Some thoughts as the end of the liturgical year approaches.

The following is a sermon preached at Choral Evensong in Blackburn Cathedral on Sunday 17^th November 2013

At the beginning of the Confessions, written by St Augustine at the end of the fourth century, are some very famous words which became axiomatic for Christian people’s self- understanding in relation to the Creator: ‘Thou hast made us for thyself and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee’.  These words remind us that, as human beings, we are constituted in a certain way; we are reminded of our contingency, and that our true home is in God.  We have a built-in supernatural destiny which we cannot secure by our own unaided effort, but for which we have a natural affinity precisely because of the way we have been made.

Pope Francis said recently that, in western culture especially, human hearts have become anaesthetized – that they no longer search for God.  And it certainly seems to be a feature of modern secularised society that people live as if the present reality around us, and which we perceive through our senses, is all there is.  This means that this present reality takes on an exclusive significance – it is all that matters; the sum total, indeed, of all that is.

So powerful and all-pervasive is this tendency to effectively dethrone God in favour of human pre-eminence, that it would be naȉve in the extreme to imagine that Christian people, and indeed the institution of the Church itself, have been entirely insulated from it.  It is so easy to find that one has slipped into a kind of ‘practical atheism’, where we live most of the time as if we are self-sufficient and self-contained, as our culture would have us believe.  How different, really, are our lives, from the lives of those whose lives we share and interact with but who do not share our faith?  The danger then, of course, is that our faith easily becomes a kind of veneer over the top; an extrinsic, incremental add-on which is not actually essential to normal human functioning.  If this is so, then we have lost sight of something absolutely fundamental about ourselves as humans: namely, that we are oriented towards an eternal sharing in God’s own life.  To lose sight of this is bad enough, but then how do we possibly commend the faith to others when it is seen as not even ‘essential’ to ourselves?  Here, we set ourselves up, ironically and unwittingly, as agents of the secular default position which increasingly dominates us and actually polices the divine, so that faith claims are scrutinised and evaluated according to the extent to which they corroborate the preconceptions of society at any one time.

At this time of the year, when we reach the end of one liturgical year and prepare to begin another when we get to Advent, the scripture readings and the liturgical texts are timely.  They call us from indifference and complacency, from cultural compliance and worldliness, to a deep repentance and a renewed wakefulness.  They call us to recognise afresh that our fulfilment comes not ultimately ‘in the world’ but in union with God hereafter.  The collects – today’s for example - make reference to eschatological hope, to the appearance of Christ in glory, and our desire to be one with him.

This evening’s first reading (Daniel 6) is to do with the faithful Jew being ready to suffer martyrdom, if need be, rather than give up fidelity to God.  It is an example of what the scholars call ‘witness literature’, in which God comes to rescue his faithful servants, saving them from certain death, which is then inflicted instead upon those who would harm them.  The story ends with the pagan king acknowledging the power of Israel’s God.  Texts such as these provided solace and encouragement for those undergoing religious trials: God would protect them, even against apparently insuperable odds; for their part, they were to remain faithful; and, like the Christian martyrs of later generations, they would embrace the principle that God, rather than humans, must be obeyed, for ‘he delivers and rescues, he works signs and wonders in heaven and on earth’.  There was a more fundamental reality yet, than what they were experiencing in their trials; and God would secure their future, even beyond the present order of things.

In the second reading (Matthew 13:1-9, 18—23), it’s easy to miss its eschatological point, as indeed does the interpretation of the parable of the Sower provided in St Matthew’s text and which is generally reckoned to have originated in the primitive church.  What is important to recognise is that the beginning of the parable describes a different point in time from its end.  Initially, it is a description of sowing seeds; but at the end it is already harvest-time.  On the one hand, we have the frustrations of the sower’s labours; but then, we have the dawn of the Kingdom of God compared to the harvest.  The tripling of the harvest’s yield (thirty-, sixty- and a hundred-fold) signifies the eschatological abundance of God, surpassing all human measure.  To us, much of the labour seems futile and fruitless, but Jesus is full of confidence; for God’s hour is coming, and will bring with it a harvest of reward beyond all our imagining.  God brings from unpromising beginnings the glorious end that he has promised.  We are called again to look beyond, to a future reality far exceeding anything that we can conceive of.

The culture we now inhabit is a culture in a state of crisis.  In spite of the years of economic downturn, we still live in a situation in which life in this world, for most people in the west, is relatively amenable and pleasant.  It’s natural for people to want to hold on to it and, indeed, to become inured, blinded, to the Christian imperative to bear witness to a different set of priorities and values.  It’s natural for people to concentrate their efforts upon making life better for themselves, in the temporal sense.  But it’s also characteristic of our culture that, for all our advancement and apparently-increasing sophistication and material well-being, people do not seem happier; there is always something missing – something which this world can never provide and which always keeps people restless.  The Israelite people of old were urged to grasp that only God could satisfy their deepest needs and that they may well have to be prepared to look beyond the present reality.  Jesus’ parables similarly are parables of the Kingdom, which although already present among us is not as yet fully realised.  Our liturgical texts and readings over the next weeks, along with St Augustine’s famous insight, call us to look beyond ourselves and help others to do likewise.  This is, fundamentally, the mission of the Church.

Wednesday of Holy Week

Today's Gospel reading opens with Judas planning his act of betrayal, seeking his payment from the chief priests; and it ends with a head-on confrontation between Jesus and his betrayer.

Thus the passage is a kind of antecedent to the drama which is about to be played out, in which Judas does the betraying and the events which unfold reach their culmination in a direct confrontation between good and evil.  Jesus, the Son of God, and the embodiment of the goodness of God, is judged, flogged, and crucified at the hands of the wicked.

The betrayal of Judas itself is an antecedent to the betrayal of all the other members of the band of Jesus' disciples.  Yes, they had travelled around with him, listened to his teaching and witnessed his healing encounters with all sorts of people.  They had wondered who he was, and grown in their apprehension of his true identity.  Peter, indeed, had answered Jesus' question, 'Who do you say I am?' by saying: 'You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God'; and Jesus had attributed this insight to a revelation from God.  And yet, following Jesus' arrest, Peter - as Jesus had predicted - denied him three times.  The rest fared no better.  After following Peter in their protestations of loyalty, St Matthew tells us that, before Peter's denials, that 'all the disciples ran away'.

During Holy Week, Catholic Christians re-enact, in a sacramental way, the events of our Redemption.  We read the passages which lead up to the Passion and Death and then, on Holy Thursday, we celebrate the Mass of the Lord's Supper, followed as it is by the Transfer of the Holy Eucharist to the Altar of Repose and the keeping of a watch of prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane.  On Good Friday, we celebrate the ancient liturgy of the Lord's Passion and Death, before waiting at the tomb and preparing for the Easter Vigil.  And we re-enact these events, not purely as a dramatic re-presentation, but so that we might actually participate in them. Through this participation, we find ourselves challenged: how would we have coped as one of the Twelve?  Might we even be Judas?  Can we enter into the heart of Mary as her Son suffered and died?  Might we have joined in with the mocking of the crucified Jesus, just going with the flow?

Human nature is basically good, but flawed and easily deceived.  It has always been so.  A faithful participation in the events of Holy Week teaches us profound truths about the human condition and the nature we all share, and even more profound truths about the grace of God which, as St Thomas Aquinas famously stated, 'perfects' nature.  Whenever we turn to God, seeking his grace, he will always infuse us afresh so that we can begin again to be the disciples of the Lord Jesus.

Tuesday of Holy Week

At the Supper, Jesus knows that he is to be betrayed by one of his own, and he knows which one.  He hands a morsel of bread to Judas Iscariot.  Fellowship is broken, Judas goes out and - the evangelist tells us, in a phrase of terrifying symbolism - that 'Night had fallen'.

It's interesting that whilst evil seems to have gained the ascendancy and the events of Jesus' passion and death unfold, there is a clear sense that Jesus remains in control somehow, a theme prominent in St John's Gospel.  Jesus knows in advance who it is who will betray him: he hands the bread to this individual.  Jesus speaks of the Passion as his glorification; to the casual onlooker, the whole business has not the slightest hint of glory about it; on the face of it, it is a miserable story of the cruel death of an innocent man.

But this innocent man, subject as he was to the judgement of Pilate, knows what is really going on.  He knows that Peter, of all people, will betray him three times over, just as he knew the identity of the betrayer.  And this innocent man, judged by the powers of darkness, is the One who actually brings God's righteous judgement to bear upon the world.  The one who is subjected becomes the one who subjects.  When people would look upon the crucified Christ, they would be confronted with a choice to make as to which side to place themselves on.

Whilst human beings were responsible for the arrest, judgement, suffering and death of Jesus, he gives his life willingly to show the depth of God's love for the world and for sinful human beings.  And whilst the Passion confronts us with a choice, the righteousness of God's judgement means that Peter, for example, - the one who repeatedly denied Jesus - can be restored to his place of pre-eminence among the Twelve and be the rock foundation upon whom Christ's Church would be built.  Because of the depth of the divine love, each one of us, regardless of what has been before, can be rehabilitated by God's righteousness.  We can, of course, choose to place ourselves elsewhere (like Judas), for God never compels anyone.  But if we turn to Christ in penitence and faith, and place ourselves under his righteous judgement, his grace will exonerate us and renew in us a sense that he is the One we must follow, and that the 'night' which 'had fallen' can be replaced by endless day.

Monday of Holy Week

In today's Gospel reading, Jesus visits the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus.  Mary anoints Jesus' feet with pure nard, a very costly ointment.  It is an extravagant gesture of devotion, gratitude and love.  Judas Iscariot regards this gesture as irresponsible, wasteful and reckless.  He criticises Mary's action on the spurious ground that the money could have been better used, for the benefit of the poor - or so he said.  But Jesus defends Mary's action and accepts it in the spirit in which it is offered.  It is a free gesture of love and devotion; it is, in a way, a reflection of the extravagance of the love of God for each one of us; a love which is free and unbounded.

Whenever we love, truly love, we share - participate - in something of the love of God, whose love is the prototype of all loving.  The marriage rite makes this clear, but there are other contexts, too, in which human beings love and become capable of the extravagant, almost reckless giving of the self which we see in today's Gospel.  And because God's love is deeper, stronger and infinitely more extravagant than our own, it follows (because our love is a participation in the love of God) that our potentiality to love is without limit.

This week, we are brought into the closest possible contact with the love of God which reaches out to every person on earth.  We see the full extent of his love shown forth in the death of Christ, and we are invited to respond in love.  Like God's love for us, and like the nard in the Gospel reading, this love is always going to be costly.  The way of love is never the easy way; it is always the harder and more-demanding way.  But it is a purifying way, a way which leads through the cross to a new manner of existence in which all suffering, cruelty and death is overcome.  This is what Holy Week is about, and it is what being a companion of Christ is about.

This week, we re-enact, sacramentally, the loving events of our Redemption.  But we do more than simply re-enact them.  We re-enact in order to participate in the movement out from ourselves and into the life of the God who is love.

Illiberal liberalism and political correctness - an unhappy combination.

Someone who was until recently a follower of mine on Twitter, and who was also among my Facebook friends, last week 'blocked' me on the former and 'unfriended' me on the latter.  This person is a trustee of the British Humanist Association and Vice-President of the Media Society.  He runs a PR company in London and is a former York city councillor and Labour parliamentary candidate.  His name is Paul Blanchard, and I name him for three reasons: firstly, he is very loquacious on social networking sites; secondly, naming him somehow 'earths' what I want to say; and thirdly, he gave me no opportunity to respond to his emotive barrage of insults before cutting me off.

What brought all this to a head - we'd had heated disagreements before in which there were times when he went beyond what most people would regard as common courtesy - was a post I put on Facebook following the election of the new pope.  Under the post, 'God bless Pope Francis', Blanchard wrote that the new pope had said that the adoption of children by homosexuals was 'a form of abuse' and said, sarcastically, that the Pope seemed like a 'nice guy'.  I had not heard what the then Cardinal Bergoglio had said, and I responded by saying something to the effect that I would prefer to see for myself what he had actually said on the matter; I added that I thought that the ideal was for children to be raised by a mother and a father.  This stimulated an interesting discussion, in which a couple of friends of mine disagreed with me, but in a perfectly reasonable and rational kind of way.  A good discussion followed, in which I was able to clarify my position.  I made no reference at any point to homosexual relationships or sexual activity within them - I restricted myself to the point with which I started; namely, that all other things being equal, a family unit with a mother and father, preferably married, provides the best and most stable environment for children to grow up.  This claim is, as is well known, backed by by clear evidence.

Some time later, Paul Blanchard decided to enter the discussion again; he called me 'homophobic' and accused me of being bound by the 'stupid' Bible (to which, incidentally, I had made no reference).  He had clearly assumed, without foundation, that I held the view that homosexual persons were not suitable people to bring up children, even though I was careful not to even imply such a thing; indeed, I acknowledged that there are excellent gay parents in precisely the same way that there are excellent single parents.  But I did re-emphasise that I believe that the norm, or ideal, is that children be brought up and nurtured by a mother and a father.  I believe that, since the relationship between a man and a woman is generative of life, gender and sexual complementarity cannot be assumed to be purely incidental to the nurture of children.  I might add that, regarding gender complementarity, I regret that women are still outnumbered in parliament and that, of all students training to be primary school teachers, only around one in ten is male.

I am quite happy for people to disagree with me and, indeed, I often post comments on Twitter and Facebook on order to try to stimulate or provoke a discussion.  But the exchange with Blanchard shows an alarming trend in contemporary society.  It's fair to say, I think, that we live in what could be termed a liberal environment in which personal freedoms are valued highly.  There has been a trend for decades now towards certain kinds of equality and non-discrimination towards people on the grounds of such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability.  This trend is to be welcomed, though I can't help but note the irony that whilst this has been going on, a reverse trend has been taking place within the economic arena, but that's another story, and for another day.

For all the progress that appears to have been made towards creating a non-discriminatory environment, it would seem that certain groups have become fair game for the most appalling ridicule.  The attitudes of people like Paul Blanchard bear this out very clearly.  For all their professed liberalism and regard for freedom, they are clearly very happy to ridicule religion.  They want to banish religion to the private sphere of individual lifestyle choices and, as a consequence, 'thin out' the fabric of public discourse.  The one thing that is not permitted in the liberal paradise is to say anything which appears to cut across the new orthodoxy.  So, when someone like myself tries to uphold traditional marriage and what many people still regard as an ideal for raising children, we are immediately denounced as homophobic, medieval, Bible-bound and so on - this is even when no mention at all has been made of gay sexuality, and when it has been conceded gladly that gay people can make good parents.  It seems that, in the brave new liberal utopia, anything goes except the view that perhaps not anything goes, or even falls short of an ideal.

Some of this unthinking condemnation of anyone who seeks to uphold what are often denounced as 'traditional' views is due to an increasingly suffocating political correctness.  This, along with a liberalism that, left unchecked, can easily mutate into a kind of tyranny, is a very unhappy coupling.  In the end, Paul Blanchard decided that he could not even bring himself to have anything more to do with me.  The free, open discussion which should be one of the principal characteristics of a truly liberal society is either banished altogether, or made to take place within a very narrow space which has been circumscribed in advance by those who trumpet their non-discriminatory credentials from the rooftops whilst at the same time bearing (most of) the hallmarks of a tyrant.  Any supposedly liberal society in which this is the case is severely impoverished, for the taboos which held people captive in the past have simply been replaced with new ones.

Paul Blanchard himself, as I made clear earlier, is no off-the-wall loose cannon.  He is prominent in organisations which make serious claims to respectability.  Imagine the way he and others express themselves outside the public arena and among  those who share their prejudices.