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Christmas Day

25 DECEMBER

Isaiah 52.7–10; Hebrews 1.1–4 (5–12); John 1.1–14

1. THE WORD OF NO FIXED ABODE

‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.’ We should translate the text literally, though few modern versions have the nerve to do so. ‘The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.’ The verb John uses sends us back to Old Testament stories of the God who chose to share the itinerant life of his nomadic people. ‘The cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle’ (Exodus 40.34). The reality of camping is rarely as blissful as it seems in prospect or retrospect – I think of a certain sodden field above Morecambe – and the wilderness wanderings of the children of Israel were far from idyllic. Nevertheless those years came to be seen by the people of Israel as the honeymoon period of their relationship with God. That’s how it should be between God and his people, sharing a journey, together under canvas and under the stars. Stephen saw that and said so – ‘The Most High does not dwell in houses made with human hands’ – and he was stoned for his pains (Acts 7.48). So there can be no more glorious a promise than Hosea’s, ‘I will make you live in tents again’ (Hosea 12.9).

‘The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.’ John’s language invites us to have second thoughts about the familiar Christmas stories. Joseph and Mary ‘great with child’ have to make the arduous journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. There they must bed down as best they can in the byre, where soon Mary’s child is born. There they are visited by shepherds, whiffy outsiders who are probably no better housed than their sheep. Astrologers from the back of beyond turn up, led on their long safari by a wandering star. While the child is still a toddler they are on the move again, this time to Egypt. As the Victorian matron remarked, ‘How very different from the home life of our dear Queen!’

We speak at Christmas of all that seems bizarre about the birth of Jesus. But if we read these stories again in the light of John’s interpretation of what took place when Christ was born, we find that they say something rather different. The strange circumstances of this child’s birth do not set him apart from those of us who were not born in a cattle trough. On the contrary, they identify him with us. It is precisely our condition that this child is born to share. I am essentially a nomad, even if I have lived for seventy years in the same semi-detached house in Sidcup. Human beings were wandering the earth for tens of thousands of years before they settled in caves and in penthouses costing millions. The security of the roof over our heads is wholly illusory. If God had wanted us to stay in the same place he would have given us roots, not legs.

On Christmas Day we read the first few verses of the letter to the Hebrews. Were there time, we should read the eleventh chapter as well. For the anonymous writer, Christians are those who recognize that they are ‘strangers and foreigners on earth’, that they are Bedouin with no need of buildings. So it was for Abraham who ‘set out not knowing where he was going’. So it was for all those who looked for Christ’s day but who did not live to see it. So it is for us who, surrounded by these witnesses, try to follow their example. Whatever our address, we are a people with no permanent home. That ‘homelessness’, so far from depriving us of our humanity, constitutes it. We may be on the road for a long time yet, so we must ‘lay aside every weight’ (Hebrews 12.1) – surely a text for the day in the year when we put so much more weight on.

When we read that ‘the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’ (Luke 9.58) we may feel sorry for him. If so, we miss the point. (As does the weepy carol, ‘Thou didst leave thy throne and thy kingly crown when thou camest to earth for me.’) The famous text is not there to arouse our pity. Beneath Luke’s haunting words is the same Christmas truth taught by John, that the boy born in a byre shares the essential vulnerability and insecurity of our human condition, however swanky are the houses we like to think are ours. In two miraculous lines Henry Vaughan goes to the heart of the Christmas story:

He travels to be born, and then

Is born to travel more again.

(‘The Nativity’)

An unnecessary footnote. To recognize that, wherever we live, we have ‘no fixed abode’ is no reason for refusing shelter to the homeless. Nor is it a reason to ignore the plight of those, massed in their thousands in our planet’s countless refugee camps, whose ‘tents’ are plastic sheets on sticks.

2. THE STRANGLED TOWN OF BETHLEHEM

What we make of the Bible depends on where we read or hear it. Take the words with which the Prologue of St John’s Gospel comes to its tremendous climax – ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (John 1.14). Supposing we hear these words in an English parish church, as the Gospel at Midnight Mass or as the final reading at a service of lessons and carols. The words may well move us deeply yet still say very little. It is not that they are too familiar. It is that they don’t connect. The great text hangs in the air, echoing high in the nave like the last notes of one of the carols we’ve been singing, but without engaging with the world beyond the church walls. But supposing this Christmas – this Christmas – we go to Bethlehem, to that ‘strangled’ little town as it has been called. Supposing we hear those climactic words in a town now encircled by walls and fences which threaten its very survival as a community. If we stop off in Bethlehem to hear John’s account of the conditions under which our gentle Lord consented to be born, we’ll make the necessary connection. (Online assistance is available for such imaginative journeys. Visit www.openbethlehem.org.)

Bethlehem is suffering what Christ suffered. Charles Wesley – his words more often cited than sung these days – talks of ‘Our God contracted to a span’. For George Herbert, the true light coming into the world was ‘glorious yet contracted light’ (‘Christmas’). It’s all about confinement and contractions. The resonances of such imagery when we’re celebrating the birth of a baby are inescapable. But for the poets, as for John, the emphasis is on the constraints of the incarnation in all its aspects. The Word made flesh is the poet Crashaw’s ‘Eternity shut in a span’ (‘In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord’).

Bethlehem too is ‘shut in a span’. Its imprisonment is iniquitous, but grimly apposite to the events over which our writer broods. The Word becomes flesh. Becoming flesh, he becomes all flesh is heir to. Pious tourists used to tut-tut about the tat marketed in Bethlehem’s Manger Square. They objected to the commercialization of a holy place. But that’s flesh for you. And in the likeness of such ‘sinful flesh’ (Romans 8.3) love came down.

Now the tourists and the tat are almost gone and we redirect our anger. We protest rightly that Bethlehem is being throttled, that the life of a once thriving community is being slowly extinguished. But that too – what stranglers inflict and the strangled suffer – is flesh, the flesh our Lord makes his own. Bethlehem struggles to breathe. It was asphyxia, the commentators tell us, that killed Jesus. The beleaguered little town proves a fitting birthplace for the one who bears the worst about us.

The last time I went there was by local bus. We were turned off the bus at gun-point and lined along the side while they checked our papers. That’s flesh too. The space where the Word ‘pitches his tent’, his ‘pad’ as one theologian has recently called it, is a pitifully narrow enclosure. Such are the conditions – those they know about in Bethlehem – which Christ endures. Yet, according to John, it is these most unpropitious conditions which allow his glory to be seen. John delights in such contradictions. The contrasting strands are woven through his Gospel – light and darkness, life and death, truth and falsehood.

Glory suffuses this Gospel. Here a baby’s flesh is bathed in it. But for John that glory will be at its most radiant when, so the other Gospels say, the sky turned black.

‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.’ What we make of the text depends on where we are. For too many of us where we are is in front of a computer screen. ‘The Word’ for us is ‘Word for Windows’. Not the word of wisdom, not the word which addresses us personally and establishes a relationship. Not the word incarnated but the word digitized. An imaginative leap greater than that which takes us to Bethlehem is needed to return to a time when the supreme purpose of words was to let us talk to each other face to face.

The Prologue to John’s Gospel harks back to the account of creation at the start of the Bible. That story too begins with a spoken word. The repeated ‘God said . . .’ is a command. God said – and it was done. But it is above all a bidding inviting a response. The invitation is to conversation and companionship. ‘Let’s be friends.’ That is what words are for and that is what the Word is for. The Word become flesh embodies the invitation made to Adam, to walk and talk with God.

3. THE BORN OUTSIDER

Jesus is born outside, just as he dies outside. The door of the inn closes on the one about to be born, just as the gates of the city close on the one about to die. The opposition of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is present throughout the Gospel story. Jesus is never found ‘inside’, where it’s safe and comfortable. He is neither Pharisee nor Sadducee, neither Essene nor Zealot. There is no party to protect him or to promote his cause. Those who go to him must ‘go out’ to him, forfeiting the security which ordinary human associations – including families – provide. Some households briefly shelter him. Perhaps they try to hold him ‘inside’, to curb his compulsion always to be on his way somewhere else. But the one who, as on this day, ‘pitched his tent’ among us (John 1.14) can never make anywhere his permanent home. The Son of Man, with nowhere to lay his head, is always ‘outside’.

This polarity of outside and inside is starkest in the accounts of his passion, where ‘Christ outside’ stands over against the scheming inner-circles around Caiaphas, Pilate and Herod. Finally he perishes ‘outside the camp’, in that waste land where, abandoning all transitory securities, we are summoned to follow him (Hebrews 13.12–13).

This tension between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is acute in the story of the birth of Jesus. He is born outside, with the despised and rejected; outside, where all must go who are not wanted. The ones inside Luke’s inhospitable inn, those described by John as Christ’s ‘own’ (John 1.11), do not receive him. No doubt it’s warm inside, but Mary and Joseph are left out in the cold. Christians, at least in the West, have always taken it that Christ was born in winter. In fact we have no idea at what time of the year he was born. But that he was born ‘in the bleak mid-winter’ is a truth about the nature of Christ’s coming, whatever the date of the first Christmas. It was cold outside, whatever the temperature. R. S. Thomas comments, ‘The very word Christ has that thin crisp sound so suggestive of frost and snow and the small sheets of ice that crack and splinter under our feet, even as the host is broken in the priest’s fingers’ (Selected Prose, Welsh Poetry Press, 1983). In a late poem, Thomas says of Christmas, ‘Love knocks with such frosted fingers’ (‘Blind Noel’, in No Truce with the Furies, Bloodaxe Books, 1995).

It’s cold outside. It’s dark too. We’re told that the shepherds, like Nicodemus, come to Jesus by night, but we do not know whether it was at night that he was born. But, as with the season, so with the hour. Night, like winter, befits his coming. The light shines in the darkness. The poets understand these things. ‘While mortals sleep, the angels keep their watch of wondering love.’ There is a history behind this story – Luke insists on that – but the truth of the nativity is in its poetry, not its prose. Jesus made our night-time his, as he made our winter.

Jesus is born outside and it is outsiders who find their way to him. The shepherds’ home, such as it is, is the hillside, but their ‘outside’ status is more than a matter of where they live. Shepherds, like the silly sheep they tend, are Sabbath-breakers, and as such are condemned by the pious. The magi come to Christ out of the desert. They were never at home in their summer palaces ‘with the silken girls bringing sherbet’ (‘The Journey of the Magi’, T. S. Eliot). Matthew will contrast these pilgrim spirits with the paranoid Herod. Outside they watch the stars. Inside, he can only watch his back (Matthew 2.1–18).

Where is Christ this Christmas? Inside or outside? At St Martin-in-the-Fields we erected a Christmas crib in ‘the courts of the temple’, in the market by the church, where they sold boxer shorts emblazoned with the Union Jack. The curate’s flat, my home for five years, overlooked this market. I looked out of my window one Christmas morning to see that, in the night, the baby Jesus had been turfed out of his crib. In his place, curled up in the straw, was a ‘rough sleeper’, one of London’s homeless.

At midnight mass we place the figure of the newborn Christ in the crib. We welcome him into our houses of prayer. We ask Jesus in. In some of our churches his presence inside our four walls continues to be affirmed long after the crib is taken down. The gentle light in the sanctuary says, ‘There he is. God is with us.’ So has Christ come ‘inside’ at last? If he has, it is only to break down the barriers we still build, in Church and society, between the included and the excluded. The distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ was drawn when Adam was driven out of Eden. Christmas signals its destruction.

The Epiphany of the Lord

6 JANUARY

Isaiah 60.1–6; Ephesians 3.1–12; Matthew 2.1–12

WHO IS MANIFESTING CHRIST TO WHOM?

In the Uffizi Gallery in Florence there is an unfinished painting by Leonardo da Vinci depicting the Adoration of the Magi. Behind the magi, behind the child and his mother, there is ruin, confusion and conflict. Stone stairs in broken buildings lead to empty space. Distracted figures ignore the momentous event unfolding nearby. Horsemen struggle to control their terrified rearing mounts. No doubt Leonardo wishes to suggest the collapse of the pagan world, but his treatment of the story reflects Matthew’s. The backdrop to the Gospel-writer’s story is as dark as that drawn by the artist. A vicious tyrant rules. Innocent blood will soon be shed. Christ is born in a world awry. As at the passion of Jesus, so it is at his birth. Those in authority, both in Church and in state, dread the one who, were he to reign, would put down the mighty.

The obduracy of Jerusalem is contrasted with the openness of the East. Matthew audaciously turns a traditional theme – the haplessness of heathen quackery – on its head. Those who search the stars are more responsive to this new thing God has done than those who search the scriptures. It is as if the Egyptian magicians had outdone Joseph (Genesis 41) or Nebuchadnezzar’s enchanters had got the better of Daniel (Daniel 4). T. S. Eliot, whose ‘Journey of the Magi’ is quoted from a thousand pulpits at Epiphany, has another account, less often cited, of the kind of characters these magi are. They are those who, ‘communicate with Mars, converse with spirits, report the behaviour of the sea monster, describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry’ (Four Quartets). The first magi may have come from Persia. Today they’d set out from Glastonbury. We’d be appalled by their New Age superstitions and give them a lot of stick.

Matthew sees the magi as the first of that great company of pilgrims from all the nations who at the last day will come to yield obeisance and obedience to this child. They are the forerunners of the many who ‘will come from east and west’ to feast at the messianic banquet (Matthew 8.11–12). They are the first of the kings of the earth to bring their glory into the City of God (Revelation 21.24). If there are trumpets in church this Epiphany, let them sound a fanfare before the tremendous Old Testament reading. ‘Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn’ (Isaiah 60.3).

But – big ‘but’ – our triumphalism needs to be tempered.

At this season I am troubled by a memory. I took the train out of Khartoum and got off at the little village of Kubushaya. On one side of the tracks were fields and the Nile. On the other side desert and, on the horizon, crumbling pyramids. I set off for the pyramids, very foolishly, in the midday sun. The pyramids are all that is left of Meroe, the capital of biblical Ethiopia. The queen of Meroe was the ‘Candace’ whose steward Philip met in the desert and whom he baptized (Acts 8.26–40). To this sumptuous court, now nothing but sand and broken stones, the steward returned with the Christian gospel. I reached the pyramids and collapsed. Mercifully, out of that apparently empty desert, someone appeared. A man on a camel. He had compassion on me. All these years later I remember the love in his eyes. He put me on his own beast and brought me to an inn – or at least back to the railway station. The date was the 6th of January, the Feast of the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.

There is no church in Meroe today and my Good Samaritan was a Muslim. Who on that distant day, I wonder, was manifesting Christ to whom? And as we Anglicans bicker and posture, what kind of a clouded epiphany are we offering to today’s ‘Gentiles’?

And what of the wise men’s gifts? It is unlikely that Matthew meant each one to mean something, but of course what Matthew meant no longer matters. Matthew entrusts his marvellous story to us to make of it what we will. That is not to say that any interpretation goes. It is to insist that such an inexhaustibly suggestive story requires imaginative reading. So, yes, we may see gold as a tribute to a king, incense as a present for our great high priest, and myrrh as a grim gift for one who must suffer and die. But such interpretations are all too familiar.

I hope that one day I’ll have another opportunity to produce a Christmas play I wrote long ago with the title ‘The cactus, the cuckoo-clock, and the big red balloon’. The point of that frolic was to reflect laterally on an entirely serious question. ‘What can I give him, poor as I am?’

The Presentation of Christ in the Temple

2 FEBRUARY

Malachi 3.1–5; Hebrews 2.14–18; Luke 2.22–40

UNCOMFORTING CONSOLATION

We tend to treat the Nunc Dimittis – Simeon’s song with the infant Jesus in his arms – like a mug of Ovaltine, as a nightcap guaranteeing a good night’s sleep. It’s what we sing at Evensong when the day’s work’s done and at Compline when it’s time for bed. The familiar cadences are like gentle lullabies, easing us into dreamless slumber.

‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’ Simeon is satisfied that all he has longed for is now fulfilled in the child in his arms. He’s an old man. His life is now as light as a feather on the back of his hand and one puff of wind will blow it away (‘A Song for Simeon’, T. S. Eliot). Now he can contentedly take his leave in the sure knowledge that his saviour has come. As we sing his words we catch his mood and our own worries begin to drain away. All’s well. We can curl up and go to sleep.

Simeon, we read, was looking forward to ‘the consolation of Israel’. This term was used to describe the Messianic age. It takes up the cry by which an unnamed prophet announced his message of hope to the exiles in Babylon, ‘Comfort, comfort, my people’ (Isaiah 40.1). Simeon had craved that promised comfort. Now salvation is in sight, not only for his own people but for the Gentiles too. Now at last he can go to God with a serene heart.

But if our impression of Simeon himself is of a contented figure with an unequivocally comforting message, then we’ve mistaken our man. We have sung his song too often and with too little regard to its setting. ‘The Song of Simeon’ ceases to sound like soothing mood-music if we return it to its context and take account of what he actually says about the child he is holding. His words to Mary paint a darker picture. People believed that the promised ‘consolation’ would follow the path mapped by the prophet. Theirs would be the destiny he had foretold. They too would rise in triumph from bitter servitude. For them too the wilderness would rejoice and the desert blossom. They too would exult over their oppressors, who would watch this mighty act of God in abject awe.

Simeon foresees an altogether different fate for Israel, not a sunlit highway but the valley of the shadow of death. The end may be glorious, but the path will be a via dolorosa. The doom of Israel is presaged in this baby, born to be a crucified king. Simeon speaks of light and glory, but also of the ‘falling’ as well as the ‘rising’ of ‘many in Israel’. It will be, as Eliot has it, ‘the time of cords and scourges and lamentation’. Simeon’s words anticipate what this child himself will one day say, ‘The Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10.45). For Mary herself, there is little comfort in Simeon’s words. The sword, thrust into her son’s side, will pierce her heart too.

Simeon turns out to be a much less reassuring figure than we have made him out to be, and ‘the Presentation in the Temple’ an altogether more disturbing event than we had supposed. A truer account of Simeon’s meeting with the child and his mother is given by the Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini. Venice Bellini wrestled with the significance of the story of Jesus as few artists have done other than Rembrandt himself. His study of the Presentation, now in Venice’s Querini Stampalia Gallery, is a great masterpiece. Looking at it, we see this scene as for the first time.

An unsmiling Simeon reaches out to take the infant Christ. We are unused to seeing babies swaddled and to us the bands, which bind him so tightly, seem like cerements. He appears to be already prepared for burial – which in a way he was. Mary seems abstracted, as if continuing to ‘ponder in her heart’ what had been told her concerning her child. Two women standing by are lost in their own thoughts. One of them is turning away. Is she unaware of what unfolds beside her? Or is the burden of it too much? Joseph – it must be Joseph – stares intently, almost angrily, at us from out of the picture. He seems to say, ‘Do not for one moment suppose that you understand what is happening here.’

Simeon sought consolation. But there is pain beyond consoling, as Mary found. Others, such as C. S. Lewis, have found that to be so.

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand. (A Grief Observed, Faber, 1961)

The Annunciation of Our Lord to the Blessed Virgin Mary

25 MARCH

Isaiah 7.10–14; Hebrews 10.4–10; Luke 1.26–38

IT IS WHAT IT IS, SAYS LOVE

The Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth is an immense pile. It is also a remarkably ugly building. It was built in the 1960s – the decade when many daft things were done – to replace the more modest church which previously had stood on the site. Many pilgrims feel that such a brutalist structure altogether misrepresents the unassuming and gentle woman it purports to honour. The symbol of Mary is the lily. Fittingly, the vast dome that surmounts a building that gets it all wrong is in the form of an upside-down lily.

Several earlier buildings preceded the present church. Neither the sumptuous Byzantine basilica nor the splendid Crusader church that succeeded it could be described as faithful in spirit to the self-effacing Mary. By the time the Crusaders arrived the Byzantine building had collapsed. In 1187 there was a particularly nasty battle between the Crusaders and the Muslims. (‘Militant Muslims’, we would call them today, but they were no less militant than the bloodthirsty Crusaders.) After the battle, in which the Crusaders were defeated, the Christian inhabitants of Nazareth took refuge in the church. They were pursued into it and slaughtered. The Crusader church was sacked and razed to the ground by an emir of the Sultan of Egypt in the thirteenth century. Eventually what was left of it became a garbage tip.

The recent history of Nazareth has not testified any more clearly to the good news of the Prince of Peace. Today Nazareth’s Christians fear Moslem extremism. A dispute which dragged on for years, until quashed by the Israeli authorities, centred on a provocative proposal to build a mosque next to the Basilica of the Annunciation. Nazareth, like the rest of West Bank, is under harsh occupation. The modern Jewish settlement of Nazareth, Illit, overlooking ancient Nazareth, prospers at the expense of the old city. Nazareth’s Christians, looking for a future, look for it somewhere else. Some say that in a couple of generations there will be no Christians left in the city where Jesus grew up.

The story of Nazareth is a sad record of the ungodly mess we mortals have made of things. Beneath the Basilica of the Annunciation is a crypt and in the crypt is an altar and beneath the altar is an inscription. The inscription makes an absurd claim: Verbum caro hic factum est – ‘Here the Word became flesh’. Here of all places – here where this preposterous building now stands, here where across the centuries the sons and daughters of Abraham have butchered each other and where they’d gladly do so again, here where today bewildered and exhausted tourists emerge from their air-conditioned coaches – here ‘the Word became flesh’.

But there is no contradiction, no absurdity. All the holy places of the Holy Land are human places and so bear witness as much to what we do to each other as to what God has done for us. In a word, they partake of our flesh. Nazareth is as the rest. It is of the stuff which – because of Mary’s ‘Let it be’ – the Word became.

‘Let it be to me according to your word.’ Mary’s prayer differs from most of ours. Our prayers, at least those that well from within, rather that merely being mouthed, are more often prayers of protest rather than of acquiescence. I do not like how things are and so I post my objection. ‘Let it not be’, I plead – whether ‘it’ is the rain that threatens to spoil my plans for the day or the cancer that bids to take my life.

‘Let it be.’ Mary’s acceptance of her task is rooted in her recognition that beneath all that is contradictory is an all-encompassing purpose of love. Lines written by the Austrian poet Erich Fried come to mind. Fried escaped from Vienna to England with his mother only after his father had been murdered by the Gestapo. What he witnessed and suffered lends great weight to his words.

It is madness says reason. It is what it is says love.

It is unhappiness says calculation. It is nothing but pain says fear.

It has no future says insight.

It is what it is says love.

It is ridiculous says pride. It is foolish says caution.

It is impossible says experience.

It is what it is says love.

(‘What it is’, 100 Poems without a Country, Calder 1987)

Perhaps those other siren voices – as well as Gabriel’s – whispered in Mary’s ear, the voices of calculation, fear and insight, of pride, caution and experience. If she was indeed a virgin, those voices would have been highly persuasive. But Mary accepted that it is what it is and that it is love that says so.

Where love tells me that ‘it is what it is’ – whatever Gabriel is asking me to do or to suffer – my prayer must be the same as Mary’s ‘Let it be’. How I need her to help me say it!

Ash Wednesday

Joel 2.1–2, 12–17 or Isaiah 58.1–12; 2 Corinthians 5.20b—6.10; Matthew 6.1–6, 16–21 or John 8.1–11

SAVED BY FIRE

The school of St Andrews, Turi, is spectacularly located in the highlands of Kenya’s Rift Valley. From its foundation in 1931 the school was run by ‘Pa’ and ‘Ma’ Lavers, legends to this day among many old Africa hands. For years the school provided education for British ‘missionary kids’. Today the school, while still Christian in its ethos, is both international and multi-cultural.

On the 29th of February 1944 a fire destroyed St Andrews. The Lavers immediately set about rebuilding the school. The symbol of St Andrew’s school today is the phoenix, a mythical bird calling to mind both a brutal event and a blessed hope, both the fire that burned the school down and the faith that ashes are not the end.

After the fire Pa Lavers instituted an annual ‘Phoenix Night’. On Phoenix Night each year a great bonfire is lit in the school grounds. There was a godly custom on Phoenix night, which I hope has not fallen into abeyance. Every child was invited to write on a piece of paper anything and everything in the past year that made them sad or sorry or ashamed. Then they gathered round the fire and, as a sign of their intention by God’s grace to make a fresh start, they crumpled up their pieces of paper and threw them into the flames.

I don’t know whether Phoenix Night at St Andrew’s school ever coincided with Ash Wednesday, but what was affirmed that night resonates with what Ash Wednesday should mean for us.

On Ash Wednesday we enter what T. S. Eliot described as ‘the time of tension between dying and birth’. Our purpose at this time is to rid ourselves of illusions. We pray with Eliot: ‘Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood.’ On Ash Wednesday I hear words that the world around me conspires to drown out. As I receive on my forehead the sign of the cross, imposed in ashes, the minister says to me, ‘Remember that you are dust and that to dust you shall return.’ The words are said to me personally. This is not something that ‘only happens to other people’. I, John Pridmore, am the one who is dust and I am the one who shall return to the dust.

The Victorians were better at facing the fact of death than we are. I do not have a skeleton by me as I say my prayers, as many a Buddhist monk does, but I do have close to hand a copy of a children’s book that sold in its hundreds of thousands in the nineteenth century: Mrs Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family. Old Rogers, the Fairchild’s gardener dies and the children are taken to see his body. ‘You never saw a corpse, I think?’ says Lucy’s father. ‘No, papa,’ answered Lucy, ‘but we have a great curiosity to see one.’ Do we dislike the tale because we disapprove of what we see as a morbid preoccupation with death – or because we continue to mock ourselves and our children with falsehoods, the most mischievous of which being that you must keep young and beautiful if you want to be loved?

On Ash Wednesday I confront the reality that I am a sinner under sentence of death. But sin is not merely what individuals commit. Nor is death only what happens to sentient beings. There is social and corporate sin, the wrongs in which we are complicit by our membership of larger groups. Such groups – the crowd at a football match, the lads out together on a stag night, the nation that declares an unjust war – can behave in ways in which the men and women who form them would never do. We need to find ways of corporate repentance, ways more costly than the token apology from someone in high office.

‘Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.’ The words said to us individually apply to our institutions too. Nobody lasts, but nothing does either. Institutions often find it hard to recognize that the time has come to let go. For example, we feel sad when a church closes, but if that church has had a useful life and has done some good then our sadness is misplaced. It looks as if the institutional church is in terminal decline, but if it is not that is not because it is immortal. Again we make Eliot’s prayer our own: ‘Teach us to care and not to care.’ Nothing lasts, save the love to which, as rivers to the sea, all we are and all we do returns.

On Ash Wednesday we face reality. We face our own sinfulness and mortality and that of the fleeting show of things, our religious structures included. And – very deliberately – we turn. We repent. We draw near to God and – like boys and girls throwing balls of crunched-up paper into a bonfire – we ask that all that is ill in us may be consumed in the inextinguishable fire of his love.

Monday of Holy Week

Isaiah 42.1–9; Hebrews 9.11–15; John 12.1–11

THE GENTLE WAY OF THE CROSS

There are many paths to the cross. Our readings for Holy Week provide one such path. These scriptures lead us to Calvary. Today, and on Tuesday and Wednesday, we are invited to consider one who, like Jesus, comes to us as one unknown. The pattern of his life too was cruciform. He is the subject of a series of poems, written four centuries or more before the time of Jesus, to be found in the later chapters of the book of Isaiah. Often he is just called ‘the servant’ and the poems that speak of him simply described as ‘the servant songs’.

Today we read the first of these ‘servant songs’. God delights, we read, in his servant. He describes what his servant will do. The servant’s purpose, we read, is to bring ‘justice to the nations’. In the Hebrew Bible, justice is not so much what is secured by an impartial judicial process. It is, rather, the result of God’s action to save the vulnerable and oppressed.

When Jesus of Nazareth sets out on his mission he makes the servant’s programme his own. In the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus announces that he will fulfil the servant’s role by bringing good news to those who rarely hear good news, namely the poor, by restoring sight to the blind and by liberating the enslaved (Luke 4.16–21).

What is remarkable about the servant is the way he works. The servant’s method, which will be Christ’s method, is not the means by which most would-be liberators operate. The servant’s way is not an exercise of power but a display of gentleness – even of weakness. Certainly it will look like weakness to those watching. It is, in a word, the way of the cross.

The servant does not ‘cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street’. Nor does Jesus as, bearing his cross, he makes his painful way from the Antonia Fortress, where Pilate has condemned him to crucifixion, to the killing field outside the city where the execution will take place.

The servant’s way will always be Christ’s way. It is ‘not to break bruised reeds’. The Christ, who is so like the servant, does not impose yet greater burdens on those already near breaking point. So it must be for those who seek to serve the servant Christ. The disciples of Jesus, says Paul, are to be known for their master’s gentleness (Philippians 4.5). The implications of the principle of ‘not breaking bruised reeds’ are far-reaching. To begin near home, the Church that preaches this Biblical ethic would do so more persuasively if it did not overload its own clergy so badly. Maybe it is right to ask the Christian minister to go the extra mile, but not if you have already broken his back.

The servant does not quench ‘the dimly burning wick’. Nor does the servant of Christ. It is easy to snuff out a feeble flame, whether that flame be some first stumbling step of faith or a tentative attempt to lead a better life.

Our readings in Holy Week are chosen, first, to bring us closer to the cross and, second, to guide us on the path of the cross which will be our pilgrims’ way until our life’s end. We ask what it is about ‘the servant’ that determines Jesus’s understanding of his mission and that must shape our own discipleship. This at least we learn from the servant and from Christ: that in worlds as harsh as ours, their way was gentle. Which gentleness we crave.

We are directed to the servant songs in Holy Week. We are sent too to John’s Gospel. Today we watch and ponder the gentleness of Jesus towards Mary whose extravagance and outrageous conduct incensed Judas and – if the parallel Gospel stories are anything to go by (Matthew 26.6–13, Mark 14.3–9) – angered others present too.

But we notice Lazarus as well. Lazarus, recently exhumed and brought back to life, is an object of macabre fascination. For some, their fascination has turned into faith, faith in the one who has made good his claim to be the resurrection and the life. For others, Lazarus back from the dead is a threat they must eliminate. They realize that there cannot be a stronger sign that Jesus is who he says he is than having someone lately a corpse walking around for all to see.

We read that ‘they planned to put Lazarus to death as well as Jesus’. Did they succeed in doing so? History does not tell us, but they may well have done. Again, we are bound to reflect what a mixed blessing it was for Lazarus to be restored to life. Lazarus’s death and resurrection were his baptism, his participation in the dying and rising of Jesus. All of us, when we are baptized, are set free from our grave-cloths to become Christ’s soldiers and servants to our lives’ end. For Lazarus, that end probably came soon enough.

Tuesday of Holy Week

Isaiah 49.1–7; 1 Corinthians 1.18–31; John 12.20–36

THE BROKEN KING

In the closing pages of T. H. White’s magisterial reworking of the Arthurian myths, The Once and Future King (Collins, 1958), we have an almost unbearably moving portrait of a broken king. Arthur concludes that his life’s work has been wasted. He had sought to build the better world he believed in, a round table, not only for his knights but for the nations. Now at the end, as he surveys the wreckage of his hopes, he is near despair. ‘Justice had been his last attempt – to do nothing which was not just. But it had ended in failure. To do at all had proved too difficult. He was done himself.’

The mysterious central figure of the prophetic poems we call ‘the servant songs’ is overwhelmed by the same sense of failure. He laments that he has ‘laboured in vain’. Is he nearing the end of his life? Clearly he is at the end of his tether. The servant wonders what his life amounts to. He concludes that the sum of his efforts has been ‘for nothing and vanity’, an appraisal as bleak as that later written across all human endeavour, ‘All is vanity and a striving after wind’ (Ecclesiastes 1.14).

The broken king and the despairing servant are very close. Both sought justice and both refused to accept that justice can be secured only by beating your enemies in bloody combat. Justice is not justice if imposed forcibly by the victors on the vanquished. Neither Arthur nor the servant will break the bruised reed or quench the dimly burning wick.

On the way of the cross you never seem to win. You never seem to win. Those who follow that path will often be tempted to suppose that how things look is how things are and how they always will be. Like the servant, like Arthur, like Christ at his darkest hour on his cross, they will feel themselves defeated. Many ministers, looking back across a lifetime’s labours, share Peter’s feelings: ‘Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing’ (Luke 5.5).

The servant believes that he has failed in the mission to which he was called before he was born. The goal of that mission was to bring Israel back to God. God’s response to his servant’s confession of failure is not to condemn him, but neither is it to ask less of him. He does not reduce the servant’s role; he extends it. Bringing Israel home to God is too light a task. The servant must look beyond Israel. The servant’s mission must now be universal. He is to be ‘a light to the nations’.

Like the servant, Jesus accepts that he has a wider mission than to the house of Israel. According to John, confirmation comes to Jesus that he is to be ‘light to the nations’ and the bearer of God’s salvation ‘to the ends of the earth’, when he hears that ‘some Greeks’ are seeking to see him. The Gentiles’ wish to see him is the indication Jesus has been waiting for, the sign that his hour has come. This will not be the hour for Israel’s oppressors to be defeated in battle and for power and prosperity to be restored to God’s subjugated people. It will be the hour when the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies. It will be the hour when Jesus will perfectly fulfil the mission of the servant. Like the servant, he will be despised and rejected, afflicted and crushed. Like the servant, he will bear in his own body the infirmities and iniquities of humankind (Isaiah 52.13—53.12). Paradoxically, this will be the hour when he, the Son of Man, will be ‘glorified’.

But at this very moment, Jesus – like Arthur, like the suffering servant – wonders whether his mission has failed. At the moment when he embraces the servant’s role and all it will entail, his faith is overtaken by doubt. ‘What should I say,’ asks Jesus, ‘ “Father, save me from this hour?” ’ According to John, Gethsemane is still to come but already Jesus is suffering its anguish. Acute spiritual distress has physical symptoms. Luke famously refers to Jesus sweating great drops of blood (Luke 22.44). T. H. White’s description of Arthur’s anguish before his last battle could be read as a commentary on Jesus’s Gethsemane of spirit and body as he faces the cross: ‘He felt as if there were something atrophied between his eyes, where the base of the nose grew into the skull.’

Jesus found himself in a dark place as he contemplated what faced him. I must register what he says about that place, if I dare. ‘Where I am, there will my servant be also.’ I shall find myself in that place too, it seems, if I am a Christian – and if I never find myself there it may be because I am something else.

Wednesday of Holy Week

Isaiah 50.4–9a; Hebrews 12.1–3; John 13.21–32

WHERE THE BUCK STOPS

Once more we look to ‘the servant’, to the one who – so said the prophet-poet – would suffer to set God’s people free. The prophet hears the servant speak: ‘I gave my back to those who struck me.’ The servant lets them do their worst to him. So does Jesus. He absorbs all that shames us – not least our anger, the anger that one social commentator tells us is ‘the defining characteristic of our times’.

I think of Michael. Michael was a huge small child, a morbidly obese ten-year-old, in a children’s club I ran when I was a curate. Michael was desperate for love but he didn’t get much, because he didn’t smell nice. One winter’s evening, as the kids were going home, Michael was in a terrible state, in floods of tears, shuddering with grief. He’d lost a coin, presumably fallen from his pocket. I see Michael now at the door of the church hall. There was bicycle there, leaning against the wall. Michael noticed it. Suddenly he stopped sobbing. He reached out and wrenched the front lamp from the bike. He switched the lamp on and shone its beam into the night sky. Then he shouted angrily up into the darkness: ‘It’s all your fault! You up there! It’s all your bloody fault!’

Michael knew where the buck must stop. He turned to the crucified God to absorb and quench his anger. As we all must, unless we want those bush fires in our belly to burn for ever.

The servant continues, ‘I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.’ We are invited in our second reading to ‘consider him who endured such hostility against himself from sinners’. The writers use past tenses, talking as if the suffering is done with. But today we ask whether Christ’s face is still exposed to our insults, whether to this day he endures our enmity and anger.

Peter Abelard was one of the great Christian theologians of the middle-ages. He held the world in his hands. But because of his love for Heloise and what that had led to, he was a broken man. The novelist Helen Waddell tells a story about him. Abelard was surviving in the forest with his one servant, Thibault. One day they hear a terrible screaming. At first they fear it is a child. They rush to where the screams are coming from – and find that it is a rabbit caught in a trap. Abelard releases the rabbit and it dies in his arms. It’s all too much for him. ‘I’ve deserved all I’ve suffered. But what did this one do? Is there a God at all?’

Thibault notices nearby a tree that has been felled. Its trunk has been sawn through, exposing all the growth rings. ‘Look,’ says Thibault, ‘that dark ring there. It runs the whole length of the tree. But you only see it where it is cut across. Perhaps Calvary is like that. It is the bit of God we see. But it goes on.’

It goes on. There is a cross – present tense – in the heart of God.

In our Gospel, we hear how Judas Iscariot left the upper room, intent on betraying Jesus. Why did Judas betray Jesus? Perhaps there was anger there, anger that Jesus had not proved the kind of Messiah that Judas had hoped he would be. If so, there is much of Judas in most of us. Like Judas, we have asked great things of God but our prayers have not been answered, and we are angry too. Our anger still burns, however piously we pretend otherwise. Better to let that anger out and to direct it towards the one place – we shall reach it on Good Friday – where it can be extinguished.

Jesus Christ, the suffering servant, still gives his back to those who strike him. The First World War army chaplain Studdert Kennedy witnessed men being slaughtered like cattle. That experience blew to bits his complacent faith in a God somehow above it all, untouched by our misery. There in the trenches he became convinced that if Christ’s passion tells us anything, it tells us what God is like.

Father, if he, the Christ, were thy revealer,

Truly the first begotten of the Lord,

Then must thou be a suff’rer and a healer,

Pierced to the heart by the sorrow of the sword.

Then must it mean, not only that thy sorrow

Smote thee that once upon the lonely tree,

But that today, tonight, and on the morrow,

Still it will come, O Gallant God, to thee.

(‘The Suffering God’)

One word more about Judas Iscariot. John does not resolve the paradox of Judas. Satan has ‘entered’ Judas and he does what Satan requires of him. But what Satan requires of Judas is also what Jesus tells him to do. If Judas was angry, that was not the whole story. That story is unfinished and its loose ends remain. Better to live with the loose ends than to try to tie them up too soon.

Maundy Thursday

Exodus 12.1–4 (5–10), 11–14; 1 Corinthians 11.23–26; John 13.1–17, 31b–35

GETTING DOWN

On the 5th July 1941 the troopship HMS Anselm was struck by a torpedo. The torpedo hit the hold on C deck where scores of men were sleeping. The hold swiftly began filling with water. The ship was soon listing. At any moment it might sink. The stairway had been blown away. There was no means of escape for all those trapped. At the entrance above, a man in a dressing gown joined the others looking down into the hold. He asked to be lowered into the hold. They tried to dissuade him, but he insisted. He said that he must be with his men. His name was Herbert Pugh. He was an airforce chaplain. So they lowered him into the hold. Those above saw him praying with the doomed men. Then they fled to the boats. Moments later the ship plunged and sank. Herbert Pugh was awarded, posthumously, the George Cross.

One image from that story has stayed with me since I first heard it – the image of one who chose to go down into dark waters and to let those waters engulf him. Jesus chose to do that when he was baptized. He sealed that choice on the first Maundy Thursday, when he refused a last chance to save himself, when he consented to go down into the dark waters of our sins and our sorrows and to let those waters close over him.

In Holy Week we are with Jesus on his journey. That journey began long before Palm Sunday; long before he began his ministry; long before he was born or conceived. The journey of Jesus began in the heart of God before time began. From all eternity, God was in Christ on his way to win us back to himself. ‘Love came down at Christmas’ – yes, but that love was coming down all along. That is what love does. Love comes down. That is love’s trajectory.

Tonight we watch one moment on the journey that began in the heart of God. Jesus gets down. All along, that has been the direction of his journey; the journey that took him from his father’s side, the journey that brought him to our broken earth, the journey that brought him to birth at Bethlehem, the journey that dragged him down beneath those lethal waters at his baptism, the journey that led him to Jerusalem, the journey that brings him tonight to a dirty floor, where dogs scavenge for scraps, where slaves kneel to wash filthy feet.