St Cuthbert: our travelling companion in faith

Some of you will have heard Melvyn Bragg’s engaging series on The Matter of the North on BBC Radio 4 this week. On Tuesday he explored “The Glories of Northumbria”. His focus was the way in which Christianity shaped the origins of what we now call the North East. As a southerner, coming for the first time to Northumberland as a parish priest over thirty years ago, I began to learn not only to admire the saints of the north but to love them: Aidan whose feast day was last Wednesday; Hild, Oswald and Cuthbert, Benedict Biscop, Wilfred, and the man without whose writings we would know next to nothing about any of them, Bede. Since the 1980s, they have been my companions in prayer, pilgrimage and the spiritual life. They have played a large part in my formation as a human being and a Christian. I have tried to learn from them, though I am a long way from emulating their devotion, their fervour, their capacity to see the world lit up by God’s fierce and wonderful love.  

When I came back to the North East as Dean at Durham Cathedral, I found myself involved with the saints in a very particular way. The Cathedral is a shrine church that holds remains of three of them: Oswald, Bede and Cuthbert. But it is Cuthbert who lies at the heart of that great and wonderful building – like Lindisfarne, a spiritual emblem of Northumbria if ever there was one. The Cathedral is only there at all because of St Cuthbert and the community who wandered all over the north until they found a permanent home for his body and built a church around it. To be guardian of Cuthbert’s shrine, to have it as a focus of prayer and reflection, to welcome pilgrims who come in search of all that his memory represents – it’s been the greatest privilege of my life.

But our own story comes in at this point, here in the upper reaches of the Tyne. For on their pilgrimage in search of a final resting place, Cuthbert’s community stopped in many different places with their bishop, their Lindisfarne gospel book and the relics of their saints. Wherever they stopped, a temporary church was constructed to house the shrine. Many of them became permanent buildings, a chain of ancient churches across the north that held the memory of this extraordinary journey. Old Haydon, Beltingham, Bellingham, Corsenside, Halton, Allendale and Elsdon are among those in the catchment of the River Tyne and there are many more across Northumberland and Durham. 

So this church we worship in tonight is a footprint of a journey, a trace of a community on the move. I find great meaning in this. Bede tells us that Cuthbert himself was a great traveller, like Aidan and Wilfred before him, always journeying towards new and unknown horizons where he believed God was leading him to bear witness to the gospel. I see him as a kind of Jeremiah as we heard in the first lesson, a young man eager to go where he could uproot and destroy all that was unjust and wrong so as to build and to plant what would serve to bring about goodness and truth. In that reading, Jeremiah is promised hardship and suffering if he is to be faithful to his call. And having preached to exiles, he himself ends up as an exile in Egypt where he dies. There’s a hint of Cuthbert there too, embracing self-inflicted loneliness and exile in a hermit’s cell on the Inner Farne, not because he saw it as a place of peace and tranquility but because he looked for a harsh and testing environment where he could do battle with the demons. 

I love the idea that like Cuthbert, his family of followers saw themselves as a pilgrim people. The monks of Durham identified them with the Hebrews tramping across deserts, rivers and seas as they looked for their promised land; they saw their great Cathedral as the goal of every pilgrim’s longing, Jerusalem the golden. I used to preach about Durham, for all its rock-like stability, having been a mobile cathedral for all those decades Cuthbert’s community were on the move. And part of its pre-history is this church dedicated to St Cuthbert. Because his community rested here with its bishop, praying, preaching good news from its gospel book, remembering its saints, we can truly say that once upon a time, the cathedral was here too. And if it turned out that in his lifetime, Cuthbert came here too, that would simply add lustre to what we cherish in the long history of this holy place.

So if we are going to be faithful to Cuthbert’s memory in this our valley, in these church's dedicated to him, then we need to be travellers of the spirit in our minds and imaginations. That is to say: daring to light new lamps, begin new tasks, think new thoughts of God, hold new hopes of heaven. Our world and our lives are not at all like Cuthbert’s or his community’s. But for them as for us, life could never be about standing still. “To live is to change, and to live long is to have changed much” as John Henry Newman said. If we follow Jesus the Way, we are always a people on pilgrimage.

Embracing change can be the most difficult thing in the world. But what’s so important about travelling is that it opens us up to new possibilities. It helps us to see new things and see familiar things in new ways. A Bantu proverb I'm find of says that if you never travel, you think mother is the only cook. That’s what Cuthbert and his community can help us to grasp: that there can be transformation and renewal in the lives of our churches, our communities, ourselves. Life doesn’t have to be stuck in old habits or routines once we entertain the thought that God could make a difference. 

This was what motivated Cuthbert and the saints. They had looked into the face of God in Christ, and had grasped what St John is speaking about in our second lesson, words I treasure more and more. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called the children of God; and that is what we are. We are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” What we shall be has not yet been revealed. But we glimpse it in the death and resurrection of Jesus and his gift to us of a transformed hope and vision of life. And we make it real by following Jesus as Cuthbert and his community did, loving one another “not in word or speech but in deed and truth” as St John says. Like them, we look for the signs that God is making all things new. Like them we are learning how to live as those who are hope-filled, unafraid and glad, who believe and trust, like them, that God is among us on every journey that we make, until one day we see him face to face and travelling days are done. 

Michael Sadgrove, In St Cuthbert’s Time, September 2016


Jeremiah 1.1-12, 1 John 3.1-3, 18-end


Thomas our Twin

Thomas – not Becket but Doubting, you understand. Only St. John has much to say about Thomas.  The first time he’s mentioned, it’s when Jesus tells the disciples he is going to Judaea.  They don’t believe him: after all, isn’t it in Judaea that they want to stone him to death?  Thomas speaks for them all when he says: ‘let us also go, that we may die with him’.  You can hear the resignation in his voice, the philosophical acceptance that what must be must be.  But you can also hear his bravery, his dogged loyalty that says, as Ruth said to Naomi, ‘Where you go I will go, where you die I will die.  May the Lord do thus and so to me if even death parts me from you!’  That fits with the next episode, where Jesus is in the upper room telling the disciples he must go away.  It’s Thomas who asks candidly, if in a somewhat panicky way, what the others are too afraid to utter: ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?’ 

The last occasion and the best known is the story we heard this morning.  Thomas wasn’t present when Jesus appeared to the eleven on the first Easter Day.  Stubbornly, for it is his way, he insists on the evidence of his senses before he will believe in the resurrection.  When Jesus shows him his hands and side, Thomas rises to the occasion magnificently. It’s the supreme confession of faith in the entire gospel. ‘My Lord and my God!’ Only Mary Magdalen embraces Jesus as ardently when she clings on to him in the garden and he calls her by her name.  For St John, Thomas is so significant because it’s this doubter who is the first to recognise explicitly what John has been telling us since the very first words of the gospel: that in Jesus, the Word of the Father himself has come down to us and we have seen his glory, ‘full of grace and truth’. St John puts it this way in his tender letter that we also heard today: ‘what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have touched with our hands concerning the word of life – we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us.’ This is Thomas’s Easter.

There is, however, one question left open by the gospels.  ‘Thomas’ or Didymus means ‘the twin’.  But whose twin is he?  Who is the other brother or sister?  In some versions of the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, it’s startling to find him as the twin brother of Jesus himself, though most of them call him one of Jesus’s slaves.  But if we discount that, it’s a tantalising question without an answer. We’d love to know, but no-one does.  It’s no use speculating.

So why ask then?  Maybe there’s a different kind of answer we can give.  If Thomas is nobody’s twin, perhaps Thomas is everyone’s twin.  I mean that there is in him something we all have in common as Christians, something in the bloodstream, so to speak, of all of us who follow Jesus.  His weaknesses are familiar to us, for they are ours too: the tired sigh that says ‘so what - who cares?’, the stubbornness that ignores danger, the lack of insight that can’t see what stares us in the eyes.  We know all too well the worries and anxieties that haunt our path: ‘fightings without and fears within’.  They may not be likeable qualities, but they are human ones.  In that respect, Thomas is our twin, our flesh and blood. We recognise him only too well: no use pretending otherwise. Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère! says Voltaire, taunting his readers to be honest about themselves.

But recognise Thomas’s strengths too.  Strength and weakness belong together: our weaknesses are usually the shadow side of our strengths.  What are his strengths?  His courage, his loyalty, his reliability, his persistence, his willingness to go anywhere with Jesus; above all, his ability to summon up faith out of despair.  Against all the odds of temperament and history and circumstance, he of all the disciples makes that great confession of faith when he realises that the person in front of him is none other than the risen Lord, his Lord. Not Peter who went inside the tomb first, not John who saw and believed, but the careful, cautious, evidence-led, risk-averse Thomas. 

What I see in Thomas is a man much more like me than either the heroic Peter, the devoted John or the passionate Mary.  I wish I were a Peter, a John or a Mary, but I am really a Thomas: preferring to live in Lent rather than Easter, more at home with the cross than the resurrection.  And yet in Thomas, the transformation of reluctant foot-dragging obedience into radiant joy is complete.  So if it can happen to him, it can happen to me, to you, to any of us – can’t it? Shouldn’t it?  I hope we can see the signs of that transformation in us, in one another, and give thanks for the work of God within us.  I hope we’re finding our faith taking wings this Easter.  I hope there’s not just duty in our worshipping God and following Jesus, but much joy. I hope we are open in new ways to God’s capacity to surprise us. Whenever encounters light up our lives on our Easter journey, in whatever ways we see Jesus ‘Eastering’ in our own experience, wherever we ‘greet him the days we meet him and bless when we understand’, it makes us his twin.  We should be thankful.

Perhaps with St John, we are meant to read back from that Easter confession of faith new layers of meaning in those earlier utterances of his.  Take away the world-weariness and they are filled with hope and trust.  ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him’ – Yes, dust we are and to dust we shall return; nevertheless let us turn away from sin and follow Christ, we who bear the name of Christian, faithful unto death, so that we may be raised with him and receive the crown of life.  And to imagine Thomas with the disciples in the upper room, this time after the resurrection, asking the question of the upper room, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?’  Isn’t this to hope against hope that the risen Jesus will reveal himself as the true and living way?  Isn’t it to look for him to go before us as God went before Abraham who did not know where he was being led on the long, risky journey of faith, trusting only that if he followed loyally, the path would rise upwards and lead to the fulfilment of long-promised blessing? 

It all looks different from across the chasm of death and burial.  It becomes possible to begin to live out of faith rather than fear, trust rather than despair, freedom rather than enslavement.  Doubt and faith will always walk hand in hand this side of the grave.  But at the portal of the empty tomb stands the Architect of the new heaven and the new earth, the Man whom another woman of faith in John’s Gospel called the Resurrection and the Life.  He invites us this Easter time not to be afraid but to have courage, place our hands in his side, and let him be the wounded healer that touches our brokenness and pain and makes us whole again. 

So my wish and my prayer for us all on this first day of the week, this reprise of Easter Day, is simply that we should be risen with him, and he in us; that the day may break upon us and the shadows flee away; that the bud of resurrection may unfold and flower within us; that the light and truth of God may be poured out upon us, and upon our world and all its injustices and pain; that so many who are without freedom or hope may live again. I long for our joy in the risen Lord to last for ever; and that we should walk together in hope until it is time to rest, and travelling days are done.

Durham Cathedral, 12 April 2015, Easter 2.

1 John 1.1-2.2; John 20: 19-end