Category: Sermons

On 4th April this year at Westminster Abbey we held a day conference and a special service to mark the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. on 4th April 1968. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, of which he became the figurehead, was seeking to right a wrong in America where black people were segregated from white. The spring of the movement for King, a Baptist pastor in Montgomery Alabama, was when Rosa Parks in 1955 refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. The rest of her story is American history…her arrest and trial, a 381-day Montgomery bus boycott, and, finally, the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1956 that segregation on transportation was unconstitutional.

In 1963, Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC gave his most famous speech: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”

People in America and beyond were inspired by King’s dream. In 1964, he became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Laws were changed in his country. Martin Luther King Day was established as a national holiday in the United States in 1986. His influence is still honoured. The US Embassy supported the Westminster Abbey conference and service to commemorate the 40th anniversary of his assassination.

150 people attended the conference, young and old, black and white, Christian, Jew and Muslim. 900 people came to the special service in the Abbey itself. Our purpose was to pay attention to the dream which Martin Luther King had of a United States in which black and white could live together in equality, justice and harmony. We wanted to apply his vision to our day and country, where, although the law forbids segregation and discrimination, divisions between black and white, Christian and Muslim, appear deep and damaging. To build an inclusive, harmonious and peaceful society here and throughout the world is one of the greatest challenges we face as a civilisation.

The life and death of Martin Luther King made a difference. No doubt many of his friends and associates supposed that his death would mark the end of his dream, and that what he had proclaimed would now be ignored. The friends of Jesus must have had much the same thought. His death must have seemed like the end of all their hopes. Some of them terrified remained locked in a place of safety not knowing where to turn.

That is where history would have left them, had it not been for the experiences of Simon Peter, Mary Magdalen, the other apostles and other disciples and ultimately of many more, which led them to believe that Jesus who had been dead was alive and that his love was still powerful. Nothing less than the resurrection of Jesus can explain how these demoralised and terrified disciples, afraid for their lives, were transformed into people who could go out and proclaim to all that would listen the fact that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Now they no longer feared for their lives, indeed were willing to give their lives for the truth they were proclaiming. Many of them gave their lives.

Jesus came to bring life, to free people from the darkness of sin and death and to enable us to live together in love, joy and peace. That is why Martin Luther King’s vision of a world in which all are equally valued and all can live in harmony is a truly Christian vision. The task of establishing justice and peace cannot be achieved by political or social activism alone.

Jesus could not achieve his vision without being prepared to give up his life. As he said of himself, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” His death was the gateway to life not only for himself, but for all who trust him. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Martin Luther King’s death might have been a key factor in allowing his vision to be caught by people who otherwise would never have seen. As they said of Jesus, “He saved others; himself he could not save.”

This evening’s readings hold out a vision of a world transformed, completed and perfected by God. The first lesson comes from the 6th century BC when God’s people of the kingdom of Judah have been in exile in Babylon for 50 years but are now allowed by Cyrus King of Persia to return to the holy land. They begin to rebuild the ruined Temple in Jerusalem. Zerubbabel who is amongst the first returning exiles begins the task but is almost overwhelmed by the demand. The prophet Zechariah promises that the work does not in the end depend on human effort and human strength but on God’s will. “The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also complete it. Then you will know that the Lord of hosts has sent me to you.” The Apocalypse or Revelation, the last book of the bible, completes the vision of a world transformed, completed and perfected by God. “I saw a new heaven and a new earth… And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”

The task of building a humane and just society, a world order in which all live together in peace and harmony, in which none is preferred and none disadvantaged on the grounds of the colour of their skin or accidents of birth, a task to which many politicians and social activists have set their hands in the 19th and 20th centuries, seems from the perspective of the early 21st century impossible of achievement. There seems no basis for human optimism, but, based on the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and in the assurance that the great work of completing and perfecting the creation, in a new heaven and a new earth, is God’s work and he will perform it, there remain solid grounds for Christian hope. The work of Christians is to collaborate with God in achieving his ultimate goal: that all should live in unity with him and thus with each other in a world transformed.

“I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

Very Rev’d Dr. John Hall, Dean of Westminster Abbey
20th April 2008

What will be my last words here on earth? What will be yours? Lying in hospital or at home – surrounded I hope by a group of our closest family and friends – I wonder what we will want to communicate in those crucial, dying moments.

Over past years famous last words have been collected and treasured. They range from the funny – Oscar Wilde’s ‘Either that wallpaper goes or I do’ to the tragic – Princess Diana’s ‘My God – what’s happened?’ They move from the romantic, Napoleon’s last word ‘Josephine’ to the mundane: Humphrey Bogart’s ‘I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis!’

They encompass the deluded – the Roman Emperor Vespasian’s ‘Oh no: I think I’m turning into a god!’ and the genuinely faithful: the French King Charles 5th’s ‘Ay, Jesus’. They include the plain unfortunate: General Sir John Sedgewick’s ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant from that dist…’, and the visionary – Thomas Eddison’s ‘It is very beautiful over there’.

And in the final instalment of this series on the Seven Words from the Cross we come to Jesus’ last words – at least the last words before his glorious resurrection: words based on a verse from the Psalms – ‘Father into thy hands I commend my Spirit’.

There had been a time, just an hour or so before, when Jesus had not been able to utter the word ‘Father’: when the only Psalm he could quote from was one of the deepest abandonment: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Yet now that hour was past. Jesus had paid the full price for the sin of humanity. He had been declared guilty so that we could be pronounced innocent; alienated from God so that we could be reconciled to God. The great curtain in the Temple that divided ordinary worshippers from God’s presence had been ripped in two from top to bottom; the clouds had parted; and once again Jesus could pray,

‘Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit’.

Jesus had passed through many hands over the previous twenty-four hours. Judas had handed him over to the chief priests and the elders; the chief priests and elders had duly handed him over to Pilate. Pilate had washed his hands, before sending Jesus to be manhandled by his guards who’d mocked and beaten him, blindfolded him and taunted ‘Who hit you that time?’

Others had used their hands to weave a crown of thorns and thrust it onto Jesus’ head; still others to take up hammer and nails, to do the dirty work of the public executioner before lifting up the cross, then throwing dice for Jesus’ clothing. ‘The son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners’, Jesus had said at the end of the vigil in the garden of Gethsemane, and from that moment on his experience was of hands that whipped and stripped and nailed and impaled – treacherous hands, guilty hands, bullying hands, murderous hands. And what a relief after all that for Jesus to pray:

‘Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit’.

To the outsider it seemed that Jesus had lost control of the situation: that from the moment he was seized in the Garden of Gethsemane he was simply a victim of his circumstances, powerless to respond. But that was not the reality. As Jesus himself put it, ‘the reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life, only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord’. Despite all appearances, the spirit had not been ripped from Jesus’ body: no, it was deliberately, carefully placed by Jesus himself into the loving hands of God:

‘Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit’.

And Jesus’ dying words, of course, could be taken as a model for all Christian believers, an expression of the deepest trust and security, and definitely more profound than ‘Either that wallpaper goes or I do!’ But commending our spirit to the Father – placing our lives in his hands – is not simply for the dying: it is also for the living.

Jesus’ words could be taken on our lips before we go to sleep: in the ancient office of compline, members of monastic communities pray every night, ‘Into your hands I commend my spirit; you will redeem me, O Lord God of truth’. Yet commending our spirit to the Father – placing our lives in his hands – is not simply for the sleeping: it is also for the waking.

The conscious decision to live for God, to follow him, to seek his direction, to acknowledge that He knows best is, of course, a distinctly counter-cultural way to behave. While we willingly place our bodies into the hands of fallible surgeons when we know that there’s something wrong, we are somehow far more reluctant to place our spirits, our very selves, into the hands of an infallible God. Yet God’s service is perfect freedom: living for him is life at its best. And anyone whose first miracle was to turn 120 gallons of water into rather good wine could hardly be described as a kill-joy!

A true story with which to finish: the great 19th century acrobat Blondin had chosen, for one of his stunts, to stretch an 1100 metre tightrope over the Niagara Falls, and to walk across it. ‘Do you believe I can do it?’ he shouted out to the assembled crowd. ‘Yes, Blondin’, they shouted back, ‘you can do anything’; and he duly walked across.

A week later the crowd assembled for another feat. Blondin was going to walk across the Niagara Falls once more, but this time pushing a wheelbarrow in front of him. ‘Do you believe I can do it?’ he shouted again. ‘Yes, Blondin’, the crowd shouted back, ‘you can do anything’. ‘Do you believe I can do it with someone sitting in the wheelbarrow?’ Blondin persisted. ‘Yes Blondin, you can do anything!’ ‘So who’s going to sit in the wheelbarrow?’ – and there was a deathly hush!

Who’s going to sit in the wheelbarrow? Who is going to entrust their very lives into the hands of our all-knowing, all-loving Heavenly Father. It’s a prayer for our waking and a prayer for our sleeping, a prayer for our living and a prayer for our dying:

‘Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit’.

Rev’d Andrew Watson, Vicar of St Stephen’s Church, East Twickenham
2nd March 2008

The earliest evidence of sermons on the ‘seven words from the Cross’ is from the Jesuits, but this is not until the seventeenth century; and it was as late as the nineteenth century that the ‘seven words’ were used in the Anglican Church. Perhaps it was influenced by other sevenfold practices – the seven sacraments, the seven deadly sins, the seven canonical hours, the seven petitions in the Lord’s Prayer, and so on. For whatever reason, it is now a well-established custom at Easter time. There is just one problem in this practice: by bringing the ‘seven words’ into one composite liturgy, it is easy to forget that they are a contrived compilation, taken from all four Gospels.

Perhaps the deeper meaning of these cries from the cross is better understood when we take into account their context within each individual Gospel. Matthew and Mark, for example, are the only two Gospels to use the cry ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’, which is a quotation from the first verse of Psalm 22: we looked at this last week. Because this is the only cry that they use, the focus for Matthew and Mark is on Jesus’ complete ‘God-forsakenness’ at the hour of his death. Luke, by contrast, has three cries, all completely different: he believes that Jesus was not abandoned by God in his last hour, so instead Jesus’ final words are a quotation from Psalm 35: ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!’. And because Luke also sees Jesus as the man for others, he uses two other cries which show Jesus’ concern, firstly, for his enemies (‘Father, forgive them; for they know now what they do’) and secondly, for the penitent thief (‘Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise’).

John’s Gospel, like Luke’s, does not see Jesus as God-forsaken. John also uses three cries from the cross, but they are different again. Jesus’ first cry addresses the two he loved most dearly – his mother and his beloved disciple – as he commends them to care for each other after his death (‘..Behold your son… behold your mother..’). The other two cries highlight the two most important aspects of Jesus’ ministry – his humanity (‘I thirst’) and his sense of completing his God-given mission (‘It is finished’). These are poignantly brief – one word in each case in the Greek – but they reflect so concisely John’s understanding of both Jesus’ humanity and his divine calling as seen on the cross.

All four Gospels concur that Jesus died with the words of a Psalm on his lips. In part this was to show that Jesus, in his humanity, identified completely with the hopes and fears of those early psalmists. In part it was a way of demonstrating that Jesus was even greater than King David, whose name was associated with most of the psalms, by showing how Jesus’ sufferings could accomplish even more than those of the earliest ‘King of the Jews’. For Matthew and Mark, Psalm 22 was an ideal commentary on Jesus’ passion; for Luke, it was Psalm 35. However, for John, it was Psalm 69, which was our Old Testament reading tonight.

Matthew and Mark and Luke allude to Psalm 69. Each records how Jesus was offered wine to drink, mixed with myrrh, and each Gospel makes it clear that this was at the very beginning of Jesus’ crucifixion, and at that point Jesus refused to drink it, for he wanted to approach the hour of his death in full control of his senses. Their audience, who unlike us would know their psalms, would perceive the flashback to Psalm 69:21 –‘They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink’.

John engages much more with Psalm 69. ‘After this Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfil the scripture), “I thirst”. A bowl full of vinegar stood there; so they put a sponge full of the vinegar on hyssop and held it to his mouth.’ (John 19:28-29). John tells us that Jesus was offered vinegar to drink at the very end of his three hours on the cross and that then he readily accepted it. There is an irony here: the one whose first miracle in John’s Gospel was the turning of water into wine – not only good wine, but the best wine, as the host of the wedding of Cana discovered – has in his last moments to succumb to foul vinegar to pacify his thirst. But John takes the irony even further than this: the reference to hyssop would remind John’s Jewish audience of the way they took this herb with the Passover lamb, and here at this Passover is the one whom John the Baptist called the Lamb of God, the one who would take away the sins of the world (John 1:29), who is himself becoming the Lamb about to be slaughtered- at Passover time. Small wonder that when John uses the cry of ‘I thirst’ it is to show that Jesus is both speaking from scripture –sharing with us the ‘mess and muddle’ of life – and yet expanding its meaning by ‘fulfilling’ it once and for all.

Psalm 69 is an important psalm elsewhere in John’s Gospel. It is also used at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry, just after the wedding at Cana, when Jesus expels the money changers from the Temple. There we read ‘His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for thy house will consume me” ’ (Jn. 2:17): these words come from an earlier part of Psalm 69, when the psalmist complains ‘Zeal for thy house has consumed me, and the insults of those who insult Thee have fallen on me’ (v. 9). Again we may note the irony here: Jesus would indeed be (literally) consumed by his zeal for true worship of God his Father, for it drove him eventually to his death. So John uses Psalm 69 at the beginning and end of Jesus’ ministry: he does this to illustrate that the rejection of Jesus was no mere accident of history, but was something which had been spoken of in the words of Scripture and was now being fulfilled.
Psalm 69 is used a third time in John’s Gospel. When Jesus is trying to explain his forthcoming rejection to his disciples – just before his arrest and trial – he says to them ‘It is to fulfil the word that is written … “They hated me without a cause” ’. The quotation is deliberate: ‘More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause’ (Psalm 69:4). So three times over, Psalm 69 is used to show how, in the life of Jesus, the words of this Psalm are now being fulfilled.

So the cry ‘I thirst’ has layers of meaning. It is certainly intended to show us a very human Jesus who needs physical refreshment in his pain: John’s Gospel is full of insights into the humanity of Jesus, who sits ‘wearied’ at a well and asks a Samaritan woman for a drink (John 4:6-8), who asks questions (John 6:5 and 11:34), who weeps at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35) and who is troubled as he enters Jerusalem (John 12:27). But ‘I thirst’ is also intended to show us Jesus’ divine calling as well – and here this is mainly by reference to Psalm 69.

‘I thirst’. The motif of ‘thirst’ occurs several times in John’s Gospel. Just after the cleansing of the Temple is Jesus’ encounter with a Samaritan woman, and the theme of ‘thirst’ dominates the scene. Jesus, wearied and thirsty by Jacob’s well asks this unnamed woman twice for a drink, and twice she refuses – ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (John 4:9). So Jesus turns the question back on her – if she had known who it was who was asking her for drink, she would have asked him instead – and he would have given her living water. ‘Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become a spring of water welling up to eternal life’ – ‘Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw!’ (John 4:14-15). So from very early on in the Gospel, ‘thirst’ is not only about wanting water but about needing God. The same point is made after the feeding of the five thousand, when Jesus says ‘…he who believes in me shall never thirst’ (John 6:35). This miracle thus shows Jesus is able to offer not only physical food but spiritual nourishment as well. The point is made a third time: this is at the Feast of Tabernacles, as the water was being ritually carried, in a golden pitcher, from the Pool of Siloam up to the Temple. Jesus proclaims: ‘If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink!’ (Jn.7:37); ‘Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive’ (Jn. 7:38).
So ‘I thirst’ is certainly a cry from the human Jesus, emphasising his physical agony and hence his need for drink, but it also emphasises Jesus’ spiritual needs – for that ‘spring of water welling up to eternal life’. Yet again we perceive a dreadful irony in this: the one who earlier had offered that ‘living water’ for others now cries for refreshment himself. A verse from another psalm is implied here: ‘My soul thirsts for thee; my flesh faints for thee, as in a dry and weary land where no water is’ (Psalm 63:1)

So we have seen how the cry ‘I thirst!’ affords us a deeper understanding of Jesus. But does this cry afford us a deeper understanding of ourselves? The use of the psalms, which are after all the prayers of every man and every woman, would suggest so. And John’s Gospel is full of Jesus meeting individuals whose self-understanding completely changes as a result of their encounter with him: we see this in the woman at the well, Nicodemus, Mary and Martha and Lazarus, Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of Jesus, and Philip, Thomas, Peter, Nathaniel, and the unnamed disciple (?John himself?) whom Jesus loved. So this scene at the cross must surely be as much about us as it is about Jesus.

Mother Theresa of Calcutta offers us an extraordinary contemporary insight into the meaning of this cry for us. In every house of her order, the Missionaries of Charity, the words ‘I thirst’ are written alongside the images of the Crucifix. For Mother Theresa, these two words symbolised what she called ‘the thirst of Jesus for our love’. In her public ministry she used to speak of her work amongst the poor of Calcutta as ‘saturating the thirst of Jesus on the cross for his love of souls’. Mother Theresa gave these words a radical dimension. Instead of us looking at Jesus on the cross, and observing his suffering, both physical and spiritual, we find that Jesus is looking down at us: he is not the object of our gaze, but rather we are the object of his. The cry of ‘I thirst!’ was not only directed to God his Father but to us as well, so that we too may be drawn into this mystery of Jesus’ thirst for humanity. “Diyw/Å” – the Greek for “I thirst” . This was not just a cry from Jesus to God; it was a cry to us- to plead for our response to his love expressed on the cross. The question is, are we really prepared to drink from his cup of his suffering, too?

Dr. Susan Gillingham, Fellow and Tutor in Theology
17th February 2008

‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

It doesn’t need much imagining to capture something of the despair, of the agony, of the sheer sense of utter abandonment, of the deeply routed human fear of pain and death that is all caught up and embraced within those simple words we are to focus on this evening – ‘Eloi – my God‘.

Mel Gibson’s film, ‘The Passion of the Christ’ has had the important effect on those of us who managed to watch it of vividly and dramatically showing us just how complete was Jesus’s betrayal from friends and foes alike, how brutal and dehumanising was his torture and unjust trial of sorts, how agonising was the journey towards and then of cause onto the cross, how no pain in the world can compare to the pain of torture, the feeling of absolute abandonment and of cause slow suffocation hung up high on a cross.

When Jesus cries ‘My God’ it is a cry of utter desolation, of complete despair, of unbearable agony, it is the cry of a human at the lowest point a human can ever experience, it is the cry of Jesus whose life has been in perfect communion with God and yet on the cross facing slow death feeling utterly abandoned, totally forsaken by God.

May I ask you to hold onto that cry of anguish, those words of desolation and abandonment, in your mind for a while as we turn to some similar but yet very different words to Eloi – my God.

The other words I want to visit are from Mark Haddon’s book: ‘The curious incident of the dog in the night time.’ Many of you will have read this outstanding novel where the main character is 15 year old Christopher who suffers from autism. If you’ve not read it and would like to gain an incite into the condition of autism, far beyond what can be achieved by a medical text book, it is well worth a read, as well as being an excellent novel.

Christopher’s father is probably the second main character in the book and he is a man who has been pushed to his absolute limits. Christopher’s father has the immense unrelenting demands involved in looking after a severely autistic child.

Amongst the behavioural issues Christopher’s father is putting up with year after year would be Christopher refusing to talk for periods of up to five weeks, being unable to eat any food that is yellow or brown or any different foods which are touching each other, not being able to cope with vacuum cleaning being done as it results in furniture being moved and when furniture is not in the right place, Christopher lies on the floor and moans loudly or smashes things. This moaning and smashing he might do in all sorts of places and for all sorts of reasons. To add to his lot in life, Christopher’s mother has left for another man and home and now Christopher’s father has to cope with Christopher by himself.

After a particularly trying episode, Christopher’s father has reached the end of his tether, and this is where an echo of Jesus’ cry of abandonment ‘My god’ comes in: ‘God only knows’ he cries, ‘God only knows what I have had to put up with.’ Of cause what Christopher’s father is saying here is actually nobody knows how devastatingly hard it is to cope with Christopher by himself and not only does nobody know but nobody cares either.

So what does Jesus’ cry, a cry which comes from that place of fear and pain of isolation and abandonment, a cry of ‘My God’ have to say about Christopher’s fathers ’God only knows’ and what does that despair of no body knows and no body cares say about Jesus on the cross?

Well when Christopher’s father cries ‘God only knows‘, while he might think that he means nobody knows, actually he’s got it absolutely right, God does know and God does care.

God does know and God does care because the story of Jesus’ desolate, abandoned cry of ‘My God’ is the story of God’s overflowing love and care for each and every person, a story well presented in Stephen Cottrell, your bishop of Reading’s, book ‘I Thirst’ from which I draw. The story of cause starts at the beginning for right at the heart of our faith is the conviction that from the beginning of human existence, God has made humans free, free to accept and respond to his love and free to reject it as well.

The Old Testament, starting with Adam and Eve, and then all the way through the stories of the wandering and later settled Hebrew people, records God seeking to work with a chosen people to find a way to show what total love, total obedience and total freedom actually means for human kind. And yet, alongside the astonishing insights when their prophesises and wisdom strike at the heart of God, we read of time and time again God’s ways and God’s inclusive, unconditional love being rejected. The journey of the Hebrew people is an illustration of the journey of human kind and it shows that there seems to be no way that by ourselves we can receive and respond to God and be in true communion with him.

How does God respond to this condition of human kind? Does he in turn reject us and leave us to our own devises? Are those deepest fears of Christopher’s father that no one, absolutely no one knows or cares, are those fears the reality of our human condition? Does God fail to know us, who we are and what we are about? Well perhaps it is ‘Eloi’, our chosen word of Jesus on the cross selected for this evening which begins to give our faiths answer to those questions. Because of cause Christian belief sees human kinds rejection of God as the start not the end of the story. Jesus, whose name means ‘God saves’ is born and lives amongst us. He shares in our joys, he enters our pains, he takes on the vocation of the Hebrew people to be in perfect, life giving communion with God.

Jesus lives out God’s love for all and as he does, so to does that radical, inclusive love challenge and threaten. The world does not like this message and so the world puts the message to death, Jesus becomes the sacrifice for our sin, he takes on the cost of God’s love reaching out to us and God’s love being rejected by us and in doing so allows the power of God’s love to finally and completely break through into our lives. And as he hangs on the cross, alone and betrayed, broken and dying, in the place of complete and utter abandonment, he knows all there is to know about being human. He knows and he cares, deeply and completely, now and in all generations, for us and for Christopher’s Dad and for everyone. Jesus’ ‘My God’ is the most complete answer to all our cries of ‘god only knows’ because in Jesus’ ‘My God’ we know that God withholds nothing in his outpouring of life and love into our lives, we are completely known and we are completely loved.

The death of Jesus was of cause an event which took place 2000 years ago and so we do need to ask how does Jesus’ solidarity and identification with the human condition then have any bearing on some of the brokenness and pain in the world today? Well it is our Trinitarian faith, our faith of one God known in three ways that helps here. Not only do we want to say Jesus is Godlike, if we have a Trinitarian faith we also need to say God is Christlike. The Jesus event, while a event in a historic context is far more than only a historic event as it reveals the ongoing eternal nature of God. Jesus offering all that he is in love, fully identifying with us and knowing us reveals a God who continuously offers himself to us in love, identifies with us and knows us.

We may or may not see a connection between Christopher’s fathers ‘God only knows’ and Jesus’ ‘My god.’ We may or may not ask ‘well so what? – the fact that God does know and God does care doesn’t seem to make much difference, in fact Jesus loving and caring ended in his despair and death .’ And of cause we need to say ‘yes it did – Jesus was rejected and Jesus died.’ But we also want to say that that is not the end of the story. God’s capacity to love and fill us with new life lay dormant for three days in the corpse of an executed man and then on the third day God raises Jesus to life. Perfect love, God’s love cannot be defeated, nothing stops it , not rejection, not despair, not sceptism, not even death itself.

‘God only knows what I have to put up with’ cries Christopher’s father. Thank God that Jesus’ words on the cross, Jesus’ cry of ‘eloi – My God’ tells us a story that God does know and that God does care and that God offers transformation and new life and nothing, nothing at all will ever ever overcome that.

Amen

Rev’d John Whittaker, Vicar of Holy Trinity, Barrow upon Soar and St. Mary’s, Walton-le-Wolds
10th February 2008

The words which Jesus speaks from the Cross are words of supreme authority, because the one who speaks them is the Son of God. Even as He dies the shameful death of a criminal, He speaks as the true Word: This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he … called God his own Father, making Himself equal with God. And the words which Jesus speaks to the penitent thief are prefaced from his own mouth with an asseveration of their significance and which S. Luke records only six times in his Gospel, and nowhere else addresses to an individual: Truly, I say to you … The thief in the mental and physical agony of a cruel and public death turns to Jesus and asks of him remember me, when you come into your kingdom; with no power to alter his fate or know his destiny, he places himself with faith into the mercy of Jesus, in the face of what is entirely fearful and unknown. And as S. Ambrose comments on this passage: More abundant is the favour shown than the request made. For Jesus reveals to him, and so to us, the gracious reward of his faith: today you will be with me in Paradise.

Human beings do not know their own fate: even when the most spiritual of philosophies charges the world with intimations of immortality, we cannot discover of our own volition where our ultimate happiness lies, where beatitude is to be found. Christian theology makes this clear in the hierarchy by which it arranges the virtues which describe authentically human living: Aristotle’s cardinal virtues of justice and temperance, fortitude and prudence, take us as far as we can go with our own resources, which even the philosopher himself says are most valuable only insofar as they contribute to the contemplation of God. But what was unknown to the virtuous pagans is declared with authority by Jesus from the dereliction of the Cross: our true end is to be with Him in Paradise, a beatitude which we receive only through our relationship with Him, one which is characterized by the theological virtues of faith, hope and love.

Christians receive in Baptism the grace to know and enjoy the true end of human living, eternal life in the loving presence of God. The office for Holy Baptism in the Prayer Book sets out this teaching in this prayer for the candidate:

wash him and sanctify him with the Holy Ghost; that he, being delivered from thy wrath, may be received into the ark of Christ’s Church; and being stedfast in faith, joyful through hope, and rooted in charity, may so pass the waves of this troublesome world, that finally he may come to the land of everlasting life, there to reign with thee world without end;

See how carefully this prayer sets out the truth about what we are made for, the truth which Jesus teaches when he speaks from the Cross to the thief: through faith, hope and love, the virtues which S. Paul teaches us are the marks of Christian living, we pass through the trials of this life to our true homeland, where with Him we are to reign for ever – Today, you will be with me in paradise.

So Jesus speaks with divine authority when in his answer to the dying thief He discloses the truth about what it is to be human, the restoration to divine life which is brought about through faith in his death and resurrection. But he speaks not only with authority, but also with knowledge. S. Paul writes to the Galatians that he lives by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. (Gal 2.20). Nowhere in the New Testament is Jesus spoken of as knowing the Father by faith, as even the greatest among the holy men and women of Israel knew Him. Jesus knows the Father because He has seen the Father (Jn 6.46): He knows Him as God with a perfect comprehension; He knows Him in his human nature, by virtue of His perfect union with the divine Word in the mystery of the incarnation. He therefore does not lack in the course of his earthly ministry that perfect and unclouded vision of the Father which is to be enjoyed by all the redeemed in heaven, and having that vision from the first moment of his conception he has always present to Him those for whom he died. Jesus speaks from the Cross to the thief out of a full and profound knowledge: knowledge of the gravity of sin which pains his soul with an anguish more painful than the physical suffering of his body, knowledge of every individual human being for whom He willingly offers Himself without stint for the sake of our salvation, knowledge which has its seat in His continuous contemplation of the Father’s face.

But this vision of God, this seeing of the Father, is not confined to the perfect sinless humanity of the Son: through the act of faith, we are graciously made participants in the same surpassing happiness. S. Paul writes to the Corinthians: If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied. This is not to dismiss the life we have now as an incidental prelude to what is to come, or to suggest as some of the earliest critics of Christianity supposed that it is impossible for the Christian to be a really committed citizen of the earthly city when the true Christian homeland is the life of heaven. It means that by his death and resurrection, Jesus Christ the Son of God has not only reversed for us the terrible and inevitable destruction of death, in the face of which we can only call out with the thief, Remember me when you come into your kingdom; He has raised our human nature and glorified it, so that when we receive our lives back from Him in the gracious gift of the Resurrection life, we receive our ultimate happiness and fulfilment in the vision of God face-to-face, children of God who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

However, at this time we remain pilgrims on the way, pilgrims who at our Baptism promised to renounce the world, the flesh and the devil and to live stedfast in faith, joyful through hope and rooted in charity. The word of Jesus from the Cross to the dying penitent thief is the word which He speaks to all suffering sinners, who despairing of their own capacities in the face of the universal fate of death turn to Him in faith for the answer to the meaning of human life. And the answer which He gives is given out of the depth of his own compassionate suffering, his own willing embrace of the catastrophe of death in order that we might live with His life. He speaks with authority, because He is the Word of the Father; He speaks with knowledge, because He sees us in the face of the Father; He speaks with compassion, because in the abandonment of the Cross He knows the violent sundering of body and spirit, the shipwreck of purely human aspiration and ambition, which is the consequence of human sin. S. Paul writes to the Galatians: I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. May we live with the life of Christ, sustained and formed by the divine gift of faith, hope and love infused into our souls at our Baptism, until at last we come to reign with Him on high, when faith shall pass into vision, hope into possession and love transform us in the words of S. Peter into partakers of the divine nature itself.

Rev’d Canon Dr. Robin Ward, Principal of St Stephen’s House
27th January 2008

On the front cover of the Journal ‘Spirituality and Health’ a while back was picture of three US ex-servicemen standing in front of the Vietnam memorial in Washington DC. One asks, ‘Have you forgiven those who held you prisoner of war?’ ‘ I will never forgive them,’ replies the other. Third then comments, ‘Then it seems they still have you in prison, don’t they?’

Forgiveness has been a topic of conversation high on the world’s agenda over recent years. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa focused on forgiveness. Indeed, the chair of the Commission, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, subsequently reflected on his experiences in a book entitled, There is no Future without Forgiveness. In Rwanda after the genocidal dispute between Hutus and Tutsis, the question of forgiveness and reconciliation has been pursued carefully. It has been high on the agenda in Northern Ireland. It will need to figure in Israel and Palestine. How will it figure in Kenya? It has even been a growth area in the academic world. In the United States, there is an International Forgiveness Institute attached the University of Wisconsin and the John Templeton Foundation, has with others, started a multimillion dollar campaign for Forgiveness Research.

Forgiveness is not just an international issue, concerned with those ‘out there’ – forgiveness affects us personally. When we are wronged, we are called upon to forgive. There are times when we need to be forgiven. Perhaps the hardest of all is when we need to forgive ourselves and when we need to accept, deep down, that we are forgiven by God. But they are all related. If we cannot believe that we are forgiven, we will find it hard to forgive others and to be enthusiastic about forgiveness further away.

Forgiveness lies at the heart of the Christian faith: it is something distinctively Christian. Christianity does not have monopoly on it, but it has made forgiveness a central part of its self understanding. Forgiveness is exemplified in the New Testament.
There are hints and examples of God’s forgiveness in Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament. In Isaiah when God promises to restore the people Israel after they had turned against him. Through the prophet, God speaks in a radical way, ’Do not remember the former things, but consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?……. I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.’ (43.18-19,25).

But forgiveness gains its greatest expression in the NT. Peter’s question of Jesus is how many times must he forgive somebody who sins against him. How often should he forgive– seven times? Not seven, but seventy-seven times, he is told!(Mt.18.21) The story of the ‘All-forgiving father’ in St. Luke (also known, quite misleadingly as the Prodigal son) tells the story of a son who is forgiven by his father even before his father hears his words of repentance. Once the father sees him approaching, he begins to arrange the welcome home party (Lk.15). At the Crucifixion, even as the nails were being driven in, Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ This is the ultimate example of forgiveness when reconciliation was brought about between humanity and God. What is significant here is that the guilt and condemnation of those responsible is not a precondition for forgiveness. Jesus didn’t ask for the repentance of those nailing him to the cross before uttering those words of forgiveness. Forgiveness means laying aside the wrong and being willing to move forward. This is not the same as forgetting in a repressing kind of way, forgetting because it was too traumatic to remember, but rather it was an act of making sure that one was not controlled or imprisoned by it.

Having said that, although the repentance of the one who has committed the offence is not a precondition to forgiveness, it can help the one who was wronged. There are times when the memory of the offence must be kept alive for a while, as long as it is needed for repentance and transformation to occur, but then it must be allowed to die so that a new relationship can be formed. The memory of any offence, sustained beyond repentance, clouds both the memory of past love and the vision of future reconciliation. If I refuse to forgive, it damages me as much as the one I will not offer my forgiveness. Forgiveness means laying aside the offence or sin in such a way as to make sure its memory does not affect my relationship with the one who has committed it – effectively to forget it.
It is important to distinguish between forgiveness and mercy. The two are often use synonymously, but there is a difference. If forgiveness is distinctive of the NT, mercy is distinctive of the Hebrew Scriptures, the OT. Behind mercy is an understanding that there is a God of justice who recognises the offence which should be punished, however, he does not punish but has mercy. Mercy says, ‘You have committed an offence and I will let you off this time, but just watch out as I will keep your offence in the back of my mind!’ However, God’s mercy in Christ becomes forgiveness. Forgiveness says, ‘ I will not allow the memory of your offence to control me or my love for you: I will lay aside your offence as I want a new relationship with you.’ Forgiveness is about new relationships and new beginnings. Forgiveness breaks the spiral and enables us to start afresh. If we seek reconciliation, mercy will not do – forgiveness is the only possibility.

‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ Forgiveness, real forgiveness (not mercy) can be the hardest gift to offer – and the hardest gift to receive. Bound up with receiving, and offering it, is an understanding of love.

I began with a conversation between 3 ex-servicemen in Washington DC where failure to forgive was compared to being locked in a prison. In the light of the fact that next Sunday is Holocaust Memorial Day, I conclude with a prayer which comes from the concentration camp at Ravensbruck where 92,000 women and children died. This prayer, which is both glorious and challenging, offered by a nameless woman and placed beside the dead body of a child, helps us understand the miracle that we celebrate over Good Friday and Easter and gets to the heart of forgiveness:

O Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will, but also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted on us; remember the fruits we have bought, thanks to this suffering – our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all this, and when they come to the judgement let all the fruits that we have borne be their forgiveness.

Rt. Rev’d Brian Castle, Bishop of Tonbridge
20th January 2008

I will never forget the moment I first encountered the art of Giovanni Bellini. We were on honeymoon, in fact, in Venice and were wandering around the church of Sancta Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in a tourist-like way until we left the main body of the church and entered a side chapel where our eyes were arrested by the image of a Madonna and child on the triptych altarpiece. We just couldn’t work out for ages what was real and what was art, as the babe standing on Mary’s lap seemed to be in an alcove all of their own. It’s the nature of art, and for me particularly the art of Bellini, to make us stop and see things differently, to surprise us with perspectives we had never considered before, to take us beyond our normal world of reference.

I am sure that over the Christmas season you have seen a great deal of art, whether it has been the briefest glance as you hurry on to see who has sent you this card or looked at as it adorns a mantle piece or wall. In amongst them no doubt there are a fair number of Madonna’s and child’s, though I suspect that no one will have received a Bellini, especially his Madonna of the Meadows which hangs in the National Gallery, for it is unlike any other Madonna and child images I know. Mary dominates the picture but instead of presenting the child Jesus to us, the fingertips of her hands are just touching as if in tentative prayer and she is looking down at a sleeping baby. But this is not the sleep of the living but rather the peace of the dead, for the composition of the piece is more reminiscent of a Pieta, than a cradled child. In this picture, a copy of which I have left at the back of the Chapel for you to look at, Bellini surprises us in the midst of a Christmas scene to remind us of that moment when Mary holds her dead son. From feelings of joy and hope and life and peace, all of which we associate with a sleeping child, suddenly the feelings of horror and sadness and grief and pain at the sight of a dead baby come upon us. And yet if you continue to look more closely at this picture you notice that whilst the land is all barren and stoney, around Mary and the child the grass is lush and full of life. For this picture reveals that the birth of Jesus, his incarnation into the joys and sorrows of this human life, are part of the redemptive process, which culminates with his death on the cross and resurrection into new life.

By becoming a child like us, by entering into our human experience, God alters it and sanctifies it by his presence. What a wonderful thought, is that surely not something to celebrate, that through the Incarnation, in the images of Madonna and childs, stories of angels and wise men, we are reminded that our lives have become holy. When we write our essays, play football, change a nappy, give a lecture, drive the children to school as well as attend Chapel, we are holy. Not because we in ourselves are good enough to be holy but because God has taken on our human lives and sanctified them. I wonder what the world or even this College would be like if we realised the Christmas message and understood ourselves and each other as holy people. Christ’s Incarnation makes us holy but as we know that alone does not make us whole. Too well we know the damaging and distorting nature of sin. It is to the Passion that we must look to find our wholeness and it is to the Passion that our sermon series will take us this term.

One of my most memorable and poignant experiences of my time as a verger at St Paul’s was on the eve of Good Friday. The Eucharist of the Last Supper was over and we had stripped the alters of the linen and silver, the choir , echoing the desertion of the disciples, had literally walked out of the stalls without ceremony and the few who had attended the Watch had gone home. For a moment the cathedral was in a sullen, abandoned silence, then suddenly without reverence or respect the work staff appeared on the church floor and all the lights glared into existence. Without ceremony and chatting about normal things, they began to erect the cross. I can still hear the way the cathedral resonated with the hammering of the nails as if the Passion was happening all over again and we were not in the fine square mile of London but outside the city walls at Golgotha.

It has often been this leap in imagination that the three hours devotion on Good Friday has required. To sit before an image of the cross between the hours of 12 and 3 just as Mary did and contemplate the mystery of Christ’s Passion through addresses on his last seven words. This term we are invited to imaginatively place ourselves before the cross, to enter into that act of devotion, not for 3 hours but for seven weeks, in order to contemplate the mystery of our redemption, to be surprised by different perspectives, to be educated by new understandings and to receive his love which brings us not only to holiness but also to wholeness. Amen.

The Chaplain
13th January 2008

There was a Victorian Bishop here in England who left a rather unusual request in his will. He had penned a short verse and he asked for it to be read to his clergy on his death. It ran:
Tell my priests when I am gone
O´er me to shed no tears.
For I shall be no deader then
Than they have been for years.

Well, it is true that we clergy are not always the new creation we are invited to be. I remember one priest in the London Diocese who said his motto in life was start each day with a smile – get it over with. No wonder Nietsche said that Christianity would be a lot more convincing if Christians actually looked redeemed!

We are fast approaching Advent, that season of the year when we asked to wake up, to stop sleepwalking through life and to live in the light of the things that matter and last. Advent is a season in the vocative, crying out to God to come and touch us for, by ourselves, we are as yet incomplete. We call out for the Christ who, Aslan-like, comes to de-frost humanity.

The reading from Matthew´s gospel tonight reveals a part of the de-frosting process, showing that for a human self to be most itself it is not to be selfish, that there is no smaller package in the world than a person who is all wrapped up in himself. Of course, there is always the danger that we can set about helping others as part of our own self-help therapy. CS Lewis once spoke of someone who knew who lived for others ”and you can tell the others” he said, ”by their hunted expression”. We are not called as Christians to serve people´s wants. We are called to serve their true needs.

The problem is that today we don´t always know the difference. Jeremiah´s God longs to be our God again so we can see but the truth is, as in former days, we are busy in the temples of all the other gods of the day. It is not always easy to recognise the power of these gods in our time. But let´s not fool ourselves. The gods are still with us. There are many of them and they have many shrines but here are just four particularly active at the moment.

The first is called Gloss, the goddess of beauty and surfaces – a fickle being, incarnated in paper and adverts, a god so big she makes us all feel small and ugly. We are drawn by her siren voice but her perfection is impossible even for those who anoint themselves with her many sensuous creams and labels. She is cunning too – she makes humans confuse their wants for their needs and this leads to many tears. She teaches that life is survival of the fittest. Fit for what she never reveals. She makes objects into people and people into objects so in her adverts you can never work out if the man is having an affair with the woman or with the car. Obese is the god of gathering, of acquiring, who is never satisified: happiness for him is having what you want not wanting what you have. And he always wants more even when bloated. Although people say he is seen on earth at the moment in the form of British children, in fact he is found in the hearts of parents and grandparents just as much over much of the world. He is related to that great god who makes us buy things we don´t need called Ikea (mainly worshipped on a Saturday). Together they magic us into spending money we don´t have on things we don´t want in order to impress people we don´t like.

Instantaneous is the goddess of now. She cannot wait. She must have fast cars, fast food, fast money, fast death. She is blind, never having the time to stop and see anything. She often gets into a mess too because she never has the patience to listen to anyone either. She beckons people to live full lives but strangely leaves them feeling empty. She is afraid of people meeting face to face in case they discover the joys of wasting time together, and so she invents screens and devices that trick us into thinking we are communicating but which actually add to our loneliness. She seduces with quick clarity and easy answers, and hates ambiguity, poetry, faith. And finally there is Punch, the god of violence and division. If hate can be escalated he´ll have a go – if they don´t agree with you, lash out. If they´re different, slap them down. If they´re not in the majority, don´t invite them. When in doubt, just punch them. Now obviously Punch is the creator of some computer games, street gangs, film directors and state leaders. Religious leaders are are often drawn to his clarifying power too. But also, Punch can be a subtle god and can hide in the consensus of the middle classes, and his punch can be made, not of a fist but of plausible, respectable, articulate words. Punch can be very charming as he drives around in his bandwagon. He can make you feel better. And he loves to play a little trick – he likes to make people yawn whenever the conversation turns to human rights and responsibilties, refugees, the poor, the environment, equality – in fact, anything that Christians believe are close to God´s heart. We need to resist Punch with every bit of energy we have.

These gods are alive and well and fracturing and splintering humanity. We need Advent to call us back to the one living God, source of life and love. We need Advent, not to draw us to an institutionalised Jesus who pleases everyone, or no-one, but to the Jesus who questions all our answers, gently but relentlessly questioning who we have become. We need Advent to tell us not to listen to all the stories that are being told to us by opinion columnists, the fashionable and the chique – and not to listen to the often damaging and unobjective stories we can begin to tell ourselves as a consequence, often beating ourselves up, shrinking into our low expectations. We need Adventto tell us instead to listen to the story that God is telling us about ourselves, of our uniqueness and wonder, of our loveableness and forgiveableness. God loves us exactly the way we are and God loves us so much he doesn´t want us to stay like this. We are not made to be consumers but citizens, citizens of the Kingdom of God, citizens whose spiritual life is not turned in on itself or hobby-like, advertising itself somewhere between gardening and the obituaries in the Times, but whose perception is our need of God and the need of those hungry, imprisoned, in a strange land.

God turns existence into life, and life into a pilgrimage. And what he says to us he says to everyone, making us non-negotiable in our calling to love our God and our neighbour and so to maintain the dignity of difference and erase the scandal of indifference, practicing what we pray for. God deserves a people who celebrate him by capacious souls, by a relentless capacity for friendships, and by a love that is frankly a bit reckless. It means opening doors, in ourselves and others, to see how God might strangely walk in.

I end with words by the Austrian poet Erich Fried:
It is nonsense, says reason
It is what it is says love.
It is unhappiness says reflection
It is nothing but pain says fear
It is hopeless says insight
It is what it is says love
It is ridiculous says pride
It is frivilous says caution
It is impossible says experience
It is what it is says love.

Ven. Mark Oakley, Archdeacon of Germany and Northern Europe
18th November 2007

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you’d planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

Today if Remembrance Sunday when we remember all those who have died as a result of war. For some, it is still, as in Christina Rossetti’s poem, a tangible memory of the loss of a loved one or comrade. It is a time when grand parents and great grand parents recall stories of wartime, such as when Uncle Ned’s house at the end of the street got bombed out in the Blitz or the freedom of flying high above the clouds in a Spitfire on reconnaissance over Dubrovnik. I can still see Tony Pearce, with his medals clinking, dressing a young boy in his Ervine flying jacket, cap and goggles as he tells the school in assembly what it was like to fly a Spit. These people and all their memories of the good old days are dying out. We may still have written records and archive footage, but its not the same as talking to those who lived through it, who saw their comrades die around them, had husbands that never came home, its not the same as looking in their faces and hearing them remember. We may be losing those who remember the First and Second World Wars but wars have not ceased and there are may whose future plans will come to nothing as a result of their loved one having been killed in manoeuvres in Iraq and Afghanistan. For them this is a poignant time of remembering, it is a time to grieve.

But for us who were born so long after the events of the Second and First World Wars, who experience war only from the comfort of our armchairs, who have no tangible memories to recall, who have no loved one we know of to grieve. For us it is not so much a day of remembering or calling to mind a past experience or person but rather it is a day on which we are reminded. Reminded of the students who came up to this College never to complete their degrees, reminded of what a time of war can be like and how it affects every person in all aspects of their lives. As we see the veterans of more recent conflict and hear the widows and bereaved, we are reminded that we are still, this day in a state of war. That someone, somewhere is risking their lives to protect our ordinary way of life. We are reminded of a larger world from our everyday happenings, a world where conflict and violence are a daily occurrence, where genocide goes on unabated. Today we are reminded, in the grimmest terms of what we are capable of doing to one another as individuals, as communities and as nations, we are reminded lest we forget. For we do so easily forget. We don’t mean to and try very hard not to but in the business of life, in all its stresses and demands we are forced to narrow our vision, to focus on the coming essay. Or the next thing that needs doing and forget to look up and out.

At the heart of the Christian faith is a similar act of remembrance when we are reminded through the act of breaking bread and pouring out wine of the saving love of Christ. In the Eucharist the past is not simply recalled but is made tangibly real in the present. Through this presence the love of Christ is not a past experience or an idea recalled but a living reality which can be known today and can alter the world around us. Just as Christ’s resurrection transfigured the horrific events of the cross, so through his love for us which is being continually poured out upon us, new life can come from the horrors of war, healing can be found in his saving presence.

It always surprises me that when I ask those who lived through the Second World War what it was like, they often reply that it was the best days of their life. Their memories are not just of fear, destruction and death but also of comradeship and sharing, compassion and concern, cherishing and love. They remember a time when a single, common concern dominated their lives and through it they were brought together in ways we just don’t experience today. It is this corporate life of sharing, Christ-like love, in the midst of a time of violence and suffering, that they recall and miss.

Today is our corporate day when young and old pause for two minute’s silence. It is the only day in the year when, as a nation we are called out of the singularity of our lives to recall and be reminded of the sacrifice of others and the cruel horrors we inflict on each other. In the midst of this we find the cross, reminding us that in his sacrificial love Christ overcomes death and brings life to the most hopeless of situations. For whilst it seems that we are unable to make the state of world peace of which the prophet Micah writes, it is our hope and our faith that through his cross Christ makes himself and his love present in the most meaningless of deaths and through that presence there is healing.

So let us on this Remembrance Sunday remember those who have died as a result of the violence and injustice of war and be reminded of the tree of the cross which through the blood of Christ flowers into the tree of life whose leaves are for the healing of the nations and for us. Amen.

The Chaplain
11th November 2007

As I walked into College this morning, the arches of the cloisters framed a tall tree, its richly reddening leaves glowing in autumnal sunshine, and it was beautiful, and it set my spirits soaring and at the same time made me strangely sad.

The capacity of beauty to exalt the spirits and to inspire joy or even virtue is often celebrated, but that beauty should also inspire sadness may be more puzzling. I don’t understand this response in myself, I know that others have similar reactions, and I have found two possible and connected reasons: firstly, that beauty is fleeting, and secondly, that beautiful things make us love them.

When I say beauty is fleeting I don’t mean simply, as countless poets have pointed out, that the fresh good looks of youth will fade. It is undoubtedly true that the richly-coloured hair and wrinkle-free skin which we readily admire are transient; but we know too that a person’s beauty does not necessarily disappear with these things. Many of us may have had the privilege of knowing a grandparent’s face, greying and lined by life and laughter, and of seeing that it really is beautiful. Those autumn leaves, too, show that beauty can grow with age. But this isn’t all I mean, because the beauty of a statue or a painting or even of a great cathedral too can be fleeting, and this is not because the things themselves are transient, but because our experiences of them are.

We experience beauty in time. I love welcoming new Visiting Students to Worcester. Often they arrive on a bright autumn day and, as they walk for the first time from the rather severe entrance of the College into the front quad, and the ground suddenly drops away at their feet into the lush green lawn and the elegant neo-classical stone soars above them, they actually gasp. It is beautiful and it is unexpected, and even though it may look just the same on future days, it will never again be such a surprise. It may be beautiful in other ways – familiar, homely even – but it will probably never again take their breath away.

A painting will suddenly strike us as at the moment that the light catches it in a certain way. A poem will seem suddenly profound because for a moment it matches our mood, and then on re-reading it may disappoint us. We do return, re-read, re-visit; we may buy a copy of the painting in an effort to hold on to its beauty – because, secondly, beautiful things make us love them, and when we love something we want to hold onto it. But we cannot, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and we cannot be always beholding all the beautiful things around us in the necessary way, with the necessary attention, so our experience of their beauty is fleeting and fragmentary. We may play our favourite passage of music over and over but in the end we will have to stop, and we may well become disenchanted. ‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

Things are different from people, of course. If we behold a person, see their beauty, and love them, then if we are open-minded we may continue to love them and see their beauty, because a living person is always full of surprises, and will always insist on being seen in new and amazing ways. But this sort of beauty can unsettle us and make us sad too, with a sadness that comes from our awareness of separation. The otherness of another person which makes us love them can also make us feel lonely. Romantic love can be intensely frustrating because we experience the beauty of another person so intensely that we long to be joined to or even absorbed into them – intense sexual experiences are often described in this way, and it is no accident that the Bible talks of a husband and wife being joined together as ‘one flesh’. But husbands and wives are not one flesh, and those we love can leave us, or pass away, or even simply misunderstand us and seem suddenly a million miles away from us.

There are a thousand and one literary connections between sex and death, and perhaps even more literary connections between beauty and death. I am struck by the beauty of the images the poet uses to describe the dead in the poem, ‘Do not stand at my grave and weep’: ‘I am the gentle autumn rain… I am the soft stars that shine at night.’ Beautiful images. But why this assertion ‘I did not die’? To deny death seems rather futile. Clearly people do die. One popular reading at funerals includes the line ‘I have merely gone into the next room’ – but if I went into the next room I would not find the grandmother I miss so much or the friend who died so sadly shortly after the birth of his first child; I wouldn’t find Tsk, with his cheeky smile. I don’t think it offers much comfort to pretend otherwise – indeed, it might rather belittle my experience of longing and loss.

In Twelfth Night, Feste the jester addresses Olivia, who is mourning the loss of her brother. ‘I think his soul is in hell’. ‘I know his soul is in heaven, fool.’ ‘The more fool you, Madonna, to mourn for his soul, being in heaven.’ What Feste exposes is that grief is fundamentally not about those who have gone, but about those who are left behind. It is, in a non-critical sense of the word, self-centred. If we believe in heaven, then if we mourn those we believe are there we do so for our sake, because we have lost them, and not for their sakes, for they are in bliss. If we don’t believe in an afterlife, then we need not worry about those who have died, and our worries about death are really failures of imagination, as Rosencrantz puts it in Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead:

It’s silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead …. which should make a difference … shouldn’t it? I mean, you’d never know you were in a box, would you? It would be just like being asleep in a box. Not that I’d like to sleep in a box, mind you, not without any air – you’d wake up dead, for a start, and then where would you be? Apart from inside a box. That’s the bit I don’t like, frankly.

We’d better admit that our mourning is for ourselves and for others who are, as it were, left behind. And maybe the sadness we feel when someone we love dies is a particularly acute form of the sadness we might feel when we encounter beauty, because the death of a loved one is the most definitive statement of the separateness of the beloved, forcing violently upon us the loneliness which that separateness, that otherness, has always potentially held.

The reading from Romans is a well known one: ‘I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, no any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.’ Note that we are not assured that nothing shall separate us from God; clearly, we are, on earth at least, very much separate from God. Rather, we are assured that nothing shall separate us from God’s love. Love is a dynamic force which reaches across the gaps which separate us one from another, and each of us from God. And we know that, when someone we love dies, our love does not die at the same moment – rather it lives and reaches out after the beloved, longing for them, dwelling on what we have shared with them, inspiring us with the memories of everything they showed us and all the beauty we celebrated in them.

It is in this sense that ‘I did not die’. It may not seem an entirely satisfactory sense, because we want certainty about what comes after, and where our departed loved ones are, and whether we will ever be reunited with them. But it is a beautiful sense, with all the joy and sorrow which our experience of beauty brings, and we might fleetingly apprehend it. And, since beauty inspires love, it is a sense we should embrace if we wish the beauty of those we mourn to live on.

Dr. Elisabeth Dutton, Senior Research Fellow and Tutor for Women
2nd November 2007