Holy Week in Hymns 4: "We sing the praise of him who died"

This Holy Week we are exploring the meaning of the cross with the help of some of our best-known, best-loved hymns. This morning I want to take a hymn that has long been a favourite, We sing the praise of him who died.

Thomas Kelly published this hymn in the early nineteenth century. He was an Irishman who was profoundly influenced by the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century. Like John Wesley fifty years before him, his life underwent a dramatic change that he might well have spoken of in the way Wesley did in his Journal. Wesley recalls how, at a Moravian meeting at Aldersgate Street in London in 1738, there was a reading from Martin Luther’s commentary on the Letter to the Romans. “While he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

This hymn breathes that spirit of evangelical confidence in the gospel of the Christ whose cross is the ultimate demonstration of God’s “love so amazing, so divine”, as another hymn writer Isaac Watts famously put it in an even more famous hymn we shall look at on Good Friday. That author speaks movingly about how “sorrow and love flow mingling down”. But in today's hymn , there is not a trace of sadness or grief, only sweetness and love, mercy and hope, worship, glory and joy eternal. It might almost be an Easter hymn but for the fact that its theme is not the empty tomb but the cross.

We sing the praise of him who died, of him who died upon the cross. The opening lines lay bare the paradox of the passion. We tell this story endlessly, we set it to music, we paint pictures of it, we sanctify it with a halo of spiritual disciplines and devotions, all for the sake of a man who died a criminal’s death in a place of execution. If we had been there when they crucified him, we would have been wracked by the pity and the pain that this man was undergoing as the crowd spat and mocked and the sun’s light failed. But here in a lonely sufferer's cruel disgrace, faith sees another story to tell. That story praises of the victim whose passion and death means the very opposite of everything it seems. Just when you would expect a lament, you get a song of praise. And the hint of the treasure beyond price, for which you would sell your soul. The sinner’s hope, let men deride, for this we count the world but loss.

The poet carries this sense of wonderful surprise into the next verse. Inscribed upon the cross we see – what? “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews”? Well yes, of course, but we must remember that “King of the Jews” was intended as an irony. To Pilate he is the self-proclaimed king of a rabble of nobodies. But Kelly sees a different and altogether more profound meaning. Inscribed upon the cross we see, in shining letters, “God is love”. And this is the light with which this hymn glows. It’s as simple as that. This death is not like every other death, any other death. On the cross where the Man of Sorrows dies, the King of Glory reigns. And those shining letters tell us what kind of reign he exercises. His is not a kingdom of coercion or brute force, but the power of the love. And this kingdom will never come to an end because as St John says, Jesus loves to the end.

The poet asks us to imagine what we feel as we read that luminous superscription over the cross, God is love. He speaks about it as bearing our sins upon the Tree, echoing John the Baptist at the beginning of St John’s Gospel when he pointed to “the Lamb of God” who would “take away the sin of the world”. And this, he says, is to bring us mercy from above. “Mercy”, or in Old Testament language “loving kindness”, is one of the most beautiful words in the language. It speaks of how God’s heart is turned towards us in tender generosity. Because of the cross, we know that we can trust to God’s everlasting kindness. He will not fail nor forsake us.

I am always moved when I sing the next two verses. Perhaps it’s because they speak so directly out of the poet’s experience. You feel you can make his words your own because like him, you too have wandered in places of fear, travelled through dark times, wondered if you would ever have hope again. Thomas Kelly is only spelling out what the cross has meant to him, but I have found their intimate way of speaking both touching and comforting. They have brought comfort in them. The Cross! It takes our guilt away; - there is the classic evangelical sense of having had a great burden taken off him and rolled away, so beautifully described in that classic work of puritan Christianity, Pilgrim’s Progress. And when we can stand upright again, and travel on, what then? Well, life is a series of ordeals as Christian and Faithful find out on their journey to the celestial city. It holds the fainting spirit up; it cheers with hope the gloomy day, and sweetens every bitter cup.

“Who would true valour see, let him come hither” wrote Bunyan for whom to be a pilgrim was what made being alive worthwhile. Kelly seems to echo that idea of the journey that calls us to be valiant. It makes the coward spirit brave, and nerves the feeble arm for fight. He is speaking about the cross, remember, that transforms us into people who are capable of what we never dreamed we could do or become. I love those words because I am learning, late in life, that it takes courage to be a Christian, or perhaps I mean, to be the kind of Christian who faces life’s challenges and ordeals for the sake of bearing witness to those shining letters on the cross, God is love.

There is a tradition of Christian spirituality that draws heavily on the idea that we must try to imitate Christ in everything so that our living and dying can bear witness to those shining letters.  How can that be possible? asks Kelly. How do we embody and live out in our lives the central truth of religion that "God is love"? His answer is: let the cross be your guide and inspiration. Live by it for all that you are worth. And even at our last and greatest ordeal, it will be there with us to bring strength and protection: It takes its terror from the grave, and gilds the bed of death with light. If only we could look ahead and shape our deaths! Yet I would love to think that when the time comes for me to face my own, I would remember those great lines, be able to whisper them to myself, and be strengthened for whatever awaits.

********

The poet sums it all up in a great phrase. He speaks about the measure and the pledge of love. He means that the cross is both the measure of a love we already know, and the pledge of a love that is yet to come. Love’s work is what it is. Time and eternity cannot make it any larger or deeper. But our realisation of it, surely, will grow and grow. In the days that are left to us, we have the cross as the balm of life, the cure of woe, the sinner’s refuge here below. But it looks beyond our mortality, beyond the grave and gate of death. The Book of Revelation says of the risen Christ that he is “the Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world”, which is to say that the cross is an eternal symbol of love. Is this why, when the risen Jesus greets his disciples, he shows them the marks of his crucifixion?

The inscription above the cross proclaims that the love of God is for all time and for all eternity. It's not only in this life that we sing the praise of him who died. It's also the angels’ theme in heaven above. And ours, always and everywhere.
 

Wakefield Cathedral, Wednesday in Holy Week 2017
 

********

We sing the praise of him who died,
of him who died upon the cross;
the sinner's hope let men deride;
for this we count the world but loss.

Inscribed upon the cross we see
in shining letters, God is love:
he bears our sins upon the tree:
he brings us mercy from above.

The cross: it takes our guilt away,
it holds the fainting spirit up;
it cheers with hope the gloomy day,
and sweetens every bitter cup.

It makes the coward spirit brave,
and nerves the feeble arm for fight;
it takes its terror from the grave,
and gilds the bed of death with light.

The balm of life, the cure of woe,
the measure and the pledge of love,
the sinner's refuge here below,
the angel's theme in heaven above.

 

Thomas Kelly, 1769-1855

Holy Week in Hymns 3: "The Royal Banners Forward Go"

On our journey through Holy Week, we are exploring some of the great hymns of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. Tonight we come to one of the oldest and greatest of them all, The Royal Banners Forward Go, or in the majestic Latin of the original, Vexilla Regis Prodeunt.

I remember we sang it on my first Good Friday after ordination. I was arrested by those first few words, powerful, evocative, strong. They struck me so forcibly because they seemed to cut through the traditional sombreness of the day as suggested by the devout Victorian hymn, not much sung nowadays, “O come and mourn with me a while”. By contrast, the spirit of this hymn felt vigorous and bracing.

“The royal banners”: what on earth are they? A vexillum is a military standard or ensign that rallies the troops and sets off before them. Think of the “eagles” that led the Roman legions and the lengths to which they would go to safeguard the standard or recover it, as n Rosemary Sutcliffe’s great children’s novel The Eagle of the Ninth. On a commander’s tent, the red vexillum would be flown to muster the troops and prepare for battle. So the “banners of the king” are a sign of engagement in conflict. And afterwards, the standards would be raised in a victory celebrated by a triumph with a great procession into the city led by the banners, and the scattering of bounty as the people cried out kyrie eleison and begged to be thrown the spoils of war.

This hymn comes out of the era immediately following the fall of the Roman Empire. Venantius Fortunatus was born in the Veneto in around 530 AD, a few years before the death of another great Italian, St Benedict. It breathes the spirit of Latin antiquity at precisely the time it was transmuting into the early middle ages. The memory of Roman triumphs was recent enough to be given poignancy by the physical signs of a great civilisation falling into ruin all around him. Like Benedict, Fortunatus saw the church as a bastion against the chaos he saw taking control in lands that had once enjoyed the pax Romana with its civic institutions, legal system, market place, temples and academy whose noble buildings, now falling into decay, stirred proud memories in the hearts of those who loved Rome.

He had trained as a poet and orator. Even in translation, his hymns demonstrate his flair for words. However, his sight began to fail until one day he went into a church in Ravenna and washed his eyes with oil burning in a lamp at an altar of St Martin of Tours. He was healed at once, and in gratitude went on pilgrimage to St Martin’s shrine in France. He settled in Poitiers, the city where Hilary had been bishop centuries before. There he was ordained, becoming Bishop of in 599. He died the following year. Our hymn comes out of Poitiers. Fortunatus wrote it in 569 in honour of the relics of the Holy Cross that were brought in a magnificent procession to a royal monastery there, “with much singing and gleaming of tapers and fragrance of incense” says the report. The cross shines forth in mystic glow.

This hymn is rich in theology as well as piety. The opening stanza cuts to the theological chase: “Where he in flesh, our flesh who made, / Our sentence bore, our ransom paid.” In the Latin, the emphasis is not so much on any theory of the atonement, but on the mystery of who it is who is hanging on the cross. Literally, the words speak about the One who made us flesh and blood is himself fastened to a criminal’s stake as that self-same flesh and blood. Mysterium is a big word for this hymn writer, and the profound insight of the cross is the “glow of mystery” that proclaims the identity of this Saving Victim, none other than the Son and Word of the Eternal God himself.

What this means is explored in a later verse. Upon its arms, like balance true, / He weighed the price for sinners due, / The price which none but he could pay, / And spoiled the spoiler of his prey. This stanza is dense with symbolism. The key is the “price for sinners due”. Jesus is hanging on the tree because there is a great work for him to do there. It is to pay that price once and for all, the price of redeeming humanity. In the middle ages, the idea of the ransom to be paid became the dominant way of understanding the cross. Put briefly, the sin of Adam had handed the human race over into the power of Satan. Our freedom needed to be bought back by the payment of a ransom, the perfect victim who was not himself compromised by the fall. That offering put the scales back into equilibrium and made release possible. If you’ve read C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe you’ll understand how the deep magic of an innocent victim has power over evil.

The image of the Incarnate Word on the cross, triumphing harrowing hell, releasing its captives and triumphing over the powers of death runs through many of these ancient Passiontide and Easter hymns. “Sing my tongue the glorious battle” is another of them by this same hymn writer, very close in spirit to “The Royal Banners”. On Easter Eve we shall sing “Ye choirs of new Jerusalem”, another medieval hymn from France that picks up where “The Royal Banners” left off. In their different ways, all the hymns we are exploring in these addresses owe a great deal to this one writer who teaches us what it means not only to commemorate but also to celebrate in Holy Week, and why we call the Friday of the crucifixion Good Friday.

The other stanzas of this great hymn adorn the “mystery” that shines out of the cross by weaving evocative poetry around the suffering of the man who hangs there. For one verse, Fortunatus lingers on the soldier’s spear and the precious flood of water mingled with the blood that flow out of the side of the crucified Christ as St John is careful to emphasise: precious because “the life is in the blood” as the Hebrew law says, and this life is given in the healing, life-giving sacraments that for all time will nourish the church as his new humanity.

But then the hymn writer launches into a passionate hymn of praise for the Holy Cross. O Tree of glory, Tree most fair, / Ordained those holy limbs to bear, / How bright in purple robe it stood, / The purple of a Saviour’s blood! By a brilliant figure of speech, gratitude for the ransom that has been won is transferred to the very object that is the source of the Saviour’s pain and agony. Far from being commemorated as an instrument of suffering, the cross has become an emblem of glory in its own right. This becomes even more extravagant in the poet’s other hymn “Sing my Tongue” in the stanza we know as Crux Fidelis: Faithful cross above all other, / One and only noble Tree, / None in foliage, none in blossom, / None in fruit thy peer may be; / Sweet the wood and sweet the iron, / And thy load, most sweet is he.

Devotion to the Holy Cross is a very ancient liturgical practice. In the liturgy of Good Friday we shall acclaim as the great Cross is brought into the Cathedral, “Behold the wood of the cross, on which the Saviour of the world is hung”. Soon afterwards, when it has been set up in full view of us all, we shall be invited to make our own personal devotion to it by touching it, embracing it, kissing it – in whatever way we want to pay our homage to the crucified Lord. I always find this intensely moving. So many emotions are gathered up for me at this symbolic Golgotha moment: sorrow, lament, repentance, pity, gratitude, rescue, and above all, love. How could the sacred cross not touch us and transform us for ever? How could it not draw out of us all the love we have to give in this most solemn Week? 

You may wonder where the good bishop Venantius Fortunatus got his theology from. After all, this extravagant poem in praise of the Tree of glory, Tree most fair is a thousand miles away from the agony and darkness of St Matthew and Mark with their desolate cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The answer is, he learned it from St John. We’ve already seen on Palm Sunday how “Ride on, ride on in majesty” culminates in a great acclamation of victory, “Then take, O God, thy power, and reign!” It’s in the same spirit as Fortunatus seeing into the heart of the passion and glimpsing How God the heathen’s king should be, for God is reigning from the Tree. In St John, Jesus often speaks about being “lifted up” and vindicated in “the “hour” that is coming, the hour of his death. He links the cross with exaltation and glory. “Now my soul is troubled” he says. “And what should I say – ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father glorify your name!” And again, “I, when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all people to myself”. And at the end, when the agony is over, he cries out a single word in Greek, tetelestai: “it is accomplished”. The work is done. Redemption is achieved. On his throne of glory, the King is crowned.

This is why we pay homage, in this Week when we recognise once again who our King of glory is, and what he has made us: subjects, citizens who are a people of the cross and an Easter people, for whom Christ has died and ransomed us from the hells that threaten to devour us, for whom he has triumphed as the heavenly Victor who is forever our Champion and Advocate at the throne of grace. No wonder the hymn ends in a doxology of praise to God the Holy Trinity. For all that needed to be done has been finished. He has done all things well. There is nothing left for us to do but to worship the King all glorious above, and offer him all that we are as our act of wonder, love and praise.

Wakefield Cathedral, Tuesday in Holy Week 2017

********

Vexilla Regis Prodeunt

The royal banners forward go;
The cross shines forth in mystic glow
Where He in flesh, our flesh who made,
our sentence bore, our ransom paid;

Where deep for us the spear was dyed,
Life's torrent rushing from His side.
To wash us in that precious flood
Of water mingled with the blood.

Fulfilled is all that David told
In true prophetic song of old;
How God the heathens' king should be,
For God is reigning from the Tree.

O Tree of glory, Tree most fair,
Ordained those holy limbs to bear,
How bright in purple robe it stood,
The purple of a Saviour's blood.

Upon its arms, like balance true,
He weighed the price for sinners due,
The price which none but he could pay,
And spoiled the spoiler of his prey.

O Cross, our one reliance, hail!
So may thy power with us avail
To give new virtue to the saint
And pardon to the penitent.

To Thee, eternal Three in One,
Let homage meet by all be done
Whom by the cross Thou dost restore,
Preserve, and govern evermore.

Venantius Fortunatus, c530-600
Translated by John Mason Neale

 

Holy Week in Hymns 2: "My song is love unknown"

During Holy Week we are looking at some of the hymns we sing during Passiontide. Tonight’s is one of the best known, and also one of the best. “My Song is Love Unknown” is by the seventeenth century clergyman-poet Samuel Crossman. Just after the Civil War, he published a little book of nine hymns called The Young Man’s Meditation, or some few sacred poems. He was the Dean that never was. He was a Canon of Bristol Cathedral and was appointed Dean there but died that same year early in 1683 before he had taken up his office. He had been a Puritan and like two thousand other ministers, was thrown out of the Church of England under the Act of Uniformity in 1662. But he found his way back into the newly re-established church shortly afterwards.

Perhaps that bitter experience of being ejected, homeless and without friends coloured the way he thought about Jesus in his Passion. For this hymn, more than most others, tries to get inside the human experience of passion – not only our experience of Jesus but his experience of us as the One who “was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”. To look at the Passion that way is to give us wholly new insights into what it must have meant to take this fore-ordained road to Golgotha and face death at the Place of the Skull.

Let us open up the hymn half way through where we find the emotional and spiritual heart of the entire hymn. “Why, what hath my Lord done? What makes this rage and spite? He made the lame to run, He gave the blind their sight.” Sweet injuries! the poet cries out in a bitter irony. Was it for these things that the Lord is strung up on a cross to be jeered at and spat upon by the crowd that only days before had shouted Hosanna? Why has he been treated with such contempt?

That question comes out of the Old Testament. In the prophecy of Micah (6.1ff), God summons his people to a court of law so that they and he can defend themselves against the charge of breaking faith with each other. The Lord begins his defence in this way: “O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me!” And he carries on by reminding them of all the ways in which he has delivered Israel: “for I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery”. This dialogue is the origin of the Reproaches that are sung on Good Friday, the long, agonised plea from the crucified Jesus to the people who have put him there. “O my people, what have I done to you? How have I offended you?” Why, what hath my Lord done? wonders the poet plangently.

In the Reproaches, and even more in the hymn, this plea becomes not a forensic law court challenge and defence so much as a highly personal lament on the part of a friend who is deeply wronged. Of course, it is the Lord who is suffering this terrible ordeal, none other than the One who came from his blest throne, the Prince of Life for whom heaven was his home. But that exalted title of “Lord” becomes intensely intimate in this hymn. He is not the Lord but my Lord – no fewer than three times, and then a fourth, my dear Lord. It reminds me of Mary Magdalen in the garden on Easter morning. At first she tells the apostles, “they have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him”. But when she encounters the two angels in white, it’s become: “they have taken away my Lord” (John 20.2, 13). That personal pronoun that carries such an intensity of emotion is the key in this poem too. Never was love, dear King, Never was grief like thine.

We have to read these references to Christ’s lordship in the light of the other great word in this hymn, friend. Indeed, we need to read the entire hymn from within the experience of a deep and intimate and wonderful friendship. We can see this coming from the play on words of love right at the outset. Love unknown is the poet’s theme, unknown not because he has to guess at it but because it passes understanding. To quote another hymn beloved here in Wakefield for its author was your Bishop, “It is a thing most wonderful, almost too wonderful to be, That God’s own Son should come to earth And die to save a child like me”. To be sure, it is my Saviour’s love to me, Love to the loveless shown That they might lovely be. It is my Lord who takes frail flesh and dies, who came salvation to bestow.

But as Crossman begins to puzzle over why humanity would not embrace such a guest, why men made strange, and none the Longed-for Christ would know it dawns on him how different are the longings and hungers within him. The opposite of making strange is to welcome, embrace, befriend. So out it bursts, his realisation that he is talking not only about the Word incarnate but someone who is as close to him as his own soul: But O! my friend, my friend indeed, who at my need his life did spend. And having rehearsed the cruel story of the passion, the bitterness of pain, the agony of suffering, the loneliness of dying, how even in death there was no friendly tomb for him to rest in, the poet comes back to what it means, this human-and-divine friendship that means more to him than everything he counts precious.

This is my friend. Where does Crossman draw this language from? It has to be the Gospel of St John. In Holy Week, we remember how Jesus taught his disciples in the Upper Room and washed their feet before going out to die. The focus of these moving farewell discourses is love, divine and human: the love with which God has loved them in Jesus, the love with which they are to imitate it and live it out by loving one another. This, says Jesus, is the new commandment. And to clothe this commandment with the warmth and vitality of flesh and blood, he goes on to offer an image of love that is freely given and received. Not the love of parents for children, or of spouse for spouse, or even the devotion of loyal servants to those they serve. “No-one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, but I have called you friends” (John 15.12-15). We know that verse from a thousand war memorials. It is the highest tribute we could pay to the sacrifices of so many that we associate it to Jesus laying down his life, and speak of it in the language of friendship.

We don’t know much about Samuel Crossman. But I think we can speculate from his hymn that he knew what deep friendship means. Maybe his troubled years of exile as a deposed minister had shown him who his true friends really were. Perhaps there were only a very few who were prepared to stand by him in his public humiliation. Misfortune has a way of isolating people when there is a whiff of disgrace in the air. Who wants to be known as an associate of this crucified criminal? Who wants to risk contracting the taint that radiates from the man whom not only mortals but God himself abandons? “Then all the disciples forsook him and fled” says the passion narrative of Jesus. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” So it’s all the more striking that this passion hymn is charged with such emotion, such a deeply-felt empathy for the cast-out victim. Here is “passion” in both senses: a story of suffering and pain, but also a story of one human being’s solidarity with and love for another.

“Were you there when they crucified the Lord?” asks the old spiritual. Where do our minds and imaginations place us in relation to the man on the cross this Holy Week? Our hymn answers: be close to him, stand alongside him, suffer with him, enter into his pain. That’s what sympathy and empathy mean: suffering with, suffering alongside, suffering in. Holy Week calls us to journey with the Son of Man, make his via crucis ours, this way of the cross that he has travelled and that all of us who are marked with the cross in our baptism are called to travel too. 

But we need to ask, in what spirit do we make this pilgrimage each year? To speak about entering into the experience of the Crucified sounds onerous, too tragic for our twenty-first century that can only contemplate darkness in small doses. People tell me quite candidly that they switch off the television news when it turns shines a light on terrorism in our cities, or bloodshed in middle-eastern war-zones, or famine victims in Africa. It’s true, as T. S. Eliot said, that humankind “cannot bear very much reality”. So a Holy Week spiritual discipline might entail not flinching, holding our gaze a little longer, thinking about and praying for the crucifixions that happen daily in our world, and then discerning what part we might play in bringing light to dark places where in life there is no house, no home.

And there’s another thing about this way of the cross. The spirit that this great hymn breathes tells us as much as the words themselves do. Yes, they draw us into a story that is truly dreadful. How can a man's crucifixion not be a terrible thing? But that is not everything it is. For I find in the poem a prospect that is indeed terrible, but also sweet. It’s a sweetness that gives me back my life and hope precisely because of what the ordeals undergone by this Saviour, my Lord, this dear King who is my Friend indeed.

So it is not a matter of somehow feeling sorry for Jesus. No, pity is a more robust attitude than that, more theological, more spiritual, more humane. If you asked the poet what word summed up his hymn, I think he would reply, gratitude. Thankfulness for the love of his Friend. Thankfulness for the greater love that lays down his life. Thankfulness for reconciliation and redemption, renewal, forgiveness and the taste of glory. You could call it eucharistia, the great thankfulness that gives its name to what we do to remember him tonight in bread and wine. 

This is my Friend, in whose sweet praise I all my days could gladly spend. And shall, please God, to the end of time.

Wakefield Cathedral
Tuesday in Holy Week 2017


*********

My song is love unknown,
my Saviour's love to me,
love to the loveless shown
that they might lovely be.
O who am I
that for my sake
my Lord should take
frail flesh and die?

He came from his blest throne
salvation to bestow,
but men made strange, and none
the longed-for Christ would know.
But O my friend,
my friend indeed,
who at my need,
his life did spend.

Sometimes they strew his way,
and his strong praises sing,
resounding all the day
hosannas to their King.
Then "Crucify!"
is all their breath,
and for his death
they thirst and cry.

Why, what hath my Lord done?
What makes this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run,
he gave the blind their sight.
Sweet injuries!
Yet they at these
themselves displease,
and 'gainst him rise.

They rise, and needs will have
my dear Lord made away;
a murderer they save,
the Prince of Life they slay.
Yet steadfast he
to suffering goes,
that he his foes
from thence might free.

Here might I stay and sing,
no story so divine:
never was love, dear King,
never was grief like thine.
This is my friend,
in whose sweet praise
I all my days
could gladly spend.

Samuel Crossman 1624-83

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

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

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

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

********

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

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

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

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

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

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

********

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

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

********

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Hart Milman, 1791-1868

The Raising of Lazarus, the Raising of a City

“To the glory of God this Cathedral burnt.” “This illness does not lead to death, rather it is for God’s glory.” Two striking sayings about ordeals and suffering. The first text is inscribed in the nave floor of this Cathedral. The second comes early on in St John’s story of Jesus and Lazarus that we’ve just heard. What connects them is the word glory.

I doubt it would have occurred to anyone who watched this Cathedral burn on the night of the 14th November 1940 to speak of that fiery holocaust as glory. It was no doubt an unforgettable spectacle to behold. But it was a calamitous act of violence and destructiveness. Many died; many more were grievously injured. Where is glory when precious human lives are laid on the greedy altars of war? Where is glory on a day when the grim reaper gathers up so bitter a harvest in this city that is home to men, women and children like us?

But you could have said the same about the suffering of Lazarus, Jesus’ friend. “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” The meaning is clear: this is a mortal sickness. The end is coming quickly. Soon this good man, this beloved friend will be dead, and Jesus is needed there. And when the worst has happened, there is still the desperate hope for a miracle: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask him.” Where is glory in any of this?

There are degrees of glory. Perhaps we use it a trifle too easily when we say that something is glorious. But in the Old and New Testaments, the meaning is quite specific. Literally in Hebrew, glory is “weight”, and therefore something significant, portentous, having lasting meaning. So glory belongs fundamentally to God himself, and to created things to the extent that they embody or reflect the divine. When we are confronted by glory, we do what Moses did at the burning bush and bow before the Holy One. We are silenced like the disciples on the mountain when they saw the glory of the transfigured Lord. Where glory is manifested, we are on holy ground. We acknowledge that God is among us. We learn our place in the world. And we worship.

When Jesus speaks of Lazarus’ illness being “for God’s glory”, his meaning is specific. It is not that there is any glory in anyone’s suffering and death, but rather “so that the Son of God may be glorified through it”. At the climax of the story, when the stone is rolled away from Lazarus’ tomb, Jesus turns to Martha and says, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” In the first sign that Jesus performs at Cana in Galilee, St John says that Jesus “revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him”. As then, so now, in this last sign before the passion. Glory and belief coalesce around the mighty works of God that reveal him as having come into our very midst.

I said that the death and raising of Lazarus are the last sign before the passion. Immediately after this episode, Caiaphas speaks about how one man must die for the people. And in the next chapter it is Passover time, and in this same home at Bethany whose intimacy Jesus loved so much, Mary anoints him for his coming death. And as he trembles on the very threshold of Holy Week, he speaks again of glory. “Now my soul s troubled. And what shall I say – Father, save me from this hour? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name!”

And this is where the story of Lazarus is pointing: to the glory of God in the suffering, death and resurrection of his Son. Like Lazarus, Jesus must be subject to this ordeal that lies ahead. “The Son of Man must suffer” say the synoptic gospels. But whereas for Matthew and Mark, the cross is a dark place of dereliction and abandonment, for St John it is glory. In the Christmas gospel he acclaims that “we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten Son full of grace and truth. And if you asked him where, more than anywhere, he beheld glory, he would say, at Golgotha. On the cross. Because it is there that we see the glory of loved poured out, with which “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son”, where Jesus is “lifted up” and draws all humanity to himself.

So there is the paradox of this day we call Passion Sunday. Glory means, not the splendour we thought it meant as we nodded casually in its direction. As we probe more deeply, we find it means the infinite “weight” of “God’s presence and his very self”, as the hymn puts it, at the heart of humanity. It is the suffering, death and raising to life of Lazarus that reveal it, and all the more because it enacts the suffering, death and raising to life of Jesus himself. But we only see it that way as we look back across the whole story. This is St John’s point in writing his gospel, so that we can enter into what glory means in the big story of God’s solidarity with the human race, his raising all of us to life through what the Son of Man must suffer and endure.

And this Cathedral is itself a living emblem of glory through suffering and resurrection. To the glory of God this Cathedral burnt and was rebuilt. I understand those words better, thanks to Lazarus. Like him, this place has a story to tell about how resurrection can take us by surprise and transfigure us even in the darkest of times. For the story of Coventry is not only about a building, powerful though the imagery and the witness are. The tapestry of Christ in Glory presides over every offering of praise and prayer, and every act of celebration and lament. It lodges in every memory we attach to this place, and in the longings and heartaches, the sorrows and joys of all who come here and stand in their simplicity before God. What burnt and was rebuilt was not just a cathedral church but a household of faith, a community among whom the lived experience of dying to ourselves and being raised in Christ is at the heart of our Christian identity. You and I, all the people of God in every place: all of us are a temple of God’s glory. The resurrections in our lives are the best evidence there is for glory. We are all Lazarus if we have been buried with Christ in baptism and raised to newness of life.

We have a little time left as we travel towards Holy Week and Easter. What will our hope and prayer be? The story of Lazarus is placed where it is in the Fourth Gospel for a reason. We read it on this Sunday for a reason. It is to provide a gateway at which to pause and ask what we really want to happen during these awesome days that will soon be upon us. In the book of Exodus, God promises to pass before Moses. Partly out of fear, but more out of love, Moses cries out: “Lord, show me your glory”. The passion, cross and resurrection are the answer to that prayer. Lazarus has given us a parable. Now it is for us to walk with Jesus in the way of the cross and find once more in that place of pain the glory of redeeming love, and beyond the empty tomb, the glory of his resurrection life.

Coventry Cathedral, Passion Sunday, 2 April 2017. John 11.1-45

New Reformations? Wisdom and the Church

Introduction

This is the final address in this year’s Lenten series at Warwick, New Reformations? Tonight our theme is “wisdom”. But please don’t assume that because this sermon brings the series to an end, somehow wisdom is going to supply a summing up, a full-stop. Far from reaching watertight conclusions, it’s more in the nature of biblical wisdom to identify and ask the right questions, and model good ways of asking them. This is all I can try to do tonight.

But how important that task is! It goes to the heart of our Church of England’s identity that owes so much to the Reformation. I am not simply thinking of the questions about authority, church polity and sacramental theology that dared to be asked five hundred years ago. We must ask the questions of today as a church that is constantly in search of reformation in every generation. The legacy of our history is not simply to have been reformed but to be constantly in a process of being reformed, or as they said in the sixteenth century, reformata atque semper reformanda.

********

Wisdom in the Hebrew Bible

Let me begin by asking what it means to be wise according to the scriptures. I then want to raise some of the challenges facing our church today where I believe wisdom is very much needed. In our reading from the book of Proverbs, the characteristics of the wise man or woman are set out. To be wise is to respond to the invitation of a gracious lady whom the text calls Lady Wisdom. She walks the street, calls out from the heights, stands at the crossroads, takes up her position at the town gate. She is in every public place, where men and women go in and out, where choices are made about which way to go, where leaders gather to transact business, where the young congregate to learn and shape their lives. “To you O people I call. Learn prudence, acquire intelligence; hear, for I shall speak noble things, and from my lips will come what is right.” She goes on to describe the treasures she has to offer to those who listen: “wisdom is better than jewels, and all that you desire cannot compare with her. Riches and honour are with me, enduring wealth and prosperity.”

If we look into these first nine chapters of Proverbs, we glimpse what wisdom means. It has many levels. We learn how to manage our household well (what we call oikonomia from which we get the word economy). We learn about shrewdness, common sense, speaking well, having good judgment, being prudent with our resources. We learn the virtues of hard work, careful speech, living purposefully, finding fulfilment in being diligent, becoming aware of other people and the environment we live in. We learn how to know ourselves better, understand the ambiguities and contradictions of our flawed human nature. We learn where to find happiness and how to avoid misery. We learn about our own creatureliness, how we live in a morally ordered universe where creation can teach us and where destinies are set. And we learn that wisdom is fundamentally a religious quality whose source and end are God himself: “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and to know the Holy One is insight”.

In all this, there is one overriding message, that the goal of the wise man or woman is to become a human being who is aware emotionally, spiritually, physically, practically and theologically. We could call this the quality of being present to God, to one another, to the world and to ourselves. When the church father Irenaeus said that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive”, I think this is what he meant. To be wise, to be aware, to be “intelligent” in all these dimensions of living, to practise “mindfulness” as we say nowadays – all these are synonyms for the God-given wisdom that, says Proverbs, makes us fully alive, fully human. As the New Testament says, Jesus himself is the embodiment, the very incarnation, the perfect realisation of divine wisdom.

There is a special emphasis on leadership in the wisdom literature. Some scholars conjecture that books like Proverbs were compiled precisely to contribute to the education of future leaders, especially young men in the royal court – witness repeated phrases like “listen my child” throughout the book. In our own day, leadership training in the church and in secular institutions of many kinds has enthusiastically taken up the phrase “reflective practitioner” to characterise what it means to lead well. The thinking is that people, communities and institutions need more than anything to become self-aware, conscious of who and what they are, and how they need to be in wholesome relationships both personally and collectively. And you only create healthy communities by leading them in healthy ways.

********

Wisdom in the Church: Three Case Studies

This is where I come to the second part of my address. For if the church is to become intelligent, reflective, generous, engaged, self-aware, compassionate, prudent, virtuous and wise, if indeed it is going to reflect the character of the God who is all these things, then it must be led by people who are formed in these ways too. I am not saying that no institution is better than its leaders. But the values by which leaders live are profoundly influential in shaping the communities they are responsible for. In the church, the ordinal spells this out carefully, reminding clergy that to be responsible under God for the household of faith is an awesome vocation indeed. These were some of the themes I explored ten years ago in my book Wisdom and Ministry. I can’t recall a time when the leadership of our church was under so much public scrutiny. We feel for the House of Bishops who need the wisdom of Solomon in responding to the challenges they are faced with.

But scrutiny is good for us. It reminds us of our accountability. I am going to come to two of these matters shortly. But let me first say something about my own situation as a recently retired priest, and how it has made me think about the Church of England’s role in the modern world. I retired eighteen months ago after nearly thirty years in full-time cathedral ministry, first as Canon Precentor here at Coventry followed by twenty years as Dean first of Sheffield and then Durham. I loved cathedral ministry and owe a great deal to Coventry for having taught me something of the craft of it. It was at Coventry that I learned how far-reaching in society and public life the mission of a cathedral can be, and how cathedrals, through their architecture and art, their music, their liturgy and preaching, yes and the life of their communities are powerful magnets that increasingly draw worshippers, pilgrims, visitors and those who are curious about faith from far and wide.

(1) The Church and Decline
We landed in retirement in a rural Northumberland village. The parish church is across the road and is served by an able young priest. He is at the same stage in his ministry as I was when I served my first incumbency in the same diocese. But that was over thirty years ago. Now, as we re-enter parish life and contribute what we can, we realise how the churches have declined in the decades we were away. The church everywhere, apart from the suburbs and market towns, is facing real threats to its long-term survival. I’m not only thinking about dwindling congregations, the buildings they have to maintain and the lack of resources with which to do it. I’m also wondering where the next generation of lay leaders is going to come from when multi-parish benefices become ever larger and clergy time is increasingly stretched. When our silver-haired generation dies out, where are tomorrow’s churchwardens, treasurers, PCC members, worship leaders and musicians going to come from? How long will the present model of parish ministry be sustainable?

Those who have analysed historical trends over the last half century tell us that organised religion is in decline in secularised western Europe. It is a fact on the ground. It is not due to the church’s faulty strategy or lack of vision or evangelistic effort or social engagement. But the institution finds it extraordinarily hard to admit to decline publicly. Bishops and dioceses devise slogans that relentlessly accentuate the positive. The word growth is usually in there somewhere, linked to Renewal and Reform. You won’t find ads at the back of the Church Times that begin: “we are a declining church, but we are learning to grow smaller gracefully. We aim to be wise in this generation, and we do not lose heart”.

How does wisdom speak into this situation? I think she would say a number of things. First of all, speak the truth and don’t massage the facts. And if the truth is frightening (which I think it is), don’t panic. Do everything you can to understand it and help others understand it, bringing to these difficult questions the critical, analytical tools with which reason has endowed you. Expect to find a great deal of complexity in what you discover that will not be susceptible to the usual solutions, for example programmes of evangelism, certainty in theology, throwing money at dwindling congregations. Wisdom says: ask yourselves where you detect the work of God in the events and processes of our time. The scriptures are, I think, less concerned with organised religion and congregational life than we may think, more outward-focused in bearing Christ to the world in word and work, more concerned with truth, justice and the weightier matters of the law. Above all, keep hope alive among those who continue to bear witness to God’s presence in times of suffering and joy. And in everything, don’t be afraid. Be of good cheer. In his death and resurrection, Christ the Lord has overcome the world.

(2) The Church and Brexit
Next, let me turn to a matter that has been much on all our minds in the past year, and indeed, in the past week. Last Saturday the European Union celebrated its sixtieth birthday. On Wednesday, the Prime Minister triggered the Article 50 process by which this country will leave the European Union.

I may as well own up to my feelings of profound sadness here. My mother was a German-Jewish war refugee and I was brought up to think of continental Europe as my home, with Britain as an essential part of it. My mother died just after the referendum, scarcely able to take in the realisation that the country that had given her a home, protected her from harm and befriended her in 1937 could now walk away from its cultural, historical and spiritual roots. But we are where we are, and in or out of the EU, we need to continue to be good Europeans, good allies, neighbours and friends across the North Sea, the Irish Sea and the English Channel.

However, my question tonight is about wisdom and how the Church of England contributed to the debate about our nation’s future. I was disappointed. We knew after the 2015 election that a referendum would soon be called and that we would be required to make the biggest political decision of our lifetimes. Some of us begged the Church of England to debate it at its February meeting last year, just as the referendum campaign began. But there was silence, no collective voice from the national church that could help bring Christian wisdom to the momentous decision we were being asked to make. You would think that the future of the nation was a matter of indifference to the Church of England. Even if the church was never going to take a view (though the other national church in Britain did, the Church of Scotland), not to have anything to say, not to help shine a Christian light on these extraordinarily difficult matters strikes me as a real failure of leadership. It’s true that an emergency debate was allowed at the July Synod. But by then it was too late. On Brexit Day last week, England’s national church had nothing officially to say about the future of the nation, no reflection to offer, no prayers to say. I felt ashamed of our silence just when we needed Christian voices to speak into a vital and contentious debate.

What is the learning here? What we find in the wisdom literature is that it is not afraid of complexity. Books like Job and Ecclesiastes do not pretend there are easy answers to the fundamental questions of human existence such as the problems of suffering and of meaning. So the national church could have warned us against the perils of binary choices, those fatal either-ors that trap us into thinking that everything must be black or white. The Church could have said: beware of thinking that all right (or all wrong) are on the side of either Remain or Leave. Even though we have to vote this way or that, listen to the case made by the other side; weigh up the evidence, assess the arguments, come to an informed conclusion. The word for this is discernment. The Church is supposed to be good at it. If only it had placed its long spiritual experience of wise discernment at the service of the nation when we needed it so much.

(3) The Church and Same-Sex Relationships
Finally I want to say something about the matter that is said to “threaten to tear the Church apart”, human sexuality and in particular, same-sex relationships. As we all know, the recent February General Synod decided not to “take note” of the House of Bishops’ report. If I had still been a member of the Synod, I would have voted with the House of Clergy not to “take note”: the report simply didn’t do justice to the complexity of human sexuality in the light not only of Christian teaching but also how to interpret that teaching knowing what we now know from science and social science about our sexualities. It seemed to bear no relation to the careful “listening process” that had been set up in every diocese to enable us to hear one another’s experience and speak frankly about sexuality. And given that a majority of lay people in the Church now support the view that committed same-sex love is as God-given as heterosexual love and that the state was right to legislate for gay marriage, the report was not just questionable as theology but bad politics too.

I watched the whole of the Synod debate. It seemed to me to be mostly well-informed, emotionally intelligent and respectful. As in the debate about women in the episcopate, the Synod can show a remarkable capacity to engage in contentious matters without sacrificing courtesy: given the wisdom literature’s strong emphasis on listening and using words with care, we can be proud of the example our representatives have set. But now the Bishops must find a way of bringing back to the Church a way forward in its understanding of sexuality that will command consent. And this calls for wisdom of the highest order because as we know, there is a real threat to the unity of the Anglican Communion should the Church of England depart (as it would be seen) from the traditional moral disciplines of the Church.

I need to tread carefully here. But as with the debate about the European Union, I may as well come clean. My belief is that whatever the complexities in the decisions we are called upon to make, we must always try to “do the right thing” without fear of the consequences, however hard they may be to face. In other words, we cannot let consequentialism dictate the way we make ethical choices; we must not allow the ends to justify or control the means.

This calls for real moral courage. I am in no doubt about what a decision to endorse same-sex marriage and to solemnise or bless it in church would mean for many Anglicans in Africa, Asia and South America. I’m also in no doubt about how hard this would be for many in our own churches to accept. At the same time, it cannot be right for our Church to retain any vestige of discrimination in the way we think, speak and act, whether it is inequalities endured by those of colour, women or gay people. So when I speak about acting courageously, I mean with the integrity that is informed by wisdom, and with consciences that have been educated by long immersion in the faith of the scriptures nurtured by the sacraments supported by the prayers of the faithful. Wisdom’s presumption is that in our decision-making, we do not look for easy ways out, nor do we crumple under pressure, nor do we take the pragmatic, politically expedient option. We behave with principle and seek to follow the way of justice and truth. I am not saying this is ever easy. But I am saying that anything less is not to act out of Christian wisdom. It comes back to wise and holy discernment. 

********

Cruciform Wisdom
I believe these three examples show how inescapable the task is of seeking wisdom for and in our church. While we live in times of bewildering complexity, I hesitate to say that previous generations would have found the task of interpreting scriptural wisdom any easier. A church that is semper reformanda can never say to itself that this work is finished. Wisdom ought to make us curious and sharpen our questions. We should expect new light and truth to break forth from God’s holy word as we make read the ancient text out of our contemporary experience of faith.

But let me end by reminding us of the way wisdom is configured in the New Testament. St Paul tells us that “wisdom” by itself is not enough. What matters is to cultivate a cross-shaped wisdom that eschews human cleverness and instead looks to the crucified Jesus as both the power of God and the wisdom of God. Paul says that what we must do is to “have the mind of Christ”. So it’s never a bad idea to ask the question, when faced with hard choices, “what would Jesus do?” It is always easier to ask than to answer, of course. But to begin to frame the question in that way is to affirm how important it is always to ask our questions and do our discernment Christianly. For if Christ is no less than the incarnate wisdom of God himself, and God’s power and wisdom are found not, in the end, in human knowledge or achievement but in Christ crucified, where else can we possibly go? Especially as we prepare to celebrate his passion and resurrection in the Holy Week of our salvation that will soon be upon us?

St Mary’s Warwick, 2 April 2017
Proverbs 8.1-21