Revisiting the Great Tapestry: a lecture in Coventry Cathedral

I am very glad to be back in Coventry in this year when the Diocese celebrates its centenary, and with it, this Cathedral in its two incarnations. We came to Coventry in 1987, this building’s silver jubilee year. In eight years here, I learned most of what I know about liturgy and music which were my main brief as Precentor. But as I look back, I realise that what influenced me most was this building itself, and the community whose place it was and is. I don’t only mean in the sense of understanding what cathedral ministry means, and thereby setting the course of the rest of my working life as a dean in two other cathedrals. I mean the experience of being a worshipper here, a disciple, a praying human being for whom this place proved to be extraordinarily formative.

My book on the Tapestry, A Picture of Faith, was published in 1995, the year we left Coventry. But I wrote it earlier than that, during a period of sabbatical leave in, I think, 1991. It was the only book I have ever written in longhand. Maybe handwriting a text makes a difference. You feel in intimate contact with the words as they take shape on paper. I wonder whether this first essay in producing something to last wasn’t the best of me, because of the slowness of writing in your own hand. Everything is weighed and pondered when you are not in a rush as you so often are on a computer or tablet.

I had not looked at it for a quarter of a century until I was invited to give this lecture. But I have revisited the Tapestry itself, times without number. When I left Coventry, I bought a remaindered poster of it for one pound in the Cathedral shop and had it framed. It has hung in my study ever since. It’s not the same as seeing it in the flesh, but it’s the next best thing. But when I have come back here, I always feel that it greets me like an old friend. As I say in the book, I feel recognised by it, known, embraced. It will always be for me a profound metaphor of being loved.

That’s partly the good recognition you often have when you find yourself back in a place where you have flourished. But it’s more than that. I think it’s the specific part the Tapestry played in my human, spiritual and theological formation in the years I was here. Writing the book was only a final stage of a process in which the Tapestry worked on me long before I worked on it.

I first came here in 1962, not long after the consecration. My parents thought we should drive up the newly opened M1 from London and see the cathedral, this emblem of a post-war Britain rising from the ashes. I was twelve. I have never forgotten that day. Two things stand out in my memory of that sunny day: the jet-black marble floor in which you could see yourself reflected; and the Tapestry, whose golds and greens cast an unforgettable glow over the entire building, and whose figure of Christ in Majesty laid down a way of contemplating the divine that I have returned to ever since.

For me it was life-changing. I don’t say that it was my very first religious experience. But I think Coventry gave me my first explicit glimmerings of a faith that I knew I did not yet have but began to crave. (That happened not long afterwards at school as I sang the top line in Bach’s St John Passion. It sowed the seeds of my next book, The Eight Words of Jesus which was a reflection on the Passion Narrative in the Fourth Gospel; but it had to wait until Durham to see the light of day.) So you can see why, when I came here twenty five years later to work, it already felt like a homecoming.

In my time, the daily prayer of the Cathedral always took place within sight of the Tapestry. In the mornings, and when evensong was sung of course, it would be celebrated in the quire. When evening prayer was said, it would take place in the Lady Chapel. This was true of both Sunday eucharists too, the early service in the Lady Chapel and the sung eucharist at the high altar. When I said that most of the week we worshipped “in sight of the Tapestry”, I don’t just mean our sight of it. I also mean its sight of us. For Christ in Majesty is such a powerful figure that he presides not only over the Tapestry but over the entire Cathedral as Basil Spence had intended. The Tapestry dominates everything. That cannot but powerfully configure the spirituality of the cathedral and everyone who worships there.

A Picture of Faith was my attempt to explore how it was configuring me. It was never meant to be an art monograph, though I read a lot about Graham Sutherland as I researched it. I was also clear that I was not writing a work of formal theology, though theology came into every page. As I put it in the book, I wanted to offer a modest piece of prayed theology illuminated by the insights of poets and painters, writers, musicians and spiritual guides down the ages. What I set out to do was to set out a personal reading of the Tapestry as it had encountered me as a human being endeavouring to make sense of life, as an explorer of the spirit as I say in the preface. I did not want to speak for anyone else, only myself. Hence the confessional tone using the first person singular throughout.

When the book was published, some people told me they didn’t see all of the Tapestry’s symbolism in the same way as I did. And why not? I’d learned something about stained glass in Salisbury when the Prisoners of Conscience east window was being installed in the late 1970s. Gabriel Loire, the artist in Chartres, spoke about tolérance. He meant the capacity of art to be read in different ways because it has depth and texture and layers of meaning. Tolérance, he said, is about an attitude of openness and generosity in the way we read art, texts, people. It stimulates our curiosity, makes us want to ask questions. This became an important idea for me because it allowed the imagination to roam, take risks with the meanings that lay in written texts (the Bible, literature and poetry), architecture like this Cathedral, and above all at that time, the Tapestry.

Indeed, one aspect of the design of this Cathedral had already got me into trouble. When the old Cathedral Pitkin Guide went out of print. John Petty asked me to write a new one, not to revise the old but to create an entirely new book. He said: don’t just describe. Interpret how you think this great church speaks about Christianity. That’s the real point, isn’t it: how to explore the architecture and the design of the furnishings as a witness to the gospel. Today we would speak about the missional dimension of the Cathedral. There’s no better way to learn about your church, not simply as heritage or architecture but as the home of a worshipping community, a place of lived spiritual experience, a building that makes a statement about this church’s mission.

Here’s what I wrote about this quire we are sitting in. “The canopies above the canons’ stalls suggest thorns, or birds in flight.” That simple sentence greatly upset one member of the Cathedral community. He said: “Provost Williams taught us that the quire was an avenue of thorns leading up to the high altar. It’s about death and resurrection. Flying birds don’t come into it.” Before long, other people were being told that the Precentor was subverting the Cathedral’s “message”. He was determined to fall out with me about it, I’m afraid. I was sorry about that. I did not think that the canopies, beautiful as they are, were worth the upset.

But I was adamant that the way we read art and architecture is permissive not univocal.  There can never be a single authorised reading of anything, whatever the artist intended (if we can ever know). Yes, Spence did speak about an avenue of thorns. But I doubt he would have excluded other images that the canopies suggested. When I showed his son-in-law and architect Anthony Blee the draft text of my guidebook for his comment, he was happy with what I had said about birds in flight signalling transcendence, which indeed he linked to the flame above the Dean’s stall symbolising the Holy Spirit and to the descent of the Dove in at the top of the Tapestry. The science of hermeneutics is dedicated to understanding how readings of texts are always multivocal – and buildings, art, human beings and communities are all “texts” for those purposes. What I was trying to do was to be inclusive in my reading rather than exclusive. As a spiritual and moral principle, I believe that inclusion is always better than exclusion. I’ll come back to that point towards the end.

Let’s turn to the Tapestry itself for another example of this. Look at what is going on just outside the right-hand edge of the mandorla between St John’s eagle above and St Mark’s lion below. You can see St Michael the Archangel reaching down to a beaked creature who is facing away from Christ. This is Graham Sutherland’s depiction of Satan being thrown out of heaven, according to the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation. But as I pondered this image I was struck how different it is from the more famous depiction of the same event at the Cathedral’s entrance. There, Jacob Epstein’s great sculpture has the archangel treading down the adversary in a decisive act of triumph over evil. The Tapestry seems more ambiguous. Michael could as easily be reaching down to stop Satan from falling out of heaven as pushing him in a final coup de grace.

This ambivalence seemed to me to be important. Is the Tapestry saying that there is an eternal chasm between good and evil, and consequently a permanent banishment of the wicked to hell? Or is there is a constant work of redemption taking place in the cosmos that will one day lead to the healing of all that is now separated, distorted, fractured? In the earliest centuries of the Christian era, theologians like Origen said that as long as a soul remains in hell, Christ remains on the cross. At the time when Sutherland was designing the Tapestry, the writings of the Catholic priest Teilhard de Chardin were highly influential. Influenced by the universalism of Origen and by Darwinian evolutionary theory, he envisaged a divine work of convergence towards the unity of creation. He spoke of it as the “Omega Point”. It’s interesting to conjecture whether Teilhard’s theology was an influence on the design. As far as St Michael and the devil are concerned, Sutherland doesn’t say in his book on the Tapestry what he intended. And even if he had, that would not constrain our own reading of it. All artists and writers speak beyond what they think or intend. Sutherland only says that by including it, he wanted to acknowledge the dedication of the Cathedral to St Michael and at the same time create a degree of asymmetry that he believed the Tapestry needed.

I went outside many times to study the Jacob Epstein sculpture and how he depicts the victorious St Michael. It’s often been observed that his face, far from wearing the conventional demeanour of a victor, is remarkably quiescent, almost subdued. I think commentators are right to construe this as compassion; not that Michael hasn’t defeated evil, but that in defeat are the seeds of a new beginning, which explains why Satan is looking up at the victor who stands guard over him, not defiantly but entertaining the hope that redemption, even for him, is not an impossible idea. If this is right, then there is a coherence between the two St Michaels, outside and in, and that seems to me to fit precisely into the message of global, indeed cosmic, reconciliation that this Cathedral has always proclaimed to the world. Who’d have thought that a detail on the Tapestry could have such far-reaching theological consequences?

I think this insight was the key to unlocking my own reading of the Tapestry. When I first thought of writing about it, I imagined it would be a kind of descriptive essay. There’s still room for that project, understanding the Tapestry’s place in the design of the Cathedral, in art-history, as a landmark in textile creation, and as a theological statement in the tradition of Christian iconography. The splendid Sutherland exhibition you are enjoying in this Cathedral demonstrates the stature of a great artist whose reputation, I think, has been steadily growing since his lifetime. Ben Quash who has already lectured here could be the person to write it. But what I was finding as I pondered the Tapestry was that it was drawing me into it and inviting me to find my personal place within its rich, complex symbolism that about God, the universe and everything. Meanings were what I was interested in, not fixed, static codes that imperiously ordered me to understand it this way, but dynamic, fluid meanings that invited me to make a personal spiritual journey, become curious, explore, discover, discern.

So I tried to put myself inside the Tapestry and learn. Let’s consider the human figure standing between the feet of Jesus because, very thoughtfully, Sutherland has already placed someone, anyone, you, me, every child of humanity, on the Tapestry. I admit I was startled to re-read what I’d written about this. Having made the point that the figure is not, in fact, life-sized, though you often hear it said, I go on:

If I concentrate on what I see in that square of tapestry and for the time being forget about the rest, I see an eloquent picture of my existence. I stand alone in a dark place. Above me is a great swirl of – I know not what; it simply overwhelms the place where I am, like some huge, lowering storm cloud. On either side of me are feet and legs, rearing up to be lost in the darkness above. I am not to know whose they are. For all I know, they may as well be the wreckage of some colossal monument, like Shelley’s “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” with their chilling motto: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

The word that comes to mind as I ponder the human being is lostness: lost in relation to the scale of his (sic) immense surroundings, lost in a deeper, more existential sense in the face of life’s dilemmas. In one way this man can look exceedingly forlorn. I come back to Dante in his dark wood: ready for his journey, yet not knowing in which direction to go. I see myself in that diminutive human figure at the times of my life when I have felt most perplexed, crushed almost by the demands, dilemmas and uncertainties of being alive and human. At such times it is as if I am stripped of all the normal securities with which I protect myself from too much reality. I am alone and naked in the dark, like the figure on the Tapestry. Like Job, I hear a voice summoning me to stand up, like a man, and be questioned. Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?

(That passage illustrates the stream-of-consciousness style in which I wrote. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but it illustrates the interest in psychotherapy that was awakening in me at the time my wife Jenny was beginning a psychoanalytic training. I believed that in the spirit of Now Voyager! the only book worth writing was an honest one in which I was not going to be afraid of the first-person singular.)

The chapter goes on to explore the hiddenness of God, the endlessly fascinating story in Genesis of Jacob wrestling with the angel, the via negativa in Christian spirituality exemplified by spiritual guides like Meister Eckhart, the anonymous fourteenth century book The Cloud of Unknowing and some of the poetry of R. S. Thomas. What does it mean to speak of the absence of God as a spiritual reality? How do we speak about God without resorting to analogies? How we find God in the dark places of life? It’s important you know that this comes near the end of the book. So it is set in the context of what we’ve come to learn about Christ in glory crucified and risen, about the grace and truth of God our Creator and Redeemer, about the four living creatures as symbols of the evangelists, the bringers of good news. And although I conceived this chapter as necessarily about the shadow side of life, it’s important that I also quote the ending.

The darkness that swallowed up Christ on the mountain of transfiguration still contains him and shines because of him. It becomes the shekinah, the cloud of glory. In the absence is a profound presence. And as I pierce through to that presence, I find out that its nature and its name is love.

The tapestry beautifully expresses this paradox. For the man’s darkness is none other than the shadow of the great Christ above him. The fearful cloud over his head is the very skirt of Christ. On each side are the feet of Christ, strong, trustworthy. The man may not know it, but he is “wholly within love”. I see myself in him now in a new way: erect, noble, dignified in this new status as child of God. He is as I know myself to be, “wholly within love”, held firm, profoundly safe… “So the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing”…In this dark yet good place I can be still; and discover that I am dancing in the sunshine.

Where did this come from, this chapter that I recall at the time felt quite tough to write? I see I referenced Biblical texts like Genesis, the Psalms, Job and the passion narrative. But I can also see my own mid-life in it, for our late-thirties and early forties can be a highly significant, sometimes fraught, time in our personal development. For me, opening up a conversation with the Tapestry in this way, being inspired by it, but daring to question it too, marked an important step in my own theological and spiritual formation.  Maybe we can only speak about darkness and pain when we have lived long enough to reflect on it. Life has to be lived forwards but understood backwards. At all events, this chapter, and the one about the crucifixion tableau, emerge from a growing conviction that if religion has nothing to say about suffering, then it has nothing to say. To me, Christ in Glory, the human figure at his feet, and the crucified man on the cross below are all about the same fundamental theme of the Christian gospel, light and dark, suffering and transfiguration, death and resurrection inseparably held together. Glory can only speak to us when we trust that it knows about pain – the world’s pain, our collective human pain, our pain as individual people before God, flesh and blood women, children, men. Which is to say that the Tapestry is an icon of the Incarnation because its central truth is that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”.

That word icon is important. It was always central to how I approached the Tapestry, and there’s a whole chapter devoted to this in the first part of the book. I’ve said I recognised that I was not describing the Tapestry so much as entering into its meanings. My meditation felt closer to poetry than prose, more imaginative writing rather than descriptive analytical prose. The metaphor of the icon was obvious. It’s a metaphor, because technically the Tapestry isn’t an icon in the strict sense of having been “written” by an iconographer according to the rules of the Orthodox Church and the stylistic and colour conventions of its iconographers. It was not envisaged that it would function directly in the Cathedral’s ceremonial, be bowed towards as a conscious liturgical action, censed in the liturgy, have candles lit in front of it and so on.

Yet in a more general sense, icon meaning an image is precisely how the Tapestry functions for this Cathedral community at prayer. No-one calls it a picture – and if I have one regret about my book, it’s the title. In one way, A Picture of Faith­ does accurately suggest exploring faith: “a meditation on the imagery of Christ in glory” is precisely what it is. But using the word picture is bound to support the idea my Icon chapter is meant to resist. We come in, we notice the Tapestry, so we look at it. But “at it” maintains the distance between subject and object, observer and observed. On the contrary, the point of an icon is to be drawn into it, know your place within its world through active attention, contemplation, the exercise of the spiritual imagination. I wanted to promote the Tapestry as a spiritual icon, functioning in worship and prayer in the same kind of way as an Orthodox icon.

Some of you will recognise this approach. I wasn’t using the language of Ignatian prayer in those days, but I now see that the book intuited the methods of the Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius of Loyola was a wounded soldier who gave his life to being a pilgrim and missioner, a “knight-companion” in the service of Jesus Christ. For him immersion in the person of Christ, and deep reflection on his own experience led to a new understanding of faith and in the light of it, how to make good moral choices. He believed that we need to grasp how Jesus’ life, death and resurrection shape the whole of life. He said that two powers need to be brought into play if we are to encounter him: imagination and love. Imagination means the willingness to enter the world of the other, in this case God as we know him in Jesus. And love is both the fountainhead and fruit of all imaginative prayer and right action. The God who sent his Son into the world as a sign of love, now invites us to find him and love him in Christ, in the scriptures, in the church and in all creation. So imagination is the handmaid of spirituality because it enables us to enter more fully into our life in Christ, into God’s world, our neighbour’s worlds, our own inner worlds.

If I were writing the book today, I would more of these insights about how we might come before the Tapestry and learn to pray and work in its presence. But I think I was reaching out for them, because the big question the Tapestry put to me was always: how does Christ in Glory change things? How does he transform our lives? How does he speak truth to the Church? How does he energise us to play our part in the work of reconciliation and mission? How does he calibrate our notions of justice and ethics? How does he hold out hope for the world? To discover how a visual image can, with the exercise of imagination and love, help us to probe these great questions is, I now realise, a basically Ignatian approach, however rudimentary and intuitive it was at the time.

The point is to shine a light on our ordinary days so that they are transfigured. Illumination is, as we know, a step on the mystical path of prayer, the spiritual journey documented by St John of the Cross in, for instance, The Dark Night of the Soul. Illumination means being lit up by the grace and truth of God as we contemplate him. Again, this is not an escape from the complexities of life but a fuller way of understanding it and committing ourselves to it in a spiritually intelligent or “enlightened” way. Through it, fantasy and illusion is banished and we become aware in a more profound way of the presence of God in our ordinary human experience and in the world in which we follow Jesus.

It always struck me how powerfully light functions in the Tapestry: the brilliance of the sunburst that emanates out of the presence of the Eternal One at the top; the golden bands of light that both stabilise the Tapestry and travel across it energising, electrifying its surface; St Michael and the four living creatures lit up as holy presences, and of course the majestic figure of Christ himself, transfigured in brilliant white, illuminated as if from within, from which all the other light in the Tapestry is derived. But all this would only work for the spiritual imagination, I think, if there were places where light is dimmed and colour muted, as it is around the figure of the human being, and the crucifixion below. The spiritual task, as both Ignatius and John of the Cross understand it, is to recognise how these realities of light and shadow, what the artists call chiaroscuro, play off one another, how we learn to find God in darkness as well as light.

I want to mention one more aspect of the Tapestry. It comes out of an abrasive encounter I once had in the nave with Professor Daphne Hampson, a distinguished feminist theologian, who was visiting the Cathedral. She stabbed a finger towards the Tapestry and asked how we in the Cathedral could live with that image of unreconstructed masculinity. My response came down to two things. The first was that the work had to be judged by the criteria of the 1950s, not by those of the 1990s. That’s a basic hermeneutical principle: we can argue with a work of art, even an icon, so long as we respect it as a different voice from our own, speaking to us out of its own age and context that are not ours. That’s fundamental to the way we have to read scripture, a matter of huge relevance to the church today as we grapple with matters like same-sex marriage, for example.

But I also saw, in the Tapestry itself, a clue about how to glimpse a less gendered, more inclusive approach. It’s true that the figure of Christ, and of the human being below, are both unambiguously male. But what about Christ’s posture and the way the priest’s robe arranges itself around the body? Sutherland says of his portrayal of Christ: “I wanted the figure to be real, yet not real. I wanted it to be something slightly ambiguous: a human form, but with overtones of a nature form” (31). Ambiguous! The artist’s own licence to practise tolerance! But doesn’t it go with inclusive, offering at least a hint of the female form to modify the traditionally male depiction of Jesus? I would now certainly explore how this merest hint opens the door to fully inclusive readings of Christian faith where difference is welcomed and celebrated, whether of gender, social class, ethnicity, sexuality or politics. I wrote the book at the time we were preparing to ordain women to the priesthood. I quoted the saying of St Paul in Galatians: “In Christ there is no male or female, Jew or Gentile, bond or free, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.” I would now make much more of this, because I believe that the church’s reluctance to act on it in relation to, for example, equal marriage, is not just unfortunate but wrong.

You may say that this is stretching interpretation too far. I reply that this is precisely the function of the Tapestry – to stretch our horizons and challenge us to think again about our assumptions. If I’m guilty of a degree of deconstruction, it is only so that I can understand it in a more profound way. Yes, like any text of literature and poetry, like any work of art, it is a “given”. We have to contemplate it, negotiate its tight corners, interrogate it while it puts its questions to us. But I want to end by saying that these are basic to a healthy theological and spiritual mentality. Those biblical texts I mentioned earlier, Genesis, Job, the lament Psalms, Jesus in Gethsemane, all seem to say: arguing with God does not devalue reverence or cheapen piety. On the contrary. The more we love God, the more we confront him not as a remote disengaged deity but as a living presence who is among and within us as our contemporary. 

 

This is how I see the Tapestry. It tells me that Christ, majestic in his glory is not far from any of us – nearer to us than our own souls. He wants us to feel after him and find him, for he has given himself to us in undying love. The Tapestry is about Christ in Glory. But it’s also about us, as we are now, and as we hope one day to become. Augustine says of the eucharist that it is the mystery of ourselves that is upon the altar. It’s the mystery of ourselves that we see on the Tapestry, held and embraced within the mystery of God and his redemptive love. That’s the clue to reading it, I believe, not only as a beautiful work of art but as an icon of all that is central to our Christian faith and human life.

Michael Sadgrove
Coventry Cathedral, 7 July 2018

 

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.

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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”. 

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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.