Sunday 24 February 2008, 3 of Lent: He suffered...

He suffered and was buried, and on the third day he rose again…

The bishops who agreed the catholic Creeds of the early Church were not advised by press officers or spin doctors. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, their work has proved enduringly robust. This is due in large part to what they chose not to say about some of the central claims of the faith they were charged with codifying and defending. Read the Apostles’ Creed, the concise statement affirmed by candidates for Baptism, and you will find rehearsed the principal events of Christ’s life. What you will not find is any account of why y these are of significance: why Christ died, for example, or for the difference that his resurrection makes. Read the Nicene Creed, a rather lengthier text, and you will be a little better off, but only a little. It tells us that Christ came down from heaven ‘for us and for our salvation’, and that he was crucified ‘also for us’. So his incarnation and his passion were for our sake, but we are not told how, and we are not told why they were necessary, if indeed they were.

This silence or near silence on the part of the Creeds has enabled unity in the Church for generation after generation, as successive theologies and traditions have sought to explain the how and the why of the events that we all agree happened ‘for us’. Buy any book on the subject and you will find a chapter devoted to each of the competing interpretations of what has become known as the Atonement. Many of you will be familiar with many of these interpretations: Catholics favour the cross as sacrifice; Orthodox the cross as battleground; Protestants the cross as due penalty for sinful humanity; Liberals the cross as supreme symbol of God’s love for the world.

There is something to be said for each of these interpretations, but essential to them all are three themes for us to cling onto as Passiontide draws near, and as we contemplate afresh the hows and the whys of the season before us.

The first is our world’s stark need of redemption. This is a need that is greater than that of personal conversion and inner sanctification, however important that may be. It is a need that is plain in the bitter poverty of huge numbers of the world’s inhabitants, in the slow poisoning of its environment and atmosphere, and in the misery of its all-too-many war zones. We inhabit a world that needs radical change, a world that needs salvation.

The second is that such change, such salvation, can only have its origins in God. For God is before creation and beyond creation, and he is not constrained by it. His free and unfettered choice is to create, and so only his free and unfettered choice can re-create and save, transforming the chaos we have made of the world and bringing about peace and the holy orientation of our common life.

The third is that some human action is needed if God’s freedom is to be allowed to work in the world. In the universe of space and time, of action and movement, of cause and effect, some earthly agent must be the conduit of God’s action.

The culmination of the three themes is, of course, Jesus Christ. He is the one who allows God’s freedom into the world, the one who brings God’s love to birth in a human life lived at a specific time in a specific place, the one who embodies God. Jesus indeed comes down from heaven ‘for us and for our salvation’. And so from the moment of his birth Jesus is in terrible danger. It’s not that some divine masterplan has required the death of an innocent from before time began. It’s that when God does what is necessary to save us from ourselves we are incapable of responding other than destructively. Introduce love to a world of violence and intrigue and there can only be one outcome. Violence and intrigue take love and nail it to a cross.

Yet Golgotha is only the beginning of the story of salvation, whatever impression the Church’s different traditions sometimes give. It’s as though the crucifixion, in Rowan Williams’s words, ‘clears the ground and establishes God’s presence in the middle of the worst of our world’. Once the ground has been cleared the work of building can begin, and this building has two distinct aspects. The first is that in a very important sense nothing much changes between Good Friday and Easter Day. What the disciples discover is that despite Golgotha God is still God; God is still their God; and God still has the form and features of Jesus. The depravity of Golgotha cannot blow God off course. It cannot make him love his own any less. It cannot change his character, for it cannot destroy the Christ, who bears God’s image and likeness to his friends.

Yet in another sense, everything has changed. For whereas Christ had once called his disciples to him and sent them out, he now does something different. He breathes his Spirit upon them and breathes his Spirit into them. It is this Spirit (literally, this Breath) that energizes and equips them for his work in the world. The disciples are no longer envoys with a commission: they now breathe Christ’s breath and speak with Christ’s voice. And through prayer and the laying on of hands, through Baptism and the breaking of bread, that same Spirit, that same Breath, has passed through two millennia of change, and still envelops and fills us today. The Church is pneumatic and charismatic, adjectives that have nothing to do either with road-drills or with tambourines, but have everything to do with being Spirit-filled and Spirit-gifted. The secular world (and, rather sadly, some Christians) view the Church as a voluntary organization, something you join and leave at will, bound together by common beliefs and practices. The Church is not. It is the community breathes the breath of Christ and thus takes responsibility for his presence in the world. In that presence remains the world’s hope of redemption. Amen.