Haydn, Happiness & Hope: A sermon at the Edinburgh Festival

When the first Edinburgh International Festival took place in 1947, it was “to heal the wounds of war through the language of the arts” by providing “a platform for the flowering of the human spirit”. The brief looked for a city with a distinguished setting and townscape that would embrace the opportunity “to make the festival a major preoccupation not only in the City Chambers but in the heart and home of every citizen, however modest”. That’s an aspiration to admire, not least for its idea that the arts need to find a place in our healing and flourishing, and that they belong to everyone, not only the wealthy or well-educated or privileged. An event that was any less generous or inclusive would not be the Edinburgh Festival we cherish.

Among possible festival locations, Salzburg was mentioned as the kind of city to emulate. So how apt to have the city of Mozart represented at this mass through his sublime Ave Verum, and indeed eighteenth century Austria, the homeland also of Joseph Haydn whose Little Organ Mass we are enjoying this morning. In its way, our music from the German-speaking world (including a Bach organ voluntary) affirms a confident Europeanism, our belonging to this continent that has enriched Scotland in so many ways and to which (setting a fine example to England) it remains sturdily committed. Brexit is not a word that’s understood in the world of music, theatre, film, letters or art.

The Haydn brothers Joseph and Michael, both great composers, were deeply religious men. Of Joseph’s Little Organ Mass one of the experts* has said: “in this music, Haydn’s religious character becomes glowingly apparent: instinctive and unquestioning in faith, yet celebratory and reverent, seeking devotion through the contemplation of beauty.” Near the end of his life he was taken to a performance of his Creation to celebrate his birthday. When they reached that glorious C major chord that bursts out of the representation of chaos at the start of the score, “And there was light”, Haydn, it is said, “raised his trembling arms to Heaven, as if in prayer to the Father of Harmony”.

He spoke to his biographer about composing an Agnus Dei for one of his late masses. “I prayed, not like a miserable sinner in despair but calmly, slowly. I felt that an Infinite God would surely have mercy on his finite creature, pardoning dust for being dust. I experienced a joy so confident that as I composed to the words of the prayer, I could not suppress my joy but gave vent to my happy spirits and wrote above the miserere, Allegro.” Not at all like the more reflective adagios we are used to at this point in the liturgy. But that is Haydn, always taking us by surprise, not least spiritually. My daughter and I once went to his mausoleum at Eisenstadt in Lower Austria, near the Palace of the Esterhazys he’d served so loyally. Inside they were playing a cd of one of his masses. I needed to honour the great man and thank him for all that he’d meant to me. It was most moving.

Why am I telling you this? Because I want to go back to that phrase I quoted, seeking devotion through the contemplation of beauty. This seems to me to be one of the functions of music and the arts for people of faith. Perhaps a hint of this lies behind the vision of those who created the Edinburgh Festival, a belief in the power of art to bring life back into some kind of beautiful order and ordered beauty. Making contemplatives of us means learning how to see, to pay attention, to be present to our experience and glimpse its inner meaning, what Gerard Manley Hopkins called inscape. And as we are doing the work of God at this eucharist today, we should celebrate the capacity of liturgy to achieve this, help us live in a more contemplative way so that we “see into the life of things” as Wordsworth put it.

So let’s ponder the juxtapositions within our worship today. Into the words of the mass and the music of Haydn and Mozart, the lectionary inserts readings that ask questions that are among the most fundamental we can face. Where does meaning lie, asks the preacher in Ecclesiastes, exhausted by the ever-circling years that bring no age of gold, only vanity and ennui. Psalm 49 examines the futility of living only for your power or wealth or fame or reputation, for death is the great leveller that will bring us all down to the grave like the beasts that perish. The gospel reading about the rich fool warns that there is no gospel of prosperity and we can take nothing with us when we die. Even Colossians, so radiant with the spirit of Easter, warns that we must put to death our self-serving behaviours and “set our minds on things that are above”.

I wonder whether we can set up a spiritual conversation between these readings and the Viennese mass we are enjoying. On the one hand the readings underline the realities of living and dying. They belong to the world of a series of medieval paintings in Hexham Abbey where we often worship, that show the “Dance of Death”. A skeleton brandishing a scythe comes up to different kinds of people and engages them in deadly waltz that tells them that their time has come. These sombre readings call on us to face our mortality and ask what it means to become wise in the light of our human condition.

On the other hand, Haydn’s music is shot through with a God-given happiness. Not I think because “Papa Haydn” was cheerful by temperament (though he was remembered for it), but rather that his music evokes the confident faith in which it was composed. The gospel reading ends with a striking turn of phrase. It speaks of those “who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God”. Might we experience the liturgy, enriched by the arts of the church and especially Haydn’s music, as one of the ways in which we might become “rich towards God”? Seeking devotion through the contemplation of beauty we said. That seems to me to be one of the God-given paths to wisdom because it enables us to see ourselves as we truly are, “frail and feeble, doomed to die”, yet in Christ raised from the dead, given back our lives, put together again, transformed, discovering the wisdom that teaches us how to be “rich towards God”.

The sixth century writer Boethius authored a famous book called The Consolations of Philosophy. He wrote it in prison as he faced death at the hands of his political enemies. It calmed his spirit and brought him peace at the last. Medieval theologians loved his writings because of their message that through wisdom, the soul attains to the vision of God. I believe music and the arts bring consolations too when they find their place in liturgy, prayer and a contemplative outlook. In this sacred space, in the environment of the holy, Haydn’s music is a source of grace and wisdom that strengthens us, steadies our gaze, comforts us and gives us confidence at the grave and gate of death. We lift up our hearts in gratitude, and find ourselves once again caught up in the movement of God’s everlasting love towards creation. And here’s the miracle, that we are risen with Christ, learning to seek the things that are above, discovering how to be rich towards God.

Old St Paul’s Church, Edinburgh, 4 August 2019
Ecclesiastes 1.2, 12-14, 18-23; Psalm 49.1-11, Colossians 3.1-11, Luke 12.13-21

*H.C. Robbins Landon & David Wyn Jones, Haydn: his life and music, 1988 

In Memoriam: Stephen Williams

Like Joshua standing on the edge of the Jordan in our first reading, Stephen knew he must be strong and very courageous as he faced the time when he must cross over. Strong for Anthea and Martin and Jane and Matthew who accompanied him to that brink; strong for himself and for them when the time came to say farewell; strong for them and for all of us who loved him for whom the world is emptier now that he has left us.

Today are remembering him in the place that meant so much to him. This Cathedral was where Jenny and I first met the Williams family when I arrived as Precentor. 1987 was the golden year that Coventry City won the Cup Final. We watched the match in Martin and Jane’s drawing room and cheered on the city with which, up to a few days before, we had not had any connection. I remember that day as much for the warmth of their hospitality as for the match itself. We soon became firm friends - they with us, our children with theirs.

At that time Stephen and Matthew were both members of the choir. The Cathedral was central to the lives of the whole family. It still is. Martin and Jane were married here, and the boys were confirmed here. And although life took Stephen about as far away from his home city as it is possible to get, he was deeply rooted in Coventry. He loved coming back, and was proud in due course to bring Anthea here too.

We can only guess how many evensongs Stephen must have sung in this cathedral. It seems so right to honour him at this celebration of the divine office that is the daily breath of the church. The music has been chosen with Stephen in mind; the hymns were sung at his funeral. But the readings are those set for the day. In the New Testament, Jesus gathers his followers and gives them power, amongst other things, to “heal every disease and every sickness”. And this work of healing is to be a sign of God’s care for human beings. “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.”

This was the vocation Stephen gave his life to. Medicine today is a world away from the first century, yet the God-given work of healing is the same: applying human knowledge and skill to reverence life by caring for it, enhancing its quality, enabling it to flourish, mending it when it is broken, helping people to make the journey towards becoming whole once more. That is a profound collaboration with God’s eternal work of healing his creation and all of us who are part of it. Those of you who were at Stephen’s funeral or watched the live link will have heard how good he was at it. Even in his illness, his commitment to his work went on, an oncologist with cancer treating others with the same condition. He was a true wounded healer. The tributes from professional colleagues to his skill and care were inspiring and moving.

But those tributes were not only about Stephen’s professional life. They said much about his personal qualities as a human being, as a man, husband, son, brother, colleague, friend. I don’t think that any of us should have been surprised at this surge of warmth and affection for him. Perhaps this strikes us with special sharpness because his life was so cruelly cut short. What would he have become? What gifts would he have given to us all? What difference would he have gone on to make in the world?

Someone said that “the unfinished symphonies of this life are the most beautiful”. What is beautiful, what touches us is when we glimpse wholeness in a man or woman or child. It speaks to us of what is God-given in life, what springs out of goodness and love, what is more than just aspiration or ideal because it has lasting value and is remembered. When Jesus says that the kingdom of God is near, maybe we see it most clearly in the faces of those who have the capacity, without realising it, to tell us truths and show us ways of living we hadn’t quite grasped before.

I talked about Stephen’s personal qualities. Among them, perhaps explaining them, was his Christian faith. He was open and unashamed about this. It nourished him throughout his life and it sustained him through his illness right up to the end. We can never know quite how another person believes, but we can and do know when it becomes a life-changing fact of their lives. It was moving to hear how Stephen found real strength from somewhere as he faced the ordeals of terminal cancer. That somewhere was his faith that did not fail him in the shadow of death. When he, with Anthea and the family received communion a few days before he died, it was his viaticum, their viaticum, food to give courage and strength for the hard crossing that lay ahead, especially for him but for all of them as well.

This is where Christian hope makes all the difference. We can’t know in this life what lies at the other end of that journey, when our travelling days are done. Death is a great mystery and we are right to be in awe of it. Those who live close to it, as Stephen did first in his professional life and then in the personal ordeal of terminal illness, are especially aware of the shadow of mortality, the power it has to overwhelm us when we are vulnerable and afraid.

But what we do know is that it is possible to travel in the hope that a greater dawn is breaking, a dawn in which we shall see the face of God, and finally know how his everlasting love gathers up all the human loves we have ever known in this life. When we recited the Creed earlier in this service, and said that we believe “in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”, I think it was something like this that we were affirming: that as the poet said, “nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest”. What else matters, if not to know God’s fierce and wonderful love that makes us truly alive and gives us a faith by which to live and die?

The meaning is in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Stephen must have gazed thousands of times on Graham Sutherland’s Tapestry of Christ in Glory. Who knows how it may have influenced him all his life, reminded him of what ultimately matters, challenged him to new adventures, comforted him in times of sorrow? Below is the wracked figure of the crucified Jesus, an image for all time of human suffering and pain. But in that agonised image lies redemption and hope, for he is the Wounded Healer of us all. We look up and there, above, is the risen Christ victorious over death, seated in splendour, his arms outstretched to welcome us home. This is our hope, this is our destiny. This is what gives us the courage to endure to the end.

Joshua was strong and very courageous. You’ll remember the final words, those most moving of words with which John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress ends. “When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the river-side, into which as he went, he said, “Death, where is thy sting?” And as he went down deeper, he said, “Grave, where is thy victory?” So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.”

We thank God for every memory of Stephen his beloved child. We thank God for the Easter hope that sustains us as we travel on in faith. And thank you Stephen for lighting up our lives in ways we shall always cherish and never forget.

Coventry Cathedral, 7 October 2018 
Joshua 3, Matthew 10.1-22

 

Holy Week in Chester 2: “I am the Resurrection and the Life”

Reading: John 11.17-27

This Holy Week, we are studying the great I AM sayings of St John’s Gospel. Last night we began with “I am the Door” in chapter 10. That saying is so closely associated with “I am the Good Shepherd” that you might expect us to come to it next. However, I want to save that for Good Friday for reasons that will make sense then. This evening we are going to move into the next chapter of the gospel and “I am the Resurrection and the Life”.

The raising of Jesus’ friend Lazarus in Chapter 11 of St John is a kind of preamble to the passion narrative. Already, Passover is drawing near. At the end of the chapter, the talk about arresting Jesus and putting him to death suddenly becomes more serious. “It is better for you to have one man to die for the people” says wily Caiaphas “than to have the whole nation destroyed”. In those days as in ours, leaders know all about “expediency”, never mind who suffers on its altar. Someone who goes around proclaiming himself to be God’s Son and bringing a dead man back to life is bound to subvert the good order of a well-regulated Roman province. The threat is, in the words of the authorities, that “the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” Jesus is already regarded as dangerous. The raising of Lazarus at Bethany raises the stakes considerably. No-one knows this better than him.

What St John sees in this beautiful story of a death and resurrection is a foreshadowing of the imminent events of Holy Week and Easter. It’s an analogy, a visual aid, if you like, of what will shortly come to pass. The pre-echoes of the resurrection story are unmistakeable: the woman weeping, the question “where have you laid him?”, the rolling away of the stone from the tomb, the details about the grave clothes. Why does John need to tell the story at all, so close to Jesus’ own passion and resurrection? Maybe it’s to allow some of the deeper meanings to emerge as a kind of commentary, so that when we come to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, that narrative can speak for itself without too much elaboration or interpolation. I’m thinking of when Jesus speaks about seeing in this sign the glory of God, and how he thanks his Father for having heard him so that everyone “may believe that you sent me”. And of course the saying we remember best of all from his dialogue with Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life”. 

We must have heard it at every Church of England funeral we’ve ever attended, the first of the sentences that are read as the coffin is processed into church. In the church service, I suppose we inevitably hear it in the way Martha replies to Jesus’s questions. To “your brother will rise again” Martha replies, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day”. And this matters to us who instinctively want to keep death at bay, protest against its cruel extinction of all that it means to be alive. When we hear the words of committal at the end of the funeral rite, “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, when we throw soil on to the coffin of a loved one or imagine it consigned to fire at the crematorium, we are faced with the brutality of death. We do not, most of us, want to “go gently into that good night”, at least not when we feel glad and grateful to be alive. Our faith is stretched on these occasions that confront us with our own mortality. The confidence of affirming “in sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead” isn’t always echoed in our own hearts.

What do those words mean to us? I can only say what they mean for me. I hear them in the light of the passage we are looking at tonight. It seems to me that Jesus is not asking us to base our faith on what will happen to the dead at the end of time, what will happen to me. Rather, the focus is on Jesus’ own resurrection, and its consequences for all of us in the present, here and now. The key is in the words believe and live. “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” Jesus did not say only, “I am the resurrection” (which is what Martha hears) but “I am the living resurrection, the resurrection and the life. This is about life now, God’s life that transforms us, irradiates even our darkest times with life and love. We need to recall, even in Holy Week, the Christmas gospel, “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people”. And in last night’s passage about the gate, “I have come that they may have life, life in all its fulness”. And in the best-known verse in the Bible, “God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” That means the abundant gift of God in our present experience. This is the sense in which believers “will never die”, for this eternal life transcends the worst that even physical death with all its terrors can do to mortals like Mary, Martha and Lazarus, like us. Death, where is your sting? Death, where is your victory?

This is what Jesus wants Martha to understand. But in St John, words by themselves aren’t enough. A sign is needed, the raising of Lazarus from the grave. I said that it’s a metaphor, like the feeding of the crowd or the healing of the blind man. What happened then, what John bears witness to has a significance infinitely greater than the event itself. For what it symbolises is nothing less than that death will no longer hold power over us, for Jesus has overcome it. In him, a new world is becoming a reality by virtue of his own death and resurrection; there is a new humanity already risen from the death our condition had brought upon us. And all this, I think, is what we are meant to draw from the resurrection and the life text when we hear it at a funeral. We do affirm it for the dead, of course, because we believe that God does not stop loving human beings when they die. But I think we affirm it even more for ourselves, who for now are still the living, and who, for as long as we live, will go on hoping and yearning and praying to be born anew as the children of God’s reign of grace and truth.

In these Holy Week addresses, I want to remind us that at its heart, Lent is the season when we prepare for the paschal celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus. For centuries, we have tended to separate Passiontide from Easter, as if the empty tomb were somehow the “happy ending” of the story of suffering and death. I think St John would point us back to the raising of Lazarus and remind us that death and resurrection – Jesus’s dying and living, our dying and living - belong together in the story of that first Holy Week and in the experience of believers. 

When we renew our baptism vows as part of the Easter liturgy, we are taken right back into the memory of passion and suffering, and enact ritually what St Paul meant when he spoke of being “crucified with Christ” and being “buried with Christ in baptism, so that we might rise to newness of life”. The Easter liturgy is the most powerful event of this Great Week precisely because it celebrates Jesus’ passion and resurrection, not simply as an event in the past but in its present reality, its extraordinary power to gather us up in the God-given movement from death to eternal life. As the cycle of the seasons brings us back once more to Holy Week, it reinforces our sense that this is where we experience being human in the most profoundly life-changing way. This is where we begin to understand ourselves as those whose lives are forever enfolded in the all-encompassing love of God.

For if Christianity is not about transformation, if it doesn’t touch our lives and make a difference when we most need to be ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, why are we here tonight at all? The raising of Lazarus is St John’s parable of what it means to cross the chasm from death to life in every dimension of human living. The whole gospel of Holy Week and Easter is here in this story. 

Here is Malcolm Guite’s sonnet on this saying.

How can you be the final resurrection?
That resurrection hasn’t happened yet.
Our broken world is still bent on destruction,
No sun can rise before that sun has set.
Our faith looks back to father Abraham
And toward to the one who is to come
How can you speak as though he knew your name?
How can you say: before he was I am?

Begin in me and I will read your riddle
And teach you truths my Spirit will defend
I am the End who meets you in the middle,
The new Beginning hidden in the End.
I am the victory, the end of strife
I am the resurrection and the life.

(c) Malcolm Guite. With permission.

In Memoriam John Fitzmaurice Petty, Provost & Dean of Coventry

I remember the first time I met John Petty. It was exactly thirty years ago. The Provostship at Coventry Cathedral was vacant. I had been Vice Provost there for just a few months. You can imagine that no one was more exercised than I was about who the new boss would be. The Bishop told me that his candidate would be coming to look us up and down, and that a colleague and I should go and meet him at the station and take care of his visit. They say first impressions count. Off the train he stepped energetically: lean, elegant, eager, expectant, and with a look of intelligent curiosity as if to say: I’m not taking anything for granted and neither must you. Let’s see how this goes, and what God might be saying to us about the future. 
 

Not long afterwards, in January 1988, John was installed as Provost. No-one who was there will ever forget the great procession of people from St John’s, Hurst, streaming down the steps from the ruins led by their former and much-loved incumbent. It seemed that the entire town had turned out for the occasion. “This is the best job in the Church of England” announced John from the pulpit. Perhaps we should all feel like that about our ministry. I did at Durham, so John was only partly right. But I think everyone in Coventry Cathedral that day was heartened by the way he spoke about his new role and the enthusiasm he brought to it.
  

John came to Coventry with a long and solid experience of parish ministry. He was ordained priest in 1967, so this year marked his fiftieth anniversary. His curacies in Sheffield and south London formed him in the tough realities of urban life where the church has never had it easy or straightforward. So he relished the challenges of mission and ministry in Ashton Under Lyne and earned wide respect and affection for his complete commitment to the place and its people. He loved them and they him. Some of his parishioners were in tears at that great installation in Coventry. That sense of loss was both telling and moving. 
 

This earthy parish experience John brought to Coventry. He was no armchair theoretician. He aspired, I think, to be a practitioner for whom Christian prayer, service, mission, pastoral care and lived human relationships were the best evidence of the gospel that he knew. John loved the Cathedral. He had big ambitions for it and from his first day set about realising them with both energy and flair. Whether it was the international ministry of reconciliation symbolised by the cross of nails, or the spirituality of the place nurtured by liturgy and daily prayer, whether it was outreach to civic leaders or day to day involvement with the lives of ordinary people, he gave everything. He grasped avidly every opportunity to champion the Cathedral in the wider world. Some of us wondered whether he could sustain this furious pace. As I got to know him, I realised that this was simply the way he lived – loving life so intensely, grasping it so joyously that he could not hold back from giving himself totally to it, in his work, his leisure, his relationships. We have heard earlier in this service about John the human being – the husband, father, friend. To see him cycling round Coventry said it all. As did the study light in the Provost’s House which would be on well after midnight every evening of the week bar Friday.  
 

But it takes more than hard work to make a good leader in any walk of life, especially in the church. One of his colleagues said that what was remembered about John was his visibility in the Cathedral, walking the nave several times a day in his cassock to talk to the staff and volunteers whose names and the names of their families and even their pets he remembered with unerring accuracy. He was an instinctive, warm-hearted pastor who was genuinely interested in people and cared about them. He was a natural encourager. The residents and staff of Mount House here in Shrewsbury know this from his years as their chaplain. One of the personal commitments that lived this our was a project he initiated called Remember Our Child, a ministry of prayer and pastoral support for parents who had lost children. John enjoyed the big public ceremonies, but just as characteristic was John’s capacity to reach out in quiet intimacy to those who were hurting years and even decades after experiencing this most painful of all bereavements. 

 

We who worked with John remember how his leadership style was to give space for his colleagues to flourish in their own roles. As his Precentor, I knew he completely trusted me with the Cathedral’s worship and music, even when it came to organising the Royal Maundy service in 1995 and many other events where my job was to put the Cathedral and him personally on a public stage with all the scrutiny this brought. He knew how to delegate. He was proud of his team and was lavish with his praise for them. He wrote copious letters in his unmistakeable blue felt-tip to thank people, cycling round to deposit them at the central post-office in the small hours to make sure they arrived next day.  

 

Today we gather up the strands of John’s life both public and personal. We give thanks for him and celebrate all that he was and continues to be to us. In my mind as I remember him is what I heard him say a thousand times about Coventry Cathedral, that amazing place that holds together like no other place I know the brokenness of death and destruction with the healing, life-giving spirit of what has risen out of the ashes. “To walk from the ruins into the new Cathedral is to walk from Good Friday into Easter” he would say as he gazed at Graham Sutherland’s tapestry of Christ in Glory, in my view the greatest work of art in a building crammed with treasures of the twentieth century.  

 

This funeral takes us on that same journey from Good Friday to Easter. For while we grieve John’s loss and feel our own mortality on a day when it’s natural and permitted to mourn, nevertheless we come here in sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead. In our reading from Corinthians, St Paul speaks about this movement from transience to eternity, from glimpsing to seeing and knowing. “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” Paul is able to say this out of his conviction that while “faith, hope and love abide, the greatest of these is love”. Perhaps that’s how we need to remember those who have died, whom we love but see no longer: to allow the mercy and grace of God to shape the way we hold them in our hearts and memories. “What will survive of us is love” wrote Philip Larkin, the twentieth century Coventry-born poet. What sustains us all on our journeys is the love from which nothing can separate us, not even the final journey all mortals must make in the dark shadow of death.

  

This was John’s faith. He held it unwaveringly. It saw this good man through a lifetime of devoted service. It was his reason for living, his nourishment, his inspiration, his joy. It will not have failed him at the gate of death. May he rest in peace, and at the last be received in the outstretched arms of Christ in glory.  

 

At St Chad’s Shrewsbury, 7 September 20171 Corinthians 13 

Retreat Address on the Psalms 3 - Prayer and Mortality (Psalm 49)

After two Psalms of celebration, we come to a trio of more downbeat psalms. Perhaps I should remind you that I am being led by your own matins psalm cycle in these reflections. Tomorrow’s (106) dwells on the historical memory of a people’s failure and shortcomings, and draws out lessons to be learned. Friday’s (79) is a cry of rage in the face of disaster, a lament that asks the familiar question, “how long?”  And so that you have the road map in mind, on Saturday, for the feast of Mary Magdalen, we are back to thankfulness again with a song of gladness (32) on the part of someone who knows what it is to be ransomed, healed, restored and forgiven.

Today’s Psalm 49 is a wisdom psalm, one of a small number in the Psalter that reflect on human experience in the light of faith. Psalms like these stretch the boundaries of Israel’s faith community, because the experiences they describe are not specific to the covenant community but are common to our whole race. You find this kind of writing in many ancient near eastern texts: Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian. They have a lot in common with the wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible such as Job and Ecclesiastes that explore the problems of suffering and meaninglessness in human life. Some of the wisdom psalms such as 37 and 73 take up these familiar themes, why evil goes unchecked, why goodness is not honoured or rewarded, why the wicked prosper at the expense of the righteous. The common thread seems to be how to negotiate life’s perplexities with equanimity, insight and understanding, how not to be thrown into turmoil by the contradictions and unfairness of the human condition but to keep calm and carry on. 

This psalm focuses on the specific matter of our mortality. Memento mori it says to its readers, remember you must die. “Unresting death, one whole day nearer now” wrote Philip Larkin in “Aubade”, one of the darkest but most unflinching of his poems. This psalm is less appalled: it has seen too much of death to be frightened by it. But it does insist that death is a fact of life we need to meet thoughtfully and in a well-prepared spiritual state. Denial is no use: it needs coming to terms with. What does it mean to know that your life is limited, that one day you must go to the place of shadows the Hebrews called Sheol? That is both a fact and a mystery, for we can both know that it happens without at all knowing what it will mean for us. But the urgency of this psalm is driven by a set of existential questions that have not gone away in all of human history. How do we rise above being just another in the endless crocodile of the beasts that perish? How do I even make friends with it? What difference does death make to the way we live now? 

This question haunted everyone in the Middle Ages. Thanks to the visitations of war, famine and plague, death was never far away from people's thoughts. In Hexham Abbey near where we live, there is a series of four medieval paintings, part of a series depicting the “dance of death”. A lurid skeletal figure dances in turn with a king, an emperor, a pope and a cardinal. Maybe the lost panels showed more ordinary men and women as well as those in high office, not forgetting the young, the beautiful, the wise, for this is a dance no one can sit out. 

Like Job and Ecclesiastes, the psalm doesn’t probe the metaphysics or engage in conjecture. Hebrew spirituality, as we find it expressed in the psalms, is always realistic and practical. What it seeks to do is to suggest ways of living with realities that are too big to grasp. Here, the pressing question has to do with one that’s familiar in the Psalter: why are the powerful, the famous, the successful and the wealthy untouched by the misfortunes of life? What about the poor, the powerless, the voiceless and the wronged? Where is their reward?

The personal laments in the Psalter insist that God is on the side of these forgotten in Israel. He stands with them and will vindicate them in the day when he acts. But in this psalm the argument is different. Its answer is: however powerful you are, however successful, however wealthy, however wise, however well-spoken of and admired, it will all count for nothing in the face of death.  Everyone, low and high, rich and poor together, good and bad, intelligent and foolish, is equal when it comes to the grave.  No-one is advantaged: we can take nothing with us and our reputations will not save us.  Twice the bleak refrain returns: man, being in honour, hath no understanding: but is compared unto the beasts that perish (12, 20 BCP).  Death is the great leveller, unpitying, untiring. He shepherds his victims without mercy down to Sheol the shadowy place of the dead.  Why waste your energy on being envious? It isn’t worth it: it simply eats you up until it destroys you. Why should I fear in times of trouble, when the iniquity of my perecutors surrounds me, those who trust in their wealth and boast in the abundance of their riches? Here’s how to respond. Do not be afraid when some become rich, when the wealth of their houses increases.  For when they die they will carry nothing away… Though in their lifetime they count themselves happy…. they will go to the company of their ancestors who will never again see the light (16-19).  

So the psalm offers this crumb of reassurance to those at the bottom of the pile, the forgotten, the disappeared, the poor, the victim, the nobody: whatever our condition in this life, our ultimate destiny is the same.   

If this is comforting, it’s a peculiarly tough kind of comfort.  Or it would be, were it not for the glimmer of hope that for a moment penetrates the shadows. But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me (15).  This is one of those rare moments in the psalms when belief in an enduring life with God beyond the grave seems to surface.  This narrow, precarious shaft of light pierces the gloom for just an instant before being shut off again.  But it is enough.  For it recognises that a relationship with God is forever, not simply for the brief span of life in this world.  It’s not yet a Christian theology of resurrection: there is still a long path to climb before the Old Testament reaches that point.  But it is, indisputably, the belief in and hope of something beyond this life, however tentative. We meet it again in psalm 73, the Psalter’s equivalent to Job’s triumphant confession of faith in the midst of his terrible ordeals. Where Job says, ‘I know that my redeemer liveth… and though… worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God’ (Job 19.25-27 AV), the psalm says: “nevertheless I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory”.  

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Let me offer three reflections. First, we need to read this psalm in the broader context of the Psalter as a whole, and indeed of the entirety of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. The measured, even resigned, tone of this meditation on life and death is very different from the confidence of the two we have already looked at this week. On its own, Psalm 49 might lead us into nihilism and despair.  Within the context of the
Psalter, and read in the light of psalms like 65 and 76 that celebrate God’s enthronement over all of life, it feels different.  For while it recognises the deep mystery of what it is to be a human being, and to stand on the edge of the abyss and ponder the enigmas of life and death, it understands how our existence is given meaning in the light of God and his everlasting reign. 

Still more is this true when we as Christian worshippers conclude this psalm with the doxology to the Sacred Trinity. That little glimpse of light that breaks through in the fifteenth verse, God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, we mustn’t lean too heavily on that by itself. But when we read this psalm back through the lens of our Christian experience of death and resurrection, it makes all the difference. Good
Friday and Easter do not take away the mysteries of inequality, evil and suffering. The valley of the shadow of death will not cease to be the dark place it always was. But the paschal mystery of Christ crucified and risen proclaims that God has himself entered into these abiding realities of our human condition. So death is no longer the great leveler where we are like the beasts that perish. Rather, it is the threshold of a new life where Christ has already gone before us. And as we sing in the Easter hymn, “death’s mightiest powers have done their worst”.

Second, this psalm is an important antidote to naïve upbeat religion that is unaware of the profound questions all thinking human beings ask about life.  It is fatally easy to clap our hands and sway to cheerful choruses oblivious to the wicked who go on relentlessly wrecking the lives of the weak, and the powerful abuse the poor and the downtrodden who have no voice of their own unless it is to cry out to God.  Nothing is so damaging to the integrity and reputation of religion as a faith that oversimplifies the complexities of things, that is practised in (often wilful) ignorance of what the world is really like.  This psalm makes us pause before we come out with the easy speeches that comfort cruel men and discredit religion in the eyes of its detractors. It helps us to ground our faith in the lived experience of all human beings, and in our bafflement that the complexities of life are not susceptible to being reduced to simple formulae.

The spiritual challenge, I think, is how to recognize and embrace mystery, yet celebrate at the same time. To pledge our loyalty to our enthroned, exalted Lord, yet not to run away from the inescapable riddles of being human, that is wisdom indeed. In particular, we should not be afraid as Christian believers to make friends with the prospect of death as I suggested earlier. Previous generations, more familiar with the thousands of ways death was a familiar visitant in less defended times, found this much easier to do than we. To read Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying was a natural thing to do. His belief that we can only live a holy life if we are ready to die a holy death was nothing remarkable in his century, though the depth and insight he brought to the question was. Or as his contemporary Bishop Ken says in the great evening hymn we sang at my retirement (a kind of dying, or at least a clear threshold) and will again at my funeral, 

Teach me to live that I may dread

The grave as little as my bed;
Teach me to die, that so I may
Rise glorious at the aweful day. 

Third, this psalm helps us to address the problem of envy. It’s interesting that this is the spiritual and moral issue at the heart of three of the most important wisdom psalms – this morning’s, together with 37 and 73. For what it is worth, my view is (pace most theologians) that envy is the worst of the seven deadly sins, worse even than pride. My reason is that if you examine it as a moral failure, and if you examine your own experience of it, envy is not simply an attitude, a longing to possess what others have. If it is allowed to feed off that longing, it begins to cultivate an active wish to destroy what the other has, and even destroy the other person. Which of course inevitably ends up by destroying yourself, devouring your own soul on a feeding-frenzy of obsession, like a black hole pulling in everything within its gravitational field. So envy leads not only to avarice but also to hatred and all that follows. You can make a case for reading the Genesis story of the Fall as humanity’s envy of God for being God, being wise and powerful and the source of life. 

The classic study of envy is the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s great book Envy and Gratitude. And that tells you what the theological and spiritual answer to it is. “I have been young and now am old” says the world-weary sage in that psalm of envy, Psalm 37. I used to eat meals three times a day underneath those words (in Latin) in the dining hall of my college in Oxford. What that psalmist says is that he “never saw the righteous forsaken, nor their seed begging their bread”. Even as a student, I wondered if he needed to get out more, for he wouldn’t have had to walk far to notice the destitute and poor who are always with us. But a better reading might be to infer that he is simply learning to be content in old age. His own experience has led him to see how God’s generosity, his care, his provision and our constant gratitude for it are the central fact of all life. So the psalmist concludes that mature wisdom equates to acknowledging the source of all that is lovely and good in life, and learning, if not full-bodied thankfulness, at least contentment. 

And this, I think, lies at the heart of Psalm 49. The logic seems to be: we see the rich and powerful and are tempted to envy them. Don’t succumb. For they, like us, must face the grave and gate of death. So do not be afraid when some become rich, when the wealth of their houses increases. Not to be afraid is not far from equanimity and contentment. So let our common mortality teach us how to cultivate a contemplative view of life that helps us be content with who we are and what we have to enjoy now. I know that is to go beyond what the text itself says explicitly. But it seems implicit. And it links back to the first morning when we looked at Psalm 65 and saw how thankfulness, the eucharistic life, is the secret of happiness and the antidote to envy. 

In conclusion, I find this noble psalm to be an important indicator of “good religion”. I am not simply thinking of how it stops us from falling into the trap of simple binaries which, pushed to extremes, get expressed as triumphalism or despair. I mean the sense of wholesomeness that runs through this psalm, a wisdom that is grounded in the tough realities of having lived a while and seen something of life. This psalmist is among the most theologically literate of the Psalter. He knows how disconcerting it is not only to watch people fall for the illusions of power and wealth, success and reputation as if they were the only goals worth craving, but worse, to envy them for it. Perhaps he was one of them himself once, who nearly sold his soul for the sake of being a “somebody” until he realized that being a “nobody”, one of God’s humble poor, is far better in God’s sight. Or maybe he was one of the envious who paradoxically mirror the envied in that they too are at risk of selling their souls through being devoured by this most destructive of the seven deadly sins. 

Whichever it is, the psalmist’s reflections have stabilized him. They have taught him wisdom. They have shown him where true value lies, yes, and his own happiness and reward as well. When he looked with a steady eye at the sculpted statues and marble tombs erected to the “somebodies” of this world, he saw through these whited sepulchres to the reality. Which is this: before God, we are all the same. Dives or Lazarus, we must all face our Maker and give account to him. When this mortal must put on immortality, we must all come to terms with our judgment and learn to receive his forgiveness. And if, like Gerontius in John Henry Newman’s poem and Edward Elgar’s oratorio, when we are face to face with the living God, and hear ourselves crying out “take me away!”, it is only so that we may gently be immersed in that healing, cleansing sea where sins are taken away and we are made ready to inherit the mansions in our Father’s House where the risen Christ has gone to prepare a place for us. 

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For meditation today, we might want to think about our mortality and how it focuses our minds and wills on the tasks of living well. We might want to reflect on our propensity for envy, and on its antidote, all that we need to be more thankful for. And in the light of this meditation on death, just what it means for us to be members of this Community of the Resurrection.