Holy Week at Southwark: Good Friday

I THE PRAETORIUM – PLACE OF HUMANITY
John 19.1-6

The Praetorium, Pontius Pilate’s headquarters in Jerusalem, is a place of truth in St John’s Gospel where the archetypal encounter between truth and falsehood is played out. Inside, Jesus speaks to Pilate about bearing witness to the truth, and Pilate asks contemptuously, “What is truth?” For St John, truth is at stake in his story of the crucifixion. In one way, truth itself is crucified in the passion, just as truth is always the first casualty of war. 

But precisely because it is truth that is on the cross, Good Friday is the day when truth is displayed before the world as never before: the truth about passion and pain and man’s inhumanity to man; the truth about this innocent victim who has proclaimed himself as the Way, the Truth and the Life; the truth about how his suffering turns out to be redemptive; and above all, the truth of Jesus’ reign that demonstrates to the whole creation how God so loved the world. 

“So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, ‘Behold the man!’” Ecce Homo, the subject of hundreds of paintings and sculptures from the middle ages to the present day. In the bombed-out ruins of Coventry Cathedral where I once worked, there is a colossal marble statue by the great twentieth century sculptor Jacob Epstein, showing Christ at this moment of the passion, being brought out of the Praetorium. “I wished to make in Ecce Homo a symbol of a man bound, crowned with thorns and facing with a relentless and overmastering gaze of pity and prescience on our unhappy world.” Epstein’s parents were Jewish refugees from Poland. When he carved the piece in the 1930s, he was not to know what would become of Polish Jewry during the Nazi holocaust. But it seems to be etched into Jesus’ face, this solidarity with every victim, this determination that suffering will not have the final word. 

“Behold the man!” To Pilate, he is no man in particular, any man who happens to get in the way, one of the many fools who try to disturb the elegant ordered world of Roman imperial politics. But St John capitalises the word “Man” as if to surround Jesus with a halo. Behold – not any man but every man, behold the embodiment of the family of man, behold the one in whom our humanity is displayed in its perfection. O yes, his is a broken humanity, a mortal humanity, a crucified humanity. Jesus knows where the scourging and the mocking and the purple robe and the crown of thorns will lead. When Pilate leads Jesus out to the crowd and announces Ecce homo, they both know that the his destiny is inevitable. 

But John’s portrait of the Man outside the Praetorium moves us, not only for its sadness but for its infinite nobility. St John wants us to recognise and respond to the dignity of Jesus in his passion, from his arrest in the garden right up to the moment of his death when he acclaims that he has finished the work he came to do. And on this solemn day, faith sees in the crucified Jesus the Man who was loyal to his Father’s will, the Man who lived for others, the Man who emptied himself and loved to the end. In him we see our own humanity exalted, literally “lifted up” so that we can see once again what it is that we are called to be and do in the world of today. And we glimpse how we can be part of God’s reconciling purpose for humankind for whom the cross stands for all time as the sign of grace and truth and everlasting love. 

II THE PAVEMENT – PLACE OF KINGSHIP
John 19.13-16

A pavement doesn’t sound a very evocative place. But like the Praetorium, its name Gabbatha stood out for St John because of what Pilate said there. The first time it had been Ecce Homo, “Behold the Man!” This time it’s another “behold!”, an even stronger one. Ecce Rex Vester, “Behold your King!” 

Does Pilate mean this ironically, no more believing him to be a king than the crowd? Or is he recalling those baffling conversations in the Praetorium where he had interrogated Jesus about his being a king, only to be told that “my kingdom is not from here”? What we can say is that each time, Pilate is speaking beyond the words he utters. “Behold the man!” – but not just any man. “Behold your king!” – for the purple robe and crown of thorns proclaim him to be a King indeed. And although Pilate cannot know it, and the crowd cannot know it, and even his faithful followers can no more than glimpse it, we know, because we have read this far in St John’s Gospel, that the cross where he will be lifted up is nothing less than his enthronement. 

There is a great mystery here. Crucifixion was an execution reserved for the worst criminals who even at the hour of their death were permitted no dignity, no final act of clemency. Yet in the spectacle of this condemned man who is led out to die, harried and mocked by soldiers and the crowd, John dares to claim that we are gazing upon royalty. The quiet nobility of his bearing, the dignity with which he takes the insults hurled at him, there is a presence about him that is nothing less than transfiguring. At Gabbatha and Golgotha, there is one kingship, one glory, one grace and truth.

In this scene at the Pavement, I seem to be witnessing a drama of universal significance. “Behold your King!” Whose king? I think St John is saying that he is King not only to his own community but to the entire human family. More than that, I seem to see him brought forth before the entire world, the created order of which he said, “all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” - this cosmos in its glory and splendour, its brokenness and potential, all that already is and all that is yet to be. He will bring all things to their Omega Point, the consummation at the end of time. And because the cross gathers up the fragments of the whole of life so that nothing is lost, it is the cross that sets forth his reign of triumph before the cosmos. 

Back to the Pavement. You would expect this King who is led out to his people to be greeted with acclaim, like he was on Palm Sunday. But a shadow has fallen across this crowd. When they see him they shout “Away with him! Crucify him!” “He came to his own, and his own people did not accept him”: in those words, the crowd speaks for a human race that has turned away from the light. “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.” Can it be that the light will go on shining in the darkness, and the darkness not overcome it? 

St John says to us on Good Friday: yes it can! Because the cross where Jesus reigns is an immortal throne built on grace and truth. The light that shines out from it never fades. The life it gives birth to never dies. He is lifted up in glory and draws all people to himself. As God’s redeemed crowd standing at the cross today, we acclaim him. “Love so amazing, so divine / demands my soul, my life, my all.” Behold our King!

III THE SKULL – PLACE OF DEATH
John 19.16b-19

If you had to invent a name for the place where death reigns, you couldn’t do better than Golgotha, “The Skull”. Those hard semitic consonants echo the hardness of this site outside the city wall, named not because of its shape so much as its fearsome reputation as a place of execution and death. St Matthew says that the cross was visible from a distance, the “green hill far away”. But green feels too gentle, too kind. You need to imagine it as a barren bleak place red with blood, strewn with bodies and bones and the machinery of torture and death, the detritus of Rome’s way of carrying out efficient capital sentences. On this hill there is no dignity and no mercy. 

On Good Friday we shouldn’t gloss over the particularities of death. One way of viewing the cross is to see it as an emblem of human suffering and pain, a sign that even the eternal God himself knows what it is to be cruelly used and to die. “Every man’s death diminishes me” wrote John Donne. We gaze upon this landscape of death that even Jesus was subject to, and are silenced, made to ponder our human condition, our own mortality, and all the other crucifixions we see acted out where inhumanity is a fact of life, and life itself is cheap. You look at Grünewald’s famous crucifixion painting in the hospital at Colmar, and you realise how for him, the cross is a universal image of suffering humanity designed to move all who saw it to pity. 

We ask what meaning can there be in suffering when want to believe in a God whose purposes are wise and good? I think suffering is simply a fact of the world as it is, the risk inherent in any creation worth worth living in. What we must do is to care about it, respond compassionately, try to alleviate it as best we can; and where it is the result of human cruelty or neglect, recognise its causes and put them right. On this holy day we gaze on Christ crucified and learn to be sensitised to this, to act in God’s name to help build a gentler, kinder world.

And to act in God’s name brings us close to what St John wants us to grasp in the passion account. In the Gospel, Jesus is revealed to us as God’s beloved Child, God’s own self in our midst, the sign of what God wants for the world he loves. On Good Friday, we see in Jesus’ suffering a vision of how God himself suffers on the cross, how God knows what it is to be abused, to be in pain, to die. Our crucified God is truly a god of compassion, suffering-with, because of his suffering-in the tortured body of his Son.

Golgotha is a profound paradox. For St Mark it’s a godforsaken place of absence. In the desolation and darkness, Jesus cries out in agony and despair “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” But for St John, it’s a hill of profound presence. He has no dark, no desolation, only a marvellous radiance, because God has been in this all along. Yes, the cross should disturb and disquiet us. Yet it’s also the source of all our consolation and hope because this is where God proclaims that he is love, and that he is with us in all our ordeals and suffering and pain. His is a heart that aches for his hurting world. Was there ever a more moving symbol of it in our time than the cross hanging so nobly in the burnt out shell of Nôtre Dame this week? It was glimpse of transfigured night.

At Golgotha we behold the Man. And we behold the King in whom we recognise – and bless - our God of pain and mercy, the Saviour of the World, our God of tender love.

                     IV THE CROSS – PLACE OF ACCOMPLISHMENT

                                                                     John 19.25b-30

So the Cross stands for the suffering of humanity and God’s involvement in it. But John tells us that God suffers not only with us but for us. For him it’s all contained in that last single word Jesus cries from the cross in his passion story: “It is accomplished!” We might imagine it was more natural to think of Good Friday as a day of despair or resignation as the other gospels do. St John stands out for his sense of completion, something accomplished, brought to its conclusion. “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work” Jesus had said. On the way to the cross he had prayed, “I glorified you by finishing the work you gave me to do”. Tetelestai! It is done.

Endings and beginnings seem to meet at Golgotha. The cross feels like a great full stop, a closure, an end. We hear in Jesus’ words an unmissable tone of satisfaction, fulfilment, even triumph. Perhaps that takes us by surprise? Not if we’ve been paying attention to the way St John has told his story. This end is not, for him, the petering out of a life that began so well. It is not the tragedy of a wasted career, the snuffing out of a guttering candle flame. Rather, it’s the great light that has never shone more steadily, more brightly than at Golgotha. This is Jesus’ moment of culmination. His life, said Jesus speaking of himself as the good shepherd, was not taken from him. He laid it down of his own accord.  On the cross he draws all humanity to himself. On the cross there is vindication of all that he came among us to be and to do. On the cross his work of love is accomplished. He is bound to the cross not by the nails but by love alone. He reigns over us as the king of love. This is where we recognise glory, full of grace and truth, where we understand what it is to say that he loves us to the end. 

If this is what he is in his incarnation and his resurrection, then this is what he has always been. In particular, this is what he is in his death at Golgotha. How can God suffer and die? we ask ourselves. Other faith communities find this the most baffling question Christianity poses. There are those for whom Good Friday is a real stumbling-block. A crucified man like Spartacus we can make sense of, even if he is innocent or even heroic. A crucified God is another matter altogether. I doubt we could ever reason it out. But faith takes us to a place where I believe we do see how love drives God to embrace the cross and in doing so, embrace his whole creation in a supreme act of self-giving, what Jesus calls laying down his life. If God is not crucified, there is no God as Christians understand him.

I imagine the cross as St John’s burning bush. It’s the place of transfiguration where we take off our shoes because we are on holy ground. We look into this sacred fire, and listen to the voice that speaks out of its midst. What do we see? The flame of love, its glory and its light blazing with divine passion for the world, for the human race, for each of us. And what do we hear? The word that says: I am what I am, all that it means to be God. Here at Golgotha are revealed his nature and his name. I am all that love means, he seems to say, all that meets our longings, hungers and hopes, than which nothing greater, nothing more glorious could ever be conceived, the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end of all light and life and love. 

“It is accomplished.” In my end is my beginning. We gaze on the burning heart of God and sense that the sun is rising on another world. There is a new creation. The day breaks and the shadows flee away. After this long and gloomy winter, spring has come at last. 

V THE GARDEN – PLACE OF REST
John 19.38-42

St John’s passion narrative begins and ends in a garden. It’s in a garden that Jesus is betrayed and arrested. It’s in a garden that his body is laid to rest. And at dawn on Easter Day, it will be in the garden that his tomb will be empty. The garden is the link between suffering and renewal, passion and resurrection, living and dying and living again.

We’ve reflected on Jesus’ cry from the cross tetelestai! “It is finished.” There is nothing left to do. He has loved the world to the end. It’s a magnificent resolution of the conflict that has run through St John’s story. But we need to be brought back to a quieter place where we can gather up the events of Holy Week. The body of Jesus needs to rest and so do we. The garden and its tomb is that necessary place. Here the friends of Jesus lay him. It was the day before Passover, the day of Preparation, like this year - Passover begins at sunset tonight, and we wish all our Jewish family and friends Chag Sameach, a joyful festival. And preparation is what this garden breathes – preparation for resurrection, for new life, for how all of history will be turned in a new direction because of Easter. 

But we must stay with St John in the garden. For it’s here that we glimpse how this finished work, this end, is also a beginning, a threshold across which a new world is glimpsed, a door held open to us that no-one can shut, a gateway to possibilities we only dared to dream about. It’s like the mythological garden God planted at the beginning of time and placed our first parents in it. Beyond the full stop of today’s “it is finished”, another sentence begins, opening up the promise of redemption, healing and reconciliation. That word paradise simply means “garden”. The Elysian Fields of mythology tapped into the longing for a paradise of peace and rest. Like singing “Somewhere over the rainbow”, an end to trouble and the fulfilment of our dreams. We mustn’t dismiss these primordial hungers of the human soul.

“In my end is my beginning” was Mary Queen of Scots’ motto, embroidered on a cloth before her execution. T. S Eliot plays with it in his poem East Coker. It starts out with a gloomy recognition of how things are, “In my beginning is my end”, echoing the Prayer Book funeral sentence, “In the midst of life we are in death”. Yet from there Eliot finds his way to a place of expectation: in the midst of death, we are in life. St John would recognise it that way round. If Good Friday is an end, then it brims with hope and possibility. Love is not eclipsed by suffering, nor its glory by death. Jesus’ death is both the end but not the end. So the grave has lost its victory and death has lost its sting. 

And this joining up of ends and beginnings makes the garden a tender place, a point of rest where we look back and look forward, and take in the cross and resurrection as Love’s work. One work because the Love that lays down its life is for that very reason unconquerable. So it is raised up in triumph. One day Love will reign across the universe, over every creature, over our broken world and in the heart of every human soul. Love is his meaning and will be to the end of time. We celebrate the Love that gives us back our humanity, heals our wounds, sustains us in life and comforts us in the face of death. 

This is my friend / in whose sweet praise / I all my days / could gladly spend. Our Friend indeed, our beginning and our end. This Friday of the Cross is a Good Friday. It is right to give our thanks and praise, and celebrate this solemn day. For Love has done its work.

Citizens of Nowhere, Citizens of Everywhere, Citizens of God - Address 1

The first of two Bible readings given at the Abbey of Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer to the annual Synod of the Archdeaconry of France in the Diocese of Europe

1 “My Kingdom is not from this world” John 18:28-40

You may wonder why in Eastertide, I’m taking you back into St John’s Passion Narrative. Perhaps to gain a different perspective on a text that we know so well. It seems to me that we tend to read it differently in this Easter season from the way we hear it in Passiontide. In Holy Week we are overwhelmed with the sense that we are caught up in the great drama of our redemption as Jesus prepares to face his hour, and, in St John’s words, to lay down his life for his friends. But now as we look back across the events of Good Friday and Easter, we hear Jesus speak not only as the crucified Son of Man, but as the Lord who is raised from the dead. In the lectionaries, among the Gospel readings in Eastertide are those that take us back to some of Jesus’ sayings that speak about his coming death: the Good Shepherd for example, and the discourses of the upper room on the night he was betrayed. We hear these passages transfigured by the light of Easter: not only as the one who laid down his life for his friends, but as the risen Christ who is among us today and who reigns in love over us. And that is true also of what he says to Pilate about his kingship, that it is “not from here”. In Eastertide we hear those words again, but now glowing with resurrection life and glory, and we recognise them afresh as the profoundest truth there is.

Throughout the Gospel, John takes pains to highlight the sayings of Jesus. In these Bible readings I want to look at two of them that occur in the Passion story, in Jesus’s examination by Pontius Pilate. First, “my kingdom is not from this world” and the conversation about truth that surrounds it; and tomorrow, “You would have no power over me, unless it had been given you from above”. These texts about truth and power take us straight to the heart of Jesus’ trial and sentencing. But more than that, I think they are crucial to the way John understands who Jesus is and why he has come into the world. They speak of universal realities about God, the world and human society, and how truth and power are central to the way we understand divine and human citizenship and belonging.

It’s citizenship and belonging that has given me my cue in these Bible readings. We are between times in the Brexit process. You will feel that with special sharpness, though maybe not less than almost half of us in Britain, the 48% for whom Brexit is the biggest political disaster to have happened to our country in our lifetimes. (I may as well put my cards on the table at the outset.) In the UK, the talk nowadays, with less than a year to go, is about the economy, trade, security and immigration. But for us who treasure the words European Union on our passports, it’s the loss of EU citizenship that hurts most. I don’t mean only the privileges of our being part of this great continental family. I mean the very idea itself, so rich in all that it suggests about our history, our identities, our loyalties, our belonging, our obligations, our aspirations and our sense of common purpose. I know that for those of you who are resident in an overseas EU country without having become its nationals, all this will have implications that even now are not clearly understood. 

My title, Citizens of Nowhere, Citizens of Everywhere, Citizens of God is a direct allusion to Mrs May famously saying, a propos of the Referendum, “If you are a citizen of everywhere, then you are a citizen of nowhere”. I’ve argued on my blog that this is a fundamental misreading of citizenship which always embraces multiple concentric circles of belonging. But I don’t want to be overtly political about it at this synod. What I want to do is to reflect in a narrative way on the light St John sheds on this vital concept. I think he would say that citizenship can only properly be understood in human terms when we understand it in terms of the divine. In other words, it’s our citizenship of God’s kingdom that enables us to understand what it means to be citizens of a human society like a city, a nation, a family of peoples like the EU, or of the world itself. What does John say about this? I believe it is that our primary obligations are as citizens of God and citizens of the world, that is to say, those two kinds of citizenship that directly concern our identity as human beings whose fundamental loyalties are to God and, because of this, to humanity. Everything else must be read in the light of these.

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In St John’s passion narrative, the encounter between Jesus and Pilate occupies more than one third of the story.  In Mark’s much longer account, Pilate features only in about one eighth; in Luke, about one fifth.  Why all this interest on the part of the Fourth Gospel?  Most scholars argue that like Luke, John wanted to exonerate Pilate as far as possible from complicity in the crucifixion.  For him, it was the Jewish authorities who bore most of the blame in delivering Jesus to the Romans to be sentenced to death. We’ll come back to that tomorrow. No doubt there was an apologetic value in demonstrating, towards the end of the 1^st century at a time of persecution that Rome had nothing to fear from Christianity, and that although they worshipped Jesus as king, Christians did not see their loyalty to him as a threat to their obligations as Roman subjects.  

Yet this does not do justice to the significance John attaches to Pilate. As writers and artists have recognised, John’s depiction of Christ before Pilate is one of the classic encounters of all time.  It isn’t simply that Pilate acts as a foil for the innocence and majesty of Jesus (though he does).  It’s that the praetorium is an archetypal place for St John.  It represents what is universally true about the world in which Christians bear witness.  In that place, two world orders collide: two kingdoms, two kinds of citizenship.  Here human power comes face to face with the rule of God himself.  

To anticipate, let me summarise what I think John is telling us about Pilate.  He is the man who comes face to face with truth.  But it proves too much for him, and he walks away from it.  He may have made half-hearted attempts to protest Jesus’ innocence, but his failure to release him only compounds his guilt.  One commentator, David Rensberger, sums him up neatly.

Certainly it would be possible in John for a character to proclaim Jesus’ innocence without himself believing in it or caring about it…. He is undeniably hostile to “the Jews” but that does not make him friendly to Jesus, for whose innocence he is not really concerned.  Rather, his aim is to humiliate “the Jews” and to ridicule their national hopes by means of Jesus’ death ....  He is callous and relentless, indifferent to Jesus and to truth, and contemptuous of the hope of Israel that Jesus both fulfils and transcends.

The Pilate episodes are constructed with great skill.  They take place both inside and outside the praetorium, Pilate’s temporary home when events required him to be in Jerusalem such as during Passover with its risks of turbulence and trouble.  Outside, publicly, Pilate is the governor or prefect of Judaea, the representative of imperial Rome.  His job is to uphold the honour of Rome, but circumstances also demand trying to negotiate with the crowd, as far as he can, to keep the peace.  Inside, the narrative takes us where the crowd cannot come.  We glimpse Pilate the man and overhear a conversation that lays bare his character.  We find that whereas we had thought it was Jesus who is on trial, in fact the man on trial is not Jesus at all, but Pilate.  It’s Pilate’s passion narrative too. 

John has an intriguing aside near the beginning of the gospel.  He says that Jesus “knew all people and needed no-one to testify about anyone, for he himself knew what was in everyone” (2.24-25). In the praetorium, John draws the contrast between the man who “knows” and the man who is ignorant, or perhaps we should say, between the man who knows with insight, and the one whose knowing is merely worldly-wise and clever.   The one reads human life with depth, taking in its subtlety and complexity. The other reads only the surface of the human text, never asking the deeper question, never probing to the heart of the matter.  Even his opening question, “are you the king of the Jews?” is not his own, as Jesus shrewdly observes. “Did you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”  If it had come from the heart of a seeker-after-truth, the rest of the story might have been different. 

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The issue of Jesus’ kingship is a crucial one (literally, cross-shaped) in all the gospels, but especially in the Fourth. When St John uses the word king of Jesus he does it aware of the risks he runs: of all the titles of Jesus, it’s the one most susceptible to misunderstanding and misuse.  At the outset, Nathaniel the ‘Israelite without guile’ is the first to recognise Jesus as a man like no other: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” Jesus’ response to this heart-warming outburst of faith is to encourage Nathaniel not to make too much of it: ‘do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree?  You will see greater things than these’ (1.49-50).  And it soon becomes clear that this slippery word sets up all kinds of misleading expectations.  It only takes a sign like the feeding of the crowd for them to decide to “take him by force and make him king” (6.15), at which point Jesus makes his escape

Jesus’ way of handling kingship language is reserved and understated.  He deliberately distances himself from popular acclaim as if to say: you have your ideas about what kingship means; but I will show you a more excellent way. So he contrasts the shepherd-kings of Israel and Judah who abused and betrayed their trust with the Good Shepherd who loves the sheep and lays down his life for them. The messianic ruler, entering his city on a donkey to palm branches and shouts of hosanna turns out to be the Teacher and Lord who washes feet.  And when Pilate says to him, “so you are a king then?” he replies along the lines of, ‘this is your word, not mine.  But if this is the language you insist on using, I had better explain carefully what it does and doesn’t mean’.  

What Jesus says to Pilate offers the most comprehensive account of his kingship anywhere in the gospels.  “My kingdom is not from this world” he begins.  Basileia, such a hallmark of Jesus’ teaching in the other three gospels, only occurs in one other place in St John.  But it’s a strikingly similar occurrence.  There Jesus tells Nicodemus that only by being born “from above” can anyone see or enter the kingdom of God (3.3, 5).  The contrast is between being born of the “flesh”, by natural means, and being born “from above”, anōthen, that is, born of the Spirit as the mysterious gift of God.  And this recalls what John’s prologue: those who have power to become children of God are born “not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man” but of God himself.  

Pilate does not know any of this, of course.  But we readers need to carry the memory of these key phrases through the Passion Narrative as we read it.  So it’s clear to us that a complete contrast is being drawn between kingship as a human institution and the utterly different character of God’s rule.  It’s not a matter of degree but of kind.  There is an absolute gulf between the values Pilate represents and those that Jesus stands for.  Jesus’ kingship comes from a source invisible to mortals.  It can’t be got except as the gift of God.  And even when it’s given, it can’t be caught and institutionalised.  It is stronger than any earthly strength.  But not everyone can see it.  The test for Pilate is going to be, will he be one of them?  

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Jesus begins by identifying what it is not, contrasting it with the kind of rule Pilate knows about, the familiar Roman world of power politics and military might.  Then he explains what it is, how his destiny as a king is not about coersive force but about ‘truth’.  

The evidence for what his kingship is not, says Jesus, is the facts of his arrest.  “If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.”  Of course, one of his followers did precisely that and brandished a sword, only to be rebuked for not grasping the true nature of the conflict.  This is the same as saying that he had not grasped the true nature of discipleship. In his recent perceptive book Not in God’s Name, the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks calls this altruistic violence. He means the kind of violence people of faith or conscience frequently resort to, not because it’s in their personal interests but because it’s in support of a belief that commands their loyalty. He is thinking of terrorists, for instance, whose understanding of their religious faith leads them to commit unspeakable acts of violence because their god seems to require it. 

Peace-loving Christians like us find it strange to realise that other faith traditions have not only justified violent action but commended it.  Of course in our day, only the radicalised minority within Islam take the exhortations to holy warfare literally - with what destructive outcomes we know only too well.  Jihad literally means “struggle”, but to most Muslims this image stands for the combat between good and evil fought in the hearts and minds of the faithful, an idea that is familiar enough from the Jewish and Christian traditions.  

But we need to see ourselves as others see us.  Large tracts of the Hebrew Bible read in Christian public worship tell of the wars between Israel and her enemies.  There are commands to deal ruthlessly with the foe, shed blood without pity, even place them under sacred ban which entailed destroying every last man, woman, child and living thing as a sign of their being “devoted” to Yahweh.  Some of the prayers in the psalms contain expressions of such violence that many people refuse to recite them in public worship.  “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” (Psalm 137.9).  Parts of the New Testament draw on the imagery of battle and bloodshed to describe the apocalyptic future and final judgment.  Sophisticated modern readers of the Bible have strategies for dealing with these problem passages that don’t include excising them.  I am simply saying that at face value, the accusation of living by the sword just as easily be made against strata within Judaism and Christianity as well. 

Until last year, we owned a small house in Vézelay in Burgundy. It’s a world heritage site, a lovely medieval cité perched on a hill. There is not a building out of place. The limestone glows like Jerusalem the golden. At the top of the colline éternelle as pilgrims used to call it stands the Romanesque Basilica of the Madeleine, one of the great churches of France. We used to think of it as a Gallic version of Durham which, as everybody knows, is the best Cathedral on planet earth as Bill Bryson put it. But this place has a bloody history. In 1146, St Bernard of Clairvaux came here to drum up support for the second Crusade.  His message was stark: the Christian lands in the middle east were at risk of tumbling to Islam, and must be defended by force.  That project was a disaster.  Rivers of blood flowed across the near east.  An early outcome was that Jerusalem was overrun by Islam under Saladin.  The site where Bernard preached is marked by a big wooden cross on the hillside.  It’s a peaceful place. But to walk here is to be reminded of what it represents: bloodshed on a colossal scale, endemic mistrust not to say hatred between Christians and Muslims which continues to this day, the flawed vision of “crusade” with its assumption that the cross, its shape already suggestive of a spear could be turned into a physical weapon to be used against fellow human beings. We are still living in the backwash of this terrible history.  If we find the rhetoric of radical Islam frightening, our crusading Christian forebears helped to shape it.

With hindsight, how prescient the words of Jesus seem!  It’s as if he has foreseen the corrupting effects of power on the Christian gospel, the distortions the use of force always introduces in the service of divine ends.  To live by the sword is to die by it.  For the root issue is not simply the destruction and waste of human life – that is the symptom. In an analysis of violence, the French writer Jacques Ellul identifies the disease itself.  “There is an unbreakable link between violence and hatred.  Far too often intellectuals, especially, imagine that there is a sort of pure, bloodless violence….like Robespierre, who dispassionately ordered executions.  We must understand that, on the contrary, hatred is the motivator of violence.” But hatred often disguises itself by being carried vicariously, on behalf of others. The theologian Renee Girard has shown how the scapegoating and exclusion of a symbolic member of the group enables it to feel safe by projecting its unconscious hatred and fear on to the banished outsider. This was Jonathan Sacks’ point in the book I mentioned earlier. It’s a key way in which we need to read the passion of Jesus.

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“If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over.” What does it mean, then, not to “fight” but to live as citizens of this kingdom that is “not from here”?  This is what Jesus goes on to explain to Pilate. “For this was I born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

“Truth”, like “life”, “light”, “glory” and “love” is one St John’s big words.  And like them, it is really a predicate of Jesus rather than some independent quality: he is life, light and love; he is truth.  In the upper room, in one of the great I AM sayings, Jesus has spoken of himself as “the way, the truth and the life” (14.6).  Truth is rooted in his own person, it is what he himself embodies. As the Word made flesh, he is the eternal wisdom of God made visible in an historical human being. In him we gaze upon “grace and truth” (1.14) which is nothing less than the face of God himself.  To know the truth and be set free by it is Jesus’ gift to his disciples.  He prays for them before the passion, “sanctify them in the truth: your word is truth” (17.17).  After his departure, truth will continue to sustain them through “the Spirit of truth” who will lead and guide them into all the truth (16.13).  

In an important passage earlier in the Gospel, there is an extended debate about truth.  It’s part of the long dispute between Jesus and the Jewish leaders that we noticed in the first chapter, that culminates in the saying that so shocked the authorities that they tried to stone him: “Before Abraham was, I am”.  What leads up to this claim and their reaction to it is his accusation that “you are from your father the devil…. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.  When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.  But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me…. Whoever is from God hears the words of God.  The reason you do not hear them is that you are not from God.” (8.44-47)  

Jesus draws an absolute contrast here.  It is much more than the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie.  He is pointing to the fundamental principles of truth and falsehood on which all life is ultimately based: “the” truth and “the” lie. as the foundations of all existence.  It isn’t easy to reduce such a fundamental concept to more basic terms: “the” truth is the reality of God himself, and by extension, the knowledge him as Jesus has revealed it. It’s this truth-as-knowledge that sets us free (8.32) and enlightens us (3.21).  To refuse it is to be in darkness where life and love don’t reach.  This is the place Judas occupies as the man who goes out into the night, as we’ll see tomorrow.  It’s the same in the praetorium.  Jesus says to Pilate, “everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice”.  That is a direct echo of what he has said earlier to the Jewish leaders.  Pilate is no better than they, for he is no more willing than they are to listen to him.  

Truth, in the way Jesus means it, scrutinises how societies and individuals see themselves, often uncomfortably.  It’s a judgment upon each of us as persons, and all of us collectively.  This undoubtedly has a political and social dimension.  And while Jesus isn’t principally concerned in the praetorium with matters of state, this is far from saying that truth is uninterested in these things.  Truth has implications for all that belongs to human empire: the governance of nations, the leadership of society, the management of institutions and the nature of citizenship. Much of our public discourse about the media centres on “fake news”, on how we live in a “post-truth” world. During the EU Referendum, “truth” was an early victim of casual rhetoric on the side of the Brexit bus. And yet our leaders ought to know better. People who hold public office nowadays usually have to sign up to certain standards.  Among the ‘Seven Principles of Public Life’, the Nolan Principles that are commended as good practice for leadership, no fewer than five are about “truth” in some form or other: integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, and honesty. Study of them reveals how far they draw on Christian ethical thought, both personal and social. 

Jesus has come to testify to the truth, he says. This is why his followers must not be seduced by the exercise of power and fighting flesh-and-blood battles: their vocation is to imitate him.  The character of the church is being defined here.  For John, truth is as much an identifying mark of the church as love.  We could say that the church is called to be “aligned” to truth just as iron filings align themselves to a magnetic field.  For the church not to be aligned to truth would be to forfeit its right to be identified with Jesus.  And that would be to fall into the same state as those whom Jesus accuses of being “of the devil”.  This is a very tough judgment.  But it isn’t meant as a rhetorical statement.  It’s what John himself believes. 

It would take a Bonhoeffer to explore what life together as a “community of truth”would look like.  Truth-telling, in the sense of open, honest unafraid relationships, is part of being “aligned” to truth, the way of living that has been exemplified by Jesus and which he taught his followers to imitate.  But for John it goes deeper even than that. “Truth-telling” is an outcome of loving the truth for its own sake, believing that truth is something to stake one’s life on, in Kierkegaard’s great words, “the truth for which someone will live and die”.

There is an analogy here with psychotherapy.  The therapist’s aim is to help people uncover the truth about themselves and live creatively with it.  One practitioner, Irving Yalom, writes about his work in language that has clear theological echoes. “Good therapy”, he says “is at bottom a truth-seeking venture.  My quarry...is illusion.  I war against magic.  I believe that though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ulti­mately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit”. As a description of how the Johannine church needs to think about itself, it could not be bettered.  The “lie” in St John means precisely the illusions, fantasies, falsehoods and fools’ paradises that obscure the light and keep us from even wanting it let alone finding it. John is clear about the extent to which we are susceptible to the lie: “people loved darkness rather than light” he says (3.19).  

If the church’s mission is to have lasting impact, truth-seeking, banishing illusion,  must always be at the core of its endeavour.  This of course is easy to say and much harder to do – harder, that is, if we see truth as going beyond simply making ‘true’ statements about orthodox faith or biblical morality.  It’s not disparaging theological and moral clarity to say that this cannot be all Jesus means by bearing ‘witness to the truth’.  Perhaps there is a suspicion among our contemporaries, even among ourselves, that the church’s witness lacks passion, doesn’t always carry the conviction that comes from standing like Athanasius contra mundum. Truth-seeking is costly and difficult.  Martyria is the Greek word for witness.  It doesn’t by itself mean death for the sake of religion or principle. But there is a dying to oneself involved in truth-seeking, in being a citizen of God’s kingdom.  Truth is hard-won; to bear witness to it entails sacrifice. We don’t need reminding that the Jesus who speaks of truth is on his way to the cross. 

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This is light years away from anything Pontius Pilate knows or cares about. Truth that is hard-won doesn’t register on Pilate’s radar. But now the atmosphere in the praetorium takes on an edgy, unstable aspect.  The truth stands before him and over him, but he will not allow his polished scepticism to see it. Or if, for a moment, a door was unlatched somewhere in his mind, and he dared to entertain the thought that maybe this man before him deserved to be taken seriously, then time is not on his side. Outside, the crowd is still baying for blood. The moment is past, the door slams shut. The cognitive dissonance is too painful. Stick to the simple binary. How unlike the long line of seekers-after-truth in John’s Gospel, like Nicodemus and the Woman of Samaria, and the man born blind, and Mary, Martha and Lazarus, and Mary Magdalen, and the Beloved Disciple and Thomas. Some of them are nearer to finding it than others, but all of them are on the way to a recognition scene because all of them are open to truth. 

Pilate too could have joined this company.  But he doesn’t wait for his question to be answered.  What if he had?  Would he have changed his mind? That has to be our question, too, as we are confronted by the majesty of Jesus who is the embodiment of the truth at the heart of all life.  If we are serious about our citizenship of this kingdom not from this world, then we must purify our vision of the truth.  For the king who embodies it has only one throne where he summons us to accept his just and gentle rule.  His regalia of a crown of thorns and purple robe show us where his throne can be found.

The cross is where this kingdom “not from here” is finally revealed. There is, indeed, a collision of empires here. But it is more than the meeting of the power of force with the power of love. It is the verdict of truth on all falsehood and fantasy.  “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out”.  And “those who belong to the truth”, who want to hear the voice of their king, know where to go and listen.  This is what it means to be citizens of God, and therefore, citizens of everywhere, a people who inherit the earth because they understand how all human loyalties and commitments are subject to God’s just and gentle rule. Only this kingdom “not from this world” makes ultimate claims upon us. All other loyalties are provisional. In whatever way we understand our human citizenship, it can never make absolute demands of us. No human institution, including our nation, can usurp God’s authority. We certainly can’t “vow to thee my country all earthly things above” unless we’ve first pledged our ultimate loyalty to that “other country” of verse 2 of that much-loved but problematic hymn, that other country whose “ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace”. Perhaps we can go even further. Could it be that we must be willing in our hearts to become citizens of nowhere if we truly desire to embrace God’s citizenship, and so inherit our citizenship of everywhere? Is this an aspect of what John means about the grain needing to fall into the earth and die? I’m saying that all human relationships, identity and belonging are subject to the scrutiny and judgment of God. It’s a hard saying, but in the end, I think, a merciful one.

When Archbishop Michael Ramsey used to arrive at Westminster Abbey on state occasions, the formalities required him to acknowledge any royalty who were present before taking his seat. But he would always reverence the high altar before turning to the Sovereign. He was heard to mutter under his breath, “God first” as he bowed his head. Every human citizenship, every allegiance, every loyalty, if it is based on integrity and truth, puts God first. We all need to ask Pilate’s question for ourselves and for our nations and communities, “What is truth?” But unlike Pilate, we need to wait for the answer. 

Ministry for the Long Haul 1: Inhabiting the Stories of our Communities and Churches

When your Bishop invited me to speak to you about “Ministry for the Long Haul”, I asked him why he thought I might be at all qualified to do this. It’s true that I am a Londoner, though not from the Stepney Area (even if my son now has a flat in Bethnal Green, so I suppose that gives me a demonstrable connection). Most of my ministry has been in cathedrals, and although I have been an incumbent too, it was in a market town in the far north of England, nothing like the densely urban multicultural sector of London that you minister in. He replied, “well, you’ve completed the long haul, so share some of your experience about making that journey. It’s the human and spiritual insights we are looking for”. I couldn’t argue with that, and indeed today marks the first anniversary of my retirement. So here I am. 

I was ordained in my mid-20s. At that age, you believe you could do anything. But after the first decade and beyond, ministry can feel like a long haul as you look forward and, as I am doing now, back. And as the age of retirement stretches ever further our working lifetimes, it is getting longer than ever, though our forebears would have smiled at the idea that you ever “retire” from the cure of souls. But I have a hunch that for reasons we are familiar with, the sheer intensity of the demands of ministry is greater than it used to be for most clergy. Athletes know that the long haul calls for stamina and survival skills as well as fitness, the hunger to do well and the will to stay the course. That image is familiar to us from the New Testament. That image is about discipleship, not ministry specifically, but that itself tells us something obvious about public ministry, that we must never divorce it from our fundamental identity and vocation given to us in baptism. As disciples it’s our lifelong vocation to live in Jesus Christ, to become like him, and therefore – an important point this – to become more fully human, the men and women God made us to be. And that helps set our vocation as the ordained alongside every other vocation and human endeavour: whoever we are and whatever we do, our purpose is always to be good human beings and good disciples, faithful unto death. Life itself, if we are spared, is a long haul. 

It sounds like a strategy for survival, getting to the finishing line in one piece. That’s how I initially heard the Bishop’s suggested title. And I don’t deny that sometimes, maybe often – we are in survival mode in ministry. We have to be when crises and challenges threaten to overwhelm us and we wonder if are ever going to live to tell the tale. The set texts in these situations are the Psalm laments, the Book of Jeremiah and the Passion Narrative, especially Jesus in Gethsemane. 

But as I thought about it, I realised that this phrase "the long haul" was actually inviting us into a deeper kind of exploration. As I looked back at my farewell preached exactly a year ago today, it began to dawn on me. What I mean is this: that ministry for the long haul has to have shape, design, a sense of purposefulness and direction. I’m not going to reduce it to the corporate language of objectives and goals because that somehow makes ministry a mere function or set of tasks within an organisation. It’s not that I’m denying that ministry often comes down to “jobs”: every vocation is “work” in both a profound and an everyday sense, and activity needs to be purposeful if it is to be effective. In St John’s Gospel, to do the “work” of God is the same as doing the “will” of God. There is a rich theology of vocation there. Because of this, I believe it’s fundamental to a ministry that has depth, that is lasting in its effects and that is fulfilling for us who practise it, that it needs to have an architecture. 

Someone said that we should all become “artists of our own lives”. To which of course a person of faith adds the rider “under God”. To live wisely is, I think, to enter into this process of artistry and design more consciously as literally a “once-in-a-lifetime” collaboration with God as we become the people he meant us to be. I see this as an aspect of being created in God’s image. So if this is true of human life, it must also be true of vocation, of every ministry we exercise, and of public ministry in particular. My experience is that it’s at those times when I’ve been most aware of this that I’ve been happiest, because most fulfilled in what I have been and done as a priest – in the sense of doing the work of God. Though I also know from my experience how God can work through us in our dark times when, perhaps, the light more easily breaks through precisely because we are broken vessels.

But before I say more about this, let me sound a caveat. I can’t do better than quote from a book by Ruth Burrows, To Believe in Jesus. “God has given each of us the task of fashioning a beautiful vase for him which we must carry up the mountain in order to place in his hands. This vase represents everything we can do to please God, our good works, our prayers, our efforts to grow to maturity; all this God values most highly. Into the making of this vase, then, we put all we have, our whole self. It is for God we are fashioning it, we tell ourselves. When it is finished we begin our journey up the mountain. When we reach the top… it isn’t beautiful anymore. There it is in our hands, a tawdry, common pot… the vase into which we had put our all. A deep instinct is telling us that if we want God we have to go over the other side of the mountain… We can’t go down with anything in our hands; we must drop the vase, still precious though so disappointing. Beautiful or not, we cannot take it with us, we must go to God with nothing in our hands. Our spiritual achievement is our most precious treasure. It has to go.” Beware of Pelagianism!

Nevertheless, whether we have completed many decades of ordained ministry or are just setting out, God invites us into this project of collaboration. So how do we become artists of our own ministry, set about designing ministry for the long haul? Ministry, as we all know, has its outward and inward facing aspects. Spiritual, emotional and intellectual equilibrium are vital for our good health as clergy, and this requires us to pay attention to both the inward and outward if we are going to sustain ministry over many decades. Tomorrow I want to say something about inwardness and attitude. Let me today explore this outward-facing aspect of the long haul.

At my farewell service in Durham Cathedral, I preached from the feeding of the crowd in St John’s Gospel, “gather up the fragments so that nothing is lost”. (You can read it on this blog site at 27 September 2015). I linked it with a beautiful line from a poem by Edith Sitwell, “Nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest”. It was harvest time, and the week of the Jewish Festival of Sukkot, Booths or Tabernacles which, says St John was precisely the season Jesus performed his great sign. So I looked back over 40 years of ministry and, so to speak, gathered some of the fragments of those four decades, their harvest. They seemed to me to echo the themes of Sukkot as the great pilgrim feast looked back over the 40 years of Israel’s desert journey from the standpoint of being settled in their own land.

Here, I said, is what has mattered to me over the long haul. “Thankfulness to God because to praise Almighty God, to practise gratitude, eucharistia, is the first principle of religion and the foundation of all it means to be human. Dependence on God because it is as we turn back to him and acknowledge his reign over us that we understand how he made us for himself and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in him. Living close to the earth because reverence for life, treating the world with courtesy and charity is to discover our true place in God’s creation. Remembering where we came from because the story of the great acts of God is the foundation of all Christian life, mission and the pursuit of truth and justice. And solidarity with the poor and needy such as the desperate and voiceless, the refugees and asylum-seekers, because as the sanctuary knocker on the Cathedral door announces, God’s household is a place of refuge, safety and care.”

Those five marks of the long haul belonged to a celebration of a journey. Israel’s wilderness journey to the land they believed was promised was celebrated in all three great pilgrim feasts. It called a community to reflect on its past story, inhabit it in the present in a dramatic ritual way, and allow it to bring expectation and hope to the life of faith and human experience. For us as Christians, it’s precisely the same dynamic that we are familiar with in the eucharist as the three tenses of past, present and future coalesce in a single rite. For the eucharist is a liturgy, the great liturgy in which we act out what we have been as a people, what we are now, and what we shall become in God’s time. Christian faith is to embrace the story of a redeemed community and own it personally in baptism by confessing that we belong, we pin our destiny to that of God’s people, we acknowledge its Lord as ours. “This is our story. This is our song.”

Let’s ask what this means for us as we undertake the journey of ministry purposefully and give it shape. For me in parish ministry, it was eye opening to attend a week’s workshops at the Grubb Institute and learn the distinction between person and public role. Never despise the transforming potential of good training! For all I know, this person-role distinction is obvious to all of you. But what made the difference for me was how it helped made sense of what a parish priest is there to do. I was learning how, as a priest, you are expected by many people to have special knowledge of divine mysteries, a hot line to God, and that at the very least I would be competent to say something intelligible in the face of human suffering and pain, whether brought about by natural disaster, human wickedness, or most often, in the personal lives of parishioners through serious illness or pain, the break-up of an intimate relationship, or bereavement.

My role in these situations, I began to grasp, was to be an interpreter of peoples’ stories. It was my calling to attempt to bring insight to shed light on human experience by looking at it in the light of faith, relating it to the big story of God’s coming among us in Jesus Christ. (I tried to write something about this drawing on the wisdom writings of the Old Testament in my book Wisdom and Ministry.) So when people speak about clergy being “religious professionals”, this is one aspect of what they are wanting to express. You could put it this way. As “professionals” (and I’m aware what questions the use of that word begs), we are embedded in a story that it’s our call to be telling. We are its public representatives, its spokespeople, its official guardians. When at our ordination we are solemnly handed the holy scriptures and told to “take authority”, this is the role that is being conferred on us. We belong, in the great image of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, to the House of the Interpreter. 

But the other side of this is to do with the stories of the communities we serve, and the human lives that constitute them. A good pastoral theology and practice requires us to be as embedded in these stories as we are in the church’s story that we rehearse in tell and re-tell in scripture and sacrament. And here is where I think we must be especially intentional as we take on the public role of interpreter in our parish. It’s true that people are the same in one place as another – human life is what it is in all its vicissitudes. But in another sense it’s not true. We are constructed by the communities we live in, shaped for better or worse by the concentric circles of our belonging in family, neighbourhood, town, city, region, nation and continent. There is a grain in the timber of human life, and if we don’t recognise it, we shall get the story wrong in important ways. So paying attention to the local story calls for careful eyes and ears and a good deal of discernment if we are to understand the places in which we work.

 

As a parish priest in the north, I had so much to learn about all this. And although I have learned a great deal in my ministry subsequently, I am quite clear that it was in my first incumbency that I learned most. In my thirties, suddenly finding myself in a public leadership role in a parish in a strange part of the world, the decades of ordained life ahead felt like a very long haul indeed. At times I found myself very low indeed and wondered how I would ever survive a lifetime in ministry. I can’t altogether explain it, though my uncomfortable discovery that as a priest you are constantly in the public eye and subject to scrutiny was near the heart of it. My difficulty in handling conflict and disappointment were also part of it. So was my fear of failure – not only because self-interest made me need to succeed but also for the better reason of not wanting to fail people, the church, the parish. I needed to develop healthier habits of mind and emotion. I needed to acquire resilience, learn that stamina comes into things.

You’re wondering how it is that I’m still here. There are a number of reasons. The sustaining love of God is at the heart of it of course. It found expression as it always does in many ways, some outward, some inward. I’ll say more about inwardness on the long haul tomorrow. I recall some of the books I read then that helped turn my attitude around from self-absorption to living more generously. Among them were the writings of Alan Ecclestone, especially A Staircase for Silence. It wasn’t just the content but the fact that it had been written by someone who had been a parish priest in a tough urban parish in the east end of Sheffield, a place I was to get to know well a decade later. He only started writing in retirement, not just (he said) because of the relentless demands of parish ministry but because he believed he would only have something to say as a spiritual or theological writer after a lifetime’s immersion in the agony and ecstasy of real life in the church and the world. 

I also remember how the poetry of R. S. Thomas came to my rescue, one of the greatest of twentieth century religious poets. Again, his profound insights were forged (I use that fiery analogy deliberately) in the tough setting of parish ministry in rural Wales. In one poem, he writes of his recalcitrant parishioners, “there is no loving such, only a willed gentleness”. How well he knew himself, and me too! How I longed to move beyond “willed gentleness” to love freely, sacrificially, given, like God’s. But one of the many things I have learned in ministry is that sometimes, maybe often, “willed gentleness” is all we are capable of. Like “good enough parenting” to quote Winnicott’s famous phrase, it may not be all that we aspire to, but rather than flail our poor selves out of guilt, shame and the sense of failure that so easily afflicts us, it is not only sufficient to be good and wholesome, but it is God-given too. Maybe someone can draw out of the gospels how Jesus practised willed gentleness against the temptation to be angry or to judge. Perhaps this turns out to be true love that is demonstrated in a way that is sustainable and practical. Remember that in the synoptic gospels, Jesus is only once said to have “loved” anyone, and that was the rich young ruler after whom the Lord looked with sorrow because the cost of discipleship was too high.

But what I learned from both Alan Ecclestone and R. S. Thomas was reinforced by a highly skilled mentor I was lucky enough to find. At this demanding and at times dark time, he was shrewd enough to see through my confusion and despondency and point me towards a healthier approach to ministry. And let me say before I go any further how essential I’ve found it to be to find the best possible accompaniers and guides in public ministry. If ever there is a fatal arrogance in people in public life, it is to think that they have to lead on their own. Nowadays, most of us take spiritual direction, mentoring, coaching and work consultancy for granted and gratefully avail ourselves of them, thanks to our bishops and dioceses who set aside funds to support us and encourage us to take the time we need to make sure we get the best help we can. I am quite clear that for my long haul as theological teacher, parish priest, cathedral canon and dean, these fellow-travellers were essential to my learning, my insight and my flourishing. And never more so than in the parish.

That particular mentor asked me in effect (and over many months) to do three things. The first was to try to understand what the priest symbolises and represents both in and to a local community. The second was to immerse myself in that community’s story, get to know it intimately, become part of it myself. The third was, in the light of the first two, to try to frame my own ministry intelligently and purposefully, make of it something that was not only of real and lasting value but lovely in its own right. They are of course all aspects of the same thing, but it was helpful at the time to see them as distinct. And I can honestly say that learning to reconfigure my public role in the light of these prompts and nudges was life-changing. They meant I could look back and see those few years as hugely formative – and be proud of the big steps forward that the parish achieved in that time. 

Let me take them in turn.

First, what the priest symbolises and represents. Thomas Mann said: “to live symbolically spells true freedom”. The Greek word means “to throw together”, to lay things alongside each other from which the word evolves into one standing for the other. It’s a rich idea theologically and psychologically and there is a vast literature devoted to it. But we have an intuitive idea about how a symbol opens up doors of perception in our minds and imaginations giving us access to meanings that are beyond the capacity of rational speech. 

We clergy inhabit a world of symbols all the time. We understand, because it is our job, how symbol and sacrament, ceremony and ritual belong to the Christian story we tell and clothe it with flesh and blood, incarnate it in a material and tangible way. This is especially true in the archetypal Christians sacraments of baptism and eucharist. What is less familiar is to think of ourselves in this way, in our ordained roles as deacons, priests and bishops. Now, a symbol (as opposed to a mere sign) is capable of exerting great power. A national flag, a football trophy, a wedding ring, a gift that carries great personal meaning for us because of the person who gave it to us – all these are true symbols in which heart is, so to say, speaking to heart. In church, water, bread, wine, oil, the book of the gospels, incense, lights, music, processions – all these and many more are invested with a symbolic character by the liturgy. They “glow”, as it were, with a quality we can only call numinous. So far so obvious – and so wonderful.

But by extension, the church building is itself a space that is symbolic of many things: the presence of God primarily, of course, and the worship and prayer that belong within it are what make it not just any space but “sacred space”. But it’s much more than that. It holds profound collective memories of a community; even a modern building like Coventry Cathedral where I once worked had rapidly acquired a deeply symbolic identity in just a few years. By the time I went there 25 years after it was opened, there were aspects of it that were as unquestionably iconic and sacred as the medieval bombed out church had been next door. And on top of that, a church is “sacred” to us if we worship there or did once, have been baptised or married there or said farewell to our beloved dead there. This year I walked my daughter up the aisle of Alnwick Church because she had chosen to be married there. It was a strange feeling to be the proud father of the bride in a place I’d known so well as its incumbent. 

For me, the sacredness of the place because of my memories, and of the sacredness of this unique moment in our family story came together unforgettably. All this belongs to the world of the symbol. I’m saying that when we operate in a highly symbolic environment, we ourselves become symbolic people. Like church buildings, we clergy evoke memories, expectations, longings, hopes, fears even. When we stand in the pulpit, when we preside at the Lord’s table, when we visit, when we chair the PCC, when we lead the prayers, even when we make a fool of ourselves in the parish pantomime so that people laugh good naturedly at us, we are functioning in this symbolic world. It goes with the role. It’s true to some extent of all leaders because a leader inevitably embodies and represents their institution or community to itself and to others. If you look at the highly ritualised world that, say, our politicians inhabit, you’ll see the point. In our case as clergy we stand on the elusive threshold between what is seen and what is unseen, between what is temporal and what is eternal, between the church’s story and the local and personal stories that belong to a particular place. We publicly represent and symbolise the values of the gospel, the story and teaching of the church, indeed the very mystery of God by who and what we are. 

I found it liberating to begin to understand that all this was to do with the role conferred in my ordination. I was called to inhabit it in a personal and unique way: we can never divorce person from role even if we need to distinguish between them to save ourselves from being swallowed up by the sheer demands of public office. It made sense of some of the (to me) sharp difficulties I thought I was facing in the parish, matters I now think are largely normal for us in our roles because they so often concern other peoples’ expectations, transferences and projections. It felt, and still feels, highly relevant to the long haul and how I was going to construe my ministry in a healthier way. In last year’s farewell sermon, I referred to knowing where we come from. That’s both a biographical and an existential aspect of ourselves. We need to know who and what we, “where we are coming from” in a pastoral, spiritual and sacramental sense. It empowers us to fulfil our calling to serve by feeding the hungry with good things. Solidarity with the poor in my sermon was meant to include all of human need wherever we find it – physical, emotional, spiritual. “Empowerment” to respond not only because it’s our duty but because it’s our privilege is how I have experienced that insight ever since, at least in my better moments.

The other side of this was to do with the parish itself and its story. This was my second point. For whom was I symbolic as the parish priest? The obvious answer is, to the worshipping community with whom, week by week and day by day, I broke bread and shared koinonia, that infinitely precious communion in holy things. But that was only part of the answer. You know what I’m going to say. Whatever I myself thought about it, whatever I said or did, there was no way that a market town parish was not going to pull me into the life of the whole community. Whether it was baptising, marrying and burying parishioners, national and local celebrations or disasters that the town wanted to observe in church, prayers at town council meetings, schools (not just the aided CofE school), hospital, theatre, music and the arts, trade, the historic Shrove Tuesday football match, the town wanted these activities to be ritualised, symbolised, “blessed”. It looked to us clergy to do this for them, or perhaps I should say, among them, as one of them. 

That was then, a generation ago, and there, in Northumberland. That was traditional Church of England parish ministry with a traditional northern accent. It’s 300 miles away from London and ten thousand miles away from the far more complex metropolitan worlds you are familiar with here in Stepney. But how strange it was to me at the time, schooled as I was in suburban churches in London and never having lived in the north of England before. I had to renegotiate my vocation. And I had to define the scope of my ministry in that parish and try to shape it round what I believed God was asking me to do there. And I believe the response I made, to embrace the wider parish, to be there in principle for everyone as far as I could, was the right one. I learned that the very word parish, “paroikia” means not those who go to church but those who “live around”. 

What this required of me was to develop a sense of place. The parish already had that – in abundance. But I needed to learn it for myself, embed myself in the particularities of that parish in that landscape at that time, learn its story. When we moved into the vicarage I found in the study a copy of the two-volume History of Alnwick by George Tate, published in the early 19th century. Copies are as rare as gold dust. Alas, inside the cover it said “For the use of Vicars of Alnwick. Not to be removed from the Vicarage”. From it I learned a lot about the church and the town, all new to me. I wrote a little visitors’ guide to the church – always a good way of learning about your place of work. This was a medieval building, but every church has a story as I’ve tried to say already. And from there I became fascinated with the history of the town itself, and the North East region in which it is set. All this seemed to me to be part of getting to grips with the story of the place in which I was serving as incumbent. It’s an approach I adopted everywhere else I went on to minister. In the language of my farewell sermon last year, it comes down to living close to the earth and paying attention to the story it has to tell.

And here is the point I want to make. It served me well to develop this sense of place as life-giving in its own right – after all, the parish is also our home and our family’s home: how could we not be curious about where we live? But it served me even better to see it as an essential resource for public ministry. It gained me, I think, a hearing, respect even, that I had taken the trouble to try to recognise the context of peoples’ lives and the stories of their community. It’s not a question of going native because a good parish theologian (which is what a priest is called to be) is not only there to affirm the environment with its narratives and traditions, its myths and rituals, its culture and habits, its self-understanding, its assumptions about what it aspires to be in the future. That goes for the church too, of course. Ministers must ask questions too, critique assumptions, perhaps even help a community reframe the story it tells about itself. But we have to learn and know and understand before we can stand in the House of the Interpreter, especially when, like Jeremiah, we have to pull up and destroy as well as build and plant. 

My third point was about the purposes and goals of public ministry. What did all this teach me about how to reframe my ministry at that time and set healthy directions for the future? I had no reason to think then that I would not spend three more decades in parishes. What I learned there was largely thanks to my mentor’s making me think through what ministry was about; much of it too was thanks to colleagues and parishioners who often without knowing it helped pennies to drop; and I have to admit, much of it was also through mistakes and misjudgements too embarrassing to recall.  But I look back to that experience as a time when better habits of mind and heart became at least the starting point for journeys that lay ahead. And I think I can say that as I have begun to take hold of ministry as something that has both purpose and art, they have largely stood up to some pretty robust testing since. (Don’t ever think by the way that cathedrals are refuges from the hard graft of parish life. If they were once upon a time, they certainly aren’t now.) 

In a report you know well in the Stepney Area, Church Growth in East London, Angus Ritchie speaks about having “a clear vison of goals, engaged in conscious self-reflection on being both faithful and reflective”. I think that is meant as a way of being for a healthy church that is growing and flourishing. But it maps directly on to our roles as clergy. If we are to be, as the phrase has it, “reflective practitioners” (what other kind of practitioner would any of us want to be?), then clarity about purpose and the capacity to be self-aware enough to think about what we are doing, and how, and why, are all indispensable. Indeed, I doubt that with the demands and stresses of ordained life as it is today, it is sustainable in any other way. I wouldn’t have used that language thirty years ago. But I now see that it was what I was seeing through a glass darkly. I can only say that over a lifetime of ministry, that way of thinking, behaving, pondering and praying has served me well. It has made the best of me what I am. 

In my farewell sermon, those insights about knowing where we come from, living close to the earth and solidarity with the poor were introduced by two imperatives: thankfulness to God and dependence on God. They sum up, I think, not only the whole of ministry but the whole of life. I’ll say more tomorrow. But in relation to the big story that we tell about a God who so loved the world, I hope I’ve made it clear that we as ministers are meant to be the public embodiment, the symbol, of those fundamental ways of being before God. Go back to the ordinal and see it for yourself in the emphasis laid on what clergy do and what we are. Austin Farrer spoke about the priest being a “walking sacrament”, or in an older register, "alter Christus", being as Christ to others. 

I said earlier that we can never separate ministry from discipleship. You could say that being ordained sets us up publicly as exemplary disciples. However uncomfortable we may feel about that way of putting it, I’m clear that this is how many see us. It’s where all those “oughts” and “musts” of ministry come from, rules that say clergy should behave like this and not like that. In a month when the sexuality of bishops has once again hit the headlines, we need to examine these assumptions. My point is simply to indicate that when you are an office-holder in the church, your life is up for scrutiny, and everyone has their own ideas about what is or isn’t appropriate for clergy. As symbolic people, we model something that is important not only in the church but beyond. Questions about values are bound to follow. We should welcome it because it shows that something, at least, still matters. The power of story and symbol is still there.

Of course, we know that none of us is that exemplary disciple. We are all broken, fractured human beings. We are precarious, we fall short and we fail God, the church and ourselves times without number. We know ourselves too well to be deceived on that point. This is why these two attitudes of dependence and gratitude are so fundamental to being a Christian. We are people formed by grace, and to live out of dependence and thankfulness is the only adequate way of responding to the God who freely comes to us, finds us, loves us and accepts us in Jesus. I doubt if I have learned anything more fundamental than that when it comes to the long haul. I am still learning it. 

So if we can tell the big story about God and engage with the stories of our communities consciously invoking (because it is our role to) the faith dimension of human life, if we can point to what is of abiding significance for us and give a reason for the hope that is within us, then, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians, we do not lose heart. We shall have found ourselves artists of our ministries. They will have been not only useful but beautiful. We gather the fragments with joy, and offer them to God. All in the end is harvest. 

September 2016