continuing this week's reflections by Ray Anglesea
O Lord, send your cherubs in my last hour to bear my soul away to Abraham’s bosom; let it rest there untouched by any pain until the last day. Wake me then from death’s sleep, so that my joyful eyes may see you, the Son of God, my Saviour, grant me this and I will glorify you throughout eternity. Chorale, St John Passion, J S Bach
We have passed Good Friday and tomorrow will be Easter Day. The visual identity of these two events is clear. Lent is generally stark: black crosses, a purple robe, crown of thorns, spear and sponge, money bag – all of which culminates with a single man, hanging on a cross, a victim of capital punishment. Easter Day, by contrast, as church flower ladies know only too well, is a rush of gold, whites and yellows, white plaster-of-Paris tombs, egg hunts and more flowers. Between the worlds of these two extremes stands Holy Saturday, its mood subdued, yet charged with anticipation.
For many people the problem with Holy Saturday is that there is nothing actually to see. The wondrous cross is not there to be surveyed, but it is not yet time to stare into the empty tomb. The time of vigil has come. We wait in silence and in darkness. In some ways this is just as well. The visual images of Good Friday – in paintings, films and television – are perhaps, over familiar, almost prosaic. All too often, Jesus looks quite solemn but resigned on his cross, passively accepting his fate. Pain, in one still portrait, is not easy to capture, and the very act of committing that event to canvas or to the screen is an act that looses something of the reality of Good Friday. Perhaps Mel Gibson’s controversial and excessively violent film The Passion of Christ (2004) which recalled the last 12 hours of Jesus life and starring James Caviezal might be considered an exception to that rule.
But instead of “seeing” suppose we shut our eyes and listen. There is a sense of waiting, of anticipation there is a stillness and quietness that is appropriate, because Jesus had been laid in the tomb. Joseph of Arimathea, the secret disciple, but now courageous and bold, had begged the body of Jesus from Pilate, tenderly annointed and wrapped it in linen and laid it in his own prepared tomb hewn in the rock. But in our waiting what is the sound we hear?
A few years ago a short play for radio told the creation story of Genesis through two lowly back-room angels whose task in God’s workshop was to dub the sound on to creation. As they talk about the sounds to be made by fish, birds, animals, seas and rivers, attention focuses on a box in the corner of the sound workshop. “That box,” says the senior to the junior angel, “is full of sounds you don’t want to hear .......a child crying, a mother dying, the sound of war........screams, the rattle of death.......once you open the box, you’ll release the noise of chaos................and you’ll never get them back in.”
Inevitably the young angel, in the absence of his mentor, prizes open the lid and lifts it slightly. He hears no scream, nor the sound of war – just the crunch of teeth into a crisp green apple.
Lent has been acknowledging that all these sounds have been let out long ago. We cannot control them. Good Friday and Easter Sunday are about hearing them contract and be redeemed in the events of the cross and resurrection. It is the sound of fury on Good Friday that cancels out the sound of the Fall, and brings the peace of Easter on a lush fresh Spring Day. Listening in silence and imagining becomes a moment that is sacred and ultimately safe. So today is a prelude to a mystery, one that defies sight.
But there is a sound – that of earth quaking and ground breaking. But they carry different messages. Tonight, all over the world, Christians will sit in silence in the darkness between these sounds. In the vigil they keep, they will hear the story of redemption, long, long ago. They will wait and watch for a spark, that first flame of Easter light. At its appearance, there will be a new noise – shouts of acclamation and the sound of celebration.
The silenced Word will speak once more.
Hush!" said the Cabby. They all listened.
In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it. The horse seemed to like it too; he gave the sort of whinney a horse would give if, after years of being a cab-horse, it found itself back in the old field where it had played as a foal, and saw someone whom it remembered and loved coming across the field to bring it a lump of sugar.
"Gawd!" said the Cabby. "Ain't it lovely?"
Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn't come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out - single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing.
"Glory be!" said the Cabby. "I'd ha' been a better man all my life if I'd known there were things like this."
From Chapter 8: The Magicians Nephew, C S Lewis
Wednesday 20 April 2011
Friday: The Way to Calvary
continuing this week's reflections by Ray Anglesea
Lord, our master, whose glory fills the whole earth, show us by your Passion that you, the true Son of God, triumph even in the deepest humiliation: Introduction, St John Passion: J.S. Bach, composed for the Good Friday Vespers Service of 1724, St Nicholas Church, Leipzig.
The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu writing in The Times 2 at the start of this year’s Holy Week (Monday 18th April 2011) spoke of a world “where governments that seemed impregnable are being overthrown.” We think of the unrest and turmoil in the Middle East, civil war in Libya, the Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Korea and, of course, Jerusalem. I am reminded in our Morning Prayer Old Testament readings from Lamentations this week how “lonely sits the city (of Jerusalem), how like a widow she has become, a city that weeps bitterly in the night, who has no one to comfort her, her friends have become her enemies.” The Archbishop comments are a stark reminder that the Christian gospel is no philosophical theory or mere symbolic story; Christians are on the front line. It is a gospel of salvation that has at its heart the execution by barbaric torture of a particular man in a particular place at a particular point in time, this year represented so graphically for me by the crucifix Lam’a Sabach’thani (Matthew 27 v46) in Durham Cathedral, by the Russian Sculptor Kirill Sokolov (1930-2004). In his obituary in The Guardian it was reported that “Sokolov regarded life as essentially tragic; he saw art as a kind of salvation.” The sculpture gives powerful and poignant expression to the suffering of people at the hands of oppressors.
What we remember on this Good Friday is all of a piece with the intense fighting around the city of Misrata, Libya. Reports on the news channels indicate that hundreds of people have been killed and 1000’s injured since late February. Golgotha, the place of the skull, where nails smashed through the wrists and feet of Jesus, the field teacher and healer from Nazareth in Galilee, stands for the skulls of every war and every genocide. Betrayed by his friends, self-preserving denial, making sport with prisoners, the mockery of crowds, spectators drawn to a spectacle, the soldiers doing their duty and dicing for his clothes, a mother in agony and a knot of women helplessly looking on – it all happens time and time again – “where human rights are perverted in the presence of the Most High (Lamentations 3 v35).
Jesus was put to death in an occupied nation. His crucifixion was the direct consequence of his challenge to the religious authorities of his day. It was no less a convenient way for a jittery Roman governor, nervous of trouble at Passover time, to get rid of a potential threat. The cocktail of the crucifixion - as I was reminded last night at the Cathedral’s compline address given by the former Bishop of Salisbury; Rt Revd David Stanclifffe - was a mixture of religion and politics. Yet although this event anchors it in history we are compelled to look deeper to see why the Cross is the mark of Christian identity and the disclosure of what God is like.
The gospels mark the ministry of Jesus with predictions of his passion. Sacrifice and suffering are at the very heart of who he is. As the 19th century novelist Dostoevsky affirmed, “loving humility is a terrible force: it is the strongest of all things and there is nothing like it.” Jesus proclaimed the coming of the kingdom, or rule, of God, a kingdom that was neither pursued nor established by the ways of violence and power. His kingdom as he tells Pilate in John’s gospel is “not of this world.” Only if it were would his servants fight.
And yet the bible tells us there is a fight, a fight of a cosmic order of which Jesus is a part, which to me in more enlightened times I find unfathomable. The ministry of Jesus is seen as wrestling with the powers of evil of and engagement with that engulfing darkness, named as sin and death, of which I can understand. When Judas goes out to betray Jesus, St John with all his layers of Gospel meanings notes that it was night, and at the crucifixion, the culmination of this struggle, the gospels record that there was darkness over the land.
Jesus came to do his Father’s will, showing that will to be a love going to the uttermost, reaching out into the very darkness of hell, plumbing the depths of human sin, betrayal, abandonment and rejection. In a costly work of reconciliation Jesus defeats the power of darkness and establishes peace. That peace is the reconciliation of a sinful, fallen humanity, caught in a web of the worship of false gods, and driven by selfish desires, with the God who made men and women in the image of his love that they might reflect his likeness.
Today is “good” only because of Easter. The passion story which comes to a close today would be vastly different without the Resurrection. It is the hope kindled by the Easter encounters with the Risen Jesus that makes all things new, a theme that I was reminded of at a dear friend’s father’s funeral today held in the very old 11th century Norman church of St Helen, Kelloe. In the light of Easter we see that love’s redeeming work was indeed done through the cross, not apart from the cross. There the fight was fought and the battle won. It was from the darkness, silence, death and the hell of the utter apartness from God that Christ rose in triumph.
And the Easter good news of the Cross and resurrection has been found to bring hope and life in the most appalling situations, in refugee camps, on battlefields and in the most abject human misery. Today we remember that even if we go down to hell God is there, and in that love going to the uttermost, we do indeed find our peace.
Rest in peace, sacred body, for which I weep no longer, and bring me also to my rest. The grave that is yours and holds no further suffering, for me opens Heaven and closes Hell. The Conclusion, St John Passion. J S Bach, composed for the Good Friday Vespers Service of 1724, St Nicholas Church, Leipzig.
Psalm 27
Colossians 1 v 19+20
Lord, our master, whose glory fills the whole earth, show us by your Passion that you, the true Son of God, triumph even in the deepest humiliation: Introduction, St John Passion: J.S. Bach, composed for the Good Friday Vespers Service of 1724, St Nicholas Church, Leipzig.
The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu writing in The Times 2 at the start of this year’s Holy Week (Monday 18th April 2011) spoke of a world “where governments that seemed impregnable are being overthrown.” We think of the unrest and turmoil in the Middle East, civil war in Libya, the Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Korea and, of course, Jerusalem. I am reminded in our Morning Prayer Old Testament readings from Lamentations this week how “lonely sits the city (of Jerusalem), how like a widow she has become, a city that weeps bitterly in the night, who has no one to comfort her, her friends have become her enemies.” The Archbishop comments are a stark reminder that the Christian gospel is no philosophical theory or mere symbolic story; Christians are on the front line. It is a gospel of salvation that has at its heart the execution by barbaric torture of a particular man in a particular place at a particular point in time, this year represented so graphically for me by the crucifix Lam’a Sabach’thani (Matthew 27 v46) in Durham Cathedral, by the Russian Sculptor Kirill Sokolov (1930-2004). In his obituary in The Guardian it was reported that “Sokolov regarded life as essentially tragic; he saw art as a kind of salvation.” The sculpture gives powerful and poignant expression to the suffering of people at the hands of oppressors.
What we remember on this Good Friday is all of a piece with the intense fighting around the city of Misrata, Libya. Reports on the news channels indicate that hundreds of people have been killed and 1000’s injured since late February. Golgotha, the place of the skull, where nails smashed through the wrists and feet of Jesus, the field teacher and healer from Nazareth in Galilee, stands for the skulls of every war and every genocide. Betrayed by his friends, self-preserving denial, making sport with prisoners, the mockery of crowds, spectators drawn to a spectacle, the soldiers doing their duty and dicing for his clothes, a mother in agony and a knot of women helplessly looking on – it all happens time and time again – “where human rights are perverted in the presence of the Most High (Lamentations 3 v35).
Jesus was put to death in an occupied nation. His crucifixion was the direct consequence of his challenge to the religious authorities of his day. It was no less a convenient way for a jittery Roman governor, nervous of trouble at Passover time, to get rid of a potential threat. The cocktail of the crucifixion - as I was reminded last night at the Cathedral’s compline address given by the former Bishop of Salisbury; Rt Revd David Stanclifffe - was a mixture of religion and politics. Yet although this event anchors it in history we are compelled to look deeper to see why the Cross is the mark of Christian identity and the disclosure of what God is like.
The gospels mark the ministry of Jesus with predictions of his passion. Sacrifice and suffering are at the very heart of who he is. As the 19th century novelist Dostoevsky affirmed, “loving humility is a terrible force: it is the strongest of all things and there is nothing like it.” Jesus proclaimed the coming of the kingdom, or rule, of God, a kingdom that was neither pursued nor established by the ways of violence and power. His kingdom as he tells Pilate in John’s gospel is “not of this world.” Only if it were would his servants fight.
And yet the bible tells us there is a fight, a fight of a cosmic order of which Jesus is a part, which to me in more enlightened times I find unfathomable. The ministry of Jesus is seen as wrestling with the powers of evil of and engagement with that engulfing darkness, named as sin and death, of which I can understand. When Judas goes out to betray Jesus, St John with all his layers of Gospel meanings notes that it was night, and at the crucifixion, the culmination of this struggle, the gospels record that there was darkness over the land.
Jesus came to do his Father’s will, showing that will to be a love going to the uttermost, reaching out into the very darkness of hell, plumbing the depths of human sin, betrayal, abandonment and rejection. In a costly work of reconciliation Jesus defeats the power of darkness and establishes peace. That peace is the reconciliation of a sinful, fallen humanity, caught in a web of the worship of false gods, and driven by selfish desires, with the God who made men and women in the image of his love that they might reflect his likeness.
Today is “good” only because of Easter. The passion story which comes to a close today would be vastly different without the Resurrection. It is the hope kindled by the Easter encounters with the Risen Jesus that makes all things new, a theme that I was reminded of at a dear friend’s father’s funeral today held in the very old 11th century Norman church of St Helen, Kelloe. In the light of Easter we see that love’s redeeming work was indeed done through the cross, not apart from the cross. There the fight was fought and the battle won. It was from the darkness, silence, death and the hell of the utter apartness from God that Christ rose in triumph.
And the Easter good news of the Cross and resurrection has been found to bring hope and life in the most appalling situations, in refugee camps, on battlefields and in the most abject human misery. Today we remember that even if we go down to hell God is there, and in that love going to the uttermost, we do indeed find our peace.
Rest in peace, sacred body, for which I weep no longer, and bring me also to my rest. The grave that is yours and holds no further suffering, for me opens Heaven and closes Hell. The Conclusion, St John Passion. J S Bach, composed for the Good Friday Vespers Service of 1724, St Nicholas Church, Leipzig.
Psalm 27
Colossians 1 v 19+20
Thursday: The Way to Gethsemane
continuing this week's reflections by Ray Anglesea
Two smells on the way to Morning Prayer this morning; the smell of newly cut grass amongst the yellow daffodils many shades of green in the Cathedral gardens and the smell of freshly baked bread from Durham’s new Mediterranean Bakery and Deli, “Ciao Ciao.” In the bakery window are displayed delicious breads - feta cheese and mint, wholemeal, olive and rosemary and a hot cross loaf. The smell of Mediterranean bread reminded me of holidays on the Vendee’s golden beaches, camping in the pine forests south of La Rochelle and the morning walk to the boulangerie to pick up baguettes and croissants to have with freshly ground steaming coffee. Why is it that bread which we take for granted as being little more than the boring stuff holding together cucumber and tuna can somehow come become a feast when eaten in the morning sun? Perhaps because when we make time we discover the importance of the simple things in life.
In the Lord’s Prayer which will be said in churches throughout the land tonight we ask God to “Give us this day our daily bread”....................bread.............the most basic of food...............we are simply asking that God to give us life. When Jesus was starving in the wilderness, the first temptation he had was the offer of bread. Centuries before, out in the desert, where we were on Monday, the migrant tribe of the Hebrews received manna from heaven; the gift of food from God to keep them alive on their great trek. Bread by which they will survive, bread by which they would live, bread received as a gift of God.
In tonight’s meal of the last supper as the Passover meal is re-enacted we remember and celebrate this great gift of God which he has given to his church. Holy Communion, The gift of bread and wine. We ask in this meal, this service, this mass or eucharist that God would give us eternal life, that God would keep us in eternal life, for after all life is a gift of God. This life, this grace, this bread is to be broken and shared with others. Simply by sharing food we are sharing friendship, we are sharing in God’s friendship. God after all loves unconditionally ..........he wants to share his life with us...........he asks us to feed on him.
But Jesus tonight at his farewell meal with his disciples in that upper room, shot through with foreboding, pathos and drama, what Yeats would call in another context “a terrible beauty,” turns everything on its head. It is not bread that gives life, the baguette, the sliced bread, the Mediterranean feta cheese and mint loaf, but Jesus: he himself is the bread of life, he is the one who gives life, and he is the one who provides the grace to share his love with each other and with strangers. Jesus at this meal of bread and wine is playing out, acting out in symbolic form something that we are to have access to for all time. He himself who is all grace, all love, and all life becomes in this meal the servant and slave. He gives himself to us; he gives his body willingly to be broken like bread, for the great tomorrow.
What happened in the past, in that upper room we make effective in our halls, cathedrals and chapels tonight. In this communion service we take a historic journey backwards crossing all ages of faith, as we remember the event when God acted to save his people. There was no time for the captive Israelites to bake bread in the normal way with yeast and leaven, so it was therefore called “the bread of affliction.” The bread was chosen to make present and for them to remember the bitterness of the slavery of the Israelites and the miracle of their deliverance.
But God will act again. The service of Holy Communion also points to Good Friday, the very next day, and to Easter, Resurrection Day. The cross of Calvary would give way to the third day conquered by goodness, death conquered by resurrection. When the Lord broke the unleavened bread and took the cup, he was giving new significance to the bread and wine with the words “this is my body broken for you. This is my blood shed for you” At his last homily before he was murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador said “May this body broken and this blood shed for human beings encourage us to give our body and blood up to suffering and pain, Christ did not do this for self but to bring justice and peace to our people. Let us be intimately united then in faith and hope at this moment of prayer.”
In this meal tonight in the eating and drinking of the bread and wine, Christ grants communion with himself. God acts in our service tonight as he does every communion Sunday by giving life to the body, the fellowship of our local churches, the renewing of each member. The bread we receive has been broken, the wine out poured. The road from the Last Supper, passes through Gethsemane, Calvary and the garden of that first Easter.
By his action tonight Jesus demonstrates that we are loved by him forever, that we will be with him forever, in bread and wine he gives himself to us. Christ gives himself with his own hand. All we need to do is extend our hands to receive what is given – peace, forgiveness and love.
We are not alone. Jesus never promised an easy journey, through Gethsemane and onward to Calvary. But he did promise bread for the journey and in that bread, his presence, every step of the way.
Two smells on the way to Morning Prayer this morning; the smell of newly cut grass amongst the yellow daffodils many shades of green in the Cathedral gardens and the smell of freshly baked bread from Durham’s new Mediterranean Bakery and Deli, “Ciao Ciao.” In the bakery window are displayed delicious breads - feta cheese and mint, wholemeal, olive and rosemary and a hot cross loaf. The smell of Mediterranean bread reminded me of holidays on the Vendee’s golden beaches, camping in the pine forests south of La Rochelle and the morning walk to the boulangerie to pick up baguettes and croissants to have with freshly ground steaming coffee. Why is it that bread which we take for granted as being little more than the boring stuff holding together cucumber and tuna can somehow come become a feast when eaten in the morning sun? Perhaps because when we make time we discover the importance of the simple things in life.
In the Lord’s Prayer which will be said in churches throughout the land tonight we ask God to “Give us this day our daily bread”....................bread.............the most basic of food...............we are simply asking that God to give us life. When Jesus was starving in the wilderness, the first temptation he had was the offer of bread. Centuries before, out in the desert, where we were on Monday, the migrant tribe of the Hebrews received manna from heaven; the gift of food from God to keep them alive on their great trek. Bread by which they will survive, bread by which they would live, bread received as a gift of God.
In tonight’s meal of the last supper as the Passover meal is re-enacted we remember and celebrate this great gift of God which he has given to his church. Holy Communion, The gift of bread and wine. We ask in this meal, this service, this mass or eucharist that God would give us eternal life, that God would keep us in eternal life, for after all life is a gift of God. This life, this grace, this bread is to be broken and shared with others. Simply by sharing food we are sharing friendship, we are sharing in God’s friendship. God after all loves unconditionally ..........he wants to share his life with us...........he asks us to feed on him.
But Jesus tonight at his farewell meal with his disciples in that upper room, shot through with foreboding, pathos and drama, what Yeats would call in another context “a terrible beauty,” turns everything on its head. It is not bread that gives life, the baguette, the sliced bread, the Mediterranean feta cheese and mint loaf, but Jesus: he himself is the bread of life, he is the one who gives life, and he is the one who provides the grace to share his love with each other and with strangers. Jesus at this meal of bread and wine is playing out, acting out in symbolic form something that we are to have access to for all time. He himself who is all grace, all love, and all life becomes in this meal the servant and slave. He gives himself to us; he gives his body willingly to be broken like bread, for the great tomorrow.
What happened in the past, in that upper room we make effective in our halls, cathedrals and chapels tonight. In this communion service we take a historic journey backwards crossing all ages of faith, as we remember the event when God acted to save his people. There was no time for the captive Israelites to bake bread in the normal way with yeast and leaven, so it was therefore called “the bread of affliction.” The bread was chosen to make present and for them to remember the bitterness of the slavery of the Israelites and the miracle of their deliverance.
But God will act again. The service of Holy Communion also points to Good Friday, the very next day, and to Easter, Resurrection Day. The cross of Calvary would give way to the third day conquered by goodness, death conquered by resurrection. When the Lord broke the unleavened bread and took the cup, he was giving new significance to the bread and wine with the words “this is my body broken for you. This is my blood shed for you” At his last homily before he was murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador said “May this body broken and this blood shed for human beings encourage us to give our body and blood up to suffering and pain, Christ did not do this for self but to bring justice and peace to our people. Let us be intimately united then in faith and hope at this moment of prayer.”
In this meal tonight in the eating and drinking of the bread and wine, Christ grants communion with himself. God acts in our service tonight as he does every communion Sunday by giving life to the body, the fellowship of our local churches, the renewing of each member. The bread we receive has been broken, the wine out poured. The road from the Last Supper, passes through Gethsemane, Calvary and the garden of that first Easter.
By his action tonight Jesus demonstrates that we are loved by him forever, that we will be with him forever, in bread and wine he gives himself to us. Christ gives himself with his own hand. All we need to do is extend our hands to receive what is given – peace, forgiveness and love.
We are not alone. Jesus never promised an easy journey, through Gethsemane and onward to Calvary. But he did promise bread for the journey and in that bread, his presence, every step of the way.
Wednesday: The Way up the Mountain
continuing this week's reflections by Ray Anglesea
In the middle of Galilee, four or five miles from Nazareth there stands a mountain. It is circular, almost perfect in it symmetry, like the top of a great round ball emerging from the Galilean plain. When you get to the top, where it flattens off you can see the whole of the central southern Galilee spread out around you. You look down on the dozens of little villages where Jesus walked and talked. This is Mount Tabor, famous locally as the Mount of Transfiguration.
Mountains matter in the story of God’s people. Moses came to Mount Sinai and saw the burning bush, and discovered himself to be in the personal, close and dangerous presence of God. That moment of commission led to the subsequent visit to Sinai, which was mentioned in Monday’s reflection, where he went up a mountain to wait upon God, to receive the law of God, to plead with God when Israel sinned. When he came down, the skin of his face was shining because he had been with God. So too Elijah, at his moment of deepest desolation, made his way from Mount Carmel, where he had slaughtered the prophets of Baal to Mount Sinai, where after the earthquake, wind and fire, there came a still voice saying “What are you doing here, Elijah?” God commissioned him afresh assuring him that God’s strange purposes were going ahead, despite appearances and despite his depression. Abraham’s strangest and darkest dealings with God too took place on a mountain. David’s lifts his eyes to the hills, and saw them as a symbol of God’s presence.
Here once again Moses and Elijah meet God on a mountain. History suddenly telescoped together: past and present are fused into one and future too, because the transfiguration points forward, as Luke says in his account, to Jesus departure, his exodus, which he was to accomplish in heaven. And the voice from the cloud, the same voice that announced the Ten Commandments to Moses and that whispered a gentle rebuke and decommissioning to Elijah now speak to Jesus and Jesus only: “This is my son, my beloved one, in whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” The next time anyone will suggest that Jesus is the son of God will be Caiaphas, in the trial narrative, and then the centurion at the foot of the cross.
But of course the strangest thing in the story is the actual transfiguration itself. Jesus was transformed so that his face shone like the sun, and his clothes themselves became shining white. This glory that shone from Jesus face on the mountain is the glory of a human being made in God’s image and now totally open to God, totally possessed by God, totally reflecting God’s image, totally on fire with God. Seeing this human being, we are seeing God, God in a mirror, God through the looking glass, God present as in the burning bush but now in the shining face, and even in the clothes of a man amongst men.
And it is because of this that the path of the Christian journey has always included the way up the mountain. The Christian tradition has emphasized two great complementary truths about mountaintop experiences, times of special and transforming intimacy with God. On the one hand they are for anyone and everyone, and if you’re missing out on them you may want to review your life of prayer and waiting upon God. On the other hand, the importance of such experiences lies not in the experience themselves, but in what they do to us, what they prepare us for, what they commission us to do.
Often we live in a perpetual spiritual winter. We look at photographs of buds and blossoms as fairy-tale fantasies, things that don’t happen in the real world. And if our present lifestyle both in the church and in our everyday lives don’t allow spaces for mountain climbing for fresh springtimes of the spirit, we should take steps to put matters right. Deep, rich transforming experiences of the presence of God are not reserved for special categories of people. They are on offer for everyone. They help us glimpse the bigger picture, to glimpse the goal, to gather fresh strength for the journey.
Spiritual experiences, great moments of illumination and transformation are never given simply that we may enjoy them for their own sake. We live in an experience-orientated culture, which teaches us to value experiences for themselves. We know so many Californians who change light bulbs and who want to share their experiences, the danger of course is to think that one’s experiences of the presence and love of God are somehow a possession, given simply to be enjoyed, clung to, celebrated in themselves, for our own use, for our own enjoyment. But the gift is given in the context of vocation, to strengthen that vocation.
Today might be a time to pause as we enter the city, to take time to walk up a mountain and wait patiently for God. Perhaps it’s time at last to do what you’ve always promised yourself and never got round to: to set time for prayer and meditation of scripture, to reordered the haunts of life in which you’ve got stuck, so as to make fresh room for God who waits to show you his glory. Perhaps its time to seek out a friend who may gently help you to move forward along the twisty mountain road. Perhaps it’s time to expose yourself again to the possibility that you too might hear a voice, might glimpse glory, might fall on your face in terror and awe, might be grasped afresh by the majesty of Jesus.
And to those who do climb the mountain comes the promise echoing the transfiguration story but pointing beyond it, from the letter of John. “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and it does not yet appear what we shall see; but we know that when Jesus appears, we shall be like him. For we shall see him as he is.”
The road up the mountain is not for the casual tourist or the faint hearted. But the view from the top is out of this world.
Psalm 54: Luke 9 v28-36
In the middle of Galilee, four or five miles from Nazareth there stands a mountain. It is circular, almost perfect in it symmetry, like the top of a great round ball emerging from the Galilean plain. When you get to the top, where it flattens off you can see the whole of the central southern Galilee spread out around you. You look down on the dozens of little villages where Jesus walked and talked. This is Mount Tabor, famous locally as the Mount of Transfiguration.
Mountains matter in the story of God’s people. Moses came to Mount Sinai and saw the burning bush, and discovered himself to be in the personal, close and dangerous presence of God. That moment of commission led to the subsequent visit to Sinai, which was mentioned in Monday’s reflection, where he went up a mountain to wait upon God, to receive the law of God, to plead with God when Israel sinned. When he came down, the skin of his face was shining because he had been with God. So too Elijah, at his moment of deepest desolation, made his way from Mount Carmel, where he had slaughtered the prophets of Baal to Mount Sinai, where after the earthquake, wind and fire, there came a still voice saying “What are you doing here, Elijah?” God commissioned him afresh assuring him that God’s strange purposes were going ahead, despite appearances and despite his depression. Abraham’s strangest and darkest dealings with God too took place on a mountain. David’s lifts his eyes to the hills, and saw them as a symbol of God’s presence.
Here once again Moses and Elijah meet God on a mountain. History suddenly telescoped together: past and present are fused into one and future too, because the transfiguration points forward, as Luke says in his account, to Jesus departure, his exodus, which he was to accomplish in heaven. And the voice from the cloud, the same voice that announced the Ten Commandments to Moses and that whispered a gentle rebuke and decommissioning to Elijah now speak to Jesus and Jesus only: “This is my son, my beloved one, in whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” The next time anyone will suggest that Jesus is the son of God will be Caiaphas, in the trial narrative, and then the centurion at the foot of the cross.
But of course the strangest thing in the story is the actual transfiguration itself. Jesus was transformed so that his face shone like the sun, and his clothes themselves became shining white. This glory that shone from Jesus face on the mountain is the glory of a human being made in God’s image and now totally open to God, totally possessed by God, totally reflecting God’s image, totally on fire with God. Seeing this human being, we are seeing God, God in a mirror, God through the looking glass, God present as in the burning bush but now in the shining face, and even in the clothes of a man amongst men.
And it is because of this that the path of the Christian journey has always included the way up the mountain. The Christian tradition has emphasized two great complementary truths about mountaintop experiences, times of special and transforming intimacy with God. On the one hand they are for anyone and everyone, and if you’re missing out on them you may want to review your life of prayer and waiting upon God. On the other hand, the importance of such experiences lies not in the experience themselves, but in what they do to us, what they prepare us for, what they commission us to do.
Often we live in a perpetual spiritual winter. We look at photographs of buds and blossoms as fairy-tale fantasies, things that don’t happen in the real world. And if our present lifestyle both in the church and in our everyday lives don’t allow spaces for mountain climbing for fresh springtimes of the spirit, we should take steps to put matters right. Deep, rich transforming experiences of the presence of God are not reserved for special categories of people. They are on offer for everyone. They help us glimpse the bigger picture, to glimpse the goal, to gather fresh strength for the journey.
Spiritual experiences, great moments of illumination and transformation are never given simply that we may enjoy them for their own sake. We live in an experience-orientated culture, which teaches us to value experiences for themselves. We know so many Californians who change light bulbs and who want to share their experiences, the danger of course is to think that one’s experiences of the presence and love of God are somehow a possession, given simply to be enjoyed, clung to, celebrated in themselves, for our own use, for our own enjoyment. But the gift is given in the context of vocation, to strengthen that vocation.
Today might be a time to pause as we enter the city, to take time to walk up a mountain and wait patiently for God. Perhaps it’s time at last to do what you’ve always promised yourself and never got round to: to set time for prayer and meditation of scripture, to reordered the haunts of life in which you’ve got stuck, so as to make fresh room for God who waits to show you his glory. Perhaps its time to seek out a friend who may gently help you to move forward along the twisty mountain road. Perhaps it’s time to expose yourself again to the possibility that you too might hear a voice, might glimpse glory, might fall on your face in terror and awe, might be grasped afresh by the majesty of Jesus.
And to those who do climb the mountain comes the promise echoing the transfiguration story but pointing beyond it, from the letter of John. “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and it does not yet appear what we shall see; but we know that when Jesus appears, we shall be like him. For we shall see him as he is.”
The road up the mountain is not for the casual tourist or the faint hearted. But the view from the top is out of this world.
Psalm 54: Luke 9 v28-36
Tuesday 19 April 2011
Tuesday – The Way to Jerusalem
continuing this week's reflections by Ray Anglesea
The way to Jerusalem is paved with great expectations.
Jerusalem is after all the city of the great King, the joy of the whole earth. It is Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest. It is the place where the living God has chosen to put his name. It is the city where David built his own house and then planned God’s house. It is the city of dreams, the Holy City, the ultimate place of pilgrimage. It was and is the city of breathtaking beauty up in the Judaean mountains, encompassing in itself steep hills and deep gullies, with stunning views and gorgeous buildings, honeycombed with twisting alleyways, shafts of sunlight into beautiful courtyards, full of smells and spices and olives, fresh bread and sweet wine, and the sound of many languages, many voices raised in prayer, many cocks crowing.
It is also a place of great pain. David captured Jerusalem from the Jesubites 3000 years ago and David too destroyed it by force. Since then Jerusalem has been besieged, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, besieged, and fought over, again and again. The joy of the world and the pain of the world, side by side and somehow intermingling. “We are going up to Jerusalem,” said Jesus, “and the Son on man will be handed over to suffering a death.” The message they wanted to hear and the message they didn’t want to hear. They came together.
It is often said that Jerusalem is a focal point for three great religions. Judaism, Christianity and Islam; but it is actually a focal point of four, because we must add another “ism” name Tourism. Tourism is the modern secular version of pilgrimage, in which we go to famous places to see well known sights, not to meet with God or to receive healing of blessing, but to see what our culture tells us what we ought to see, to expand our own horizons and experiences, to buy souvenirs that make us feel good when we get back home, to take photos and videos so that we can steal something of the reality of the place and make it our won private reality. Perhaps you go to Jerusalem to worship the God of secularism, the god of a liberal culture that tells you to observe from a critical distance, but not get involved. To sense the magic of the place, and then to buy the postcards. To say a prayer perhaps if that’s your kind of thing, but not to stay on your knees all day. We’ve to get back to the museum or back to the hotel for tea. Our reality must remain undisturbed. Take no notice of that cock crowing in the background.
In Jewish history and scripture there were two main reasons in particular for going to Jerusalem. You went to enthrone the King, or to pay homage. And you went there to meet God, to offer sacrifice, to celebrate his love, his salvation, his covenant. It was never quite that easy of course. To be near the king was to be in the danger zone. The way to the presence of God remained dark and mysterious, assisted and sometime blocked by priests and well intentioned stewards. And for long periods of Jewish history, ancient and modern, it was rumoured that God had abandoned Jerusalem, at least temporally. Enthroning the king and meeting God that was what Jesus was inviting his followers to do with all its multiple ambiguities.
But the disciples with their home spun bravado were not ready for the sort of enthronement that Jesus has in mind. When the Son of man goes to Jerusalem he must suffer many things at the hands of the elders and the chief priests and scribes and is killed and on the third day is raised. The disciples are not ready to see their hopes crucified. They are not ready to see their great expectations turned upside down and inside out in order to be fulfilled. They want the kingdom of God the way they’ve always wanted it. They expect it to be tough, they expect it to be challenged, it’s going to be hard, you may have to suffer, and you’ve not going to like it.
The disciples perhaps don’t penetrate the innermost meaning of the challenge. If anyone wants to come after me let him deny himself and take up his cross, for anyone who wants to save his life will loose it, and those who want to lose their life for my sake will find it. What will it profit someone to gain the whole world, but forfeit their life, their soul; and their heart? The kingdom is coming and sooner than the disciples think. Their expectations will be more than fulfilled. But the only way for that to happen is for them to be first dashed to pieces, broken in fragments on the dusty floor, so that God can make a new jigsaw of them, one that conforms to his sort of, kingdom. Skilled craftsmen take months to make a conventional throne; it took the soldiers only a few minutes to construct one for Jesus.
When we think of Peter with his blustering confidence, his attempt to order Jesus about, we are bound to think also of the cock crowing in the early morning near the governor’s palace in Jerusalem. And we learn – and perhaps this is part of the lesson of all who would venture to a holy city, a holy shrine, to listen to the cock crowing every time we allow our own great expectations, in whatever field of sphere we may cherish them, to dominate our horizons and blot out the call to suffer, the call to lose our life, the call to take up the cross. We all have lessons for wanting to be enthroned, our private way of distorting his kingship so it suits our own aspirations and ambitions. Alas the way to Jerusalem must always be the way of thwarted expectations.
And the test of whether this journey to Jerusalem is genuine is to ask the questions whether you’re prepared for God to remake you and lovingly break the brittle you you’ve so carefully constructed. To be like soft clay in his hands, ready to be remoulded so that God can make of you what he had in mind all along. Jerusalem, that great city is a symbol of God’s great expectations, which will by no means coincide with our own. The only true way to enter Jerusalem is perhaps to go, like Abraham, no knowing where you are going, or what it is that you will meet there, perhaps to suspend a clinging and anxious belief, may be a sceptical unbelief, to simply to be, be open, to be still, to wait in silence for the strange God who still comes to those who wait in silence.
The way to Jerusalem stands for the deeply inviting, yet deeply threatening journey into the presence of the one true God, where all is known and all is unknown, where all is asked and all is promised. And those who like us are learning the pilgrim way, learn to listen, in scripture and sacrament, in silence and suffering for the voice of the one who loves us more deeply than we love ourselves. And that, whether or not we ever make the geographical journey to Jerusalem itself, is the journey to which we are all summoned.
Psalm 17 v1-8; Luke 19 v 28-44
The way to Jerusalem is paved with great expectations.
Jerusalem is after all the city of the great King, the joy of the whole earth. It is Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest. It is the place where the living God has chosen to put his name. It is the city where David built his own house and then planned God’s house. It is the city of dreams, the Holy City, the ultimate place of pilgrimage. It was and is the city of breathtaking beauty up in the Judaean mountains, encompassing in itself steep hills and deep gullies, with stunning views and gorgeous buildings, honeycombed with twisting alleyways, shafts of sunlight into beautiful courtyards, full of smells and spices and olives, fresh bread and sweet wine, and the sound of many languages, many voices raised in prayer, many cocks crowing.
It is also a place of great pain. David captured Jerusalem from the Jesubites 3000 years ago and David too destroyed it by force. Since then Jerusalem has been besieged, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, besieged, and fought over, again and again. The joy of the world and the pain of the world, side by side and somehow intermingling. “We are going up to Jerusalem,” said Jesus, “and the Son on man will be handed over to suffering a death.” The message they wanted to hear and the message they didn’t want to hear. They came together.
It is often said that Jerusalem is a focal point for three great religions. Judaism, Christianity and Islam; but it is actually a focal point of four, because we must add another “ism” name Tourism. Tourism is the modern secular version of pilgrimage, in which we go to famous places to see well known sights, not to meet with God or to receive healing of blessing, but to see what our culture tells us what we ought to see, to expand our own horizons and experiences, to buy souvenirs that make us feel good when we get back home, to take photos and videos so that we can steal something of the reality of the place and make it our won private reality. Perhaps you go to Jerusalem to worship the God of secularism, the god of a liberal culture that tells you to observe from a critical distance, but not get involved. To sense the magic of the place, and then to buy the postcards. To say a prayer perhaps if that’s your kind of thing, but not to stay on your knees all day. We’ve to get back to the museum or back to the hotel for tea. Our reality must remain undisturbed. Take no notice of that cock crowing in the background.
In Jewish history and scripture there were two main reasons in particular for going to Jerusalem. You went to enthrone the King, or to pay homage. And you went there to meet God, to offer sacrifice, to celebrate his love, his salvation, his covenant. It was never quite that easy of course. To be near the king was to be in the danger zone. The way to the presence of God remained dark and mysterious, assisted and sometime blocked by priests and well intentioned stewards. And for long periods of Jewish history, ancient and modern, it was rumoured that God had abandoned Jerusalem, at least temporally. Enthroning the king and meeting God that was what Jesus was inviting his followers to do with all its multiple ambiguities.
But the disciples with their home spun bravado were not ready for the sort of enthronement that Jesus has in mind. When the Son of man goes to Jerusalem he must suffer many things at the hands of the elders and the chief priests and scribes and is killed and on the third day is raised. The disciples are not ready to see their hopes crucified. They are not ready to see their great expectations turned upside down and inside out in order to be fulfilled. They want the kingdom of God the way they’ve always wanted it. They expect it to be tough, they expect it to be challenged, it’s going to be hard, you may have to suffer, and you’ve not going to like it.
The disciples perhaps don’t penetrate the innermost meaning of the challenge. If anyone wants to come after me let him deny himself and take up his cross, for anyone who wants to save his life will loose it, and those who want to lose their life for my sake will find it. What will it profit someone to gain the whole world, but forfeit their life, their soul; and their heart? The kingdom is coming and sooner than the disciples think. Their expectations will be more than fulfilled. But the only way for that to happen is for them to be first dashed to pieces, broken in fragments on the dusty floor, so that God can make a new jigsaw of them, one that conforms to his sort of, kingdom. Skilled craftsmen take months to make a conventional throne; it took the soldiers only a few minutes to construct one for Jesus.
When we think of Peter with his blustering confidence, his attempt to order Jesus about, we are bound to think also of the cock crowing in the early morning near the governor’s palace in Jerusalem. And we learn – and perhaps this is part of the lesson of all who would venture to a holy city, a holy shrine, to listen to the cock crowing every time we allow our own great expectations, in whatever field of sphere we may cherish them, to dominate our horizons and blot out the call to suffer, the call to lose our life, the call to take up the cross. We all have lessons for wanting to be enthroned, our private way of distorting his kingship so it suits our own aspirations and ambitions. Alas the way to Jerusalem must always be the way of thwarted expectations.
And the test of whether this journey to Jerusalem is genuine is to ask the questions whether you’re prepared for God to remake you and lovingly break the brittle you you’ve so carefully constructed. To be like soft clay in his hands, ready to be remoulded so that God can make of you what he had in mind all along. Jerusalem, that great city is a symbol of God’s great expectations, which will by no means coincide with our own. The only true way to enter Jerusalem is perhaps to go, like Abraham, no knowing where you are going, or what it is that you will meet there, perhaps to suspend a clinging and anxious belief, may be a sceptical unbelief, to simply to be, be open, to be still, to wait in silence for the strange God who still comes to those who wait in silence.
The way to Jerusalem stands for the deeply inviting, yet deeply threatening journey into the presence of the one true God, where all is known and all is unknown, where all is asked and all is promised. And those who like us are learning the pilgrim way, learn to listen, in scripture and sacrament, in silence and suffering for the voice of the one who loves us more deeply than we love ourselves. And that, whether or not we ever make the geographical journey to Jerusalem itself, is the journey to which we are all summoned.
Psalm 17 v1-8; Luke 19 v 28-44
Monday 18 April 2011
Monday - The Way in the Wilderness
Holy Week reflections by Ray Anglesea
The great Easter getaway has started. Press reports have already indicated that holidaymakers leaving for an extended Easter break can expect heavy traffic on the main roads and congested departure lounges as motorways and airports face their busiest week of the year so far. The travel chaos had begun.
For Christians the holiday getaway takes us in heart and mind to Jerusalem to remember and re-enact the events that are at the centre of our faith, the last days of Jesus life, his death and resurrection. Our travelling to that city may take us via various routes – each day of this Holy Week we might imagine one route which might take us there as we start out on this year’s spiritual journey and pilgrimage.
It is perhaps in the wilderness that the real choices are made. It is one thing to go with the crowds into the city chanting Hosanna it is another to go into the city on our own. There are too many pros and cons to weigh up, advantages and disadvantages, positives and negatives, to make that decision. Indeed it may not be easy to decide anything. When we come to make that decision there are dependents and partners to think about. And if we add to our turmoil and perplexity of journeying into the city a prayer and spiritual life that is dry and barren, the possible dilemma that we are not quite sure where we are and where we belong and where God is, then decisions may be virtually impossible to make. It is so much easier to stay where we are. It might be safer to stay with the crowds in Galilee than to risk going to Jerusalem, to stay with predictable certainty rather than setting out into unknown territories and unchartered waters.
One thing for sure you are never far away from the wilderness when you approach Jerusalem; when you are in Jerusalem the wilderness is just over the next hill. The wilderness comes in many shapes and sizes, just as the desert of Judaea and Sinai are by no means uniform the wilderness that surrounds Jerusalem comes in many forms; huge crags like Masada, there are gullies and crevasses, great rocky outcrops and hidden valleys. And it is perhaps in that place of wilderness that the decision about the journey into the city has to be made; for at the start of this Holy Week we may find ourselves in that place. Sometimes in that wilderness place we may hear many voices; being in the wilderness can be a frightening and a risky experience. Life may appear to be like a trudging journey across a lunar landscape of desert and rocky slopes, an environment that resembles more the ruins of some prehistoric catastrophe, a place of struggle and conflict, a place of loneliness and emptiness, banishment and thirst.
Moses the great law giver, prophet and enduring friend of God, the leader of the Hebrew people had been wandering around the Sinai wilderness for many years, following the call of his God, travelling like the patriarchs before him on an ambiguous and uncertain journey with his irksome, quarrelsome and difficult community. But now Moses hears the call to go to a land promised by God to his descendants, a land of milk and honey. A decision has to be made. The pillar of cloud stands outside the entrance to the tent of meeting. Moses prays.
The problem was that Moses does not want the land of promise without God, and the land of promise is nothing to the people without that same presence. God must go with them. Moses anguished prayers are answered. God will accompany him and his people and the rest of Canaan will be given to them. But Moses requests more. He is convinced that God’s favour does not rest upon him. He prays for a sight of God’s glory. He yearns for a special disclosure of God, not physical sight for he knows that no man can see God and live, but for a spiritual perception of who God is and what he will do for him and his people. God reveals himself by his name. Moses nestles in a rock to see the afterglow of God’s glory, he is to hear old truths in a new splendour, a veil is momentarily drawn back and God passes by, the strangeness of his friend remains with him.
Out there in our lives we may stand on the edge of Jerusalem in some mini wilderness of darkness, uncertainty even banishment as we struggle to move on, to take that step, to make that decision to go to Jerusalem. For Moses it was in a similar place that God met him and gave him directions that would change the face of religion for all time. In the wilderness God for Moses was his heartbeat. Closer than close. In the refuge of that rock Moses felt safe, protected, covered by the hand of his God, his friend.
It is difficult to know sometimes that God is with us, that God is for us, that God cares about our decision making, that God was even with his Son, Jesus, as he turns his face to Jerusalem and all that lies ahead of him. But the paradox is that even though we don’t know it, even though sometimes we don’t feel it – out there - God is with us. Ahead of us, before us, before we get there, he is waiting for us, hands open, to hold us as he did with Moses.
Moses the man who met God in the wilderness is often my inspiration. God met him in a new way and gave him direction and purpose, a blue print of his future plans for Moses and the people who were following him. He holds us as he held Moses. We know it will be all right, at that moment, later or at any time. We are in God’s hands; we may even feel something of that strange glory.
God is with us. Forward then to Jerusalem and may God have mercy on us.
Psalm 91; Exodus 33 v 15-23; Luke 4 v10-13
The great Easter getaway has started. Press reports have already indicated that holidaymakers leaving for an extended Easter break can expect heavy traffic on the main roads and congested departure lounges as motorways and airports face their busiest week of the year so far. The travel chaos had begun.
For Christians the holiday getaway takes us in heart and mind to Jerusalem to remember and re-enact the events that are at the centre of our faith, the last days of Jesus life, his death and resurrection. Our travelling to that city may take us via various routes – each day of this Holy Week we might imagine one route which might take us there as we start out on this year’s spiritual journey and pilgrimage.
It is perhaps in the wilderness that the real choices are made. It is one thing to go with the crowds into the city chanting Hosanna it is another to go into the city on our own. There are too many pros and cons to weigh up, advantages and disadvantages, positives and negatives, to make that decision. Indeed it may not be easy to decide anything. When we come to make that decision there are dependents and partners to think about. And if we add to our turmoil and perplexity of journeying into the city a prayer and spiritual life that is dry and barren, the possible dilemma that we are not quite sure where we are and where we belong and where God is, then decisions may be virtually impossible to make. It is so much easier to stay where we are. It might be safer to stay with the crowds in Galilee than to risk going to Jerusalem, to stay with predictable certainty rather than setting out into unknown territories and unchartered waters.
One thing for sure you are never far away from the wilderness when you approach Jerusalem; when you are in Jerusalem the wilderness is just over the next hill. The wilderness comes in many shapes and sizes, just as the desert of Judaea and Sinai are by no means uniform the wilderness that surrounds Jerusalem comes in many forms; huge crags like Masada, there are gullies and crevasses, great rocky outcrops and hidden valleys. And it is perhaps in that place of wilderness that the decision about the journey into the city has to be made; for at the start of this Holy Week we may find ourselves in that place. Sometimes in that wilderness place we may hear many voices; being in the wilderness can be a frightening and a risky experience. Life may appear to be like a trudging journey across a lunar landscape of desert and rocky slopes, an environment that resembles more the ruins of some prehistoric catastrophe, a place of struggle and conflict, a place of loneliness and emptiness, banishment and thirst.
Moses the great law giver, prophet and enduring friend of God, the leader of the Hebrew people had been wandering around the Sinai wilderness for many years, following the call of his God, travelling like the patriarchs before him on an ambiguous and uncertain journey with his irksome, quarrelsome and difficult community. But now Moses hears the call to go to a land promised by God to his descendants, a land of milk and honey. A decision has to be made. The pillar of cloud stands outside the entrance to the tent of meeting. Moses prays.
The problem was that Moses does not want the land of promise without God, and the land of promise is nothing to the people without that same presence. God must go with them. Moses anguished prayers are answered. God will accompany him and his people and the rest of Canaan will be given to them. But Moses requests more. He is convinced that God’s favour does not rest upon him. He prays for a sight of God’s glory. He yearns for a special disclosure of God, not physical sight for he knows that no man can see God and live, but for a spiritual perception of who God is and what he will do for him and his people. God reveals himself by his name. Moses nestles in a rock to see the afterglow of God’s glory, he is to hear old truths in a new splendour, a veil is momentarily drawn back and God passes by, the strangeness of his friend remains with him.
Out there in our lives we may stand on the edge of Jerusalem in some mini wilderness of darkness, uncertainty even banishment as we struggle to move on, to take that step, to make that decision to go to Jerusalem. For Moses it was in a similar place that God met him and gave him directions that would change the face of religion for all time. In the wilderness God for Moses was his heartbeat. Closer than close. In the refuge of that rock Moses felt safe, protected, covered by the hand of his God, his friend.
It is difficult to know sometimes that God is with us, that God is for us, that God cares about our decision making, that God was even with his Son, Jesus, as he turns his face to Jerusalem and all that lies ahead of him. But the paradox is that even though we don’t know it, even though sometimes we don’t feel it – out there - God is with us. Ahead of us, before us, before we get there, he is waiting for us, hands open, to hold us as he did with Moses.
Moses the man who met God in the wilderness is often my inspiration. God met him in a new way and gave him direction and purpose, a blue print of his future plans for Moses and the people who were following him. He holds us as he held Moses. We know it will be all right, at that moment, later or at any time. We are in God’s hands; we may even feel something of that strange glory.
God is with us. Forward then to Jerusalem and may God have mercy on us.
Psalm 91; Exodus 33 v 15-23; Luke 4 v10-13
Sunday 17 April 2011
Holy Week Reflections
Ray Anglesea's Holy Week reflections will be posted here day by day throughout the week
Palm Sunday: Protest and Extremism
From a sermon by Ray Anglesea delivered to a joint service of West End, Robert Stewart Memorial and Jesmond United Reformed Churches
It wasn’t Hosanna the jeering, hostile crowds were chanting but “Farewell Mohamed, we will avenge you.” Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street trader, didn’t mean to start a revolution. On the 17th December, a week before Christmas, this 26 year old Tunisian university graduate and street trader wheeled his barrow into the market square of Sidi Bouzid, a dusty town in central Tunisia. He set up his stall at the street corner and began calling out his wares. Within minutes he was interrupted by a municipal inspector who started to confiscate his merchandise; the inspector alleged he did not have a trading permit. Grabbing his fruit and vegetables back the local inspector slapped him in the face.
Perhaps that was the turning point that burst into a revolution. For an Arab man to be slapped by a woman in public was the height of humiliation. Bouazizi, embarrassed and enraged, stormed over to the municipal office demanding the return of his stock. There he was beaten again. Now angry and enraged he went to the main regional government office. He was turned away. “If you don’t see me, I’ll burn myself,” he shouted. At 11:30am, less than an hour after the 1st altercation, Bouazizi was back in front of the gates of the governor’s building. He sat down and poured two bottles of paint-thinner over himself and demanded once more to see an official. Then he lit his cigarette lighter and by the time the flames were extinguished he had suffered third degree burns over 90% of his body.
He was taken by ambulance to a hospital 70 miles away then later to a special burns unit in Tunis. On 4th January 18 days after setting fire to himself Bouazizi died. By then the protests had already started. Dissent and remonstrations began to spread like grassfire throughout the capital and regional towns powered by Facebook and Twitter. Police fired on the crowds in several towns. The death toll mounted. On the day of Bouazizi’s death the Jasmine Revolution erupted into full force. Within a week President Ben Ali of Tunisia had fled the country. A 23 year old dictatorship collapsed in a matter of days. Weeks later the 30 year old rule of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt (who had amassed a family fortune of £40.5 billion), was at an end. Bouazizi had become a martyr. The very ordinariness of his life has given his story the power to overthrow dictators. The rage, frustration and poverty that first erupted on an ordinary Friday morning in a nondescript Tunisian backwater has now spread to Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Libya and Syria.
Does Bouazizi’s story ring any bells? A death on a Friday, a poverty stricken nobody from a backwater nothing town, the martyr a symbol of rebellion, beaten, spat on, abused, humiliated, mocked, abandoned. On this Palm Sunday of all days we remember the early morning madness, the protest, the repression, complaints and objection; an excited demonstration in the dense architecture of Jerusalem, a young servant king on a donkey fulfilling Zechariah’s messianic prophecy, who was to turn expectations of political deliverance on its head. Amongst waving palm branches the smell of defiance was in the air, a possible subversive peasant uprising, threats of arrest, and criticism by those who thought Jesus and his group were going too far, too fast. “This is the controversial field preacher and healer,” they shouted. “This is the son of a virgin who went to parties and turned water into wine.” Danger! Controversy! Fear! In the backwater of a destitute and penurious provincial town amid the Judaean hills there were too many authoritarian, conflicting and violent ideologies. And one of those unjust and immoral ideologies was religious extremism. Religious groups and individuals had become radicalised; a pathological illness which feeds on the destruction of life. In Jerusalem nothing has changed.
Perhaps the greatest Scottish poet of the 20th century, Hugh MacDiarmid, a passionate nationalist and convinced Marxist described his time as an age “whaur extremes meet.” Hugh MacDiarmid was the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve who was no stranger to extremism; indeed the extreme political beliefs that bewitched many during MacDiarmid’s time in the 1930’s possessed something of the quality of religious faith. The result of the extremes of global recession in the 1930’s caused many Jarrow miners and ship builders from this region to walk over 300 miles, with their MP Ellen Wilkinson, to London, demanding employment and an end to abject poverty.
Hand in hand with extreme political views is the extremes of religious intolerance and fanaticism that sometimes goes with it; recent decades have been characterised by worldwide suffering of many as a result of the actions of radicalised religious groups. Complex religious views still prevail - the murder of a Catholic police officer Constable Ronan Kerr, 25, killed after a booby-trap device exploded under his car, in Omagh, County Tyrone: the attack on a United Nation base in the city of Mazar-e Sharif which killed 14 people, seven of them UN staff, as a result of an American pastor who burnt the Koran. "The desecration of any holy text, including the Koran,” said Mr Obama “is an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry; to attack and kill innocent people in response is outrageous, and an affront to human decency and dignity.” Yet don’t let’s deceive ourselves – it was the Christian evangelical fundamentalism and neo-conservative ideology that underpinned the Bush administration that took the American nation to war in Iraq, aided and abetted by the British Government; “a war widely perceived without any basis in international law and a war that could not be described as just or moral,” stated Prof. Michael Northcott, Professor of Christian Ethics, Edinburgh University in his book An angel directs the storm. Perhaps the engineer’s song’s from the musical Miss Saigon “The American Dream” has faded, to many minds the extravagant new life of the American dream has now become the American apocalypse.
But that was last week’s breaking news. Senior church leaders have brought to the forefront of all our concerns at the start of this Holy Week the situation of Christians who are living with the daily threat of violent persecution often in unstable environments. Our thoughts this Holy Week are with the leaders and people of Jerusalem, the Middle East and the African Ivory Coast faced with massive instability and uncertainty, and with many disturbing signs of what may come. We also think with anguish of the sufferings and anxieties of the Church in Pakistan, in the context of the brutal killings that have occurred in recent months and weeks; the murder early in March of Shahbaz Bhatti the minister for religious minorities in Pakistan, a Christian and a critic of Pakistan's blasphemy laws, who was shot dead by gunmen on his way to a cabinet meeting in Islamabad. The continuing attacks on Christian communities in parts of Nigeria and Gays in Uganda are a matter of deep concern, and in Zimbabwe Christians are still subject to constant attack because of their brave stand for justice. In Southern Sudan, after a referendum more peaceful than most people dared to hope, the Church faces the huge challenge of helping to shape a new nation; the same challenge of witnessing to a unity beyond political boundaries inspires the continuing courageous ministry of the Church in Korea.
At the beginning of Holy Week, we stand with Jesus before the gates of the city of Jerusalem, the Holy City in a world dominated by news of religious fanaticism and extremism. Simon Montefiore in his new book Jerusalem: The Biography describes the city as “the global focus of the struggle between the Abrahamic religions; the shrine for increasingly popular Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism. Jerusalem is the house of one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions. She is the only city to exist twice, in heaven and earth. The city which is the cosmopolitan home of many sects, a hybrid metropolis of a hybrid people with many interlinked and overlapping cultures and layered loyalties, each of which believes the city belongs to them alone.” It is a city of religious extremism indeed; an illuminated stage for the cameras of the world in the age of 24 hour news.
As believers and as human beings, we stand today at the gates of the city at the start of Holy week – a 'city of wrong' as one great Muslim writer, Kamel Hussein, called it in the title of his fictional meditations, City of Wrong: A Friday in Jerusalem as he meditates on the last week of Jesus’ life; a city where so many sufferers are silenced and where so many innocent on both sides of the terrible conflict are killed and their deaths hidden under a cloak of angry, selfish, posturing words, whatever language they are spoken in. “We know in our hearts,” stated the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently “that so much of what fuels the violence of religious extremism is in ourselves too: the passionate longing for power and control, the impotent near-mindless fury that bursts out in literally suicidal ways in cities around the world, and brings destruction to so many. We know the urge to defend what can't be defended because we can't lose face.” We search for any drop of the elixir of tolerance, sharing and generosity to act as the antidote to the arsenic of prejudice, exclusivity and possessiveness. “We too are citizens of this city of wrong.”And as Ian Cowie reminded us in his poem Welcome to the City – “ don’t interfere with politics or economics – if you get it wrong for our city, who knows? We, too, might have to liquidate you.”
And in this city of protest, of religious extremism, in this city of wrong, we stand at its gates to remember the extremes of a different kind, the extremes to which one man was driven because of faith, and draw a very different message. The Easter narrative helps us to understand that what the world needs is not a retreat from faith, and religion’s moral codes, but an approach towards the mystery of creation marked by the humility of Jesus and infused by the sympathy that He showed to all mankind. The extremes to which Jesus was driven were the furthest reaches of human suffering. Scourged, beaten, tortured and crucified, His body was robbed of all dignity, like the Tunisian street trader, his existence extinguished in excruciating pain. Jesus’ journey on the Via Dolorosa was a consequence of others’ actions, specifically the rejection of His message, and the promise of redemption through faith which He offered. He was betrayed by the religious leaders of His time, who put a rigid adherence to rules, hierarchy and status before the message of love. He was condemned by the secular powers of the Roman occupation, who chose expediency rather than principle. He was, ultimately, denied by His own disciple, Peter, who sought the good opinion of others before the truths of his own heart. In each case, suffering came because men lacked zeal and passion, would not stand up for what was right and preferred a course the world seemed to deem prudent rather than the path they feared would render them exposed. Those in the Easter narrative who betrayed Jesus did so because they acted in a manner which was political, calculating and worldly.
The journey to Calvary that Jesus made was, however, for them as much as anyone. He confronted the ultimate extreme — a painful death and the cries of the world jeering in His ears — to prove that compassion can triumph over calculation, and that sacrifice can redeem sin. He required a faith that might be considered so strong as to be extreme. But His quiet adherence to the principle of love, and the willingness to sacrifice His interests for others, and then His Resurrection, completed a symbolic but real journey, and began a new phase of human spirituality.
The extremists who challenge our peace this Easter in Ireland, in the Middle East, in fragile African states come not as Jesus did, to redeem, but as His tormentors did, to uphold an arid purity and proclaim a vengeful power. Their faith is a political religion, like MacDiarmid’s Marxism, their vision is exclusive and self-indulgent, and their hands are clenched round a gun. The faith of Jesus was of a very different kind: His outstretched hands on the Cross were there to embrace all mankind. If the world is to overcome the dark passion of those whose hate drives them to violent extremes, it can only be helped by contemplating the message of compassion from the One who went to the ultimate extreme for love.
Five months ago Bouazizi was a frustrated, poverty stricken nobody in a nothing city. And that, I suspect, explains his astonishing posthumous power as a symbol of rebellion, anger and political upheaval; peaceful protestors demanding basic human rights: the humble fruit-seller who had a bad day, and couldn’t take it anymore. In the ongoing aftermath of the North African and Middle East revolution that fills our newspapers and television screens, Tarak Ben Ammar, formerly a manager of Michael Jackson’s world tour is planning to make a film about Bouazizi’s life and death. A Kuwaiti businessman has offered $10,000 to buy his cart. A square in Paris is to be named after him. Two thousand years later the ongoing Jesus revolution too is still turning the world upside down. Jesus turned out to be the only beloved son of God, who died that our sins may be forgiven, and that those who believe in him might have eternal life. And for that assurance and promise of that priceless gift we can say with the cheering Palm Sunday Jerusalem crowds. Alleluia!
Amen
Revd Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working across synod church partnerships.
It wasn’t Hosanna the jeering, hostile crowds were chanting but “Farewell Mohamed, we will avenge you.” Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street trader, didn’t mean to start a revolution. On the 17th December, a week before Christmas, this 26 year old Tunisian university graduate and street trader wheeled his barrow into the market square of Sidi Bouzid, a dusty town in central Tunisia. He set up his stall at the street corner and began calling out his wares. Within minutes he was interrupted by a municipal inspector who started to confiscate his merchandise; the inspector alleged he did not have a trading permit. Grabbing his fruit and vegetables back the local inspector slapped him in the face.
Perhaps that was the turning point that burst into a revolution. For an Arab man to be slapped by a woman in public was the height of humiliation. Bouazizi, embarrassed and enraged, stormed over to the municipal office demanding the return of his stock. There he was beaten again. Now angry and enraged he went to the main regional government office. He was turned away. “If you don’t see me, I’ll burn myself,” he shouted. At 11:30am, less than an hour after the 1st altercation, Bouazizi was back in front of the gates of the governor’s building. He sat down and poured two bottles of paint-thinner over himself and demanded once more to see an official. Then he lit his cigarette lighter and by the time the flames were extinguished he had suffered third degree burns over 90% of his body.
He was taken by ambulance to a hospital 70 miles away then later to a special burns unit in Tunis. On 4th January 18 days after setting fire to himself Bouazizi died. By then the protests had already started. Dissent and remonstrations began to spread like grassfire throughout the capital and regional towns powered by Facebook and Twitter. Police fired on the crowds in several towns. The death toll mounted. On the day of Bouazizi’s death the Jasmine Revolution erupted into full force. Within a week President Ben Ali of Tunisia had fled the country. A 23 year old dictatorship collapsed in a matter of days. Weeks later the 30 year old rule of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt (who had amassed a family fortune of £40.5 billion), was at an end. Bouazizi had become a martyr. The very ordinariness of his life has given his story the power to overthrow dictators. The rage, frustration and poverty that first erupted on an ordinary Friday morning in a nondescript Tunisian backwater has now spread to Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Libya and Syria.
Does Bouazizi’s story ring any bells? A death on a Friday, a poverty stricken nobody from a backwater nothing town, the martyr a symbol of rebellion, beaten, spat on, abused, humiliated, mocked, abandoned. On this Palm Sunday of all days we remember the early morning madness, the protest, the repression, complaints and objection; an excited demonstration in the dense architecture of Jerusalem, a young servant king on a donkey fulfilling Zechariah’s messianic prophecy, who was to turn expectations of political deliverance on its head. Amongst waving palm branches the smell of defiance was in the air, a possible subversive peasant uprising, threats of arrest, and criticism by those who thought Jesus and his group were going too far, too fast. “This is the controversial field preacher and healer,” they shouted. “This is the son of a virgin who went to parties and turned water into wine.” Danger! Controversy! Fear! In the backwater of a destitute and penurious provincial town amid the Judaean hills there were too many authoritarian, conflicting and violent ideologies. And one of those unjust and immoral ideologies was religious extremism. Religious groups and individuals had become radicalised; a pathological illness which feeds on the destruction of life. In Jerusalem nothing has changed.
Perhaps the greatest Scottish poet of the 20th century, Hugh MacDiarmid, a passionate nationalist and convinced Marxist described his time as an age “whaur extremes meet.” Hugh MacDiarmid was the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve who was no stranger to extremism; indeed the extreme political beliefs that bewitched many during MacDiarmid’s time in the 1930’s possessed something of the quality of religious faith. The result of the extremes of global recession in the 1930’s caused many Jarrow miners and ship builders from this region to walk over 300 miles, with their MP Ellen Wilkinson, to London, demanding employment and an end to abject poverty.
Hand in hand with extreme political views is the extremes of religious intolerance and fanaticism that sometimes goes with it; recent decades have been characterised by worldwide suffering of many as a result of the actions of radicalised religious groups. Complex religious views still prevail - the murder of a Catholic police officer Constable Ronan Kerr, 25, killed after a booby-trap device exploded under his car, in Omagh, County Tyrone: the attack on a United Nation base in the city of Mazar-e Sharif which killed 14 people, seven of them UN staff, as a result of an American pastor who burnt the Koran. "The desecration of any holy text, including the Koran,” said Mr Obama “is an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry; to attack and kill innocent people in response is outrageous, and an affront to human decency and dignity.” Yet don’t let’s deceive ourselves – it was the Christian evangelical fundamentalism and neo-conservative ideology that underpinned the Bush administration that took the American nation to war in Iraq, aided and abetted by the British Government; “a war widely perceived without any basis in international law and a war that could not be described as just or moral,” stated Prof. Michael Northcott, Professor of Christian Ethics, Edinburgh University in his book An angel directs the storm. Perhaps the engineer’s song’s from the musical Miss Saigon “The American Dream” has faded, to many minds the extravagant new life of the American dream has now become the American apocalypse.
But that was last week’s breaking news. Senior church leaders have brought to the forefront of all our concerns at the start of this Holy Week the situation of Christians who are living with the daily threat of violent persecution often in unstable environments. Our thoughts this Holy Week are with the leaders and people of Jerusalem, the Middle East and the African Ivory Coast faced with massive instability and uncertainty, and with many disturbing signs of what may come. We also think with anguish of the sufferings and anxieties of the Church in Pakistan, in the context of the brutal killings that have occurred in recent months and weeks; the murder early in March of Shahbaz Bhatti the minister for religious minorities in Pakistan, a Christian and a critic of Pakistan's blasphemy laws, who was shot dead by gunmen on his way to a cabinet meeting in Islamabad. The continuing attacks on Christian communities in parts of Nigeria and Gays in Uganda are a matter of deep concern, and in Zimbabwe Christians are still subject to constant attack because of their brave stand for justice. In Southern Sudan, after a referendum more peaceful than most people dared to hope, the Church faces the huge challenge of helping to shape a new nation; the same challenge of witnessing to a unity beyond political boundaries inspires the continuing courageous ministry of the Church in Korea.
At the beginning of Holy Week, we stand with Jesus before the gates of the city of Jerusalem, the Holy City in a world dominated by news of religious fanaticism and extremism. Simon Montefiore in his new book Jerusalem: The Biography describes the city as “the global focus of the struggle between the Abrahamic religions; the shrine for increasingly popular Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism. Jerusalem is the house of one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions. She is the only city to exist twice, in heaven and earth. The city which is the cosmopolitan home of many sects, a hybrid metropolis of a hybrid people with many interlinked and overlapping cultures and layered loyalties, each of which believes the city belongs to them alone.” It is a city of religious extremism indeed; an illuminated stage for the cameras of the world in the age of 24 hour news.
As believers and as human beings, we stand today at the gates of the city at the start of Holy week – a 'city of wrong' as one great Muslim writer, Kamel Hussein, called it in the title of his fictional meditations, City of Wrong: A Friday in Jerusalem as he meditates on the last week of Jesus’ life; a city where so many sufferers are silenced and where so many innocent on both sides of the terrible conflict are killed and their deaths hidden under a cloak of angry, selfish, posturing words, whatever language they are spoken in. “We know in our hearts,” stated the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently “that so much of what fuels the violence of religious extremism is in ourselves too: the passionate longing for power and control, the impotent near-mindless fury that bursts out in literally suicidal ways in cities around the world, and brings destruction to so many. We know the urge to defend what can't be defended because we can't lose face.” We search for any drop of the elixir of tolerance, sharing and generosity to act as the antidote to the arsenic of prejudice, exclusivity and possessiveness. “We too are citizens of this city of wrong.”And as Ian Cowie reminded us in his poem Welcome to the City – “ don’t interfere with politics or economics – if you get it wrong for our city, who knows? We, too, might have to liquidate you.”
And in this city of protest, of religious extremism, in this city of wrong, we stand at its gates to remember the extremes of a different kind, the extremes to which one man was driven because of faith, and draw a very different message. The Easter narrative helps us to understand that what the world needs is not a retreat from faith, and religion’s moral codes, but an approach towards the mystery of creation marked by the humility of Jesus and infused by the sympathy that He showed to all mankind. The extremes to which Jesus was driven were the furthest reaches of human suffering. Scourged, beaten, tortured and crucified, His body was robbed of all dignity, like the Tunisian street trader, his existence extinguished in excruciating pain. Jesus’ journey on the Via Dolorosa was a consequence of others’ actions, specifically the rejection of His message, and the promise of redemption through faith which He offered. He was betrayed by the religious leaders of His time, who put a rigid adherence to rules, hierarchy and status before the message of love. He was condemned by the secular powers of the Roman occupation, who chose expediency rather than principle. He was, ultimately, denied by His own disciple, Peter, who sought the good opinion of others before the truths of his own heart. In each case, suffering came because men lacked zeal and passion, would not stand up for what was right and preferred a course the world seemed to deem prudent rather than the path they feared would render them exposed. Those in the Easter narrative who betrayed Jesus did so because they acted in a manner which was political, calculating and worldly.
The journey to Calvary that Jesus made was, however, for them as much as anyone. He confronted the ultimate extreme — a painful death and the cries of the world jeering in His ears — to prove that compassion can triumph over calculation, and that sacrifice can redeem sin. He required a faith that might be considered so strong as to be extreme. But His quiet adherence to the principle of love, and the willingness to sacrifice His interests for others, and then His Resurrection, completed a symbolic but real journey, and began a new phase of human spirituality.
The extremists who challenge our peace this Easter in Ireland, in the Middle East, in fragile African states come not as Jesus did, to redeem, but as His tormentors did, to uphold an arid purity and proclaim a vengeful power. Their faith is a political religion, like MacDiarmid’s Marxism, their vision is exclusive and self-indulgent, and their hands are clenched round a gun. The faith of Jesus was of a very different kind: His outstretched hands on the Cross were there to embrace all mankind. If the world is to overcome the dark passion of those whose hate drives them to violent extremes, it can only be helped by contemplating the message of compassion from the One who went to the ultimate extreme for love.
Five months ago Bouazizi was a frustrated, poverty stricken nobody in a nothing city. And that, I suspect, explains his astonishing posthumous power as a symbol of rebellion, anger and political upheaval; peaceful protestors demanding basic human rights: the humble fruit-seller who had a bad day, and couldn’t take it anymore. In the ongoing aftermath of the North African and Middle East revolution that fills our newspapers and television screens, Tarak Ben Ammar, formerly a manager of Michael Jackson’s world tour is planning to make a film about Bouazizi’s life and death. A Kuwaiti businessman has offered $10,000 to buy his cart. A square in Paris is to be named after him. Two thousand years later the ongoing Jesus revolution too is still turning the world upside down. Jesus turned out to be the only beloved son of God, who died that our sins may be forgiven, and that those who believe in him might have eternal life. And for that assurance and promise of that priceless gift we can say with the cheering Palm Sunday Jerusalem crowds. Alleluia!
Amen
Revd Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working across synod church partnerships.
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