Easter 2020: fear and hope in a landscape of death

Public was death, but Power, Might
But Life again, but Victory
Were hushed within the dead of night
The shuttered dark, the secrecy.
And all alone, alone, alone,
He rose again behind the stone

Alice Meynell’s poem is haunting me this Easter. ‘All alone, alone, alone’ is precisely how much of the human race finds itself during these weeks of Coronavirus lockdown. Despite all the ways in which we are digitally connected to one another as never before, this enforced isolation from physical human contact is still hard for many and for some, almost impossible to bear. We feel especially for those cut off in even more extreme ways because they are seriously ill, unconscious or facing death, and for those who love them. These are terrible times.

The poem underlines what’s said in all the Easter stories in the gospels, that no-one was there to witness Jesus being raised from the dead. All there was to show for it was an empty tomb from which the beloved body had gone. The resurrection narratives all begin there, not with joyful meetings with the risen Lord but with emptiness, bafflement and fear. They begin at the threshold of profound mystery, in a strange and disturbing place where nothing is quite as it seems.

The painting captures the paradox of Easter. It’s an extraordinary work of art from the same altarpiece I wrote about in Passiontide by Matthias Grünewald, the early sixteenth century German painter whose masterpiece this is. This resurrection panel is not as famous as the crucifixion but I find it just as remarkable. The colours for a start - this could have been painted by William Blake three centuries later. The way Jesus’ head seems to dissolve into the aureole of light surrounding it - that could be Turner. The beautiful curve of his diaphanous robes traced out by his rising up into the sky; the vibrancy of the risen Lord presiding majestically over a landscape of death with the wreckage of the rent tomb centre-stage: it all makes for a painting that’s as dramatic and compelling as anything in religious art. As an imaginative journey it takes us where no theologian would dare to tread.

I keep coming back to the aloneness of this risen Christ. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been tuned into it before we went into self-isolation. But I’m struck by how the painter pointedly does not include a heavenly panoply, a host of angels to celebrate the resurrection. Nor have the women yet arrived at the tomb. True, there are human figures in the painting, but the guards could not be more lifeless, strewn like broken toys across the foreground, When Lazarus stepped out of his tomb, his sisters and Jesus his friend were waiting to greet him. When it’s Jesus’ turn, there’s no-one. He is ‘alone, alone, alone’. Whatever has taken place on Easter night has happened out of sight, hidden from all human gaze.

The theological point is that the event of resurrection is unknowable. It can’t be witnessed or conceived, or even spoken about. It is a mystery, a work only God can do. ‘I trod the wine press alone’ says Isaiah, imagining a warrior returning after a great victory (Isaiah 63). He is bloodied but unbowed, triumphant, ‘announcing vindication, mighty to save’. Did Grünewald have this passage in mind when he tried to capture in paint the rending of the tomb and Christ the victor ascending in his gorgeous red robe, and his battle-scars, the marks of the nails, for ever branded on his hands and feet? ‘I looked, but there was no helper, so my own arm brought me victory.’

We’re struck by the purity of the risen Christ’s skin. In the crucifixion panel, Jesus’ body was terribly defaced by scars, boils and pustules; as I pointed out in the blog, this painting was commissioned for a convent whose vocation was to care for people with skin diseases. It was to reassure the sick that Jesus had suffered as they were suffering, identifying with them in their pain. But now, all this has been healed. Resurrection brings healing, transfiguration and beauty to our disfigured humanity. The sky may still be black and the landscape sombre, but the rainbow colours of Christ rising from death point to a transformation that is coming upon the world. Easter changes everything.

********

I think this painting encapsulates where we find ourselves just now if we are Christians. Faith affirms that God raised Jesus from the dead. We profess it in the creeds and try to live by its promise. But like the altarpiece, our lived experience may take us into very bleak landscapes. The sterile ground may show no green shoots of spring, the dark vault of heaven may hold no hint of dawn. Our worlds may be strewn with wreckage and destruction. This radiant resurrected Christ gazes straight at us as if to say, hope against hope. A better future is promised. And we want to hope, desperately. We want to defy the despair we’re tempted to fall into. Even at the grave we want to sing ‘alleluia’. But the barren earth beneath us and the inky sky above seem to say: whatever this promise means, it is not for now. It is not yet.

Easter in lockdown may feel a bit like that. What hope does it bring to people who are lonely, frightened or very sick, or who have lost people they love? Or who are overwhelmed by worries about what the virus may mean for their homes, jobs and finances? Or who are burned out with the tasks of caring for others? Bring it close to home. Any of us could die in the next few weeks. Easter won’t make any difference in this strange and terrible year. Will it?

It would be easy for us to see Easter as the happy issue out of all our  afflictions, to allude to a prayer for the sick in the Book of Common Prayer. We want our tragedies to end in triumph, our tangled chaotic experiences to achieve resolution and come to rest. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t crave a good ending to all this misery. Or at least, could glimpse some light at the end of this long dark tunnel. ‘Easter brings us hope’ will be the message of every online sermon preached today. But what does it mean? What difference does it make?

Let me say what I think it doesn’t mean. Easter makes no promise that things will get better, or that we’ll pull through this crisis because we’re resilient. It really doesn’t. You don’t tell someone who’s been terribly injured or is terminally ill or about to lose someone they love that ‘everything will be all right’. We don’t know if it will. It may not be. Worst fears may be realised. It’s a pastoral mistake in my view prematurely to quote Mother Julian’s ‘all shall be well’ as if it neutralised suffering here and now. Indeed, she wrote: ‘He said not, “Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be dis-eased” but he said, “Thou shalt not be overcome”’.

When the desperately sick patients in the convent looked at Grünewald’s resurrection, I don’t think they necessarily believed that the risen Christ would cure their diseases and put everything right again.What did they look for then?

I think they found strength. That is to say, they were comforted by this luminous painting, given a strength that was not their own, resources with which to face suffering and death. Comfort isn’t a soft palliative word. It comes from confortare, to make strong, invigorate, en-courage. It’s about fortitude. Perhaps they recalled St Paul’s words about not being overwhelmed by trials beyond our capacity to endure, how God’s strength is revealed in human weakness. And surely they thought back to the words spoken by the empty tomb when the women were terrified, ‘do not be afraid’ (Matthew 28.5). And his final words in that Gospel, ‘I am with you to the end of the age’. The world’s age, yes, but my own too, whenever and however my life comes to its close.

I don’t underestimate the hope the painting’s message would have brought to the dying. The vision of God is at the heart of Christian faith and the resurrection opens a door on to our communion with ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’, to quote the marvellous last line of Dante’s Paradiso. The dying can feel very alone, especially when death comes because of this virus. As Jesus rises alone, up above the desolate landscape of death, his risen aloneness touches and transforms our loneliness. The rainbow colours of glory and the garland of stars promise that while there are tears in things, they do not have the final word.

That conviction could not be more comforting, more empowering. It imparts confidence, reassures me that my faith, fragile and faltering though it is, beset by ‘fightings and fears, within, without’, will hold whatever may come. Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was executed by the Nazis 75 years ago this month, said: ‘only the suffering God can help’.  When we read the resurrection painting in the light of the crucifixion, when we understand Easter in the light of Good Friday, we glimpse how suffering love is also the love that ultimately triumphs. We can be comforted, strengthened, by the truth that lies at the heart of all of life, amor vincit omnia, love overcomes all things. It feeds the hope that dares to imagine how things could be different for our world and for us all.

So my Easter prayer is that God may look with mercy on his suffering world and be close to every human child. That God will give us strength to persevere through this crisis, endure suffering, care well for one another. And that we hold on to our hope for the time we long for when ‘all shall be well, and shall be well, and manner of thing shall be well.’ And that the risen One who rose ‘alone, alone, alone’ will bring comfort to us all by reassuring us that because of Easter we are never alone.

Prayer in a Time of Coronavirus

I'm sitting in the study window as I write. The sun is shining outside, the air is calm and still. There are very few people walking past in the street. Daffodils are in full flower: this is a beautiful spring. I look across to the parish church of St Cuthbert. It will be open all day for prayer, reflection and stillness, but on this Mothering Sunday, the bells will not ring, the candles will not be lit and there will be no public act of worship.

These are such strange times to be living through. Here in Burswell House, we are in quarantine, lazaretto, as I wrote last time. Unless you are St Cuthbert who knew a lot about self-isolation, it takes some getting used to. We know it is for the safety of all of us, others, ourselves. But on Sunday especially, it is hard to realise that the eucharist will not be the focal point of our day, hard not to look forward to seeing our friends and neighbours in church, one of the village's key gathering-places, hard not to have face-to-face contact and share our stories of the past week.

So like many of you I'm sure, we listened especially carefully to today's act of worship on BBC Radio 4. It came from Lambeth Palace and was led by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It could not have been done better. There was great sensitivity in the choice of readings, music and prayers to reflect the seriousness of these times. Familiar words seemed to take on fresh and urgent meanings. In the opening hymn, for instance, ‘Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy’. I’ve sung it hundreds of times, yet never felt more powerfully the sense of the day’s curve and of our life’s curve traced out in the last line of each stanza, from ‘the break of the day’ through ‘the noon of the day’ to ‘the eve of the day’ and ‘the end of the day’. It was inspired, too, to choose as the gospel reading the word from the cross in St John where Jesus entrusts his mother and the beloved disciple to each other’s care: Mothering Sunday perfectly linked to human suffering in the passion of Jesus.*

Tonight at 7pm, in common with people across the country, we shall light a candle in the study window. Indeed, we’ve decided to light it each evening at that time for a few minutes for as long as this Coronavirus is with us. In the Middle Ages they spoke of plague stalking the streets. Well, maybe the virus will see these candles burning in our windows and think better of crossing our thresholds. I’m speaking in primitive metaphor, of course. But there’s something undeniably powerful in kindling lights in a solidarity of prayer and hope. Our solidarity with others, God’s solidarity with us. I dare say we shall be the stronger in mind and spirit for taking part in this simple yet profound act, better equipped to face whatever ordeals the coming weeks and months may bring.

When we are forced to be socially distanced or ‘self-isolated’, it matters that we do not think of ourselves as alone, cut off from the mainstream of our society, the human family, those who love us. There’s a required solitude just now, of course whether we experience it as individual people, couples or families. But as Cuthbert and the desert fathers teach us, solitude is not isolation. The hermit life was and is a profoundly connected way of being human in which relationships and community matter all the more, not less. Our lighted candles, vulnerable and precarious though their flames will be, nevertheless represent the conviction that we are together in anxiety and suffering, together in our wish to hold victims in our hearts and care for them, together in our hope, our expectation indeed, that under God we shall be kept safe through this time of trial.

That’s an allusion to the final petition of the Lord’s Prayer, of course, ‘Save us in the time of trial and rescue us from the evil one’ as I think it should be translated.** Peirasmos, which we usually render as ‘temptation’, has much more the sense of a great ordeal such as would destroy the faith and hope of anyone. It’s what Jesus experiences in the desert as we recall in this season of Lent, this quarantine of savage times and places that he must undergo in his wilderness of self-isolation. In the anxieties that this pandemic is generating, I think we are probably experiencing a collective peirasmos such as we haven’t known for decades, maybe never in our lifetimes. It’s as cruel as that.

I doubt those who first prayed the words of the Our Father thought they were thereby protected from physical danger or harm. What’s the Lord’s Prayer fundamentally about? Surely it’s the coming of God’s kingdom, his just and gentle rule that brings everything into its right relationship with the Creator, that reconciles all that is broken and destructive and hurtful, that is the source of grace and truth, joy, peace and good in human life. It’s our inward transformation I shall be thinking of when we light our candle tonight. And of the words Jesus says to Peter before the ordeal of his passion, ‘I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail’*** - personally and collectively. We need to pray for one another and for our world that in the face of this threat, our faith may not fail and our hope be kept alive - even if it’s as fragile as a tiny candle flame burning in a great darkness.

This ordeal is hard for all of us and may be devastating for some. Who knows if we shall catch the virus ourselves despite taking every precaution, perhaps be severely affected by it, maybe even die or be bereaved because of it? It’s foolish not to ask ourselves those questions and make preparations in case our fears are realised. Our forebears took mortality for granted: read the seventeenth century Bishop Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying as one of the most famous and spiritually wise examples of how to face death with equanimity. We find it harder than his generation to imagine that we won’t live for ever. But when we love life and are filled with gratitude at the beauty of things and the wonder of our own existence, it’s not surprising that the thought of not seeing another springtime seems unbearable at times.

So our candle can be the prayer that during these turbulent times, we don’t lose heart but that our faith holds, sustained by the belief that God is not far from any of us and that he is especially close to those who are suffering or lonely or afraid. We need to pray, ‘save us in the time of trial and deliver us from the evil one’. And perhaps see in the candles in our windows a promise of the Paschal Candle  that will be lit in our churches on Easter Day in celebration of Christ risen from the dead. In our darkened streets, tonight’s candles will speak not only of our solidarity in suffering, but of a hope that transcends fear and pain and loss and even death itself. ‘We are more than conquerors through him who loved us’ says St Paul.****

I think of those words, and my spirits lighten. I am not as fearful as I was. I feel strangely calmed, and stronger once again.

*John 19.25-27       **Matthew 6.13       ***Luke 22.32      ****Romans 8.37

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.

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 Buried Life: an Ash Wednesday meditation

In our garden, once, stood a weeping-willow. (I'm sorry I don't have an image of it.) In spring and summer, it was the most beautiful of trees, its long, delicate fronds sweeping down to the grass in a graceful canopy. Our children used to wave its branches at the Palm Sunday procession.  Each morning we would waken to bird-song from its crown. One day, however, the neighbours asked for more light (a very theological kind of request). So our tree was cut right back to the trunk. It stood there gaunt and skeletal against the sky, a parody of its former self. The birds found somewhere else to sing. Our garden fell silent.

But, my neighbours keep on assuring me, the tree had its own hidden life. In a month or so, when it is spring, they said, we shall see it. The secret sap, rising now in full flow, would bear its fruit, they said. The birds would yet again sing on its topmost branches. Like Thomas Hardy at Christmas, I spent the early part of that year “hoping it might be so”. And they were right. By midsummer, the tree had miraculously grown back, if not quite to what it had been before, then at least greened over once more. Back came the birds. And the arguments over our neighbours’ right to light began all over again.

The secret life is what the Ash Wednesday gospel** is about.  It is not trumpets and the acclaim of others that herald our almsgiving, our prayer, our fasting, says Jesus: if those rewards go on mattering to you any more (and how hard it is to outgrow them!), then they are yours for the asking.  No: only one thing matters, what God sees in secret: those inward stirrings of our heart towards God, the sap rising deep within our souls. When we feel that impulse within, we know that nothing matters but that we were made for God, restless till we find our rest in him. We know our truth for which we would live and die. We know we are alive.

It's amazing to me how uncurious people can be about their inner lives, how uncurious I can be.  “People travel to wonder at the mountains, the sea, the stars, and pass by themselves without wonderment” said Augustine.  I sense that it is when I am least attentive to my own inwardness that I become less than I should be, less than human.  Perhaps it is at precisely those times that poison seeps into the organism, mingling with the sap, diluting its healing, life-giving qualities, stunting my growth.  I am thinking of how, insidiously, even over a short lifetime, habits, addic­tions, destructive attitudes infiltrate and take root, become part of us, and everything feeds them, good as well as evil, beauty, music, books, even friendship, even religion itself.  We can become obsessed with the things Jesus warns us about: what he calls our rewards. We need never know what is happening to us until it is too late. That is the really frightening thing.

Lent is, therefore, an annual gift to those who take the secret life seriously - which means all of us, for what is religion if it is not attending to our own inwardness?  Lent is a time for reckoning with our own discontent - that blissful unease of spirit that throws us into God because there is nowhere else for us to go.  It is a time to encounter God in a new way, hear him stand at the door and knock, face up to what is demanded of us if we would attain to the dignity of being human beings. 

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife, 
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life,
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course.

Matthew Arnold is right. We need to check our course constantly, I understand that. But Lent offers me the chance of an annual review of our life’s journey, and how true our bearings are to that original course God set us on in baptism. To fast from distraction, from all the voices that compete for our attention, to become, as Buddhists say, “single pointed”, intentional about why we human beings are here on this good earth is deeply important from time to time. It’s what Jesus means by having “purity of heart”.

It’s a simple enough ceremony, to receive the ashes on our foreheads as a sign of turning back to God in memory of our baptism and in anticipation of Easter. But how profoundly this movement from dust to fire sums up the meaning of our mortal existence in the light of the paschal mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection!

Maybe this Lent could be a time when I say yes to God with a new awareness of divine love stirring within. This would be to allow the sap to rise and our buried life’s flow to begin again and reach the surface. It would be to find that we are doing Love’s work in the world. For at its heart, Lent is always a work of love.

**Matthew 6.1-18

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.

40 Days and 40 Nights: ordeal or opportunity?

 We've now passed a small milestone on the EU referendum countdown. It's just 40 days and 40  nights till we cast our vote in the biggest political decision any of us are likely to make in our lifetime. Will they be an ordeal, or an opportunity?

It's a number rich in symbolism for Jewish and Christian believers. Let's start with the Hebrew Bible. 40 days and nights was the length of time Moses spent on the mountain when God made a binding covenant with his people. It was a period of preparation, of seeking wisdom and deepening understanding, days of awe when an unknown future awaited and faith was sorely tested.

I've likened this country's relationship to the European Union to the biblical covenant, for strictly speaking, that's what a treaty is - a solemn, binding relationship in which undertakings are made and promises given. It's always important to prepare properly for covenant making and covenant renewing. These days before the vote are an opportunity to do just that: take time to prepare thoroughly for the decision we make. It takes time, patience and often a lot of struggle to do this well. Moses knew that. But we may have to learn it in a fresh way this year. To leap into a momentous decision without taking the trouble to understand what it may mean would be irresponsible. 

40 days was also the length of time Jesus spent in the wilderness at the outset of his work. The first three gospels all agree that it was a vitally formative time for him as he embarked on his ministry: to seek solitude in a fierce landscape, lay himself open to testing and ordeal, get to know himself in a new way, probe the mysterious purpose of the God he knew as Father, and emerge strengthened to encounter whatever lay before him. We commemorate these 40 days in the season known as Lent. Popularly, it's a time to "give things up" in memory of Jesus' desert ordeal. Fasting is certainly a central aspect of Christian spirituality, even if it's not nowadays practised as it used to be. But at its heart, Lent means preparing for Easter and celebrating the Lord's Passover. 

These coming 40 days are calling us to a tough journey. Discipline and hard work come into things if we are serious about doing the "work" I mentioned earlier: pondering the issues surrounding our EU membership, engaging with the debate in a serious way, listening carefully to all sides of the argument and weighing things up. We may feel that at times this aspect of the preparation process is being increasingly submerged by the rising babble of Babel-noise where attentive listening, thoughtful discernment are surely vital to an intelligent well informed decision. Perhaps we all need to be a bit more Lenten in our approach and turn the volume down so that we can contemplate the issues with equanimity, make sound judgments, hear the still small voice of conscience and of God.

Finally, 40 days marks the period of time beginning on Easter Day when Jesus revealed himself to his followers as having been raised from death. It ends with Ascension Day when according to the New Testament story, he was taken from this world no longer to be physically present among humanity. Strictly, Eastertide lasts 50 days rather than 40 because its culmination lies in the gift of the Holy Spirit to humanity, whose advent we celebrate this coming Sunday of Pentecost. But the 40 days of the risen Christ's Easter presence among his disciples is still a significant period. 

So the coming 40 days could be for us all a time of what we might call resurrection. It's a metaphor in this context but it may be a helpful one. It could be an opportunity to "rise" above self concern and obsession about our own fortunes in the referendum debate, and start to think seriously about others and their needs. I've written on this blog about how we should be thinking about the "common good" of all the peoples of continent, not just "what's best for Britain". We need to think globally about the UK's and Europe's place in the world, and what we, in partnership with the nations of the EU can bring to it in terms of peace, justice, security, good international relations and our care for our planet. Through these neighbourly concerns we would find ourselves "rising" above our deadening obsession with self-concern. Resurrection can be an image of transcending our limitations and turning our faces outwards in justice and in love.

I am writing in analogies, of course. 40 days and 40 nights represent a symbolic period. But perhaps this threshold, coming as it does around the time of Pentecost when we seek the wisdom and charity of the Spirit, can give us pause to think about the journey we are making. Will it be a time of thoughtful, disciplined preparation during which we learn and grow? Will it be a time to renounce self-serving arguments in favour of enlightened self-interest that is informed by the Spirit of God and embraces the concerns of others? Will it be a time to "rise" above ourselves and think in a truly outward-facing global way? 

Will these coming days be Sinai, Lent or Easter? How wonderful if they could be all three! 

Should We Fix the Date of Easter?

A formidable line-up of Christian leaders is discussing whether to fix the date of Easter. It includes Pope Francis, the Ecumenical Patriarch, the Coptic Pope, the Primates of the Anglican Communion and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

When so many global concerns clamour for the attention of religious leaders, why on earth are they even considering talking about the church calendar? Isn’t it a case of displacement activity of the first order?

These are waters to venture into warily. Blood has been spilt over the date of Easter. For the Saxon church in England, Bede tells us, it was a big point of dispute between those who followed Roman use, and those who adhered to the old Irish calendar. When a royal husband and wife observed different customs, there were years when for a whole week, one would still be fasting while the other feasted merrily away.

When I was a chorister and (God forbid!) my thoughts wandered during the sermon, I used to amuse myself deciphering the complex rules set out in the Book of Common Prayer to calculate the date of Easter. My head would spin with Sunday Letters, Epacts, Golden Numbers and long division by 19. I even wrote an article about it for the school magazine, arguing that we should fix the date of Easter on the second Sunday of April. Not only would it be so much simpler, and make life more convenient for a lot of people, and enable Christians across the world to celebrate the resurrection on the same day, but it would also mean more reliable bank holiday weather and considerably increase the frequency on which Easter Day fell on my birthday.

There is, clearly, a strong ecumenical case for Christendom to observe a single liturgical calendar. Nobody would dispute that. It’s impressive that even Islam in its bitterly divided state observes the same (lunar) calendar, as of course does Judaism. So I’m all for top-level discussions about whether agreement about the date of Easter could be reached by the world’s historic churches.

But I’d need persuading to think it’s right to disconnect the date of Easter from a long history of determining it in the way we currently do. Here’s why.

Firstly, its origins go back centuries before the Christian era itself. Easter Day falls on the first Sunday after the Paschal Moon which is the first full moon after the spring equinox. (There were debates about what happened when the full moon fell on a Sunday, and whether it counted if that was the equinox itself.) It’s the Paschal Moon that determines the date of the Jewish Passover on the night following 14 Nisan. So the Christian Easter is hard-wired to Judaism and the Festival of Passover. This is made much of in the New Testament where the passion and resurrection accounts are shot through with passover imagery. It’s not too much to say that the entire biblical theology of Jesus’ death and resurrection is premised on it. We should not sacrifice it.

Second, this close relationship between the Jewish and Christian calendars is a vital link between our two faith traditions. Holy Week and Easter texts have always had a special regard for Jewish rites and ceremonies taking place at precisely the same time of year. Our two faiths are uniquely held together by scripture, history, covenant, and also by our common observance of time. It would be a bad mistake to weaken the calendrical and liturgical threads that bind us together. (I should declare an interest here and admit that I write as a Christian of Jewish background.)

Third, the calculation of Easter, involving as it does the movements of sun, moon and earth, gives our feasts and fasts a dimension that is nothing less than cosmic. Astronomy and our concept of time comes into things. It tells us that what we do as people of faith is intimately connected to physical science and mathematics. You could say that the universe is ‘aware’ of and ‘interested’ in when and how we celebrate the passion and resurrection of Jesus. That is to say, Easter is of cosmic importance. It involves the whole of creation. It isn’t any old date in springtime that happens to suit us.

I believe that our capacity for religious imagination is at stake here. The prosaic ‘second or third Sunday in April’ could never capture the rich theology that I’ve outlined. Easter would be cut adrift from a truly ancient religious history. It would have severed its relationship with astronomy and mathematics that makes it a festival not only of human but of universal significance. The symbolism of the paschal season which is the pivot of the entire year would be impoverished. A glory would have departed.

Easter, with its idiosyncratic and rather wonderful variation of date, compels us to notice it and adjust our lives around it. It’s that way round. I’m just not persuaded by arguments from convenience. However, as I said, I’m all for worldwide Christianity agreeing on a matter that shouldn’t divide us. I’d have thought that nowadays there was sufficient consensus about the calendar to achieve this. So by all means, let an ecumenical conversation happen. But please don’t let’s give up on such a long and rich paschal tradition too quickly.