Winter Light at Easter

It's a wintry Easter we are celebrating this year, for all of us cold and for some, very white. It’s no comfort to be told that a March Easter is more likely to be white than Christmas Day. The psychological and emotional effect of this equinoctial cold is all the more potent because we do not expect it and were not prepared for it when the days became longer than the nights. Fierce has this unseasonal winter’s grip been in upland Britain which begins not 20 miles west of here. Ask the elderly. Ask the farmers.

Lent is an old English word for spring. We have ached for spring, for its luminous duck-egg skies, its birdsong, its fresh colours and flowers. We would love to see cumulus bubble up again borne on a southerly zephyr letting loose sharp showers to wash the landscape. We would love to feel the gentle warmth of the strengthening sun as it climbs towards the zenith. When spring comes, it will never be more welcomed. 

Of course whether it is white or green, Easter is always a bursting forth of light and colour and life. In this Cathedral and in every church in the land, and in the hearts of all who feel the slightest pull of spiritual reality, it is springtime today. Rise heart, thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise without delays.

I got me flowers to straw thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree:
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.                             
(George Herbert, 'Easter')

But perhaps this prolonged winter brings a gift with it: to help us to enter into an aspect of the Easter story that we might not have felt in quite this way before. I mean the complex emotions of those who loved Jesus and who on Good Friday experienced the most terrible sense of bafflement, confusion and loss. For them, the aftermath of Golgotha would have been nothing less than a winter of the soul

           when a black frost is upon
One’s whole being, and the heart
In its bone belfry hangs and is dumb.
(R.S. Thomas, 'The Belfry')

In her cycle of radio plays about gospel story, The Man Born to be King, Dorothy Sayers has John discover a pair of old sandals that Jesus had worn. He hides them from Peter because of what memories charged with sight and feel and smell would do to him ‘like a sick animal that has crawled home to die. He can’t eat. He can’t sleep.' One of the normal symptoms of bereavement is aching for the presence of the loved-one, and an instinct to search that will not go away. Who is to say what brought the women to the garden at dawn on Easter morning? They went to anoint a body with spices, but what else drove them there? Surely the need to see him again, feel the tender skin, remember his voice, his touch, his scent. Perhaps this year we have glimpsed this in an attenuated way by our sense of the cold, our own wintry longing for Easter, for springtime, for warmth. 

Easter answers our longings and desires. It does this by both changing how things were, and transforming our view of them. We would not be here if we didn’t believe that something infinitely life-changing took place on Easter morning when the women went to the tomb and found the stone rolled away and the grave space empty. There is no getting away from this singularity in history. ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here’ say the two men in the garden. A real absence, indeed, but a vacuum that gives the women what they most need: to dare to entertain the possibility that all was not as it seemed, that they were in the presence of the most profound of mysteries that nevertheless had the capacity to turn round despair. ‘He is risen. Remember how he told you.’ Here is where fantasy meets reality, where longing is transmuted into hope. The women begin to see reality differently. We begin to. The world is a different place. The garden has flowers. There is blue sky above our heads. The earth begins to warm. At last it is spring. Everything changes.

Of course, all this is to collapse a long disclosure and its realisation into a few moments. Luke himself keeps us in suspense here: the disciples did not believe the women at first. The two who walked the Emmaus Road with the unknown stranger did not recognise him: there was a journey to make, not simply along a dusty cratered near-eastern cart track but an inward journey of the soul to bring springtime to their bleakness, coax their frozen spirits back into life. The important thing is: there is disclosure. There is recognition. There is a new world. Winter has fled, and with it its gloomy shadows and oppressive captivity. He is risen. 

St Augustine has a beautiful passage in a commentary on the feeding of the crowd where he speaks about our human longings and hungers. ‘Give me a lover: a lover will feel what I am speaking of; give me one who longs, who hungers, who is a thirsty pilgrim in this wilderness, sighing for the springs of his eternal homeland; give me such a person, for they will know what I mean.’ He might have added: give me one who is longing for spring, yearning to be rid of burdens, tired of this endless Narnian winter, weary in themselves, weary for our globe that strives to find some hope as it struggles under the weight of unhealed conflict, sorrow and pain.

If this echoes your experience, then come to the risen Lord today. Sit down at his Easter feast. Eat bread and drink wine. Find your healing and refreshment in him; be glad that he is among us as our beloved brother who was lost in his death but found in his resurrection, who opens up the way home for all people and welcomes us to celebrate here in his Father’s house. For here, at least, the winter is past, the flowers appear on the earth, and the time of singing has come. Arise my love, my fair one, and come away.

Michael Sadgrove
Durham Cathedral, Easter Day, 2013
Luke 24. 1-12

Anointing Jesus' Feet

On the Sunday before a new Archbishop of Canterbury and a new Pope are anointed for their ministry, the gospel tells how Jesus is anointed at the house of Lazarus.  The timing is suggestive: just as Jesus is anointed for burial, so two new Christian leaders embrace the vocation to take up the cross.  When Donald Coggan was installed as Archbishop, a secretary mistyped ‘enthronement’ as ‘enthornment’ in the draft service order. She typed more wisely than she knew, said Coggan. Archbishop Justin Welby and Pope Francis will be in all our prayers this week. 

Back to Bethany, where Jesus loved to go. There a woman spontaneously does what prophets and priests do in the Old Testament: anoint a king for a royal vocation.  This is what Christ literally is, the mashiah or anointed one who has come into the world, says St John, to bring a kingdom that is not of this world. What prompts this extraordinary, extravagant gesture, so disapproved of by tut-tutting Judas, emptying a pot of scented oil almost above price over the feet of Jesus? It’s worth a king’s ransom indeed, and that is what it is, for this is a King above price, at least to Mary for whom her anointing symbolises all the passionate devotion she feels for him.  

Tim Rice in Jesus Christ Superstar assigns to a different character (how confusing all these Marys are in the New Testament!) the song, ‘I don’t know how to love him’. But her precious ointment shows that she does know in her heart of hearts.  She knows how to love in a way few of us ever have.  And Jesus knows it too. That touch of hers, so physical, so erotic that it cannot fail to shock; the perfumed scent that fills the house like incense: both freight this story with powerful, sensual images.  Of all the senses, touch and smell are the most pervasive and long-lasting.  The sense of smell is the last to leave a dying person; it has the capacity to evoke long-forgotten landscapes, recall long-dead people, reawaken long-lost memories. So it is not surprising that this aromatic episode is associated in St Mark with an act of memory: ‘wherever this gospel is proclaimed, what this woman has done will be told in memory of her’, anamnesis, the same word that Jesus uses when he commands us to take bread and wine ‘in memory of me’. 

In St John, this episode opens the passion narrative, and sets the scene for what he will go on to tell us in the following chapters about the suffering and death of Jesus. It is six days before the Passover, Jesus’ last Sunday. So this is a last Sunday meal, perhaps meant as a pre-echo of the last supper in the upper room on the coming Thursday just as the bathing of Jesus’ feet with oil also looks forward to the upper room where he himself will wash his disciples’ feet. The previous chapter has ended ominously with the threat of Jesus’ arrest. Now, says Jesus, Mary has anointed him with oil for the day of his burial. From now on, St John will be concerned with one thing above all else: how Jesus will be lifted up on a cross so that all humanity may be drawn to him.  For in the Fourth Gospel Golgotha is not tragedy but triumph. Jesus’ life is poured out on the cross just like precious oil so that the aroma of divine self-giving and grace may fill the world that God so loves.

Maybe Mary intuited this in her act of anointing, maybe not.  For her, it may simply have been the offering of her devoted service and passionate love; or an extreme act of courtesy to honour a guest in her home; or else the recognition of a royal presence on the part of a loyal subject. It is Jesus who turns it into preparation for his death and burial. John tells us that after his death, women bring spices to anoint Jesus’ body before laying it in the tomb.  We are in the realm of the symbolic: this is more than simply an anticipation of what will happen in six days’ time.  What does it mean?

The word I want to use is ‘consecration’.  This little drama at Bethany is nothing less than Jesus’ consecration for the work he has to do: to achieve the salvation of the world. The idea of a set purpose and of accomplishment is strong in the Fourth Gospel.  Early on, Jesus says that his food is to do the will of the one who sent him and to accomplish his work. And his last word from the cross will be the triumphant cry of accomplishment that all is now done: tetelestai, ‘it is finished!’. So Mary consecrates Jesus by anointing him for this awful but glorious task.

On Passion Sunday, I want to suggest that we too must consecrate Jesus in our hearts as we prepare to celebrate the coming days of awe, the Passover of our crucified and risen Lord. In the next chapter of St John, it is Jesus himself who washes the feet of his disciples, consecrating them for service and commanding his disciples in every time and place to wash and anoint one another’s feet. But just as we do this for one another and for the world, we also need to do it for Jesus, come to him with all the love we can find in our hearts to break open the container of our heart and pour at his feet all its wealth and treasure.   

Perhaps something like this lies behind the puzzling saying about always having the poor with us, but not always having Jesus. Judas’ angry outburst about waste, and how the money saved could have been given to the poor misunderstands the gesture.  For it is precisely as we pour out all that we have and anoint the Messiah’s feet that we begin to grasp what our obligation to the world truly is.  The Torah says in Deuteronomy that we always have the poor with us, so we must open our hand to our neighbour in need. In a sense this is precisely what Mary does for the poor Christ who has nowhere to lay his head, who has to rely on the kindness and generosity of those like her who receive him into their homes. What we do for Christ, we do for one another, just as St Matthew says: what we do for the hungry and thirsty, the stranger and the naked, the sick and the prisoner, we do for him. We wash Jesus’ feet and we wash him in his poor companions.  

As I approach the threshold of Holy Week, I ask myself: how have I consecrated Christ in my heart for this celebration of his passion and resurrection? How will I honour him, love him, serve him as he goes to the cross for my salvation?  Will it be by doing the works of mercy to the poor who bear his image and who are always with us? Will it be by some act of generous giving to the church which is his body that we love and care about?  Will it be by time spent in prayer and reflection in this holiest of seasons?  Might it be in all three ways: consecrating Christ by serving the poor, giving to the church, growing as disciples as we walk the via dolorosa with him?

We have six days to think about it before Holy Week begins and we sing about the love that is so amazing, so divine.  For love is the issue today: loving Jesus and not being afraid of extravagance in the treasure we open up and lay at his feet. The question we face is simple: if he has so loved us, how will we show our love for him?  How will we consecrate him within our own selves for the work of love he comes to do? And how will we become ‘as Christ’ to a world that needs him so much?

 Durham Cathedral, Passion Sunday, 17 March 2013 (John 12.1-8)

In the Wilderness

Our Old Testament reading took us into the wilderness in words which Samuel Sebastian Wesley set to music in tonight’s anthem.  The desert is a rich theme in the scriptures.  One aspect of this is that it is a place of truth. If you have been in the desert for even an hour, you realise what a profoundly discomfiting place it is. But to biblical writers it can become not an enemy but a friend.  The desert fathers heard the voice of prophets like Hosea and Jeremiah, who said that all Israel’s problems stemmed from their having abandoned the faith of the desert.  So they turned their back on the cities and went into the desert to seek God.  Our beloved St Cuthbert whom we celebrate this week followed this same way of life when he went as a hermit to the Inner Farne. He went to face the hunger, the thirst, the silence, the loneliness, the exposure, the cravings the wilderness throws at you, live with the wild beasts, face the demons in the depths of the soul, and find God. 

We need a place of truth to teach us who we are and who God is. Jesus too goes into the wild places where, like Israel in the desert, he undergoes ordeals, not so much temptation as testing, the time of trial that portends the last things.  The test for Jesus is the same as it is in the story of Israel’s wilderness wanderings. To whom do I owe allegiance?  Will I choose to have no other gods but the Lord?  The desert teaches us the difference between illusion and truth. It purifies our vision, helps us regain clarity about what our lives are really for.  So we keep Lent to strip the spirit bare like trees in winter so that we pay proper attention to what matters ultimately.  It invites us to a table spread with prayer and fasting and silence and simplicity and acts of charity: our teachers and soul mates for forty days to help us make space for God.

When we do this, we find something remarkable happens. The wilderness becomes a place of blossoming and joy.  When we give ourselves to him, God comes to us, relieves our fears, makes us strong, gives us back our lives. Waters break out, streams in the desert in the imagery of Isaiah. There is a highway, a holy way which turns out to be nothing less than the way home, the way out of exile, the way back to God. And as we journey through Lent, this wilderness way offers the promise of redemption, reconciliation, healing. We glimpse how life can begin again: for our broken world, for our damaged communities, for everyone who has lost hope, for ourselves. We sense that things could blossom and flower for us, even when life is at its most deserted, desperate and dry

The Sunday sheet charmingly announces that at this service I am offering ‘medication’ on Isaiah chapter 35. Well, the Prayer Book Collect for St Luke speaks about the wholesome medicine of the gospel and this is what we celebrate in Passiontide.  That medicine is the cross of Jesus: by his wounds we are healed.  The eyes of the blind are opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped; the lame leap like deer and the tongues of the speechless sing for joy.  These healing images in Isaiah are metaphors of what will become true for all humanity when the wilderness becomes a paradise.  The cross is no longer a symbol of shame but of victory.  The final hymn invites us to ‘sing my tongue the glorious battle’. In this hostile, destructive wilderness there blossoms a tree that, in the hymn’s imagery frees the world from death. Its fruits are for the healing of the nations.  Christ is the victim who has won the day.  We make our boast in the cross.  Sorrow and sighing flee away.

Durham Cathedral, Passion Sunday 2013 (Isaiah 35)

Going Slow

‘Lord, it is good to be here’ says Peter. ‘Let us make three dwellings: one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah’ – not knowing what he said or why he said it. The disciple blunders in, nearly exploding the divine moment with a rush of activity and words. He is arrested by the Voice that comes from the mysterious, threatening cloud: ‘this is my Son, the beloved.  Listen to him’. 

To listen in any serious way means paying attention. The transfigured Christ and his companions on the mountain top knew what this meant. Moses learned it at the burning bush, Elijah in his cave, and Jesus in the desert. Peter had not yet learned it. He could not walk slowly enough. This is one of the most important of life’s lessons. And I speak about it this morning because on Wednesday it will be Lent, and Lent can be our teacher, and I guess that we shall not learn about slowing down unless we have some kind of discipline to guide us. Lent prepares us to celebrate the cross and resurrection of Christ at Easter. This means knowing cross and resurrection ourselves, paying attention to God’s work within us. This is more than a yearly Lenten practice. St Benedict says that all of life should be Lent, reaching for and growing towards the God who invites us to know him as truth and love. So I am speaking about all our days, not just the forty days of fast that lie ahead. But those forty days focus what all of life should mean. And one of its aspects should be our ability to slow down and listen to what the voice of God has to say to us.  

In 1878 Mark Twain was in Switzerland.  He had climbed high up a valley near Zermatt from where, below, was a glacier.  He thought he might travel down with it:

I took up as good a position as I could upon the middle of the glacier – because Baedeker said the middle part travels the fastest.  As a measure of economy, however, I put some of the heavier baggage on the shoreward parts, to go as slow freight.  I waited and waited, but the glacier did not move.  Night was coming on, the darkness began to gather – still we did not budge.  It occurred to me then that there might be a timetable in Baedeker; it would be well to find out the hours of starting.  I soon found a sentence which threw a dazzling light upon the matter.  It said, ‘The Gorner Glacier travels at an average rate of a little less than an inch a day.’  I have seldom felt so outraged. I have seldom felt my confidence so wantonly betrayed.  I made a small calculation: one inch a day, say thirty feet a year; estimated distance to Zermatt, three and one-eighteenth miles.  Time required to go by glacier, a little over five hundred years!  The passenger part of this glacier – the central part – the lightning express part, so to speak, was not due in Zermatt until the summer of 2378, and the baggage, coming along the slow edge, would not arrive until some generations later….  As a means of passenger transportation, I consider the glacier a failure.

 

By now, Twain would have travelled about a kilometer.  It’s not the slowest form of travel - continental drift takes longer. But the glacier’s message is the same as that of looking back in time as we gaze at the stars, or the timescales of geological strata and the origin of species,or waiting for your first grandchild to be born. They will not be hurried, for God has plenty of time. A friend of mine said that it was like walking a toddler in the park and forever waiting for him to catch you up. Perhaps you hadn’t considered the two year old as an image of God.  The Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama called him ‘Three Mile an Hour God’.  He points to the 40 years it took God even to begin to teach the Israelites the single lesson that we do not live by bread alone.  Maybe we shall not come close to learning this even after 40 Lents. On the mountain of transfiguration, he calls to the disciples out of the cloud and tells them that to pay attention and listen hard. ‘This is my Son, the beloved.’  It’s as if the Glory is inviting them into a differently calibrated kind of life, a way of being that is not governed by the breathless sprint of our ordinary days but that paces itself according to divine time, a spiritual ecology that cherishes and cultivates the inward response to a greater reality that surrounds it, discovers its own rhythms through living reflectively.  

I am trying to learn, late in life, that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong.  Ours is an age where speed is everything.  Wherever you turn, in business, in industry, in education, even in the church, success is measured by this: that you fill your diary, work every hour God sends, work both smart and fast.  When I was in Sheffield and trying to raise funds for the Cathedral, I asked a wealthy businessman to help.  As he wrote out the cheque, he said to me: ‘Michael, it’s really important that the church models something different from the hectic pace at which we in the public and private sectors expect to see results.  The cathedral has been here for centuries. It has a perspective sub specie aeternitatis: it looks at things from the vantage point of eternity. It can help us take the long view, learn the meaning of patience.’  Perhaps this is what St Benedict meant by stability in his rule for monks: not running feverishly from place to place either physically or metaphorically, but being committed to the present where God has placed us, living according to that long view. 

A gift of Lent could be finding equanimity, equilibrium, balance among the world’s destabilising, capricious changes and chances. And help is at hand. If you go to www.notbusy.co.uk you will find resources put together by Canon Cherry and Sacristy Press based on his book Beyond Business. The idea is to give up business during Lent and regain control of our lives by living more at God’s pace than our own. You can ever a wristband telling the world that you’re not busy. For me, the first sign of success will be not to agree with anyone who says to me ‘You must be so busy’. Indeed, authentic Christian ministry means the very opposite: having time for other people and for God. I see this as the work of love: ours for God and for others, but most of all, God’s love for us. If Lent means anything, it should be that we become more aware of Love’s work in us and all around us, and learn to live it for ourselves. As everyone who has loved knows, love has its own speed.  ‘It is ‘slow’, yet it is lord over all other speeds.  It goes on in the depth of our being, whether we notice it or not, whether we have mountains to scale or torrents to span or are crossing the quieter welcome prairies of our existence. If you ask me about the speed God walks, I would say: Adagio, lento, sometimes andante, but not often presto or vivace; the still small voice, not the earthquake, wind and fire.  

It’s true that occasionally, ‘he is such a fast god’ as R.S. Thomas says: baffling, elusive, strange.  But most of the time he is so slow his movement is undetectable except to those who stay still for long enough. To see it, we need to become more contemplative: sit on the glacier and travel at God’s speed; lie prostrate on the mountain top and listen to the voice of glory.  Try it this Lent: paying attention and seeing into the life of things. It will bring to its relentless flow and flux the gift of stability and peace.  Love works slowly but God has plenty of time.  We can afford to wait for him.  Spring is nearly here, Lent’s slow awakening, forty days for the wilderness to blossom, for us to listen and pay attention and find a new happiness in our souls. For then we shall know the hills where our life rose and the sea where it goes.

Durham Cathedral, 10 February 2013 (Sunday before Lent)

Holocaust Memorial: at a Jewish-Christian Commemoration

Tonight’s readings have moved me deeply, but none more so than the railway meditation ‘Winton Train: Kindertransport revisited’.* The train journey is one of the emblems of Holocaust memory: transportation away from the horror into a kind of freedom for the fortunate few (though when are exile and asylum ever a true release?); delivery to the death camps for the many, the trucks freighted with human cargo deposited like cattle at the gates of Aushwitz, Buchenwald and Treblinka. When I see the rails of the East Coast Main Line almost but not quite buried in snow, I always think of those unforgettable wintry photographs of the railway tracks that ended at Auschwitz and wonder how the railway, one of England’s greatest gifts to the world, could become so efficient an engine of destruction.  

But I have a more personal reason for being touched by Winton Train poem.  It is the reference to cathedral-spired Cologne. This was my maternal grandmother’s birthplace, her home before she married and moved down the Rhine to Düsseldorf where my mother and my uncle were born. Theirs was a prosperous middle-class Jewish family: her father owned a thriving business in the town.  He had fought for Germany in the Great War and was proud to be an assimilated Jew in a civilised and flourishing nation.  The 20th century was for them a time of optimism.  Then came the rise of Hitler.  Like most of their family and friends in the Jewish community that time, they did not at first see in Nazism more than a temporary aberration from the values of a great nation, a fit of madness that would soon exhaust itself.  

Almost too late, they realised that they must act to save themselves. My mother and uncle were sent to England to complete their education. My grandparents fled to Holland, leaving behind family and friends most of whom ended their days in Auschwitz.  After the German invasion of Holland, they went underground, being hidden by a couple of extraordinarily courageous evangelical women in Edam.  At the liberation in 1945, my uncle who had been sent out of Germany before my mother and joined the Black Watch drove his tank into the town square of Edam, and calling through his loud-hailer asked if anyone knew the whereabouts of his parents.  Out they came. What a recognition scene it must have been, this family embrace after so long. My grandfather died shortly afterwards, broken by what he had lived through.  But my grandmother lived on to a great age, first in Holland and then in this country where she exercised a deep influence on all her grandchildren. I doubt if I would be standing here as a priest today were it not for her. 

It did not dawn on me at once that the Holocaust was part of my own formation, though I had always known that as a child of a Jewish mother, I was Jewish too.  It was only as I became a teenager that I became curious about my family’s story and my own identity.  Much later still I learned about the psychoanalytic study of holocaust survivors and their families and realised that I was one of the so-called second-generation survivors.  Understanding what this means is at best a work in progress – deep, difficult and complex. Like those readings from Lamentations, experience of trauma - physical, emotional and spiritual - poses life-questions about who and what we are, and where God is in all this. And because these questions go to the heart of our existence, they are remembered and passed down the generations. We read those texts from the Babylonian exile and recognise in them the universal pain and longing that follow traumatic human suffering of any kind.  

Genocide is never an accident.  It is deliberate, calculated, systematic and precisely executed.  It has to be to succeed. But it needs soil in which to grow. That soil is a community that is prepared, consciously or unconsciously, to permit it, collude with it.  In 'The Prophet' it says that 'the leaf does not turn brown without the consent of the whole tree'. Nazi evil triumphed, as evil always does, because so many stood by and did nothing.  As we heard in the words of Martin Niemöller, that courageous pastor of Dahlem: ‘First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.  Then they came for the socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.  Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.  Then they came for me, and there was no-one left to speak out for me.’  As Edmund Burke famously said, ‘for evil to triumph, it is enough for good men (and women) to do nothing’. 

The holocaust stands as a symbol for all time of what human beings are capable of doing to one another, men and women like you, like me.  Don’t ever say: I could never let this happen here.  Have we ever dared to speak out for another person against the fashionable group-think of the day: a black person, a gay man or woman, someone who protests innocence when the world says ‘guilty!’?  Then you will know the cost of doing that.  It is far easier not to get involved, say nothing, comfort ourselves that someone else will take responsibility.  I look into my own heart and see it all there: the fear, the cowardice, the wish for a quiet life.  Out of that attitude, prejudice is given house-room.  And prejudice is the parent of discrimination and discrimination hatred, and hatred, when it is full grown, throws off its mask so that its awful face can be seen for what it is: genocide, ethnic cleansing, the final solution.

What we say today we must imagine being able to say in the presence of the victims of the death camps.  That is to say, we must not, cannot, offer easy answers, imagine we know or can guess how God could permit this, try and say that we understand what ordeals the victims had to endure.  Elie Wiesel courageously said he wondered whether even God could understand it. We don’t, and can’t. Better not to speak, and to keep silence as we peer into this abyss that opened up in our recent history. Better to weep and lament as we have done in some of the readings tonight for the cruelty of this world.  Better, in our imagination, to step into those lines of fatal selection, like Maksimilian Kolbe and Mother Mary Polenko, and smell the fear for ourselves.  And then, when we can speak again, better to name evil for what it is and fight the demonic powers with all the weapons God gives us.  

But as they tell you when you go to Auschwitz, or to the Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, you are not here simply to stand and observe. You are here to bear witness.  You are here to take in all that you see, and be ready to help others grasp its important for the world today. This is why we are holding this commemoration tonight: so that we can bear witness to the extent human madness and cruelty reached in the Shoah, and also to bear witness to the beautiful dignity and worth of each of its victims. Tonight we are especially remembering the children of the holocaust.  We are here to say and to pray ‘never again! Not in a world I have anything to do with.’ For as people of faith, we bear witness to a suffering God, El Adonai, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, worshipped alike by Muslims, Christians and Jews, who himself becomes a victim and is therefore himself a witness of this holocaust and who stands  alongside all victims as a wounded healer. 

Here are some famous words found written on a scrap of paper beside the body of a dead child at the Ravensbrück concentration camp.  

Lord, remember not only the men and women of goodwill, but also those of ill will.  Do not remember all the sufferings they have inflicted upon us; remember the fruits we bear, thanks to this suffering – our comradeship, our loyalty, our humanity, courage, generosity, the greatness of heart that as grown out of all this.  And when they come to judgment, let all the fruits that we have borne be their forgiveness.

And let us say: Amen. 

Michael Sadgrove, Keble College Oxford, 27 January 2013


*Winton Train, September 1-4 2009: Kindertransport Revisited

Smelling again
The steam train smells
Soot through the window
Crossing the landscape
Of the Czech lands,
Woods and rolling fields,
To Nurnberg of dark memories,
The banks of the Rhine,
With a choir of elderly kinder
Singing: Kde moj dom....
Cathedral-spired Cologne
And the level plains
Of placid Holland,
A sea crossing to Harwich
With English grey-morning gulls 
Screeching, as our train
Pulls out of the platform,
Rushes over fens and fields
Coming at last, steam wreathed
Into Liverpool Street Station.
A voyage re-enacted,
Passing on the message
To a younger generation.

So many stories,
Trajectories of scattered lives,
Chance coincidences
Punctuated with jazz sessions
By the Hottentot Band,
Much laughter, tears
And a kaleidoscope
Of memories shared,
Old friendships found
And new bonds made.

"Inspired by Good"
A voyage re enacted after seventy years
Re-telling the tale to a younger generation.
Sending forth Nicky Winton's message of
Tolerance, compassion, kindness, humanity, humility, humour. 

Winton was responsible for organising the Kindertransport from Czechoslovakia in 1939, thereby rescuing about 689 children from certain death. In September 2009, as an educational project, a Kindertransport train with 22 of the original children on board, re enacted the original journey from Prague to London . This poem is by one of them, Sandra Dwek. 

CANA IN GALILEE

Cana in Galilee is not a beautiful place today.  Perhaps it never was.  The souvenir shops in this down-at-heel little town are among the tackiest in Galilee.  They sell an expensive, sweet and sickly wine in bottles labelled ‘Cana in Galilee’ for the credulous to buy. In the orthodox church there is a charming icon of the marriage at Cana.  This, and the stone water jars in both churches, are all that can be said for this unattractive village.  What is more, the historical claims made for it are as bogus as the wine.  The archaeologists place biblical Cana a few miles away at a site that can no longer be identified. 

But it is the way of God to choose unprepossessing places to disclose himself from the manger to the cross. Galilee seems to have been just such a lowly, workaday place.  ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ asks Nathaniel a few verses before, on first hearing about Jesus, son of Joseph of Nazareth.  Philip’s answer is simply, ‘come and see!’  What he, they, all of us are invited to see is nothing less than a rabbi who is Son of God and King of Israel in whom, says Jesus, we gaze upon an open heaven.  And hard on the heels of this talk about seeing and believing, about meeting and knowing, about heaven and the angels of God comes Cana in Galilee. For in today’s gospel St John tells us that it was here at Cana that Jesus first revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him. 

St John’s Gospel is built around a number of stories in which Jesus performs some marvellous action. These ‘signs’ show how the glory of God has visited the earth in Jesus, how light and love are at work in the world.  The turning of water into wine is the first.  Then come the healing of the royal official’s dying son and the paralysed man by the pool of Bethesda.  The feeding of the crowd is followed by the healing of the man who had been born blind and by the raising of Lazarus. It’s as if St John has carefully selected these stories as performed images of the incarnation, the Word made flesh and dwelling among us.  He wants us to see, to recognise and to love. ‘These are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.’  The signs are given, says John, in order to evoke trust, and bring about a life-changing encounter with Jesus the Christ. ‘Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.’  At Christmas we heard John say: ‘we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the father, full of grace and truth’.  Glory is his great word: glory that changes lives; glory that makes us free. 

If Cana is the first of the signs, what might the last one be?  Or put it this way: if you were to ask John where more than anywhere else you could see this glory full or grace and truth, what would he reply?  I think he would tell you: at Golgotha where the Son of Man is lifted up, where love is shown to be without end, poured out like the wine at Cana that kept flowing and flowing.  And I want to put it to you that this first sign looks forward to the last and greatest sign, where water and blood flow out of the side of Christ's body on the cross, Christ the true Vine, crushed so that all who abide in him might live again.  Water and blood, water made wine.  In other words, this story already looks forward to the passion. Cana speaks of the cross, and beyond it to this eucharist where we drink of the true and everlasting Vine, the crucified and risen one whose gift is life eternal. 

‘Ah, that miracle!  Ah, that sweet mir­acle!  it was not men's grief but their joy Christ visited.  He worked his first miracle to help men's gladness.’  Dostoyevsky, from Brothers Karamazov.  Or is it our joy and our grief together, indeed the whole of life?  There is the Cana glory of happiness and joy, and there is the Golgotha glory of kingship through suffering.  They are not different.  The sacrificial victim who reigns from the cross is our wounded healer.  Lifted up in death he draws all people to himself.  In this eucharist, we bring our own brokenness and the pain of the world for Christ to work his own sign of renewal, healing and grace.  For if Cana happened once, it goes on happening today in the stories of transformation and change we tell one another to remind ourselves that the gospel is true and that we should go on believing and hoping.  We drink deep and find our thirst slaked, our longings and desires recognised and met.  Out of the stony water jars of Cana, out of the stony hill of Golgotha flow healing, happiness and hope.  Only he can satisfy the restless spirit, the unquiet heart.  Only he can bring rest to the weary and burdened.  Only he can heal us and put us back together again.

The glory of God is humanity fully alive said one of the early fathers of the church.  We come to this sacrament and as we look into the cup of salvation we glimpse how we might be transformed like the wine of Cana.  We gather here as his friends and as his mother said, we do whatever he tells us; and that is to do this in remembrance of him. We are here because in Jesus heaven is opened and we are loved back into life.  We are here to drink deeply of his grace and truth.  And we are here to reawaken hope and anticipate the new heaven and earth where hope will be emptied in delight because the wedding supper of the Lamb has come.

St Chad’s College Durham, 20 January 2013 (John 2.1-11)