Sermon for Passion Sunday

“When Christ came into the world, he said: "Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased. Then I said, 'Here am I; I have come to do your will, O God”
I have been thinking a lot about sacrifice this Lent. Not sacrifice in the colloquial sense, the sense we use it in, but in the real sense. Today is the fifth Sunday of Lent, sometimes called Passion Sunday. The whole of Lent is intended to lead up to the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but it is today that what is going to happen is really brought home to us. The readings at the 9.45 service are designed to make the actual events live for us, most especially the gospel passage in which Jesus faces his own death: “Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? 'Father, save me from this hour'? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name! Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out. But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” His task, which had been before him all his life but placed somewhere in a vague future, is suddenly weighing heavily upon him. He suddenly has to wrestle his human will into conformity with his divine will, or, if you like, come to terms with what was before him and what was within him. That is what the devil – “the prince of this world” is doing in the scene. Had Jesus felt no reluctance about the job and the way in which it was to be carried out, the devil would have had no handhold, no point of attack; and he clearly had. Of course; because Jesus may have been true God, but he was also true man; one would have to doubt his humanity had he never run up against the devil. We are now in the deepest part of Lent, and the time for speaking, for preaching, for healing, is at an end. All that is left is God’s glorification through the sacrifice of the Son, and he knows it.
And that’s where the readings we have heard at this service fit in. They are the theological commentary on the event narrated in the 9.45 gospel. If, as the poet Hopkins says, each mortal thing expresses its self in what it does (Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:…myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came) that is even more true in the case of Jesus, the Son of God who became incarnate to do what he is: to be God to us, God with us. And to be the sacrifice that sums up, completes and ends all the sacrifices offered until then.
The sacrifice we heard about in the first reading was not the first sacrifice; but it was one of immense significance, as it sealed the first covenant, the Old Covenant, which is summed up, completed and ended by the New Covenant in the blood of Jesus.
As to our second reading, the letter to the Hebrews is a poetic explanation of how the life, and specifically the death and resurrection of Jesus both fulfils and ends that Old Covenant and everything that it comprised. You need to know your Old Testament very well indeed to understand all the points it makes, but once you do, it changes from a beautiful but rather obscure piece of poetic writing to an extremely clear and rigorously thought out treatise. What it really is is a sermon, though I’m not sure how people nowadays would take to a densely argued sermon taking a good hour to deliver. It may, or may not, have been actually sent as a letter. It has been attributed to St Paul, but honestly the Greek is simply too good for it to have been written by someone who thought in Aramaic, as he did. Various authors have been suggested, from Apollos to Priscilla (writing as a man so that people would not dismiss the piece as worthless). I don’t think it really matters who wrote it. It has been in the Canon of the Scriptures since the earliest days, and that is enough for me.
If you want to know how the Jews of the first century struggled to reconcile what they had learned at their mother’s knee, from their teachers and in their synagogues with what they were now hearing from Jesus and his disciples, the letter to the Hebrews is the place to go. Over and over again the author gives a well-known event or character from the Old Testament and then its fulfilment in Jesus. At the end of the book a receptive Jew could be in no doubt that the Lord really had visited his people.
But for those of us who have never been Jews, who are not really that bothered whether Jesus perfectly fulfilled the prophecies and types of the Old Testament (because for us it is the New Testament that matters and the Old Testament that we read for context and background) …is the epistle to the Hebrews just a historical religious curiosity, with not a lot of relevance to our lives? Well, you might say so if you are the sort of Christian who thinks that all we need to do is be reasonably nice people and go to church occasionally. God is unbelievably merciful, so that may even be true, but how much such people miss!
In fact, it is relevant in two very different ways: in what it tells us about Christ and how our salvation was achieved; and what it tells us about how to deal with suffering. Both are particularly appropriate in Lent and most particularly today as we move into Passiontide.
The death of Abel at the hands of Cain is extremely important. We are told the myth of the fall of Adam and Eve – the first sin being depicted as a refusal of love and a move towards pride and disobedience – but it is with the first murder, of Abel by his brother Cain, that we see its effects. Effects that are reversed, objectively for all of us, and subjectively for each of us as we accept Christ’s grace, by the death of another innocent at the hands of his brothers. God heard Abel’s blood crying out from the ground where it had been spilt, but the blood of Christ, true God and a willing sacrifice, outshouts it, so to speak. That sacrifice reversed everything, turned everything upside down. God’s mountain is no longer the physical Mount Sinai, but the spiritual Mount Zion; God’s presence is no longer seen in darkness, thunder, terror and death but in the brilliance of heaven – or rather, of eternal life, a life in which we already live if we so choose. Because Jesus Christ willingly walked through the darkness, the thunder, the terror and the death, it no longer has any power over those who follow him. Our life makes sense because God lived it. Our sufferings make sense because God suffered. And our death made sense because - God died.

So let us enter into Passiontide with gratitude and mindfulness, and show our willingness – no, our longing – to be with him and follow him wherever he goes.

O God of endless mercy, by our annual celebration of these mysteries you rekindle the faith of the people consecrated to you; increase the grace which you have given us, so that we may fully understand what baptism has cleansed us, what Spirit has given us new life, and by whose Blood we have been redeemed. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Laetare, Ierusalem

A while ago I heard this comment on the radio: “Well, that’s what Lent is about, isn’t it: to discover how strong we are.” I was so distracted by that phrase that I hardly heard the rest of the programme. Strangely, Lent, like Christmas, has entered secular culture (“what are you giving up for Lent?” people with no Christian connection ask, rather as they ask about New Year’s Resolutions), while Easter seems almost entirely confined to the shops; I can see the mounting panic in the shops already, as they advertise cut-price Easter eggs. They won’t sell, of course - they don’t sell - and after Easter chocaholics swoop on Scotmid and make a killing.

I am not sure why Lent has caught on. Perhaps it is a cover for, and a spur to, dieting - the most common thing for people to give up being chocolate, closely followed by alcohol.

But if there is one thing Lent is not about it is “discovering how strong we are”. It is also not about increasing our self-control by practice. Stoics and Buddhists may cultivate “apatheia”; it is not a Christian virtue. Christian indifference is something quite distinct. We do not reach the point at which we have risen above joy and sorrow pleasure and pain, to such an extent that we no longer feel them or even no longer care about them. or maybe some do, but they have no advantage, Christianly speaking, over the rest of us Christian indifference is this: first, we know that whatever God sends or permits it will ultimately turn out to our advantage; as Paul said, all things work together for good to those who love God. So if something unpleasant happens we dislike it, and would have preferred if the contrary pleasant thing had happened. God knows what he is doing and while I do not believe that he ever sends troubles principally “to try us”, he is not put off by their troublesome nature if he knows that they are the best thing for us. And secondly, as St Ignatius pointed out, we want to be as like Christ as possible, and he had a pretty rough time of it. So if we have a rough time we may not enjoy it (we are certainly not required to enjoy it, and most certainly, short of a special vocation not required to ask for it) but it is OK by us, because although we have the bad experience of having the rough time, we have the good experience of being like the Lord.

“How strong we are” is not of any real interest to the Christian, except insofar as learning that contributes to our self-knowledge. As Paul said, “our sufficiency is of God” - the sufficiency that matters, that is. If he asks a particular thing of us, whether it is martyrdom or keeping the Lenten fast, he will provide the required strength; but there is no reason to suppose that he will give me the strength to keep off olive oil for six weeks just because I on a whim think it might be a good thing to give up for Lent. “Strength” has nothing to do with God; look at the people who have the “strength” to put themselves through misery and suffering to win an Olympic medal or look like a catwalk model and apparently find it quite easy. They have “discovered how strong they are” - and where does it get them, Christianly speaking?

There is no harm in fasting or performing ascetic practices, but it must be for the right reason, or, Christianly speaking, it is worthless. The other bad reason for fasting is indeed religious, or quasi-religious, and pretty poor religion it is too. It is to punish ourselves, to make ourselves suffer. Because that is what God likes, isn’t it? I am afraid that is indeed the impression that many Christians have given throughout the ages, but it is not Christian; it is perhaps a basic human instinct and stems from our fallen natures. We know, in a very confused way, that we are sinners, and to us sin means punishment. And so we punish ourselves; but we generally pin it on the wrong thing - think how guilty a thirty-something feels when she eats a slice of chocolate cake! - and we misunderstand the purpose and nature of punishment. To God, sin does not call for punishment; sin calls for healing.

I think one of the main lessons of the Bible is just that: our sufficiency is of God. Pharaoh could persecute the children of Israel as much as he liked; Moses the chosen one not only survived, but was suckled by his own mother, infiltrated Pharaoh’s very palace, and finally robbed him of his entire contingent of Hebrew slaves. You could of course argue that while God’s overarching Plan was no doubt behind all this, the instruments he used were the midwives and the mothers. And I guess that is quite topical today, because, of course, it is Mothering Sunday.

Jesus told us that we must be like little children if we are to enter the kingdom of heaven. Those of us who have dealings with children, or can remember our own childhood, know that children are not innocent little darlings absolutely all of the time. What he meant to evoke was the trust that children have in their parents, their awareness (most of the time!) that they can’t go it alone. Our sufficiency is of God - we should know it, and live by it, as Moses must have known throughout his life that had it not been for his mother’s courage and right decision, he would not have survived.

Christians of the Reformed traditions are perhaps less likely than Roman Catholics or Orthodox to regard the Church as their mother, but it wouldn’t do us any harm to think, occasionally, of God as our mother. God is certainly our father; but God has no gender; God is also our mother. The concept presented no problems to Julian of Norwich, Indeed, she went further; not only God, but Jesus himself, is our mother. She says, for example: “What does Jesus, our true mother do? Why, he, All-love, bears us to joy and eternal life…The human mother will suckle her child with her own milk, but our beloved Mother Jesus feeds us with himself, and with the most tender courtesy does it by means of the Blessed Sacrament, the precious food of all true life.”

Is that so strange? When we make a list of the ways in which Jesus described himself, we remember the True Vine, the Way, the Truth and the Life, the Good Shepherd, but do we remember the mother hen? It is one of my favourites. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered together your children as a hen gathers her chicks uner her wings, & you would not”.

We are safe under the wings of Jesus. I am aware that there is controversy around exactly how much we have to contribute to our salvation, but I think we will all agree that, firstly, we could not have done it for ourselves, and, secondly, Jesus’ sacrifice was sufficient, once for all. Our sufficiency is of God.

That is what Lent is about. Not discovering how strong we are. Not punishing ourselves by suffering. But discovering, or reminding ourselves of, the true relationship between ourselves and God. Of course that will involve some sadness, because, like the publican, we are sinners, & our salvation required great suffering & the ultimate sacrifice from God. But Lent is, as the Orthodox have it, a time of “bright sadness”, because it leads, through Good Friday, to Easter. In Christianity, everything is ultimately joyful because however much our Lord suffered for our sins, the fact remains that he died to free us from them & that he rose again in glory & is seated at the right hand of the Father, where we shall join him when our own personal Lent is over.

What do we need “strength” for? We have the Lord.

Better late than never

3rd Sunday of Lent 2009

The most terrifying moment of my childhood was on a holiday in Yugoslavia, when my father, finally driven to the end of his tether by a half-witted switchboard operator who kept inanely instructing him to “dial 9” on a telephone that possessed no dial, ripped the telephone out of the wall and smashed it upon the floor.

When I read today’s gospel and imagine myself in it, I am reminded of that moment of terror. Perhaps that is not surprising if I am seeing myself as an unconcerned bystander (I’ve never seen myself as one of the money-changers, but that is not so much because I’m convinced of my virtue as because I have never been engaged in business). But even when I do see myself as one of those who are being ripped off by the money-changers, desperate to buy the smallest of birds for a sacrifice and realising that the coins I am getting back amount to barely half of what I have brought with me – and therefore should feel grateful to this man who is revenging himself, and us, on these criminals who are using their position in the religious establishment to make life difficult for the faithful – I still find that my primary reaction is fear. I think there are two reasons for this. Firstly, any violence frightens me because violence means anger that has lost control, and you never know what might happen next; and secondly, this is just not going to help. Violence rarely does. he is only going to make things worse. The traders will not only become angry and vindictive themselves they will increase their prices to make up for their losses and their inconvenience. What is the point of this action? No doubt the man will feel better for having goy it out of his system, but even he won’t get any benefit – he’ll probably end up being lynched or thrown into prison.

this last was perfectly true, and Jesus knew it, which suggests that we ought to look deeper for his motivation. To begin with, in this case violence did not signify anger that had lost control. Strictly speaking, Jesus never lost control – indeed, could not lose control. St Thomas explains that although Christ’s soul was passible, yet he did not have passions as we do; he certainly had passions in the sense of “affections appetitus sensitivi” (so his soul was passible, subject to suffering) because that is part of being a human being. However, says Thomas, his passions differed from ours in three ways: as regards their object: he could not be led by passion towards illicit things; as regards their origin: his passions always arose according to the judgement of reason; and as regards their effect: in us our passions overcome our reason and lead us to do things we should not; in him that could not happen. In other words, his passions were real and he felt them (they arose in “the appetite of his senses”) but they never went further than that. St Jerome seems to be the one who coined the word “propassion” to distinguish Christ’s passions from ours. This long theological digression is not a digression at all; it attempts to explain my statement that Jesus’ passions could never lead him to lose control: anger, sadness and the rest were there, but always within the control of his reason. And there is an interesting fact to add to that: although we are frequently told in the gospels that Jesus was sad, or angry, or had some other emotion or passion, none of the four accounts of the cleansing of the Temple suggest any such thing.

So perhaps we should see the scene differently: not according to that famous painting in which a furious Christ is laying about him with a whip, incensed beyond measure with what is going on, but rather as a calm authoritative Christ, in control not only of himself, but of the whole scene. He is not whipping the traders, much less the animals. He is walking quietly through the Temple, pushing over the money-changers’ tables as he goes, pausing to open the birdcages, and driving the sheep and oxen ahead of him. That’s what the whip is for – it is the language they understand. All this fits far better with the reaction he received: bewildered, hostile certainly, but not violent. it is not as if the people were reluctant to abuse Jesus, try to arrest him, stone him or throw him over cliffs when he made them angry. Had he barged through the Temple in an unseemly rage, attaching respected members of the public and scattering terrified livestock all over Jerusalem, I can’t imagine that they would simply have politely asked Him: “What sign can you show us to justify what you have done?”

This is an important point; because upon Jesus’ behaviour in the Temple depends the meaning of the whole episode. Of course he did intend to show that what was going on in the Temple was an abomination; but there was a lot more to it than that. his action is yet another of those acted parables which I have mentioned before. He is pointing out the unsuitable behaviour of the traders in the Temple, yes, but almost in passing; it is the occasion, not the message. he is not telling us primarily about the Temple but about himself. Because the request from the Jews “What sign can you show us to justify what you have done?” was completely the wrong request; this WAS the sign. Jesus only once, according to the gospels, used, unqualified, the phrase “I AM”, the pointer to identity with God. “Before Abraham came to be, I AM”. But that does not mean he never otherwise made that point. The Hebrew mind does not say “My essence is the same as my being” or “I possess my being entirely and not by participation” or such Greek ideas. The Hebrew mind says: “I lay down my life that I may take it again. No man taketh it away from me; but I lay it down of myself, and I have power to lay it down; and I have power to take it up again” or, perhaps even more significantly, “Although I give testimony of myself, my testimony is true; for I know whence I can, and whither I go; but you know not whence I come or whither I go”. Which is precisely the sort of thing he is saying in this acted parable. The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath, and we see here that the Son of Ma is also Lord of the Temple; something greater than the Temple is here.

He did not give a new sign, but he explained the one he had already given, wen he said “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up”. He was speaking, we are told, of the temple of his body. Well, yes, he was. But he was also questioning whether there was any difference between the two temples, and challenging his hearers to follow his answer to its logical conclusion. His body and the Temple were one: both were the place where God was. As John Austin Baker has put it, “When God enters our space and time, a man is what he becomes”. A temple can be a privileged place to find God, but only a human being can truly be what he becomes. Jesus was the true Temple; the other one was only a shadow. He did explain his sign, but you could have understood it without the explanation as he walked through God’s house, rearranging it to his liking, as if it were his own dwelling – which is exactly what it was. “The Temple and I are one”? He did not need to say it.

And so we return to the point of the whole episode. Of course Jesus knew that he wasn’t going to “achieve” anything by disrupting the money-changing and selling on one day. he wasn’t a fool, to think that the shock would convert the traders or would give the punters the courage to stand p to them. And he certainly wasn’t overcome by rage. The point of the episode is to tell something about himself, and so aout God. The message was not so much about the traders as about the Temple, and about the od of the Temple. The message could e summed up as: “Look at me, and see what and who I am” but Jesus, who was meek and lowly of heart, had no interest in being recognised as God for the sake of it. He had come to earth not only to redeem us – we could have been saved without all that blood, sweat and tears, had God so chosen – but to show us, we who, as Thomas said, can grasp nothing in our mind unless it has first passed through our senses, what God is like. As the Jesuit van Breemen put it, “The epitome of the Good News is not that Jesus is God, but that God is as he appears in Jesus”. Quite so; and that is why it is important that we should grasp that he is God; and it should have been enough to convert the lot of them at a stroke. And, incidentally, if we could leave it at that and stop picking at it, it might well solve a great many of our interdenominational squabbles, which are no less of a scandal than the most dishonest of the money-changers in the Temple.

Frygt og Bæven

Sermon for the 2nd Sunday of Lent, Year B
Genesis 22:1-18

I have chosen the Roman Catholic readings for today, simply because this passage from Genesis has always been regarded as a problem, and I do not think it is. It has caused much heart-searching and hair-tearing among people of all shades of opinion. There seem to be two reasons for this: some feel that Abraham should not have done what he did, and some feel that God should not have done what he did. Some, of course, hold both opinions. Kierkegaard devoted an entire closely argued book to explaining that there can be “a teleological suspension of the ethical” (in more simplistic terms, that the end can sometimes justify the means). I agree with him that there can, though I am not sure either that that is the issue, or that Abraham regarded things in quite that way. In general I have no problem with this passage. Apart from anything else, we do not know enough about things to criticise the actions of an omniscent, omnipotent being; and we do not know anything about Abraham’s state of mind – or Isaac’s, for that matter. The Mystery Plays portray him as begging Abraham to spare him and/or accepting his fate with holy resignation; I wonder about both, and does it really matter? What we do know is that in fact, or for the purposes of the story, the communication between God and Abraham and vice versa was quite other than what we are used to; and, indeed, Abraham’s world-view and view of himself as part of it was quite different from ours.

“For the purposes of the story” is the operative phrase; for that is what this is: a story. By saying that I am not making any statement at all about whether it “really happened” or not; sometimes a story is pointless unless it is a story about what really happened. Don’t forget that God the Father and God the Son are, with the Spirit who proceeds from them, one God. Indeed, that as far as their actions towards creation are concerned, there is no distinction between them. God the Son taught by preference in parables, both spoken parables and acted parables, of which there are more than you might think: from his birth in the stable in Bethlehem to his taking a repentant criminal with him into Paradise, from the cleansing of the Temple to the cursing of the fig tree. And the Father and the Spirit do exactly the same thing. In words through the prophets God tells parables, and in actions – and sometimes in the prophets’ actions – God acts them. God was acting a parable when he sent the plagues upon Pharaoh and drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea while Israel crossed dry-shod; and he was acting a parable when he instructed Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.

It is said that we are an individualistic and selfish lot, we at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; my instinct is to deny it, to say that human nature doesn’t change much. But I think, when I compare us with Abraham, that it might just be true after all. It is certainly true that we are desperately concerned about our rights and our dignity; Abraham would, I believe, not thank us for our concern for his rights as against God. Perhaps we are not to blame; I don’t know whether more rights have been violated in or time than in others, but it is certain that we hear more about it. had there been a Hitler, somewhere away in the barbaric North, Abraham would never have heard about him. The only violation of human rights that he was aware of were those close to him: the capture of Lot, for example. And these were fairly straightforward affairs, which he could generally do something about. Abraham was a confident man, sure enough of himself to be humble and obedient; he was a good man, honest and loving enough to be trusting. We are like frightened animals, seeing predators, tamers and domesticators behind every bush, fearing always that our very nature as the animals we are is at any moment to be negated. How could Abraham think that? Only God who had made that nature could touch it. We are, I suppose, less at the mercy of the natural world than Abraham; but our aeroplanes and air-conditioning and our super-hygienic environment have made us more, not less, aware of our vulnerability, and more at a loss when we do lose control. Isn’t that why we respond as we do to terminal illness and death? To Abraham these things were part of life: floods, hurricanes, droughts; these things happened, but could not fundamentally alter the nature of things. We have lost our sense of the nature of things and live on perpetually shifting sands in the midst of a hostile sea; we are unable to receive eents as they come, and peacefully wait to see what will come of them, in this world and the next.

Not only did Abraham have a more correct view of the universe than we do – we have no view of it at all except as a subject for investigation and as something to protect ourselves against – for the purposes of the story we are to understand that he did not misinterpret the Lord’s messages. he had, as we would say, a hotline to the Holy Spirit. Few of us could be sure we heard a clear message from God, especially if it were something outrageous like an instruction to sacrifice our only son. There is therefore a whole ethical question for us which does not arise for the Abraham of the story. When Job said “God has given and God has taken away”, he meant it in a literal way that we cannot begin to conceive: and for Abraham it was clearer yet: as clear, indeed, as it was for Mary when she returned to God – no ram-substitute there! – the son whom she had received from him thirty-three years earlier. For Abraham as for Mary the son of the promise belonged to God. Everything he himself was or possessed was of God. God’s rights over himself and over Isaac were absolute; and God would never act in a way that contradicted himself, that violated his promise. Paul tells us that God’s promises are without repentance, and Abraham knew that. Isaac was his heir; through him he would be the father of many nations; how God chose to achieve that was up to him. Abraham’s only task was to obey, and obey one whom he knew from experience to be his protector and so by definition the protector of his descendants after him.

So for the purposes of the story, Abraham has no problem with the command – which is not to say that it didn’t hurt. I had no problem, more than a quarter of a century ago, with the command to enter religious life, but that didn’t mean I enjoyed causing my parents pain and my friends bewilderment. Abraham knew that if the episode ended as, humanly speaking, it ought to have done, he would have to cope with a distraught Sarah, quite apart fom his own feelings. But I think that his faith in God was such that he did not look ahead, did not make assumptions.

No problem for Abraham, then. And certainly no problem for God. It may be unfashionable to say this, but there can be no question, ever, of seriously judging God’s actions to be wrong or immoral. We can cry out “God, why?” and we can challenge Him after the manner of Job. But it is essential that we know throughout that there is an answer, and that our bewilderment is due to our limitations and not to God’s failure. Did God have the right to command Abraham to sacrifice his son? Without any doubt. And he would have had the right to let him do it, too. He would even have “had the right” to break his promise, but he does not do that, by his very nature. God is truth, not in the sense that “he really exists” or that he dictates truths to which we must assent, but in that he is totally true to himself, totally reliable, totally faithful.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time justifying God and Abraham. But in fact, what really justifies this episode is something quite different: it is, quite simply, the true meaning and significance of the episode. That is on two levels: the effect God intends it to have on Abraham and Isaac; and its status as “a Scripture” which is to be remembered and believed when shadows are chased away by reality. God knew perfectly well that Abraham would obey him without fail. But, I am sure Abraham didn’t. We all doubt our fidelity, and that doubt detracts from the vigour we bring to our Christian lives. Not just “will I let God down?” but “God, who knows me, can’t possibly trust me”. After this, Abraham had no such handicap. It was he, not God, who was reassired, he who now knew that nothing could come between God and his love and obedience. If he had not known that, he would not have shown himself worthy to be the father of many nations, the beginning of God’s own people. His will and God’s were one, and that was something he had to know. I think Isaac had to know it too: to know that God had to come first, and that he could be trusted in all circumstances, terrible though they might seem. Abraham and Isaac would not have come out of this as we might, feeling like the playthings of God, but rather they would have felt honoured to be confirmed as the pillars of God’s plan.

God is not Zeus; Abraham is not Agamemnon, nor Isaac Iphigenia. No human being could have such value or be so close to God’s heart as to renew all things. But there was to be a father whose broken heart was not spared, and there was to be an Iphigenia, a child who was not substituted; and it was when Abraham (and Isaac) saw his day that they understood, and rejoiced.

The first Sunday in Lent

Asking a person to preach on that Genesis passage is the equivalent of asking them to nail their theological colours to the mast. The temptation is to skip it altogether and preach on the Gospel. However, while I do appreciate the Anglican reluctance to define, perhaps we do have to be clear on what we do, and do not, believe. In his first letter St Peter says “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have”. I think that means that we should be clear about our beliefs and the foundation of them, not just in our minds but in what we say too. Theology isn’t just for the clergy. We, the lay-people, are if you like the “default” Christians. The clergy have a particular role, but they are Christians first and foremost just as we are. St Peter is not talking to the clergy, or to members of the ministry team, or even to the unusually devout. He is talking to you and to me – ordinary piskies in the pew.

It should be said, of course, that anything we state about God, whether it is about God’s nature or about salvation history, can never be more than provisional. In Thomas Aquinas’ words, we cannot understand “what” God is, only “that” God is. Which didn’t stop Thomas from writing dozens of books about “what” God is and “how” God works, but as he said after the great vision or dream that he had the year before his death, “All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me”. That’s the problem with any definition – if you have a living faith, nourished by prayer and chewing over the scriptures, it will not be long before you realise that “that’s not it…” It has been said many times that the only way to define God is to say what God is not. And some early Fathers of the Church used to say that it was better to say that God is not good than to say God is good and then sit back and think you had defined God.

But we do need to be able to say “This, so far as I understand it, and with the proviso that better understanding may come and lead me to change the way I express it, is what I believe.”

So here goes. This, so far as I understand it, and with the proviso that better understanding may come and lead me to change the way I express it, is what I believe about why the Son of God died on the cross for us and rose again.

The Genesis passage we have just heard is key, and that is why we have it at the beginning of Lent, the time set apart to meditate on precisely that.

God created human beings with free will. He did this, I believe, because he was more interested in being loved than in being obeyed. Paul says the demons believe and tremble; equally one could obey and tremble; obey and hate. That was not the sort of obedience God wanted, the sort of obedience it was his to command. Love cannot be commanded; love must be free. When Jesus says that the first commandment is to love God and the second is to love your neighbour he is not saying (how could he?) that he commands us to love. What he is actually saying is that that is the one thing necessary – if you do that there is no need for you to be commanded to do anything else. It is almost saying “There is no commandment: love, and do what you will”.
Now human beings, having free will, disobeyed God. There are people who believe the Adam and Eve story is literally true, and you may believe this if you wish. I don’t really mind whether it is or not; on balance, I doubt it.

Are you a bit shocked that I say that the Genesis story may not be true, that it may be just a myth? But I’m not saying that. A myth is something profoundly true, and it is never “just” a myth. It is a way of expressing a truth which both tells that truth and is within the grasp of the person you are telling. For example, when you tell a child that if he sticks a wire into the socket the Electricity Monster will get him. It’s not true, but it IS true that something very bad, that you can’t explain because he can’t yet understand it, will happen. That’s the sort of myth that Genesis is.
What Genesis is telling us is that human beings, created by God with free will, lost sight of love, and started being bothered about obedience (and it is only one step from valuing obedience above love to wondering just how obedient the letter of the law requires us to be, and thence to disobedience). That’s what it is, you know; and if you will forgive me for speaking so irreverently about God the Son, you can tell it because that, following the letter and not the spirit, is one of Jesus’ “hot buttons”. He can’t stand it. It is the one thing that makes him really, really angry.

People often have difficulty about the question of why the Son was crucified. Is it a sacrifice, is it a sort of restorative justice, what is it? I think the answer is that it can be understood differently by different people, different societies, and different times. We do not now naturally understand the concept of sacrifice in atonement for sin. We don’t do it. The original sense of the word is repugnant to us. To describe Christ’s death on the cross as an atoning sacrifice does not make sense to the modern mind.

Similarly the concept of “making satisfaction”, of appeasing an angry god, or the idea that someone had to die for the sin of the first human being. As if our God demanded suffering and death in strict justice and somehow was pleased by the suffering and death of his Son. These explanations fitted with particular societies, particular belief systems, particular ways of life. They do not seem to fit now.

But “Christ yesterday and today, and the same for ever”. Christ did die on the cross for our salvation, and that does not change. And we need to understand this during Lent and at Easter, because we need to understand what God has done for us and to us. May I suggest one possible way of understanding it, a way that fits – for me – with the idea that our first parents replaced divine love with human obedience, fits with Isaiah’s statement that “He was offered up because he wished it so”, and fits with that beautiful phrase “the restoration of all things in Christ”. In some way the death of Christ restores us to our original state of blessedness by restoring us, from the realm of law and obedience, to the realm of love and grace. What did he say? “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends”. Love is his meaning, and love is the meaning of his death. To me it is not a question of justice, of a necessary death following a sin, but of such a weight of love thrown into the balance that it outweighs centuries – millennia – of law, obedience, and disobedience. Augustine said Amor meus pondus meum: My love is my weight: my love for God is what moves me, as surely as gravity. And Christ’s love is his weight, the weight that outweighs all our sins. Love is stronger than death, so how could he not rise again? It’s not a final answer – no answer will ever be final until, in God’s nearer presence, we know as we are known. But just now it’s my answer, and the answer I will try to take with me through Lent. I think…one could do worse.

Dust and ashes?

Ash Wednesday 2009
Yearly I am struck by the irony – which I am sure has not escaped you either – that on the only day of the year on which our Christian observance shows – when we go out into the streets with a large sooty smudge on our foreheads and trickling down our noses – we have the Gospel passage in which Jesus tells us most insistently and most severely that our observance should not show. I know there are ostentatious people around today, and I suppose there are even people who are ostentatious about their Christianity. There are indeed those who are pushy about their moral stance, and you do get the odd noisy procession or celebration, but on the whole we – especially we Anglicans – prefer to hide in our pews and keep a stony face, and sing and respond as unobtrusively as possible. We like to give our contributions to the collection in those little envelopes so that no-one can see what we are giving; I have derived a certain amount of innocent amusement from watching the various methods of discreet giving. There is the careless toss: the coin (this does not work with notes) flies rapidly from the fingers and disappears quickly among its fellows. There is the protective crouch: the hand, containing the donation, descends into the collection basket and crouches, crablike, over its contents as they release the offering into the heap. There is the nervous stab: in which the thumb and forefinger insert the coin violently, as into a slot machine, into the contents of the basket, burying forcefully. This too, is dicey with notes, except in an unusually generous congregation. And then there is the furtive plonk, in which the donor glances almost fearfully at almost any point in the church, thus distracting attention from the donation, which is placed rapidly down as if both money and basket were red hot. Sometimes I feel I should like to see some shameless person hold up a £50 note, raise a horn to their lips, play a quick fanfare and place the note reverently (on its own little silver salver) upon the heap of fifty pees and pound coins.

We need a touch of ostentation, a touch of shamelessness, a touch of chutzpah, in this area, to counterbalance the vast weight of it elsewhere. I am not just talking about the collection; in fact, I am not really talking about the collection at all. I have spoken before about the absurdity of attempting to show one’s own humility and devotion to holy poverty by denying glory and richness to the house of God. I would like to see, among so many people who, by their actions as well as by their words, declare ostentatiously “I matter”, a few who will equally ostentatiously declare “God matters”.

God matters, God’s church matters, God’s servants matter. Of course I matter; but that is, frankly, only because I matter to God, because in some way I am part of God’s glory. “The glory of God is a living human being”. Of course it matters that I become a complete and actualised human being, and fully myself; but it only matters because I am part of God’s creation, a unique part (as are all the other parts) and the perfection of God’s creation and God’s plan for his creatures matter. And, incidentally, nothing else does.

I acknowledge that it is hard to tell the difference, sometimes, between a person who is showing himself off and a person who is showing God off. It is difficult sometimes even to tell the difference within oneself. But, firstly, the difficulty in distinguishing does not mean that there is no distinction, or that nobody in fact shows off God; and secondly it is not necessary, as it is most likely not possible, to have completely pure motives. I think that if I make it clear that God matters, that God matters primarily and uniquely, it is a small price to pay that I am drawing attention to myself. I do not mind if I am criticised for standing in a pulpit and holding forth; just as I did not mind, in my hermit days, if I was criticised for wearing a monastic habit, for presenting myself as “holy”. Nobody criticises a police officer for drawing attention to herself and presenting herself as “virtuous, law-abiding and courageous” or a doctor for presenting himself as “intelligent, hard-working and caring”. How you perceive a doctor, a police officer, a nun or a preacher, and whether or not you feel resentment or jealousy, is your baggage and not mine. I am not presenting myself as a professional – much less a successful – seeker of God; I am simply saying that God is worth seeking.

I am sorry if all you can see is a woman standing in a pulpit and holding forth with her own opinions. What I want you to see is the overwhelming importance of God. I acknowledge that I am a sinner and that my motives are mixed; but I am doing, from that point of view, the best that I can. I am acting out, in a manner approved by the church, my conviction that God is what matters. On Ash Wednesday we act out, in the manner approved by the church, the fact that we are sinners, yes, but above all that God made us out of the dust of the earth and that we would not exist at all were it not for God; that we have no existence apart from God and independent of God, nor would we want to. In addition, by marking in this way the beginning of our forty days of penance we proclaim that Christ became human for us, was tempted in the desert for forty days, gave us the new law, led us out of slavery, and lay forty hours in the tomb. None of that, surely, should make us seem to be glorying in ourselves? We may, I should have thought glory in the Cross of Christ without being accused of self-ostentation.

People forget – and the Pharisees criticised by Jesus forgot – that if we do penance it is for a reason and that reason is that we are sinners and belong to a sinful race. It does not show that we are holy it just shows that our sins are sufficiently flagrant to have come to our notice. Religious observance is so rare nowadays that people tend to think that simply by taking part in it we are presenting ourselves as somehow superior beings. It reminds me of the frequent reaction when I entered the monastery and, more so, when I became a hermit. I was widely accused of thinking I was holier and better than everyone else. What a strange idea. On the contrary. In the Eastern tradition it is assumed that one becomes a monk in order to repent of one’s sins, and a hermit because one’s sins are such that they need more intensive repentance and reparation. The hermit who goes into solitude because he thinks he’s holy won’t last unless he undergoes a major change of heart: there are a few amusing stories to that effect in the Lives of the Desert Fathers.

So please don’t be intimidated by those who think you are showing your holiness off together with the sooty smudge on your forehead. Remember that you are approaching as near as we ever do nowadays to covering yourself in sackcloth and ashes, and that you are doing penance for your sins. We are all dust, and unto dust we shall return; the only difference between those with a smudge and those without is that we know it, and know that God will raise up that dust on the last day.

By all means keep your exceptional penances under wraps; we are asked to do that, and that was what Jesus was getting at; the observances he mentions were optional ones, which should have been done in secret. But not the observances laid down by the church – let people see our faithfulness, such as it is; it is not ours, but that of the church.

But there’s one thing that Jesus recommends which we should keep to scrupulously. I’m not suggesting that we should all dance out of church today singing the forbidden A-word. But don’t forget that we are saved, that our repentance and penance, through the sufferings and merits of Jesus himself, are all fruitful, for ourselves and for the whole world; and let us look forward with all spiritual longing, as St Benedict says, to the holy feast of Easter.

Capis unum captus ab uno

“Jesus Christ, whom having not seen ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.”

I have known people of whom this is transparently true. My father had, shall we say, an ambivalent attitude towards the Church. He did not like being limited, being constrained, being dictated to (oh yes, I’m his daughter!). He would have found life very much easier had he been without religion. He tried. He tried hard. He didn’t set foot in a church for twenty years. He called himself an atheist, while writing passionate poetry to, and about, Christ and his apostles. He was finally forced back into the Church when, as he said, “they tried to take the beauty away”; and he fought with his characteristic mix of ferocity and gentleness for the rest of his life for the return of that beauty.
Well, not everyone has the same opinion about the effects of the Second Vatican Council and the new rite of the Roman Mass. A reasonable comparison for us might be the difference between the Book of Common Prayer and the Alternative Service Book. The latter is more easily “understanded of the people”, undoubtedly; more accessible, maybe; but, I think, less beautiful. And for many people like my father, people who are captivated by the beauty of Christ, totally unsatisfying. One of the last things he said to me was “I would have really liked to be an atheist. But…I love Christ too much”.

St Bruno, the founder of the Carthusian order, was another person like that. His epitaph, which suits him down to the ground, is almost untranslatable. For the Latinists among you (I am sure there are some) it is: Sic Pater o Bruno, capis Unum captus ab Uno. The nearest I can (clumsily) get to it is: “At last, O Father Bruno, you possess the One by whom you were possessed”.
St Paul too. He was totally possessed by Christ, possessed in both senses. He was entirely Christ’s own, which does not mean all his faults and weaknesses were wiped out, as he knew only too well. But in the other sense too: I doubt if he ever thought of anything else but bringing people to Christ, because he knew that that was the only thing that mattered. He was captivated; he was – there is really no other way of putting it – in love. And it was love at first sight, life-changing and permanent. Love unto death.

How about you? Now I am not trying to make you feel guilty, in the old-fashioned way – “If you REALLY loved God, if you REALLY had faith, if you REALLY prayed…” We’ve all been damaged to some extent by that one. But the feeling of these things is a gift, and to some extent either you have it or you have not, rather as you are either musical or you are not. I’m just wondering. What is it that keeps you coming to church, or that brought you in here today?
I suggest that, unless it is sheer habit, you too are motivated by the love of God, even if you are not as acutely aware of it as St Bruno or St Paul – or my father.
I think I see some of you muttering, “Well, convince me. Convince me that I love God.”

We need to look for a moment at what the word “love” means. People who have come through difficult times in a marriage, to find that the bond is stronger than ever, or parents who have continued to love a child who has fallen into bad company, perhaps into addiction or crime, have in my opinion, a good notion of what love is. Love is the thing that is still there when you no longer feel love. Love is the thing that keeps you trusting when your reason tells you there is nothing left and you might just as well cut your losses and run. Love of God, for most of us, is what keeps us defining ourselves as Christians and keeps us coming to church when it is patently obvious that there is no God. I think it is what keeps those Christian writers who appear no longer to believe anything that is recognisably Christian indefatigably continuing to define themselves as Christians. They would prefer to be atheists…but they love Christ too much. Love, real love, is the thing that you don’t feel, and yet you act upon.
It’s a bit like courage, really. Acting bravely when you are not afraid is not courage. Courage is, in the hackneyed but useful phrase, feeling the fear and doing it anyway.
We are told that “there is no room for fear in love. We love because God loved us first.” Being what we are, even that can make us feel guilty and doubtful. Do I really love God if I am still afraid – of so many things, including my meeting with him after my death? Yes, you do. It is only perfect love that casts out all fear, and I don’t know anyone who has got there. All fear is cast out when we love as we are loved, and that will not happen until we know as we are known. To misquote, we love now as in a mirror, dimly; but then face to face.
Yes, of course, sometimes we do feel love of God, or fervour, and we do, to our own surprise, sometimes find ourselves praying spontaneously, or really meaning it when we say we are Christians. But, as I said, these things are gifts. They are not, for most of us, the normal state, and they are not the bread and butter of our life with God. God is spirit, and for flesh to love spirit - which is what is happening when we feel these things – it requires a special dispensation, a small miracle, if you like. Miracles do happen – oh yes, they do – but they are not the basis of everyday life for most of us. Loving in spirit and in truth is the real thing, the everyday thing, which for most of us will simply keep us coming to church, attempting to keep the commandments, and being, as far as we can, good and faithful servants. Some of us - we don’t know who until it happens - will one day realise, perhaps with incredulity, that when we are called to make a stand, perhaps even give our life, for God, we are ready for it. Reluctant maybe, terrified perhaps, but our love, whatever that unfelt thing is, carries us through.
There’s a splendid prayer in the prayer corner over there, written – or prayed – by Harry Williams. It may shock some of you and I’m sorry if it does, because in my opinion it is a nearly perfect expression of selfless love of God. He sits before God, completely honest, completely human, completely transparent and guileless, and completely loving, and prays thus:
O God, I am hellishly angry; I think so and so is a swine; I am tortured by worry about this or that; I am pretty certain that I have missed my chances in life; this or that has left me feeling terribly depressed. But nonetheless, here I am like this, feeling both bloody and bloody minded, and I am going to stay here for ten minutes. You are unlikely to give me anything, I know that. But I am going to stay here for ten minutes nonetheless.

If you really want to exercise and prove your love of God, go and do likewise. And may the joy unspeakable and full of glory of which St Peter speaks be yours now and always.