Readings

Daniel 7.9-10, 13-14

2 Peter 1.16-19

Luke 9.28-36

Now it happened that as he was praying alone the disciples were with him. […] And he said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”. And Peter answered, “The Christ of God”.

Now about eight days after these sayings he took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray.

Words from the gospel according to St Luke, the ninth chapter.

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Gods are to be found on top of mountains. Everybody knows that. Zeus rules from atop Olympus; Shiva the Destroyer meditates on Kailāśa; Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, was born from a stone on Huāguo. On Mount Sinai, Yahweh dictated the law to Moses and came to Elijah, not in the furious wind that split the hills, nor in the earthquake that followed, but in the soft whisper of a voice.

“Who do you say that I am?” he asks.

“The Christ of God”, we reply, not knowing what we are saying.

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Christian theology, like Christian discipleship, is a quixotic enterprise that begins by asserting its own impossibility. God is not only that being greater than which none can be conceived, but also that which is simply inconceivable.

That this is so is hardly surprising. After all, our brains evolved to deal with medium-sized objects located in time and space. Being the source of all things, including time and space themselves, God cannot be counted among objects, medium-sized or otherwise. Much more so than even the weird and wonderful things posited by theoretical physicists—that pantheon of fermions and bosons; those n-dimensional space-times—God is a mystery beyond our telling, the mystery of existence itself.

All of this is just to say that whatever it might mean to know God, it cannot be like knowing anything else. This can be seen in the way theology is actually done. One model is presented to us at the end of the gospel reading: they kept silence. Their stunned silence was temporary, but since the days of the early church, silent contemplation and adoration has become, in some circles, the ultimate goal of theology. But another model is exemplified for us in the reading from the book of Daniel: here, the author is not silent, but is desperate for words, furiously drawing from various aspects of the created world to express something of God. There is snow and wool; there are wheels and flames, thrones and multitudes, ever world without end. The Church has always lived in both these modes: responding to the Word God speaks, who is Jesus Christ, with her own babblings and her sighs too deep for words, both supplied by the Holy Spirit.

For Christians then, the route to knowing God is not—for the most part—to scale mountains uninvited: not ours are the stories of Babel and Bellerophon. Rather, our knowledge of God begins and ends with God’s self-revelation and invitation to us into the divine life. The Spirit helps us in our weakness, intercedes for us. We are brought to the mountain to pray with Jesus.

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It is easy enough to see that the story of the Transfiguration is about revelation: Jesus of Nazareth is revealed as the Giver of Light, the fulfilment and consummator of both Law and Prophecy, the very Son of very God.

It is also easy to see how this revelation is meant to reassure the disciples, in the harsh and cruel shadow of the Cross, upon which their would-be Messiah was broken, and with him, their hopes of new life. “We have the prophetic word made more sure”, they told themselves, “we were there with him on the holy mountain; we heard this voice: this is my beloved Son”. Despite all appearances to the contrary, our faith is true: or so the experience of the Transfiguration allows us to say.

But we pass too quickly by what Moses and Elijah were talking to Jesus about: his departure, which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem. To put it more bluntly: his death. Paradoxically then, in this scene—in which Christ is revealed in cosmic splendour, and the voice from on high confirms his Divine Sonship—it is the mortality, the finite humanity of Jesus, that is the topic of conversation.

We must, therefore, not misunderstand the Transfiguration as a demonstration that the Second Person of the Trinity is merely temporarily pretending to be a human being, Jesus of Nazareth. The comfort we derive from this event must not be based on the notion that when Jesus suffers and dies on the Cross, he does not really die, but only appears to. No: the Transfiguration is precisely a repudiation of this heresy that we call Docetism. It is also a repudiation of a tempting view of the Christian life associated with this and other similarly dualistic heresies. In all three Synoptic Gospels, Peter is recalled as having said to Jesus, “It is well that we are here; let us make three booths”, the implication being that they should stay there, on the mountain, and at least Moses, Elijah, and Jesus ought to have shelter. But this God is not to remain on the mountain top, far from the troubles of the world: this God has gone already to the hill-country and will go now into the city, to be mocked and tried, tortured and murdered. In the same way, we are not to stay on the mountain, above the fray—good though it surely is to be there—but to follow our Lord wherever he may go, which is everywhere on earth, even to its hells.

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Christian theology is like Christian discipleship, because that’s what it is.

Knowing God is not like knowing other objects, because God is not an object.

Talking about God is not like talking about other objects, for the same reason, but also because the goal of theological speech is not merely unilateral declaration, in which an active human subject makes assertions about a passive divine object. Christian knowledge is, in this sense, decidedly not power, if power is power over something or someone else. Rather, it is a response to the Word God utters, even from creation.

Finally, to know and respond to God is to live. The voice from above the mountain says “This is my Son”, but also “Listen to him”: revelation entails commission. To see God—in the transformation of dull flesh into dazzling light, or in the pillar of cloud that envelops us, or in bread and wine made holy for us—(to see God) is to see a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in our hearts. Lamps are not just for staring at in silent adoration or just for propositional predication; lamps are first and foremost for following, as they light our path. The Transfiguration of the Lord is therefore not merely for our intellectual benefit—now we know what it means semantically to say that Jesus is the Christ—but for our own metamorphosis into the very likeness of this Jesus.  

Readings

Deuteronomy 30:10-14

Colossians 1:15-20

Luke 10:25-37

One perfectly sensible way to tell the story of social psychology is to begin at the Holocaust. In the wake of what seemed to be unimaginable horror, there was a desperate need to understand how such a thing could have happened, not least so that we might be able to avoid it happening again. And so, the Jewish diaspora, particularly in the United States, took it upon themselves to investigate the issue: thus was born a field obsessed with such dark matters as intergroup conflict, stereotyping, prejudice, ostracism, and dehumanization. The tragedy is that these psychologists have, in the past seventy or so years after the War, found time and time again how terribly commonplace, terribly normal this darkness is among and within us. We are, all of us, prone to inhumanity.

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Who is my neighbour? he asks, meaning: whom am I required to love, even as I love myself, that I may inherit everlasting life? Jesus, in this most famous of parables, seems to refuse to answer the question. Instead he speaks of a man, beaten and abandoned, who was helped, not by a priest or a Levite—people with whom this interlocutor would have identified—but by a Samaritan, an outgroup member, as social psychologists would say. The traveller’s own social identity is left ambiguous, but it seems safe to assume that the lawyer would have read him as Jewish: after all, the parable is reminiscent of an old story in the book of Chronicles, in which Samarian warriors released their wounded captives—soldiers from the Kingdom of Judah—having clothed and shod, anointed and fed them, and even returned them home on donkeys to Jericho. This is therefore not a story about who our neighbours are, whom we should love as ourselves, so much as a story about whose neighbours we are, by whom we are loved. In characteristic fashion, Jesus turns the legalistic question on its head.

This reversal casts the Samaritan—the other—in unexpected light. The other is not a threat, not a violent criminal or a vigorous competitor or a voracious consumer of state-funded welfare. Nor is he merely an object of charity, a passive recipient of our magnanimity, our neighbourly love. He is neither to be feared, nor to be pitied. Rather, in this story, he—the other, the Samaritan—is the saviour: the one without whom we would have perished, abandoned by our peers, left to die alone.   

This is not a story about who our neighbours are, but about whose neighbours we are. To be sure, there is a symmetry to the relation of being a neighbour: if A is a neighbour of B, then B must be a neighbour of A. In this sense, the parable of the Good Samaritan is, of course, a perfectly sensible answer to the lawyer’s question. But this flipping on the head of the question is not without its significance. Jesus does not just tell his interlocutor to love the Samaritan: he tells him to be like the Samaritan. Be like the other: the immigrant, the refugee, the ethnic minority, the religious nonconformist, the queer and gender nonconforming. Love, like they love themselves, like you love yourself.

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Seventy or so years after the Holocaust, and we don’t know much, but we do know that there is no silver bullet with which to vanquish our deep-seated instincts to favour those we deem to be like us, even to the detriment of those we deem to be unlike us. We live in insecure times, and such insecurity and anxiety has a way of sharpening our boundaries and our claws. In such times, we are prone to build walls, rather than bridges, whatever the Pope might have to say about the matter.

Here, at this University, social psychologists tend to favour what is called the “contact hypothesis”: familiarity with the other, so the research suggests, breeds liking. The well-known problem with this strategy is that the individuals with whom we come into contact and whom we discover we like are often re-categorised, and so prejudices about the group itself remain stubbornly and unrepentantly unfalsified. I cringe whenever someone tells me, under the false assumption that it is a compliment, that they don’t see me as Chinese. The implication is that I’m not like the rest of them, those foreigners, to be kept at arm’s length.

In the wider culture, there is also the move to “not see race”: that is, to behave as though there are no differences between groups of people. As noble as this is, not least as an attempt to reduce stereotyping, it also risks collapsing into the hegemony of the culturally dominant. To ignore difference and otherness is, all too often, to refuse to make space for them, to ignore their needs and preferences and grievancesg and unique contributions to the common good. Thus, so-called “men’s rights” activism against feminism and the #alllivesmatter strategy of denying the systematic bias against Black Americans. When we say that we want us all to share the same values or speak the same language or worship the same God, we usually mean that others should share our values, our language, our God. We want cooperation and unity and friendship and peace, to be sure, but only on our terms. The problem, for Christians, is that the gospel simply does not let us buy peace on the cheap.

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In our fervent commitment to the doctrine of the Incarnation, we typically emphasize God’s becoming one of us, like us in every respect. This is, of course, well and good. But given our current social and cultural contexts, Christ is also other. As appropriate as it is for people around the world to depict Christ in creative and contextual ways, we are rightly disturbed by that all too familiar image of the White Jesus, whether in his Aryan form or his American Republican one. Jesus of Nazareth is, in one sense, every man, woman, and child; but, at the same time, is—in scandalous particularity—a Middle Eastern peasant, once a refugee, now in occupied territory, a convicted criminal, a man on death row. It is this poor foreigner on the margins of society who is the image of the invisible God, in whom and for whom and through whom all things were created, in heaven and on earth, in whom all of the fullness of God is pleased to dwell.

This strange man, through whom God reconciles all things, makes peace with his blood, and calls us—not least in our dying, in the waters of baptism; and our offering ourselves to be broken and spilt, in the eucharist—(calls us) to do the same.

Readings

1 Kings 19:16,19-21

Galatians 5:1,13-18

Luke 9:51-62

There is nothing particularly new about people leaving their homes, traveling far to find fortune or refuge, to spread goods or gospel. The motif of the hero’s journey is, after all—as Joseph Campbell has taught us—the monomyth common to so many of our cultural and popular stories, told and retold. Think of Abraham and Moses; think of Siddhartha and Tripitaka; think of Bilbo and Frodo. Think of ourselves, those of us who have crossed land and sea to end up here, away from our roots, our blood, living and dead.

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Let the dead bury their own dead, he says.

Being here, roughly seven thousand miles away from home, I have missed two funerals already: of my grandparents who for most of my life lived with me and raised me, while my aspirational middle-class parents worked their long days to be able, when the time came, to send me away. Despite the best of intentions and the miracles of modern commercial aviation, there is a good chance that I won’t be there when my parents die. There is a good chance that I will not get to kiss my mother and father good-bye. There is nothing particularly new, particularly unusual, about this. It is just true for many immigrants—the 28% of us here in Oxford—like me and like some of you.

     And yet, of course, Jesus is, in his refusal of this would-be disciple’s request, intending to shock. We ought to bury our relatives: the Torah is clear on this, and the Mishnah will later make it clearer still. Even here, even today, we feel great sadness when we hear of someone who has no one to bury them; this happens more than you might think, the priest and the corpse alone in a crematorium. All the same, so Jesus implies, not even this act of filial piety takes priority over the urgent work of his kingdom.

Let the dead bury their own dead, he says, unflinchingly.

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There seems to be an exception, in Second Temple Judaism, to this expectation that we will, in order to fulfil the Fifth Commandment, bury our parents: high priests and Nazirites are exempt, even forbidden from handling a corpse, unless there really is no one else to bury the body.

A nazirite vow—from the Hebrew for consecration or separation; the word nazir, in modern Hebrew, still refers to monks—(a nazarite vow) may be taken up by a man or woman either permanently or for some finite period of time, during which they are to abstain from cutting their hair; from consuming  the fruit of the vine, including vinegar and wine; and from contact with corpses and graves.

It is unclear what relationship the first generation of disciples had with nazirite vows, but it was in the air at the time: John the Baptist’s austere asceticism and teetotalism is suggestive, as is Jesus’s saying at the Last Supper that he “shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes”. 

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At four o’clock this afternoon, Fr Jarred will be ordained to the priesthood; I hope to see many of you there. In the course of his ordination, he will be making vows too, though, rest assured, he will still be allowed to keep his hair impeccably cropped and have the occasional tipple. Also quite unlike nazirites, Fr Jarred will have rather a lot to do with the dead: the provision of the last rites and the presiding over funerals are, after all, important parts of a priest’s work.

You will, I suppose, not be too surprised to hear me say that there is an oft-neglected aspect of the priesthood, and that that has to do with it being a kind of death itself. This sense is not well expressed during the ordination service, but next Tuesday Fr Jarred will celebrate his first mass; I hope to see many of you there too. At the end of the mass, as is our custom, he will offer thirty-three roses to Our Lady, the same number as the age at which Jesus gave up his life for us. And just as my mother did last year, Jarred’s mother too will receive roses, the same number as his current age. The symbolism is not particularly subtle, though I confess that its implications are clearer for our Roman Catholic colleagues whose vows of celibacy entail a further kind of familial death: a genealogical dead end. Jarred’s mother is at no risk of that, at least. All the same, this act recalls to us Jesus saying on the cross to the beloved disciple “behold your mother” and to Mary, “behold your son”, which is the denouement of another difficult saying that “If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple”.

Ordination is a kind of death, then; a leaving our fathers and mothers, and all other allegiances based on worldly categories, whether biological or cultural, social or political. But, of course, our understanding of ordination is necessarily an extension of our understanding of baptism: as +Michael Ramsey would have said, Jarred’s priesthood is meant to reflect and serve the priesthood of all believers. Indeed, our baptismal liturgy is more obviously about death than is our ordinal: baptism is a kind of drowning, and is overtly described as a participation in the death of Jesus Christ, and in his resurrection to new life.

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Discipleship is a costly thing, make no mistake, and it should worry us if our Christianity is entirely comfortable and comforting. It should worry us if the only price we pay is the inconvenience of parking before mass, or the mild anxiety of abseiling off a church tower. Luke’s gospel refuses to let us off the hook so easily. Over and over again, Luke’s Jesus spells out what it means to follow him. Recall his response to the rich young ruler: sell all that you have and distribute to the poor. Recall last week’s gospel reading, in which Jesus calls us to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow him. Recall the emphatic instructions for us to count the cost in Luke 18, which concludes in the assertion that whoever does not renounce all that he has cannot be his disciple.

This business about leaving the dead to bury their dead is hardly an isolated case, but perfectly consistent with the hard truth that to follow Jesus is to have our faces also set to Jerusalem, to the High Priest’s house, to Pilate’s court, to Golgotha.

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There is no explaining such texts away; no amount of de-mythologizing or re-contextualising will make the ethical injunctions of Christianity more palatable. The good news of Jesus Christ is not the marketable news of convenience, but the declaration that we are free to live for one another, unencumbered by our parochial and partisan allegiances, our fleshly self-definitions that so easily collapse into ethnocentrism and nativism and nationalism and other forms of mistaken identity and idolatry. The good news of Jesus Christ is that we can now leave our dead to bury their dead. We can sell our possessions and distribute them, because our financial security and prosperity is no longer our bottom line. We can—by the grace and strength of God—bear our crosses on the way to wherever, to whatever may come.

John 17:20ff

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The first step is admitting that we have a problem.

It didn't take long for us to start bickering, though I suppose it took a little longer before we split up for good...or ill. And now, here we are, with our various divisions: east and west, Catholic and Protestant, mainline and evangelical, episcopal and congregationalist. It is impossible to count how many Christian denominations there are, but the point is that there are more than one.

There is disunity, and there is no sense pretending otherwise. We are, they say, one in spirit, which just seems like another way of saying that we are not really one at all. The unity of the Church, they say, is an eschatological reality, which just seems like another way of saying that it's not a reality at all.

Or rather, these are convenient slogans that we use to exculpate ourselves, to excuse ourselves from actually attempting reconciliation. But this is surely an abuse of theological categories. The Church is indeed spiritually united, but this is no reason to cease our ecumenical endeavours, any more than the real spiritual freedom of Christian slaves should have led us to abandon the abolitionist movement, as many slavers conveniently argued back in the day. The vision of the Church united is indeed an eschatological one, but this too is no reason to stop working toward it on this side of eternity; after all, all our moral visions are eschatological, and yet we strive to do better here and now, or we ought to, anyway. 

There is disunity, and there is no sense pretending that it's not a scandal, a crisis of Christian credibility. One among many, to be sure, but still, I think, a crucial one. The modern ecumenical movement arose out of concerns that denominational diversity would confuse the poor pagans and heathens in foreign, newly colonised, lands. And these concerns, while patronising, were not totally unfounded. Even growing up in Malaysia in the 1990s, I was bemused about how the evangelical Methodists were suspicious of the charismatic Baptists, and how both were suspicious of the Jehovah's Witnesses and Roman Catholics in equal measure. These Christians, they seemed to enjoy splitting up.

The broken-upness of the Church is a scandal and a crisis, and this is not least because balkanisation and insularity has never served any organisation well. Given the abuses of power that have recently been brought to much-needed light, one would think that this is a lesson well learned by now. Especially for an organisation so pruriently obsessed with the personal relationships and break-ups of individuals, it smacks of hypocrisy that we are not more concerned with relationships at ecclesial levels.

The first step is admitting that we have a problem. All the other steps involve doing something about it.

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Alas, so much of what passes as ecumenical activity--like so much religion more generally--is frightfully dull. It is difficult to get excited about gatherings of polite people trying very hard not to openly disagree. And it is not as though ecumenical groups are unaware of this shortcoming. Recently, I saw a headline in the News section of the Churches Together in England website that read "Boring but beneficial", describing a new constitution for local groups. It was, I am sure, someone's attempt at self-deprecating humour, but might have hit the mark a bit too well.

And yet, of course, we are woefully under-selling the modern ecumenical movement if we assume that it's all instant coffee and superficial cordiality. As I have already mentioned, the modern ecumenical movement began as a missional movement. And this is not just to say that it was  concerned with evangelism or proselytism, which of course it was. Rather, it is to say more generally that it was an outward looking phenomenon. The goal was to be one for the sake of the world, not least when the world was torn asunder, first by the Great War and then by its yet darker sequel. The world is still torn, of course; and so the need has not changed, and our call is to come together to meet it. Therefore, the question with which we are faced is this: what does the gospel compel us, together, to do, in this time and place?       

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We--Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Pentecostals, ad infinitum--(we) disagree on moral and political issues: this much is obvious to all of us. But it is not as though the disagreements are only between denominations: even within our own churches there are diversities of positions on any number of ethical topics. And yet, here we are, regularly worshipping and working together for the sake of the world, at least on a good day, at least when we are not defensively gazing at our navels, at least when we are not threatening to split up ourselves. There is no denying our differences, but there is, equally, no point in fetishising them. 

The fact of the matter is that we agree on much. And, if so, we can do much, and should and must, do much, together. Complete ecumenical agreement has never been a prerequisite for cooperative social action, and may well be its consequence. There is a relevant piece of advice that psychologists often dispense to the parents of adolescents: we tell them to cook together, or to engage in some other kind of joint activity in which parents and children stand side-by-side, rather than face-to-face. This has a way of improving the conversation, opening both sides up to free and frank talk. Churches are, in many ways, like adolescents.

There is, in meta-ecumenical reflections, a tendency to worry that ecumenism descends into mere humanistic do-goodery, but this anxiety seems misplaced. Woe be to us, if the thing we worry about is doing too much good together. Whether feeding the poor together or caring for the sick together or tilting against the windmills of injustice, violence, and oppression together will lead to inter-communion, I cannot say: but it is not as though this kind of cooperation would be a waste of time, even if it didn't. The poor will be fed; the sick will be cared for; evil windmills will be toppled. And we will have done this work of the gospel, hands joined, even if gingerly.

We agree on much, I don't think it is pollyannish to say. We agree on more than we want to admit, perhaps. There is a vanity, as Freud used to say, in small differences. And if the freedom that Christ won for us is meant to achieve anything, surely it is meant to defeat the narcissistic insecurities that compel us to drive wedges between ourselves. The Pope's response to Donald Trump's immigration policy should burn our hearts also: "a person who thinks only about building walls ... and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel".

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So, what now? We turn up, together. Maybe not to lowest common denominator prayer meetings and tepid talks in cold church halls, but to soup kitchens and protests and sit ins and refugee camps. The Churches Refugees Network, the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance, Christian Aid, Church Action on Poverty, the Gatehouse here in Oxford, based just down the road at St Giles's: there are any number of ways to work side-by-side other Christians in ways that that go beyond mere symbolism and tokenism. The afore-mentioned Churches Together website is a good source of information.

Readings

Acts 5:12-16

Revelation 1:9-13, 17-19

John 20:19-31

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Christ is risen, and now everything has changed; but, of course, nothing has changed.

Christ has risen, and Rome has fallen, but in her place have risen empire after empire, each one repeating that age old trick of dressing up thuggery in the respectability of marble busts and fine bone china.

Christ is risen, but the poor are still with us, as indeed he himself said they would be; this time, however, we have not wasted the choice nard to anoint his feet, but have instead stored up riches for ourselves under the eschatological vision that wealth trickles down. Meanwhile, since Good Friday last week, approximately 180,000 people around the world have died of hunger or hunger-related causes.

Christ is risen; meanwhile, we are witnesses to another kind of resurrection, of the old time demagoguery that appeals to our basest prejudices and insecurities. The most effective tool in the arsenal of the craven warmonger is the fear of the other, and boy do we fear the other. Thus, for every side of every bout of armed conflict, young men and women give up their lives, and all we have to show for it is an ever bloodier mess. First, it was the Jews we feared, and since then we have found others, and the cycles of preemptive and retaliatory violence have gone on unimpeded as the Neros of the world play on.

Christ is risen, and now everything has changed; but, of course, nothing has changed. Or, at least, we haven’t; not enough, not nearly enough.

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And yet, this—this sordid state of affairs in which we find ourselves, and which is of our own making—is precisely why we need to continue celebrating Easter, why we need the Paschal light that pierces the darkness, and brings warmth into a cold world.

Truth be told, Christianity has much more in common with nihilism than it does with any whiggish view of history, in which the world is getting inexorably better toward some beatific vision of a just and peaceful society. To be sure, we hope for such a world, but it is not offered to us on a silver platter. After all, surely we know better than most, that it is the severed heads of the politically inconvenient that tend to be thus offered.

There are, in the Christian life, no pat certainties, no guarantees of projected outcomes: ours is a risky enterprise, a sojourn in the wilderness, destination unknown, but for the pillar of cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night, the rising star. Christ is our help and hope, without whom we are lost for sure, trapped in our world of credit default swaps and sweatshops and factory farming and military-industrial complexes.

Hope is the operative word. Easter—the Resurrection—is our sacrament of hope: it is our rejection of the world that has been sold to us on the cheap, in which violence is the cost of peace, and poverty the price of economic growth; in which our conveniences and comforts are bought with the blood, sweat, and tears of anonymous others, kept far, far away for fear that if they too are allowed to prosper, then we would suffer as a consequence; a pale facsimile of the world that God loves into being. Christ—the subjugated Jew; the son of man who has no place to lay his head; the prophet, marginalised and ignored—(Christ) is risen. Christ is risen, and we are raised with him: raised into peace and out of fear, and out of our locked rooms into the world, led by the Spirit whom we have received, to forgive the sinners and wash the unclean and heal the sick, we who are ourselves the beneficiaries of healing, washing, and forgiveness.

This is the difference then, between Christianity and nihilism; and it is a difference that means that there is, for Christians, no room at all for the apathy of resignation or complacent cynicism. Popular opinion to the contrary, we are not about pie-in-the-sky-when-we-die, but about bread today, the kingdom of God come, the will of God done, on earth as it is in heaven.   

This is, after all, the faith of Martin of Tours; of Genevieve of Paris; of Thomas Becket; of Francis and Clare of Assisi; of Catherine of Siena; of Bartolomé de las Casas; of William Wilberforce; of Elizabeth of Russia; of Maximilian Kolbe; of Edith Stein; of Dietrich Bonhoeffer; of Martin Luther King Jr.; of Albert Schweitzer; of Óscar Romero; of Dorothy Day. We stand with these, and so many more, men and women—all doubtless fallible and flawed—but nevertheless beacons of the light of the Risen Christ. We have a great cloud of witnesses who have leaned against the windmills of conquering warlords and power-hungry kings and slave-traders and bigots and robber barons.

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Do this in remembrance of me, he says. But, why? Why this business with the bread and the wine, the eating and the drinking?

The obvious answer, often given, and true enough, is that eating and drinking are central to life. We need food to survive, and “This is my body” is the denouement of “One does not live by bread alone”. In the Eucharist, instituted on this night so many nights ago, we feed on God who sustains us. The symbolism is as plain as the wafer itself.

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We also need each other, and at his table, Christ brings us all together in himself, we who are so many. (Pardon, for a moment, an excursion into autobiographical indulgence.) My first time in an Anglican Church, it was an 8am BCP service, and terribly unfamiliar, both the liturgy and the people. There weren’t many of us, a half a dozen at most. I was the youngest by about a half a century, and stood out like…a Malaysian Chinese lapsed Pentecostal in a choir stall of respectable, White, anglo-Catholic women in their Sunday best. We had nothing in common, they and I, and yet there we were, standing and bowing and kneeling together, crossing ourselves together, me mimicking them, feeling less lost and more found with each moment and movement. And then we were at the altar rail together, the faithful ladies of All Saints’ Anglican Church, Dunedin and my uncertain self at the end, and I watched them close their eyes and open their lips, and then and there I knew that they were home, and so was I, so exposed and vulnerable did they—did we—allow ourselves to be: eyes closed, mouths agape, looking like fools. Like fools, half-expecting the wine to taste of silver or blood, and yet struck, surprised, by the strong, sweet headiness of the liquor when the chalice is finally presented. The Eucharist is not like a shared meal, so much as the other way around: all the best meals are, like the Eucharist, occasions for creating families ex nihilo.

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The body of Christ, the priest said to me, and I believed her, as if I’ve believed it all my life. It is a crazy thing, though, by any measure of crazy things. It is exactly as crazy as God becoming a human being: born wet and wailing as all babies are, and then battered and broken and murdered, a political criminal on trumped up charges, like too many young men and women still are. The body of Christ, this flimsy piece of bread.

Priests are not, I think, meant to have favourite parts of the Eucharistic liturgy, but I must confess that I do, though favourite is probably the wrong word. It’s that moment, during the Agnus Dei, when we take the consecrated host in our hands, and snap it in half. There is, of course, no sense in which we are in that moment breaking or re-breaking the physical body of Jesus: and yet, of course, this is, in our hands, the body of Christ, broken for the sake of the whole world.

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Do this in remembrance of me, he says, to us for whom his body is broken and his blood is spilt. He says it to us, who in our feckless faithlessness fail to keep watch, who betray him and deny him and abandon him in the darkness, our bellies still full of the bread and wine, immortal food from his own hand. 

There is a caricature of Christianity—Catholicism in particular—in which Christians are, on one hand, steeped in guilt, and on the other, cheaply exculpated by bits of liturgical technology. It has always seemed to me that, in some ways, we have the opposite problem: for so many of us, our moral senses are dulled against the gross injustices in the world, and our feelings of responsibility or obligation are likewise diminished, desensitised by the enormity of the problems, perhaps, or just as part of the detached cynicism that, for whatever reason, seems to characterise our age. The Church has penitential seasons, and in a callous world, this is no bad thing. And as for liturgical technology: as you will be told by any cleric at St Mary Magdalen’s, we go to confession not to be forgiven, but because we already are. And to repeat an old theological cliché, forgiveness is free, but far from cheap.

When Jesus washes his disciples feet, it is, as we know, a sign of love. The son of man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. But there is something else going on. Jesus washing the feet of his disciples should remind us of the time when his own feet were washed. The fragrance filled the house when Mary of Bethany poured the perfume on his feet, and wiped them with her hair: let her alone, Jesus says to Judas who criticises her for wastefulness, let her keep it for the day of my burial. Mary’s act too is one of love, but for Jesus, it is also a preparation for death. To have our feet washed is, likewise and like our baptism, a dying to ourselves, for the sake of the world.

So it is also with the bread and the wine, in which we are ourselves offered as a living sacrifice, bound up in that—as the old words have it—one full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, who is Jesus Christ, our Lord. In breaking bread together, we pledge ourselves to be broken for one another and for the world; in sharing wine together, we drink from the bitter cup of Christ’s own suffering. Just as his resurrection life is ours, so too is his earthly life and ministry, even his wounds, even unto death. Make no mistake: there is nothing cheap in our receiving that free and gracious gift that is our Lord’s body and blood.

Why do it then? There can, I think, be no justification, except the rejection of the economic logic of balancing costs and benefits, and the certainty that there is truth to be found in these symbols, even if they are truths that bring tears of anguish before they bring tears of joy.

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Do this in remembrance of me, he says, in remembrance of him, to whom we belong forever, even though we stumble and fall from the weight of our own egos and insecurities, even though we are cowards and traitors, even though we abandon love for safety. And for certain we will do all these things, and more: stumble, fall, cower, betray, abandon. Not because we are, as they like to say, “only human”, but precisely because we are insufficiently so. And so it is that Christ, who is the very meaning of humanity, calls us to join him at table, to sup with him at this banquet first prepared this very night so many nights ago, world without end. Do this in remembrance of me, he says. Why? Because it is here—where we who are many eat and drink together; where our notions of power and glory are subverted by the Word made flesh, made bread, broken; where we are ourselves broken, spilt, and consumed—(it is here) that we discover what it means to be truly human. Do this in remembrance of me, he says, and I don’t think we need to be told twice.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Spirit. Amen.

If only our story ended on Palm Sunday.

As indeed the Scriptures foretold, the Christ approaches the holy city from the Mount of Olives; triumphant, he comes—Maccabean, even—what with the palm branches, and the singing. Maccabean, but with less of the guerrilla warfare, and the death. No, this heir to David’s throne will be a peaceful one: he rides on a donkey, and not a warhorse.

If only our story ended here. Maybe with that quip in Luke’s gospel about how even the stones would cry out, were everybody else silenced. So glad is all of creation at the coming of her saviour that even the dirt come to life.

But, no. That’s not the happy ending that we get. St Luke, bless him, the great killjoy, he moves swiftly on from Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem to his lamentation over it. The King of the Jews, he weeps over this place and this temple, which will, not long from now, be broken, crushed.

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The King of the Jews, so Pilate says, arrayed in gorgeous apparel, silenced, but no rocks cry out on his behalf.

The crowds are gathered and excited, but no longer do they hymn this son of David. They have no need for a prince of peace; in his place, they choose a killer, a strong man, a man with a strong name: the son of the father, it means, which is kind of fitting, in a perverse sort of way. That’s just the kind of messiah we want, with our bloodlust, disguised as a desire for the kind of peace that really is just the cessation of conflict, which looks more or less like everyone looking and sounding and behaving like us, or else. Or, it looks like the friendship between a Jewish vassal king and his Caesar’s Roman apparatchik, bound by precariously shared power and united in common enmity of this puzzling pretender from, of all places, Nazareth. Surely, nothing good could have come from there? It’s hard to believe that anybody ever hailed him king of anything. It could hardly be surprising that his followers, we have scattered like ash in the wind.

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And then, of course, we kill him.

If only our story ended on Palm Sunday.

But, of course, it couldn’t have. I mean, what did we think was going to happen? He rides, quixotically, into the occupied territories, looking very much like a conquerer, just underfunded and very badly prepared. They probably thought the donkey thing was an economic necessity, rather than an erudite political statement: and fair enough.

What did we think was going to happen? It’s not as though the soldiers, upon sight of him, were going to beat their swords into ploughshares. That would be like the scene in the book of Jonah, where the prophet half-heartedly demands repentance, and suddenly even the beasts comply. But Jonah is a comic fairy story, and this is real life. Itinerant preachers don’t get to prance around on ponies, looking like royalty, during Passover in Roman Palestine without consequence. Come think of it, it’s still probably a bad idea over there.

So, we kill him. Of course, we do. Everything in history prior and hence tells us that that’s exactly what we do to good men and women: we marginalise them, or we murder them. What did we think was going to happen to Jesus, the goodest of all good people? The source of all goodness that comes from the Father.

Our story, it couldn’t possibly have ended with Palm Sunday. So, instead, we get this gruesome scene. With the beating and the mocking and death and the darkness and the mother and her tears.

Well, that’s not quite right, of course.

The rocks, they are, even in the darkness, silent still, but there is this one guy, a Roman soldier, whose lips cannot quite hold their praise. And that’s not nothing. Intimations of great things to come. 

Welcome to Holy Week. Watch this space. 

NB: This homily was for a Lent series on the wounds of Christ.

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

She pours on his feet the choicest pure nard, these feet that and the fragrance fills the house like prayers rising to heaven. She dries his feet with, of all things, her hair.

He rises from supper, girds himself, and prepares a basin. He washes their feet, and dries them. Even Simon’s, the coward. Even Judas’s, the traitor.

They pierce his feet, and his hands too; and his brow, and then eventually his side. A sword pierces his mother’s soul, as it would any mother’s soul, shattering it to godforsaken pieces.

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We make a crucial mistake—or at least a crucial omission—when we suppose that foot-washing is about the humility of the washer and the honour of the washed. It is that, of course: Mary of Bethany humbles herself before her Lord; Jesus enacts humble service for the apostles; the priest humbles himself before the congregation he serves.

But it is also a perilous thing, to have one’s feet washed: it is a preparation for death.

This is most obvious in the case of Jesus himself, of course: when Judas chastises Mary for wasting expensive oil rather than selling it, Jesus rebukes him, telling him to let her alone. Let her keep it for the day of my burial, he says. The feet that were washed became those that were pierced.

In the case of the disciples, the washing of their feet is transformative. It cleanses them, without which—Jesus tells them—they will have no part in him. There are obvious connexions with baptism here, which is itself a kind of drowning: in baptism, we are in the Red Sea and in the sea monster and suffocating on the Cross. In baptism, we give up our lives to God and, therefore, for the world. This is just what it means to wash one another’s feet, to love each other as Jesus commanded that night, after supper, before he was betrayed and abandoned. Before we betrayed and abandoned him.

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Christianity is an ugly religion, with frankly unappealing stories. The only thing going for it is that it is true.

When I was growing up, we were told—and told each other—stories of the Indian prince Gautama Buddha, who when he was born could miraculously walk, and did so: and with each of the seven first step he took, lotus flowers bloomed ex nihilo. It was a lovely, beautiful thing that made for charming watercolours.

Now I tell stories about Roman soldier driving nails into the grubby feet of a political criminal.

Not only that, but I tell you—and I tell myself—that the bloodied feet of Christ are your feet too, and mine. Glib slogans about “walking with Jesus” have no place unless they come with the realisation that the path of glory is the road to Golgotha.

Only then will we arrive at the joy of the empty tomb, where angels sit in white, at the head of Jesus now gloriously gone and also at his feet.

Readings

Gen 15:1-12,17-18

Phil 3:17–4:1

Luke 13:31-35

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

What is he waiting for? God knows.

The blood is drying; even the buzzards are losing interest, circling lazily overhead. Their sudden swooping downward jolts his eyelids open; he leaps to his dusty feet, and flails his hands, soiled with sacrificial butchery. 

Abram waits; he knows not what for.

The Sun is setting, and the wild darkness is soon to come and is now here. It is only when Abram can see no longer, alone in his terror, that God speaks. Smoke and fire, God speaks: judgement, promise, and peace, God speaks: to your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.

Sure. Give the old man sons and daughters, and his wife; she’ll have a chuckle when she hears the news.

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What are they waiting for?

Citizenship in heaven, he says. They want to believe him, as we all do. But Roman citizenship is difficult enough to obtain, how much more difficult will be the road to heaven? And besides, where is this place? Will there be roads and aqueducts, like the Romans have made? Will my grandparents be there? I miss them.

New bodies, he says, glorious bodies to replace our humiliating ones. Wait a second. What did he just say about my body? I suppose he’s right. It’s all terribly humiliating.

I don’t know about all this. It all seems too good to be true. Or too mysterious to be true. Or too mysterious to be good. I don’t know.

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Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!

Your house is left to you.

You will not see me until the time comes.

Comes for what?

What are we waiting for?

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It is the second week of Lent, and we wait; in our Lenten observance, we wait; in our lack of Lenten observance, we wait. We haven’t had chocolate and tea and coffee for so long, the withdrawal symptoms have so affected us that we have forgotten what it is that we are waiting for, if we ever knew in the first place.

Lent is, like all time, ambivalent. The road to the joys of Easter does, after all go through the passion of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. We will abandon Jesus in the darkness, before we sing unto his light. We will gather in the absence of the God we murdered, before we experience again eternal faithfulness and love. Easter does not negate Good Friday, because the Resurrection is not the denial of the Passion, but it’s fulfilment and meaning.

What are waiting for?

Resurrection.

The time when we say: blessed.

Or the time for judgement and peace, from the Nile to the Euphrates.

Or the time for new bodies, for transformation and glory.

Blessing. Peace. Glory.

We are easily fooled, aren’t we, into thinking that these are comfortable words, or comforting ones. But of course, to call blessed he who bears the good news is to sign up for it. That good news is, of course, peace and glory. But the peace of God is not the absence of conflict; rather, it is the creation of a world in which conflict is no longer necessary. It is a world in which we—you and me—we make room for ourselves and others to flourish, refusing the participate in the cycles of oppression and exploitation that characterise most of human history, including our present lives, whether we realise it or not. And glory? The New Testament is clear in its analysis of glory and power. Glory looks like a man, falsely accused, battered and nailed to a cross. Power looks like a lamb, enthroned and slain from the foundation of the world.

We are awaiting the death and resurrection of Jesus, into which we are baptised.

Baptism of Scarlet O’Keefe

But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

— John 1:13

Scarlet, this is the most important day of the rest of your life. This is, I realise, a strange thing to say, seeing as you won’t remember any of it. You have not spoken your first words; nor have you taken your first steps. You have many birthdays to come; some will be more memorable than others. There are many milestones ahead. First day of school; first job; first home. First love, first heartbreak. Perhaps one day you will have a daughter of your own, and that will be a glorious day indeed. These will all be important days, to be sure—life changing ones, even—but still, none will be more important than this day, the day of your baptism.

Unlike all these other events, baptism does not change your life, so much as it gives you life: today, you will become truly alive. Actually, today your birth and your death come together. In baptism, you will be joined with Jesus in his death, and this means that you are also joined with him in his resurrection. You will be drowned, in the water of baptism, and be born again with life that flows from God’s abundant spring. (We don’t usually tell parents this before they have their precious babies baptised, but I figured I should be straight with you.) It is a mysterious thing, but I guess that is appropriate, because you, Scarlet, are a most wonderful mystery too.

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You might think it odd that this day, this event, should be in some sense about death. That sounds like a scary thing. And so it is: the Christian life, into which you are baptised, is no light and easy matter. We are told in no uncertain terms to give up our lives for the sake of others. The pattern of our lives is Jesus Christ, who lived and died for his enemies as well as his friends. This is to be the pattern of your life too. It is good to be clear and frank about this from the start, I think: Christianity is not a particularly cuddly religion. We’re out to change the world, and the world doesn’t particularly want to change.

But here’s the thing about the Christian life, impossibly hard though it is bound to be. It is, by definition, one in which you will never be left struggling on your own. To be baptised into the death and resurrection of Christ is to be adopted into God’s family, the Church.

You already have a family, of course: your mother is here, and she loves you with a love stronger than death. You probably won’t believe me when you’re a stroppy teenager; but it’s true. You already have a family, but in baptism, your family grows; as, indeed, did your mother’s, when she was baptised. We—those of us here today, and the Church more widely—are unspeakably privileged, from now on, to call you our own. And, just as we will always have your mother’s back, we will also always have yours.

This will forever be your Church, and we will forever be your people. It will not matter whether you have been a good girl, though of course—for your mother’s sake—you should be; our call is to always stand by you and walk with you. It will not matter how many times you leave from this place; it will always be a home to which you can return. Your baptism calls forth ours, in which we too were brought into this family, and became committed to one another for the sake of the world. God help us, then, that we keep our vows to share with you this life that we have been so blessed to receive.

Reading

Luke 4:1-13

On Friday this week just past, I went to watch Spotlight, a film about the team of investigative journalists who revealed the Roman Catholic cover up of the sexual and spiritual abuse that was allowed to go on for decades. Lest we are tempted to think that it is only the Roman Church that is guilty here, let me assure you that the Anglican Communion has its own share in this obscenity.

Leaving the cinema, my clerical collar around my neck, all I could think was that the whole edifice—the Church, her clergy and her committees; her schools, for Christ’s sake—the whole thing should come crumbling down.

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Power. That’s the Devil’s gimmick. The power to turn stone to bread. The power over all the kingdoms of the world. The power to cheat death. It could be anything, really. The power to be adored by vulnerable young people. The power to cajole or coerce others to do terrible, terrible things. The power to avert eyes from the skeletons in our closets. The power to avert our own eyes from injustice and abuse.

I fear, we have not done very well, really. We have succumbed to temptation in the most embarrassingly basic, textbook, way. The trappings of being a venerable institution with impressive international resources; they have, it seems safe to say, had a devilish effect on us.

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It is not as though I have a solution up my sleeve.

Leaving the Church has never been an option: to whom shall we go? His are the words of eternal life. Besides, while our moral outrage surely comes from our common humanity, our faith does give us a particular perspective on and against the abuse of power. From the Hebrew prophecies that railed against the oppression of the poor to the passion narratives of Christ who died a political criminal falsely accused, our most sacred stories reveal a deep concern for how power is understood and used and abused. They compel us toward the same concern; or they should, if we still want to think of them as our stories.

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I don’t generally have what people think of as “religious experiences”. But there are a few things I am privileged enough to get to do that transport me somewhere else.

One of those things is a moment during the Eucharist: during the Agnus Dei—Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world—the priest performs the fraction, breaks the consecrated host. Granted that there is no physical sense in which Jesus is being snapped in half, the symbolic power of that action is beyond my capacity to articulate it. The Eucharist is about the Incarnation, which is about Power itself becoming a little baby boy; it is about the Passion, which is about that boy growing up to be broken and murdered by human hands and instruments. Every time I snap the host in half, I am struck by the glorious ludicrousness of the whole thing: God becomes mortal, and dies at the hands of cowards.

Readings

Isaiah 6:1-8

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

Luke 5:1-11

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The word “vocation” comes from the Latin verb vocāre, to call, to name, or to invoke. It is a word with which those of us who have been ordained to the priesthood are intimately familiar. Prior to ordination, we were made to discern our vocation, and then others were made to test it. There is a lot of navel gazing in this process, and if one is not careful, it can mutate into a narcissistic enterprise: and, worse still, a perversely clericalised one, in which priests are made to seem somehow superior to laypeople. What every ordinand needs at some point in the process is a reminder that her priesthood, should she be ordained, is inseparable from the priesthood of all believers. Most of us get this from Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1960s, who wrote in his classic book The Christian Priest Today that priests are “called to reflect the priesthood of Christ and to serve the priesthood of the people of God, and to be one of the means of grace whereby God enables the Church to be the Church”. In other words, the vocation of the priest is to serve the vocation of the other members of Christ’s Body that this Body, the Church, may fulfil her mission in the world.

The second thing that every ordinand needs is a reminder of what vocation looks like in the Bible, which is, after all, the primary source of the Christian imagination. This is particularly important because part of the priest’s serving the priesthood of the people of God is reminding the people—that’s you—of the very same thing. We are, that is to say, to remind each other what God sounds like when God calls.

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Abraham attempts to pass his wife off as his sister.

Moses kills a man in a fit of rage.

Jacob cheats his brother out of his inheritance.

David send a solider to his death, so he can have his wife.

I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips!

Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!

I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle!

Thus spake Isaiah the prophet, and Peter the pope, and Paul the persecutor of Christians turned proselytiser par excellence.

These stories tell us two things. The first is that we are not doomed to be who we are when we are at our worst: our lowest points do not define us. The second is that the call of God sounds nothing like an annual appraisal upon which some future reward is conditioned: God all but ignores our protestations of unworthiness. God is in the business of touching our lips with fire—your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out—and telling us not to be afraid.

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There is, in a sense, everything to be afraid of. Isaiah is commanded to remove his sackcloth garments, and walk naked and barefoot for three years (as a sign and a portent against Egypt and Cush). Peter is, according to tradition, crucified upside down. Paul, likewise, is beheaded, also under the Emperor Nero.

It is, it seems to me, too convenient to reassure ourselves with the idea that our calling is to an easier life than Isaiah’s or Peter’s or Paul’s; a more middle-class form of mission and ministry, to be conducted through the writing of cheques and the making of phone calls. I say this as an academic with rooms in North Oxford, and a part-time curacy in a well-resourced parish church smack in the middle of town. I say this as someone who probably relates more with Jonah—who fled when he was called—than the protagonists of today’s readings. And therefore, I say this to myself as much as to you, perhaps even more so. We are not, all of us, called to abandon our comforts and head out into the wilderness, but some of us are: we had better listen carefully and listen well. And, if and when the time comes, my hope for myself and for you is that we will—trembling to be sure, but faithful anyway—say “Here am I; send me”, and, leaving everything, follow him.

Readings

Isaiah 62:1-5

Ps 36:5-10

1 Cor 12:1-11

John 2:1-11

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It all began with the Magi: pagans, turned by our tradition into wise kings, who first made him known to, of all people, Herod, the Roman client king of Judea. It seems now an ill-advised thing to have done, foreigners telling Herod that there is born another King of the Jews. In retrospect, “wise” might not quite be the right word for these astrologers. In any case, at this point, they knew about Jesus—from their study of the Scriptures, no less—but this does not quite count as “epiphany”. Epiphany requires encounter, requires meeting Jesus in the flesh, even in a manger. This is, of course, entirely unsurprising, given the central Christian confession of the Incarnation. The Church is nothing if not obsessed with physical, material reality. In that way, she is like God: John 3:16, and all that. And so it is that two Sundays ago we celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany, during which we remembered the visitation of the Magi, which in turn marks the revelation of Christ to all the world, even to the Gentiles.

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Epiphanytide is one of those liturgically contentious seasons in the Church’s year: the Roman Catholics no longer really keep it, whereas Anglicans officially still do. Good Catholics that we are here at All Saints’, we’re with Rome, but it must be said that this move loses something from the ancient tradition that keeps together at one go the visitation of the Magi, the baptism of the Lord, and the miracle at the wedding at Cana. In all three, Christ is in some sense revealed to us, made known and real and present.

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This time last week, we remembered and celebrated the baptism of Jesus by John. Just like that, thirty years have flown by. The infant boy to whom the Magi brought their precious gifts is now all grown up, and we are unworthy to untie the thongs of his sandals. “Behold”, his eccentric cousin exclaims, “The lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world”. Jesus is, like the rest of us, baptised, after which—unlike for the rest of us—the heavens opened, the Spirit descended like a dove, and a voice said, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”. Thus, Jesus’s identity—crucially, his relationship to the Father—is made known, even by the voice of God.

And then, as we have just heard, Jesus turned water into wine at the weeding at Cana, at the beginning of his ministry. John’s gospel asserts that this was the first of his signs, which revealed his glory, and led his disciples to believe in him. Serious stuff, to be sure. And yet, if the account of the wedding at Cana counts among the best-known miracle stories in the New Testament, it is at least in part thanks to Rowan Atkinson’s sketch from the 1980s. You may recall that, in this piece of comedic genius, Jesus also produced a white rabbit, sawed a woman in half (and renamed her Sharon), and cracked puns about being sick of the palsy. The crowd thus proclaimed, “Thou art indeed an all-round family entertainer”. The joke is only as ridiculous as it is representative of how many, many people—including Christians; especially Christians, perhaps—think about Jesus and his miracles. Despite knowing better, we often fall into the trap of believing that Jesus is a sort of conjurer of parlour tricks, whose power is best used for our comfort and convenience, if not quite our entertainment. It is tragicomically ironic that this story, meant to reveal some truth about Jesus—his glory, as St John puts it—now represents one of our crassest and most common theological failures.

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If our celebration of the visitation of the Magi points to the kingship of Christ, and our celebration of his baptism points to his divine sonship, what does it mean to remember the wedding at Cana?

In the water made wine, the new creation was revealed at the wedding feast. Poverty was turned to riches, sorrow into joy.

So it goes in one of the Extended Prefaces for Epiphanytide. In other words, what is revealed is the world in which the Son of God is King, not only of the Jews, but of all people, and every time and place. In this new creation, things are turned on their heads. The best wine is served last, rather than first; plain water in pots for purity is made into that heady substance that moralists have in every age cautioned against. This is not to say that Jesus is some kind of weird contrarian, violating expectations just for kicks. Rather, it is to recall the absurdity of grace, the unbounded generosity of God. The central event of this absurd grace is, of course, not this miracle itself nor the wedding during which it occurs. The water and the wine point beyond themselves. There is, for Christians, no thinking about the conjunction of Jesus and wine that does not immediately lead us through the Eucharist to the Cross, the paradigmatic locus of grace. St John writes of this first sign that it reveals Christ’s glory, and we can see why. In John’s gospel, the glorification of Christ is his crucifixion: this first sign thus foreshadows and makes known that final event, which is the very beginning of the new creation.

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Finally, there is, I think, something fitting about the way in which Epiphanytide and Ordinary time bleed into one another in the confused way that it does. After all, the revelations we claim for all three events—visitation, baptism, and wedding miracle—are also to be found in the every day and the apparently unremarkable. It is, after all, to water and wine—not just to timely conversions of the former to the latter—that we come to encounter God. The waters of baptism and the Eucharistic wine are for us portals to the new creation that is not a different place but this very place transformed by self-giving love, even the love that dares to die for the sake of thieves and traitors.

By the mystery of this water and wine        

may we come to share in Christ’s divinity         

who humbled himself to share in our humanity. 

Readings

Ecclesiasticus 3.2-6, 12-14

Colossians 3.12-21

Luke 2.41–end

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Son, why have you treated us so? is the New Testament’s equivalent of that more familiar parenting trope, “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed”.

This is, so our cultural cynicism has led us to believe, just what families do: families disappoint. They fail to remember birthdays, or show up to piano recitals; they refuse to take over the family business, or settle down with a nice Chinese girl; what about that one you used to play together with when you were small? Families, they disappoint. They get pregnant, and claim that it was a miracle. They try to end the engagement in secret. They don’t think to tell their mom and dad where they’ve gone; don’t you know that we’ve been worrying sick? You could have been kidnapped, like that poor girl all over the Internet: the blonde one, with the eyes, her parents are still looking for her. Why have you treated us so?

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The preacher’s temptation at this point is to pivot from the fraught fragility of the facts of human families to the simple serenity of our spiritual home, with that paradigm of loving relationship, the Father, Son, and Spirit. From there, the preacher can derive some moral ideal about how we should treat our fathers and mothers, our brothers and sisters, with self-giving love.

The problem with this otherwise apparently sensible and edifying approach is that there is precious little evidence for this kind of idyllic familial bliss in the Bible. It may be true that the perfectly mutual self-giving love that is Father, Son, and Spirit can—with some heavy qualification—provide a sort of template for our own earthly family lives, but the doctrine of the Trinity is not in the first place a doctrine about human social relations. To confuse it for one is to confuse God for creature.

What we get instead, even in the case of the Holy Family, is dysfunction and awkwardness, failures to communicate and to empathise. Long before we even get to the New Testament, the Bible is a saga of familial conflict and complication. We have Abram trying to pass off his wife as his sister. We have Laban tricking Isaac into marrying both daughters, rather than one. We have Jacob cheating Esau of his inheritance. We have Joseph, sold to slavers by his brothers. We have the soap opera of the lives and times of Saul and David and Jonathan and Michal and Merab and Bathsheba and Uriah and Absalom and Amnon and Tamar and Solomon. 

By the time we get to Joseph and Mary, it seems only a minor scandal that she conceived out of wedlock and that he tried to get rid of her. He even comes off as a nice guy for trying to do it quietly, even if it is also his own face that he is trying to save. And then, of course, Joseph himself soon vanishes from the picture altogether, we can only speculate why.

And what of our Lord? At least in South East Asian terms, Jesus himself can hardly be said to be a paragon of filial piety. In our gospel reading today, we have Jesus, the insolent pre-teen, neglecting to inform his parents of his whereabouts in a magnificent failure of empathy. This would not have gone down well with my parents when I was a child, I assure you. And then, at the beginning of his adult ministry in John’s gospel, we have that famous and much debated scene of the Wedding at Cana, in which Jesus says to his mother, “Woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come”. And in Matthew’s gospel, his response to the bloke telling him that his mother is looking for him is more unambiguously dismissive, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?”.

You know, I’m beginning to think that Jesus did not have very much time for the nuclear family. In any case, any attempt to establish the nuclear family as a biblical mandate is flagrantly unwarranted.

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If there is a Christian doctrine of the family, it is a doctrine of adoption. Think of the election of Israel, think of the appointment of David; think of Jesus and Joseph and Mary. Think of us, the goyim of the eleventh hour, nevertheless called up to our place at Israel’s banquet. It is at least a picture of family that rejects pat certainties about who’s in and who’s out, that refuses to fetishise genetic relatedness or ethnic membership, and that instead takes risks in hope and perhaps even in absurdity, based solely on the faithfulness of the God who first adopted us.

There is, of course, an important sense in which we don’t, for the most part, choose our families. But of course we do, in much more important ways, daily, with every interaction.  

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Families, they disappoint. Sometimes, it’s their fault; sometimes it’s ours; sometimes it’s nobody’s fault, really. But—and maybe this is perverse to say in these most tender of times post-Christmas reunions—[but] the very fact that families can and do disappoint is, it seems to me, a good thing, a good sign, in that it reveals an openness, a vulnerability in us to be affected by those whom we love enough to hurt us.

Make no mistake: this is not to let ourselves off the hook, not to enable our neglectfulness and selfishness; nor is it to encourage us to allow ourselves to be abused or taken for granted or otherwise disappointed. To celebrate vulnerability is by no means to condone its exploitation.

Quite on the contrary, the reminder that we are called to be vulnerable to one another is precisely and for that reason a reminder of our obligations toward those who are vulnerable to us. Say what you like about the gender politics of the epistle to the Colossians, but it gets right at least the fact that all human relating is mutual, even if not always equal: wives and husbands are both addressed, ditto parents and children. The call to be vulnerable comes with obligations for those toward whom the vulnerability is directed.

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Much has been made in recent weeks about the Holy Family as refugees, and this is no bad thing. It is no bad thing not just because that reading inspires compassion in us, but because it relocates our imaginations away from cookie cutter, colour-by-number dioramas and nativity plays, into the gritty particularities of actual human familial experience. The Feast of the Holy Family captures pregnancy scares and anxieties about infidelity as much as it does the triumph of innocence over the unreasonable expectations of imperial bureaucracy and the long arms of despotic persecution. In other words, it is about your family, and mine. And it is about our disappointments and regrets, as much as it is about the mundane miracles of being and having father and mother, brother and sister, husband and wife. Our prayer therefore, is that these families are made holy, in ways that only precious, fragile, vulnerable things can be. And, we pray also to recognise that they already are holy, in the ways they afford opportunities for love.