Consepulti sumus cum illo in baptismate

10 April 2009 – Good Friday

Since the Fall, we have managed to ruin or misunderstand everything, and we have turned the following of Jesus Christ into two things it is not: first, an ideology; second, a religion of success. We Scottish Episcopalians have not yet got to the point reached by those American churches which encourage their embers to become as wealthy as possible and achieve as much worldly success as possible as an integral part of their religious practice, but I am not sure that we look at things in a fundamentally different way. It is human to try and get rich, and to need approval, and there seems to be a lot of the human – as opposed to the superhuman – in Christianity.

Look at the cult of the saint; look, above all, at hagiography. have you noticed how they were all beautiful, talented, intelligent, and successful at everything they put their hand to? I usually complain about this because it seems to put the saints out of our reach, and absolve us from trying to become saints ourselves. But today I’m complaining because these are just the characteristics which a saint does not need – I almost said: these are unchristian characteristics. I suppose it is inevitable that most of the canonised saints were in some way successful, or we’d never have heard of them, and they would never have been canonised. Thank God, I say, for saints like the Cure d’Ars and Benoit-Joseph Labre. Especially the latter, that most glorious of failures. A failure, you could say, in the image of his divine Master.

And that, you see, is why our cult of success is all wrong. That is why I like to see a “failure” saint. Not because it makes me, in my mediocrity, feel better; but because the most outstanding thing about Jesus’ life, looked at humanly at this time on the first Good Friday, was his resounding failure. In the old days those of us who were reluctant about penance and asceticism were scolded and admonished to remember that we were “members of a thorn-crowned Head”. True, of course, though Jesus was no ascetic. His life was, as it happens, very hard, but never, I am sure, just for the sake of it. But we should remember that we are members of a Head who was condemned as a criminal and executed, betrayed by one of his disciples and denied by another, and deserted by all of them – except, needless to say, by the women; because woman, in her natural state, understands and values failure. The Cross we are to carry daily was the instrument of execution for the lowest class of criminal. It is not just that we’ll be accepted even if we fail. But that the more we are failures by the world’s standards, and those standards encompass everything except holiness, the more – yes, the more – we will be like our Lord.

God does not stand at the end of our road watching us struggle, tutting when we go off the road, smiling approvingly when we do not, and occasionally cheering us on. He is there on the road with us, at all times, especially in our failures (he who failed), even in our sins. If when the two of us reach the end of the road our sins have brought us to the point at which we choose to turn away from him, that is another matter. But he will never leave us: our life is a series of choices, or one enormous ongoing choice, whether to leave him. We need to realise who it is we are choosing to cleave to, whose road we are choosing to walk, and see things with his eyes; but conversely, we must realise that it will never be failure that will separate us from the Crucified One, whose only success was being God; for that is what he offers us by his own free gift, he who became man that we might become gods.

St Benoit-Joseph Labre, pray for us!