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!