I ha' seen him eat o' the honeycomb sin' they nailed him to the Tree

19 April 2009 – Low Sunday

A son of God was the Goodly Fere
That bade us his brothers be.
I ha’ seen him cow a thousand men.
I have seen him upon the tree.
A master of men was the Goodly Fere,
A mate of the wind & sea.
If they think they ha’ slain our Goodly Fere
They are fools eternally.
I ha’ seen him eat o’ the honey-comb
Sin' they nailed him to the tree.

I hope you’ll forgive me for not preaching on today’s Matins readings. To me they seem to hark back altogether too much to the suffering & the sacrifice. Today is sometimes called the Octave of Easter, the day, a week after a great Feast, when in some sense we celebrate it again. It is a day of rejoicing in the Resurrection, not of looking back at the Passion, however worthily & theologically correctly we do it. Today is the day when the risen Christ came into the presence of his disciples & convinced them that he was not a ghost by tucking into some broiled fish, & according to some versions, a honeycomb.
Eating a honeycomb is quite a messy business. It cannot be done with dignity, nor while retaining an atmosphere of mystery & awe. Indeed, I’ve never seen it done with a straight face, despite having watched an entire convent of nuns engaged in this activity. That is one of the reasons why, in the teeth of the evidence, I would love to retain the honeycomb in Luke 24:42.
Jesus did not need to be taught how to put people at their ease. We forget tat he knows exactly how we feel & how we work, & exactly the right way to deal with us. Not only has he been one of us, which need not imply more knowledge of the rest of us than any sensitive person might have, but he made us. He didn’t just make us in the sense that he set Creation in motion & let it proceed by natural reproduction; he made each one of us individually. We do not, according to the Fathers of the Church, derive our souls from our parents; the soul is created immediately by God & infused into us as we are conceived. Jesus had made each one of his disciples, both the easy ones & the difficult ones, like Peter, the sons of Zebedee, & Thomas. I have no doubt that, within a moment of taking up the honeycomb, he had them all giggling like schoolboys.
I once read a book of the Miserablist School of Theology which stated flatly, with no substantiation whatever, that “ Jesus had few joys”. Although I was in those days more inclined to swallow that sort of thing than I am now, even then I found that statement unconvincing. If there was one thing that Jesus obviously knew about, obviously knew how to experience & to give, it was joy. You can’t give something you haven’t got, & didn’t he say to Nicodemus “We speak of what we know”? He knew joy all right. Read the parable of the lost sheep or the lost coin. At the Last Supper, according to John, he prayed: “that my joy may be in them & their joy may be complete”. If we are, at the last, to enter into the joy of our Lord, it does follow that our Lord has a joy for us to enter into. I am not that keen on the song “Lord of the Dance”. But it does express a truth, if not in its words, in its irrepressible rhythm: “They cut me down & I leapt up high; I am the life which will never never die”. Jesus was irrepressible. He couldn’t be silenced. He couldn’t, ultimately, be killed. Thomas Aquinas said that the more intense one’s life, the more agonising is the separation of soul & body & the acuter the suffering. True, obviously true. But it is equally true that the more intense one’s life, the more intense one’s experience of life. & life – being alive – is, in itself, an experience of pure delight, of pure joy. Things can happen to make a person’s experience of living a painful one. But even then I maintain that being alive in itself is joyful & delightful. Why else would the prospect of eternal life, life in its essence or distillation, attract us?
Jesus was not just fully alive. He was Life. & that means he was joy & delight. His joys, far from being few, were constant. He had the joy of an intensely living & sinless man; & he had the infinite, unimaginable joy whereby God rejoices in his own existence & which overflowed, by his choice, into Creation. If we think about the elements in our joys, we realise that he created them all. To me it is almost blasphemous to refuse such joys, even if we claim it is to be in union with Jesus in his sufferings. There are no doubt some whose vocation is to embrace suffering & asceticism, but for the vast majority of us the way to God is the way of his creation, &, essentially, the way of joy. If sufferings are sent, I think we will be more able to embrace them as Jesus did if we have embraced joy, embraced creation, as he did.
A totally spiritual person, who despised the flesh, would, I think, have responded to Thomas’ doubts somewhat along these lines: “I am not constrained by death, because I am above the flesh, I transcend it. & so should you. You should not need to see me in order to believe something which, after all, s self evident.” He would not have done what he did, which was to give Thomas an exclusively fleshly proof of the resurrection. He did not say “You should not need to see me” but “You believe because you see”. Of course, Thomas believed more than he saw, & Jesus knew it. & then he said something which should be a source of joy to those of us who wish we had seen him & did not. He looked down through the endless ages & saw all of us & each of us who would believe in him without seeing & pronounced all of us & each of us blessed. Here is the perfect balance between the spirit & the flesh.
& since I am talking about that, I’ll end this sermon with Jesus’ blessed Mother, the one who is blessed among women, & yet whose blessing, as Jesus had insisted, was upon all who heard the word of God & kept it. No doubt the Miserablist School of Theology would point out that she is the Mother of Sorrows & that her joys were few also. But there are ten joyful mysteries in the Rosary (glory is only heavenly joy) & only five sorrowful ones. She did suffer, the sword did pierce her heart; just as Jesus did suffer. But as by nature he is life & joy, so by nature & by grace she is the joyful one. In the Greek of the Gospel, the angel didn’t, actually, say “Hail Mary”, he said “Rejoice, Mary”. He didn’t, come to that, say “full of grace”; he said the untranslatable word “kecharitomene” which could equally well be rendered “full of joy”. Did he at least say “You have found favour with God”? Not necessarily. The meaning of what he said could equally well be “You give joy to God”. “Rejoice, O joyful one! You rejoice the heart of God.”
I think that Mary was in Jesus’ mind as he spoke to the Apostles at the Last Supper: when he referred to the woman in labour it was Mary that he meant first & foremost, & the pains which, according to legend, had not touched her at his birth were to take place at the cross. But when that child rose from the dead, she no longer remembered the sorrow, for joy that all mankind was born to eternal life.