inaccessible hid from our eyes. ’Tis only the splendour of light hideth thee it goes, verses rich in theological wisdom. The paradox is that light conceals as much as it reveals. Moses prayed, “Lord, show me your glory”, but is warned to protect himself in the cleft of the rock because if he so much as glimpses Divinity as he really is, it will kill him. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality” says T.S. Eliot, least of all when that reality is God. 

St John plays with some of these themes in the course of his gospel. In particular, he takes us back to Moses in the prologue we keep returning to. Where Moses had asked to behold God’s glory but had needed to be shielded from experiencing its fulness, John tells us that in the Word made flesh who lived among us, “we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth”. His claim is as high as it could possibly be. And to underline it, as he embarks on telling the story of Jesus’ works among humankind, the great “signs” he performs, John says that he “revealed his glory and his disciples believed in him”. 

And it is not long before Jesus begins to speak of the destiny that awaits him, his own suffering and death. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” he says; and later, in his prayer on the very threshold of his passion, “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do”. We know where it is that Jesus finishes his work, for he tells us so in his last word from the cross: “It is accomplished”. If you had asked St John, where do we see God’s glory most clearly, where do we see his light shining most steadily, he would answer, at Golgotha, at the cross where love’s work is completed, where the crucified Lord lays down his life for his friends, where the Son of Man is enthroned as the king who is lifted up so that he may draw all people to himself. In the Fourth Gospel, the cross, the last and greatest sign of glory, represents not defeat but God’s work achieved, completed, victorious.

It’s worth lingering on this point about the Johannine cross. It seems perverse to use words like light and glory of that darkest and cruellest of places, Golgotha, the “skull”. But that paradox, seeing glory in a place of ignominy and shame, light in the midst of darkness and desolation, is precisely John’s point. “There is in God a deep and dazzling darkness” says one mystical poet. It’s not far from St Paul’s language about seeing God’s wisdom in the folly of the cross, his power in its weakness. “It is accomplished” proclaims Jesus in the last word from the cross in St John. Throughout the gospel, he emphasises how Jesus has come into the world to do the work of God and complete it, or as he says of Jesus in the upper room, to love to the very end. So tetelestai, “it is finished”, is the most important word in the Passion narrative. 

On Good Friday, Bach’s St John Passion will be performed in the Cathedral. I wonder how Bach’s setting of that last word will be sung by the bass who takes the part of Christus. It’s a falling line in Bach’s music, Es ist vollbracht.  I hope it will be with firmness and confidence, not resignation and defeat. I have a theory that just as the last words from the cross in the other gospels are quotations from the Psalms, John’s “it is finished” refers to the conclusion of the Passion Psalm 22. Matthew and Mark tell how the dying Jesus quotes the first line, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Could it be that St John alludes to the triumphant last line of that Psalm that moves from utter despair to gratitude and praise: “future generations will proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it”. He has performed it. All is done. Tetelestai. That’s glory.

And because it is done, the cross inevitably points beyond itself to the new day that begins at Easter. As we saw last night in the story of the raising of Lazarus, throughout John’s gospel, resurrection seems to be enfolded into the passion and crucifixion in a single movement that the author describes as Jesus’ “going to the Father”. When the Easter story begins and Mary goes to the tomb, it is still dark. I think it’s meant to point up the contrast between what she and the disciples don’t yet know, can’t yet grasp about the empty tomb, and what the emerging light of day will reveal to be the dawn of a new glory, that Jesus is risen and is present to his people until he returns to his Father. 

So the Light of the World gives sight not only to the man born blind, but to the whole of creation, for “the true light which enlightens everyone was coming into the world”. For St John, the incarnation, the signs, the crucifixion, the resurrection are like the seamless robe for which the soldiers cast lots in his passion story. They all disclose the glory that is revealed as the Light of the world that he loves, says John, “to the end”. This Holy Week we celebrate the great light that shines into the shadowy places of life, brings warmth and vitality to a cold dark world, and shows us the way back to him so that we can learn to be God’s people once again.

Here is how Malcolm Guite puts it in his sonnet on the Light of the World.

I see your world in light that shines behind me,
Lit by a sun whose rays I cannot see,
The smallest gleam of light still seems to find me
Or find the child who’s hiding deep inside me.
I see your light reflected in the water,
Or kindled suddenly in someone’s eyes,
It shimmers through the living leaves of summer,
Or spills from silver veins in leaden skies,
It gathers in the candles at our vespers
It concentrates in tiny drops of dew
At times it sings for joy, at times it whispers,
But all the time it calls me back to you.
I follow you upstream through this dark night
My saviour, source, and spring, my life and light.

(c) Malcolm Guite. With permission 

Holy Week in Chester 1: “I am the Door”

Reading: John 10.1-10.

This Holy Week, I want to explore with you the famous I AM sayings in St John’s Gospel. They are among the most characteristic utterances of the Gospel, associated as they are with the words and signs that, St John says, proclaim Jesus as the incarnate Word, the Son whom God sent among us to bring about the salvation of the world. So he feeds the hungry crowd and speaks of himself as the Bread of Life; he heals the man born blind and announces that he is the Light of the World; he raises Lazarus from the grave and tells the onlookers that he is the Resurrection and the Life. 

The words I AM are a golden thread that runs through this Fourth Gospel. To us they sound simple enough. But the way they are highlighted by St John tells us that to his ear, tuned to every nuance of the Hebrew Bible, they carry deep significance. They originate in the deepest layers of the Old Testament. In a defining narrative in Exodus, God reveals to Moses his sacred and mysterious name YHWH. It’s derived from the verb to be. So when Jesus speaks the emphatic ego eimi, I AM, he is consciously recalling that holy name, and associating himself with it as if to say, here is the Eternal Word of God who has come among you to reveal the Father’s glory, the fulness of his light, life and love. The legacy in St John is these sayings that are among the most significant and best-loved ways we have for speaking about Jesus. How could we now think about him other than as the Good Shepherd, as the Way, the Truth and the Life, as the Bread of Life or as the True Vine? 

What has this got to do with Holy Week? you ask. My answer is that the whole of St John, from the prologue we read at Christmas to the concluding stories of the appearances of the risen Jesus is pointing to the events of this great week. For John, this week’s paschal celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus is the essence of his good news. Nearly half of the gospel concerns the final week of Jesus’ life – and what came next. And even in the earlier chapters of St John, what is sometimes called the Book of Signs, it’s clear that the author is constantly anticipating – foreshadowing – the cross and resurrection. 

In the I AM sayings, the evangelist offers us a series of unforgettable images that speak about God, his coming among us in Jesus and what these might mean not only for us who follow him, but for the whole cosmos, our world, his world, the whole human family. They urge us to look beneath the surface of familiar texts into the larger ocean of meaning that imagery, symbol and metaphor open up to us. As poetry comes into things, at the end of each address I shall read a poem by Malcolm Guite, an Anglican priest and poet, who has composed sonnets on all of the I AM sayings. Poetry can awaken our imaginations in ways that cold prose can’t always achieve. And that is what I hope these addresses may help to do – awaken our spiritual imaginations as we walk the way of the cross and resurrection, and celebrate again love’s work during these days of awe.

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In this first address, this gateway to Holy Week, it seems apt to take Jesus’ saying in the tenth chapter of St John, “I am the door”, or as the modern version has it, “the gate”. In this section of the gospel, Jesus introduces a new idea, that of the sheepfold. The gate is introduced first, closely followed by the shepherd. Unlike the thief and the bandit, the shepherd does not climb over the wall or enter secretively by some other hidden means, but comes and goes through the open gate, followed by the sheep who know his voice. “Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.” So not only is this saying closely linked to the Good Shepherd whom we shall come to on Good Friday, but also to another saying, “I am the way, the truth and the life”, or as it’s better translated, “the true and living way” that leads to salvation. 

We need to picture an ancient near-eastern sheepfold to catch the force of this image. It would look familiar to a shepherd on the high fells of Northumberland where I come from: a space enclosed by a round drystone wall high enough to keep out not only human predators but wild animals in search of prey. On the sheltered side there would be a gap in the wall for the sheep to go in and out. It would be narrow enough for a man to lie across it, thus closing the circle and protecting the sheep. This is likely to be what Jesus means when he speaks about himself as the gate – both the opening itself and the deeply symbolic action of lying down to safeguard the flock, or as he will go on to say, laying down his life for the sheep.

The thing about a door is that it marks a threshold, defines the spaces that are either “outside” or “in”. It looks both ways, like the Roman month of January, the door of the year that was pictured as a double face that looked backwards to the old year and forwards to the new. A threshold is a limen, from which we get the world liminal. It implies a crossing over into a different space. Very often we are one person on this side of a threshold, and someone else on the other. For instance, our front door marks the transition from the public and visible world to the personal and intimate environment of our own homes. The door of this cathedral symbolises the transition from what we call “secular” space to the sacred. The rites of passage at birth, marriage and death are our familiar examples of liminality, but it’s everywhere.

So what is the threshold Jesus alludes to when he speaks of himself as the door or the gate? It’s the passage to safety, to a space we can call home where we can be unafraid and flourish and find life in all its fulness. A space to be safe in, to grow into and inhabit is not far from what the Hebrew scriptures mean by salvation. At this paschal season, we tell the story of how the Hebrews left their Egyptian slavery behind and undertook their journey across the wilderness towards the land that had been promised them. They were not to know that it would be forty years before they crossed the Jordan and entered Canaan. More than a generation in that liminal state of being between places and between times, one life behind them and another life before them. You could picture the Jordan as a threshold, a gateway, a door to a new and at first utterly strange way of life as a settled people. I don’t think it’s over-speculative to wonder whether this isn’t part of the background to Jesus’ saying “I am the gate of the sheep”, when we remind ourselves how the people of Israel were likened to a flock whose shepherd was none other than the Lord himself. The promise of a land, a home to call their own, was to the wandering tribes their sheepfold, their safety, their salvation. 

In Northumberland, shepherds talk about sheep being “hefted” to the hill where they were born. It’s the place they belong to, that gives them their identity, that part of the landscape from which they will never willingly stray. So the sheepfold, and the gate through which the sheep go “in and out to find pasture” is, I think, a far richer image than we might think. For safety, in the way I’ve been speaking about it, is much more than merely the absence of need or hunger or pain. It means knowing the place we call home, knowing where we belong and where our hearts are hefted. rediscovering the lost domain we spend our lives longing for, that Eden from which we were banished, that paradise garden where our humanity is given back to us again. It’s the destiny for which God made us. “I came that they might have life, and have it in all abundance.”

And if you asked St John where he saw this door opened wide and the invitation given to cross over that threshold to abundant life, I think he would not hesitate to say, at Golgotha, at the cross where the world’s salvation is achieved and God’s work accomplished. And beyond it, at the place where the stone was rolled away, and a door opened on to an empty tomb, and a new day dawned, and the kingdom of heaven was opened to all believers. For as we travel through the events of Holy Week, as we go with Jesus to the cross, Easter is the goal that lies ahead, for which we have prepared all though Lent with eager longing. “Behold, I have set before you an open door which no-one is able to shut” says the risen Lord in the Book of Revelation. And now, in Holy Week, we are nearly there, close to the portal that’s the culmination of our great journey. The doorway through which God beckons us stands open. Through it we see our promised land where we know we are hefted and will always belong, that place which is to all pilgrims happiness and home. 

Here is a sonnet by Malcolm Guite on Jesus as the Door. 

Not one that’s gently hinged or deftly hung,
Not like the ones you planed at Joseph’s place,
Not like the well-oiled openings that swung
So easily for Pilate’s practised pace,
Not like the ones that closed in Mary’s face
From house to house in brimming Bethlehem,
Not like the one that no man may assail,
The dreadful curtain, The forbidding veil
That waits your breaking in Jerusalem.

Not one you made but one you have become:
Load-bearing, balancing, a weighted beam
To bridge the gap, to bring us within reach
Of your high pasture. Calling us by name,
You lay your body down across the breach,
Yourself the door that opens into home.

(c) Malcolm Guite. With permission.

Retreat Address on the Psalms 5 - Prayer and Rage (Psalm 79)

In my second address, I began by mentioning the psalmists oppressed by wickedness and the utter wrongness of things who cry, “How long, O Lord?”. Here is one of those psalms that has turned up in our morning cycle. So let’s not tiptoe round the maelstrom but plunge into its centre in the hope of finding some still small voice amid the roar of wind and waves.

Primo Levi’s powerful memoir of Auschwitz, If This is a Man, offers an unflinching testimony to the minute particulars of cruelty and suffering. In one place, he writes about the wooden bowls each prisoner had. They were precious because without your bowl, you would not be able to eat, and once lost, it could be extremely hard to procure another. So prisoners would etch their name or camp number on the bottom of their bowl. But Levi came across a Frenchman who did not do this but etched instead the words Ne pas chercher à comprendre. For Auschwitz is a place beyond all understanding, a place that makes no-sense, where there is no answer to the question “why?” This is the world our psalm inhabits.

You’ll remember that in the week of The Queen’s Speech, a “day of rage” was organised in London in support of the Grenfell Tower victims and the social conditions that were exposed by that terrible fire. There was a lot of criticism about the demonstration, and a number of Christians posted messages on social media arguing that it was a day of prayer that was needed, not a day of rage. I can see both sides of this debate. But when I read psalms like 79, so full of anger in the aftermath of a fearful catastrophe, I find I have more sympathy with the protesters. Whatever else this psalm and others like it have to say, they seem to me to give us permission to rage. Not to protest at the injustice of it all seems to me to be a failure to feel with and for its victims who are our own flesh and blood.

But this is not a licence to rage blindly, or to rage hatefully at other people. The thing is, to rage in the presence of God. And that is the startling insight of these angry psalms, as it is of the Book of Job which we have been reading at the Church of England morning office in recent weeks. This is not sightless rage, but a far-seeing rage that sees that there is a God to be wrestled with and reckoned with, to whom all the great questions of life and death, suffering and distress need to be addressed. Why this? Why us? Why now? Why did you allow it? Where were you? How long, O Lord before you come to help us?

Like Psalm 106 which we looked at yesterday, disaster has struck Judah. They, the destroying nations, have defiled your holy temple; they have laid Jerusalem in ruins. This points again to the Babylonian invasion of the sixth century. By this time, the people are possibly in exile, or maybe still picking over the ruins of their holy and beautiful house in a post-traumatic state of shock, bewilderment and paralysis that is common after some awful catastrophe has befallen. And the opening verses leave us in no doubt about the terror they have endured. Human bodies lie unburied because there is no-one left to care for them; they are now carrion for wild animals and birds of prey. Blood has flowed in rivers around Jerusalem. The nations looking on, the pitiless goyyim as the psalm calls them, have no words of comfort, only derision and mockery. It is one of those unforgettable human landscapes depicted in the scriptures, and one of the most desolate and forlorn. Who would not weep in the face of such anguish?

The heart of this lament is the passionate prayer introduced by the words we began with, How long, O Lord? Will you be angry forever?  It’s hardly a comfortable psalm to recite when so much of it is dominated by the sense of divine judgment. But there is a logic here, and the way the argument works is important. It begins by recognising that the Lord’s anger with his people is justified. There is a reason for all the suffering they have endured: do not remember against us the iniquities of our ancestors…deliver us and forgive our sins. So we are back in the same experience of yesterday with Psalm 106 and how we tell the story of our own failure and sin. Here, it is the people who are doing this collectively. In the other psalm we recited this morning, Psalm 51, it is the individual penitent. Both these are different from the many laments where the sufferer does not understand why he or she is undergoing this punishment. Here, the people do not question God’s justice. They accept the premise that turning away from the will of a righteous God, violating his torah and transgressing his commandments is wilfully to break his covenant. And that in turn is to bring down on Israel the sanctions of a broken contract, the curses that are the other side of the blessings set before the people when the covenant was enacted in cloud and fire at the mountain of Horeb that you find in the Book Deuteronomy

The psalmist sees the nations as God’s unwitting agents in punishing Israel. Yet the prayer is that God will deliver Israel from the goyyim who have been the instruments of his justice. There seems to be the assumption that in the wholesale havoc they have wreaked, they have overreached themselves. So the prayer asks that God will turn his anger away from Israel and towards the goyyim. Pour out your anger on the nations that do not know you, and on the kingdoms that do not call upon your name. For they have devoured Jacob and laid waste his habitation. And all this because poor Jacob is left friendless without ally or champion – whether among the surrounding nations or in almighty God himself. 

It’s important not to misunderstand outbursts of anger like these which are very common in the psalms. It is not (or not primarily) that Israel wants vengeance for its own sake. Rather, it is the concern that God should be God, should vindicate himself before the world, publicly demonstrate that he cares about protecting his reputation, is moral as well as mighty. You could say that what exercises the psalmist is putting right and stabilising the moral order of the universe. It is unjust that the nations have punished Israel beyond what they deserved. And it is unjust that they continue to mock the people and blaspheme their God. Why should the nations say, “Where is their (that is, Israel’s) God?” Let the avenging of the outpoured blood of your servants be known among the nations before our eyes. 

The final section encapsulates these themes and adds an afterword. The psalmist returns to the plight of Judah’s victims and prays let the groans of the prisoners come before you; according to your great power preserve those doomed to die. But his fury is so close to the surface that it bursts out one last time. Return sevenfold into the bosom of our neighbours the taunts with which they taunted you, O Lord! A sevenfold punishment is exceptionally severe. But the psalm doesn’t end on that vengeful note. Instead, it looks forward to deliverance. There is a “certainty of hearing” as there is in so many laments, the confidence that God will act for his beleaguered nation and in due time they will have cause to be thankful. Then we your people, the flock of your pasture, will give thanks to you forever; from generation to generation we will recount your praise. So the first forever question is answered by a forever affirmation. Will you be angry forever? … We will give you thanks forever. It is in the Lord’s hands. Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.

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I said this was not a comfortable psalm. I think it calls for spiritual self-awareness if we are going to pray it with integrity. I don't so much mean that we are all affected the church’s culture of niceness where negative feelings are not allowed. I am more thinking of the risk we face that we could be eaten up by this rage, so full of righteous (or unrighteousness) anger that we forget that we are taught to love not only our neighbour but our enemy as well. I want to come back later to how we read this psalm on Friday, the day of the Cross.

Here is what I find myself doing with psalms like these. First, I want to affirm the importance of truth-telling when it comes to calamity and devastation. What is refreshing in the psalm laments is the total absence of pretence. They are written out of the searing experience of disaster and agony, and this is what the psalmist intends to lay before God. This puts a question mark by our propensity always to find a formal, courteous register that we regard as fit to be used in the presence of God. I am all for getting the words of public worship right! But there are times when carefully honed rhythms and cadences do not quite do justice to the hardness and roughness of human experience. The laments tell us: we do not need to be afraid to come as we are into the divine presence. God asks us and wants us to be truthful about our condition, and if that means crying out in unadorned protest at the ordeals that others or we are suffering, then that is how we must pray. Indeed, it would be wrong to bend the ear of the divine on any other terms. And if we doubt the legitimacy of praying out of godforsakenness and despair, we have only to think of the agonised last words of Jesus on the cross in St Matthew and St Mark. “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabhachthani? “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

Next, I want to ask us to take seriously the kind of God to whom this lament is addressed. When the text talks about his being angry forever, we tend to think of the affect, an outburst of emotion as likely as not wild and uncontrolled. I believe this is to misunderstand the psalm. In the Hebrew Bible, anger at its best, like love, is an act of the will. It's a decision. In the concrete imagery of the Old Testament, love is to turn your face towards someone else, while anger is to turn your face away. Which is to say that when we get behind our emotions, anger and love are two sides of the same coin, which is about honouring the integrity of a personal relationship. It’s in the nature of a holy God to love truth, integrity and justice, and to abhor what is false, wicked and wrong. So the psalm appeals to God’s character as a way of reckoning with the disaster that has happened. If God is responsible for events (as he must ultimately be), then it is only by laying over them the template of God’s character as we have learned to know him that we can hope to respond adequately, theologically and spiritually. So at its best, our human rage at the injustices that we see all around us is a way of aligning ourselves with the God who is angry about them too. I would not want to pray to a God who was not angry about the injustice and cruelty in the world, angry at how the poor and the voiceless and the meek and those in pain suffer, so often at the hands of both the tyrannical and the neglectful. 

And this brings me to a third reflection, that all our prayer and all our theology must be rooted in the experience of human beings. What has prompted this psalm is the destruction of a land and the suffering of its people. So it starts out with the victims and their plight. This is a feature of all the laments. Psalm 79 is specific about the pain being endured by a people who are crying out to be delivered. The first four verses are a vivid description of an ordeal that speaks for itself. Only after the psalmist has entered into that dreadful experience can he develop a way of praying in the light of it. I think there is an insight here of profound importance for our prayer, our proclamation and our mission. For if, as I said yesterday, religion has nothing to say about suffering, then it has nothing to say. We must be for the suffering people, as Albert Schweitzer said. And whatever we believe we are called to say in the aftermath of some terrible tragedy (and we shall of course choose our words with the greatest of care), the first message to convey is that we are trying to understand, to think ourselves into other people’s ordeals, to give ourselves in compassion, empathy and love. And if this is the way in which Christianity teaches us to serve, it is also the way it teaches us how to think, theologise and pray. 

My fourth thought is about the importance of keeping hope alive. That might not strike you as the message of the psalm. But I think it lies at its very core. For one thing, why pray to God at all if the psalmist didn’t believe that he or she would be heard? Or that God was capable of making a difference? Or that he cared? Prayer is the evidence that hope exists even when it looks as though all hope is lost. And the psalm’s conclusion leaves us in no doubt that this lament springs not only out of bitterness and anger, but also out of hope. There is this “certainty of hearing” that I have mentioned before. We your people, the flock of your pasture, will give you thanks forever. That phrase your people holds the clue. It’s an allusion to the covenant promise, “I will be your God and you shall be my people”. So the psalm ends by reminding God of his undertakings to the people he loves. It's a vital clue about the relationship between God and his people that makes this passionate prayer possible at all. We could easily miss the promise and hope enfolded in it. For us Christians, it makes us look beyond the immediate historical context of the psalm to the relationship of mercy and love God wants to have with all humanity. It was for this that he sent his Son as the everlasting sign of his face turned towards us, and which is symbolised in the gospel when Jesus is named Immanuel, God is with us. 

My final reflection is perhaps the most important of all. On this Friday as on every Friday, we commemorate the cross. So we must always read texts of suffering in the light of the Passion. For it is at Golgotha that human pain meets God’s pain, and the suffering of humanity is interpreted and given meaning by a crucified God himself. 

As we gaze on the cross with our hearts full because we love Jesus, we can perhaps share the anguish of this psalm. I mean that as we look on him as the innocent victim of human cruelty, it would be natural to rage against those who hate him so, who mock him and spit on him, who crown him with thorns and pierce his precious side. Some of the art and music of the crucifixion captures this sense of outrage, for instance the choruses in the Bach Passions that protest against what is being done to the divine Victim. But of course that sits side by side with another insight of Holy Week, that it is we ourselves who are doing this to Jesus. It is we who need to be reconciled, we for whom Jesus prays from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. 

So before I take this psalm on my lips to express my anger, or God’s anger, towards others, I need to recite it against myself, so to speak, imagining myself as the oppressor of God’s people and therefore the oppressor of God. For I know, if I'm honest, that I have it in me to be the one who clamours “crucify him!” I wish I didn't. So I need to face the violence within myself that is capable of cruelty and harm, even if I don't act it out. And when I view the psalm from that turned-round perspective, it leads me straight to the cross and to the Reproaches of Good Friday, “O my people, what have I done to you? How have I offended you? Answer me!”  

I'm saying that while it may seem a long journey from the rage of our psalm to the forgiveness and healing of the Cross, it isn't really. When the psalmist draws on the image of the shepherd tending his flock, we know we are not far from Golgotha, the place where that same shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. In that act of redeeming love, all hatred, all wrath, all bitterness, all despair is gathered up and transformed. The cross makes all the difference because it is where, as I said earlier in the week, we see what glory means: self-emptying, love poured out. It turns lament into thanksgiving, defeat into victory, sorrow into joy, desperation into hope. The psalmist can glimpse a dawn because he knows that even as he passes through the valley of the shadow of death, he needs fear no evil “for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff comfort me”. The possibility of living confidently out of hope while surrounded by terror and devastation is all that the psalmist needs to travel on. It is all we need as well. We can once again light candles in dark places and make the desert blossom. It may sound heroic in bleak circumstances. But experience tells us not to lose heart. It may feel like hoping against hope. But because of the cross, we know that our hope is not in vain. 

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For meditation today, we might want to think about those on whose behalf we are angry, people treated unjustly, the victims of cruelty, those who are helpless in circumstances that overwhelm them. We could ask ourselves how we express our anger, how we turn it into prayer and good action that could make a difference to others. And on this Friday, we shall want to come back to the cross and give thanks for the redemption of the world and for our own forgiveness, and where we pray for the reconciliation of all people and all things in the Christ who loves us to the end.