Values for Advent 4: Illumination

‘What if this present were the world’s last night?’  The seventeenth century metaphysical poet John Donne puts that question in one of his Divine Poems.  He was much exercised by thoughts about the end of the world and about death, the end of his world.  ‘This is my play’s last scene, here heavens appoint / My pilgrimage’s last mile’;  ‘Oh my black soul!  Now thou art summoned / By sickness, death’s herald, and champion’; ‘Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste, / I run to death, and death meets me as fast, / And all my pleasures are like yesterday’.  And with death come thoughts of darkness, for his was a troubled soul.  ‘To see God only, I go out of sight: / And to ’scape stormy days I choose An everlasting night’.  

For Donne, the Winter Solstice held powerful significance: the shortest day, the ‘year’s midnight’ as he calls it.  This precarious axis of the seasons when the sun’s light almost fails is for him a metaphor of his spiritual condition: wondering, hoping but not always expecting that the light will grow strong again, half believing that it might not.  Midwinter raises anxiety about the last things: solstitium: the sun stands still in the sky, the light burns low, and life is short, and nature holds out no promise that she will ever renew herself or that this pale sun whose rays barely penetrate to earth could ever warm another living thing.  

For most of us, the Solstice (at 4.19 am on the morning of Sunday 22 December) will pass unnoticed.  We are insulated from it not just by electric light and central heating and the ceaseless flow of online activity, but by the business that occupies us in the days before Christmas.  But those whose lives are tuned to the rhythms of the seasons and the rise and fall of light pay attention: Pennine farmers, market gardeners, seafarers, meteorologists, astronomers, poets.  For billions in our world, less burdened by technology than we are, these primal rhythms are close to what it means to sustain life, hold out the prospect of a tomorrow as well as a today.  ‘What if this present were the world’s last night?’ is not the private fantasy of a morbid soul.  It is the question to ask when the planet is spinning relentlessly towards an irreversible climate catastrophe.  The first victims to suffer will be the poor and voiceless of the developing world.  The world’s last night is no longer the fantasy of a fevered imagination.  The apocalypse is now.

In these days before Christmas, you may wish I’d lighten up (an apt image for the solstice if you think about it).  But while modern Anglican texts soften as Christmas approaches, the Book of Common Prayer maintains a tougher Advent focus.  Sunday’s collect is one of the most majestic in the book: ‘O Lord, raise up thy power and come among us, and with great might succour us’: we call on God as those who are helpless because he alone can rescue us.  In the Prayer Book communion rite, both the third and fourth Sundays of Advent give us gospel readings about John the Baptist, hardly comfortable reading for Advent.  The Great O antiphons of Advent are a crying for the light at this dark time of the year: ‘O Morning Star, splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness: come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death’.  And when Advent at last utters the name ‘God with us’ in the antiphon of the final day before Christmas Eve, it is longing and desire that run through it: ‘O Emmanuel, our King and our Lawgiver, the hope of the nations and their Saviour: come and save us O Lord our God’.  Come…. Come….It is futures that we fasten on in Advent: futures promised, futures glimpsed, and yes, futures feared as well.  

At the Solstice, people used to kindle fires to keep light and warmth alive and cherish them for the long year ahead.  Perhaps it is the distant origin of fairy lights and Christmas trees; perhaps we still need to echo our forebears and in ceremony and symbol act out the issues of light and dark. In many cathedrals and churches, the traditional Advent procession moves up the church from west to east: a movement towards the light, at first experienced partially, brokenly, as if it might be swallowed up again by the immense darkness in which we stand and wonder and wait.  Gradually that fragile light is established; it grows until it reaches its full strength, luminous, radiant like the heavenly Jerusalem, the city that ‘has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.’ ‘Eternity’s sunrise’ to quote Blake’s famous phrase.

Yet the hope remains future.  We don’t yet possess it.  We still pray ‘Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus!’, for the kingdom is not yet present and God’s purposed not yet fulfilled.  We ask every day in Advent that we may ‘cast away the works of darkness’ and that God may put upon us ‘the armour of light now in the time of this mortal life’.  We glimpsed the light of God’s presence in that great climax of the Advent Procession, but then it was taken from us again: for it was but a glimpse of glory given for a while.  It had to subside, for at the end we have to go outside again into the night, like the winter sparrow in Bede’s parable who flies into the warm lit hall only to fly out again into the cold and dark. 

It’s in that half-light of daily existence that the prayer, ‘Come thou long-expected Jesus’ becomes most real. It breathes desire, expectancy, hope.  We know we can face the night, for this vision will sustain us, Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun who is the glory of the nations.  We know that though we walk in darkness we have seen a great light and need not be afraid.  In midwinter the darkness envelops us again, fraught with ambiguity. The bright clear long light of summer is but a memory.  For now. But darkness is not necessarily ominous and bad.  In the Bible clouds and darkness are where you find the presence of God. ‘There is in God a deep and dazzling darkness’ says the poet, drawing on a long Christian mystical tradition.  ‘Churches are best for prayer, that have least light’ says Donne.

It was on Christmas Day in Durham Cathedral ten years ago that the ‘new creation’ high altar frontal was unveiled.  It shows the rising sun, its golden rays penetrating to and animating the extremities of creation.  It rises out of a blue sea, as if to remind us of Advent and waiting for the God’s purposes to be fulfilled.  For even the birth of Jesus is not the end but the beginning of our world’s redemption, the dawning of the light.  The sun has yet to rise completely and fill the sky.  Across the frontal is a thin red arc, almost invisible until you come close to it, the thread of pain and passion stitched across glory which is the cost of it, the destiny of the Holy Child.  On Solstice day, which this year falls on the first day of the week that we call Sun-Day, we celebrate the light that is coming among us while at the same time we hold in our hearts those who in the dark places of pain and passion wait each day for deliverance.

‘What if this present were the world’s last night?’  Only when we ask John Donne’s question for our world and for ourselves can we begin to hope.  It is a clarifying question, for it tells us that there is work to do and darkness to dispel and lives to change.   There are four days of Advent left to us.  We must make the most of them, especially as after Sunday the days will start getting longer again, and the light become stronger; for ‘the night is far spent and the day is at hand’, the day of Christ whose glory fills the skies. 

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 

A Dark and Dreadful Death

This is the sixth in our series of sermons on St Mark’s passion narrative. Throughout Lent we have walked the via dolorosa with Jesus. Today we have arrived at its awful destination: Golgotha, crucifixion, darkness, desolation and pain. It is a world away from Palm Sunday with its hosanna acclamations and royal expectations. If ever you needed a reason not to trust a crowd, it is Palm Sunday. For look what has become of this king! The mob has bellowed for his crucifixion. He cannot, will not, save himself from this destiny, St Mark’s three fateful ‘musts’ that have pointed to this journey’s end. Today, on this Sunday of the Passion, we contemplate him as the man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.

If we are honest, part of us does not know what to make of him hanging there. The trouble is, we know this story too well. We know, or think we know, what lies beyond the end of it, which is next Sunday’s theme. We also know how the other three evangelists tell it and they colour our reading of St Mark. If we only had this first among the gospels, it would both appal and baffle us. We would be baffled because Mark does not explain why the innocent Son of Man should undergo such suffering. We would be appalled because Mark does not spare us the agony: the darkness that falls on the scene, the desperation of this man’s last cry, the hopelessness of this death. And worst of all perhaps, he endures all this alone, taunted and mocked on every side, deserted by his friends, abandoned by God. This is a narrative of dread. We should tremble to read it.

Let me explore some of the themes in this part of the story. The first is the darkness. Forget about eclipses, even though they are recent memory this year. Mark’s darkness is altogether deeper than a mere shadow. It’s the darkness of judgment in our lesson from Amos which Mark quotes earlier in the gospel in a famous apocalyptic passage. ‘In those days after that suffering, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, and that stars will be falling from the sky, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken’ (13.24-5). Jesus is speaking just before the passion narrative begins. He says that the kingdom of God cannot come until there is an utter collapse of the present world order: the great stones of the temple will be toppled, human communities and relationships will disintegrate, the entire cosmos will fall in an instant like a house of cards. Mark expects us to remember that saying, so that when we hear of the sun’s light failing in the middle of the day, we recognise what it represents. It is the end of the world, and it is the end of Jesus’s world. He must be extinguished like the sun. He must collapse and die as everything dies round him.

That is dreadful enough. But my second theme is darker still: Jesus’s last word from the cross. Was ever a cry more desperate and more desolate than this awful cry with which he dies? Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? We must tread carefully here, for we are on holy ground. Our Lama Sabachthani crucifix in the north quire aisle captures something of it: the figure of Jesus whittled down to its bare essentials like the skeleton of a dead tree, his back arched in agonising pain. ‘Was ever grief like mine’ he seems to say to us. But this is more than physical suffering. There is a godforsakenness of the soul as the world ends for him and his existence is snuffed out. ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ The quotation is of course from Psalm 22, one of the psalms like 69 that so profoundly influenced the way in which the evangelists shaped their passion stories. These psalms end on a note of hope that God does not forget his suffering children and will bring them to a place of deliverance and thankfulness. Does Jesus anticipate the rest of the psalm when he cries out in its opening words, as if he can envisage his own resurrection? I doubt it. I believe that as the abyss opens up beneath him, he takes to his lips the words no doubt learned from childhood that so aptly echo his despair. God has handed him over, betrayed him. He has turned his face away. He may cry, but there is no answer. Elijah will not come to save him.

At the instant of his death, an extraordinary event takes place not far away from Golgotha. This is my third theme: ‘the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom’. For the evangelists, this was remembered as deeply significant on that terrible Friday afternoon. But what did it represent to them? The ‘veil’ hid the holiest part of the temple where only the high priest was allowed to go once a year on the Day of Atonement. Does this violent tearing symbolise the passing of the old religion with its worn-out dependence on rituals and ceremonies? For now a new and living way to God is opened up through the blood of Jesus.

And Mark sees this as another scene in the apocalyptic drama acted out on the cross. Like the darkness at noon, like Jesus’ wrecking of the money-changers’ tables in the temple precinct, the rent veil stands for judgment on Jerusalem and its religious institutions. The old must be swept away before the new comes. When Mark wrote, probably in the 60s of the first century, the temple was about to be destroyed by the Romans. The unthinkable would happen. Was this not a sign of the end of days? In his description of the tearing of the temple veil, Mark uses a word he has already used early in his Gospel. At Jesus’ baptism, he says that the sky is ‘torn open’ as the dove descends and the voice from heaven speaks, and Jesus announces that the kingdom of God is at hand. The rending of sky and curtain is linked to a new world order we call the kingdom. But this can only happen if he drinks the cup we heard about early on in this series, this cup that will not pass from him. He must drink from the pressed grapes of the vine-press of the wrath of God. If he is to save the world, he must be utterly crushed.

What strange work is set before us in Holy Week at Golgotha! But what do we need to do as we watch these events unfold? Mark answers his own question. Forget the crowds shouting hosanna one day and crucify the next; forget the disciples who forsook Jesus and fled, forget the cynics who hail him as king, or the thieves and soldiers who mock him. There is an individual who stands out from the crowd and sees differently: the centurion. Maybe he is in charge of the soldiers who have crucified Jesus. Watching, this gentile Roman, this Jew-hater, this military man whose trade is power and cruelty, has an epiphany. ‘Surely, this man was the Son of God.’ Not just innocent, not just a good man, but the Son of God. The centurion isn’t a bystander now. He has become a participant whose words form the climax of the entire Gospel in one of the Bible’s great recognition-scenes. Mark sees this not just as one man’s confession of faith but as speaking for all humanity, for us as we acknowledge the majesty of this crucified Messiah. Bach took it this way when he gave these immortal words to the full chorus in his St Matthew Passion, the two greatest bars of music ever written. The only reason Mark is writing his Gospel is to make believers out of us, to draw us from being bystanders to participants as we become subjects of God’s kingdom and follow the crucified Lord. In last week’s preacher’s words, God renounces all power but the power of love, yet faith is possible in the teeth of suffering and ridicule. In the darkness, we can still believe.

Which means that we cannot simply watch him hanging there, but must summon up an act of faith that acclaims him as our Lord, and puts right our perspective on the world as God’s, with ourselves as loyal followers and subjects. To mould the church’s faith and our own in this cross-shaped way is the only reason we observe Holy Week with such care and devotion. By remembering in this way, we place the cross at the very centre of our lives, this everlasting sign of God’s ‘tender love towards mankind’, this saving death that sets us free to live again, this life freely poured out for us. Yes, indeed. ‘It is a thing most wonderful’.

Durham Cathedral, Palm Sunday 2015
Amos 8.9-12, Mark 15.33-41

Christmas: taking the long view

Four days ago it was midwinter, solstice day. Here in this Cathedral, the brightest days are not in high summer but in deepest winter when the sun shines almost horizontally into the building and illuminates the vaults from below. For the few days on either side of the shortest day, you are not aware of any change in the sun’s altitude. But as the calendar comes full circle, the light begins to lengthen: ever so slowly at first, but perceptibly. It takes time for it to make a real difference. But we know it is happening. The light and warmth will return. The cycle begins once more.

Since ancient times, Christmas Day has been linked to the natural rhythms of earth and sky and nature. Like the Roman Saturnalia that celebrated the birth of sol invictus, the unconquered sun a few days after the solstice, Christians rejoiced in the birth of the Sun of Righteousness who had risen with healing in his wings. As they did this at the darkest time of the year, they experienced a surge of hope because of the one who would come, this promised dawn that prophets and seers had looked forward to, this long awaited Messiah and Saviour of the World. They longed for a sunrise of wonder. And now, the great Sun is shedding his great light on people who walked in darkness. The world begins to be bathed in it, coaxed into life, turning back towards the source of grace and truth.

The midwinter festivities that our Christmas customs owe so much to were never an end in themselves. Their point was to keep the precious light alive during a season of darkness and death. The rituals looked forward to the return of life in the springtime, the greening of the earth once more, the gift of fertile fields and orchards, the warmth of summer and the fruits of the harvest. In other words, the middle of winter opened up a long view, took a perspective on another new year.

And so must Christmas be about more than just today, wonderful though it is. Throughout Advent we have reached out for that dawn that will herald the end of all that is wrong in the world. We have learned how to take the long view, see how our lives are part of something greater. That something is what God wants to do with this universe, how he wants to end its sorrows and its pain. He has set eternity in our hearts and puts that same longing within all of us. So as Advent yields to Christmas, it is not that we come to the end of a journey. Far from it: we are launched on a voyage of faith and hope, full of confidence in the God whom we see in the baby of Bethlehem. That tiny, cherished life is like the precarious light of the sun at midwinter. How easily it could be snuffed out, as Herod tried to do in his massacre of the innocent children. But we know that light and love will not be extinguished. Because of Christmas, they are here to stay: His name is ‘God with us’, Jesus our Immanuel, says our reading.

This year we recall the Christmas Truce 100 years ago today that was kept by enemy soldiers along the Western Front. That outbreak of peace was extraordinary and unexpected, when men shared food and drink, showed one another photos of their loved ones, kicked balls around and sang carols together. It must have felt like a gift from heaven amid the mud, the slaughter, the smell of fear: perhaps a bit like a tiny solstice when the guns were silenced, and the sun was permitted to rise again into the clear air and shine into dark and murky places, and hardened men gazed into the sky and heard the birds sing and dreamed about a better world.

That was all for a while, an all too brief interval in a terrible war. It was only a truce. But Christmas can feel like that, in a world where there seems to be terror on every side with so little prospect of an end to suffering and pain; or when life feels unbearably hard or our personal demons haunt us. We can treat Christmas like a short-lived truce, when we are permitted not to peer over the horizon for fear of what we might see that could take away our merriment. But Christmas is not a truce, not if we take the long view. If we truly take in what we are celebrating today, God here among us in the infant Jesus, it changes our entire perspective on life. It is God’s sunrise on an old and weary earth, his promise to banish the shadows of our existence. If we can only see it, the Sun is rising upon us. In Jesus’ birth, the whole of time enters a new era. Our little lives take on an eternal significance because we know now that God cares for each of us. The solstice of dark and despair has passed. The Light of the World has come, the light that shines in the darkness. The darkness can never overcome the Great Light that enlightens every human being who has ever been and will ever live.  

The watchword of the Christmas story is, ‘Do not be afraid’. This is how the angel spoke to the shepherds while it was still night. All is dark, though I imagine the morning star shining brightly in the night-sky. Yet the angels sing, and the shepherds hear; they shed their fear and run to the manger to see this thing that has come to pass. And, says St Luke, when they have taken in the sight that awaits them, Mary and Joseph and the Baby lying in a manger, when they have seen this light shining out of a little tiny Child, and bowed low and worshipped him, they return ‘with great joy’ for all the things that they have heard and seen. In St Matthew, the angel comes to Joseph in a dream, while he slept, so we assume that this appearance too was by night. The message is the same: ‘do not be afraid’ for Mary’s child will be the salvation of the world. To be touched by an angel is to be touched by heaven itself. It puts life in a wholly new perspective. It gives back our long view because at once, life becomes worth living again. There is hope and expectation and joy. We come, we see, we are transfigured.

This can be true for all of us here today. We are here to celebrate Christmas once more and adore the new-born King. Some of us have been doing this all our lives. For some of us perhaps it is a first time. But might we all hear it as if for the first time, rekindle the wonder we saw in the faces of the children who thronged here ten days ago for the Blessing of the Crib? Could a bolt be shot back within us, a door opened, a light break in upon our darkness and our need? Could our wintry hearts be reawakened as the solstice passes and the sun begins to rise within us? Could Christmas change our lives for ever? Could it touch the life of our broken world?

I am appealing to all of us: take the long view of Christmas. See it as the start of something wonderful when angels tell us not to be afraid because of the day that is dawning. And if we find that life is never the same again, it redoubles our efforts to live differently, less selfishly, more truthfully, more kindly, because we are inspired by the spirit of Christmas. We need to believe that changed lives can change history, point to that better world the soldiers glimpsed during that Christmas truce. When the season turns, the solstice is past and the Sun rises upon us, we learn to see things by the new light of lengthening days. Our Advent longings were not misplaced. He has come as he promised, God with us. We meet him, we greet him, we bless him, we understand, we hope, we celebrate, we love. Fear is gone. We know that our joy at his birth will last for ever. 

Durham Cathedral, Christmas Day 2014 (Matthew 1.18-25)

Candlemas

I am glad to be here on your patronal festival, especially as an envoy of the diocese of which your former bishop is now legally the incumbent. We are sorry to have stolen him from you. However, I hope you will still receive the warm greetings of Durham Cathedral, the only other Romanesque cathedral in the northern province.  

Down with the rosemary, and so /Down with the bays and mistletoe;

Down with the holly, ivy, all / Wherewith ye dressed the Christmas hall;

That so the superstitious find /Not one least branch there left behind;

For look, how many leaves there be /Neglected there, maids, trust to me,

So many goblins you shall see.

Robert Herrick was writing in the 17th century.  It sounds like a poem about Twelfth Night.  But it's called ‘Ceremony upon Candle­mas Eve’.  In those days they kept the Christ­mas decorations up for 40 days.  Then, on 2 February, they took them down and, in some rural parts of England at least, burnt them: bonfires to light up dark nights in honour of Christ the world’s true light. In the middle ages, Candlemas was an occasion for elaborate ceremonies of blessing tapers and carrying them in procession to light up churches and much partying.  In Durham Cathedral, a great row blew up in 1628, the puritans alleging that the high church party had lit 60 candles on the holy table, while they claimed it was only two.  Durham has always enjoyed a good argument about liturgy.  There are echoes of pre-Christian rituals here: Roman lighting candles to banish evil spirits, or Celts kindling fires at this time of year to mark the end of winter as the days grow perceptibly longer and snowdrops and crocuses signal that spring will soon be here. 

Candlemas is the last official day of Christmas.  Like the 40 days of resurrection from Easter to Ascension, these past 40 days of incarnation have kept before us the truth of the Word made flesh.  At Candlemas we recall how Jesus is brought by his parents as an infant of 40 days to be presented in the temple and blessed by God.  Simeon acclaims him as ‘a light to lighten the gentiles’: Light of the world, Light of all people, Light of life.  And we who stand by, looking on as Simeon cradles this little human light in his arms, we too are ready to sing our own Nunc Dimittis.  For we have seen all that is worth seeing: we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth.  We can depart in peace.

Those loving parents, and old Simeon and Anna, and the little tiny child – all of humanity is there. Rembrandt depicted this scene many times in his paintings and etchings.  He returned to it again and again, fascinated by the inter­play of themes: intimacy and vastness, child­hood and old age, life's dawning and its eventide, prom­ise and ful­filment, darkness and light. It is the scale of these pictures that is so memor­able: the immense spaces of the temple, and at its centre, the tiny figures of the holy fam­ily, like a fragile colony of life precariously nurtured in a shadowy cave.  You wonder about those lowering shades that seem to press in upon that tiny point of light.  Will the light grow in that darkness and finally overcome it - or is the darkness about to close in upon the light, extinguish it, snuff out what has been carried at such cost in Mary's womb?

They are sublimely accurate, these paintings.  They portray things as they are, the dark-and-light realities God takes on as he comes among us and shares our human condition.  By now, we know that Christmas has not suddenly made the world all right again, though we longed and prayed for it, for peace on earth and goodwill to all people, ‘hoping it might be so’.  The shadows and the darkness are real enough.  The massacre of the inno­cents shows how fragile incarnation is.  According to St Matthew, the infant Jesus had to cling precariously on to life in a world as mis­chievous and as viol­ent and as mur­der­ous as we know it to be today.  The Candlemas story foreshadows the child's destiny.  ‘A sword will pierce your own soul too’ says Simeon to Mary.  It is another annun­ciation that sets her pon­dering in her heart all over again as she feels Golgotha looming over the holy family, foresees another, crueller, presenta­tion of Christ, when he will be handed over into the hands of wicked men to suffer death upon a cross. W. H. Auden has a poem ‘At the Manger Mary Sings’.  He has Mary say to her child, with terrible foreboding yet infinite love: How soon will you start on the sorrowful way?  Dream while you may.

So Candlemas has a poignancy as well as joy about it.  We have said goodbye to the festive cheerfulness that warmed up the bleak midwinter.  The crib will be put away for another year, its pieces disassembled into a forlorn plastic bag.  Tomorrow it will be ordinary time again, and soon Lent and ashes: ‘dust you are and to dust you shall return’.  Christians in the east call Candlemas ‘the meeting’, the strange meeting between old and new covenant, between Christmas and Lent, light and dark, nativ­ity and cross.  In the Candlemas ceremony in this liturgy we shall mark the end of Christmas by carrying candles in procession, and then – get ready for it - blowing them out.  It is a deliber­ate, almost sacri­legious thing to do: to snuff out the very light of the infant Jesus.  In Advent it was darkness to light; now in a way it is light to darkness: the human pattern so familiar in our world today as we watch nations and peoples being drawn inexorably into destructiveness and conflict; familiar to people with no home or livelihood or friends; familiar to anyone who has lost someone they loved; familiar to all of us in a thousand different ways.  It is as if a shadow falls across what light we have.  The cross is always present. 

This time of year is paradoxical.  It makes you wonder about the mystery of things, how ‘joy and woe are woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine’ as Blake says; how our light, glorious as it is, is as yet only partial; how spring tries to prize this world out of winter’s clasp, yet frost clings on to its soul.  God forbid that at this precarious time in our history, the threats we face should hold us fast for ever.  There is the ecstasy of the crib and the agony of the cross and these two belong together.  But it is still true that the days are growing longer, and the sap is rising.  The worst of winter may not yet be over, but February doesn’t last forever, thank God.  Spring will come, and Lent’s lengthening light.  Soon we shall climb towards Easter.  Today we light candles of longing in dark places and even when they are put out, we keep the memory of a precious flame alive for when the day breaks, and shadows flee away, and Christ is the glory of the nations, and hope is emptied in delight.

2 February 2014, on the Feast of the Presentation, Southwell Minster

Luke 2: 22-40