Holy Week in Chester 1: “I am the Door”

Reading: John 10.1-10.

This Holy Week, I want to explore with you the famous I AM sayings in St John’s Gospel. They are among the most characteristic utterances of the Gospel, associated as they are with the words and signs that, St John says, proclaim Jesus as the incarnate Word, the Son whom God sent among us to bring about the salvation of the world. So he feeds the hungry crowd and speaks of himself as the Bread of Life; he heals the man born blind and announces that he is the Light of the World; he raises Lazarus from the grave and tells the onlookers that he is the Resurrection and the Life. 

The words I AM are a golden thread that runs through this Fourth Gospel. To us they sound simple enough. But the way they are highlighted by St John tells us that to his ear, tuned to every nuance of the Hebrew Bible, they carry deep significance. They originate in the deepest layers of the Old Testament. In a defining narrative in Exodus, God reveals to Moses his sacred and mysterious name YHWH. It’s derived from the verb to be. So when Jesus speaks the emphatic ego eimi, I AM, he is consciously recalling that holy name, and associating himself with it as if to say, here is the Eternal Word of God who has come among you to reveal the Father’s glory, the fulness of his light, life and love. The legacy in St John is these sayings that are among the most significant and best-loved ways we have for speaking about Jesus. How could we now think about him other than as the Good Shepherd, as the Way, the Truth and the Life, as the Bread of Life or as the True Vine? 

What has this got to do with Holy Week? you ask. My answer is that the whole of St John, from the prologue we read at Christmas to the concluding stories of the appearances of the risen Jesus is pointing to the events of this great week. For John, this week’s paschal celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus is the essence of his good news. Nearly half of the gospel concerns the final week of Jesus’ life – and what came next. And even in the earlier chapters of St John, what is sometimes called the Book of Signs, it’s clear that the author is constantly anticipating – foreshadowing – the cross and resurrection. 

In the I AM sayings, the evangelist offers us a series of unforgettable images that speak about God, his coming among us in Jesus and what these might mean not only for us who follow him, but for the whole cosmos, our world, his world, the whole human family. They urge us to look beneath the surface of familiar texts into the larger ocean of meaning that imagery, symbol and metaphor open up to us. As poetry comes into things, at the end of each address I shall read a poem by Malcolm Guite, an Anglican priest and poet, who has composed sonnets on all of the I AM sayings. Poetry can awaken our imaginations in ways that cold prose can’t always achieve. And that is what I hope these addresses may help to do – awaken our spiritual imaginations as we walk the way of the cross and resurrection, and celebrate again love’s work during these days of awe.

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In this first address, this gateway to Holy Week, it seems apt to take Jesus’ saying in the tenth chapter of St John, “I am the door”, or as the modern version has it, “the gate”. In this section of the gospel, Jesus introduces a new idea, that of the sheepfold. The gate is introduced first, closely followed by the shepherd. Unlike the thief and the bandit, the shepherd does not climb over the wall or enter secretively by some other hidden means, but comes and goes through the open gate, followed by the sheep who know his voice. “Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.” So not only is this saying closely linked to the Good Shepherd whom we shall come to on Good Friday, but also to another saying, “I am the way, the truth and the life”, or as it’s better translated, “the true and living way” that leads to salvation. 

We need to picture an ancient near-eastern sheepfold to catch the force of this image. It would look familiar to a shepherd on the high fells of Northumberland where I come from: a space enclosed by a round drystone wall high enough to keep out not only human predators but wild animals in search of prey. On the sheltered side there would be a gap in the wall for the sheep to go in and out. It would be narrow enough for a man to lie across it, thus closing the circle and protecting the sheep. This is likely to be what Jesus means when he speaks about himself as the gate – both the opening itself and the deeply symbolic action of lying down to safeguard the flock, or as he will go on to say, laying down his life for the sheep.

The thing about a door is that it marks a threshold, defines the spaces that are either “outside” or “in”. It looks both ways, like the Roman month of January, the door of the year that was pictured as a double face that looked backwards to the old year and forwards to the new. A threshold is a limen, from which we get the world liminal. It implies a crossing over into a different space. Very often we are one person on this side of a threshold, and someone else on the other. For instance, our front door marks the transition from the public and visible world to the personal and intimate environment of our own homes. The door of this cathedral symbolises the transition from what we call “secular” space to the sacred. The rites of passage at birth, marriage and death are our familiar examples of liminality, but it’s everywhere.

So what is the threshold Jesus alludes to when he speaks of himself as the door or the gate? It’s the passage to safety, to a space we can call home where we can be unafraid and flourish and find life in all its fulness. A space to be safe in, to grow into and inhabit is not far from what the Hebrew scriptures mean by salvation. At this paschal season, we tell the story of how the Hebrews left their Egyptian slavery behind and undertook their journey across the wilderness towards the land that had been promised them. They were not to know that it would be forty years before they crossed the Jordan and entered Canaan. More than a generation in that liminal state of being between places and between times, one life behind them and another life before them. You could picture the Jordan as a threshold, a gateway, a door to a new and at first utterly strange way of life as a settled people. I don’t think it’s over-speculative to wonder whether this isn’t part of the background to Jesus’ saying “I am the gate of the sheep”, when we remind ourselves how the people of Israel were likened to a flock whose shepherd was none other than the Lord himself. The promise of a land, a home to call their own, was to the wandering tribes their sheepfold, their safety, their salvation. 

In Northumberland, shepherds talk about sheep being “hefted” to the hill where they were born. It’s the place they belong to, that gives them their identity, that part of the landscape from which they will never willingly stray. So the sheepfold, and the gate through which the sheep go “in and out to find pasture” is, I think, a far richer image than we might think. For safety, in the way I’ve been speaking about it, is much more than merely the absence of need or hunger or pain. It means knowing the place we call home, knowing where we belong and where our hearts are hefted. rediscovering the lost domain we spend our lives longing for, that Eden from which we were banished, that paradise garden where our humanity is given back to us again. It’s the destiny for which God made us. “I came that they might have life, and have it in all abundance.”

And if you asked St John where he saw this door opened wide and the invitation given to cross over that threshold to abundant life, I think he would not hesitate to say, at Golgotha, at the cross where the world’s salvation is achieved and God’s work accomplished. And beyond it, at the place where the stone was rolled away, and a door opened on to an empty tomb, and a new day dawned, and the kingdom of heaven was opened to all believers. For as we travel through the events of Holy Week, as we go with Jesus to the cross, Easter is the goal that lies ahead, for which we have prepared all though Lent with eager longing. “Behold, I have set before you an open door which no-one is able to shut” says the risen Lord in the Book of Revelation. And now, in Holy Week, we are nearly there, close to the portal that’s the culmination of our great journey. The doorway through which God beckons us stands open. Through it we see our promised land where we know we are hefted and will always belong, that place which is to all pilgrims happiness and home. 

Here is a sonnet by Malcolm Guite on Jesus as the Door. 

Not one that’s gently hinged or deftly hung,
Not like the ones you planed at Joseph’s place,
Not like the well-oiled openings that swung
So easily for Pilate’s practised pace,
Not like the ones that closed in Mary’s face
From house to house in brimming Bethlehem,
Not like the one that no man may assail,
The dreadful curtain, The forbidding veil
That waits your breaking in Jerusalem.

Not one you made but one you have become:
Load-bearing, balancing, a weighted beam
To bridge the gap, to bring us within reach
Of your high pasture. Calling us by name,
You lay your body down across the breach,
Yourself the door that opens into home.

(c) Malcolm Guite. With permission.

The Simplicity of St Cuthbert: a sermon at St Cuthbert's Edinburgh

It is good to be here in this church whose spire I have often admired but which I had never seen inside until yesterday.  I am especially glad to be here for this annual service of the Friends of St Cuthbert’s.  I bring you greetings from Durham Cathedral, also dedicated to St Cuthbert, and from the Cathedral’s Friends (along with Christ and Blessed Mary the Virgin). 

It’s our privilege at Durham to be the home of Cuthbert’s shrine which is the spiritual heart of the Cathedral.  For many people it is one of this island’s ‘thin’ places where the Spirit of God seems to be present in a palpable way, like Iona, Lindisfarne and other Christian sites.  Once I was asked to take an elderly blind imam from Saudi Arabia round the Cathedral.  The shrine is not a place where we encourage much talking, so I did not say anything as we climbed the steps into what we call the feretory where the shrine is situated.  But as we got to the top, he said at once, ‘Ah!  I sense the presence of a holy man here, like our own shrines in Islam.  Who is this and why is he here?’  So I explained that the Cathedral, indeed the city of Durham itself, would not exist were it not for Cuthbert’s body and the long journey his Saxon community made in the 9^th and 10^th centuries to find a new home for their saint safe from the Viking raids that were terrorising the coast of Northumbria.  We lingered for a while there: he was not in a hurry to leave. Afterwards, he gave me a copy of the Holy Qur’an with all the passages that speak well of Christians underlined.  ‘What about those that are hostile to Christians?’ I asked.  He replied: with your saint, you are people of the Book.  We are all members of Abraham’s community.’  And I want to say, here at St Cuthbert’s, that all the places that have a connection either with Cuthbert in his life time, as this ancient site perhaps has, or with the journey his coffin made for over a century are linked by a common memory and sense of belonging.  Which is why I am so glad to be here today.

What do we love so much in our native northern saints: Aidan the gentle, Oswald the far-seeing, Hild the reconciler, Bede the wise, Margaret the generous? The treasured memory of Cuthbert can perhaps speak for them all.  Here is one of Bede’s stories about him.  Cuthbert had gone out on one of his long journeys to preach, taking with him a boy for company.  The day was long and the road steep, and they were tired and hungry.  The boy grew worried.  ‘Learn to have constant faith and hope in the Lord’ said Cuthbert.  ‘Whoever serves God shall never die of hunger.’  They saw an eagle in the sky and Cuthbert said: ‘God can send us food by that eagle.’  Soon, by the river bank, they saw it settling on a rock.  ‘There is the servant I was telling you about.  Run and see what God has sent and bring it quickly.’  The boy returned with a big fish that the bird had caught.  ‘What?’ said Cuthbert: ‘Didn’t you give the servant his own share?  Cut it in two, and give half to the bird.’  After a good meal of cooked fish with villagers nearby, Cuthbert praised God for his provision and said: ‘Happy the one whose hope is in the Lord’. 

That little tale shows something of what motivated Cuthbert.  His was an intensely devoted spirituality.  For him, to be human was to live in utter dependence on God, aware of his constant presence as something immediate and inescapable.  We could call it a true simplicity, being pure in heart and poor in spirit.  Perhaps only this can ever challenge what is broken and wrong in the world and in our communities and relationships.  And the beautiful detail of his care for the eagle and his dinner speaks of a man profoundly connected to the natural world, in tune with God’s creation.  His reverence for life and his intimacy with nature makes him peculiarly attractive, in an age of environmental awareness, to all who want to treat all things living with courteousness which, for Christians, should mean all of us.

Bede sums up his character: ‘like a good teacher he taught others to do only what he first practised himself.  Above all else he was afire with heavenly love, unassumingly patient, devoted to unceasing prayer, and kindly to all who came to him for comfort…. His self-discipline and fasting were exceptional, and through the grace of contrition he was always intent on the things of heaven.’  He also tells us that ‘Cuthbert was so skilful a speaker, and had such a light in his angelic face, and such a love for proclaiming his message… that all confessed their sins to him’.  Our readings today remind us what being a disciple means.  It is not the fine phrases and rituals of religion, but the devotion to God that begins in the heart and issues in a life of compassion and service to humanity.  For Cuthbert, perhaps the image more than any other that inspired his extraordinary ministry was that of the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep.  This familiar but striking picture no doubt draws on the passages we heard today.  In Ezekiel, the context is the failure of human shepherds, the kings of Israel and Judah, to care and provide for the flock entrusted to them as they should have done.  So God himself will take up that mantle: ‘I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep;, and I will make them lie down, and seek the lost, and bring back the strayed, and bind up the injured, and strengthen the weak, and feed them with justice’.  And this great promise is echoed in the gospel where Jesus says that to search for the 100^th sheep that is lost is a mark of the shepherd who acts as God himself does, to whom every life is infinitely precious and valued.

For Cuthbert and his contemporaries, Christianity meant living in the spirit of those texts where dying to ourselves becomes the price we pay for embracing the gospel and surrendering our lives to God.  The Book of Revelation speaks of those ‘who loved not their lives even unto death’, the martyrs who bore faithful witness to Christ.  What the Benedictine vow calls conversio morum, the ‘conversion of life’ means a kind of martyrdom, a way of dying in order to live, losing our own selves in order to find them, laying down our lives like the Good Shepherd.  This was how Cuthbert always was in his utter dependence upon God.  I called it true simplicity just now, purity of heart: having only one thing as your goal and focus and aspiration in life. Buddhists call this being ‘single-pointed’.  Such people are blessed because they see God.  Bede puts it this way: he ‘was afire with heavenly love, unassumingly patient, devoted to unceasing prayer, and kindly to all who came to him for comfort…. always intent on the things of heaven.’  What is ministry, what is Christianity, what is true humanity if not that? 

St Paul sums up his own ministry and apostleship: ‘as having nothing, and yet possessing everything’ is how describes the life of those who have surrendered all to follow Jesus Christ and bear witness to him.  Let me come back to this church and the Friends of St Cuthbert’s.  That name, ‘the Friends of St Cuthbert’s’ reminded me of a sculpture by Fenwick Lawson that many of you will have seen in the parish church on Lindisfarne.  There is also a bronze bust of it in Durham’s Millennium Square.  It is called ‘The Journey’ and shows six monks carrying Cuthbert’s body on the 120 year pilgrimage from Viking-threatened Holy Island via southern Scotland, north Yorkshire and Chester-le-Street to Durham where the saint’s body was finally laid to rest.  Perhaps the Society of the Friends of St Cuthbert’s are like those first Saxon friends who bore his name and his memory, for whom their beloved saint’s spirit of simplicity, humility and holy love inspired them to carry his body so long and so far. And if the Friends ‘carry’ him in this way, then so of course do our Christian communities dedicated to him: this church in Edinburgh and ours in Durham.  To live in his spirit is to live in the spirit of Jesus himself, whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light. 

For me, the gaunt stark slab in Durham Cathedral with his name on it says it all.  The simplicity and lowliness of the shrine tells us in a place of power and majesty who and what is worth honouring.  ‘Whoever would be great among you, let them be your servant’.  We know in our hearts that it is not status or wealth or achievement that matter, but becoming among the least by turning away from sin and being faithful to Christ.  The call, which belongs to all of us through baptism, is to give our lives to the project of purity and steadfastness, in the spirit of the saints ‘willing one thing’, wanting more than anything else the coming of God’s reign of justice, peace, truth and love.  For when God’s kingdom comes it mends our brokenness, gives us back our dignity, and makes life wholesome and beautiful once more. Amen! Come Lord Jesus!

At St Cuthbert’s, Edinburgh, 7 October 2012

Ezekiel 34.11-16, Matthew 18.12-14