'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
for a journey, and such a long journey
The ways deep, and the weather sharp:
The very dead of winter.'
Over the years the twelve verses of Matthew's Gospel which tell the story of the visit of the Wise Men to Bethlehem have had to bear an immense weight of creative interpretation. They have been painted and sculpted. They have been stitched into tapestry and represented in mosaic. They have been reproduced in film, set to glorious music, and immortalized in verse.
These interpretations have often sought to fill in the gaps in Matthew's narrative. The nameless three were named about five hundred years into the Common Era - as Melchior, Balthazar, and Caspar. At about the same time they were given nationalities - Babylonian, Persian and Arab. The uncertain status conferred on them by the Greek word 'magi' was resolved - they were kings. They have been provided with camels; their number has been added to ('The Story of the Fourth Wise Man'); their relics were reputedly brought to Constantinople by Constantine's mother and have since the twelfth century rested in Cologne Cathedral. Numerous attempts have been made at uncovering their later history. What became of them after they return from Bethlehem and disappear from the pages of the biblical narrative?
All these elaborations point to the essentially sparse nature of Matthew's account. He does not give the reader much detail; not, that is, except in one particular. For he is quite specific about the three gifts that the mysterious strangers from the East bring with them: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. So it is at least arguable that this is what Matthew wanted his readers to remember about the Wise Men; that this is what he believed was significant about them. They are the men who give to the infant Christ: in their journey they give of their time; in their worship they give of their love; in their gifts they give of their resources. They are the men who give.
This does not appear to have satisfied later generations, from St Helena of the Holy Places to TS Eliot, who with countless others have added to the story all the accretions I have mentioned, and more. Why is that? Why have we not been satisfied with Matthew's belief that it was their giving that was important and their giving that should be their memorial? Why have we insisted on more?
In his recent Christmas message the Bishop of London considers the harsh economic times in which we live, and finds in them the possibility of spiritual renewal. History has not ended, as some confidently predicted it had twenty years ago. Instead its drama continues to unfold. The author of this cosmic drama is God, and while its plot and script do not shirk the darkness they contain the promise of hope. 'We need to hear and receive a meaningful narrative about our civilization' writes the Bishop 'which does not shrink from what is happening but which contains the promise of hope'.
The financial crisis has compelled us to re-discover (or, perhaps, to discover) that economics and ethics are linked. To be truly meaningful any narrative about our civilization must address that link. What we earn; what we owe; the power we wield; the responsibilities we bear; unemployment; homelessness; despair: none of these is morally neutral; none of these can be viewed in isolation; none of these can be excluded from a meaningful narrative about who we are. The Gospel has something to say about all of them.
Which brings me back to the Wise Men and to our apparent unwillingness to remember them as the visitors who gave to the infant Christ. It's as though generosity is not regarded as an adequate summation of their life, or, perhaps, of any life. I'm not sure I've ever heard a eulogy which remarked on the deceased's giving as the touchstone and hallmark of his existence. We look for more. In the case of the Wise Men, we look for exotic names, exalted ranks and anguished interior ponderings; today, we are likely to scan the obits pages and look for career highs and lows, relationships failed and successful, and comments sage and incendiary.
The Wise Men travelled many miles, and gave of their time; they knelt before the infant Christ, and gave of their love; they opened their treasure chests, and gave of their resources. They were in the presence of the King of all kings, and their grateful response was to give. We are their successors and we stand in the same blessed presence. What will be our memorial? Perhaps we crave fame for ourselves, the sort of fame that has been created for them. Perhaps we want our names to be remembered, our occupations to be honoured, and our families to be celebrated.Perhaps we are concerned that we should be known everlastingly as the people who we really were. Or perhaps we are we ready to acknowledge we, like the Wise Men, are recipients of a gift beyond price. And perhaps we are ready to give everything that we have and are, and to be remembered only for that. Now - there's a meaningful narrative for our civilization. Amen.
Monday, 9 January 2012
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
Christmas Day 2011
“Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”
In A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens, the bicentenary of whose birth is celebrated next year, tells the story of the redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge is transformed from a man described as “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, and covetous” in the opening pages, to a man described as “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew” in the closing pages.
Set as it is on Christmas Eve it is Scrooge’s opinion of the festivities that surround him that serves as the benchmark of his transformation. At the beginning that opinion is crystallized with admirable clarity in one unforgettable word. Christmas is humbug. “If I could work my will” says Scrooge “every idiot who goes around with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly though his heart”. At the end that opinion has changed. Out on the London streets he “regarded everyone with a delighted smile” writes Dickens. “He looked so irresistibly pleasant…that three or four good-humoured fellows said, ‘Good morning, sir! A merry Christmas to you!’ And Scrooge often said afterwards, that of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears”.
Scrooge’s early opinion of Christmas is forged by his analysis of its costs and benefits. Christmas brings no profit and it impoverishes those who indulge in it. “What reason have you to be merry?” he asks his kindly nephew. “What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer?” But by the end that analysis is abandoned. Scrooge despatches an impossibly large turkey to Bob Cratchit’s family, increases his salary, and gives liberally to the poor. When we meet Scrooge he knows his own mind. When we leave him he is beginning to know his own heart.
During Advent at St Peter’s, conscious that the lives of disciples begin with the decision to follow Christ, we reflected Sunday by Sunday upon how decisions are made, and, consequently, upon the deployment of knowledge in the making of decisions. In A Christmas Carol we encounter two kinds of knowledge, the knowledge of the mind, and the knowledge of the heart. We encounter their relationship, and we encounter their conflict. This encounter is a theme emphasized and re-emphasized by writers on prayer. Augustine of Hippo writes of the lower part of the mind, that reasons, and of the higher part, reserved for the contemplation of God. Evagrius of Pontus distinguishes between the reasoning mind that makes use of concepts, and the dimension of the mind that comes to knowledge directly, without their mediation. The mind knows facts, figures, and forecasts. The heart knows pains, pleasures and personalities. The mind understands information. The heart understands others. It is the heart that is the sphere of God’s communication with us and God’s activity within us. It is in our hearts and through our hearts and with our hearts that we are drawn to God, we respond to God and we love God.
This is not to relegate God and faith in God to the far reaches of emotive speculation, where the late Christopher Hitchens and his supporters long to locate them. The human mind can take human beings great distances along the road of faith. Scrooge’s nephew gives us an example. “Christmas time” he says “is the only time I know of…when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good”. In other words, he assesses the objective benefits that the observance of Christmas brings and concludes that such observance is worthwhile. But what changes in Scrooge, and what changes Scrooge, is the disposition of his heart, a change effected by the visitation of the three Spirits. The Ghost of Christmas Past shows him the lonely child he once was. The Ghost of Christmas Present shows him the generous affection that warms the home of others at Christmas. And the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him the squalor and loneliness of his approaching death. The Spirits do not argue with him. They do not seek to convince him or make a case for him to answer. They hold up a mirror in which he sees his life and the life of the world. What he sees there speaks directly to his heart. What he sees there changes it, and that change in his heart changes his mind.
The knowledge of the heart and the knowledge of the mind have to be balanced. The nineteenth-century Russian monk Theophan the Recluse, canonized in 1988, writes “You must descend from your head to your heart”. What I think he means is that if our restless, questioning, calculating minds are joined to – or perhaps reined in by - our open, trusting, loving hearts; that if through persistence and effort, trial and error, mistake and mishap we learn to subject all our certainties, all our convictions, everything we think we know to what Almighty God longs for us to know; that then and only then will we stand a chance of becoming Christlike, as, perhaps, did Ebenezer Scrooge
Like him, we have awoken on Christmas morning and come to Church, where our eyes fasten on the crib and on the figure of the One who:“…came down to earth from heaven,
who is God and Lord of all”. We’ve sung it countless times and this morning we celebrate it: the humble descent of the divine to the mortal, and their union in the Christ-child. And we who have come in spirit to Bethlehem, we too must make a humble descent, the descent from the mind to the heart. We too must seek a union, a union of mind and heart, so that in all our thinking and acting and speaking we show forth the Word who is made flesh for our sake. It’s what Phillips Brooks meant when he wrote these words:
“O holy child of Bethlehem
Descend to us we pray,
Cast out our sin and enter in,
Be born in us today”.
Be born in us today. God bless us, every one. Amen.
In A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens, the bicentenary of whose birth is celebrated next year, tells the story of the redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge is transformed from a man described as “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, and covetous” in the opening pages, to a man described as “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew” in the closing pages.
Set as it is on Christmas Eve it is Scrooge’s opinion of the festivities that surround him that serves as the benchmark of his transformation. At the beginning that opinion is crystallized with admirable clarity in one unforgettable word. Christmas is humbug. “If I could work my will” says Scrooge “every idiot who goes around with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly though his heart”. At the end that opinion has changed. Out on the London streets he “regarded everyone with a delighted smile” writes Dickens. “He looked so irresistibly pleasant…that three or four good-humoured fellows said, ‘Good morning, sir! A merry Christmas to you!’ And Scrooge often said afterwards, that of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears”.
Scrooge’s early opinion of Christmas is forged by his analysis of its costs and benefits. Christmas brings no profit and it impoverishes those who indulge in it. “What reason have you to be merry?” he asks his kindly nephew. “What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer?” But by the end that analysis is abandoned. Scrooge despatches an impossibly large turkey to Bob Cratchit’s family, increases his salary, and gives liberally to the poor. When we meet Scrooge he knows his own mind. When we leave him he is beginning to know his own heart.
During Advent at St Peter’s, conscious that the lives of disciples begin with the decision to follow Christ, we reflected Sunday by Sunday upon how decisions are made, and, consequently, upon the deployment of knowledge in the making of decisions. In A Christmas Carol we encounter two kinds of knowledge, the knowledge of the mind, and the knowledge of the heart. We encounter their relationship, and we encounter their conflict. This encounter is a theme emphasized and re-emphasized by writers on prayer. Augustine of Hippo writes of the lower part of the mind, that reasons, and of the higher part, reserved for the contemplation of God. Evagrius of Pontus distinguishes between the reasoning mind that makes use of concepts, and the dimension of the mind that comes to knowledge directly, without their mediation. The mind knows facts, figures, and forecasts. The heart knows pains, pleasures and personalities. The mind understands information. The heart understands others. It is the heart that is the sphere of God’s communication with us and God’s activity within us. It is in our hearts and through our hearts and with our hearts that we are drawn to God, we respond to God and we love God.
This is not to relegate God and faith in God to the far reaches of emotive speculation, where the late Christopher Hitchens and his supporters long to locate them. The human mind can take human beings great distances along the road of faith. Scrooge’s nephew gives us an example. “Christmas time” he says “is the only time I know of…when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good”. In other words, he assesses the objective benefits that the observance of Christmas brings and concludes that such observance is worthwhile. But what changes in Scrooge, and what changes Scrooge, is the disposition of his heart, a change effected by the visitation of the three Spirits. The Ghost of Christmas Past shows him the lonely child he once was. The Ghost of Christmas Present shows him the generous affection that warms the home of others at Christmas. And the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him the squalor and loneliness of his approaching death. The Spirits do not argue with him. They do not seek to convince him or make a case for him to answer. They hold up a mirror in which he sees his life and the life of the world. What he sees there speaks directly to his heart. What he sees there changes it, and that change in his heart changes his mind.
The knowledge of the heart and the knowledge of the mind have to be balanced. The nineteenth-century Russian monk Theophan the Recluse, canonized in 1988, writes “You must descend from your head to your heart”. What I think he means is that if our restless, questioning, calculating minds are joined to – or perhaps reined in by - our open, trusting, loving hearts; that if through persistence and effort, trial and error, mistake and mishap we learn to subject all our certainties, all our convictions, everything we think we know to what Almighty God longs for us to know; that then and only then will we stand a chance of becoming Christlike, as, perhaps, did Ebenezer Scrooge
Like him, we have awoken on Christmas morning and come to Church, where our eyes fasten on the crib and on the figure of the One who:“…came down to earth from heaven,
who is God and Lord of all”. We’ve sung it countless times and this morning we celebrate it: the humble descent of the divine to the mortal, and their union in the Christ-child. And we who have come in spirit to Bethlehem, we too must make a humble descent, the descent from the mind to the heart. We too must seek a union, a union of mind and heart, so that in all our thinking and acting and speaking we show forth the Word who is made flesh for our sake. It’s what Phillips Brooks meant when he wrote these words:
“O holy child of Bethlehem
Descend to us we pray,
Cast out our sin and enter in,
Be born in us today”.
Be born in us today. God bless us, every one. Amen.
Monday, 21 November 2011
Christ the King, Sunday 20 November 2011
There has never been a less propitious time to speak of kingly power than this, for kingly power is unaccountable and capricious, and we have had our fill of it.
Think of mad Caligula, the emperor who appointed his horse a Roman consul and himself a god. Think of Shakespeare’s Richard III, the king who had his brother drowned in a malmsey butt and his nephews smothered in the Tower. Think of the Bible’s Jezebel, the queen who slaughtered the prophets of ancient Israel and whose name is still a byword for cruel treachery. Think of any of the monarchs whose bloody fingerprints stain the pages of history and mythology and you will conclude that what unites them is the exercise of unaccountable and capricious power
There are no horses in the House of Commons; there are no malmsey butts on Fleet Street; and they’re not building altars to Baal in the Square Mile – not quite – but the exercise of capricious and unaccountable power has dominated our public life for four years.
In the parliamentary expenses crisis, in the tabloid phone-hacking crisis, and in the ongoing economic crisis we have been exposed to power that has treated us with contempt. Ethics have been abandoned; laws have been broken; and responsibilities have been shirked. Systems have been abused; lies have been told; and fortunes have been made. Democracy has suffered; lives have been ruined; and the economic well-being of millions has been put in jeopardy. No one should be surprised that there are tents outside our Cathedral. Power has ignored our needs. It has ignored our requirement of confidence in the integrity of those who represent us. It has ignored our expectation of honesty among those who report and communicate the news. And it has ignored our entitlement to stability in our homes, our incomes, our pensions and our savings. Power has ignored us.
So there has never been a less propitious time to speak of kingly power than this. We object to it intellectually and we are outraged by it morally. Yet speak of kingly power we must, for we proclaim that Christ is King. That proclamation, the earliest Christian creed, was once punishable by death. The one who made it denied that Caesar was king; the one who made it claimed an alternative allegiance; the one who made it was a traitor to the imperial state. The consequences for those make it today are similarly drastic. We belong to Christ – not to Westminster, not to Wapping, and not to Wall Street. We belong to Christ. We reject the claims of systems, political, media and economic. We reject their pretensions to ultimate authority over us. Christ rejects the capricious and unaccountable power that they have exercised. They ignore our needs. Christ cannot.
His kingly power is characterized by his abandonment of the prestige, security and comfort to which those who wield unaccountable and capricious power cling. Christ’s kingly power is characterized by his identification with the hungry and thirsty, with the estranged and the naked, with the sick and the imprisoned. “Truly I tell you, just as you did to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me”. Christ’s kingly power is located wherever our need is greatest. It does not exacerbate our need. It meets it.
And this, I think, is ultimately why there is never a propitious time to speak of the kingly power of Christ. It’s not that in speaking of it we have to face intellectual objection; it’s not in speaking of it we have to face moral outrage, although we do. It’s that we cannot speak of it without speaking of our needs, without acknowledging that they are great, and without acknowledging that the answer to them is beyond us.
That is hard for a generation used to shaping its own intellectual terrain and ever more accustomed to taking to the streets in pursuit of its liberties. Our needs are great and the answer to them is beyond us. Some hunger for forgiveness. Some thirst for the capacity to forgive. Some know the loneliness of estrangement from those to whom they appear closest. Some are naked before hostile enquiry. And some are imprisoned by destructive habits.
But in the darkness of human need the kingly power of Christ is encountered, and in the darkness of human need the nature of that kingly power is revealed. It is revealed as the most devastating power imaginable: capricious, yes; unaccountable, yes; abusive, never. It is revealed as love, absolute and infinite, undiscriminating and eternal. It fills the hungry and clothes the naked. It encircles the sick and embraces the prisoner. It cannot be diverted by intellectual objection, for it speaks an alternative language. It cannot arouse moral outrage, for it is unfailingly gentle.
This is the power in which the Church meets. It is a power which calls us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit the prisoner. This is the power in which we baptize Guy and Rihanna. It is a power which will never ignore them, never oppress them, and never treat them as less than a beloved son and daughter. And this is the power which, we are promised, will redeem the world. It is a power which will overcome poverty, destitution, sickness, and captivity. It is a power which will bring a new creation to birth. In the water of Baptism and in the bread and wine of the Eucharist we touch that new creation. This is the power of Christ the King. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
Think of mad Caligula, the emperor who appointed his horse a Roman consul and himself a god. Think of Shakespeare’s Richard III, the king who had his brother drowned in a malmsey butt and his nephews smothered in the Tower. Think of the Bible’s Jezebel, the queen who slaughtered the prophets of ancient Israel and whose name is still a byword for cruel treachery. Think of any of the monarchs whose bloody fingerprints stain the pages of history and mythology and you will conclude that what unites them is the exercise of unaccountable and capricious power
There are no horses in the House of Commons; there are no malmsey butts on Fleet Street; and they’re not building altars to Baal in the Square Mile – not quite – but the exercise of capricious and unaccountable power has dominated our public life for four years.
In the parliamentary expenses crisis, in the tabloid phone-hacking crisis, and in the ongoing economic crisis we have been exposed to power that has treated us with contempt. Ethics have been abandoned; laws have been broken; and responsibilities have been shirked. Systems have been abused; lies have been told; and fortunes have been made. Democracy has suffered; lives have been ruined; and the economic well-being of millions has been put in jeopardy. No one should be surprised that there are tents outside our Cathedral. Power has ignored our needs. It has ignored our requirement of confidence in the integrity of those who represent us. It has ignored our expectation of honesty among those who report and communicate the news. And it has ignored our entitlement to stability in our homes, our incomes, our pensions and our savings. Power has ignored us.
So there has never been a less propitious time to speak of kingly power than this. We object to it intellectually and we are outraged by it morally. Yet speak of kingly power we must, for we proclaim that Christ is King. That proclamation, the earliest Christian creed, was once punishable by death. The one who made it denied that Caesar was king; the one who made it claimed an alternative allegiance; the one who made it was a traitor to the imperial state. The consequences for those make it today are similarly drastic. We belong to Christ – not to Westminster, not to Wapping, and not to Wall Street. We belong to Christ. We reject the claims of systems, political, media and economic. We reject their pretensions to ultimate authority over us. Christ rejects the capricious and unaccountable power that they have exercised. They ignore our needs. Christ cannot.
His kingly power is characterized by his abandonment of the prestige, security and comfort to which those who wield unaccountable and capricious power cling. Christ’s kingly power is characterized by his identification with the hungry and thirsty, with the estranged and the naked, with the sick and the imprisoned. “Truly I tell you, just as you did to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me”. Christ’s kingly power is located wherever our need is greatest. It does not exacerbate our need. It meets it.
And this, I think, is ultimately why there is never a propitious time to speak of the kingly power of Christ. It’s not that in speaking of it we have to face intellectual objection; it’s not in speaking of it we have to face moral outrage, although we do. It’s that we cannot speak of it without speaking of our needs, without acknowledging that they are great, and without acknowledging that the answer to them is beyond us.
That is hard for a generation used to shaping its own intellectual terrain and ever more accustomed to taking to the streets in pursuit of its liberties. Our needs are great and the answer to them is beyond us. Some hunger for forgiveness. Some thirst for the capacity to forgive. Some know the loneliness of estrangement from those to whom they appear closest. Some are naked before hostile enquiry. And some are imprisoned by destructive habits.
But in the darkness of human need the kingly power of Christ is encountered, and in the darkness of human need the nature of that kingly power is revealed. It is revealed as the most devastating power imaginable: capricious, yes; unaccountable, yes; abusive, never. It is revealed as love, absolute and infinite, undiscriminating and eternal. It fills the hungry and clothes the naked. It encircles the sick and embraces the prisoner. It cannot be diverted by intellectual objection, for it speaks an alternative language. It cannot arouse moral outrage, for it is unfailingly gentle.
This is the power in which the Church meets. It is a power which calls us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit the prisoner. This is the power in which we baptize Guy and Rihanna. It is a power which will never ignore them, never oppress them, and never treat them as less than a beloved son and daughter. And this is the power which, we are promised, will redeem the world. It is a power which will overcome poverty, destitution, sickness, and captivity. It is a power which will bring a new creation to birth. In the water of Baptism and in the bread and wine of the Eucharist we touch that new creation. This is the power of Christ the King. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
Easter Day 2011
On the eastern wall of St Peter’s is a mosaic depiction of the Transfiguration of Christ, installed by my nineteenth century predecessor George Howard Wilkinson. It survives to this day in what is now the sacristy, and I see it whenever I vest for the Eucharist. In it, Christ, arms outstretched, resplendent in glorious gold and white, hovers a few feet above the holy mountain-top. The scene is suffused with divine light. It is an arresting image.
Its didactic purpose is clear. Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God. He has a human nature, evident in his human form; and he has a divine nature, evident in the glory that emanates from him. The glorious transfigured Christ of the mosaic foreshadows the glorious risen Christ of this morning. He is a human being, and is recognizable as such. Yet he is a human being who is unconfined by the limits of time and space.
But there is a difference between the glorious transfigured Jesus and the glorious risen Jesus. It is that the outstretched hands of the mosaic are whole and unblemished, whereas the hands that are proffered to us this morning are not. They bear the marks of the nails which pinned him to the cross. The risen Jesus is wounded.
Why? If Jesus is as our creeds proclaim him to be; if he is as the mosaic depicts; if he is the human face of almighty God, who was revealed in glory on the mountain top then why does he submit to the nails? Why the wounds?
All the classic theologies of the cross answer this by making a link between the wounds of Jesus and the sin of humanity. At one extreme the wounds are seen as a necessary price. Our sin merits death; Christ dies in our place; Christ’s wounds are the cost of our redemption. At the other extreme the wounds are said to work upon our consciences. They call to us, compelling us to repent of the sin that has inflicted them upon him. Both extremes, and all the variations in between, reveal an understanding of the human condition – of human
nature – as essentially sinful. It is our sinfulness that is addressed by the cross of Christ.
I would like to suggest another understanding of the human condition, another understanding of human nature. This not to supplant the understanding that we term original sin, but to offer an alternative to it. We might call it ‘original woundedness’. The wounds of Christ are linked to the wounds of humanity; it is our woundedness that is addressed by the cross of Christ. Before we learn to be sinful men and women we are wounded men and women; often grievously wounded.
I probably need to stop right there. Wounded? Us? It hardly seems likely. We inhabit one of the greatest cities on God’s earth at the beginning of the third millennium of the Common Era. Compared with the generation which fashioned the mosaic on the east wall we enjoy lives of remarkable ease and simplicity. We are a confident generation, an articulate generation. In what conceivable sense are we wounded? Sinful we can admit to; sin we understand; sin we can deal with; because, to some extent, sin we’re in control of. We commit it, we identify it, we repent of it.
But wounds are different. Wounds we do not control; wounds we do not choose; for wounds have been inflicted upon us. Perhaps in our tenderest years, perhaps much later; perhaps through neglect, perhaps because of tragedy, perhaps as a result of experiential poverty of a thousand different kinds. Perhaps we are not believed in, we are unsupported, we are rarely heard, or scarcely known. Perhaps our wounds assert themselves in unhappy relationships and in unrealized ambitions, in addiction and in fear, in disappointment and in loss. From our wounds flow the sins of rage and lust, of envy and of hatred. For what does a wound do? It disfigures our beauty; it causes us pain; and from it flows our lifeblood. If I am right; if we are essentially wounded, then our loveliness is hidden, our pain is desperate, and our life – our real life, not the one we build to conceal the wounds, our eternal life – is ebbing away from us.
The twentieth century priest and prophet Henri Nouwen wrote these words: ‘the great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there’. So to wounded humanity comes a wounded leader. The Christ of the mountain top, trailing clouds of glory, shares little with wounded men and women. His feet don’t even touch the ground - quite literally, in the St Peter’s mosaic. The Christ of the cross shares everything with wounded men and women. Like us, his beauty is disfigured; like us, he is in pain; and, like us, the life flows out of him as surely as does the blood.
This sharing is reassuring. We are not alone. Our wounds are known and understood. But this sharing cannot be the end of the story. For sharing is a Good Friday experience. This is Easter Day, and he is risen.
He is risen indeed, but he is wounded. Still his body bears the marks. A wounded leader comes to us, but he does not come to wipe away every last trace of our wounds. He comes to redeem them. He comes to show us that they are an inexorable part of our humanity. He comes to show us that concealing them, ignoring them, running away from them, will only lead us deeper into them and deeper into their consequences. He comes to show us a different path: the path of resurrection, the via vitae. He comes to show us that our woundedness can make us a source of life and love for others. He comes to show us that our woundedness can turn us towards our brothers and sisters. He comes to show us that our woundedness can open our hearts to them in compassion. He comes to show us that our woundedness can enlarge our empathy and equip us to attend to others. He comes to show us that in our woundedness lies our resurrection.
He comes so that our scars might blaze with beauty, so that our pain might be changed to salvific love, so that the flow of life from us might be staunched, and so that we might begin to live as he lives.
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrestled with the wounds of isolation, fatigue and depression in his last, Dublin, years: yet, contemplating the resurrection of his wounded Lord, he could write these lines:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
He is risen; we are risen. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Its didactic purpose is clear. Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God. He has a human nature, evident in his human form; and he has a divine nature, evident in the glory that emanates from him. The glorious transfigured Christ of the mosaic foreshadows the glorious risen Christ of this morning. He is a human being, and is recognizable as such. Yet he is a human being who is unconfined by the limits of time and space.
But there is a difference between the glorious transfigured Jesus and the glorious risen Jesus. It is that the outstretched hands of the mosaic are whole and unblemished, whereas the hands that are proffered to us this morning are not. They bear the marks of the nails which pinned him to the cross. The risen Jesus is wounded.
Why? If Jesus is as our creeds proclaim him to be; if he is as the mosaic depicts; if he is the human face of almighty God, who was revealed in glory on the mountain top then why does he submit to the nails? Why the wounds?
All the classic theologies of the cross answer this by making a link between the wounds of Jesus and the sin of humanity. At one extreme the wounds are seen as a necessary price. Our sin merits death; Christ dies in our place; Christ’s wounds are the cost of our redemption. At the other extreme the wounds are said to work upon our consciences. They call to us, compelling us to repent of the sin that has inflicted them upon him. Both extremes, and all the variations in between, reveal an understanding of the human condition – of human
nature – as essentially sinful. It is our sinfulness that is addressed by the cross of Christ.
I would like to suggest another understanding of the human condition, another understanding of human nature. This not to supplant the understanding that we term original sin, but to offer an alternative to it. We might call it ‘original woundedness’. The wounds of Christ are linked to the wounds of humanity; it is our woundedness that is addressed by the cross of Christ. Before we learn to be sinful men and women we are wounded men and women; often grievously wounded.
I probably need to stop right there. Wounded? Us? It hardly seems likely. We inhabit one of the greatest cities on God’s earth at the beginning of the third millennium of the Common Era. Compared with the generation which fashioned the mosaic on the east wall we enjoy lives of remarkable ease and simplicity. We are a confident generation, an articulate generation. In what conceivable sense are we wounded? Sinful we can admit to; sin we understand; sin we can deal with; because, to some extent, sin we’re in control of. We commit it, we identify it, we repent of it.
But wounds are different. Wounds we do not control; wounds we do not choose; for wounds have been inflicted upon us. Perhaps in our tenderest years, perhaps much later; perhaps through neglect, perhaps because of tragedy, perhaps as a result of experiential poverty of a thousand different kinds. Perhaps we are not believed in, we are unsupported, we are rarely heard, or scarcely known. Perhaps our wounds assert themselves in unhappy relationships and in unrealized ambitions, in addiction and in fear, in disappointment and in loss. From our wounds flow the sins of rage and lust, of envy and of hatred. For what does a wound do? It disfigures our beauty; it causes us pain; and from it flows our lifeblood. If I am right; if we are essentially wounded, then our loveliness is hidden, our pain is desperate, and our life – our real life, not the one we build to conceal the wounds, our eternal life – is ebbing away from us.
The twentieth century priest and prophet Henri Nouwen wrote these words: ‘the great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there’. So to wounded humanity comes a wounded leader. The Christ of the mountain top, trailing clouds of glory, shares little with wounded men and women. His feet don’t even touch the ground - quite literally, in the St Peter’s mosaic. The Christ of the cross shares everything with wounded men and women. Like us, his beauty is disfigured; like us, he is in pain; and, like us, the life flows out of him as surely as does the blood.
This sharing is reassuring. We are not alone. Our wounds are known and understood. But this sharing cannot be the end of the story. For sharing is a Good Friday experience. This is Easter Day, and he is risen.
He is risen indeed, but he is wounded. Still his body bears the marks. A wounded leader comes to us, but he does not come to wipe away every last trace of our wounds. He comes to redeem them. He comes to show us that they are an inexorable part of our humanity. He comes to show us that concealing them, ignoring them, running away from them, will only lead us deeper into them and deeper into their consequences. He comes to show us a different path: the path of resurrection, the via vitae. He comes to show us that our woundedness can make us a source of life and love for others. He comes to show us that our woundedness can turn us towards our brothers and sisters. He comes to show us that our woundedness can open our hearts to them in compassion. He comes to show us that our woundedness can enlarge our empathy and equip us to attend to others. He comes to show us that in our woundedness lies our resurrection.
He comes so that our scars might blaze with beauty, so that our pain might be changed to salvific love, so that the flow of life from us might be staunched, and so that we might begin to live as he lives.
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrestled with the wounds of isolation, fatigue and depression in his last, Dublin, years: yet, contemplating the resurrection of his wounded Lord, he could write these lines:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
He is risen; we are risen. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The Innocent Blood: Three Addresses for Holy Week, 18, 19 and 20 April 2011
The Innocent Blood: 1
In these addresses for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of Holy Week I will pursue our Lenten theme of the Way of the Cross, and our Lenten emphasis on the Gospel of Matthew, and will reflect each night on a feature of the Passion narrative that is unique to that Gospel. The theme that unites these three addresses is the blood of Jesus and the response that it evokes: hence I have entitled the series ‘The Innocent Blood’.
Tonight we consider Judas Iscariot, and these remarkable verses which are Matthew’s alone:
When Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. He said, ‘I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.’ But they said, ‘What is that to us? See to it yourself.’ Throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself. (Matthew 27: 3-5).
Matthew inserts these verses into the Passion narrative after the trial before the high priest. This has concluded in agreement that Jesus deserves to die, and he is bound and led away to face Pilate. The tide is running against him. His own people have resolved to destroy him, and they are handing him over to the Imperial authority which has the power to realize their resolution.
According to Matthew, Judas sees this and reacts. He returns to the chief priests and elders. He confesses that he has sinned. He acknowledges that Jesus is innocent. He flings down the silver coins that he has received. And he goes and hangs himself.
How are we to understand this reaction? There’s some controversy about the verb that Matthew uses to describe it. He uses , which the New Revised Standard Version translates as ‘repents’. The verb more commonly used for repentance is different: . It’s this that John the Baptist cries when he cries to Israel to repent because the kingdom of heaven is at handIt seems that Matthew interprets Judas’s reaction and Judas’s repentance rather differently.
Judas certainly has a change of heart. He is seized with remorse and acts upon it, declaring his guilt publicly, and giving up the benefit he has accrued. He then commits suicide. This is not an action that Jewish scripture or tradition condemned - think of Samson the judge at the Philistines’ feast or Saul the King after his defeat. In his suicide we perhaps see his atonement, or his attempted atonement, for his sin.
But what Judas does not do is repent with any hope or expectation that he can or will be forgiven. His repentance is despairing. Confronted by innocent blood he declares his past fault. Confronted by innocent blood he cannot glimpse any future. If the kingdom is coming then it holds no place for him, and its king, whose blood is on his hands, will not look mercifully upon him. Judas dies, hating himself, hating what he has become.
That is the first response to the innocent blood that Matthew describes: repentance leading to despair. The repentance to which we are called by the innocent blood of Jesus is of a different character. It leads to life. It is to repent - - because the kingdom of heaven is coming. It is not just an acknowledgement of our sin, but an acknowledgement of our need of forgiveness and an acceptance of the forgiveness we are offered through the innocent blood of Jesus. It is to death that we are called, certainly, but it is also to resurrection.
It’s hard to believe that any good comes out of Judas’s despair, and over the generations the Church has tended to prefer Luke’s dramatic and gory account of an unrepentant death. But Matthew adds these lines:
But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, ‘It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since they are blood money.’ After conferring together, they used them to buy the potter’s field as a place to bury foreigners. For this reason that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, ‘And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of the one on whom a price had been set, on whom some of the people of Israel had set a price, and they gave them for the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me.’ (Matthew 27: 6-10)
Matthew’s is a Gospel written for a Jewish audience; his Jesus describes himself as sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. So we cannot leave this passage without acknowledging that one of the fruits of Judas’s despair is that Gentiles are given a resting place in the City of David. Confronted by innocent blood, even out of despair there comes hope, if not for Judas, then for us.
The Innocent Blood: 2
In these three addresses for Holy Week I am reflecting on three features of the Passion narrative that are unique to Matthew’s Gospel. The theme that unites the three addresses is the blood of Jesus and the response that it evokes. The first considered the despair and death of Judas Iscariot. The second is introduced by the enigmatic figure of Pilate’s wife, who is given a cameo role lasting only one verse:
While he was sitting on the judgement seat, his wife sent word to him, ‘Have nothing to do with that innocent man, for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him.’ (Matthew 27:19)
Dreams have a special place in Matthew’s Gospel. They pepper the famous stories that we tell and re-tell at Christmas-time. Joseph is told in a dream that he should marry Mary; he is told in a dream that he should take his young family to safety in Egypt; he is told in a dream that Herod has died and that it is safe to return to Nazareth. In dreams, God speaks. For Matthew, dreams are a means of divine self-revelation. And in this most Jewish of Gospels God does not confine his self-revelation to the Jews. The wise men, representatives of all the nations of the earth, are told in a dream that they should return to their own country by a different route. So we, Matthew’s audience, can be under no illusion. In Pilate’s wife’s dream God has spoken. God has communicated directly with Gentile power at the very end of Jesus’s life, as he did at its beginning.
The tradition has named her Procla, but in reality we know no more about Pilate’s wife than Matthew tells us in that one verse, and that is not very much. The content of her dream seems clear, though. Jesus is innocent. To shed Jesus’s blood will be to shed innocent blood. The revelation that only dawned on Judas once he had seen his master led away in chains comes to Pilate from God himself through the medium of his wife’s dream. How does Pilate respond when confronted with innocent blood? Matthew tells us:
Now the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowds to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus killed. The governor again said to them, ‘Which of the two do you want me to release for you?’ And they said, ‘Barabbas.’ Pilate said to them, ‘Then what should I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?’ All of them said, ‘Let him be crucified!’ Then he asked, ‘Why, what evil has he done?’ But they shouted all the more, ‘Let him be crucified!’
So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.’ (Matthew 27: 20-24)
There is an ironic parallel between this scene and the scene I considered yesterday. When the desperate Judas returns to the chief priests and elders and confesses “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood” they respond with contempt “What is that to us? See to it yourself”. Now Pilate declares himself innocent of Jesus’s blood and flings their contempt back at them. “See to it yourselves”.
“See to it yourselves”. The remark is surely bravado, the arrogance of the tyrant, the petty haughtiness of the Imperial bureaucrat. Pilate does not, cannot leave the matter to the crowd. What he actually does when confronted with innocent blood is to reach for a basin and wash his hands. Where Judas repents in despair, Pilate steps to one side.
How are we to understand his response? What he wants to do is publicly rid himself of any trace of guilt. Yet it is Pilate who releases Barabbas; it is Pilate who has Jesus flogged; it is Pilate who hands Jesus over to be crucified. Does he not wash his blood-stained hands in vain?
“What, will these hands ne’er be clean? Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand…”
Perhaps Shakespeare had Pilate and his wife in mind when he wrote those lines for the wife of another autocratic ruler.
The innocent blood of Jesus calls Pilate to a decision that is personal, and it calls us to a decision that is personal. Judas chose despair and death instead of forgiveness and hope; Pilate chose injustice and security instead of risk and righteousness. Choosing is a bit uncomfortable for Christians of a tradition which has valued the common life of word, prayer and sacrament. But this is Holy Week and the innocent blood of Jesus confronts us. A compromise, or the Christ? Choose we must.
Under the dark trees, there he stands,
there he stands; shall he not draw my eyes?
I thought I knew a little
how he compels, beyond all things, but now
he stands there in the shadows. It will be
Oh, such a daybreak, such bright morning,
when I wake to see him
as he is.
The Innocent Blood: 3
This is the last of three addresses for Holy Week in which I reflect on three features of the Passion narrative that are unique to Matthew’s Gospel, the theme uniting the three addresses being the blood of Jesus and the response that it evokes. The first address considered the despair and death of Judas Iscariot. The second considered the evasiveness of Pontius Pilate, who ignored the divine prompting of his wife’s dream and washed his hands of Jesus’s blood. This evening I consider the response of the people, the response recorded by Matthew in some of the most notorious words in the Bible.
Then the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’(Matthew 27: 25)
A bitter history of Christian anti-Semitism has drawn its inspiration from these words, a bitter history whose protagonists have heard in them an everlasting curse upon the whole Jewish race. This history has chosen to treat the blood of Jesus in the same way that the Hebrew Scriptures treat the blood of Abel. You will recall that according to the book Genesis Abel’s is the first innocent blood to be spilt upon the earth. He is struck down in the fields by his jealous older brother, Cain, to whom God speaks these words:
‘What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.’ (Genesis 4: 10)
‘Abel’s blood for vengeance pleaded to the skies’, we sing: Abel’s innocent blood calls down recrimination upon the one who has shed it. Ye those Christians (and I use the term loosely) who have over the generations interpreted Jesus’s blood as having the same effect misread the verse itself and neglect the resurrection faith which is our hope.
As to the verse itself, Matthew makes it very clear that the crowd was being stirred up by the Jerusalem hierarchy of chief priests and elders. This hierarchy has sought Jesus’s destruction and is instrumental in its achievement. If the verse is a curse then the hierarchy is the principal candidate for the role of victim. Even if the curse extends to the crowd, the crowd is only a tiny proportion of the Jewish race. And to extend it any farther defies the plain sense of the text. Matthew, writing as he was in the aftermath of the cataclysmic destruction of the Temple in AD 70, no doubt saw in that event the final, desolating outcome of the Temple’s rejection of the Messiah. The curse, if a curse it was, had done its work.
But that is a limited, historical understanding of Matthew’s infamous verse. It can, indeed it must, also be read with the eyes of resurrection faith, and such a reading opens up a different interpretation altogether.
Let us begin by recalling that the blood of the innocent does not always condemn. God’s covenant with the children of Israel is forged on Mount Sinai. At its foot Moses builds an altar, with twelve pillars to represent the twelve tribes. He offers burnt offerings and sacrifices oxen. Half the blood is dashed against the altar; half is dashed on the people. The blood of the innocent victim falls on them not to curse and condemn but to sanction and seal the covenant, to actualize the faithful love of God for his people.
Now, in Pilate’s judgement hall, the children of Israel are once more confronted with innocent blood. It plunges Judas into despair, because he cannot conceive of forgiveness or hope. It prompts Pilate into twisting and turning away from the demands of justice. But the people call for the blood to fall on them. It has perhaps the greatest integrity of the three responses we’ve considered. But what is it that they seek?
In his most recent book Pope Benedict has offered an answer. The eyes of resurrection faith, he writes, allow us to understand that the blood of Jesus is not poured out against anyone; it is poured out for many, for all. Those who call down the blood of Jesus upon themselves immerse themselves in the new covenant that the blood sanctions and seals. But this time the blood is not that of an ox; it is the blood, the life, the love ,of God. These words are not a curse, writes Pope Benedict, but rather redemption, salvation.
He is called Rose of Sharon, for his skin
is clear, his skin is flushed with blood,
his body lovely and exact; how he compels
beyond ten thousand rivals. There he stands,
my friend, the friend of guilt and helplessness,
to steer my hollow body
over the sea.
His blood be on us…
In these addresses for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of Holy Week I will pursue our Lenten theme of the Way of the Cross, and our Lenten emphasis on the Gospel of Matthew, and will reflect each night on a feature of the Passion narrative that is unique to that Gospel. The theme that unites these three addresses is the blood of Jesus and the response that it evokes: hence I have entitled the series ‘The Innocent Blood’.
Tonight we consider Judas Iscariot, and these remarkable verses which are Matthew’s alone:
When Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. He said, ‘I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.’ But they said, ‘What is that to us? See to it yourself.’ Throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself. (Matthew 27: 3-5).
Matthew inserts these verses into the Passion narrative after the trial before the high priest. This has concluded in agreement that Jesus deserves to die, and he is bound and led away to face Pilate. The tide is running against him. His own people have resolved to destroy him, and they are handing him over to the Imperial authority which has the power to realize their resolution.
According to Matthew, Judas sees this and reacts. He returns to the chief priests and elders. He confesses that he has sinned. He acknowledges that Jesus is innocent. He flings down the silver coins that he has received. And he goes and hangs himself.
How are we to understand this reaction? There’s some controversy about the verb that Matthew uses to describe it. He uses , which the New Revised Standard Version translates as ‘repents’. The verb more commonly used for repentance is different: . It’s this that John the Baptist cries when he cries to Israel to repent because the kingdom of heaven is at handIt seems that Matthew interprets Judas’s reaction and Judas’s repentance rather differently.
Judas certainly has a change of heart. He is seized with remorse and acts upon it, declaring his guilt publicly, and giving up the benefit he has accrued. He then commits suicide. This is not an action that Jewish scripture or tradition condemned - think of Samson the judge at the Philistines’ feast or Saul the King after his defeat. In his suicide we perhaps see his atonement, or his attempted atonement, for his sin.
But what Judas does not do is repent with any hope or expectation that he can or will be forgiven. His repentance is despairing. Confronted by innocent blood he declares his past fault. Confronted by innocent blood he cannot glimpse any future. If the kingdom is coming then it holds no place for him, and its king, whose blood is on his hands, will not look mercifully upon him. Judas dies, hating himself, hating what he has become.
That is the first response to the innocent blood that Matthew describes: repentance leading to despair. The repentance to which we are called by the innocent blood of Jesus is of a different character. It leads to life. It is to repent - - because the kingdom of heaven is coming. It is not just an acknowledgement of our sin, but an acknowledgement of our need of forgiveness and an acceptance of the forgiveness we are offered through the innocent blood of Jesus. It is to death that we are called, certainly, but it is also to resurrection.
It’s hard to believe that any good comes out of Judas’s despair, and over the generations the Church has tended to prefer Luke’s dramatic and gory account of an unrepentant death. But Matthew adds these lines:
But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, ‘It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since they are blood money.’ After conferring together, they used them to buy the potter’s field as a place to bury foreigners. For this reason that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, ‘And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of the one on whom a price had been set, on whom some of the people of Israel had set a price, and they gave them for the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me.’ (Matthew 27: 6-10)
Matthew’s is a Gospel written for a Jewish audience; his Jesus describes himself as sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. So we cannot leave this passage without acknowledging that one of the fruits of Judas’s despair is that Gentiles are given a resting place in the City of David. Confronted by innocent blood, even out of despair there comes hope, if not for Judas, then for us.
The Innocent Blood: 2
In these three addresses for Holy Week I am reflecting on three features of the Passion narrative that are unique to Matthew’s Gospel. The theme that unites the three addresses is the blood of Jesus and the response that it evokes. The first considered the despair and death of Judas Iscariot. The second is introduced by the enigmatic figure of Pilate’s wife, who is given a cameo role lasting only one verse:
While he was sitting on the judgement seat, his wife sent word to him, ‘Have nothing to do with that innocent man, for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him.’ (Matthew 27:19)
Dreams have a special place in Matthew’s Gospel. They pepper the famous stories that we tell and re-tell at Christmas-time. Joseph is told in a dream that he should marry Mary; he is told in a dream that he should take his young family to safety in Egypt; he is told in a dream that Herod has died and that it is safe to return to Nazareth. In dreams, God speaks. For Matthew, dreams are a means of divine self-revelation. And in this most Jewish of Gospels God does not confine his self-revelation to the Jews. The wise men, representatives of all the nations of the earth, are told in a dream that they should return to their own country by a different route. So we, Matthew’s audience, can be under no illusion. In Pilate’s wife’s dream God has spoken. God has communicated directly with Gentile power at the very end of Jesus’s life, as he did at its beginning.
The tradition has named her Procla, but in reality we know no more about Pilate’s wife than Matthew tells us in that one verse, and that is not very much. The content of her dream seems clear, though. Jesus is innocent. To shed Jesus’s blood will be to shed innocent blood. The revelation that only dawned on Judas once he had seen his master led away in chains comes to Pilate from God himself through the medium of his wife’s dream. How does Pilate respond when confronted with innocent blood? Matthew tells us:
Now the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowds to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus killed. The governor again said to them, ‘Which of the two do you want me to release for you?’ And they said, ‘Barabbas.’ Pilate said to them, ‘Then what should I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?’ All of them said, ‘Let him be crucified!’ Then he asked, ‘Why, what evil has he done?’ But they shouted all the more, ‘Let him be crucified!’
So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.’ (Matthew 27: 20-24)
There is an ironic parallel between this scene and the scene I considered yesterday. When the desperate Judas returns to the chief priests and elders and confesses “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood” they respond with contempt “What is that to us? See to it yourself”. Now Pilate declares himself innocent of Jesus’s blood and flings their contempt back at them. “See to it yourselves”.
“See to it yourselves”. The remark is surely bravado, the arrogance of the tyrant, the petty haughtiness of the Imperial bureaucrat. Pilate does not, cannot leave the matter to the crowd. What he actually does when confronted with innocent blood is to reach for a basin and wash his hands. Where Judas repents in despair, Pilate steps to one side.
How are we to understand his response? What he wants to do is publicly rid himself of any trace of guilt. Yet it is Pilate who releases Barabbas; it is Pilate who has Jesus flogged; it is Pilate who hands Jesus over to be crucified. Does he not wash his blood-stained hands in vain?
“What, will these hands ne’er be clean? Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand…”
Perhaps Shakespeare had Pilate and his wife in mind when he wrote those lines for the wife of another autocratic ruler.
The innocent blood of Jesus calls Pilate to a decision that is personal, and it calls us to a decision that is personal. Judas chose despair and death instead of forgiveness and hope; Pilate chose injustice and security instead of risk and righteousness. Choosing is a bit uncomfortable for Christians of a tradition which has valued the common life of word, prayer and sacrament. But this is Holy Week and the innocent blood of Jesus confronts us. A compromise, or the Christ? Choose we must.
Under the dark trees, there he stands,
there he stands; shall he not draw my eyes?
I thought I knew a little
how he compels, beyond all things, but now
he stands there in the shadows. It will be
Oh, such a daybreak, such bright morning,
when I wake to see him
as he is.
The Innocent Blood: 3
This is the last of three addresses for Holy Week in which I reflect on three features of the Passion narrative that are unique to Matthew’s Gospel, the theme uniting the three addresses being the blood of Jesus and the response that it evokes. The first address considered the despair and death of Judas Iscariot. The second considered the evasiveness of Pontius Pilate, who ignored the divine prompting of his wife’s dream and washed his hands of Jesus’s blood. This evening I consider the response of the people, the response recorded by Matthew in some of the most notorious words in the Bible.
Then the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’(Matthew 27: 25)
A bitter history of Christian anti-Semitism has drawn its inspiration from these words, a bitter history whose protagonists have heard in them an everlasting curse upon the whole Jewish race. This history has chosen to treat the blood of Jesus in the same way that the Hebrew Scriptures treat the blood of Abel. You will recall that according to the book Genesis Abel’s is the first innocent blood to be spilt upon the earth. He is struck down in the fields by his jealous older brother, Cain, to whom God speaks these words:
‘What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.’ (Genesis 4: 10)
‘Abel’s blood for vengeance pleaded to the skies’, we sing: Abel’s innocent blood calls down recrimination upon the one who has shed it. Ye those Christians (and I use the term loosely) who have over the generations interpreted Jesus’s blood as having the same effect misread the verse itself and neglect the resurrection faith which is our hope.
As to the verse itself, Matthew makes it very clear that the crowd was being stirred up by the Jerusalem hierarchy of chief priests and elders. This hierarchy has sought Jesus’s destruction and is instrumental in its achievement. If the verse is a curse then the hierarchy is the principal candidate for the role of victim. Even if the curse extends to the crowd, the crowd is only a tiny proportion of the Jewish race. And to extend it any farther defies the plain sense of the text. Matthew, writing as he was in the aftermath of the cataclysmic destruction of the Temple in AD 70, no doubt saw in that event the final, desolating outcome of the Temple’s rejection of the Messiah. The curse, if a curse it was, had done its work.
But that is a limited, historical understanding of Matthew’s infamous verse. It can, indeed it must, also be read with the eyes of resurrection faith, and such a reading opens up a different interpretation altogether.
Let us begin by recalling that the blood of the innocent does not always condemn. God’s covenant with the children of Israel is forged on Mount Sinai. At its foot Moses builds an altar, with twelve pillars to represent the twelve tribes. He offers burnt offerings and sacrifices oxen. Half the blood is dashed against the altar; half is dashed on the people. The blood of the innocent victim falls on them not to curse and condemn but to sanction and seal the covenant, to actualize the faithful love of God for his people.
Now, in Pilate’s judgement hall, the children of Israel are once more confronted with innocent blood. It plunges Judas into despair, because he cannot conceive of forgiveness or hope. It prompts Pilate into twisting and turning away from the demands of justice. But the people call for the blood to fall on them. It has perhaps the greatest integrity of the three responses we’ve considered. But what is it that they seek?
In his most recent book Pope Benedict has offered an answer. The eyes of resurrection faith, he writes, allow us to understand that the blood of Jesus is not poured out against anyone; it is poured out for many, for all. Those who call down the blood of Jesus upon themselves immerse themselves in the new covenant that the blood sanctions and seals. But this time the blood is not that of an ox; it is the blood, the life, the love ,of God. These words are not a curse, writes Pope Benedict, but rather redemption, salvation.
He is called Rose of Sharon, for his skin
is clear, his skin is flushed with blood,
his body lovely and exact; how he compels
beyond ten thousand rivals. There he stands,
my friend, the friend of guilt and helplessness,
to steer my hollow body
over the sea.
His blood be on us…
Monday, 14 March 2011
Sunday 13 March 2011, 1st of Lent, Evensong (Westminster Abbey)
An extract from the Parish Magazine of St Peter’s Eaton Square, dated Lent 1911:
“A ‘Quiet Day’ was held at St Peter’s by the Vicar, on Thursday, the 23rd. The timetable was as follows: Holy Communion, 8.30 am; Mattins, 10.30 am; Addresses, 11 am, 3 and 4.45 pm; Special Intercession for the Parish , 12.30 pm. Evensong at 5.30 formed a fitting close to the day. The attendance, especially considering the weather, was very good and well maintained throughout the day.”
It’s reassuring to know that some things never change. I’m not just referring to the weather. The intensity of the worship and preaching which my illustrious predecessor as Vicar of St Peter’s, John Storrs, offered to the faithful in Lent certainly gives the lie to the suspicion that Victorian religion in Westminster was all about social convention. Ten hours, four services and three sermons: not for the faint-hearted, but not what the day was billed as, either. Ten hours, four services and three sermons do not a Quiet Day make. They ad up to an extremely active day. My point is that the weather never changes and our compulsion to pack Lent with activity, whether it’s un-quiet Quiet Days, worthy books, sermon series, or study groups, never changes either. This morning I promoted 2011’s Lent programme at St Peter’s just as John Storrs must have done 1911’s Lent programme one hundred years ago, and they don’t look so very different.
Of course, books and sermon series and study groups are good, and I hope that what’s being offered at St Peter’s (and I’m sure what’s being offered at the Abbey) will nurture the disciples of Jesus Christ in their faith. However it will fail to do so if it encourages us to believe that faith is equivalent to religious activity. It will fail to do so if it encourages us to believe that we can read, listen or attend our way to eternal redemption.
There is no more active word in the vocabulary of faith than the verb ‘to repent’, ‘’ in the Gospel-writer’s Greek. To repent is not simply to change your mind or adjust your preference. It’s to turn away. In early Christian liturgy candidates for Baptism were asked whether they repented, and they would turn to give their answers, demonstrating through their physical posture the fundamental re-orientation of their lives. So how strange it is that, in Saint Luke’s record of stories told to illustrate the nature of repentance, Jesus chooses as his subjects a lost sheep and a lost coin. The latter is an inanimate object capable of no activity at all, be it physical, intellectual or emotional, and the former is a notoriously stupid animal capable of the first of those but not, frankly, of much else. Neither can conceivably repent in the active sense that the verb demands. The activity in the stories is all their owners. Clearly, there’s a different way of understanding repentance.
The lost sheep does nothing except to wander in the wilderness. Yet nothing can keep the shepherd from his charge, and when he finds it he carries it home rejoicing, and calls his friends to party. It’s not the only party in this passage. There’s another in the home of the woman whose coin is lost and who lights the lamp, sweeps the house and searches high and low until it is found. The stories paint a picture of a God who does not wait to be approached, but who goes out eagerly looking for each one of us, and who will not rest while any is lost. And they paint a picture of repentance which consists less of our activity, and more of our inactivity, of our being found by God. Of course, we have to be willing to be found. If we are bent on hiding ourselves from his eyes, or blocking our ears to his call, or fleeing wildly from his embrace then we will not be. But our redemption is God’s activity, not ours.
Many of us will be very active this Lent. It’s simply how the disciples of Jesus Christ are. But as we absorb ourselves in study groups, fill our ears with sermons and concentrate our minds on books we might just ask whether our activity will allow God to find us, or whether it will keep God at a safe distance. We might ponder the commandment that Moses put before the Israelites. ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might’. It’s the commandment that Jesus called the greatest. But perhaps it’s rather easier to love our Lenten diaries and our Lenten programmes. Perhaps it’s rather easier to love our activity. Perhaps. Amen.
“A ‘Quiet Day’ was held at St Peter’s by the Vicar, on Thursday, the 23rd. The timetable was as follows: Holy Communion, 8.30 am; Mattins, 10.30 am; Addresses, 11 am, 3 and 4.45 pm; Special Intercession for the Parish , 12.30 pm. Evensong at 5.30 formed a fitting close to the day. The attendance, especially considering the weather, was very good and well maintained throughout the day.”
It’s reassuring to know that some things never change. I’m not just referring to the weather. The intensity of the worship and preaching which my illustrious predecessor as Vicar of St Peter’s, John Storrs, offered to the faithful in Lent certainly gives the lie to the suspicion that Victorian religion in Westminster was all about social convention. Ten hours, four services and three sermons: not for the faint-hearted, but not what the day was billed as, either. Ten hours, four services and three sermons do not a Quiet Day make. They ad up to an extremely active day. My point is that the weather never changes and our compulsion to pack Lent with activity, whether it’s un-quiet Quiet Days, worthy books, sermon series, or study groups, never changes either. This morning I promoted 2011’s Lent programme at St Peter’s just as John Storrs must have done 1911’s Lent programme one hundred years ago, and they don’t look so very different.
Of course, books and sermon series and study groups are good, and I hope that what’s being offered at St Peter’s (and I’m sure what’s being offered at the Abbey) will nurture the disciples of Jesus Christ in their faith. However it will fail to do so if it encourages us to believe that faith is equivalent to religious activity. It will fail to do so if it encourages us to believe that we can read, listen or attend our way to eternal redemption.
There is no more active word in the vocabulary of faith than the verb ‘to repent’, ‘’ in the Gospel-writer’s Greek. To repent is not simply to change your mind or adjust your preference. It’s to turn away. In early Christian liturgy candidates for Baptism were asked whether they repented, and they would turn to give their answers, demonstrating through their physical posture the fundamental re-orientation of their lives. So how strange it is that, in Saint Luke’s record of stories told to illustrate the nature of repentance, Jesus chooses as his subjects a lost sheep and a lost coin. The latter is an inanimate object capable of no activity at all, be it physical, intellectual or emotional, and the former is a notoriously stupid animal capable of the first of those but not, frankly, of much else. Neither can conceivably repent in the active sense that the verb demands. The activity in the stories is all their owners. Clearly, there’s a different way of understanding repentance.
The lost sheep does nothing except to wander in the wilderness. Yet nothing can keep the shepherd from his charge, and when he finds it he carries it home rejoicing, and calls his friends to party. It’s not the only party in this passage. There’s another in the home of the woman whose coin is lost and who lights the lamp, sweeps the house and searches high and low until it is found. The stories paint a picture of a God who does not wait to be approached, but who goes out eagerly looking for each one of us, and who will not rest while any is lost. And they paint a picture of repentance which consists less of our activity, and more of our inactivity, of our being found by God. Of course, we have to be willing to be found. If we are bent on hiding ourselves from his eyes, or blocking our ears to his call, or fleeing wildly from his embrace then we will not be. But our redemption is God’s activity, not ours.
Many of us will be very active this Lent. It’s simply how the disciples of Jesus Christ are. But as we absorb ourselves in study groups, fill our ears with sermons and concentrate our minds on books we might just ask whether our activity will allow God to find us, or whether it will keep God at a safe distance. We might ponder the commandment that Moses put before the Israelites. ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might’. It’s the commandment that Jesus called the greatest. But perhaps it’s rather easier to love our Lenten diaries and our Lenten programmes. Perhaps it’s rather easier to love our activity. Perhaps. Amen.
Friday, 11 March 2011
Ash Wednesday, 9 March 2011
At last week’s Annual Parochial Church Meeting I spoke of my interest in the gym. It’s not purely a personal interest, although part of the Lenten regime that I’m aspiring to is a more rigorous use of my own membership. I went at lunchtime which is why I’m looking the picture of health tonight. It’s an interest in the reality that gym membership is booming while church membership is not.
I attribute this to three words beginning with ‘P’ at which gyms excel. They have a clear purpose; they offer a clear programme; and they make a clear promise – they promise that if their members follow the programme they’ll achieve the purpose. I told the APCM that I believe that the Church needs to get better at articulating its purpose, its purpose of forming disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of God’s world. It needs constantly to shape its programme to meet that purpose; and it needs to rediscover its confidence in promising that that through faithfulness to the programme that purpose will be achieved.
This is abundantly true in the season we enter today. Lent’s purpose is the formation of disciples; Lent offers a programme; and Lent makes a promise. This is reflected in our liturgy. The Introduction has placed before us the programme. It’s of ‘self-examination and repentance…prayer, fasting and self-denial…reading and meditating on God’s holy word’. It promises that ‘By carefully keeping these days’, that is, by following this programme, we will ‘grow in faith and in devotion to our Lord’. The Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer will express our hope that through Lent’s pilgrimage of prayer and discipline ‘we may grow in grace and learn to be your people once again’. And in the Post-Communion Prayer we will pledge ourselves to follow daily ‘the blessed steps’ of Christ’s most holy life.
That is why Lent’s theme at St Peter’s this year is Via Crucis: Via Vitae. The Way of the Cross is not a way of life, like veganism, Freemasonry or caravanning, but the Way of Life. It’s not just that we will be privileged to host a performance of Liszt’s work for piano and choir on Sunday 10 April – although as it features Leslie Howard and our Choir under Andrew’s direction I would advise you strenuously not to miss it. It’s that in the Way of the Cross, in the last hours before Jesus’s crucifixion, we discover for our discipleship what the Atkins diet is for slimmers or what British Military Fitness is for those strange individuals who enjoy running round Wandsworth Common while being shouted at. We discover the programme, the model, the pattern, that we are called to follow.
It is a pattern that we will enter into and inhabit on Tuesday evenings throughout Lent. Using the building, its grounds, and the garden of Eaton Square we will walk with Jesus from the Garden of Gethsemane to Pilate’s judgement hall, from Calvary to the empty tomb. We will hear the story told again and again, and we will pray for ourselves and for the world to which the Way shows the way. In a series of addresses followed by meditations on the organ we will ponder the disciplines that the Way requires of us, the disciplines of prayer and worship, of study and service. Then on Sunday mornings our preachers will bring alive for us the virtues which will flourish if we are faithful to the Way. These are not Virtues with a capital ‘V’, a notion so redolent of Sunday School Victoriana, but the hard-won, costly virtues of trust, of justice and forgiveness, of solidarity and hope. It is these that will transform God’s world, a world in critical need of more trust, more justice, more forgiveness, more solidarity and more hope.
And the Way begins tonight with a cross of ash inscribed on our foreheads. Ash serves as a sign of our acknowledgement of our sin and of our contrition at our sin: so ash does for us what that first run or first tomato juice sometimes does for potential gym members. Ash signals our willingness to change and be changed. Ash also reminds us that we are mortal and that one day we will die: so ash also does for us what health scares and encroaching middle-age sometimes do for actual gym members. Ash spurs us on to change and to be changed, to allow God not to remove our mortality but to transfigure it, so that our every pore shines with divine light.
Via Crucis. We follow in the footsteps of Jesus. We tread where he trod. Through prayer, worship, study and service we are formed as his disciples; through the love, hope and forgiveness that flow from us God’s world will be transformed. Amen to that.
I attribute this to three words beginning with ‘P’ at which gyms excel. They have a clear purpose; they offer a clear programme; and they make a clear promise – they promise that if their members follow the programme they’ll achieve the purpose. I told the APCM that I believe that the Church needs to get better at articulating its purpose, its purpose of forming disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of God’s world. It needs constantly to shape its programme to meet that purpose; and it needs to rediscover its confidence in promising that that through faithfulness to the programme that purpose will be achieved.
This is abundantly true in the season we enter today. Lent’s purpose is the formation of disciples; Lent offers a programme; and Lent makes a promise. This is reflected in our liturgy. The Introduction has placed before us the programme. It’s of ‘self-examination and repentance…prayer, fasting and self-denial…reading and meditating on God’s holy word’. It promises that ‘By carefully keeping these days’, that is, by following this programme, we will ‘grow in faith and in devotion to our Lord’. The Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer will express our hope that through Lent’s pilgrimage of prayer and discipline ‘we may grow in grace and learn to be your people once again’. And in the Post-Communion Prayer we will pledge ourselves to follow daily ‘the blessed steps’ of Christ’s most holy life.
That is why Lent’s theme at St Peter’s this year is Via Crucis: Via Vitae. The Way of the Cross is not a way of life, like veganism, Freemasonry or caravanning, but the Way of Life. It’s not just that we will be privileged to host a performance of Liszt’s work for piano and choir on Sunday 10 April – although as it features Leslie Howard and our Choir under Andrew’s direction I would advise you strenuously not to miss it. It’s that in the Way of the Cross, in the last hours before Jesus’s crucifixion, we discover for our discipleship what the Atkins diet is for slimmers or what British Military Fitness is for those strange individuals who enjoy running round Wandsworth Common while being shouted at. We discover the programme, the model, the pattern, that we are called to follow.
It is a pattern that we will enter into and inhabit on Tuesday evenings throughout Lent. Using the building, its grounds, and the garden of Eaton Square we will walk with Jesus from the Garden of Gethsemane to Pilate’s judgement hall, from Calvary to the empty tomb. We will hear the story told again and again, and we will pray for ourselves and for the world to which the Way shows the way. In a series of addresses followed by meditations on the organ we will ponder the disciplines that the Way requires of us, the disciplines of prayer and worship, of study and service. Then on Sunday mornings our preachers will bring alive for us the virtues which will flourish if we are faithful to the Way. These are not Virtues with a capital ‘V’, a notion so redolent of Sunday School Victoriana, but the hard-won, costly virtues of trust, of justice and forgiveness, of solidarity and hope. It is these that will transform God’s world, a world in critical need of more trust, more justice, more forgiveness, more solidarity and more hope.
And the Way begins tonight with a cross of ash inscribed on our foreheads. Ash serves as a sign of our acknowledgement of our sin and of our contrition at our sin: so ash does for us what that first run or first tomato juice sometimes does for potential gym members. Ash signals our willingness to change and be changed. Ash also reminds us that we are mortal and that one day we will die: so ash also does for us what health scares and encroaching middle-age sometimes do for actual gym members. Ash spurs us on to change and to be changed, to allow God not to remove our mortality but to transfigure it, so that our every pore shines with divine light.
Via Crucis. We follow in the footsteps of Jesus. We tread where he trod. Through prayer, worship, study and service we are formed as his disciples; through the love, hope and forgiveness that flow from us God’s world will be transformed. Amen to that.
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