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

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

Endings and beginnings seem to meet at Golgotha as we hear John’s great narrative. The cross feels like a great full stop, a closure, an end. We hear in Jesus’ words an unmissable tone of finality, even triumph. Perhaps that takes us by surprise? Not if we’ve been paying attention to the way St John has told his story. This end is not, for him, the petering out of a life that began so well. It is not the tragedy of a career that has been wasted, brought to nothing. It is not the extinguishing of a guttering candle flame finally overcome by the darkness. Rather, it’s that this great light has never shone more steadily, more brightly than at Golgotha. Far from representing the waste of a man’s career, this is its moment of culmination. His life, said Jesus speaking of himself as the good shepherd, was not taken from him. He laid it down of his own accord.  On the cross he draws all humanity to himself. On the cross there is vindication of all that he came among us to be and to do. On the cross his work of love is accomplished. What binds him to the cross is not nails but love. He reigns over us as the king of love, a kingship that is not from here but from another place  entirely. This is where we recognise glory, full of grace and truth, love’s endeavour, love’s expense, love to the very end.

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

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

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

This is how St John portrays the majestic figure who is enthroned in the cross at Golgotha. How can God suffer and die? we ask ourselves. Other faith communities find this the most baffling question Christianity poses. If you want to see a display of naked power, a crucified God makes no sense. If you want to hear fine wisdom, a messiah nailed to a cross is not for you. There are many for whom Good Friday is a real stumbling-block. And yet... there is power and there is wisdom at the cross, a divine wisdom and a divine power that change lives, heal brokenness and bring great hope. Faith takes us to a place where we see how love drives God to embrace the cross and in doing so, embrace his whole creation in a supreme act of self-giving, what Jesus calls laying down his life. If God is not crucified, there is no God as Christians understand him and no Christianity worth following.

I imagine the cross as St John’s burning bush. It’s the place of transfiguration where we take off our shoes because we are on holy ground. We turn aside today to look into this sacred fire, and open our ears so that we can hear the divine voice that speaks to us. What do we see? The flame of love, its glory and its light blazing with divine passion for the world, for the human race, for each of us. And what do we hear? The word that says: here is the essence of all that it means to be God. Here at Golgotha we see his nature and his name. I AM utters that voice, I am all that love means, all that meets our hungers and hopes, that than which nothing greater, nothing more glorious can be dreamed or conceived, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the origin and destiny of all that is, our light, our life, our love. 

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

Holy Week in Hymns 1: "Ride on, ride on in majesty"

This year in Holy Week at Wakefield Cathedral, we are going to explore some of the hymns of Passiontide. You may wonder why I’ve taken this as my theme. Well, I’ve drawn inspiration from a famous saying of St Augustine, “when we sing, we pray twice”. He’s usually taken as meaning that the music of our prayer adds a second “layer” or dimension to the words we mouth. Through music we breathe God’s praises in a way that reaches different parts of ourselves, touches our emotions, our longings, our fears, our hopes, our loves. More than that, the words of hymns are themselves not prose but poetry, allowing them, like music, to penetrate beyond the limits of our normal ways of speaking. 

There’s another aspect to this. How we sing or worship or pray has a great deal to do with the kind of faith we have and how we believe it. The words of our liturgy, our prayers and our hymns form us as Christian disciples. Lex orandi, lex credendi says the old tag: it’s how we pray that lays bare the content of our faith. And perhaps our singing of hymns, our “praying twice”, plays a far more important part in shaping our faith than all the sermons, creeds and catechisms in the world.

So I want this Holy Week to allow the words and music of the church’s great legacy of hymnody to accompany us as we enter into the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus so that we can discover a little more of what this season can mean for our lives. I hope we shall all be “praying twice” in this Great Week of our salvation as we entrust ourselves to these great hymn writers as our spiritual guides. 

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So we begin where Holy Week itself begins, on Palm Sunday and its great processional hymn “Ride on, ride on in majesty”. You can tell that its author was sure-footed, not only as a theologian but a poet. Henry Hart Milman was Professor of Poetry at Oxford and was ordained 200 years ago this year. In 1849 he became Dean of St Paul’s, another poetry-writing-dean to succeed an even greater poet who had held that office 200 years earlier, John Donne. 

The hymn captures the essence of Palm Sunday brilliantly. It's a perplexing paradox of Holy Week that a crowd can cry “Hosanna!” today and “Crucify!" just five days later.  Tomorrow’s hymn, “My song is love unknown” does it too, but in a more personal, intimate way. Today, the key word is majesty, repeated in the first line of every stanza like a drum-beat that is both noble and ominous. Ride on, ride on in majesty! The exclamation mark tells you something important, that this refrain honours a king who has not only come to his city to receive the acclamation of his subjects, but also prefigures the tragedy and triumph that is unfolding throughout this Holy Week. 

 In the first verse, majesty means sovereignty, kingship, hosannas, royal palms and a carpet of robes like the procession of a Roman triumph when a great battle has been won. But this isn’t Easter a week in advance, for “the last and fiercest strife is nigh” says verse 4. And all this ceremony is to recognise what the destiny of this Man on the mule will turn out to be: in lowly pomp ride on to die. To die! It comes twice, pulling into itself a succession of poignant words that rhyme with die: cry (in acclamation, but also in anticipated pain), sky (for the drama of Holy Week is not just some squalid little local incident but is universal, cosmic in its scope), nigh (because the end, the tragedy and triumph of approaching sacrifice, is upon us), and then die again in the final verse, where the word ties together a meek head bowed to mortal pain with God’s taking power and reigning. Those emphatic lines proclaim that in all this, Jesus his Son truly is both King and Lord.

Let’s stay with that final couplet for a moment, because it sums up what this hymn is trying to tell us. Bow thy meek head to mortal pain,/Then take, O God, thy power, and reign. What kind of king is he, this messiah who rides in triumph into his city to shouts of hosanna? What fervent hopes and longings claimed the hearts of those who were so glad they had lived to see that day? 

The point about Palm Sunday is that today is the Sunday of the Cross. That is to say, the hosanna procession is not itself the central theme. It’s what it leads up to that is the focus of today's liturgy. And this is the Passion of the Lord. So once we have processed into church, laid up our palms and taken our places, our attention turns towards the cross. We listen to the solemn recital of the Passion narrative and in bread and wine, participate in Jesus' life laid down for the salvation of the world in his broken body and shed blood. From now on until Good Friday, it is the "wondrous cross" that occupies our minds, imaginations and prayers, from what we begin in the procession today to what is completed at Golgotha on the holiest day of the year.

But what is “finished”, says St John, is not a defeat but a victory. Yes, the Son of God must bow his meek head in mortal pain. He must know the suffering, the dereliction, the despair, the God-abandoned darkness that is appointed for him, for as the gospels have relentlessly told us, “the Son of Man must suffer”. And yet, St John sees in these dreadful events nothing less than the victory of God-in-Christ. He ascends his throne of the cross, and is proclaimed there as nothing less than king. And so the hymn dares to command him to take, O God, thy power, and reign. 

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What is the power with which he reigns? Not the power of mortals who slash and burn their way to victory. Not even the moral power of the human victim who has done no wrong and gone innocently to his death. 

No. It is nothing less than the power of love that holds him there on the cross, his arms stretched out to welcome home and embrace every child of the human race, every soul that longs to be reconciled, every man and woman who knows that only here, where this life is laid down, does human existence hold any purpose or meaning. “Love so amazing, so divine” we shall sing later in the week. On the cross, in the strange disfigured form of love that is crucified, we meet him and greet him, and however bewildered we find ourselves, worship and adore him. And pledge our allegiance and loyalty to this broken but majestic Man of Sorrows whom we acclaim as Lord and King.

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Ride on! ride on in majesty!
Hark! all the tribes hosanna cry;
O Savior meek, pursue thy road
with palms and scattered garments strowed.

Ride on! ride on in majesty!
In lowly pomp ride on to die;
O Christ, thy triumphs now begin
o'er captive death and conquered sin.

Ride on! ride on in majesty!
The angel-squadrons of the sky
look down with sad and wondering eyes
to see the approaching sacrifice.

Ride on! ride on in majesty!
Thy last and fiercest strife is nigh;
the Father on his sapphire throne
expects his own anointed Son.

Ride on! ride on in majesty!
In lowly pomp ride on to die;
bow thy meek head to mortal pain,
then take, O God, thy power, and reign.

Henry Hart Milman, 1791-1868

Power, Justice and Mercy: on the 60th anniversary of the Coronation

60 years ago today, Elizabeth the Second was crowned Queen. We are celebrating the diamond jubilee of this event at evensong this afternoon. Last year, at the time of the Accession, I explored the significance of the monarchy in the 21^st century. One insight, I said, is how monarchy is not only a symbol of who we are and how we understand ourselves as a nation state; at its best it points beyond itself and beyond ourselves to the rule of Christ the King and the celestial city whose builder and maker is God.  And if its exemplar is Christ whose throne is the cross and who washes his people’s feet, it follows that the essence of monarchy is consecration to the service of her people: ‘whoever would be great among you must be your servant, for I am among you as one who serves’.

This is part 2 of that sermon. And because this weekend’s commemoration focuses on the ceremony in Westminster Abbey in 1953, I want to draw out a further aspect of monarchy from one of the most important elements in the coronation service.

Coronation rites have a long and rich history. They reach back into pre-Christian times where in every society, the king was seen as the deity’s representative on earth, set apart to express divine sovereignty among human beings and to intercede for them in a priestly way before heaven. Ancient Israel learned kingship from her neighbours in a manner that was not altogether approved of by some prophets: ‘give us a king like all the nations’ was a plea that always threatened the faith of the wilderness where the Hebrews had learned that God alone was their king. But monarchy established itself soon after the Israelites settled in their land: first Saul, then David and finally Solomon, the last and grandest king to preside over the one nation before it fell apart in the reign of his successor.

The ceremonies that made Solomon king are told of in well-known words that we shall hear in Handel’s famous coronation anthem this afternoon: ‘Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon king. And all the people rejoiced and said: ‘God save the king!’ Today’s Old Testament reading takes us on into his reign, though it still belongs to its promising beginning, before corruption and decline set in. As a sacral king, Solomon is charged to defend the faith of his people. This he demonstrates by building the first temple in Jerusalem at God’s command. Today we heard part of his prayer of dedication. Solomon invokes the promises of which the temple will be the focus. It will be a symbol of mercy, kindness and generous love. The people are to ‘pray towards this house’, and see it as a source of life and forgiveness; even the foreigner, says the prayer. And these words echo the Deuteronomic view that what is true of the temple is true of the king himself. Both institutions, monarchy and church, will be signs of the covenant between God and his people: symbols of loyalty, justice, and enduring love.

The first English coronation ceremony for which we have a text dates back to Saxon times with the coronation of King Edgar in Bath Abbey in 973. Elements of the modern rite are drawn directly from Edgar’s, appropriately as he was the first king of all England. Here is his coronation oath:

 

These three things I promise in Christ’s name to the Christian people subject to me. First, that the church of God and the whole Christian people shall have true peace at all time by our judgment; second, that I will forbid extortion and all kinds of wrongdoing to all orders of men; third, that I will enjoin equity and mercy in all judgments, that God, who is kind and merciful, may vouchsafe his mercy to me and to you. 

60 years ago, Elizabeth took the oath answering ‘I will’ to questions put to her by the Archbishop of Canterbury, among them this which quotes words from King Edgar ten centuries earlier: ‘Will you to your power cause Law and Justice, in Mercy, to be executed in all your judgments?’  I will!  It must have reminded her forcibly of her marriage vows; indeed, coronation is nothing less than the marriage of the Sovereign to her people. But it also has echoes of ordination promises, and here again, and in the anointing, there is more than an echo of the ordination liturgy. Indeed, I think it is better not to speak of coronation so much as consecration, for the entire ceremony is the consecration of the monarch to royal service of which her crowning is the climactic event.

The words of the whole coronation oath are momentous.  They promise sound governance, fidelity to the laws of God, defence of the Christian faith, and as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, making a true profession of the gospel.  But to me this phrase about executing law and justice with mercy is especially revealing in what it says about leadership, for these words link royal power with the virtues of religion: ‘law and justice, in mercy’. This is what God himself is like, and this is how his servant the Sovereign is to be too. It is how Jesus is in today’s gospel reading. The centurion makes unquestioning authority the basis of his appeal to Jesus to heal his slave. Jesus is moved, and acts precisely by demonstrating power through an act of compassion.

There is a Prayer Book collect with a striking opening: ‘O Lord, who showeth thy almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity’. That is an extraordinary claim to make when we think about it; and yet it is how our faith portrays him: a principled trustworthy ethical deity whose kindness is at the very core of his power and authority. God does not do coersive power; he only knows the cruciform power of mercy and pity: cross-shaped because Golgotha shows us what it looks like. And if God is like this, then monarchy and every other kind of leadership in state, church and society needs to emulate it too if it is to lead with integrity.

This is more difficult than it sounds in a world where everything is allowed and nothing is forgiven; where litigation makes the possibility of mercy practically impossible, where our lives are governed by compliance. How can anyone dare to be merciful in such an environment? In her Reith Lectures a decade ago, Honora O’Neill questioned whether such micro-management of human life was compatible with wise, noble, humane values, as if what matters is not what is good and virtuous but merely what is compliant and legal. If mercy and pity are at the heart of God’s exercise of power and are embedded in the Coronation Oath, then all leadership must embody the graces, virtues and character that belong to the greater authority to whom, whether we know it or not, we are accountable as citizens and subjects of the kingdom of God.

Portia in Merchant of Venice famously speaks about this. She says:  

The quality of mercy is not strained.

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown.
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,

The attribute to awe and majesty,

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings.

But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;

It is an attribute of God himself;

And earthly power doth then show like God's

When mercy seasons justice.

On this anniversary, we give thanks once again the faithfulness with which as a Christian queen, Elizabeth has consecrated herself to live her coronation vow. We celebrate her obedience to this vocation: unlooked for, unwanted, thrust upon her by history, yet lived out for 6 decades with dignity and wisdom. Leadership wedded to humane discipleship is a gift to any people. Today we honour it once more. 

(1 Kings 8.22-23, 41-43; Luke 7.1-10)

Christ the King: Coersive power/Crucified power

This is my first sermon after last week’s vote in the General Synod that saw off - for now - the resolution to ordain women as bishops in the Church of England.  As many of you know, I am a fervent advocate of female bishops for reasons of theology, history and justice. So I won’t deny that I am more disappointed than I can say.  This is not the place to go into the whys and wherefores: you can read my blogs if you wish. However, on this feast of Christ the King, I believe we all need to gather to acknowledge the sovereignty of the one who is on the throne, and whom we all worship, follow and serve whatever side of this debate we find ourselves on.  There are memories to be healed today, and the eucharist of our risen Lord is the right place for us all to be as his loyal subjects and faithful friends. 

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After Jesus has fed the crowd, John says that he hid himself ‘because they were about to take him by force to make him king’.  On the day we celebrate Christ the King, the gospel tells us that this is precisely the title Jesus refuses!  And not only here but throughout John’s Gospel. Of all the titles of Jesus, John seems to say, it’s the one most susceptible to misuse.  When Nathaniel is the first to recognise Jesus as a man like no other, he says: ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ And Jesus’ responds by telling 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’.  And this understated way of using Old Testament kingship language pervades the whole gospel.  Jesus distances himself from popular acclaim as if to say: you have your ideas about what kingship means; but I will show you another way.  So he contrasts the shepherd-kings of Israel and Judah who abused and betrayed their trust with the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. 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. 

When Pilate says to him in the passion story, ‘so you are a king then?’ he replies, ‘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’.  ‘My kingdom is not from this world’ he begins.  He is saying that there is a world of difference between kingship as mortals set it up and the divine character of God’s rule.  Jesus’ kingship comes from another source entirely.  It is stronger than any earthly power.  It endures when all other kingdoms have crumbled to dust.  But not everyone can see it, still less welcome and embrace it. 

This is not the kind of rule Pilate knows about.  His is the world of power politics and coercive force.  But what Jesus is speaking about comes from a different place. ‘If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.’  Power and violence are not very far apart in most societies, whether it is the Rome of Pilate, the Jerusalem of the zealots, or the Babylon of Belshazzar’s feast.  Jesus emphatically rejects a kingship built on them. His reign is based on a different premise, what he calls the ‘truth’.  What does it mean to be citizens of this kingdom of truth?  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’.  In the upper room, Jesus has spoken of himself as the truth, the truth that sets free.  Truth, in the way Jesus means it, scrutinises how we see ourselves.  It’s an uncomfortable judgment upon us all, for truth has implications for all that belongs to ‘human empire’: the governance of nations, the leadership of society the management of institutions, and all that belongs to the life of every human being.

Jesus has come to testify to the truth.  This is why we must not be seduced by power.  Even in the church we easily fall prey to lazy notions of victory and triumph.  For some churches it is elaborate building projects; for others it is church growth and success in outreach and evangelisation.  Or we talk the language of politics, winning or losing the argument over female bishops, and still the categories are of human power in its assertive, adversarial mode. We begin to think that we can grow or build or extend God’s kingdom with our own hands.  Yet Jesus teaches us that the kingdom is God’s act, not ours.  We must be open to it, embrace it, live out its values, but we can never bring it about.  In places like this we must be especially vigilant against triumphalism.  The Normans built Durham’s castle and Cathedral as a sign of their conquest of the Saxons of the north country.  That subjugation meant terrible attrition, the notorious harrying of the north.  In the Cathedral the prince-bishops erected the highest throne in Christendom.  It all sits uncomfortably alongside St John’s image of the Christ who washes the feet of his disciples and goes out to die. 

How is the human power embodied in places such as this stronghold redeemed then?  One answer is, in the shrine of the man who was remembered on this peninsula for his Christ-like humility and truth-seeking holiness.  Cuthbert is its conscience, the key to its spirituality, the antidote to triumphalism.  This is how his beloved St John saw things, for one of the identifying marks of the church for him is truth.  Truth-telling, in the sense of open, honest unafraid relationships, is part of being ‘aligned’ to truth. ‘Truth-telling’ is an outcome of loving the truth for its own sake, believing that truth is something to stake one’s life on.  I am saying that to be the church in an authentic way, truth-seeking must always be at the core of our endeavour.  It is costly and difficult.  It involves dying to oneself.  Bearing witness to it entails sacrifice. We must not forget that the Jesus who speaks of being ‘from the truth’ is on his way to the cross.

The cross is where this kingdom ‘not from here’ is finally revealed.  Golgotha is the writing on the wall of the world-empires.  There, the fingers of the man’s hand write the fateful words for all to see: that they are numbered, weighed, divided and destined to topple before the coming kingdom of truth and peace.  The cross is the judgment of truth on all falsehood and fantasy.  Jesus says just before his crucifixion: ‘now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out’.  We who want to hear the voice of our king and be his loyal subjects know where we must go.  We will find him not where crowd-pulling signs and wonders are worked, but outside the city wall.  For if he is Christ the King, his heavenly reign is not different from his earthly coronation on Golgotha where, high and lifted up, he is sovereign in a purple robe and crown of thorns.  

 

Yes, we have been to the place of a Skull.  We have looked on the king we have pierced.  We have seen his glory. 

Durham Castle University College,

Christ the King, 25 November 2012.
Daniel 7.9-10, 13-14; John 18.33-37