Ride on to Die!

Ride on, ride on in majesty!
In lowly pomp ride on to die.

It is strange not to be singing those words in the Palm Sunday procession this year. Strange and dislocating when for my entire adult life the great ceremonies of Holy Week and Easter have been the pivot round which the year turns. It will no doubt feel more and more uncomfortable as the week goes on. Not to gather with others in the Upper Room and Gethsemane, at Golgotha and by the empty tomb. We understand why this is necessary. But it hurts, the locked door of the parish church across the road, its emptiness, its silent organ, its lonely altar. It hurts very much for it feels like a kind of abandonment, a death even. It's as if a great stone has been rolled across the entrance.

Which is why this Holy Week will require a great act of the imagination on the part of all of us for whom it matters. It always does call for imagination, of course. We are not literally actors in the drama of the Passion. When we tell its story, we are not rehearsing history but proclaiming this story as a life-changing narrative that is of ultimate significance for us. This is what the liturgy does through its words and images, its rituals and symbols. It's anamnesis, invoking the dynamic of memory that brings past, present and future into a single whole and says: this is the reality that has formed and shaped us, makes us what we are, that lies at the heart of what it means to be human.

I was due to give Holy Week addresses in a southern cathedral this week. The theme was to have been St John's passion narrative, and on Good Friday, the three last words from the cross in that gospel. For St John, Golgotha is a place of achievement, of glory. 'It is accomplished!' I had drafted the sermons before it became clear that there would be no public liturgy anywhere this year. Looking back on them now, they seem to come out of another world when things were normal and we felt safer, less afraid than we do now. Such first world illusions, when so much of the human race lives in fear and insecurity all the time. But this was life back then. And sermons written in one context won't travel when everything has changed.

In the last few days, Covid19 has begun to touch me personally. I don't mean foregoing so much I took for granted and practising social isolation: for us the sacrifices have not cost very much, not compared to others. No, I mean that someone I used to know (and like and admire - but that isn't the point) has died of the virus. I mean that family and close friends are now reporting deaths of people they knew. It has suddenly become a whole lot more real. And even that is a more distant kind of reality for me compared to what is being faced by people who have lost those they loved or who are seriously ill and afraid for their lives. And so many others who are taking great risks every day to care for them, or to maintain the fabric of our common life. These are cruel times. We wouldn't be human if our hearts weren't being broken more than perhaps we can ever remember.

So I find that for now, I'm living more in St Matthew than St John. In this Year of St Matthew, his is the passion story we would have read at the Palm Sunday service. It perfectly fits the experience of this Holy Week 2020. This is the gospel in which there is a great darkness 'across the whole earth' says the evangelist. And Jesus dies with the agonised words of the psalm on his lips, 'My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?' How many people 'across the whole earth' find themselves in just such a darkness uttering just such words right now? I tried to write about some of this in last week's blog when I reflected on a crucifixion altarpiece specifically painted for a convent where the sick and dying were cared for.

St Matthew is clear early on in his gospel that Jesus' death was inevitable, that he 'must go to
Jerusalem and undergo great suffering' (16.21). On Palm Sunday he enters the city as its humble anointed one. No-one gets the irony of the donkey bearing the messianic king. There are shouts of hosanna and victory palms. Who else guesses that he has come to die? Not even his disciples seem to have been paying attention. I wonder what this felt like to the Son of Man who when he arrived at the city he had wept over from afar, how illusory the acclamations and palm branches must have seemed when he looked beyond them to what must inevitably follow. 'Ride on to die.'

This is the first time I've consciously thought, I too must 'ride on to die'. We all must. Not with any messianic pretentions of course, but in the sense that what's true for Jesus is true for all of us. His mortality is ours and ours is his if he is truly 'bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh'. This is the solidarity I wrote about last time, God’s life with ours. We mortals move from one scene to the next in the drama of life that's 'but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more'. That's not to say that the play (let’s not name it out of respect for those in the acting profession) is right to sum it up as a 'tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'. On the contrary. Every human life holds an infinity of meaning and value, if only we could see it and know it. But as to mortality, who is going to argue with Shakespeare, least of all when we face the threat of a disease that could bring the life of any of us to an unexpected end? We all ride on to die, if not soon, then one day.

********

This means me. I can't escape that fact. 'Most things may never happen: this one will' writes Philip Larkin as he lies awake at night and imagines what it will be like to die. Philip Larkin’s greatest and bleakest poem ‘Aubade’ won’t bring any comfort to us during this testing time or any other. ‘Not to be here / Not to be anywhere, / And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.’ Fear of death is real. It calls for courage, and yet ‘being brave / Lets no-one off the grave. / Death is no different whined at than understood.’ The poet accuses religion of being implicated in denial: ‘That vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.’ Who is to say that he’s not at least partly right about that? It’s easy for preachers like me to present the resurrection as the ‘happy ending’ to the story of suffering and death rather than the great mystery about which we can only say that it is the heart of our faith, it keeps our hope alive, yet we cannot know this side of the grave what it really means. And meanwhile, the ‘work’ of dying is inescapable, whether we have faith or not.

What Larkin’s poem teaches me is that paradoxically, it’s calming and empowering, if not immediately then in time, to stop pretending, face the truth and live in the light of it. This is the theme of Kathryn Mannix’ outstanding book With the End in Mind: dying, death and wisdom in an age of denial. I read it before I’d ever heard of Coronavirus (but knowing that I would soon reach my allotted three score years and ten). She is a consultant in palliative care who has found in her work with the terminally ill, dying and bereaved that when we acknowledge our mortality and are able to speak about death, we not only prepare ourselves to die well, but also find that we live more fulfilled lives as a result. This is precisely the theme of the great classics of seventeenth century Anglican spirituality, Bishop Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying. Perhaps one of the positives to come out of this crisis is that we are being urged to think realistically about dying, name it and talk about it with those who are closest to us. This means that if we were to succumb to the virus, we would die having said what we needed to say and made what practical arrangements were necessary. (To their credit, William Collins, publisher of Dr Mannix’ book, has made it available as a free e-book for the next few days. Follow the link.)

Of course Holy Week is about a lot more than our own mortality. These coming ‘days of awe’ celebrate nothing less than the redemption of the world through the cross and resurrection of Jesus. This Great Week transforms everything. This includes our own personal view of life, what we value, what we aspire to, how we are going to live. And how we hope to die. This year, as we observe Holy Week in isolation from one another and in anxiety about what the future may hold, it would be strange if we did not see in the lonely vulnerable Sufferer on his Via Dolorosa an image of us all, strange if we did not hear his cry ‘let this cup pass from me’ as ours, not only for ourselves but for these we love and for all who are suffering in these terrible  days. And yes, even his ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

The days of Holy Week were terrible for Jesus too. Which is why, paradoxically, they can bring reassurance, comfort and hope. Where we are travelling in fear, desolation and sorrow he has been, and in an important sense, still walks and always will. Could it be that this year, because of the unique context we find ourselves in, we hear these familiar stories as if for the first time? Could they come alive for us in new ways in our aloneness, our fear, our loss? Could they help us to live better and trust that we shall die better when the time comes? In the last few days Sister Catherine Wybourne, the ‘Digital Nun’, has written a blog that I find profoundly moving. She has decided not to undergo a course of chemotherapy for her terminal cancer, which would now be ‘treatment of last resort’. She asks what it might mean to die at a time like this.

But what about dying itself? We all have our own views on that. The chances are that, in common with many others, if I die in the next few months, I shall die without the sacraments. I cannot easily express what that means to me, but if that should be my lot, I know that it is one I will share with many others, including many great saints. Can it really be so lonely to tread a path many have travelled before? I don’t know. What I do know is that whether I die alone or with someone watching at my bedside, with the sacraments or without, I shall be surrounded by the prayers of the great cloud of witnesses, living and dead, who make up the communion of saints. So, surely, it will not be so lonely after all.

Sister Catherine inspires me this Palm Sunday as I begin the Holy Week journey towards Easter. We can’t know what lies on the other side. It’s a case of ‘one step enough for me’. It always is. But as we take up the cross today we may perhaps find to our surprise that its yoke is easy and its burden light - or at least, a little lighter and a little easier than we had imagined. The Palm Sunday hymn sets the tone in which we must ride on ‘with the end in mind’ - both to die and to live:

Bow thy meek head to mortal pain,
Then take, O God, thy power, and reign!

Bearing our Sickness: the Passion in 2020

This painting means a great deal to me. It lives in a marvellous museum in Colmar in the Alsace region of France. I first saw it there when I was a teenager, working on a farm near Strasbourg during what we would now call my gap year. I was grasped by this extraordinary and powerful work. Like Bach's St John Passion, it's been central to the way I've tried to understand and respond to the crucifixion throughout my adult life.

Let me first describe the painting. It belongs to a complex threefold altarpiece whose constituent parts were displayed to reflect the changing seasons of the liturgical year. It was created for an Antonine convent at Isenheim not far from Colmar (hence its name, the Isenheim Altarpiece). The 'Hospital Brothers of St Antony' lived under the Rule of St Augustine. Their particular vocation was to care for the sick. The altarpiece was commissioned in the early sixteenth century and was complete by 1516. This was on the eve of the German Reformation, so it belongs to the very last phase of medieval religious art with its distinctive spirituality focused on the passion and death of Christ. It is the masterpiece of German painter Matthias Grünewald (c1470-1528) of whom we know little, and of whose output only a handful of works survive.

The crucified Jesus dominates the painting, not only because he is placed at the centre but owing to his immense size - compare the figures on either side. He is not the martyr serenely offering up his life to his Father, but the agonised victim wracked with pain and suffering spiritual torment in a terrible darkness. There is no beauty or dignity to admire in this figure: this could be any common criminal, vagabond or slave. His skin is pitted with scars; we can read every muscle and sinew as the tension in his body drags down the ends of the cross-piece of this engine of death. It's as if God has entirely abandoned him at Golgotha. This is the passion according to Matthew or Mark: 'my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'

And this seems to be the experience of the two women to his right. His mother Mary is attired in a grave-cloth white (where else is she depicted quite like this?), swooning at this appalling sight of her Son's death. At her feet Mary Magdalen kneels distraught at the foot of the cross, wringing her hands in a gesture that's as pitiful as anything in art. St John leans in to Mary, his hand pressing her towards him in a vain attempt to protect and comfort her. Opposite, John the Baptist stands apart, the interpreter out of time, pointing to the cross as an event foretold in the scriptures. The text reminds us of his words about Jesus, that 'he must increase while I must decrease', and of how he had spoken of him as 'the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world', shown in the painting as emptying his blood into a chalice that will, paradoxically, bring life to the world.

The Marys and the Beloved Disciple are shown again in the entombment below the crucifixion, where the agonies above finally reach some kind of resolution - it would be too much to call it rest. And on each side stand figures of saints: Sebastian, pierced by arrows, and Antony, the patron of the order that commissioned the painting. Both were appealed to in defence against sickness, not least the plague that was endemic across Europe during much of the middle ages. But there's a more specific reference in the image of Antony. The Antonines had been founded in 1093 by a man whose son had been cured through Antony's intercession of what was known as the 'burning sickness' or 'St Antony's fire'. Outbreaks of ergotism, a fungal poisoning caused by alkaloids in infected grains, regularly afflicted pre-modern societies. Its distinctive symptoms were severe and painful seizures and spasms, and a gangrenous rot that spread across the entire body. The suffering was excruciating, and usually fatal. It was to the care of its victims that the Isenheim convent was devoted. 

Experts who have studied the altarpiece have suggested that the artists consciously chose to depict the crucified Jesus as a victim of this terrible disease. His scarred, defaced skin not only bears the marks of persecution and human cruelty. It shows him covered with tumours and lesions from head to toe. No doubt Grünewald had seen for himself the effects of ergotism on its victims, perhaps in the convent morgue. This physical disfigurement of Christ adds to the profoundly disturbing effect the painting would have had - and was meant to have - on those who viewed it. It was a memento mori, a reminder of mortality. The message was: anyone could catch the disease and die from it. And even if they didn't, they would die of something. Even the Son of Man was not immune, for he was mortal, like us. 

Which of course is the whole point. In that bleak warning about mortality is embedded the possibility of a transforming vision. The startling insight that Jesus shares our humanity to the point of embracing our sickness is how the painter wants suffering victims to begin to find solace and hope. For he is Immanuel, God-with-us! This crucified Lord, says the painting, does not stand above suffering and pain in self-isolation from all that afflicts human beings. On the contrary. He makes our pain his own, immerses himself in our suffering, empties himself of his life because of it, demonstrates the depth of his love through his solidarity with the human race. 

How could Grünewald not have had in his mind the image of the suffering servant of the Lord in Isaiah 53? St Matthew quotes this famous passage (though not in the form we know it best from Handel's Messiah). 'He took our infirmities and bore our diseases' (Matthew 8.1). This turns out to be the likely meaning of the Hebrew. The Jewish scholar Robert Alter translates the passage as follows. 'Despised and shunned by people, a man of sorrows and visited by illness. And like one from whom the gaze is averted, despised, and we reckoned him naught. Indeed, he has borne our illness, and our sorrows he has carried. But we had reckoned him plagued, God-stricken and tormented' (Isaiah 53.3-4). 

You'll see why this painting has come alive for me in a new way since the Coronavirus pandemic began. I can't give you a precise explanation of what it means to say that the suffering servant 'bears our sickness'. But the key to it for me is the idea of solidarity. I think that during these past weeks we've all discovered how important solidarity is, and how heartening. Our feeling for those who have the virus severely, for those who have died of it or lost those they love have resulted in a profound sense of holding them together in our hearts and in whatever way we find ourselves praying.

I'm also thinking of our admiration of and respect for the courage and heroic commitment of those involved in health care and the emergency services. And of so many others who also face risks in front-line services that support us, from supermarkets to corner shops, in food supply chains, social services, education, public transport, refuse collection not to mention the three quarters of a million people who have enlisted as volunteers.... the list is endless. We are more aware of how interdependent we are in our common life and that can only be good. Lighting candles in our windows, coming out on the streets to applaud the NHS, a million little acts of care and kindness are examples of this. It's truly inspiring. 

And solidarity is what I experience by being drawn into the painting: my solidarity with all who suffer, theirs with me, and God's solidarity with all the human race. My response to the altarpiece is complicated, but it goes something like this. 'Behold the Lamb of God' it seems to say through John the Baptist as he points to the Christ on the cross. 'Look on this victim, this innocent sufferer who is undergoing what is afflicting so many people and threatens to overwhelm you, who was as lonely and desperate and afraid as you are. He drinks the cup of suffering to its dregs, embraces our sickness and our sorrow in solidarity with us, lightens burdens that are so huge, so dreadful that they would crush us completely if we had to bear them on our own. Look on him, and find strength. Cast your care upon him, for he cares for you. Find comfort, learn trust, have hope.' Perhaps this is all I need just now.

Today, Passiontide begins and our thoughts turn to the cross and all that it means. The gospel reading on this Sunday is the raising of Lazarus in John 11. Twice comes the pitiful lament from the dead man's sisters, 'Lord, if you had been here he would not have died!' On another panel of the altarpiece St Antony is shown again, this time with an agonised question, 'Where were you, good Jesus, why were you not there to heal my wounds?' The painting, and the passion narrative, answer that question. He was there. He is there. He will always be there with us and for us, this crucified God who bears the pain of the world on his heart. He is the Christ of Coronavirus. It's what incarnation means. This is the glory of the cross, full of grace and truth.

Grown Up Faith in a World Come of Age

This new year marks the golden jubilee of my coming of age. How so, you ask? I was one of a batch of baby-boomers who at the stroke of midnight on 1 January 1970 became legal adults. I was nineteen and three quarters. For this was the date when the age of legal majority was lowered from twenty one to eighteen. We saved the partying till I reached twenty one. But this fiftieth anniversary gives me pause for thought. Becoming a legal adult is one thing. Growing into moral and spiritual adulthood is quite another. It's a life task, I believe, always a work in progress. I doubt if any of us can say of ourselves that in every possible respect, we have altogether grown up however old we may be biologically.

I shall reach seventy in April. It feels like another coming-of-age threshold, this arrival of the decade in which I shall have to learn to grow old - gracefully, I'd like to think - and face the indisputable fact of my mortality. Quite possibly it will be my last full decade of human life (if I'm spared that long). Yes, I know that Thomas Ken and Jeremy Taylor tell us always to live each day as if it were our last. But somehow it's feeling all the more real as I approach the biblical three score years and ten.

The same month will also mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer's execution by the Nazis on 9 April. It was just a month before the end of the war in Europe. Bonhoeffer doesn't need any introduction from me. He was - is - one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. His return home in 1939 from the safety of the USA to face the dangers of life under the Third Reich was a decision to live in solidarity with his church in its protest against tyranny. The question with which he wrestles in those extraordinary letters from Tegel Prison, "Who is Jesus Christ for us today?" represents a theology that was finely wrought in the place where all the best thinking is done, at the edge of human experience. It was to be an unfinished symphony. But how rich are the movements he bequeathed us!

One of Bonhoeffer's most fertile ideas was that of "a world come of age". It was a phrase much bandied about in the 1960s along with "religionless Christianity" and "the Man for others". I remember as a chorister half-listening (on good days) to sermons about Honest to God and hearing the name Dietrich Bonhoeffer linked to John Robinson, Paul Tillich and what was coming to be called "secular theology". Looking back, I can't help admiring the heroism of that project, its intellectual and spiritual courage in questioning inherited language and ideas. What Bonhoeffer himself would have made of it is an intriguing question.

What is coming of age? Entering my majority 50 years ago wasn't the same as acquiring particular rights closed to me earlier in life such as voting, driving a car, drinking alcohol and so on. Some of these coincided with attaining adulthood but many didn't. What it meant was that my parents no longer held legal responsibility for me. I was now responsible for myself. Which in a moral and spiritual sense means becoming aware of who and what I am, recognising the truth about myself, taking responsibility for what I think and say and do. And if my adulthood reflects attaining any kind of personal maturity, it means grasping how responsibility is never self-serving, but is part of a collaborative, communitarian project that extends to all others in the world where I learn that human existence means "life together".

I think this is what Bonhoeffer is getting at when he links humanity's "coming of age" with shedding infantile notions of dependency. Like St Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, becoming an adult means "putting an end to childish ways" in which others hold responsibility for us. So faith that has come of age honours the proper autonomy and self-determination that belongs to adulthood. Bonhoeffer said that this means living etsi deus non daretur, no longer resorting to the divine as the answer to every unsolved problem or dilemma. This is much more than merely invoking a "god of the gaps" to explain what we don't yet know intellectually. It means learning what's altogether more exacting spiritually, that in the modern world God is no longer a presumption, a given part of our daily experience of cause and effect. In such a world, I have to learn to think for myself, take responsibility for my values, decisions and behaviours, and make the most intelligent response I can to the challenges of living authentically as an adult of my own century.

There is a paradox here that Bonhoeffer loved to point out. It's the answer to those who were tempted to see him as a liberal protestant with a strongly agnostic, not to say humanistic, streak. He said that it was precisely as humanity learned to live in this way that startling insights about God began to be revealed. "Before God and with God we live without God." It’s an arresting rhetorical saying that it’s tempting to regard as metaphorical. But I think Bonhoeffer was putting words to a genuine spiritual experience of simultaneous absence and presence. The naked exposure that feels like abandonment means not the renunciation of faith but entering into its most profound meaning at the very place where the truth about God and humanity is finally disclosed: at Golgotha, where God is crucified in the Jesus who cries out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” In another memorable saying, Bonhoeffer suggests that "God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross".

One of the implications of this way of reading the cross is that at Golgotha, religion itself is put to death, for it belongs to the old self that needs to die if the new self is to be born. Bonhoeffer’s "religionless Christianity" doesn't mean in any way denying faith, but letting go of the childish dependency that flees to the bolt-hole of religious practice as an escape from living in the real world. Only this can put true faith back in the centre where it belongs. For "religion-as-refuge" can never do the work that only an adult response to God can do. What this entails can only be learned by taking in all that the cross symbolises: how God reaches out to embrace and love humanity unconditionally, how he invites us into a relationship of gratitude and trust and mutual self-giving. We could call this "faith seeking understanding" in Anselm's great phrase.

I want to learn late in life what grown-up faith means. I won't deny that it's tough to figure it out in an environment where I try in vain, or so it seems, to trace shapes and patterns amid the baffling complexity of events, whether it's the twists and turns of history or the ever shifting light-and-shadow of my own path through life.

********

Which brings me back to the times we find ourselves living in as 2020 dawns. The year has not begun well. On this feast of the Epiphany we celebrate the light that radiates from the Holy Infant whom the magi travelled from distant lands to worship.  But while Christmas songs of peace and good will were still echoing in our ears, the US President ordered the assassination of an Iranian general who was visiting Iraq. And at once we are plunged into uncertainty, worry and fear on account of consequences we cannot even guess at. We are destined to watch a relentless game of tit-for-tat being played out by powerfully armed nations with the suffering of innocent people almost inevitable. Far from having come of age with the emotional intelligence that goes with it, humanity is regressing into infantile patterns of behaviour that pose frightening possibilities for destructiveness. If there are world leaders with influence who are capable of behaving as adults, now is the time we need them.

How do we have faith, how do we say our prayers in such grave times? Bonhoeffer, prisoner of the Nazis, who lived through even darker events than we do, knew there was no point in praying to some deus ex machina that would intervene and rescue him. He knew that the only meaning to be found in his own suffering and death, one more victim out of so many, would have to come from within. It would flow out of what he had learned by contemplating the crucified Jesus and seeing in the cross the universal victim of man's inhumanity to man. At Golgotha we know that there is a solidarity in prayer shaped by the cross as a sign not only of victimhood but supremely, of love. And this solidarity brings the strength to go on loving in the midst of suffering and to bear witness to its transforming power. The capacity to love in every circumstance, to love my neighbour and love my enemy, to love as an act of the will because it is required of me as a matter of Christian obedience, this is the ultimate test of how far I have come of age.

In this year that we celebrate the seventy fifth anniversary of VE Day, we should remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyr of the twentieth century. Martyria means "witness". We need to do what he did, discover how best to live today as adult Christian citizens not only of our own country but of the world. And to embrace our vocation to be citizens not of past ages, however nostalgically we are tempted to feel about them, but of our own century with all its contradictions, possibilities and pain. And how to bear witness in our time to the grace and truth we have seen in the glory of God's incarnate Word this Christmas.

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!

The Centenary of the Great War: Thoughts on Good Remembrance

“This is without doubt the saddest story I have ever heard.’  That’s the first line of Ford Maddox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier published just as the Great War began.  It captures the dying of an era, the end of innocence.  You read it knowing, as the protagonists did not, that the lights were going out all over Europe.  I have heard it said that the war that was declared in the summer of 1914 did not truly come to an end until 1989.   Perhaps, with the hindsight of another thirty years, we might say that it has still to come to an end. The red horseman of the Apocalypse with his bloodied sword who takes away peace rides this earth yet.  Wilfred Owen called it ‘the pity of war’. 

In a week’s time we shall keep Remembrance Sunday and commemorate the centenary of the 1918 Armistice. It is one of the last truly national rituals left to us. Whoever you are, you are aware of poppies and war memorials, of the Royal Albert Hall, the Cenotaph and the Chelsea Pensioners.  You are drawn into the ceremonies that symbolise the remembrance, the gratitude and the care of a nation.  Every society, every people needs a day such as this both to remember and to think.

I once thought that we should have to work harder in the future to keep the collective memory alive of what it is like when nations go to war, and civilisations are nearly destroyed, and so many have their futures taken away from them or carry their physical and emotional injuries with them for the rest of their lives.  But in the last twenty years we have seen attendances at Remembrance ceremonies soar, especially among the young. For the landscape of war remains only too well known to us.  Our world is as precarious today as it has ever been, more so in some ways with the pressure on liberal democracies and the rise of nationalisms and the far right.  I shall never forget that on the very day of my installation as Dean of Durham the Iraq War began. Its aftermath lingers on. The unfinished business of war casts a long shadow. Its victims, like the poor, are always with us. 

The trouble is that all this is so big in its scope. We look back to 1914 and 1939, and the other conflicts of our age - lesser maybe in scale, but not lesser to those who were its victims. How do you begin to take it in?  A few years ago I was in Russia, in what was once Stalingrad, now Volgograd. There is a vast war memorial there, a colossal sculpture in the tradition of socialist realism that dominates the skyline for miles around. The eternal flame that burns beneath it, the perpetual guard that is kept there, - the need never to forget is everywhere. Yet the hugeness of it didn’t move me as much as something I saw in the museum dedicated to the terrible Battle of Stalingrad of 1942/43: a helmet that had lain frozen for months alongside the body of its owner in that terrible winter, a sweetheart’s letter that was the last thing a dying soldier pressed to his face as he bled in the snow, a battered, forlorn tin mug, a torn photograph of a mother and father who were not to know they would never see their son again. It spoke of unbearable sadness, of the tears in things. 

This for me put a human face on war, because the huge was brought down to the level of individuals.  If you talk to me about the slaughter of millions, my mind seizes up. But talk to me about the suffering and the dying and the bereavement of individual people with names and homes and loved ones, and I begin to know what you mean. Tell me the stories of men, women and children with faces I can picture, and voices I can imagine, and the words become flesh and the reality of it all begins to dawn.

Today’s news has told us that a bugle carried by the poet Wilfred Owen will be sounded at his grave tomorrow, 4 November, exactly 100 years since he was killed in action in France. It was one week, almost to the hour, before the Armistice. He took the bugle from a dead German soldier. Perhaps he wondered who that German was, where he had come from, what family he had left behind at home. “Bugles calling for them from sad shires” says his “Anthem for Doomed Youth”. Calling for them both, on opposite sides of a conflict neither of them wanted, yet united in death by a musical instrument. “Strange Meeting” indeed.

Our Armistice ceremonies and traditions are a way of holding and handing on raw memories of pride and shame, bravery and cowardice, outrage and fear, comradeship and sacrifice. We find our own meanings in them, we think our own thoughts and pray our own prayers during the two-minute silence. The risk is that the rhetoric of remembrance becomes too broad, too elegiac, too generalised for us to make sense of it. I’m reading a rather wonderful book by Rachel Mann, Fierce Imaginings: The Great War, Ritual, Memory and God. Her writing originates in her memories of her Grandad Sam and Grandad Bert, both of whom fought in the Great War. They survived it, yet remained its victims all their lives. Her reflections range far and wide across the landscape of conflict and how we remember it, yet she constantly comes back to these two men who anchor her writing in what is specific to them and their families. Particulars matter.

What does Christianity have to say about all this? 

Every Sunday is a remembrance Sunday, for every Sunday we remember a dying and a death. ‘Do this in remembrance of me’. It is individual and specific: one man's pain and darkness, one man's broken body and shed blood, one man's mother and best friend looking on in grief as his life ebbed away on the cross. ‘Long years ago, as earth lay dark and still/Rose a loud cry upon a lonely hill/While in the frailty of our human clay/Christ our Redeemer passed the self-same way’ says the much-maligned yet (to me, anyway) moving ‘O valiant hearts’. That hymn from the Great War comes straight out of the struggle to make sense of the new experience of mechanised warfare and death on a scale never known before. It’s moving because it interprets those deaths in the light of the death of Jesus; it asks God to “look down and bless our lesser Calvaries” where God suffers in every human soul, each one cherished by God, each death mattering to him, or might we dare to say diminishing him just as it diminishes us?  The cross ties our human suffering to God’s for eternity. We remember. God remembers.

A rabbi was asked whether a garment that had been symbolically torn in grief could be sown up and used again. Yes, he replied, but you mustn’t disguise the tear.  The scar must always show.  In other words, we always carry our collective and individual memories around with us. Time gives a perspective from which meanings can become clearer, the picture comes into focus.  However we must learn in the ceremonies of remembrance not to make it better by easy speeches that gloss over the particularities of suffering, loss and grief with the language of willing self-offering and the glorious dead.

In particular, we mustn't elide our piety as essentially sympathetic bystanders with the raw experiences of those who have served in conflict. Rachel Mann comments on the last line of Siegfried Sassoon's poem "The Attack": “O Jesus, make it stop”. She observes that the difference between prayer and blasphemy is hard to draw. Could we hear the final cry from the cross in Matthew and Mark in that way, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” The experience of wondering where God is, the outrage at a God who does not come to rescue us is familiar to human experience. And the resurrection, especially in Mark’s short ending, does not make it “all right”.

At least, not yet. We glimpse a future that could be different, indeed, will be different according to our Christian hope. In the eucharist, we "remember forward" to what will dawn one day, that other country whose “ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace”. It seems as far away as ever for now, further away, I think, even than it seemed earlier in the lives of my post-war generation. Our world is not in a good place as we mark this centenary. All the more reason, then, to make sure remembrance leads us into prayer for the future of humanity. And into reflection, so that we ask ourselves what we have learned from the past and how we intend to act on it. Memory, prayer, wisdom and resolve are the antidote to despair.

These are among the things that will make for "good remembrance".

How shall we mark Brexit in Church?

I posted a tweet today. It was a question, addressed to the two national churches of our island, the Church of England and the Church of Scotland. I also copied in Westminster Abbey because they know about these things too. My question is, will there be church services to mark Brexit Day? 

You may laugh. With the nation so hopelessly divided about Brexit, and the negotiations themselves mired in difficulties, how on earth can we contemplate marking the 29th March 2019 liturgically? Everyone agrees that it will be a momentous event in our history, but that’s about it. Remainers and Brexiters will want to tell entirely different stories about how we got to this threshold and what we believe, or hope, or fear, lies on the other side. One side will look for celebration, the other lament.

But let’s think a little more deeply. For one thing, it would seem very strange not to hold public services around Brexit Day when we are used to marking other big national events in this way. Liturgy is one of the ways we gather up and ritualise the events that are shaping our collective lives, whether it’s the centenary of the Great War, the end of the Falklands War, celebrating a royal jubilee or in the aftermath of terrorist attacks and natural disasters. By doing this in public, high-profile ways, we hold up a mirror to our common life and understand the place we occupy within the larger story of our peoples.

And of course, we offer our story to God. That’s primarily why people of faith have a strong instinct that we should gather together at times of transition. At every threshold, especially when we are at our most febrile, we need to pause to look back as well as look forward, try to discern where God is in the events we are passing through, ask ourselves what he is calling us to be and do in the future, and above all, offer our lives afresh to him in faith and hope. 

If ever we needed to do this, it is going to be next March as one chapter of our nation’s life comes to an end and a new one begins. Yes, this process has been and still is controversial, divisive and extraordinarily painful. But that’s precisely why we need to try to find words and ritual actions that will help carry us across this threshold as we pray for whatever awaits us beyond. 

And they need to be actions that we can perform, and words that we can say together. It will be far too soon in the spring to talk about the healing of memories. It could well be that things will become more bitter and fractious before they begin to mend. But if there is going to be healing, then the memory that we came together at a time of division and tried to reach out to one another could sow a seed of reconciliation that we can build on in the years ahead. And yes, a seed of forgiveness too, for many things have been said and done in this Brexit journey for which we shall need to say we’re sorry.

There could be two approaches to a Brexit liturgy. One would be to construe it as a vigil of prayer on the eve of crossing this threshold, offering what we are about to do - for better or worse - to God’s wise and loving providence. Many of us remember the vigils of prayer that were held across England before the General Synod vote in 1992 in relation to the ordination of women to the priesthood. People of utterly different convictions recognised in one another a common, God-given need to call upon God to help us at a time of deeply divided opinion. I could see us doing something like this as we contemplate a future none of us can yet foresee. Might a national day of prayer and fasting be appropriate?

The other approach would be to ritualise the transition we shall be negotiating. This would be harder to do in an inclusive way, but that shouldn’t stop the church from trying to interpret it in the light of what we as Christians believe about nationhood, about our place in the wider Europeans and worldwide family of peoples, about our commitment to the enduring values of peace, justice, inclusion, collaboration, honour, loyalty and truth. We need to articulate a vision of the kind of society we want to become, a vision for the kind of world we want to live in. It would include thankfulness for all that has been good in the past, penitence for what has fallen short, and the offering of our nation’s life in the future with as much confidence and hope that we can muster. The register will need to be humility not self-congratulation, reticence not assertiveness, acknowledging that there is so much that we cannot know about where this Brexit Road will lead us. But equally, in the spirit of St Paul in the midst of his ordeals, we must confidently affirm that we do not lose heart.

I’ve made no secret about how very disappointed I was that the Church of England ducked the challenge of holding a debate about Brexit before the Referendum, both in the General Synod and, I’m told, in the House of Bishops. The Synod debate, when it happened, took place after the Referendum - too little too late. It was such a lost opportunity: the national church in England ought to have contributed as an institution to a big conversation about what we believed at that time England’s place in Europe should be. It still should. But it seems afraid to. Sadly.

Now, once again, our national churches have the chance to help us as we reach a historical crossroads. Yes, of course the context will be continuing disagreement, opposing views that are passionately held. But this is precisely where our churches can make a real contribution - by naming our conflicts and divisions, the difficulty of the process we are in, and then by ritualising this painful collective journey in ways that signal what Justin Welby calls “good disagreement”. I’d say that it was not only desirable but necessary. And possible.

As readers of my blog know, I’m a heartfelt Remainer. I admit that I am deeply afraid of what is going to happen in six months’ time.  I am angry and frustrated about Brexit and I dread turning over the page in the 2019 calendar that will tell me that March 2019 has arrived when that fateful threshold must be crossed. I can’t see anything that may happen before then that will change my mind. For me this is not a good night and I don’t want to go gently into it. Raging? Well, yes.

But that’s precisely why I recognise that the church must try to speak into our confusions and help us see our hopes and fears in the larger context of God’s wisdom and care for humanity. Churches are at their best, not when they preach moral sermons but when they stand with our people so that they can weep or rejoice with them - or both. Especially is this true at the liminal places of life, when we are more than usually aware of our human fragility and our need of one another and of God. Churches are good at entering into the flow of public and personal history. It’s what’s needed now.

March 2019 will see us journeying towards Passiontide and Easter. The gospel of death and resurrection will furnish us with all the spiritual resources we need as we ask how best to mark our departure from the European Union. So I want to ask our church leaders: what will we do to help the people of our nation at this time of change? How could our cathedrals and greater churches play a role in regions and localities? How could local churches become places of prayer, resolve, hope, even healing? 

There’s an abundance of liturgical and spiritual imagination to draw on in every part of the church. Wouldn’t it be a terrible failure to be defeated by this challenge on the grounds that it’s just too difficult? I admit that it will be hard. But perhaps the nation is looking to us to respond, as it often does at times of uncertainty. I hope and believe that we will prove equal to the challenge. But we need to be thinking about it now. What are we doing to prepare? That’s my question. 

Lent with St John's Gospel

I'm working on a series of Holy Week addresses that I'm giving at Chester Cathedral. Once again I'm immersed in the Gospel of St John. Not specifically the Passion story this time (I preached through it a few years ago, which is how my book The Eight Words of Jesus originated). This year I decided I would offer addresses on the seven "I am" sayings in the Fourth Gospel. In the order in which they occur, they are: the Bread of Life, the Light of the World, the Door, the Good Shepherd, the Resurrection and the Life, the Vine, and the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Believe it or not, I have never preached specifically on any of these great sayings, though I've often alluded to them in sermons on St John - you can hardly avoid it when they illuminate so much of his gospel. (Actually, that's not quite true. I did once write a sermon on the Way, the Truth and the Life,  but had to abandon it when some big event in the parish supervened and I needed to preach in a different way.) So this has been a voyage of discovery for me. It's been inspiring and stimulating to research the Greek text of St John with the commentaries, something retirement gives me time to do (even if it also brings the despondent reminder of no longer possessing key books I'd have been glad to consult because they were left behind in Durham when downsizing my library).

We've been companions for half a century, the Fourth Gospel and I. I blogged about the St John Passion a few years ago and said something about the part it played, together with the music of J.S. Bach, in my coming to conscious faith. In that blog, I wrote about the last word from the cross in the gospel, "It is finished" and how significant that single Greek word tetelestai is for the author. The cry of accomplishment, triumph even, because Jesus has completed the work God gave him to do, strikes an entirely different tone from the last words in the other gospels. There, it's much more a case of abandonment and desolation ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" in Matthew and Mark), or resigned trustfulness ("Father, into your hands I commit my spirit" in Luke). In John, Jesus is not the tragic victim who is "done to" by others. He is the sovereign Lord who lays down his own life as an act of the will. It makes all the difference to the way we hear the story.

My challenge this Holy Week is to show how the "I am" sayings point towards the cross - and towards the resurrection as well, for in John, the cross-and-resurrection is a single hyphenated event as Jesus "goes to the Father" as John puts it. The ancient liturgies of Easter celebrated the cross and resurrection, not as two separate moments in Jesus' career, but as a unified redemptive event, the Pascha, the Lord's Passover. As it happens, at Chester they were keen that my addresses should remind congregants that Holy Week represents the last phase of our Lenten commitment to prepare for the celebration of Easter. That seemed to fit well into the way St John handles and interprets the "I am" sayings.

To do this properly, we need to look carefully at each saying's background in the Hebrew Bible. Take for example the saying "I am the bread of life" (John 6.51). This was the obvious text to assign to Maundy Thursday evening and the liturgy of the Last Supper. Here is John's key eucharistic text ("Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them"), this in a gospel that unlike the others does not record Jesus breaking the bread and sharing the cup in the upper room. That's already a substantial sermon in its own right. But I couldn't do it justice without noticing how Jesus' feeding of the crowd that introduces this saying is intended to remind them of how God fed their ancestors in the wilderness with manna from heaven. Much is made of this in the dialogue between Jesus and the crowd that forms the substance of this chapter. Once we grasp the significance of Jesus' saying "I am the bread of life" at Passover time (John 6.4) when that wilderness journey was remembered in a ceremony of the breaking of bread, we realise how profound the symbolism is.

In a way I find miraculous, this is how the text of the Fourth Gospel works from start to finish. It is the most densely textured of the four gospels, with layer upon layer of symbolism, key words and phrases (including the "I am" sayings), and references to the Hebrew Bible not only through direct quotation but by allusions that trigger associations in the mind of the reader. These are a bit like Wagnerian Leitmotiven - musical themes that associate to particular characters, objects, events or destinies. Their role is subliminally to enable listeners to navigate a long and complex story by reminding them of the past, foreshadowing the future or setting the appropriate mood. In St John, certain words function as archetypes that are present throughout the text: explicitly here, implicitly there, for example light, life, love, glory, work, end (as in purpose), ascent (being "lifted up"), way, king, water, bread, wine and so on.

And I am is one of those. As I shall try to explain during Holy Week (no easy task!), those words derive from the story of Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3.1-15). As he takes off his shoes (for this is holy ground) and gazes into the fire that burns without being consumed, he hears God addressing him. The voice discloses God's name: "I AM WHO I AM....Thus shall you say to the Israelite, I AM has sent me to you." This is the origin of the divine name in Hebrew, YHWH, or in its debased English form, Jehovah. What does it mean? That God can only be spoken about or described in terms of himself. For he is the essence of what it means to exist, to be alive. The theologian Paul Tillich spoke about "the ground of being". So when Jesus takes the emphatic Greek words ego eimi on his lips, "I am", John takes him to be identifying directly with the God worshipped by the Hebrews, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Jesus does this explicitly in a passage that records an argument with the community's leaders who accused him of blasphemy. He makes the extraordinary claim, "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8.58). No wonder they tried to stone him there and then!

Enough for now. In this blog, I only really wanted to point to the infinite richness of this wonderful Fourth Gospel. I'm looking forward to being in Chester Cathedral for Holy Week and preaching through the "I am" sayings as a small act of gratitude for what has felt like a lifetime of friendship with St John. I'll publish the addresses as I give them (at http://northernambo.blogspot.com) and put the links on social media.

Good Friday Music

Wagner may not be to your taste. He is a Marmite composer: you either love him or loathe him. But he is one of those alongside Bach and Handel whom I turn to on Good Friday. And one of his works in particular, his last music drama Parsifal.

Not to try your patience unduly, here's all you need to know about Parsifal. Its theme is the quest for the Holy Grail, the redemption of the world, and the healing of an eternal wound. Redemption comes through an innocent young man (Parsifal, or as he's better known in the Arthurian Legend, Percival). He is the "pure fool" who is innocent of the world's evil, does not know wrong and can therefore resist the seductions of pride, power, lust and self-interest. The message is: if our destructive human instincts can be transcended by self-giving and purity of heart, everything will be transfigured, universal love will redeem the world, and humanity will be set on a path of wisdom and goodness.

You don't have to buy the entire philosophical package to succumb to the rapturous music. All Wagner's music dramas are about redemption in one form or another, but Parsifal is the most luminous of them all, and the one that most clearly displays its debt to Christianity. Wagner's syncretic mysticism may not strike us as altogether orthodox, but the central role the eucharist plays in Parsifal shows that its the Christian tradition where the composer has sought his primary inspiration.

In Act 3, there is a ravishing interlude known as the "Good Friday Music". It's often played as a concert piece in its own right. At this point in the drama, Parsifal, exhausted by his travels, stops to rest in a beautiful sunny meadow full of flowers. The knight is entranced by the springtime radiance all around him. He learns that this is due to the magic spell of Good Friday when all of nature is glad because it is cleansed from its sin on this day. In this music, a serene sound-world is created that sings of beauty, tranquility, healing, goodness and love. It sets the scene for the climax of this enormous work where the wound is finally healed, humanity reborn and resolution achieved.

Good Friday is a day to think about the fatal wound that pierces our world, and the endless, calamitous destructiveness that comes from it. The liturgy of the day doesn't flinch from exposing us to the innocent victim who was inhumanly murdered on this day. Nor does it flinch from exhibiting the instrument of his execution. We gaze silently at the cross, reverence it, embrace it, kiss it, think our thoughts, shed our tears, lament for what became of this righteous man. We even sing to this horrendous machine of pain and torture in words like those of the Crux Fidelis:

Faithful Cross! above all other,
one and only noble Tree!
None in foliage, none in blossom,
none in fruit thy peers may be;
sweetest wood and sweetest iron
Sweetest weight is hung on thee!

It's extraordinary, when you think about it. And among the many thoughts we bring to our Good Friday worship is that this Jesus who has done no wrong stands for millions and millions of other victims across the centuries who like him do not deserve this destiny. Their innocence, his innocence, was not enough to save them from this hour.

It's right that we think such thoughts, however painful. And not just think them. A vital part of the Good Friday liturgy is to offer the Solemn Prayers from the Cross. At this point in the service, we take time especially to remember the victims of cruelty and conflict in our own day when there seems no end to the terrible ordeals people are intent on inflicting on one another. But we mustn't think our thoughts or pray our prayers hopelessly. Indeed, to turn thought into prayer is precisely to make the decision never to succumb to despair, easy though it would be. It is to resolve that prayer, and the action that flows out of it, will place us on the side of truth against the lie, the side of everyone who intends good for the world, not evil. If we are a people of the Cross, then we want to do everything we can to be a part of the work of redemption, impossible though that may look at times. Or if we can't quite yet want to be part of it, we can maybe "want to want to".

So the serenity of Wagner's Good Friday Music isn't an escape from the turmoil of a troubled world. It isn't in the music drama, and it isn't in real life. It's a promise of redemption where everything is put right in creation and in our human life and relationships. It often feels like hoping against hope, yet that's precisely what we are called to do in the New Testament. So if, at Easter, we decorate the cross with greenery and flowers and make it beautiful, we aren't denying what it is, this engine of death. What we are doing is to make our defiant statement of hope precisely because of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The wound of humanity may look fatal, but what flows from the wound in the side of Jesus, the water and the blood, hold the source of healing our world hungers for.

And when we sing alleluia again on Easter Day, it isn't to deny suffering, cruelty and pain but to imagine the cosmos as it will one day be, gathered up in the risen, glorified Christ in whom all things hold together, and when he is all in all.  

This is why, of all the days of the year, this is the one we call "Good". It's why we celebrate the cross as well as lament it. Because we know that at Golgotha, our lives are given back to us, and our hope is restored. It's the beginning of Paradise Restored.

We need Good Friday music and places for quiet hope more than ever. For everyone's sake. For God's sake.