Easter Reflections shared by a Philo Professor

I received this from the mail today and don't seem to have the energy to go through it right now. So i'm posting it for future reading. Hopefully, one of these days, I'll muster the energy to go through this.

EASTER WITH ROWAN WILLIAMS, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY


Emmaus

First the sun, then the shadow
so that I screw my eyes to see
my friend's face, and its lines seem
different, and the voice shakes in the hot air.
Out of the rising white dust, feet
tread a shape, and, out of step,
another flat sound, stamped between voice
and ears, dancing in the gaps, and dodging
where words and feet do not fall.
When our eyes meet, I see bewilderment
(like mine); we cannot learn
the rhythm we are asked to walk,
and what we hear is not each other.
Between us is filled up, the silence
is filled up, lines of our hands
and faces pushed into shape
by the solid stranger, and the static
breaks up our waves like dropped stones.
So it is necessary to carry him with us,
cupped between hands and profiles,
so that the table is filled up, and as
the food is set and the first wine splashes,
a solid thumb and finger tear the thunderous
grey bread. Now it is cold, even indoors,
and the light falls sharply on our bones;
the rain breathes out hard, dust blackens,
and our released voices shine with water.
2004



Easter Sermon, Canterbury Cathedral
Sunday 11 April 2004

A good few years ago, I heard a distinguished American scholar of ancient history commenting on the proclamation of the resurrection as it would have been heard in the classical world. 'If an educated Greek or Roman had been told that someone had been raised from the dead', he said, 'his first question would have been "How do you get him back into his grave again?"'. The point was that most of those who first heard the Easter gospel would have found it grotesque or even frightening. Resurrection was not a joyful sign of hope but an alarming oddity, something potentially very dangerous. The dead, if they survived at all, lived in their own world – a shadowy place, where they were condemned to a sort of half-life of yearning and sadness. So Virgil at least represents it in his great epic, unforgettably portraying the dead as 'stretching out their hands in longing for the other side of the river'. But for them to return would have been terrifying and unnatural; the boundaries between worlds had to be preserved and protected.

Even the ancient Hebrews, who first made resurrection a positive idea, thought of the condition of the dead in just such a way: and resurrection was something that would happen at the end of time, when the good would be raised to receive their reward and the wicked their punishment, as in the prophecy of Daniel. But the news that someone had been raised from the tomb now would have been as disturbing for the Jew as for the Greek, if not perhaps quite so straightforwardly frightening. When St Matthew tells us that between the death and the ascension of Jesus many holy people of older days left their tombs in Jerusalem and appeared to many in the city, he is portraying not a scene of happy reunion but a true earthquake in the established order of the universe. It all helps us make sense of that unmistakeable element in the resurrection stories in the gospels that speaks of terror and amazement.

But why might resurrection be such a problem? Apart from the total confusion of present and long-term future which resurrection involved for the Jew, and the untidy blurring of boundaries between worlds for the Greek, there is another factor. When the dead did appear in vision or dream in the ancient world, it was often to denounce their killers; and the ancient empires specialised in mass slaughter. What would it have meant to a Roman to be told not only that the dead could return but that the 'firstborn from the dead', the firstfruits of the harvest, was one who had been among the victims of the empire's legal system? Ancient empires grew and survived by assuming that enormous quantities of human lives were expendable and unimportant; those who fell victim to the system simply disappeared. But what if they didn't? Here was a message that might well cause alarm: an executed criminal, instead of disappearing into oblivion, is brought back into the world and his friends are told to speak in his name to his killers, telling them that for their life and health they must trust that he has made peace for them with God.

And what was worse still was that this was seen not as an isolated matter: the risen one was only the first. His rising from death guaranteed that all would be raised, that no life would be forgotten and obliterated, or even relegated to the everlasting half-light of Hades. Death does not end relationships between human persons and between human persons and God; and this may be sobering news as well as joyful, sobering especially for an empire with blood on its hands. We forget so readily what Christianity brought into the world; we are so used to it that we think it is obvious. In the ancient world there was absolutely no assumption that every life was precious. Fathers had the right to kill their children in certain circumstances, masters their slaves; crowds flocked to see criminals or prisoners of war killing each other in the theatres; massacre was a normal tool of war. Some philosophers defended a theory of abstract human equality, but they were untroubled by the political facts of life in which lives were expendable in these familiar ways. It is a shock to realise just how deeply rooted such an attitude was. And when all is said and done about how Christianity has so often failed in its own vision, the bare fact is that it brought an irreversible shift in human culture. Human value could not be extinguished by violence or death; no-one could be forgotten.

The gospel of the resurrection announced many great things, but this must have been one of the most disturbing of all. Here and now, God holds on to the lives of all the departed – including the lives that have been wasted, violently cut short, damaged by oppression. All have worth in his sight. If God can raise as the messenger of his word and the giver of his life a man who has been through the dehumanising process of a Roman state execution, a process carefully designed to humiliate and obliterate, then the imperial power may well begin to worry.

We don't live under an empire like that, thank God. Yet we look back on a century in which imperial powers have in so many ways sought to obliterate their victims, as if the resurrection never happened. At Auschwitz there is an inscription in Hebrew from the Old Testament, 'O earth, cover not their blood'; the Holocaust, along with the mass killings of the thirties in the Soviet Union or the revolutionary years in China, went forward at the hands of people who assumed as blandly as any ancient Roman that the dead could be buried one and for all and forgotten. Cambodia and Rwanda and the Balkans remind us that it doesn't need to be an imperial power; it may be your closest neighbours who turn into murderers.

Now we may not have that kind of blood on our hands; but there are times when we are convicted of sharing something of that assumption about the dead. Who is there who has not felt a little of this conviction, reading in these last few weeks the heartbreaking stories that mark the tenth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda? It is not that we wielded the weapons; but the nations of the world stood by in indecision and distractedness while the slaughter went on. Some lives, it seems, are still forgettable; some deaths still obliterate memory, for those of us at a distance. And as I speak, the carnage in Northern Uganda continues; just a matter of weeks ago, a mass killing there failed to make anything like an adequately serious impact on great tracts of the media; and most people here are not aware of the nearly one million displaced persons in that region, living in continual fear, and the nightmare situation of the hundreds of thousands of children kidnapped to be soldiers, to kill and be killed. When deaths like this are forgotten, the gospel of the resurrection should come as a sharp word of judgement as well as of hope.

But hope, of course, it is. We may and we should feel the reproach of the risen Christ as we recognise how easily we let ourselves forget; and nearer home, we might think too of those who die alone and unloved in our own society – the aged with no family (or forgotten by their family), the homeless addict, the mentally disturbed isolated from ordinary human contact. But Easter tells us to be glad that they are not forgotten by God, that their dignity is held and affirmed by God and that their lives are in his hand. In that gladness, we should be stirred to turn our eyes to look for those likeliest to be forgotten and to ask where our duty and service lies. God's justice rebukes our forgetfulness; and the truth that he will never let go of the lost and needy, so far from being an alibi for us not to bother, is a reminder of the responsibility of service and reverence laid upon all of us.

But the goodness of the resurrection news is most evident for those who have lost people they love to any sort of incomprehensible evil – the tragedies of dementia, the apparent meaninglessness of accident, the horrors of violence or injustice. Think back for a moment to the days when death squads operated in countries like Argentina or El Salvador: the Christians there developed a very dramatic way of celebrating their faith, their hope and their resistance. At the liturgy, someone would read out the names of those killed or 'disappeared', and for each name someone would call out from the congregation, Presente, 'Here'. When the assembly is gathered before God, the lost are indeed presente; when we pray at this eucharist 'with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven', we say presente of all those the world (including us) would forget and God remembers. With angels and archangels; with the butchered Rwandans of ten years ago and the butchered or brutalised Ugandan children of last week or yesterday; with the young woman dead on a mattress in King's Cross after an overdose and the childless widower with Alzheimer's; with the thief crucified alongside Jesus and all the thousands of other anonymous thieves crucified in Judaea by an efficient imperial administration; with the whole company of heaven, those whom God receives in his mercy. And with Christ our Lord, the firstborn from the dead, by whose death our sinful forgetfulness and lukewarm love can be forgiven and kindled to life, who leaves no human soul in anonymity and oblivion, but gives to all the dignity of a name and a presence. He is risen; he is not here; he is present everywhere and to all. He is risen: presente.


Meditations for Easter Morning, Canterbury Cathedral
Sunday 11 April 2004

In a few minutes, we shall hear St Paul telling us why Easter matters to every one of us, and specially to everyone who makes the great decision to trust that what Jesus says is true and that what Jesus does makes all the difference. If you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, you are not just believing an odd fact from two thousand years ago; you are trusting that there is a kind of life, a kind of love and trust and joy that is the very essence of Jesus' identity which is now coming to life in you. And as it comes to life, you begin to know that no amount of pressure and stress and suffering in your life has power in itself to break the bond that has been created between you and Jesus' life and activity. You are alive with a fuller and deeper life than just your own. Your resources are more than you could ever have imagined.

Jesus rises from the dead so as to find not only his home in heaven but his home in us. He rises so that we may rise out of the prisons of guilt, anxiety, self-obsession or apathy that so constantly close around us. But for this to happen, says St Paul, we have to go on, day after day, getting used to parts of us dying, just as Jesus died: we have to get used to the beloved habits of self-serving and self-protecting being brought into the light that shines from Jesus' face and withering away in that brightness. That's why Paul says that Christians go around with both death and life at work in their lives — always trying to let the light of Jesus kill off these sick and deadly habits, always letting the new life that is ours but so much more than ours shine through.

This year, both the Eastern and the Western churches celebrate Easter on the same day. It doesn't happen all that often, and when it does it's a great opportunity for us in the West to remember what we owe to the insight and genius of Christians from the Greek and Syrian and Russian worlds. One of the most important contributions has been their vision of how the light of God in Jesus can inhabit this ordinary world and shine visibly in the faces of Christian people. In the art of the Eastern Church, in the great icons of Greece and Russia, we can see a sort of visual commentary on St Paul's words. Here are human figures seen against the background of divine light; and the light doesn't take away their human features but makes them transparent, stretches them and reshapes them in great elongated forms whose powerful flowing lines seem to speak of another world that has come to life in the middle of this one. Any of you who've seen the El Greco exhibition in London this spring will recognise that El Greco is doing just this; he was an artist who had been trained by Greek painters of icons, so it isn't surprising.

That's the visual expression of what Paul has to say about the Easter news of new life. Ordinary humanity, ordinary physical reality, your bodily life and mine are being transfigured from within by the presence of God's glory.

It was still dark, says St John as he begins his story of the rising of Jesus; and at the end of the passage we've heard he says that up to the point when the two disciples look into the empty tomb and see the folded graveclothes they hadn't understood what the Jewish scriptures were all about. As they go back to join the others, the dawn begins to break; the light is rising in their minds and it's no longer dark.
St John uses this imagery again and again. In the very first chapter of his gospel, we read that the light has shone in the darkness and the darkness hasn't quenched it. When Judas Iscariot leaves the Last Supper to betray Jesus, John says that 'He went out; and it was night'. After the story we have just heard and the following story of Jesus' meeting with Mary Magdalene, we hear of Jesus coming to the other disciples in their locked room 'late in the evening'. Where Jesus is around, the view becomes clear; darkness is put to flight. And this is why our worship at Easter traditionally begins with the lighting of a fire and the blessing of a candle.

Jesus lights up the landscape; and what St John tells us here is that one bit of the landscape which he lights up is the Bible itself. The disciples haven't known how to read their own scriptures until now; but they come to see that the events of Good Friday are part of the pattern of God's work with his people all along. Salvation and renewal always come as people are shocked into the recognition of how deeply they have betrayed God. God is always faithful to his people, even when all they have to give him is rejection and contempt. And — and this is what that first Easter morning begins to get across to them — no human rejection can destroy God's promise and God's longing to be with those he loves. Not even the torturing to death of Jesus can change this love; and so when the disciples come looking for a body, they find an empty grave — like a door open into God's future.

So, if we can turn one more time to the icons of the Eastern Church, it is fitting that we so often see Jesus in glory holding an open book. Sometimes it just carries the Greek letters Alpha and Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet; sometimes it has a specific text from the Bible. But the point is the same: all that is written in our book, the Bible, is what Jesus present to us for our reading and understanding. If we don't follow his finger along the text, we read wrong. So our Bible isn't just a holy book we can open and consult for answers without any more ado; we need to try and read it in the presence and in the Spirit of Jesus, to see how all of it finds its unity around him and in relation to him, to what he says and does in his life and his death.

But of course it's the whole landscape of our life and our reality that is enlightened by Jesus. In this light we see who God really is, how deep his faithfulness is to us. We see who we are, how constantly we fail, but also how passionately we are loved and valued. We see each other, as people valued by God, and our attitudes are drastically changed. We see the material world itself full of God's glory, demanding our reverence and care.

So with the two disciples, we look this morning into the empty tomb as if through an open door. On the other side is a world drenched with light, God's beauty shining through; yet it's our own world we are seeing, seeing it as God made it to be, seeing ourselves as God made us to be. We are walking into daylight.


Easter Sermon, Canterbury Cathedral
Sunday 27 March 2005

Death, says St Paul, is our enemy; and Christians are the most pitiable of all people if their hope is confined to this life. To many modern ears, these statements sound a bit suspect. Isn't this the kind of religion we have learned to be wary of, a religion that justifies suffering and frustration here and now by the promise of compensation somewhere else? And as for regarding death as an enemy – is this more than the childish resentment of human beings who haven't yet accepted their limitations? One of the great books of the twentieth century, by a man who had read Freud more intelligently than most, was called The Denial of Death, and it spelled out the evil consequences of this refusal to face our limits, the anxiety and unreality and psychological fragility that could distort lives lived in this state of denial.

The longing for everlasting life takes strange forms. There are people who obsessively investigate the evidence for spiritualist phenomena, people who have their bodies cryogenically frozen in the hope of resuscitation, people who claim that their diet and lifestyle is slowing down the ageing process. And of course when you think of things like this, you realise that it isn't simply certain kinds of religion that produce odd and unhealthy attitudes to ageing or limitation or death. Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can't do, fear or even disgust at growing old. Ernest Becker's book, referred to a moment ago, was directed not against religion as such but against a climate of fantasy encouraged by cheap psychology ('you can be anything you choose to be') and a childlike faith in technology.

Now St Paul doesn't show too many obvious signs of resenting human limitations or indeed wanting not to die – after all, he tells us in all kinds of ways in the course of his letters that we have to let our self-protective instincts 'die' as we grow into the full scope of love for God and each other; so he can hardly be recommending to us the kind of attitude that gave Freud and Nietzsche so much material for criticism. What then is he saying here? And how do we hear it now as good news?

The first thing to notice is something that has been said countless times, yet we still miss it. Paul does not say that we shall live for ever; he says that we shall die and that we shall be raised as Jesus was raised. Forget spiritualism and cryogenics; forget supposed evidence for 'survival'. Paul doesn't think we are going to survive but that we are going to live again because of God's action. Here and now, we must indeed once to terms with the reality of death, and we must put to death all in us that binds us to our narrow self-interest. Indeed, you could rightly say that Paul's teaching is really that we must put to death our refusal to die, because that refusal to die, that fearful denial of our limits, is the root of our selfish and self-paralysing habits of sin. A healthy human environment is one in which we try to make sense of our limits, of the accidents that can always befall us and the passage of time which inexorably changes us. An unhealthy environment is one in which we always look for someone to blame and someone to compensate us, and struggle to maintain fictions of our invulnerability to time and change.

Societies as well as individuals fall victim to these diseases. We react so often with panic and hostility to the presence of persons and cultures who are different and blame them for our own dysfunctions. We maintain a ludicrous confidence in technology to solve the environmental problems it has itself intensified because we can't believe that our capacity to generate wealth and comfort for ourselves is anything other than infinite. We fantasise about a state of security so complete that nothing and no-one will ever threaten us. We need to hear that all this is really the denial of death – that it is what Paul elsewhere calls 'the works of the flesh', the closing up of ourselves in the face of a reality we can't fully control.

What Paul is telling us is this. If your hope is that this life will be protected and prolonged, that your comfort zone as you understand it will never be challenged, that you will never have to face the reality of being mortal and limited, God help you. It's a recipe for illusion, terror and the killing of the soul. But that doesn't mean that your 'real' life only begins on the far side of death. Rather it means that here and now you learn to live not by self-defence but by opening up to what God gives.

Because that is the essence of belief in the resurrection. It is not a matter of natural survival, not a right we can demand from God, but a gift. God has promised to be our God, he has promised to hold us in relationship with himself whatever happens to us. Remember the end of Romans chapter 8? 'There is nothing in death or life...nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord'. He has committed himself to be there for us by his own gracious decision; we face death knowing that his promise has been given – but not knowing (as St Paul goes on to say) just how the promise will be honoured. All we can guess is that our present life has the same relation to the future as the seed has to the full-grown plant. Not survival, but growth into an unimaginably greater dimension. If we now begin to live in a way that gives priority to God's promise and gift, to live in trust and generosity, we shall not be haunted and imprisoned by fear of death. We have begun to live the kind of life that can cope with death because it simply looks for God's gift at every point.

So the importance of Jesus' resurrection is not that it somehow proves there is life after death in a general sort of way. What it proves is that God keeps his promises: the commitment of God the Father to Jesus his beloved son is absolute and eternal; so the cross does not separate Father and Son, and life is restored on the far side of the cross, life that both is and isn't like the ordinary physical life Jesus had in Galilee. And the divine promise Jesus, God among us, makes to his friends, the promise of mercy and renewal, is absolute; not even the unfaithfulness of the disciples can destroy it. Jesus' life is there for them once more, the source of their joy and hope. The violent and terrible death of Jesus does not stop God from giving what he wants to give, giving consistently and steadily. If Jesus is raised, we can count on the faithfulness of God.

And perhaps we can dimly see why death can be called an enemy. Death seems to challenge the idea of an eternally faithful God; and it poses an obvious difficulty for any belief that God wants to develop with us a relationship that is always growing and developing. It looks as though death means that our relation with God comes to a halt, as if God eventually treats us as disposable. But if we see in Jesus' resurrection the confirmation that God is faithful, we can face death differently – not because it has stopped mattering or even hurting, not because we have assurance that we shall carry on as before (we shan't), but because God has not finished with us. We have more to receive from him, and he will create the conditions that will make it possible for us to receive.

Death will be the last enemy to be overcome, says Paul. At the end of everything, death will be behind us, death will be history. We shall have become what we have become because we have lived with death and learned how to love realistically and humbly, within the compass of a limited life. Death the enemy of our confidence has been a friend to us after all – an enemy we learn to love, as Christ tells us to love our enemies; and at the end of everything its work is done. What remains is only growth in love, as we stand with and in Jesus Christ looking into the inexhaustible depths of God's reality – the sea we must learn to swim in but will never cross over, as the Welsh poet Ann Griffiths put it in one of her hymns.

And here and now we are called on to challenge the denial of death that locks us into folly and fear; the pride and arrogance, the desperation and brittleness of our hopes. Easter proclaims to individuals and economic systems and governments alike that we shall not find life by refusing to let go of our precious, protected selves. Let go with Christ, die into his love; and rise with Christ, opening yourself to the eternal gift of the Father.


Easter Day Sermon at Canterbury Cathedral
Sunday 16 April 2006

One of the ways in which we now celebrate the great Christian festivals in our society is by a little flurry of newspaper articles and television programmes raking over the coals of controversies about the historical basis of faith. So it was no huge surprise to see a fair bit of coverage given a couple of weeks ago to the discovery of a 'Gospel of Judas', which was (naturally) going to shake the foundations of traditional belief by giving an alternative version of the story of the passion and resurrection. Never mind that this is a demonstrably late text which simply parallels a large number of quite well-known works from the more eccentric fringes of the early century Church; this is a scoop, the real, 'now it can be told' version of the origins of Christian faith.

You'll recognise the style, of course, from the saturation coverage of the Da Vinci Code literature. We are instantly fascinated by the suggestion of conspiracies and cover-ups; this has become so much the stuff of our imagination these days that it is only natural, it seems, to expect it when we turn to ancient texts, especially Biblical texts. We treat them as if they were unconvincing press releases from some official source, whose intention is to conceal the real story; and that real story waits for the intrepid investigator to uncover it and share it with the waiting world. Anything that looks like the official version is automatically suspect. Someone is trying to stop you finding out what really happened, because what really happened could upset or challenge the power of officialdom.

It all makes a good and characteristically 'modern' story - about resisting authority, bringing secrets to light, exposing corruption and deception; it evokes Watergate and All the President's Men. As someone remarked after a television programme about the Da Vinci Code, it's almost that we'd prefer to believe something like this instead of the prosaic reality. We have become so suspicious of the power of words and the way that power is exercised to defend those who fear to be criticised. The first assumption we make is that we're faced with spin of some kind, with an agenda being forced on us - like a magician forcing a card on the audience. So that the modern response to the proclamation, 'Christ is risen!' is likely to be, 'Ah, but you would say that, wouldn't you? Now, what's the real agenda?'

We don't trust power; and because the Church has historically been part of one or another sort of establishment and has often stood very close to political power, perhaps we can hardly expect to be exempt from this general suspicion. But what it doesn't help us with is understanding what the New Testament writers are actually saying and why. We have, every Easter, to strip away the accumulated lumber of two thousand years of rather uneven Christian witness and try to let the event be present in its first, disturbing, immediacy.

For the Church does not exist just to transmit a message across the centuries through a duly constituted hierarchy that arbitrarily lays down what people must believe; it exists so that people in this and every century may encounter Jesus of Nazareth as a living contemporary. This sacrament of Holy Communion that we gather to perform here is not the memorial of a dead leader, conducted by one of his duly authorised successors who controls access to his legacy; it is an event where we are invited to meet the living Jesus as surely as did his disciples on the first Easter Day. And the Bible is not the authorised code of a society managed by priests and preachers for their private purposes, but the set of human words through which the call of God is still uniquely immediate to human beings today, human words with divine energy behind them. Easter should be the moment to recover each year that sense of being contemporary with God's action in Jesus. Everything the church does - celebrating Holy Communion, reading the Bible, ordaining priests or archbishops - is meant to be in the service of this contemporary encounter. It all ought to be transparent to Jesus, not holding back or veiling his presence.

Yes, the sceptic will say, all very well, but why on earth should I believe that? Especially when it comes from the mouth of a figure who clearly has a bit of a vested interest in getting me to believe it, or from an institution that doesn't always look like a model of transparency? Well, all any preacher can do is point to how the text of the New Testament actually works. Two points at least are worth bearing in mind. First, it was written by people who, by writing what they did and believing what they did, were making themselves, in the world's terms, less powerful, not more. They were walking out into an unmapped territory, away from the safe places of political and religious influence, away from traditional Jewish religion and from Roman society and law. As the Gospels and Paul's letters and the difficult, enigmatic letter 'to the Hebrews' all agree, they were putting themselves in a place where they shared the humiliation experienced by condemned criminals going naked in public procession to their execution.

Second, the New Testament was written by people who were still trying to find a language that would catch up with a reality bigger than they had expected. The stories of the resurrection especially have all the characteristics of stories told by people who are struggling to find the right words for an unfamiliar experience - like the paradoxes and strained language of some of the mystics. The disciples really meet Jesus, as he always was, flesh and blood - yet at first they don't recognise him, and he's something more than just flesh and blood. At the moment of recognition, when bread is broken, when the wounds of crucifixion are displayed, he withdraws again, leaving us floundering for words. He gives authority and power to the disciples to proclaim his victory and to forgive sins in his name, yet he tells Peter that his future is one in which he will be trussed up and imprisoned and hustled away to death.

So the New Testament is not a collection of books with a single tight agenda that works on behalf of a powerful elite; it is the product of a community of people living at great risk and doing so because they sense themselves compelled by a mystery and presence that is completely authoritative for them - the presence of Jesus. They have been convinced that being in the company of Jesus is the way to become fully and effectively human. They are discovering how to live together without greed, fear and suspicion because of his company. They believe that they've been given the gift of showing the world what justice and mutual service and gratitude might look like in a world that is a very dangerous place because of our incapacity for these things. They take the risks because they believe they have been entrusted with a promise.

Whatever this is, it is not about cover-ups, not about the secret agenda of power; it may be nonsense to you, it may be unreal to you, but don't be deceived about the nature of the message and those who lived it out in the days when the New Testament was being written. And that's why if we want to know what it is about today, we need to turn to the people who are taking the same risks, struggling with the same mystery. We need to look at the martyrs and the mystics. There are still those who tell us about God in Jesus Christ by lives of intense and mostly wordless prayer; how very powerfully God was to be seen in last year's extraordinary television series, 'The Monastery', where we saw some very ordinary human beings faced with the demands of a life in which you had to be truthful, where you had to be silent, where you had to search for reconciliation at all costs. But still more important, there are those who tell us about God in Jesus Christ by putting their lives at risk. There are places in our world where conversion to Christianity is literally a matter of putting your life on the line; we have all been following with agonised attention the story of Abdul Rahman in Afghanistan, and we know that his story is not unique. We can say there with absolute certainty that whatever the Gospel means in circumstances like that, it isn't a cover-up for the sake of the powerful.

But there are also places where what brings down the violence and the murderousness is simply a willingness to make reconciliation real. Nearly three years ago, during the bloody civil war in the Solomon Islands, a major part was played in peacemaking by the local Anglican religious order known as the Melanesian Brotherhood, a community of local men committed to a common discipline of praying and teaching and spreading the gospel as they travel round the villages by drama and song and preaching. Seven of them were held hostage and killed in cold blood by a rebel group. The shock of that act of gratuitous butchery jolted almost everyone involved into beginning a peace process; the brothers continue to be involved at every level in that work.

Last summer, a number of the brothers visited England, taking their songs and their drama into churches and schools in a number of areas. Everyone who has seen them at work will remember it all their lives. One of the things they did was to perform a passion play; and this is what one of them wrote about it.

"This passion was our own testimony to our seven brothers who were murdered in 2003. For Christ-like they became the innocent victims of the violence they had worked so hard to stop. They were beaten and mocked and tortured and recorded on tape recorders in the sickening mockery of a trial before their murderers...They were put to death for the sins of the people. And they live on. I wish I could show you these men and their goodness and their innocence. And when we see real evil we must recognise it too: the opposition, the true sin of our world where brutality of this nature becomes a cause to be justified."

"...Our story of the Passion of Christ took place 2,000 years ago but it is still taking place throughout our world today. But we have been changed. We did not travel from the other side of the world to preach a death but to preach a resurrection. For we know where we stand and we know who we belong to. And we believe there is a choice in all this, a choice to belong to the life giver."

'We know where we stand and we know who we belong to'. Beyond all the history of confusion and betrayal that surrounds a lot of the Church's history, beyond the power games that we still play in the churches, this one rocklike conviction remains, the conviction that drove the writing of every word of the New Testament. Nothing to do with conspiracies, with the agenda of the powerful; everything to do with how the powerless, praying, risking their lives for the sake of Christ and his peace, are the ones who understand the Word of God. And to accept that is not to sign up to the agenda of a troubled, fussy human society of worried prelates and squabbling factions. It is to choose life, to choose to belong to the life-giver.


Easter Day Sermon - Human Failure is Overcome by God's Love
Sunday 08 April 2007

It was two and a half years ago; we had just finished a substantial open-air meal after a Eucharist on the football field in the tiny island of Malaita in the Solomons. The Premier of Malaita had been talking about the bloody civil war that had divided the islands until just a year earlier; and then he said, 'I want you to bless us; I need to say in public that we were responsible as well as the people on the other islands. So I'm going to ask the crowd to be quiet, and then I'll kneel down and ask you to pronounce God's forgiveness for whatever we contributed to the horrors of these last years.'

Sometimes you know that you have heard the reality of the gospel as you've never heard it before. Here was a politician, representing a community that had suffered greatly and inflicted great suffering as well, simply saying, 'We were all wrong. We all needed healing and forgiveness. The problem isn't them but us - all of us, or us and them.' And it was as if for the first time you could see the bare bones of what reconciliation means.

There is a huge step from looking back over past history and telling only your story and looking back to find out what other stories there are and giving them room to be heard also. I don't know whether Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, a few weeks back, were beginning to take that step, but at least they helped to make it possible for others. There have been two stories in Northern Ireland for such a long time, two incompatible stories - Catholics telling the story of heartless British imperialism, systematic discrimination and economic injustice, corrupt law enforcers; Protestants telling the story of heartless terrorism, religious authoritarianism, priests who secretly promote violence. And then there comes a moment when the possibility is just dimly discerned that neither of these perceptions is an objective record; that everyone in this history made decisions, some shockingly evil, some tragic, some foolish - and that those decisions and the sufferings that came from them don't have the power to tell you what decisions you have to make today.

Our natural human default setting, when we're stuck in conflict, seems to be to ask those around to agree with us that our story is the right one, and that no amount of suffering or tragedy on the other side can compare with ours. And if you suggest that they might need listening to as well, you are regarded as in effect justifying the terrible things they have done. We do it in our individual relationships, as all of us here will know. And we do it, compulsively and destructively, in the relationships between nations and cultures, demanding that the world recognise our exclusive claim to innocence.

Now there are relationships in which the imbalance is enormous - we've recently been recalling one such in the shape of the grim history of slavery. There are hideously abusive relationships between individuals, marriages scarred with horrific violence for example, or the abuse of children. No sane person will pretend that everyone is equally to blame.

But the point is that the situation is not changed by someone being declared completely innocent and someone else completely guilty. What changes things is seeing that the horror of violence against a child or against an enslaved race is dreadful not just because the victim is innocent but because the victim is human and helpless. The shared story is not a cartoonishly simple tale of absolute embodied evil and absolute embodied innocence, but as a human story of pain, error, violence and sin, a vortex into which people have been drawn, innocently or not so innocently. And in relationships between persons or groups more or less equal and grown-up, going forward requires us all to learn a measure of openness to discovering things about ourselves we did not know, seeing ourselves through the eyes of another. What they see may be fair or unfair, but it is a reality that has been driving someone's reactions and decisions. We'd better listen, hateful and humiliating though it may be for some of us.

Now what the events of Good Friday and Easter tell us is that every single human being is implicated in something profoundly wrong. We say, rather glibly, that Jesus died for our sins, that he died to save humankind - and thereby we say that we are all in need of something we cannot find or manufacture for ourselves, in need of a word, a gift, a touch from someone else, somewhere else, so that we can be made free of whatever it is that keeps us in the clutch of illusions and failures. If the purpose of Jesus dying was that all might be made whole, the implication is that all have been sick. So that Good Friday tells all of us, those who think they're good and those who know they're bad, all alike, to look inside and ask what part we would have played in the drama of the Lord's death. There is only one innocent character in that drama and it isn't me or you. So for all of us there is something in our lives that would, if it came to it, if it reigned unchecked in us, allow us to range ourselves with the crucifiers - some habit of selfishness or fear, some prejudice, some guilt that we don't want confronted, some deficit in love or lovability. In some way, however small, we have already contributed to the death of Jesus. He is there on the cross because we are the way we are.

But on Easter Day, this bleak recognition is turned on its head. We were all involved; yet the combined weight of every human failure and wrongness, however small or great, all of that could not extinguish the creative love of God. We share one human story in which we are all caught up in one sad tangle of selfishness and fear and so on. But God has entered that human story; he has lived a life of divine and unconditional love in a human life of flesh and blood. He has not protected himself, or forced anyone to accept him. And in this world that human beings have made for themselves, this world of politics and religion and social co-operation, divine love loses. It is helpless to maintain itself in the face of the so-called real world. The vortex of error and failure that affects everybody in the world draws Jesus into its darkness and seems to destroy him body and soul. That, says Good Friday, is the kind of world this is, and we are all part of it.

Yet there is more than the world to think about. If that love is really what it claims to be, eternal and unconditional, it will not be destroyed. What's more, the human embodiment of that love, the flesh and blood of Jesus, cannot be destroyed. As we heard in the reading from Acts this morning, the friends of Jesus ate and drank with him after he was raised from the dead - as we are doing in this Holy Communion. The life that God brought into the world in Jesus is here forever with us.

So if we can accept the unwelcome picture of us and our world that Good Friday offers, we are, in the strangest way, set free to hear what Easter says. Give up the struggle to be innocent and the hope that God will proclaim that you were right and everyone else wrong. Simply ask for whatever healing it is that you need, whatever grace and hope you need to be free, then step towards your neighbour; Easter reveals a God who is ready to give you that grace and to walk with you. In St Paul's bold words in his Letter to the Romans (11.32), 'In making all mankind prisoners to disobedience, God's purpose was to show mercy to all mankind.'

When in our world we are faced with the terrible deadlocks of mutual hatred and suspicion, with rival stories of suffering and atrocity, we have to pray for this resurrection message to be heard. In the Middle East, in Northern Ireland and the Balkans and Sri Lanka, in the tribal conflicts of Africa, in the suspicions between Muslims who associate all Christians with the Crusaders and Christians who associate all Muslims with terrorism, in our most tangled and unhappy personal relations, and yes, in the bitter conflicts in the Church too - can we take in what Good Friday and Easter Day have to say to us? That we are all trapped, and we shall only come out of the traps we have made for ourselves when we grasp that God is greater than we are and is determined to go on living his life among us whatever happens? If so, we are free, like that extraordinary politician on Malaita, to face the past with courage and realism and to begin the risky journey towards true reconciliation.


We Live in a Culture of Blame - But there is Another Way
Sunday 23 March 2008, The Observer

A couple of weeks ago, there was a rather sadly predictable report of the reaction from some ultra-conservative Christian groups to the BBC's advance publicity for its dramatisation of the passion of Jesus. The author and producer had underlined the fact that they were presenting a fairly nuanced view of the characters of the 'villains' of the story like Judas and Pilate; the Christian critics responded by complaining that this was being unfaithful to the Bible. These characters were bad, and that was an end of it.

Viewers of the series will have their own judgement. But the alarming thing is that anyone should think that the story of Jesus' death is a story about the triumph of bad men over good ones – with the implication that if we'd been there we would have been on the side of the good ones.

It's not only that the biblical story – especially St John's Gospel – shows us just the mixed motives that can be seen in figures like Pilate and the High Priest.

Much more importantly, the entire message of the Bible on this point is that the problem begins with us, not them. Jesus is killed because people who think they are good are in fact trapped in self-deception and unable to get out of the groove of their self-justifying behaviour. And the New Testament invites every reader to recognise this in himself or herself.

In recent years a number of Christian writers – inspired by the French critic and philosopher, Rene Girard - have stressed with new urgency how the Bible shows the way in which groups and societies work out their fears and frustrations by finding scapegoats.

Because we compete for the same goods and comforts, we need to sustain our competition with our rivals and maintain distance from them. But to stop this getting completely out of hand ('the war of all against all'), we unite with our rivals to identify the cause of the scarcity that makes us compete against each other with some outside presence we can all agree to hate.

Just as the BBC drama suggested, Jesus' context was one where Judaeans and Romans equally lived in fear of each other, dreading an explosion of violence that would be destructive for everyone. Their leaders sweated over compromises and strategies to avoid this. In such a context, Jesus offered a perfect excuse for them to join in a liberating act of bloodletting which eliminated a single common enemy. The spiral of fear was halted briefly.

Frequently in this mechanism the victim has little or nothing to do the initial conflict itself. But in the case of Jesus, the victim is not only wholly innocent; he is the embodiment of a grace or mercy that could in principle change the whole frame of reference that traps people in rivalry and mutual terror.

Thus the scapegoat mechanism is exposed for what it is – an arbitrary release of tension that makes no difference to the underlying problem. And if you want to address the underlying problem, perhaps you should start listening to the victim.

For many of our contemporaries, the Christian message is either a matter of unwelcome moral nagging or a set of appealing but finally irrelevant legends. If it has a place in our public life or our national institutions, it is on the basis of a slightly grudging recognition that 'it does a lot of good work' and represents something about continuity with our past.

But what if the Christian story offered more than this? What if it proposed a way of understanding some of the most pervasive and dangerous mechanisms in human relationships, interpersonal or international?

It doesn't take much imagination to see how internally divided societies find brief moments of unity when they have successfully identified some other group as the real source of their own insecurity. Look at any major conflict in the world at the moment and the mechanism is clear enough. Repressive and insecure states in the Islamic world demonise a mythical Christian 'West', and culturally confused, sceptical and frightened European and North American societies cling to the picture of a global militant Islam, determined to 'destroy our way of life.'

Two fragile and intensely quarrelsome societies in the Holy Land find some security in at least knowing that there is an enemy they can all hate on the other side of the wall. A crumbling dictatorship in Zimbabwe steps up the rhetoric of loathing and resentment towards the colonial powers that create the poverty and the shortages. Nearer home, disadvantaged communities make sense of their situation by blaming migrants and asylum seekers.

It's not that the fears involved are unreal. Global terrorism is a threat, Israel and Palestine really do menace each other's existence, colonialism isn't an innocent legacy, and so on. But the exploitation of these real fears to provide a 'solution' to more basic problems both breeds collective untruthfulness and makes any rational handling of such external fears infinitely harder. It breeds a mentality that always seeks to mirror the one who is threatening you. It generates the 'zero-sum game' that condemns so many negotiations to futility. Worst of all, it gives a fragile society an interest in keeping some sorts of external conflict going. Consciously or not, political leaders in a variety of contexts are reluctant to let go of an enemy that has become indispensable to their own stability.

The claim of Christianity is both that this mechanism is universal, ingrained in how we learn to behave as human beings, and that it is capable of changing.

It changes when we recognise our complicity and when we listen to what the unique divine scapegoat says: that you do not have to see the rival as a threat to everything, that it is possible to believe that certain values will survive whatever happens in this earth's history because they reflect the reality of an eternal God; that letting go of the obsessions of memory and resentment is release, not betrayal.

People may or may not grasp what is meant by the resolution that the Christian message offers. But at least it is possible that they will see the entire scheme as a structure within which they – we - can understand some of what most lethally imprisons us in our relationships, individual and collective. We may acquire a crucial tool for exposing the evasions on which our lives and our political systems are so often built.

Yes, the Christian Church itself has been guilty of colossal evasion, colluding in just those scapegoating mechanisms it exists to overcome. Its shameful record of antisemitism is the most dramatic reversal of the genuine story it has to tell, the most dramatic example of claiming that the killing of Jesus was indeed about them and not us.

But it keeps alive that story. Every human society needs it to be told again and again, listening to the question it puts, whether or not people identify with Christianity's answer. The point of the Church's presence in our culture is not to be a decorative annex to the heritage industry, but to help us see certain things we'd rather not about common responsibility - and the costly way to a common hope.


Archbishop's Easter Day Sermon at Canterbury Cathedral
Sunday 23 March 2008

'The last enemy to be overcome is death' (I Cor 15.26)

Your hair and your nails may keep growing for a while after you die; but nothing else does. Death is when growing stops - the routine ways in which your body repairs itself and grows fresh tissue, and the ways in which the mind and heart stop developing. We know the suffering that is caused when the mind and heart have already apparently stopped responding even before physical death - the agonizing spectacle of vegetative states or dementia. That's why people sometimes speak of these conditions as death-in-life. Signs of life are signs of response and development, and when they're not obviously there, we don't know what sort of life is really present.

So too we talk of the death of a relationship when nothing moves it forward; and we say that individuals or whole cultures are in some sense dead when they seem to be producing nothing fresh; they've lost the skill of responding and can only repeat, like the unhappy person suffering from some sorts of dementia. We fear dementia because we fear being trapped in sameness, repetition; we fear the death of love and imagination; we fear death itself because it is the end of all change. And we know that it is inescapable.

Recognising that this is so, that all the processes we value because they enlarge and enrich us will one day simply stop, is hard but it is part of growing up. Artists, scientists and psychoanalysts have in different ways warned against the dangerous illusion of thinking we are immortal. Maturity lies in accepting the truth - and then making the most of every moment of sensation so that our response is as deep and wholehearted as may be. 'This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long', as Shakespeare has it at the end of one of his most memorable sonnets (no.73).

Yet here comes the Easter gospel, apparently determined to upset this stoical maturity and to promise us just that eternal life we are urged to leave behind as a childish fantasy. Death will be 'overcome', 'swallowed up in victory'. (I Cor 15.54) Is the Christian gospel just a version of that popular but problematic passage sometimes read at funerals, beginning 'Death is nothing at all' and talking of it as just 'slipping into the next room'?

That's not quite the tone of what St Paul or any of the other New Testament writers is saying - nor of some of the ancient hymns and prayers of the Church in this season. 'Death and life have contended in that combat stupendous', says one early mediaeval hymn (the Sequence of Easter Sunday); and the whole idea of a battle between life and death in the events of Christ's death and resurrection doesn't suggest an event that is 'nothing at all'. Death takes quite bit of overcoming; there's a struggle involved here. And Jesus as he faces death seems to take it with utter seriousness, acknowledging terror and shrinking from it in his desperate prayer in Gethsemane. Easter may tell us that death is conquered, but it doesn't tell us that there was never any contest.

Perhaps that's the clue. Easter is not about denying death, and the resurrection doesn't make the nightmare death on the cross unreal. Death is exactly what the artists and scientists and psychoanalysts say: it is a full stop to human growth and response, it is night falling on everything we value or understand or hope for. Fear is natural, and so is grief at the death of another (Jesus, remember, shed tears for the death of a friend). Don't attempt to avoid it or deny its seriousness. On the contrary, keep it in view; remind yourself of it. When the tradition of the Church proposes that you think daily about death and prepare for it, it isn't being morbid but realistic: get used to it and learn to live with the fear. And meanwhile - Shakespeare was being entirely Christian in this respect - get used to loving and valuing things and persons irrespective of the fact that they won't be there for ever. Love them now, and what you would want to do for them, do now. 'Night is coming when no-one can work', says Jesus. (John 9.4)

So what does it mean to say that, despite all this, death is 'defeated'? When death happens and growing stops, there are no more plans, no more hope of control: for the believer, there is only God left. Just as at the very beginning of creation, there is God, and there is the possibility that God has brought into being by his loving will. When death has done all it can do, God remains untouched and his will is the loving and generating will that it eternally is. When we look at death, we look at something that can destroy anything in our universe - but not God, its maker and redeemer. And if we accept that we shall die and all our hopes and schemes fall into the dark, we do so knowing that God is unchanged. So to die is to fall into the hands of the living God.

That is why the effort to keep death daily before us is a source of life and hope. It is to commend ourselves every day into God's hands, trusting that he is eternally a loving creator, in whom there is no darkness at all, as the New Testament says. (I John 1.5) And when we let ourselves go into God's hands, we do so confident that he is free to do what he wills with us - and that what he wills for us is life. The Easter story is not about how Jesus survived death or how the spirit of Jesus outlasted his mortal frame or whatever; it is about a person going down into darkness and the dissolving of all things and being called again out of that nothingness. Easter Day, as so many have said, is the first day of creation all over again - or, as some have put it, the eighth day of the week, the unimaginable extra that is assured by the fact that God's creative word is never stifled or silenced.

Celebrating Easter is celebrating the creator - celebrating the God whose self-giving purpose is never cancelled and who is always free to go on giving himself to those he has called. And resurrection for us is that renewed call: when we have fallen silent, when we no longer have any freedom to respond or develop, God's word comes to us again and we live. (II Cor 5.17) We can't really imagine it; it isn't just a continuation of our present life in slightly different circumstances but a new world. Yet all that God has seen and worked with in this life is brought into his presence once more and he renews his relationship with it all, spirit and body.

That is the overcoming of death - made clear to us in the only way it could be made clear, by the historical, tangible recreation of the life of Jesus, still recognizably who he always was, yet changed in ways we can't grasp in their fullness. Death is allowed to do its worst in him - not only in the form of physical pain and final extinction, but in the terror and desolation with which Jesus approaches it. He lets go of everything, even the hope that God will intervene to spare him. He descends into Hell, and is brought up again by the creative call of his Father. A true struggle, an agon as the Greeks said, an agony of conflict; and a victory - not a reversal or cancellation but a new thing, risen life, the new age begun.

And so when we proclaim all this today, we as Christians are charged to address ourselves to two different sorts of delusion. On the one hand: we face a culture in which the thought of death is too painful to manage. Individuals live in anxious and acquisitive ways, seizing what they can to provide a security that is bound to dissolve, because they are going to die. Societies or nations do the same. Whether it is the individual grabbing the things of this world in just the repetitive, frustrating sameness that we have seen to be already in fact the mark of an inner deadness, or the greed of societies that assume there will always be enough to meet their desires - enough oil, enough power, enough territory - the same fantasy is at work. We shan't really die - we as individuals can't contemplate an end to our acquiring, and we as a culture can't imagine that this civilization like all others will collapse and that what we take for granted about our comforts and luxuries simply can't be sustained indefinitely. To all this, the Church says, somberly, don't be deceived: night must fall.

On the other hand, this alone would only be to echo the not very helpful remark of John Maynard Keynes – 'In the long run, we are all dead'; not much of an Easter message! So the Church says: 'We shall die, we shall have no choice but to let go of all we cling to, but God remains. God's unshakeable love is untouched by death, and all we do and all we care about matters to him. He and he alone is free to make us afresh, to re-establish the world on the far side of every catastrophe.'

It isn't so much that Christians say, 'Death is not the end'. In an important sense, it is the end, and we must prepare for it as people of faith by daily seeking to let go of selfish, controlling, greedy habits, so that our naked souls are left face to face with the creating God. If we are prepared to accept in trust what Jesus proclaims, we can ask God for courage to embark on this path. We don't hope for survival but for re-creation - because God is who he is, who he has shown himself to be in Jesus Christ.
The vital significance of the Church in this society, in any human society, is its twofold challenge - first, challenging human reluctance to accept death, and then challenging any human acceptance of death without hope, of death as the end of all meaning. Death is real; death is overcome. We are mortal, and that is basic to who and what we are as humans. But equally we are creatures made so as to hear the call of God, a call that no power in heaven or earth can silence. That conviction is the foundation of all we say about human dignities and rights, and it is the heart of our Easter hope. The gospel, by insisting on both our limits and our eternal hope in God, safeguards equally the humility and realism we need for mature human life and the sense of a glory embodied in our mortality because it has been touched by God. Death is real; death is overcome. On that basis we claim to have a word to speak to our world that can renew every corner, every aspect, of our humanity.