A Memorial Service at Alnwick: Tom Moralee RIP

I got to know Tom Moralee during my time as Vicar here in the 1980s. He was a stalwart of this church, rarely missing a Sunday, always there to help out in whatever way he could. As a new incumbent, I recall thinking: there’s one of those people you instinctively know belongs to the backbone of a place. He was quietly spoken and didn’t draw attention to himself, yet he was a reliable, strong presence who imparted confidence. You are always glad of such people you know you can trust and whose support and friendship you can count on.

Tom was a native North Easterner, Northumberland-born and bred. He had lived in Alnwick since his father’s work brought him here as a teenager. He, Sheila, Brinley, Clare and her husband Steve were - are - a close family. He was utterly conscientious in his work, whether it involved wearing a boiler-suit or an immaculately laundered collar and tie. He was the kind of man we call “public spirited”. He cared about this place and took his citizenship seriously. As a special he was commended by the Chief Constable for his role in connection with a stabbing in the town. Here at St Michael’s he was a sidesman and member of the Parochial Church Council. But he contributed to the social capital in unseen, unsung ways too. If Bailiffgate looked clean and tidy, the chances are that Tom had been there to pick up litter. If the grass in the churchyard looked well-cared for and the weeds kept down, that too could well have been Tom’s work. When elderly parishioners shared Sunday lunch together, Tom was part of the team that did the hard work. He wouldn’t have thought of any of this as exceptional. It’s what you do if your community matters to you and jobs need doing. But goodness doesn’t mean doing extraordinary things. It means doing ordinary things in an extraordinary way. 

He knew a lot of people in and around Alnwick, and it’s not surprising that so many are gathered here today. Whether you are among his family and friends, colleagues or neighbours, you will have your own memories of him. There are many stories told about his kindness and care for people. One elderly woman remembered how at Christmas, he took heating oil round to her home because she had run out of fuel. Someone else said that if you were having a bad day, the one person you would have been glad to bump into was Tom. For a private kind of man with what he would have said were traditional values, he had a wicked sense of humour and was famed for his jokes and stories, though as a vicar I didn’t necessarily get to hear the more risqué ones! 

All this speaks of a sociable, well-respected man who, perhaps without realising it, acted as a glue to the society of our town (as someone how once lived here, I can’t help thinking of it even after all these years as our town). He helped bind it together in the bonds of friendship, good neighbourliness and citizenhood. Whether in public roles in church or community, or in the intimacies of family and personal life, such good men and women are a precious gift. It’s when they are gone that we become keenly aware of the debt we owe to them. 

Which is why we bring our memories to this place where the people of our town have been named and honoured across the centuries. To remember and pay tribute to someone we have lost reminds us how precious they were to us, and always will be. Not simply because of our treasured memories but because death is not the end of the relationships we cherish. Those whom we have loved and lost are always alive to the God in whom all of human life is gathered up in a Love that is more profound than ours can ever be. Today is a day to remind one another that we are always held by God’s everlasting arms every moment from the cradle to the grave and beyond it.

Our Bible reading reassures us on this point. “Nothing can separate us from the love of God” says St Paul in those marvellous words we heard just now, not even the power we are most afraid of, death itself. How could it when Christianity tells us that Jesus suffered, died and was buried; and in rising again at Easter opened the way to everlasting life? In St John’s Gospel, on the night before he died, Jesus bade farewell to his disciples and comforted them. “In my Father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” There is room enough for us all: that’s the promise. So he tells us. “Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” 

Words like these mean everything in our grief. They bring us strength when we feel lost, confidence when we despair, comfort when fears and doubts assail us, light to see by when we are afraid of stumbling in the dark. We say our goodbyes in tears and sorrow, yet edged with hope because of the promise that God will not abandon us. That makes it possible to release our loved ones, give them back to the God who lent them to us, with hearts full of gratitude for all that they were to us. 

When I knew I would be leaving Alnwick more than thirty years ago, I decided I would visit each member of the church council personally to let them know. I don’t know why I’ve retained such a clear memory of Tom walking me to the front door after our conversation and his saying to me, “Michael, thank you for these last few years. We won’t forget you when we’ve gone.” Now it’s my turn to say those same words to him, which I do on behalf of all of us. Tom, thank you for the life that we have lived together in these years that have now come to an end. We shall always remember you. Go in God. Rest in peace, Rise in glory. And may God bring us all to the eternal mansions of his love.

Alnwick, 5 August 2019

Romans 8.31-end

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holy Week at Southwark Address 2: Crucified by Religion

Religion should be a force for good in human life. It should ennoble us, give us stature and dignity, inspire and equip us to become the men and women God made us to be in his own image and likeness in the world. It should make us just and compassionate and kind. Above all it should be a liberating power in life and in society, for the truth should make us free. This is why we come to places like this cathedral, where through worship and prayer we glimpse how we could become better versions of ourselves, more whole. 

But what if religion goes bad, becomes instead a force that diminishes us, oppresses us, narrows our perspective, makes us domineering, judgmental or cruel? What if religion becomes a persecuting force that instead of imparting freedom starts denying it to its adherents or still more to those who follow different paths? What if it crucifies those who do not conform to its principles? All this can happen when religion turns in on itself, starts insisting on its own literal truth, becomes a rigid system that diverts it from being a means to a greater good into serving its distorted end? I’ve been reading a book called Dark Religion: Fundamentalism from the Perspective of Jungian Psychology*. No-one needs to be persuaded that dark religion is real enough in our world today. In my mind has been a famous poem of William Blake from his Songs of Innocence and Experience: 

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green. 

And the gates of this chapel were shut,
And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore. 

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

This Holy Week I’m exploring the different “worlds” in which Jesus is crucified. Yesterday we reflected on the city that Jesus arrives at on Palm Sunday. Tonight’s passage places us in the garden where Jesus has just been arrested, and straight away takes us into the first trial he must face, his interrogation by the religious authorities represented by Annas, and Caiaphas his son-in-law who was high priest at that time. 

Jesus is inside being asked, says John, “about his disciples and about his teaching”. At precisely the same moment, Peter is outside, one of the disciples the high-priest wants to know about, outside warming himself by the fire and denying that he knows anything about Jesus. Inside the religious organisation levels accusations against the Son of God; outside, personal faith fails comprehensively. It is not a good night for religion. 

We have come across Caiaphas earlier in St John’s Gospel. After the raising of Lazarus, he and the pharisees are concerned about Jesus’ growing influence: “if we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” You can hear the anxiety. This man must be guarded against, otherwise Israel’s sacred institutions are at risk. And Caiaphas, the spokesman of organised religion, is clear about the order of priorities. The shrine comes first, then the people. And he makes the kind of judgment institutional leaders often make when stability is put at risk. There must be a sacrificial victim. “Better for one man to die than for the whole nation to be destroyed.” It is Jesus’ death-sentence. And it is organised religion that signs it. 

We need to understand what “religion” is up to here. By themselves, the religious authorities had no power to put Jesus to death. Nor would the Romans be interested in the theological niceties of his claim to be the Son of God. Caiaphas had to demonstrate that Jesus was a threat to good civil order, that he subverted the authority of the Emperor himself. When it comes to public affairs in Judaea under the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate, this is how we need to read the passion narrative. Jesus dies as the political victim, a prisoner of conscience you might say. And if the priests and pharisees could lay responsibility squarely on Pilate and the empire he represents, so much the better. Religion must not have blood on its hands. 

I’m saying that before Jesus becomes the victim of politics, he is the victim of religion. All the gospels paint a picture of religious controversy surrounding Jesus from the very outset, arguments and debates that erupt into outright hostility. There is an ominous hint early on, when he has thrown the money-changers out of the temple. He is asked by what authority he does this. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” he replies, a highly enigmatic response calculated to baffle his audience. From then on, he is a watched man. And he himself is careful not to entrust himself to anyone, says John, for his hour has not yet come. And although in St John, Jesus frequents the temple more than in any other gospel, there is a wariness after this episode that Jesus knows people will not forget. He loves the native faith of his upbringing, practises it with a devotion unmatched in any other adherent, we can be sure. He is a loyal son of Abraham. And yet he is increasingly at odds with it, or rather, with what it has become. I think we can say that to Jesus in all four gospels, the temple represents both the best and the worst of organised religion. It symbolises the potential for divine transcendence but also the hardening of humans’ best instincts for kindness, charity and justice. When religion goes sclerotic, things can only end badly.

There is something deeply paradoxical about saying that religion crucified Jesus, that he was a victim of a dysfunctional way of believing. The paradox is magnified by the realisation that in history, some of the worst crimes against humanity have been perpetrated in his very name. Think of the Crusades and the slaughter of millions of Moslems. Think of the Albigensians, the Inquisition, the Wars of Religion in Europe, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France, all persecuting believers who wanted to follow Christ in their own way. Think of the German national churches that were complicit in the Nazi holocaust. You think this is all a matter of history in far-off places? Ask many women to tell you how they have experienced the church. Ask people of colour. Ask your LGBT friends. Ask the victims of clergy who have abused children. Some of these people will say that they too have been crucified. Ask yourselves whether dark religion is really a thing of the past, even among Christians. 

Please don’t think that I’m hostile to organised religion. Far from it. You can’t be a dean for twenty years without believing in the potential of institutions like cathedrals to do very great good. When institutions function well, when their leaders behave justly, when their members are treated fairly, when they exhibit justice and compassion in the public square, then their power to change the world is great indeed. If God loves humanity, then he must love human institutions too, for we cannot organise ourselves as societies and communities without them. 

And as I read the Hebrew Bible, I’m struck by how much it invests in the temple as an institution. When Solomon dedicated the temple he had built, he uttered a prayer that was as comprehensive as the world itself, beseeching the Almighty to make it a focus for God’s love, blessing, forgiveness and reconciliation. And when it was rebuilt after the exile, the new temple was to be called “a house of prayer for all peoples”. The temple was to be nothing less than a sacrament of Yahweh’s holiness, his sacred presence in the midst of the people he had chosen as his own. Which is why the prophets were scandalised when it failed to live up to that noble vision, why Jesus protests so vehemently at the way the authorities had poured the poison of injustice and corruption into its soul. 

How can a diseased institution be healed? How can organised religion in its many global manifestations be redeemed from the long shadow it casts? The answer, I think, lies precisely in the cross that it is capable of wielding so destructively. If we weaponise the cross, then its potential to cause damage to the human race is limitless. When the cross becomes a force with which to oppress others (the literal meaning of the word crusader), it reverts to its original function in the Roman state as an ugly instrument of cruelty. 

But St John’s image of the crucifixion is the direct antithesis of this. It is true, as we shall see on Good Friday, that in the Fourth Gospel, the cross is the great work Jesus has come into the world to complete. It is true that the cross is the throne where he reigns gloriously as king. It is true that the cross expresses God’s ultimate victory over all that would resist his reign of truth. All this is encapsulated in the last word Jesus speaks from the cross in St John: not a whisper of resignation but a cry of triumph. Tetelestai! “It is accomplished!” 

But all this has to be understood in the way John intends it. For him, the spirit of the cross lies in the act Jesus has performed for his disciples in the upper room the night before his death. In taking the towel, stooping down and washing their feet, Jesus takes the form of a slave, as St Paul puts it in one of his letters. “He emptied himself” says that famous passage, made the supreme sacrifice as we say of those who have laid down their lives for their friends. In that act of self-giving, kenosis, you have the most profound meaning that the cross carries. That is to say, it is the embodiment of love: the love that has nothing to give but itself, is empty-handed but for its infinite embrace of us all, the love that is capable of being endlessly refused and rejected and hurt, yet for all that is patient and kind, will wait an eternity if that is how long it takes to win the creation back to its Creator and reconcile all things to the God who out of love gave it its capacity to exist and be free. 

In Holy Week the cross faces us with all our flaws and failures and ambivalences. We know that it is the power of God for salvation, that if we walk in its way it will give us the strength to face our life-task and learn to live out of this love that is so precarious and vulnerable. And if institutional religion once crucified Jesus and still does, then it too needs to turn itself back to the cross and consider what it means to live in its kindly light. I believe that it is vastly more important that we cultivate being a cross-shaped church than a mission-shaped church. For a church that turns its back on triumphalism, knows its own vulnerabilities, glimpses how the love and forgiveness of the cross are the most transformative power the world has ever seen, and lives out these realities with the conviction that nothing could matter more - such a church will in its very nature be shaped as a sacrament of divine love. Such a church that lives and breathes the events of Holy Week will be the best invitation there could be for the human family to discover how “love is that liquor sweet and most divine / which my God feels as blood, and I as wine” as George Herbert puts it. 

Religion crucified the Lord of Glory. But his cross has borne its griefs and carried its sorrows. It can heal the church, renew it and set it free to become an agent of self-giving love in the world. That needs to be part of our praying through Holy Week as we bring to the cross our world, our church and our own deepest selves. 

John 18.12-14, 19-24

*By Didier, G. J. & Solc, V. 

The Good-Enough Parent: a sermon on Mothering Sunday

I find the parable of the Prodigal Son the most beautiful and the most moving in the gospels, this story of the wayward child in a far country making the long journey home and his father running to meet him. I once wrote a book about the “lost children” of the Bible. I found it hard to get my mind round these painful stories of children who had died, been betrayed, murdered, abused, exiled, neglected - or who had taken themselves off to some distant place like the Prodigal. The faces of my own children kept coming into my mind, and what it would be like to lose them. It would be unbearable. And as we approach Passiontide, we imagine that God must have felt that way as he watched his Son taken away to die. God who is both our father and our mother, as the medieval writer Julian of Norwich said. “Can a mother forget the child she bore?” asks the prophet.

But on this Mothering Sunday, we’re bound to ask a question of our gospel reading.  All these men – the two sons and their father: where is the woman in this story – the wife, the mother, the homemaker?  Is she present but assumed, the silent onlooker to this drama being played out among the men in her life?  Or is she absent – dead maybe, or like the perfect wife in the Book of Proverbs, away on business, or, a darker possibility perhaps, in a far country of her own?

There are so many layers to this story.  It is about the father who waits for his son to return and runs to meet him when he glimpses him far off.  It is about the son who realises that he must begin again, and makes the long, difficult journey towards his waiting father.  It is about the elder son and how he cannot find it in his heart to welcome his wayward brother home.  It is about all these things.  But I want to suggest to you that it is also about the place where all these things happen, the place that is home to all three of the characters in our story, the father and his two sons.  This home is not just the stage-set on which the human drama is acted out.  It is a participant in its own right.  For the story is supremely about homecoming.

Home is where the heart is, says the strap-line: trite, but true, for it is precisely heart calling to heart, a lost man’s heart longing for home that drives him to risk returning to his family hearth.  Heart and hearth – so close in sound, and close in meaning: we all long for somewhere to be welcomed home to, somewhere to belong, feel safe in, somewhere we are held and cherished and loved.  We mustn’t be sentimental about this. Foyer as a picture of home is not just about firesides, armchairs, comfy slippers and sipping cocoa in mugs.  Foyer is a wonderfully humane word.  It means intimacy, connection, sanctuary. It means shelter, warmth, safety, friendship, love.  But it also stands for the tough challenge of living together in community.  It is where we learn about integrity and trust, how to resolve conflict, be reconciled, forgive, how love is a matter not just of words but of will. It is the school where  we learn how to be human.

In his far country, the prodigal was free of all this.  He had no duties, no cares, no-one to please but himself.  Yet in Luke’s picture of this young man’s life, this self-indulgent isolation could never satisfy, for he was oppressed by pleasure and wealth.  He knew emptiness and despair, I think, long before he was spent, began to go hungry and subsisted beside the swine he was paid to feed.  So he began the long climb back, recognising in his heart before he could bring himself to say the words that he must turn round, return to his father, make his way home again.  And home meant re-entering this privileged yet costly place where loving and being loved are the only things that ultimately matter, where he could re-learn the first lesson of childhood, how to be held, embraced and kept safe, how to love and to give and to be happy in the intimacy of the family.

Homecoming and family mean the joy and the cost of human relationships and our life together. In the parable, the loving father proved himself to be a mother to his wayward child – not just a “good enough” parent but an excellent one. Today we remember and give thanks for those who have mothered us and loved us into life, and continue to surround us with wholesome care that far exceeds whatever we see as our duty. It’s a happy thing when our biological mothers have loved us in this way, though today can be difficult for people who know all too well the misery of conflicted family life, where a parent is not to be trusted and home is not the safe place we need it to be and where the God-given gifts of intimacy, trust and mutual service can flourish. Today is a day to give thanks for all that is lovely in family life, but also to feel for those who find themselves, even behind their own front doors, in a far country, alone, uncertain, lost.

I believe it’s the task of us all in our churches and communities as well as our families to create this sense of welcome and homecoming. Durham Cathedral, where I used to be Dean, was a Benedictine foundation in the middle ages. I learned a lot about St Benedict’s Rule for Monks, written fifteen hundred years ago but still an inspiration for all who want to be better disciples in our own times. In the Rule, it says that welcome, hospitality and care are a sacred duty.  The brothers and sisters were told to receive the stranger ‘as if they were Christ himself’, to honour and serve him in everyone who looked for a place in which to find a home in which to be cared for. So foyer isn’t an end in itself.  It is a sign of how God welcomes us home, comes running to meet us, embraces us in Christ, accepts us in love, invites us to feast at his table.  It’s a picture of how we become fully human as we learn that
we are loved.

This is the gospel in its purest and simplest form, the good news that God loves us unreservedly in Jesus, whoever we are, whatever the far country we have come from, and however we got there.  To be a disciple means being a living, walking sign of this welcoming love and care that God has for us all.  Sometimes love has to be tough, more often, perhaps, gentle.  Sometimes the foyer we create can seem almost luminous with God’s presence, sometimes we wonder if he is to be found there at all. But as ancient Greek wisdom put it in words Carl Justav Jung had inscribed over the mantel of his front door, “Whether he is called upon or not, God is present”.

And this is what we celebrate on Mothering Sunday. In every expression of good mothering, whether the biological parenthood that brought us into the world, or the intimacy of loving relationships where we give and receive the care that sustains us, or the professional care that models what it is to respect and reverence each human person, “mothering” is at the heart of life. Today at this eucharist we give thanks to the God who is our father and our mother, in whom we live and move and have our being, whose heart of love reaches out to all his creatures, every human soul, each one of us.  He invites us to feel after him and find him, and in finding him, to find our true home, and in finding our true home, learn to be God’s people once again.

St Nicholas Collegiate Church, Galway, Mothering Sunday 2019

At the Ordination of Deacons in Newcastle

I would have the words of John the Baptist emblazoned on the vesture of every newly ordained deacon, priest and bishop. “'I am not the Messiah!” he says, and doesn't not deny it when people want to know. “Are you Elijah? Are you that Prophet?” And he answers “No”. “Who are you then? What do you say about yourself” And John replies: “I am simply the voice of one crying out, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord’”. Not the Messiah who brings in the kingdom. Not Elijah with his earthquake, wind and fire. Not that Prophet like Moses storming down the mountain with the tablets of the law. Just a voice crying out in the wilderness, preparing for the Lord’s coming.

And a wilderness it may seem like at times. Who wants deacons these days? Who needs clergy other than to lend tone or make fun of? Why be ordained at all when the tides of secularism sweep all before them? Well, look back to John the Baptist on your ordination day. Things were scarcely more auspicious then. His ministry baffled some and offended many more. He spoke truth to power and paid for it with his life. You could hardly call it a successful career. And yet he bore witness. That’s what matters – bearing witness. “In the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord.” “But”, some might reply, “of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight was ever made” as Immanuel Kant put it. Maybe he was right. Nevertheless, it matters that we point to the promised justice and reconciliation and truth that will one day break into our world.

For you who are becoming deacons this afternoon, “pointing” in words and deeds to the reality of God is what ordination means. Of course every baptised Christian does this day in, day out, if we take Christianity seriously. But what marks clergy out is that you are public representatives of God and his church, witnesses before the world of what the gospel promises to all who welcome it and embrace it. You are not the Messiah, however much people may wish that you were and sometimes even build pedestals for you to try to make you one. You are not Elijah, and not the Prophet. You are you, and your calling to is point to the Messiah in what you say and what you do and what you are. That makes you a public witness to the gospel. It confers on you the authority of the church. You become, as Austin Farrer famously said, a “walking sacrament”, a living symbol of God’s love. He was speaking of priests but it’s true of all who are ordained, because we are “outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace”, which is how the Prayer Book defines a sacrament.

Once, when I left a cathedral I’d served for eight years as dean, the Bishop said at my farewell service: “what matters in ministry is to know your place”. He used that phrase half a dozen times: knowing our place. I have often thought about it in the twenty years since then. Knowing your place is close to knowing yourself, and in public life, there is nothing more important than to know ourselves inside as well as out. In the church’s ministry, as in any other institution, it’s what gives leaders authenticity, integrity, emotional and spiritual intelligence, empathy, influence. You look at Jesus in the gospels and you’re struck by how powerfully he lived out these qualities. And because he knew how essential it was to nurture them, he went up mountains to pray and find solitude and nourish his relationship with his Father. He knew himself and he knew his place as God’s Son and servant. And John the Baptist knew his place too, as not being the messiah, or any messiah but simply a seeker after truth who bore witness and pointed to the One who was to come.

In our retreat at Alnmouth Friary this week, I’ve shared some reflections on Jesus as he is portrayed in St John’s Gospel, from which our reading today was drawn. In the Gospel Jesus performs a number of signs that act out different aspects of his coming among us as God’s Son. St John says that in these signs he reveals God’s glory. He turns water into wine. He heals a child. He feeds the hungry crowd. He gives sight to a man born blind. He raises Lazarus from the dead. In these five ways he brings joy, and wholeness, and nourishment, and light, and life. In my addresses I’ve suggested that we as deacons are called to perform works like his that visibly draw attention to God’s love that is always at work in the world. We too are signs of joy, signs of wholeness, signs of nourishment, signs of light, signs of new life and – yes – signs of glory, God’s glory, the God who loves the world, who is at work in human lives, whose glory is revealed even – if you can believe it – in the words and actions of ordinary people like us whom he calls to the office and work of a deacon.

An American church bulletin recently reported on a deacons’ ordination with the headline in big letters, “Not to serve but to be served”. Oh dear. Maybe you don’t always say what you mean, but you do mean what you say. “Being served” is precisely how some people view the clergy, and some clergy see themselves. So it matters, it really matters, that we are not going to be grand or self-important. We are going to wash the feet of others and prepare the way of the Lord. John the Baptist shows us the spirit in which we shall do this. For him, everything is looking forward to the Messiah who is to come. His words are charged with an unshakeable, radiant hope in the promises of God. And later in this first chapter of the Fourth Gospel, here is the Messiah himself, the promised one of whom John says, “see the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world…This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me…I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”

And all the signs Jesus performs are a fulfilment of what John has looked forward to so keenly, that God is now among us, and we see his glory full of grace and truth. It takes hope to do what John the Baptist did, what Jesus himself did, what we must do in his name. If we don’t have hope in God’s coming among us, why are we here today in this holy place, pledging ourselves to a life of service in the company of friends with whom we break bread? If we don’t have hope, if we don’t truly believe through our ministry God will touch the lives of others, how can we be good witnesses of the gospel that the church calls us to be? If we don’t ourselves minister and live by hope, what hope can there be for the church? For the world? For any of us?

You are here to bear witness. You are here to bring hope. You are not the Messiah or Elijah or the Prophet. But you are witnesses of grace and truth in our midst, and you will speak of them in the words you utter and the service you give. You too will perform signs of glory that imitate the works of Jesus. In his name, you announce the coming of the Lord, you prepare his way, and you point to the hope he brings. Your ordination today is a sign of the hope God has set before us. May the God of hope be with you all.

Newcastle Cathedral, 30 June 2018
John 1.19-23

Letting God be God: a sermon on Trinity Sunday

‘Great music’ said the pianist Artur Schnabel ‘is music that is better than it can ever be played’.  That fits my faltering attempts to play Bach or Mozart at the keyboard. I know that I am touching a mystery here. It lies within the notes I stumble over, and in a sense, I am releasing that mystery as I play. Yet somehow it is always beyond the notes themselves, beyond even the most perfect performance of them imaginable.  Worship, too, is something that is performed. The words we say and sing this morning – the gloria, the creed, the readings, the intercessions, the eucharistic prayer, the hymns, even this sermon – they are like a musicical score: only in the performance, in the doing, do they come alive.  And we realise that however good the words, however honest our intentions, our worship always falls short of what it proclaims, always points beyond itself.

On Trinity Sunday, we realise the impossibility of ever doing God justice by talking about him. We ask too much of language when we expect it to carry this deepest mystery of all:

                       words strain, / Crack and sometimes break under the burden,

                       Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place.

says T.S. Eliot.  For how can we speak about the God who is both high and deep, beyond us yet within, encompassing all that has been, and is, and is yet to come?  ‘To whom then will you compare God?’ asks the prophet.  I can barely comprehend the mystery of another human being, my own self even, let alone the mystery of God.

 

                        For one like me / God will never be plain and

                        out there, but dark rather and / inexplicable

writes the Welsh priest-poet R.S. Thomas. Perhaps what the preacher on Trinity Sunday should be saying is that there is nothing he can say. ‘Of that whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent’ said the philosopher Wittgenstein.  It’s holy ground that we tread today.
 

Trinity Sunday should make contemplatives out of us; people who are not afraid of silence, who are as ready to be as to do, who are at home not only with earthquake, wind and fire but also with the still small voice. Religion, if it is anything, is about the practice of the presence of God, about discovering and discerning the signs of that presence in life. It is about exploration and awareness, about finding meanings and making connections, about celebrating what is yet to be in the face of what already is. To do that, we need to learn how to be quiet, become more present and attentive to life, to see what is there, and love what we find. Pascal said that all our troubles derive from one basic fault: our inability to sit still in a room.  That is what the contemplatives and mystics down the centuries have always understood. They teach us that when the words run out we become open to God in a new way, because he is nearer to us than our own souls. In a church of ‘fresh expressions’ that are often busy, hectic and loud, I believe people are looking to some of us to create contemplation-shaped churches that are pools of quiet awareness where ordinary people can reconnect with the gift that is in them to know the mystery of God.  This is one of the gifts of Trinity Sunday.

But those who are most practised in contemplative ways of prayer tell us that we cannot stop there. The Quakers, for instance, whose worship is a weekly celebration of the sacrament of silence - what Christians have been more active in politics and social concern than they? Prayer is not passivity. Trinity Sunday means more than what we can’t say.  This ‘more’ is about what we can do, indeed must do, if we are to live as Christians. In the Trinity, we see a pattern of relation­ship that speaks of how we are to be towards others and towards the world. The threeness of Trinity means community, a society of persons moving constant­ly out towards one another in self-giving, living and being in that perfect oneness we call by the name of ‘love’. 

‘Love’, as the New Testament understands it, is not so much a matter of the passions as the will.  ‘If you love me you will keep my commandments’. To be a Christian is to acquire the habit of living and loving in this commanded, costly way that Jesus acts out historical­ly, and that Trinity embodies eternally. So, Trinity Sunday calls me to the life of active love: love for my neighbour and community, love for my nation and for the world. There is no other way of being a Christian, no other path shown us by Jesus than this if we are to embody God's Trinitarian life in the world.  So contemplation and action belong together, as indivisible as loving God and loving my neighbour. The more I practise God's presence, the more I find myself caring about the world and the society I am a part of. I need to do more more than just pray. ‘What matters for praying is what we do next’ said Alan Ecclestone.  

 

Today, with people across the world, we are all in silence at events to which there are no words that can do justice.  I mean of course the cyclone in Burma and the earthquake in China.  It may be the silence of helplessness: we think there is nothing we can do that will make a difference apart, perhaps, from giving what we can towards the relief of those who have suffered and are suffering so terribly.  But the kind of silence I am speaking of is not helplessness.  It’s the same as the silence of contemplative involvement with God the Holy Trinity.  As we gaze on him who is love, who has taken the manhood into God, we take into that gaze all of creation, all God’s world, all the human family, all who cry out of pain and distress.  Our attentive silence embraces them all, and perhaps does for them far more than ever we can know or imagine.  For we can’t pray for our fellow human beings without by that very act committing ourselves to re-make the world as Christ would have it.  To be rooted in scripture, sacrament and silence is to be rooted in God’s mission for the healing of the world.  But in the same way, what matters for action is what we do next.  Prayer, silence, reflection, being aware and attentive to the miracle of God’s presence in life, this both begins and completes the circle.

In this morning’s gospel, the risen Jesus says farewell to his disciples with the words: ‘all authority in heaven and on earth is given to me’.  It is the climax of the gospel, the culmination of all that St Matthew’s story has been leading up to.  ‘I am with you always, to the end of the age’.  It ends as it began – with the angel’s promise to Joseph that the child would be called Immanuel, God-with-us. The narrative has travelled far since then.  But the promise is the same: that Yahweh the high and hidden one, who is beyond all words and images, the creator of the world and the holy one of Israel, is in our midst, present to us forever as grace and truth.  This is God the mighty and eternal who calls worlds into being and loves us into life.  This is God the compassionate and merciful, who bears on his heart for all time the sorrow and pain of the world.  This is the God enthroned in majesty who answers the longings of the ages and shows us his glory.  This is God who is Trinity of persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit to whom be all might, majesty, dominion and power now and to the end of time. 

St Chads College, Durham, Trinity Sunday, 18 May 2008.  (Matthew 28.16-end)

Citizens of Nowhere, Citizens of Everywhere, Citizens of God - Address 2

The second 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

“You would have no power over me, unless it had been given you from above” John 19.1-16

Yesterday we explored how St John’s passion narrative opens up the question, “What is truth?” in relation to our loyalties and our belonging. Today I want to look at citizenship in relation to power, and particularly its shadow side. 

In the passion, different kinds of power collide: imperial, coercive, brutal power, and the naked defenceless power of love. These forces act on Pilate like a vice.  In the conversation between the man of Rome and the man of God, Pilate is more and more helpless, tossed this way and that like grain in a sieve, half wanting to set free this prisoner who speaks about truth, half needing to appease the crowd who are thirsty for blood.

The shouts of “crucify!” rattle Pilate. But not half as much as when he goes back inside the praetorium and asks Jesus, “Where are you from?” Jesus is silent. And this has the effect of unnerving Pilate all the more. Not knowing where this extraordinary dialogue is leading him, he blunders on, returning to his favourite theme of power because it is all he knows.  “Do you refuse to speak to me?  Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?” It’s the speech of a desperate man.  Jesus’ reply is the last thing he says before he reaches the cross. “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above”.  And perhaps it begins to dawn on Pilate that this kingdom that is “not from here” is different in every way from that of imperial Rome. Yet the power Jesus acknowledges in Pilate to crucify and set free comes from the same source as his own, the power to lay down his own life and to take it up again, as he has said earlier in the gospel. That is to say, it comes ultimately from God.  

This is not to give divine legitimacy to the human political system that has Jesus in its grip.  Jesus’ point is neither to affirm the political system Pilate represents nor to subvert it.  It’s simply to acknowledge that it’s a temporal, derivative power.  Every Roman governor knew that the only power he held was like that.  He was merely the local representative of the emperor, a servant of Rome.  In particular, governors of Judaea were under no illusions about the significance of their patch.  This remote unloved outpost of empire was no Gaul or Spain, or even Britannia. 

Instead, Jesus turns Pilate’s riposte about power into a theological reflection on the divine origins of all human authority.  That is to say, whoever we are, whatever we are, our power - hard power, soft power, collective power, individual power - comes “from above”.  To recognise this is to learn how to handle power wisely and responsibly.  Not to recognise this, to imagine that power is autonomous, is to become corrupted and destroyed by it. The demonic principalities and powers Paul writes about are destructive precisely because they think they are supremely autonomous and do not acknowledge where they themselves ultimately come from.  “Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice” said Simone Weil. This is Pilate’s dilemma.  

Christian faith commits us to name accurately where power belongs and to confront its abuse by speaking truth to it. As we saw yesterday, this means taking the side of truth against the lie.  It calls us to stand with victims who are exploited and abused, because unlike Pilate, they have no power of any kind, whether their own or given to them from somewhere else. There are Pilates in every walk of life, men and women whose judgments are governed not by what is right but by what others will think of them, what the majority want, what their superiors tell them to do, what will be in the pragmatic interests of their institution. I have suggested that one way of reading the Passion Narrative is as a judgment on Pilate and what he stands for: the cowardice that breeds confusion and mistrust by walking out on truth.  No wonder Pilate was “more afraid than ever”.  When fear dominates our motives to the extent that we are incapable of acting according to principle, we have lost our moral bearings.  

I say we. Anyone who undertakes public office knows that they put their integrity on the line, whether in politics, business or the church.  All of us start out committed to upholding the standards I mentioned yesterday like trustworthiness, accountability, integrity, transparency and selflessness. But if our high ideals are not to be a fantasy, we need to know ourselves, and this includes our propensity for self-deception.  We know how easily the vision we start out with can become dulled with time.  Our choices begin to lose their moral edge and spiritual integrity.  It isn’t that all our good motives are discarded overnight, just that they are eroded bit by bit as the years go by.  The little compromises that smooth the path of daily existence, the courage it takes to stand up for an opinion that may be unpopular but is probably right, our disinclination to take risks, our wish to please other people or be liked, our being satisfied just to be compliant – “doing things right” at the expense of “doing the right thing” - or simply the wearing-down effect of tiredness or boredom – all of this goes into making a Pontius Pilate. These words of Jesus offer a reality-check.  They trace the authority of every institution and every individual back to its proper source in God himself.  To know where our power comes from, as leaders and as citizens, is vital for our self-understanding. Only then do we understand that all work is both his and ours. 

The church has a particular responsibility in the way it orders its life, not only for what it models to the world but especially for what it should be in itself. In the Fourth Gospel, the church is not an institution constructed around power-relations; rather as I said yesterday, it’s a community of truth and love where leadership means washing the feet of other people and laying down your life.  As Meurig said on our first evening, last month’s child abuse hearings in London that focused on the Church of England were painful precisely because they drew attention to how easily, even in the best institutions, what masquerades as benign power can quickly be distorted into power of the most malign and destructive kind. Yet there is no quick fix, no easy path to servanthood. Our transformation from people fascinated by power into servants who wash feet doesn’t happen just because we act it out on Maundy Thursday. It begins when we pay attention to the example of Jesus and make it our daily prayer to imitate him.  Only then do we acknowledge that to live as Jesus did can never be the result of human effort.  It depends on charisms, grace-gifts that empower us “from above”, so that we can become what we are incapable of being by ourselves.   

I want to connect our citizenship of this kingdom that is from above, with the Christian virtue of humility. You can define it in different ways, but fundamentally, humility is to “know our place” in the divine scheme of things, and understand that whoever and whatever we are comes from the power and authority of God.  St Benedict recognised this when he wrote his Rule for Monks.  Humility is the theme of one of the longest and greatest sections of that remarkable book.  It comes early on, for if a brother or a sister hasn’t begun to know their place in the monastery, how will they ever know it before God?   The monastery is a “school for disciples” – this is why Benedict wrote the Rule.  It’s tantamount to saying that it’s a training-ground in humility, for humility is learned through obedience.  So the first of Benedict’s twelve rungs on the ladder of humility is to know that we are always under divine scrutiny; all our actions “are everywhere seen by the eye of God’s majesty” (chapter 7).  To put it simply, humility is the renunciation of power as humans tend to understand, in other words, to embrace the wholly other kind of power that is to embrace truth and love. 

To find that his power under this kind of scrutiny is precisely what is happening to Pilate.  Everything that he has ever been has come under the gaze of Jesus.  Jesus has cut him down to size. “You are what you are because of God”.  What Jesus says to Pilate he says to all of us.  Our human capability and potential, our “power” is given “from above”.  That phrase, as I said yesterday, reminds us of the conversation Jesus has had earlier with another man who knew about power, the Jewish leader Nicodemus. I reminded you that in St John, the two words kingdom and from above occur side by side both in that conversation (3.1­­­­­­­­­–8), and here in the Passion Narrative.  Jesus tells Pilate that he must look beyond himself to understand the source of his power, just as he told Nicodemus that the only way he would see the kingdom of God was by being “born from above”.  “Can you enter your mother’s womb and be born a second time?” asks Nicodemus.  The other gospels say that we must indeed become like little children. What Jesus is telling Nicodemus and Pilate is that the journey of humility begins and ends in God.  Without him, we shall never find it, and therefore never “know our place” in the world. Which is the same as saying, we can never become good citizens in the human sense, let alone the divine, we can never hold and use our power wisely until we know our place.

****

Jesus does not stop there, though he might have done.  But there is more to say about power and its abuse. “Therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin”.  Who or what is Jesus referring to? 

Pilate has already stated the facts himself, and has used the very word Jesus now picks up: “your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me” (18.35).  But the process of “handing over” didn’t begin with them.  As in all the gospels, John is in no doubt about where it originated.  He uses the same word to refer to Judas Iscariot whose shadow has fallen across John’s Gospel from early on after the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus spoke about the one who would betray him. We have known all along about the central part he will play in delivering Jesus to his destiny.  Yes, technically it was the high priest, not Judas, who delivered Jesus to Pilate. But Judas’ role has been symbolically much more significant.  So Jesus acknowledges that without Judas, he would not now be standing in the praetorium facing judgment.  

It is not only Judas and the Jewish authorities who are engaged in “handing over”.  The word turns up again in the sentence which rounds off the long Pilate episode. His final act, John tells us, is to “hand him over” to be crucified. In the deadly game of relay that culminates in the death of an innocent man, many different players are involved.  John sees the judicial murder of Jesus as a collusion whose central act is one of “handing over”: Judas to the priests; the priests to Pilate, Pilate to the crowd.  But we need to notice how the word reappears one last time at the cross itself.  There Jesus bows his head in death and “hands over” his spirit (19.30).  Ultimately, what Judas, the priests, Pilate and the crowd do without knowing it is to “hand over” the spirit of Jesus for the world’s salvation.  That is to reflect theologically on how human events unwittingly fulfil a divine purpose.  Perhaps it recalls the words of Joseph to his brothers when they are reconciled: “even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today” (Genesis 50.20).

Sometimes a writer changes forever the way you see things. W. H. Vanstone is one of these for me, in his two books Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense and The Stature of Waiting. That second book has shown how the word “betray” is used as a marker in the gospels.  It indicates a transition in Jesus’ career.  Up to the passion, Jesus is the active agent in events: teaching, doing good, bearing witness to the kingdom of God.  But once he is “handed over”, his role becomes passive.  Out of the very power that is his by right, he chooses to renounce power.  He becomes the one who is “done to” by others, culminating in his suffering and death. The true significance of Judas’ act, says Vanstone, is that he is the means through whom Jesus has become the victim, his destiny no longer lying within his own control but in the hands of others. 

This helps us to see the connection between what Jesus has just said about Pilate’s “power” over him and Judas’ guilt in “handing over” Jesus to Pilate.  Throughout St John, Jesus has exercised power - as the bringer of light, life and love, he acts with the authority and power of God himself.  But now, instead of being in control of his own destiny, he is subject to the power of someone else, Pilate who can crucify or release him at will.  That the Son of God by whom worlds were made should now have become the object of someone else’s power marks a new phase in his abasement. And because of Judas’ key role in this, he is guilty of a “greater sin”. 

John is unsparing in his judgment on Judas, whom he calls “the son of destruction”.  More than anyone else, he is the man who has used power for evil ends; or, we might say, been taken over and possessed by an evil power intent on destroying truth and goodness. “The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him” says John (13.2). At the last supper, “Satan entered into him....So after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night.”

What does John find so unforgivable in the career of Judas that he uses the dramatic image of the night to symbolise his inner condition?  It goes back to how he pictures the church as an upper room community.  I think we can say that the sin of Judas as John sees it is a sin against both the truth and the friendship of that room. There, Judas is portrayed as the direct antithesis of the disciple “whom Jesus loved”.  When Jesus predicts that one of them will betray him, it’s the beloved disciple next to Jesus at table who asks him who it is.  Jesus answers with an action of friendship, by giving Judas a piece of bread.  The word companion literally means someone with whom we break our bread: here in France children’s friends are their copains.  Yet Judas abuses the privileged position friendship gives.  He throws the gesture of intimacy back into Jesus’ face and leaves the table.  There’s a pointed contrast here for St John. As the one abandons Jesus, another, the beloved disciple, stays with him all the way to the cross: loving ‘to the end’ just as John tells us that Jesus loved his disciples to the end.

We can speculate about what John thinks drove Judas to hand Jesus over.  Traditionally it comes down to envy or greed. But the Fourth Gospel probes the psychology of Judas more deeply.  As I’ve said, the first references to Jesus being ‘handed over’ occur immediately after the story of the feeding of the crowd, when Jesus foresees that people want to take him by force to make him king (6.15): here, at last, is the messiah who will rid Israel of Rome and give her back her freedom!  This suggests that Judas is not the envious or greedy disciple so much as the disappointed friend.  As the gospel unfolds, it becomes clearer that what he has hoped for in Jesus is not going to be realised.  The delicate irony in John’s use of the friendship-symbolism of bread points to these failed expectations.  Jesus begins by multiplying loaves and hopes of kingship are high.  But they are progressively dashed as Jesus’ meaning becomes clear, and by the time we reach the upper room, all he gives Judas is a single morsel of bread.  The kingdom is not going to come; or as we know by now, it is not going to come in that form.  Maybe Judas thought that Jesus’ arrest would force the issue, but that is to speculate beyond what the gospels tells us. 

But in the Fourth Gospel he is not simply the lonely, isolated erstwhile friend whose destiny is to become the most tragic individual in history destined, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, to be chained forever at the icy centre of hell with those other two great traducers, Brutus and Cassius.  He stands for an entire community that has turned against Jesus and made him the object of their hatred. This is the shadow side of citizenship that, as John sees it, sets itself up against the kingship that Jesus has come to bear witness to. John has underlined this collective rejection of Jesus at the very outset of his book.  “He came to his own, and his own people did not accept him” (1.11).  The theme of how his mission results first in misunderstanding and then in open hostility is present in all the gospels, but in St John it features from the start.  Subsequent episodes in the Gospel flesh out that initial statement about the man who was not welcome in his own community.  In a long and bitter debate about his messiahship in John 8, Jesus rounds on the religious leaders and accuses them of being from the devil (8.44).  And when Jesus tells Pilate that the hander-over, the traditor, is guilty of a greater sin, we can’t avoid the conclusion that St John sees an entire community implicated in his action. ‘Judas’ is not only the individual man.  His name in Greek means “the Jew”. 

****

This is hard to say for someone like me who is Jewish by birth and whose mother was a holocaust survivor.  The anti-semitism that has poisoned Christian attitudes to the Jewish community for centuries has found St John’s Gospel a text that has fed its hatreds.  There is no getting away from the disparaging references to “the Jews” throughout the story John tells. Instead of asking for the release of an innocent man, they clamour for a murderer and thug.  Despite their hatred of the Romans, they appeal to Pilate to crucify Jesus on the disingenuous grounds of loyalty to the state.  And worst of all is their response to Pilate’s question, “shall I crucify your king?”  They cry out in a terrible unison, “We have no king but the emperor”.  There is not a trace of hesitation or doubt in that cry.  It’s the ultimate surrender of their birthright, the betrayal of their identity as the people whose king is God alone.  

We can’t gloss over how the Passion Narrative was exploited by Christians early on to blame Judaism for the death of Jesus.  And the first thing to acknowledge is how late in the day official Christian recognition of these facts has come, together with the first serious attempts to address it as an issue in Jewish-Christian dialogue. We are learning as we read and handle texts to be careful about the historic resonances they carry for different communities, especially for those that have been or still are voiceless, without power, made victims in some way. Women, people of colour, the LGBTI community, those with disability, people who are stigmatised, immigrants, abuse survivors and many others know what I mean. As we learn to sensitise ourselves to how discrimination has been justified by recourse to familiar texts, we must go back to the scriptures and ask whether we have unwittingly (or even willingly at times?) colluded in readings that can exercise a destructive power over some groups and individuals. I see this as especially urgent when antisemitism is once again raising its head today, as we have seen in the alarming increase in attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions in Europe in recent years (including France). You could call this being humble before the text, knowing our place in relation to it.

Historians tell us that how a society treats its Jewish minorities has often proved to be the bellwether of how that society upholds the virtues of civilisation such as honour, respect, kindness, toleration and human rights. As we know, the assimilation of Jews into the mainstream of the historically Christian European nations was not a straightforward process. My grandparents, living and prospering in a middle-class suburb of Düsseldorf in the early 1930s, did not see the signs of regression until it was almost too late. They could not believe that the hard-won integration of the Jewish community over two centuries into German society, including fighting for their country in the Great War, could ever be reversed. What the rise of Nazism should have taught us is that so-called progress is never irreversible. Which means that our societies have to maintain constant vigilance against the inequality and discrimination that pave the way towards racial hatred and the violence it begets. Antisemitism among the far-right of Germany, a nation acutely aware of the burden it carries because of its twentieth century history, should worry us greatly. And where there is antisemitism, there are always other expressions of hostility based on race, colour, political opinion, religious belief, gender and sexuality. It was not only Jews who ended their days in the Nazi death camps. 

“You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.” You can see how, in a society that was already looking for a scapegoat in connection with Jesus’ death, St John’s telling of the story about Judas the representative Jew would provide a ready candidate on whom to project anti-Semitic tendencies. I mentioned the key work of the anthropologist and theologian Rene Girard in that connection yesterday. This is why I’ve been talking about how we affirm good habits of reading that allow the text to speak into our political and social situations in ways that offer resources for the mending of all that disintegrates and destroys in human life.

However, Jesus’ words to Pilate must not be read in isolation from all that he has said up to this point. I’m thinking of sayings like “I have come that they may have life, and have it in all its abundance”; and “I, if I am lifted up from the earth will draw all humanity to myself”. And most of all, his prayer that “they may all be one: as you, Father are in me, and I am in you, may they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me”. I know that in their strict sense, these sayings apply to those whom Jesus has called to him, the society of friends that is St John’s way of speaking about the church. But the scope of his gospel forbids us from the narrow reading of these texts. From its opening words “in the beginning” to its vision of the cross as a cosmic event, there is what I would call a tendency towards convergence in St John, towards the integration of all that is split off and at risk of being scattered. Alone among the gospels, it’s John who quotes Jesus’ saying, after he has fed the five thousand, “gather up the fragments so that nothing may be lost”. This, it seems to me, is the work of the grace and truth we see in the glory of the only-begotten from the Father. That is the ultimate power of love about which St John has so much to say, the love that binds all things together and remakes the world as God intended it to be. And such is its power that even the “greater sin” Jesus speaks of to Pilate is capable of forgiveness and reconciliation, that transformation in the life of communities and individuals that the gospel is about. 

This is why I believe that these chapters of St John speak into our dilemmas about peoplehood, nationhood, belonging and citizenship. I believe we are at a profoundly significant moment in the history not only of Britain and Europe but of the world. Maybe every generation feels this about the times they live in, but not since the Cuba Missile Crisis have I felt such a loss of hope for the future of humanity. Wherever we look, the threats posed by climate change, the hardening of extreme political views, endemic violence and the fragmentation of former alliances, not to mention the fractiousness of public debate and the sidelining of basic human virtues like generosity, kindness, collaboration, sympathy, respect, tolerance and the love of goodness, truth and beauty. Maybe getting old is making me grumpy?

I’m afraid that the outcome of the EU referendum was to me a symbol of just such a walking away from the covenants and alliances that have served us so well, imagining that it’s better to be isolated than together, regarding sovereignty as something to be grasped at rather than shared, demeaning the common good across our continent and beyond, tolerating the rhetoric of closing our borders to immigrants who contribute so much to our country. I’m not of course saying that the Referendum created these attitudes. Rather, it forced them into the open by putting to the electorate a simple, binary question about being in or out of a family of nations and peoples. The exposure proved toxic. We all know how ugly the discourse has become. And that was perhaps something we did not expect.

But I believe that the way John explores the questions of power and citizenship speaks into our current dilemmas. Pilate and Judas are I think symbols of institutional self-interest, the kind of citizenship that serves its own ends. It feeds on the collective myths about privilege, power and destiny that are only too familiar to us who contemplate the populist nationalisms all over the world today. Phrases like “America first”, “Take back control”, “What’s in Britain’s best interests” elevate the nation-state into an entity that risks becoming an absolute, an end in itself. This seems to me to fly in the face of the kind of citizenship John is talking about, where friends associate as a community of love and truth, and serve one another by washing feet. 

It’s not that a Jew ceases to be a Jew, or a Roman a Roman. It’s not that we don’t love our country and are privileged to be its citizens. But when we meet as friends of Jesus Christ and citizens of his kingdom, we always know that we are subjects of the same rule and authority, and this transcends all other kinds of belonging, whether it’s the tribe, the race or the nation. To me, the EU symbolised the capacity of nations not to give their own cherished national identities absolute status but to go beyond them by building a coalition of reconciliation, peace-making, protecting the environment, defending human rights, and promoting the common good. (These are purposes we did not, and still do not hear nearly enough of in the Brexit debate.) We achieved this hard-won position by pooling our sovereignty, the power we have to change things. Perhaps God’s kingship, the kingdom that is “not from here” is more like pooled sovereignty than it is about “taking back control”. For in God’s scheme of things, power is not coercive but collaborative, God working in and through our human agency with all the freedoms we continue to have as men and women created in his image and exercising responsibility within the created order. “Build bridges, not walls” says Pope Francis. Instead of pulling up drawbridges, we need to reach out to one another in truth and friendship, celebrating the citizenship we have in common both within the human family, and as brothers and sisters under God. This is what I think we see prefigured in the passion story. 

Which is why it’s not comfortable reading.  It’s a searchlight that probes both our outer and our inner worlds, scrutinises our collective and personal motives, exposes our ambivalence about the moral good.  It can seem as though there is no mercy in this pitiless exposure of who and what we are.  But if we stay with it, we discover that it is about grace as well as truth, which turns out to be the power of love.  The cross’s judgment upon us is also our salvation: the light that scrutinises us also brings hope.  We bring to it our shadows and our distorted vision, and discover that it this light of truth and grace flows from an open door.  Our great refusals don’t have the last word after all. By grace we can become citizens of God, and therefore, citizens of the whole world, of all humanity. That will teach us how to understand our citizenship within the human circles of belonging I spoke about at the outset. For that open door is nothing less than the invitation to come back in out of the night, be welcomed at God’s table, have our feet washed by the suffering Servant, and in that humane place of warmth and trust, to learn to love one another once again.