Janet Baker - In Her Own Words

Occasionally you watch something on television that you know will stay with you for a long time to come. Maybe even for a lifetime. That's a big claim to make for a broadcast. But a recent BBC Four documentary for me falls into that extremely rare category of "outstanding". It's
Janet Baker - In Her Own Words.

She had, as everyone knows, one of the greatest mezzo-soprano voices of the twentieth century. I say "had" because, to the consternation of her audiences (though for the best of reasons that she explains in the programme), she decided to retire from professional performance thirty years ago when she was just 56. She had already retired from the operatic stage a few years earlier. I won't rehearse her life story. Her autobiography Full Circle, an appearance on Desert Island Discs and above all this TV documentary tell it all - or at least, the bits she is willing to share in public for she is, as she herself acknowledges, a very private person.

We all have our favourite Baker recordings. Among mine are her Mahler songs, her Wagner Wesendonck Lieder and her Brahms Alto Rhapsody which we had played at my beloved grandmother's funeral and which had us all in tears. Two discs stand out above all, for me. The first is her radiant performance of Bach's solo cantata 82 Ich Habe Genug, recorded in 1966 with Yehudi Menuhin and the Bath Festival Orchestra. Although it originated as a bass cantata, I can only ever hear it in my mind as Janet Baker sings it, with an insight, a sensitivity and what I can only call a degree of personal commitment that are second to none.

My other favourite from a vast discography is her legendary recording of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius made with Sir John Barbirolli in 1964 (on my disc, linked with her equally legendary performance of the Sea Pictures). For many of us, that version of Gerontius will always be the definitive one. I learned to love Elgar's masterpiece through this recording which we bought when my wife was singing it (in the alto chorus line!). We had not long been married. Janet Baker was the soloist in that concert at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford - 1975, I think. I'd never heard the work before, and it came as a revelation that was life-changing for a quondam evangelical confronted with the catholic spirituality of John Henry Newman and Edward Elgar. There's so much deep magic in Barbirolli's classic recording, and not a little of it is due to Janet Baker's rapturous performance as the angel, especially in those marvellous closing pages of the oratorio. Who wouldn't willingly be lowered into the cleansing waters of purgatory if we were sung to like that?

But you don't need to know any of this to enjoy, and be inspired by, this substantial TV documentary. It's beautifully made. Janet Baker is 85 now, but she comes across as a woman of extraordinary dignity and nobility of character. During much of the conversation, the focus is on her face as she sits in an upright chair squarely facing the camera. She makes a lovely portrait, a bit like a late painting of Rembrandt. To me her features, animated, strong but tender, disclose a personality that is finely wrought over a long lifetime, radiating a deep wisdom that comes from living the reflected life. She has a wonderful way with words, by which I mean not simply her fluency, her charm, her gentle irony and her self-deprecation, but the insights with which even the most straightforward of her observations and reminiscences seem to be charged.

You feel that she conceals as much as she reveals, and you honour that. This is a respectful documentary. But she tells us more about herself in this programme than we have heard before. Not so much the facts about her career as the meaning they have carried for her. Early on, she speaks candidly about her childhood memory of the death of her much-loved elder brother from a heart condition. One morning she was told that he would die that day. She was sent down the road to play with her friends. Coming home in the early evening, her parents and she went upstairs and stood round his bedside until the end came. Her mother turned to her and said: "You're all I've got now". Baker goes back to this memory more than once in the broadcast: not surprisingly, it proved a defining moment in her life. She says that she carried the burden of being there to look after her mother from that moment onwards, how it made her into someone who was fundamentally serious about life as she put it. The programme shows her singing the Farewell from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas at the Glyndebourne Festival in the 1960s. It is achingly beautiful. You wonder how it could be done with such intensity not only of musicianship but of human feeling. When we know about the loss she had to bear in childhood, we understand where it comes from. "She could not sing something that was not deeply understood by her" says one of her colleagues.

There is so much that is deeply moving in this programme: in the quotations from Janet Baker's sublime musical performances, in the tributes of her colleagues and friends, and most of all, the awareness and humanity with which she speaks about herself and her life. Towards the end she muses about growing old, suffering, mortality and death. She speaks about how old age is a kind of withdrawal, a turning away from hectic involvement in the world, how important self-acceptance, truth-telling and solitude have become. You glimpse something of her vulnerability. She is realistic about approaching the end, about the necessity of dying. You don't see her as she speaks. Instead, you are treated to a beautiful sequence of images of the sea, the waves lapping the shore as if to say: dying is, or ought to be, a homecoming, a safe landing after the hazards and ordeals of travelling the ocean of human existence.

And all the while, we hear her sing the last of the five Rückert-Lieder by Gustav Mahler, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.

I have died to the world's turmoil,
And now I rest in a silent realm!
I live alone in my own heaven.
In my love, and in my song!

I can't tell you how poignant it is, perhaps especially when you are conscious yourself of growing old. When the song has ended, we see her turning tenderly to her husband next to her, whose carer she has been since his stroke, touching his hand, as if to say, yes, Mahler speaks the truth, doesn't he? And then her own tears come, and the camera does not flinch from them, because somehow they gather up the meaning of this extraordinary, and beautiful, human life.

"It is a difficult thing to be a singer" she says. "But it's a far more difficult thing to be a human being." The spirituality, if you like, that runs through this broadcast is something very special indeed. It's worth the licence fee by itself. It won't be on the iPlayer for ever. Watch it while you can. Have tissues to hand.

All Those Sermons! On Preaching at Easter

This is a guest blog I wrote for Sacristy Press for Easter. It was published on their website yesterday. Friends and followers of the Northern Woolgatherer may be interested. It is reproduced here as published. 

I’ve always loved preaching. I’ve found it among the most rewarding aspects of public ministry. I don’t simply mean delivering a sermon to a (usually) appreciative audience in a church or cathedral. There’s the satisfaction of preparing it, immersing myself in the biblical texts set for the day, reflecting on my own experience of faith and human life, drawing on poetry or music, film, literature or art to stimulate the imagination.

So I was delighted that some of my sermons from my time at Durham Cathedral were published by Sacristy Press when I retired in 2015. And I’m pleased that four years later, as I write, Christ in a Choppie Box is being featured as Sacristy Press’s Book of the Month. (If you find the title baffling and wonder what it means, read the preface!) Being asked to write this month’s blog gave me the chance to pull the book off the shelf and glance through it once more.

I turned to an Easter sermon that the editor chose to include (my friend Carol Harrison, once of Durham University, now the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford). It’s called ‘White Easter’ because that year it fell in March and it was proving to be a bruisingly cold spring with unseasonable frosts and snows lingering well after the equinox. I am surprised how keenly I felt the rigours of winter. I was clearly getting old.

In the sermon I link our yearning for warmth and light with our hunger for springtime and resurrection in life. “Easter answers our longings and desires,” I say. “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… Here is where fantasy meets reality, where longing is transmuted into hope.”

Re-reading that sermon made me think about preaching at the great festivals. I’ve now been ordained 44 years. That must mean around forty Easter sermons—many more if you include those preached during the fifty-day Easter season. Not all of them have survived (mercifully), though the earliest sermon which I have a clear memory of preaching was, as it happens, an Easter one. That was when I’d been ordained just a few months. It was on the beautiful story of the Emmaus Road in St Luke’s Easter story (Luke 24: 13-35). The text is long lost, but not the memory of how, like the disciples, my heart seemed to burn as I tried to speak about the risen Christ. When that happens to the preacher, it’s an experience to cherish.

“Easter answers our longings and desires,” I say. “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… Here is where fantasy meets reality, where longing is transmuted into hope.”

All those sermons! How does the preacher stay fresh over a lifetime of preaching? How do we not collapse into cliché time and again, or simply recycle old material from years ago? This year I’m preaching Holy Week and Easter at Southwark Cathedral. How do I say something new at first light on Easter Day? – for yes, on the south bank of the Thames, the guest preacher has to be up at the crack of dawn to preach at the Great Vigil and Liturgy of Easter.

I wish I knew the answer. Maybe it’s one of the miracles of ministry. I’m not in any way comparing myself to Johann Sebastian Bach, but when you think how as cantor of the two churches at Leipzig he had to write a new cantata every week, orchestrate it, copy out the parts and rehearse his musicians all in the space of a few days, you’re amazed that it could be done at all, let alone with such brilliance and consistency. (That was a normal workload for church musicians in those days from the greatest like Bach to the least. Meanwhile Lutheran pastors would be expected to deliver sermons lasting a full hour… you have to admire the stamina not only of preachers and musicians but also of church congregations!)

I guess there are many aspects to staying fresh as a preacher, or trying to. One is the conviction, as the Puritan Samuel Rutherford put it, that “there is always more light and truth to break forth from God’s holy word”. A lifetime of preaching is too short to fathom the mystery of God and his ways, let alone speak of it in the pulpit. But that calls for curiosity on my part as a preacher: about the text, about life, about human beings, about God. I need to continue to be animated by this lifelong journey of discovery as faith seeks understanding. “Old people should be explorers” said Haydn when he was composing his last great works. Even in retirement. (Especially in retirement?)

Michael’s sermons are both beautiful and inspiring. They draw the reader face to face with God in surprising ways, always feeding the spiritual appetite—yet leaving me thirsty for more of what we have just tasted. They are beautifully crafted, and admirably concise. The use of English is impeccable and the scholarship profound. The eclectic references to art and literature demonstrate an aesthetic talent and theological versatility that is exceptional.”
from the Foreword by Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury

Liturgy, prayer and spirituality are of course the bedrock of authentic ministry. You can’t speak about what you haven’t at least begun to glimpse, or wanted to. To be inspired by the church’s liturgy and to feel its rhythms is, I think, vital for good liturgical preaching. But so is personal prayer, especially the capacity to be still and pay attention to (“notice”, my wife says) the ebbs and flows of life where so often God comes to us. You can call it being a reflective practitioner for it’s certainly true that “the unreflected life is not worth living”. Why else would people listen to sermons if not to glean wisdom and insight from the word of God as mediated through the preacher’s own lived experience?

The golden rule of every sermon is, before you ever get into the pulpit, first preach your sermon to yourself. The same is true of blogging. I’ll try to remember that when I get into the pulpit on Easter morning.

Happy Easter to you all!

Thoughts on Nôtre Dame

What can I say about the fire at Nôtre Dame?

It is a terrible, terrible disaster. The burning of this great and greatly beloved cathedral church is beyond the capacity of mere words, at least in the shock of tonight’s news. What moved me more even than the images of Nôtre Dame being attacked by the flames was to see French people weeping in the streets of Paris. Old, young, people of many different cultures and backgrounds, but especially Catholics for whom this is a uniquely sacred place, all were saying that this is a tragedy for France.

But the first thing to say is that thank God, no one appears to have been killed or injured thus far by this huge destructive fire. We must keep the fire fighters and others plunged into this emergency in our thoughts tonight. Trying to save a medieval building from total collapse entails great risks to many people’s safety. But there is at least a real hope that the western parts of the Cathedral with its twin towers may have escaped the worst and can be conserved. Meanwhile, our hearts go out to the people of France tonight. Like them we are stunned by this calamity that has overtaken them

I’ve visited Nôtre Dame often. I never went to Paris without venturing inside this miracle of a gothic cathedral. It was never a peaceful place - all year round crowds surged through the building,
laughing, chattering, taking selfies on their mobile phones...and yet they came in their millions,
drawn here by something many of them could not have articulated but which religious faith wants to describe in terms of the mystery of God. No English cathedral attracts visitors in such phenomenal numbers (though some might perhaps, if they did not charge for entry). It was wonderful to think that for the vast majority of tourists, coming to Paris without visiting its cathedral was unthinkable.

This isn’t the place to lament the celebrated treasures of Nôtre Dame that will have been lost, or at least severely damaged. It’s too early to tell how much of the glorious medieval glass has survived, or the sculptures or the furnishings or the organ. The fabric itself will be capable of being reconstructed much as it appeared before; after all, this was precisely what the great nineteenth century architect Viollet le Duc achieved when the French authorities realised that the Cathedral was falling down and would soon be beyond repair. The sacred space can be reimagined, but it’s the contents that are irreplaceable.

We need to understand what Nôtre Dame symbolises for the people of France. It’s similar to the emblematic significance of St Paul’s Cathedral for the English. The famous image of St Paul’s rising serenely above the fires and smoke of wartime London that did not destroy it (though the nation feared for its survival) suggest what France is feeling tonight. But I think the French feel their attachment to Nôtre Dame even more intensely. For all its laicité, France has a powerful feeling for its great Catholic shrines. Emotionally if not spiritually, for the French, Nôtre Dame is the greatest of them all.

This is because the Cathedral has stood “strong and stable” (forgive me) over so many centuries, never yielding to the often chaotic events of France’s turbulent history, surviving war, defeat, revolution, civil unrest and neglect in ways that we English haven’t experienced to quite the same extent. It’s not too much to say that Nôtre Dame symbolises the soul of France. It is its mystic heart, if you like, its collective memory reaching back into the middle ages, and even beyond to late antiquity when her first saints worshipped and evangelised on this very site in the former Roman city. This is why this catastrophe will be felt far beyond Paris, right across the country, right across Europe, right across the world not only by the French but by everyone who loves France. As President Macron said tonight, Notre Dame is part of us alL

I learned a little about what happens to a community when fire engulfs its cathedral. I’m thinking of course of Coventry Cathedral where I worked as a canon for eight years. In 1987 when it celebrated the silver jubilee of the new Cathedral, there were plenty of people who could tell stories about the night of 14 November 1940 when Luftwaffe incendiary bombs burned the medieval church of St Michael. The new building seemed a palpable symbol of resurrection, while the ruins of the old Cathedral became a symbol of forgiveness, reconciliation and hope. TO THE GLORY OF GOD THIS CATHEDRAL BURNED AND IS REBUILT says the striking inscription set in big brass letters into the nave floor of the new building. I was always deeply moved by those words.

What about Nôtre Dame? I’ve no doubt that even tonight, many people will already be thinking about what happens next. This is an especially cruel blow to have struck this great Cathedral during the holiest season of the chuch year, just when the liturgies of Holy Week had begun to be celebrated, and the days were building up to the great Paschal Triduum from Maundy Thursday to Easter.

Yes, crucifixion comes into things. But to recognise this on Holy Monday is the clue to what must follow. There will be a resurrection of Nôtre Dame, of that we can be as certain as that we shall celebrate Easter at the culmination of this Holy Week. How and when will be questions that will need to be debated for a long time. But catholic France will not lose hope as a result of this terrible fire. What feels tonight like an irrecoverable attack on a cherished holy place is, from a larger perspective another opportunity for resurrection to be experienced. When St Paul’s burned in the Great Fire of London, a new splendour rose out of the ashes. So it was at York Minster (twice). So it was at Coventry. So it will be in Paris.

These words from one of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible were important to those who oversaw the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral after its destruction. They were spoken to the despondent exiles who returned from Babylon to Judah to find that their beloved temple was in ruins. Could it ever rise again? The prophet raises their spirits to stir them into action with a promise of hope. “The latter glory shall be greater more than it was before, says the Lord of hosts, and in this place I will give prosperity” (Haggai 2.9). As the Psalm says, “Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” Tonight must be about new life as well as death. Which is why the great word of Easter must be the last one on this evening of tears and lament: RESURGAM!

Afterthought on Tuesday morning. Thank God the fire is contained, and the core of the medieval fabric is still standing. The relics have been saved, including the Crown of Thorns, and some of the art works. The firefighters have done a magnificent job, risking their lives for a cathedral they love. Already thoughts are turning towards the rebuilding of the Cathedral and one benefactor has pledged a hundred million euros. Christians in Paris will go on observing Holy Week, but with a new intensity now, and with many tears - but, I think, with a stronger sense of resurrection hope than ever. We feel for them and pray for them today. For now, we are all Parisians.

A Black Hole and our Capacity for Wonder

This is the image of the day. No, the image of the year, surely. Maybe of the decade. I find it magnificent. Wondrous. Humbling. And yes, I admit it. Moving.

This is of course the first ever image of a black hole. Its mass is 6.5 billion times that of our sun. It is about 54 million light years away, at the heart of the galaxy known as Messier (M) 87.

I’ve no hesitation in saying that this image, redolent of a doughnut, will prove to be as emblematic as that famous photo of the earth rising above the surface of the moon. (That and other famous astronomical images are here, thanks to the Guardian.) There are some photos you know you’ll never forget, because they burn themselves into the memory and the imagination. This is one of them.

As a milestone in scientific collaboration, this image is already a spectacular achievement. It is the result of networking eight radio telescopes across the world into what’s been called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The effect is to create a receptor dish as large as the earth itself with a vastly increased reach into space. It’s an amazing feat of technology in its own right, not to mention the extent of partnership and team working among all the research agencies involved. When human beings pool their knowledge and their talents, there seem to be no limits to what can be done.

As for this ring of fire, I think it would need a poet to do it justice. As we know, black holes can’t themselves be seen directly since all electromagnetic radiation, including visible light, is pulled back inside these super-massive objects by their immense gravitational fields. What we are looking at is the event-horizon, the fiery perimeter-zone where matter in the “accretion disc” is being sucked inside the black hole at nearly the speed of light and generating such prodigious quantities of energy that it becomes visible in its last gasp.

So as the name implies, black holes will always be deeply mysterious. Astrophysicists refer to them as singularities where the “normal” laws of physics break down. Beyond the event horizon is unknowable, so distorted is the space-time continuum by the massive gravitational effects of black holes. But what we do know is that these objects power the galaxies they lie at the heart of. That includes our own galaxy, the Milky Way. We can look forward to seeing “our own” black hole, Sagittarius A*, in due course, thanks to the EHT.

We owe a great deal of the theory of black holes to Stephen Hawking, especially what happens around the event horizon. It’s a tribute to his extraordinary mind that observation is on the point of confirming his theoretical models. It may possibly refine them too: falsifiability is a key concept in establishing sound scientific hypotheses. But behind him stands another of the twentieth century’s greatest scientists, Albert Einstein. His theory of general relativity will also be tested by these latest revelations. Relativity theory was itself a refinement of Newtonian physics whose accuracy failed near extremities and singularities like very massive objects. Will his theories too need further modification in the light of the research that will follow this image of a black hole?

What we need to remember is the key role that is played in science by the imagination. The periodic table, the Benzene ring and the structure of the double helix in DNA are all attributable as much to the imaginative capacity to think in new ways that break out of the boundaries of accepted models as to observation by itself. The black hole was imagined long before it was theorised about let alone observed in its own right, as has been this year.

Which is where the arts can perhaps add their commentary on this dazzling image. I saw two allusions in it that have stayed with me this afternoon. The first is a poem by the seventeenth century metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan:

I saw eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright,
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years
Drive’n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved; in which the world
And all her train were hurl’d.

“Calm” a black hole is not. It is a vortex of furious uncontained violence. And yet from half way across the cosmos, it radiates a sense of timeless stability. The perception gets me thinking about time, eternity and God, what is transient, what is enduring, where we came from and where we are bound on this little speck of stardust we call Earth. Spirituality comes into things when we look up at the heavens and read how they “declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19.1).

The other allusion is to Wagner’s cycle of four music dramas The Ring. Here the connotations are altogether darker, more true perhaps to the catastrophic forces of a black hole. The ring is a symbol of naked power, stolen from its rightful owners the Rhine Maidens and thereafter destroying everyone, god or mortal, whom it touches. (Cross reference J. R. R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings where many of these themes recur.) In the final scene of the fourth drama, The Twilight of the Gods, the ring is returned to the Rhine, the old corrupted world is destroyed and out of fire and water a new, redeemed order rises up. Black holes, conjectures Hawking, play a vital part in “recycling” the matter of the universe which, if you think about it, is a redemptive image. Wagnerian in its scope, you might say.

I began by saying that I was humbled by this image of a black hole. It put me in my place, and put my worries and concerns into a larger context. It’s not that they don’t matter any more, simply that when we look beyond ourselves and contemplate the wonders of the cosmos, it has a curiously calming, healing effect. To me, that makes this iconic image religious in character. And that should drive us to our knees.

Preaching the Cross in the Shadow of Brexit

This year I'm preaching Holy Week in Southwark Cathedral. Once again, I've chosen to give a series of addresses on St John's Gospel. Its passion narrative has been an inexhaustible source of inspiration throughout my life. Indeed, I owe my Christianity to it, something I blogged about a few years ago. This is perhaps the sixth Holy Week I've preached when I’ve focused on St John's Gospel. Far from repeating myself year after year, I've been amazed at the fresh insights it has to offer, this profoundest of stories that seems forever new.

However, this is the first year in which I'm aware of proclaiming the cross in the shadow of such momentous events. I mean, of course, Brexit. It's possible, though I think unlikely, that the UK could crash out of the European Union on 12 April, two days before Palm Sunday. But even if we are still EU members as Holy Week begins, the air of crisis and panicked uncertainty will almost certainly still be real. So this year's question is, how do I, how do any of us, interpret the passion in such a febrile political climate? How does the Brexit emergency colour the way we "lift high the cross" in liturgy, preaching and prayer?

Of course, that's putting the question the wrong way round entirely. It falls straight into the Brexit trap of seeing everything from our own limited perspective. What matters infinitely more is, how does God see things? How does the cross itself interpret our national politics at this turning point in our history as a people? More than that, how does the cross judge our collective and individual motives, attitudes and choices at this critical time in our history, and indeed all of the time? I almost said at this crucial time in our history, this “crossroads” that is subject to the judgment of the cross of Jesus Christ.

I'm clear that in Holy Week, the preacher is called "to know nothing but Christ and him crucified", as St Paul puts it. Yet in the powerful passage from which I’m quoting (1 Corinthians 1.18-2.5), Paul directly contrasts "the foolishness of God", that is, the wisdom of the cross, with what he calls merely "human wisdom". He concludes that faith must rest on the power of God that is the ultimate judgment on all human activity. So the proclamation of the cross places all human thinking and action under divine scrutiny. And that includes the politics of every nation, people and society at all times in all places.

Let me say straight away that I don't intend to mention the B-word explicitly at Southwark. I don't see it as the preacher's role in Holy Week to weary long-suffering listeners by expatiating on Brexit. But just because I won’t inflict my Remainer opinions on people, it doesn’t mean that I’ll apologise for them if asked - which, I suppose, is conceivable. It’s true that I've argued with some passion that as an established church, the Church of England can and should take a view on this nation's future in relation to the European Union. It should be as committed to shaping opinion as it is to reflecting it, because Brexit is a matter of public theology, morality and social ethics. But Holy Week is not the time to do it from the pulpit.

However, it doesn't follow that the passion narrative sits above politics. Far from it. In all four gospels, it’s clear just how deeply political this story is. While it's true that the cross is the ultimate demonstration of how "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself" (St Paul again, 2 Corinthians 5.19), the particulars plunge us inextricably in the politics of first century Palestine and the complex public interactions of the Jewish people with their Roman overlords. Whatever else Jesus' death means spiritually and theologically, we can't evade the historical fact that the crucifixion was the direct consequence of political decisions.

Given that the divisive politics of our own day is the context in which we shall be commemorating the cross this year, it would be surprising if we didn't hear all kinds of political echoes and resonances in the passion story. Some of the themes that have haunted the rhetoric of the Brexit debate are clear in the narrative. We could think of financial inducement and betrayal (Judas and the thirty pieces of silver); the strain on personal relationships ("Are you not one of his disciples?"); the naked populism of the crowd that sucks everyone into its craving for a victim ("Crucify him!"); the indecisiveness (some might call it non-alignment) of the political leader who could have saved the victim (Pontius Pilate who found no fault in Jesus but for all that turned him over to be crucified). And so on.

None of these is "about" Brexit, of course. Rather, both Brexit and the passion narrative reflect atavistic aspects of human beings that act out archetypal patterns. In particular, the theme of the scapegoat, the victim that is driven out of a community carrying with it its pain, conflict and dysfunction has been extensively explored by the theologian-anthropologist Rene Girard as an important insight into the atonement. Such behaviour seems to underlie the desire to attribute blame that is pervading so much of our politics right now. When feelings are running high, finding a victim on whom to project our ambivalence or anger, our hatred or distress, our longing for revenge is a basic human instinct. Annas and Caiaphas, Herod and Pilate, the religious authorities and the wayward crowd all fit this template. Laid across the passion, the Girardian template yields illuminating insights.

In all these ways, human politics turns out to be deeply implicated in the passion narrative. I'm pretty sure that without trying very hard, we Holy Week preachers and listeners will find ourselves attuned to the political nuances of the story this particular year. As I've said, it isn't a matter of explicitly alluding to our Brexit dilemmas. It will be implicit in our reading and preaching of the texts if we are sensitive to the layers of meaning the evangelists are conveying. Context is everything for both preacher and listener. What are called "reader-response" approaches to the interpretation of texts have highlighted the importance of understanding the context of the listener, whether political, social, cultural or personal. We need to be aware of whom we are preaching to, and what kind of assumptions (not to say fears and worries) they will bring to our Holy Week and Easter services.

But the glory of the cross in the New Testament is how the politics of God and the politics of mortals intersect in a story that turns out to be about reconciliation, redemption and healing. Even in the subterfuge and chaos, the falsehoods, betrayals and thirst for violence, the passion narrative tells of God's purposes to bring about the salvation of the world. All our churches have expressed the hope that even in our divisions over Brexit, people of good will may come together and find that our differences are transcended by our shared humanity and our resolve together to seek the common good. That is where we Christians can make common cause with people of other faith communities or of no faith, but who, like us, care about the welfare of the human family. That will be healing in itself.

In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus speaks about how when he is "lifted up from the earth" he will draw all humanity to himself (John12.32). This is what we must allow the cross to do to us and for us this Holy Week. As we celebrate the paschal mystery of Jesus' cross and resurrection, we shall, I'm sure, find ourselves also drawn closer to one another in wonder, love and praise. We shall want to listen to others' stories about what the cross means to them, and to share our own. Those stories have implications for the whole of life, including social justice, public life and politics. To worship together at the foot of the cross is not somehow to iron out our differences and make everything “all right”. It’s certainly not to extricate religion from politics. But it is to acknowledge that the cross summons us to the search for truth and justice. It’s to recognise that God cares as passionately as we do about the politics of peoples and nations. It’s to bring politics with us to the cross and seek a new purity of vision for our life together in society. And that could transform the quality of the discourse as we go on debating Brexit after Easter.

Maybe you were hoping that Holy Week would mean a few days' retreat into the peace and tranquility of personal piety from the turbulence of politics in the public square. If so, I'm afraid you can't have been paying attention to the gospels!