‘Mother of Pure Evil’ screamed Friday’s headlines after the conviction of the kidnappers of Shannon Matthews. Those headlines were a reminder, as if one were needed, that judgement is a theme that fascinates and implicates us in equal measure.
For more than four years before I came to St Peter’s I worshipped every Sunday underneath something almost as cataclysmic as a red-top headline: painted above the chancel arch of St Thomas’s, Salisbury it dates from the late fifteenth century and is one of the largest surviving mediaeval frescoes in England. The tabloids’ judgement of the kidnappers is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper; but the subject of the painting is, of course, the Doom, or The Last Judgment, the theme of this second address in our Advent series.
It depicts Christ robed in majesty outside the walls of the New Jerusalem. He is the judge of all creation. Beneath his feet sit the apostles in their long-promised places of honour. To the north and south of the chancel arch, and to the right and left of Christ, members of our race go to the fate decreed for them. Angels give the righteous a helping hand and they are raised to life, while the damned are dragged towards the gaping maw of hell. Numbered among them are crowned, mitred and tonsured heads.
No doubt the citizens of late-mediaeval Salisbury would have marvelled at the painting’s colour and detailed sophistication; no doubt they would have been cheered by the rewards promised to the saved; no doubt they would have shivered at the gruesome end of the condemned. To twenty-first century eyes the colours have faded, the detail appears crude, and the rewards and the gruesome end cruder still.
Today few are prepared to argue seriously for the existence of hellfire; fewer still accept that the fate of the unrighteous will be to be tortured for all eternity. Yet our principled loss of faith in hell’s gaping maw has not heralded an equally principled new era of faith in compassionate, forgiving human judgement. Friday’s headlines and the public reaction to every conviction of a child abuser testify to that. And we should not dismiss such outrage as mere populism of little consequence. It does not happen in a vacuum – it influences public policy. The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales has recently reminded all judges that their primary purpose in passing sentence is the punishment of the accused. Deterrence of others from committing crime, let alone the rehabilitation of the offender, is a secondary consideration. We inhabit a punishing society.
Our standards conflict in this as in so many spheres of life and faith. God cannot condemn us, we insist. He must love us just as we are, coming alongside us and responding to our needs and concerns. Yet we may (indeed we must) condemn the offender in our midst. We have learned a new way of understanding God – we have not learned a new way of understanding judgement. Our model is still the one painted above the chancel arch in Salisbury. It’s just that we’ll no longer allow Christ to sit in majesty. Preferring the court of public opinion, we’ve enthroned ourselves.
My belief is that it’s time to rediscover and renew our understanding of divine judgement, and that in the light of that understanding we’ll find our view of human judgement changing too. For if we remove God from the judgement seat and turn him into a divine social worker then we turn our backs on our tradition. Punch the word ‘judge’ into your Bible software and you’ll find that it occurs no fewer than 587 times between the books Genesis and Revelation; while ‘saviour’ appears 59 times and ‘creator’ 21. God is our judge: that is a non-negotiable Christian doctrine.
Yet if God is our judge then we must ask: what sort of judge is God? Is he like our own punishing judges, only on bigger scale? In the Salisbury Doom painting Christ holds his hands up in blessing. He is bare-chested and his feet are unshod. At the end of time, all things being complete, blood still streams from his wounds. All-powerful and glorified, his humanity is ever present, ever visible. Christ is transformed from suffering prophet to omniscient judge; yet the omniscient judge is still the suffering prophet. God’s longing is not for the obliteration of humanity (hence the painting’s rainbow throne, token of God’s promise to Noah that never again would humankind be destroyed); his longing is for its transformation. His judicial concern is not with our rehabilitation. He does not want to make us into different people, but to make us more fully the people we essentially are, the people he loves and knows we might become.
And how is this transformation effected? The mediaeval artist shows the cross, spear and crown of thorns brandished trophy-like behind the throne. Christ’s victory is complete, but he is a wounded victor, and his victory is a victory of love. It is love that keeps Christ faithful to his vocation and bears him to the cross; it is love that scars him with eternal wounds; it is in love that we will judge us. On the last day, however we conceive of that, we will discover what it is to stand in the presence of pure love. What would a human court of law look like if it were constructed on a similar foundation?
For no one should imagine that that will be a reassuring or comforting thing. Imagine the light of a love so intense that it shines like a penetrating laser into the darkest corners of our souls. Imagine the heat of a love so coruscating that it burns away the dross and filth that have accumulated within us. Imagine the gaze of a love so clear that it knows us better than we know ourselves and has held us in being from the moment of our first creation.
Demons, fires and toasting forks are terrifying; but to see ourselves as we really are and to let ourselves be changed – that is the judgement of Christ. Perhaps that’s why we remain stuck, content with our overcrowded and unsanitary prisons, content with religion that constrains and demeans, and content with the Doom: because the reality is even more terrifying. Amen.
Monday, 22 December 2008
Wednesday, 10 December 2008
Christ the King, Sunday 23 November 2008
Like a refreshment stall temptingly positioned somewhere in the twenty-fourth mile of a marathon, the feast of Christ the King beckons the unwary as they enter the last week of the Church’s year. Its imperious title suggests that the last seven days can be run with omniscient warmth in the heart and a royal spring in the step. Christ is King, after all, and with that dynamic assurance the purple wastes of Advent are so many puddles to be vaulted over on the way to the rapture that indubitably awaits. However, if a long-distance runner succumbs to the lure of the refreshment stall, takes a rest and enjoys a long cold beer when he has a mile of his course still to run he’ll find that last mile longer than all the preceding miles put together. A similar fate awaits those who too readily take refuge in the seductive promise that because Christ is King all is necessarily well. And maybe I’m becoming wise, or maybe I’m becoming cynical, but I am refusing the comforting blandishments proffered by today’s feast and, feeling neither omniscient nor royal, am approaching the end of the year with a sense of dissatisfaction.
I am at risk of sounding more like a chairman giving an end-of-year report than a priest proclaiming the Gospel, and I apologize, but it’s me preaching today rather than James or Mark because it had been our hope that today we would bring to an end our Giving Campaign for 2008. You all know the facts. Increased basic costs mean that for St Peter’s simply to keep going as it always has we need to find an additional £30,000 in 2009. If we want to achieve the relatively modest new ambitions we have set ourselves then we need to find an additional £38,000. The need is therefore urgent: but I am unable to tell you today that we have met it. Circumstances that no one could have foreseen or overcome mean that the Campaign’s mailing has only just gone out. I remain very confident that we will raise our income and plug the hole in the budget, but at the year’s end I regret that we have not done so already and as we had planned.
It had also been our hope that we would go into Advent with a new sound system in Church, one that would enable the many people who will worship here in the next month to participate in that worship in a more effective way, perhaps even by actually hearing the preacher. This is occasionally thought to be a good thing. Although we have identified the system and the supplier that we would like, we have also discovered unexpectedly that its introduction into our building will require a faculty from the Chancellor of the Diocese. Again, I am confident that we will obtain the faculty and that the system will enhance what we do here, but I regret that it will be 2009 before I am able to address you without the risk of the microphone dying or the speakers booming.
I could go on, and point to other areas of our common life where we have not achieved what we have set out to achieve within the time-frame we had set out to achieve them: hence springs my year-end sense of dissatisfaction and of a job only half-done. But if we cannot help how we feel, we can help what we do with our feelings. What might I do with my sense of disappointment?
Ignore it, I suppose, and preach a different sort of sermon, telling you that the plan all along had been to delay the Giving Campaign until Advent when people are in the mood to spend money, and that the new sound system was always destined to be part of our Lenten adventure. Or get angry, blame the PCC, blame the printer, blame the Diocese and inform the Assistant Priest that he will be preaching on Christ the King.
Or, or – draw breath and think for a moment about today’s claim. Christ is King. Of course he is: every breath in our lungs, every sinew in our bodies, every drop of blood in our veins compels us to this conclusion: that in Christ is all authority ultimately vested; that in Christ all history finds its meaning; that in Christ the nations will be one. Christ is king. Yet look at the chaos and agony of the world which is his, a world stalked by injustice and violence, a world where evil runs unchecked, a world where innocence is put to the sword every hour of every day. Look at all that and acknowledge that while Christ is King his kingdom is not yet Christ-like.
To commit to the proclamation that Christ is King is to commit to dissatisfaction, to disappointment, and to a sense of a job half-done. To proclaim that Christ is King is perpetually to reach the year’s end unfulfilled. For to proclaim that Christ is King is to proclaim that the kingdom has not yet come and that in the forests of the Congo and on the streets of this very city it sometimes seems an awfully long way off. And to proclaim that Christ is King is to respond to our dissatisfaction at that distance not by ignoring it and not by getting angry with it, but by learning humility in the face of it. Christ is King is a shout of triumph, but it is also a call to action. It is a defiant statement of hope in the face of human sin, but it is also an indictment of human sin. It starkly holds before us the scale of the task that is ours, the task of working alongside the God who was, who is, and who is to come, for the Earth’s redemption.
The year is ending, there’s no shiny new PA, and we face a deficit next year. I - we - must learn to plan better and to deliver on the expectations we raise. But Christ the King convinces me of disappointments and dissatisfactions which dwarf mine ten thousand times over. Christ the King propels us into the season of Advent and compels us to pray the Advent prayer with greater urgency than ever: ‘Come, Lord Jesus’. And Christ the King bids us transform this world to make it one fit for a King.
Stir up, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people… Amen.
I am at risk of sounding more like a chairman giving an end-of-year report than a priest proclaiming the Gospel, and I apologize, but it’s me preaching today rather than James or Mark because it had been our hope that today we would bring to an end our Giving Campaign for 2008. You all know the facts. Increased basic costs mean that for St Peter’s simply to keep going as it always has we need to find an additional £30,000 in 2009. If we want to achieve the relatively modest new ambitions we have set ourselves then we need to find an additional £38,000. The need is therefore urgent: but I am unable to tell you today that we have met it. Circumstances that no one could have foreseen or overcome mean that the Campaign’s mailing has only just gone out. I remain very confident that we will raise our income and plug the hole in the budget, but at the year’s end I regret that we have not done so already and as we had planned.
It had also been our hope that we would go into Advent with a new sound system in Church, one that would enable the many people who will worship here in the next month to participate in that worship in a more effective way, perhaps even by actually hearing the preacher. This is occasionally thought to be a good thing. Although we have identified the system and the supplier that we would like, we have also discovered unexpectedly that its introduction into our building will require a faculty from the Chancellor of the Diocese. Again, I am confident that we will obtain the faculty and that the system will enhance what we do here, but I regret that it will be 2009 before I am able to address you without the risk of the microphone dying or the speakers booming.
I could go on, and point to other areas of our common life where we have not achieved what we have set out to achieve within the time-frame we had set out to achieve them: hence springs my year-end sense of dissatisfaction and of a job only half-done. But if we cannot help how we feel, we can help what we do with our feelings. What might I do with my sense of disappointment?
Ignore it, I suppose, and preach a different sort of sermon, telling you that the plan all along had been to delay the Giving Campaign until Advent when people are in the mood to spend money, and that the new sound system was always destined to be part of our Lenten adventure. Or get angry, blame the PCC, blame the printer, blame the Diocese and inform the Assistant Priest that he will be preaching on Christ the King.
Or, or – draw breath and think for a moment about today’s claim. Christ is King. Of course he is: every breath in our lungs, every sinew in our bodies, every drop of blood in our veins compels us to this conclusion: that in Christ is all authority ultimately vested; that in Christ all history finds its meaning; that in Christ the nations will be one. Christ is king. Yet look at the chaos and agony of the world which is his, a world stalked by injustice and violence, a world where evil runs unchecked, a world where innocence is put to the sword every hour of every day. Look at all that and acknowledge that while Christ is King his kingdom is not yet Christ-like.
To commit to the proclamation that Christ is King is to commit to dissatisfaction, to disappointment, and to a sense of a job half-done. To proclaim that Christ is King is perpetually to reach the year’s end unfulfilled. For to proclaim that Christ is King is to proclaim that the kingdom has not yet come and that in the forests of the Congo and on the streets of this very city it sometimes seems an awfully long way off. And to proclaim that Christ is King is to respond to our dissatisfaction at that distance not by ignoring it and not by getting angry with it, but by learning humility in the face of it. Christ is King is a shout of triumph, but it is also a call to action. It is a defiant statement of hope in the face of human sin, but it is also an indictment of human sin. It starkly holds before us the scale of the task that is ours, the task of working alongside the God who was, who is, and who is to come, for the Earth’s redemption.
The year is ending, there’s no shiny new PA, and we face a deficit next year. I - we - must learn to plan better and to deliver on the expectations we raise. But Christ the King convinces me of disappointments and dissatisfactions which dwarf mine ten thousand times over. Christ the King propels us into the season of Advent and compels us to pray the Advent prayer with greater urgency than ever: ‘Come, Lord Jesus’. And Christ the King bids us transform this world to make it one fit for a King.
Stir up, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people… Amen.
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