What must I do?

Sermon by Alan Walden, 14th October 2012

Readings: Mark 10:17-24 

What must I do - must have been the question which Chesley Sullenburger III (Sully) had to answer on January 15^th 2009. He was the pilot of the US Airways flight which took off from La Guardia airport in New York.  2 minutes later the plane flew into a flock of geese which caused catastrophic damage to both engines. The plane was over the densely populated area of the Bronx.  If he was going to save the lives of people on board, and many more on the ground, the answer to 'What must I do' was (among other things): 

Shut down the engines,

set the right speed to glide,

decide where to land (in the river being the best option at least for those on the ground),

get the nose down to maintain speed,

disconnect the autopilot and override the flight management system,

seal all the vents and valves to make the plane waterproof,

make a sharp left turn,

line the plane up with the river,

slow it down as much as possible,

then land it straight and flat on the water, to make the first ever successful ditching of a commercial aircraft into water.

And he did it! In about the time for which I have just been speaking.  As you may remember, every single person got off safely, Captain Sully checked the plane carefully before leaving himself, then offered his shirt to one of the passengers who was cold. Even now it is hard not to be touched by this remarkable story. How did Sully manage to answer the question 'What must I do?' in such a stunning fashion? 

When the rich young man in our reading went to Jesus and asked the question ‘What must I do?’ Jesus took hold of his question and transformed it. He expanded its meaning and interpreted in quite a different way from what the man seemed to intend. The question becomes not just ‘what must I do, but ‘how am I to do it?

The rich young man has got the first part of the question (the content) clear, he thinks. As a first century Jew he is quite clear about the rules, and as far as he is concerned he has kept them - every single one - since he was a boy. At least he has kept the commandments Jesus refers to - not a comprehensive list, in fact only the ones which refer to behaviour towards other people. 

Even keeping these is a remarkable achievement. But there is no mention of loving God, not worshipping idols, not coveting, keeping Sabbath, using the Lord’s name in vain. Jesus doesn’t mention these commandments, but instead applies them, wrapping them up into a short summary: Give up your possessions - sell them, give them away - and follow me.  So Jesus brings both the two questions ‘what must I do’ and ‘how can I do it’ together and provides a combined answer: ‘Follow Me’. 

What must we do?  ‘ Follow me’. 
How can we do it? ‘Follow me’. 

Jesus' answer is not about rules, but about transformation! Following him is becoming a completely different person. It is not just a transformation of behaviour, but of something far deeper - transformation of character. Jesus is inviting the rich man - and us - to a new way of being human, with a renewed mind, a transformed character.

Captain Sully relied on his character when disaster struck. What ‘Sully’ had done was to practice good behaviour so that when an emergency happened, doing the right things was ‘second nature’. This was not natural, it was not luck, it was the result of his training. He had deliberately and consciously formed his character to be prepared for emergencies, and when one came, he swung into action. 

However much he wanted to save his life and that of his passengers, he could not have worked out what to do in the short time he had without it being ‘second nature’.  It was his developed character which brought this about.

Just as good character is  a wonderful prize which brings great blessings, so an evil character brings untold harm. This week, much has been revealed about the character of Jimmy Saville, which seems to have been so very different from his public reputation.  Good character is shown by good deeds, and there is a great need to shine a light onto the appalling character of a man who it seems was willing to abuse the most vulnerable people who he was pretending to help.  When we know someone's actions, we see their true character, and if any good is to come from these terrible revelations, perhaps it will be to raise the importance of good character for those put in positions of responsibility.

The value of transforming character is not a specifically Christian idea. The greatest exponent of the importance of virtue and character was the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He identified four key virtues: courage, prudence, justice and temperance.

With the goal of a fully flourishing human being, he identified the need for strengths or virtues, and a process of moral training which turns the virtues into habits, so that they become second nature. This sounds good in principle, but it is hard in practice. ‘What must I do?’   'Develop these great strengths of character, and practice them until they become second nature.'

Christianity takes these ideas, and builds on them in 2 ways: Firstly it adds other virtues for which Aristotle would have had little time - humility, love, gentleness.   These hardly make the task any easier!  But then it adds the means of character formation - the Holy Spirit.  God is not a task master in Christian transformation but a partner.  He provides the means - he is the means - by which we can be renewed and transformed. Following him takes commitment on our side to start off, but it is then very different from heading off on our own way.  ‘His yoke is easy, and his burden is light’.

A character which does the right things is of great value.  In early September 2008, it had rained for days in Chester le Street (between Durham and Newcastle).  Mark Baxter was out walking with his daughter Leona and the family dog. The dog ran into a large puddle, and the 3 year old girl (the same age as my Katy) dashed in after him. Then as Mark looked on, Leona disappeared, followed by the dog.  She had been sucked into a storm drain which had burst its cover, and was underwater, underground.’ Her father looked on - ‘What must I do?’

Mark might have been overtaken by panic, gripped by thoughts of his drowning daughter trapped in the drain.  But he said afterwards ‘every time I had a bad thought, I forced myself to think of something else’. 

He realised that the drain might empty into the river, 100 metres away. He ran to the river, and soon spotted the girls coat floating.  He plunged in, grabbed the coat, and the little girl, face down, unconscious inside it.  He had managed to do the right thing.   His character had shown through.

As we practice the habits of heart and life that lead towards the full expression of our humanity, we are developing good character. If we do this by following Jesus, then we are developing Christian character. 

In the culture of today, there are two contrasting views about how we might be fulfilled as humans.  One is ‘discovering rules and applying them’ and the other is ‘discovering who you really are and being true to it’.  Neither of these is the Christian way.  Rather - following Christ - practicing doing what he calls us to do - turning away from what he says is wrong, and towards what he says is right. Practicing it, changing old habits, adding new ones - to become more like him. I think that is what he means when he says ‘Follow me’.

Following him is the transformation of our character into who God has really made us to be. It is God and us working together - we want it and work at it, God blesses it and enables it by his Word and his Spirit.  In this way we are being renewed - made new and ready for what God has planned for us and for the world in the future.

My ministry here in Frimley has been rewarding and worthwhile, as it has involved encouraging people along the path of that transformation.  Following Jesus means being transformed by worship, and for mission.  

I believe that we are transformed by worship, and that our church life transforms us to be more like Jesus.  If we are following Christ then we are looking for ways to spend more time with him, learning, worshipping, being formed, where the Spirit is at work in us as we spend time with God. 

Our heavenly Father transforms us when we spend time in his presence, by the working of the Holy Spirit.

And we are transformed for mission.  The mission which God has given us is building his Kingdom here, through our jobs, our families, our social interactions. Do we do these things for God and to honour him, or do we do them for our personal gratification? That is the challenge.

Developing Christian character involves radical transformation of what we are doing in all of our lives. The transformation which Christ brings is every bit as miraculous and wonderful as the landing of that plane in the Hudson river. There is a great need for such a transformation in our society, from its leaders, role models and celebrities downwards, and not least here - in Surrey, in Frimley. 

And there is also a great need for that in Madeley, Telford where I will soon be going.  In both places, we need more people who have grasped that being a Christian is about a profound transformation in all parts of life, that it involves sacrificing certain things, in order to replace them with things which are of much greater value.

God called me in 2006 to give up the career I had, the income which I enjoyed, and move out of the home which we had established, away from the friends we had made, to follow his call to ministry.  I don't regret that for one second!  This didn’t feel like a sacrifice - it was what I wanted to do - the Holy Spirit at work, transforming me.  I wanted to do things which pleased God rather than just what pleased me.  I say this to reflect no credit on me, but I say this to give glory to God, and to give an example of what happens when God is at work, transforming us.   As I prepare to move on, I am encouraged by the promise of 1 Thessalonians 5:24 has held true.  'The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it!'

I am pleased to say that during the time I have been here in Frimley, the church has been at work, developing its character as we have focussed on topics including Christian discipleship, on prayer, on renewal of our parish vision and on the Bible.  So I am thankful for Christian virtue, for that transformation of character which is the path we take as Christians. 

And my prayer for this parish is that God would be more at work in you and in those around you, building good character, to make the full, rounded human beings which he intended each one of us to be. Fully prepared to display a Christ like character in whatever situation you are faced with, and in every part of your lives.

The influence of the Good Shepherd

Sermon by Alan Walden, 29th April 2012

Readings: 1 John 3.16-end, John 10.11-18

Who are the most influential people in the world today?  A recent poll was done for Time Magazine to find the world's 100 most influential people.  Some of them are those who wield political power - Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and Israeli leader Benjamin Netenyahu (but not David Cameron).  Then there are figures in contemporary culture  - Pop Singer Adele,  Footballer Lionel Messi, and the Duchess of Cambridge and her sister Pippa Middleton. 38 of the 100 are women, more than ever before, and many owe their influence to social media, like Twitter and Facebook.  This got me thinking about the whole idea of influence, and how we choose and allow people to be our role models and guides. How should we decide who we allow to influence us? 

Jesus was very concerned about who influenced his followers, and he used this image of the Good Shepherd to help us think about who we allow to influence us and why.  And then he moves us on to think about how we can allow him to influence us for good.

What do we make of this idea of a shepherd?  Strangely enough, there are no shepherds in today's list of the most influential people in the world!

In this country today, if we see sheep at all, they are gathered in fields, with good grass to eat and kept in by fences , and shepherds are rarely to be seen. A couple of weeks ago we spent a wonderful week at Lee Abbey in Devon, a Christian community, surrounded by fields full of sheep.  Very occasionally someone would drive into the field on a quad bike, drop off some food, and then leave.  Shepherding in this country today is about providing nourishment, and about containment so the sheep don’t escape.   

But in Jesus day, and in many poorer parts of the world today, shepherds are required to lead a flock of sheep across dangerous and largely barren areas, seeking out places to feed, protecting them from wild animals, finding them when they are lost, healing them when they are injured or diseased.  It is fundamentally about leadership rather than control.  And it is that very particular, special kind of leadership which Jesus refers to.  A shepherd is very involved, caring for the sheep, but also he has absolute authority.  So we can see that when Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd, he is describing his loving care as well as his authority - those two things go together in the leadership of the Good Shepherd. 

That can be hard for us to understand as it is so different from much of our experience of human leadership and influence.

Jesus is aware that a lot of the leaders around in his day were pretty dreadful.  Israel’s leaders had led them away from God, and towards disaster, exile, enslavement and most recently to be under Roman domination. 

There is no shortage of examples of bad leadership in our time - you might well have personal experience of it. Around us today, we might think of certain Bank directors or other bad bosses in business.  In recent history there have been some very bad political leaders, some have been overthrown like Gadafi and Sadam Hussein, others have been held to account like Charles Taylor and Milosevic, others remain in power like Assad and Mugabe.  A bad leader causes the death of those they rule over.

When we consider Jesus, we see there is a huge contrast.  Why should we follow him, rather than anyone else? Not just because the alternatives are often so bad.  Jesus is a leader who does something completely different and unexpected.  5 times in our passage (v11,15, 17, 18) it tells us that he lays down his life for the sheep. He doesn't kill, he lays down his own life.

When Jesus died on the cross, he was laying down his life so that everyone who believes in him could be found - to be reunited with God.   Reuniting us when we had wandered away cost him everything - he laid down his life for us. And in the reading in 1 John we read that this is how we know God's love.

But what would be the use of a shepherd / leader who died in the course of their job.  Once a leader dies, that is the end of their authority, a new leader is needed.   But of course the Easter story tells us that Jesus didn’t stay dead.  He laid down his life, and then on the day of resurrection he took it up again.  In fact it says in v17 that he lays it down in order to take it up again.

He laid down his life on the cross so that we can be reconciled with God, and at the resurrection he took it up again, so that he could carry on being the Good Shepherd.  That is the power of the resurrection - the Good Shepherd lays down his life and takes it up again.   Alleluia!

So how can we be sure we follow Jesus, to receive the abundant life which he wants to lead us to?

Make the right choice - follow Christ and not any other system of belief.  This means recognising that we have a choice.  Everyone is following someone, or something. It’s not just about the people who lead us, but the values which drive us.  Look at the contrast between following Jesus and following something or someone else. 

Verse 11 "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. ¹²The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. ¹³The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep.”

 

How many of the top influences are really in it to care for us, rather than for their own reasons?

Nothing else we choose to follow, has the loving care for us that God does.  Nothing else has the power to defend us in the face of evil.  No one else has laid down their life to bring us back to God - only Jesus.

One type of influence which I have encountered quite often recently in this area is spiritualism.  I have spoken to several people who have told me that they have consulted mediums, or attended a spiritualist church or spiritualist meetings, apparently thinking that this was entirely consistent with Christian beliefs.  But it is very much not the case.    Spiritualists repudiate the Christian doctrine that Jesus died to save us from our sins.

They seek to draw people away from Christ and towards their own authority, claiming knowledge and influence which, whether you consider it simply fake, or genuinely evil, can only have a negative influence on those who are drawn in.  For ourselves, we should steer well clear of spirtualism, and for those we know who are involved, we should seek by our prayers and our words that they find the love of God, and trust that the dead are safe and secure in God's hands, rather than being taken in by the false and malicious claims of spiritualism.

But there are plenty of other influences out there.  What is it for you?  For some it is materialism - the need to acquire possessions.  For others,  status - the approval of other people?  For others of us it is fear, or resentment or guilt which control us.  It’s really important to understand what drives us, because if it is the wrong thing, it will end up not with abundant life, but with wasted life. 

The key influencers on that top 100 list were media moguls (traditional),  new media (bloggers), politicians, celebrities, people with control over money (bankers, finance ministers etc), fashion leaders!

It is all too easy to fritter away the precious life which God has given us, and to make choices to be influenced by people who are here today and gone tomorrow, rather than the eternal values and influence which God has made available to us through Christ.  Many people in the world, living in authoritarian regimes, they have no choice about who drives them.  But we do have a choice, and the tragedy is that many people make wrong choices and go astray.

So there is a choice, and choosing to follow Jesus makes all the difference in the world, because he is the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for us.

Lastly, allowing Jesus to be our influence and guide means getting to know him, and allowing him to know us. Jesus said 'I know my own and my own know me'.  Following him requires us to get to know him as much as we can. 

Jesus calls us to that sort of close relationship.  He knows us and we are to know him.  It couldn’t be any closer.  Jesus said the relationship we have with him is just the same as the way he knows the Father and the Father knows him - v14. How incredible is that?  We are to know Jesus that closely, and we can cultivate that through our worship, reading the Bible and spending time in prayer.

Following the announcement of the top 100 influential people, a gala dinner was held this week, giving these folk the opportunity to parade on the red carpet, to congratulate themselves on their success and to enjoy a banquet in their own honour.  (I doubt if any of us were invited).  What a contrast with our Lord Jesus, the Good Shepherd, who invites us to come to his banqueting table, where we remember how he laid down his life, to open up the way to abundant life with him.

The Reality of Dereliction and Death

Address by Rt Rev Ian Brackley, Bishop of DorkingGood Friday 2012 5^th Address The Crucifixion and the Reality of Dereliction and Death

In the addresses that I gave in the first part of the service my theme has been to look at the Realities of Life as exposed by the Passion and Death of Jesus on the Cross. As we heard the story of Jesus’ arrest, the denial of Peter and the interrogation by Pilate, we looked at the Reality of God, the Reality of being Human and the Reality of Love in Human Relationships. Now we come to that difficult subject of Death, the Reality of Death and the sense of loneliness and dereliction that can accompany it.

Perhaps the most strange and yet the most comforting of the Words spoken from the Cross are these, “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?” If Christ is fully human, then a sense of Godforsakenness must be his too. Has not each of us at some time in our life experienced a sense of Godforsakenness? Would anyone here not admit that at some point in their life they have cried out too, “My God, why, why, why?” Why this pain, why this horror, why this injustice? We see that our life together on this planet is full of such things. Why do human beings behave so vilely towards each other? Why do governments murder their own people? Why do the wealthy nations of the world not have more determination to stamp out poverty and make it history? Why do majorities always seem to want to oppress and persecute minorities, whether those differences be racial, religious or sexual? And it is not only against the world that we cry out, but also against God. Why did that teenager hang himself on Christmas Eve? Why did a priest friend of mine, having recently suffered the death of his wife from a brain tumour, then have to cope with the death of his younger son from a hit and run driver on the very day that son got engaged and was on his way to give the ring he had just bought to his fiancée? Why did that young couple’s baby have to die when they had wanted so long to have a child? These are questions I have had to face in my ministry. Many clergy could add their own and you too could supply plenty of examples. Why, why?

Jesus knew about this experience too. In Gethsemane he prayed to be spared the ordeal ahead of him. It seemed, as he hung upon the Cross, that that prayer for healing and release had been ignored. My God, why? He felt a sense of Godforsakenness.

As we try to come to terms with these experiences we gradually realise that the Whys, the questions, will not always be answered this side of the grave. That isn’t easy for us. We need our securities. We need material security to protect us from want; security of good relationships to protect us from frustration and dependence; the security of definite answers to protect us from doubt; the security of the institution to protect us from anarchy. But God will not allow us to rest in our securities. The search for truth is a search which goes beyond securities, resting not in easy answers but in still more searching. The search for love is the search which takes us beyond the shelter of a human love to the greater depth of the love of God and the inner life which is our ultimate unity with God. We cannot rest content any more than Christ could rest content on the lower and easier levels of life. As Bonhoeffer once said, we have to learn to live as though God were not there. The cry from the Cross is the cry of a man in search of that ultimate unity with God, which leads him through the dark night of that feeling that God is not there at all. Disillusionment, despair, scepticism, blasphemy are states only possible for a man who cares about existence: they are perverse indications of a will to believe.

So then, this cry of Christ from the Cross is not a cry of unbelief but of belief. It is because we believe fundamentally that God is love, because we believe life does have meaning, that we seek explanation for what does not seem in our understanding to fit. If we did not think that God is love but rather, like the French writers and philosophers Camus and Sartre, that life is absurd, random and meaningless, then there would be no protest. There would be no expectation that any God would come to rescue us in our difficulties. It is just because suffering and injustice seem contrary to belief that we cry our “Why?” That is also the experience and cry of the prophets in the Old Testament and of the Psalmist: “How long shall the ungodly triumph, flourishing like a green bay tree?” St Paul constantly asks God to take away that particular affliction from which he suffered, which he describes as a thorn in the flesh, but it was not taken away. St Teresa of Avila, when the wagon in which she was travelling overturned and deposited her in a filthy ditch, is reported to have exclaimed, “I am not surprised, Lord, that you have so few friends, if that’s the way you treat them”. I once read about a priest who was going to visit his 12 year old daughter in hospital. He was taking her a birthday cake. She was dying of leukaemia. On the way he calls in at a church to pray for her. When he arrives at the hospital, he finds that she has just died. He goes back to the church and throws the cake at the crucifix, breaking down in tears on his knees crying “Why, why?” Jesus railed against God. Thank goodness. And so have I.

But let us remember that we can only rail against those we trust and love. You can be angry with those you love and you can accept anger from those who love you. It is only strangers with whom we cannot be angry. How often in my ministry have I heard of people who have left the Church because they were upset with the vicar, something he had said or done or not done. Why did they have to leave? Perhaps because neither they nor the vicar loved each other sufficiently to be able to be angry with each other. I can, therefore be angry with God. I can bitterly complain that he has forsaken me, because I know the opposite: that he has not, because the moment he did forsake me he would not be God nor would I have any faith in him. When I cry out against God, I know that I am safe in doing so and perhaps I shall only be able to enter into real relationship with him when I have cried out.

Let us be clear. When Jesus cried out those words of dereliction and abandonment from the Cross, he is not asking for compassion for himself. He is seeing his rejection or seeming rejection by God as a test of the truth of all he has taught about God. If God is good then God must somehow vindicate himself. The cry of Jesus begins with the opening words of Psalm 22, words of the first eleven verses the choir sang just now before the Passion Gospel, but the final verses of that same psalm are an affirmation of belief in a vindicating God. If God is love and Jesus is the incarnation of that love, then God must be vindicated or love will fail. Jesus himself on the Cross entered into that darkest of human experiences, the silence and absence of God. But it was precisely at that moment, that God showed his solidarity with his suffering and death. God is there with him on the Cross. Jesus cries out his experience of Godforsakenness, but he does not cease to believe in God. For only minutes later he is able to say “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”. Elie Wiesel, a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps, tells of the occasion when his whole camp was summoned together to witness the SS hanging two Jewish men and a youth with piano wire. Being heavier the two men died quite quickly, but the young lad lingered in his tortured death throes for nearly half an hour. Someone whispered to Wiesel as he watched this terrible death, “Where is your God now?” Wiesel felt within himself the reply rising up, “Where is he? He is there hanging on the gallows”. When the cynics of this world looking at the pain and distress and cruelties of the world cry out to us who claim to believe “Where is now your God?”, the answer comes through Christ, “He is here with me, struggling to make sense of what is happening, but continuing to know that God will be vindicated, because God is God in the crucified Jesus”.

I cannot prevent death, the final reality of all life’s realities. Each of us one day will have also to cry, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”. Death is the only certain fact to life. Whatever our status, however much of life still lies before us, each of us here will die. So since it is a very certain fact, it should be treated responsibly. But here is where we face a great lack of reality. Death is a taboo subject. Life must be prolonged at all costs, however useless and hopeless the life must be. Medical advances can keep the body alive now far longer and our improving standards in the West mean we could have a much longer old age (thus causing a pension crisis!), but prolonged senility is not my idea of life, even though we must face old age with grace and dignity. Society generally seems to believe in death avoidance at all costs, and when it comes, as it inevitably does, death is to be dealt with as quickly as possible. The local crematorium allows 20 minutes. Mourning is something that has to be got over as quickly as possible and the doctor can give you something to help you cope. Christ will have none of this escapism. He prepared his friends for his death, though they found it hard to take. He never dodged the fact that death faced him and prepared for it with dignity and that wrestling with aloneness which is the real facing of the agony and pain of death. So how then do we face death with reality?

God like any true parent allows us to accept responsibility for our lives. You have probably heard people say of someone who has died, “He is better off now”. The Bible knows nothing of such easy universalism: “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” It is the loving Christ who says to the uncaring and unloving at the Judgment parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew ch. 25 “Depart from me” and to the child abuser, “It were better for him that a millstone were put around his neck and he be cast into the sea”. There is judgment – not the self-righteous judgments we make on each other, but what St John of the Cross called “the judgment of love on love”. And that can be a terrible judgment. Christ would teach us that at every moment of our life we are being judged by love on love. Every moment we are being solicited by God for his love, but if I refuse that solicitation and choose to live in the shallows of life, then I may run the risk of shutting the door on eternal life.

That Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran whom I have already quoted from today in “The Prophet” says this: “If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life. For life and death are one even as the river and the sea are one”. All life is both going to death and coming to life. The more we live each day at one with God, the more at the moment of death we come alive. Jesus, because of his perfect ‘at-oneness’ with God was at once, as it were, reabsorbed into the Godhead. We for our part may have to be purged of that which at death is still imperfect, before there can be that complete at-oneness with God. But if we have died in grace, then we are on the way to that coming alive, which is the ultimate end of all and the meaning of heaven: to be at one with God. But just as in life we have to be continually risking the unknown, the unfamiliar, the disturbing, so one day we face the greatest risk of all – to go into the unknown without any of the securities we have so carefully built up in life, knowing that our death is the dark face of our eternal coming to life.

Because of the uncertain timing of death none of us can know when it may come to us. So being prepared is both prudent, sensible and facing reality. Make a will and update it when necessary. Make your funeral wishes known or even give detailed instructions – your executors are not bound by them but will do their best to carry them out. An older friend of mine now dead used to write at the front of his new diary each year “In the event of serious illness or an accident send for an Anglican priest”. Good advice. Sacramental grace is meant to be available and used and it is good to see that the Common Worship provision for pastoral ministry to the sick and dying, not to mention the funeral material, is both rich, wide ranging, and designed to assist the person concerned and their family and friends to come to terms with the journey they are on.

I suspect that even the most devout of us have doubts about what happens after death. My own faith is very simple on this point. True love by its nature cannot be destructive, only creative. If God is love, my end as made in his image cannot be annihilation, unless by my self-alienation from him I not he have made no other end possible. A God who utterly destroys would be no God of love. So my belief in God and in life beyond death hangs together. Either there is life or there is no God. There is no other alternative. Christ faced dereliction and death but he knew the certainty of the God of love who holds all things in life. That life we shall begin to celebrate tomorrow evening after the silence of Holy Saturday and into Easter Day. Today we share the tragedy. Tomorrow we share the triumph. Let Kahlil Gibran speak the final words:

“Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.

And when you have reached the mountain top then shall you begin to climb,

And when the earth shall claim your limbs then shall you truly dance”.

The Reality of Love in Human Relationships

Address by Rt Rev Ian Brackley, Bishop of Dorking Good Friday 4^th Address: Jesus before Pilate(ii) & the Reality of Love in Human Relationships

When Jesus spoke to his mother and the beloved disciple from the Cross, “Woman, behold thy son: behold thy mother”, we get a glimpse of the humanity of Christ and the cost of human loving. But no word perhaps carries with it so little reality as the way in which the word “love” is constantly used and misused. And the multiplicity of nuances which this one small word has to carry seems so often to reduce it to meaninglessness. Pop songs or operatic arias, television soaps or romantic novels, teenage magazines or the popular press, all will use this word which can mean sexual attraction, lust, possessiveness, even jealousy. But is it really fair to load on to this word these often negative and destructive attributes? What do we need to discover about the reality in human relationships of the word “love”?

If we would understand love, we must first seek to know and understand ourselves. Jesus endorsed the mainstream Jewish teaching about the most important of the Commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength” and “Love your neighbour as yourself”. The First Letter of John spells out for us what this means, as of course did Jesus in many of his parables: “Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers and sisters, are liars: for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”

So, “Love your neighbour as yourself”, means, that if we cannot love ourselves, we shall never be able to love another, for we shall be constantly taking out on them the inadequacies we are failing to recognise in ourselves.

As a human being I am a split personality, the result of that division between the me who is made in the image of God and the me who has become alienated from God. In psychological terms there is a split between the conscious and the unconscious. My conscious mind wants health, my unconscious sickness; my conscious wants life, my unconscious has a death wish; my conscious is forgiving, willing to let go of someone, to let them live their own life, my unconscious wants to nurse resentments, to cling, to make others dependent on me. Disunity in life’s relationships often begins when the unconscious takes control over the conscious, the immature over the mature. Often love becomes distorted because we have never grown up.

Jung wrote, “Something in me wishes to remain a child: to be either unconscious or at most conscious of the ego: to reject everything foreign or at least subject it to our will: to do nothing or else indulge our cravings for pleasure or power.” We recognise this in mothers who want their children to continue dependent on them even when adult; in spoilt people who marry and look to their partner to continue to spoil them as their mother or father did. Or else we wish to dominate our partner, as the celebrated Mrs Proudie, the bishop’s wife, in Barchester Towers did: “In the determined fashion of a masterful woman she is devoted to him”, wrote Trollope – and God help us if we become the victim of such devotion!

The neurotic tendencies within ourselves find their outlet either by taking it out on those nearest to us, or in that kind of do-gooding which has been well described as “She is the sort of woman who lives for others and you can tell the others by their hunted look”. Or there is the man who refuses to come to terms with advancing years and imagines that the flattery of his younger secretary is a tribute to his ‘macho’ image despite his decreasing virility. Or there is the woman who spends hours in beauty parlours trying to make mutton look like lamb! To be able to live each age appropriately to its reality is very difficult.

Christ had to deal with all these human immaturities. His family at one point wanted to take him over. His disciples wanted to keep him to themselves and shield him from danger and from other people. Mary Magdalene had to be told “Do not hold on to me”. Both Mary, his mother, and John, his closest friend, had to be taught that true love is by release and not by possession. Even Pilate, we hear, wanted to try to save him yet really failed to exercise the power that he boasted of before Christ – to release him or condemn him – and he gives in to pressure fearing for his reputation in Rome.

If knowing and loving ourselves is the first act of loving, so affirming the significance of another underlies the whole meaning of “Love your neighbour”. The psychologist Erich Fromm who wrote a seminal book in the late 1950s called “The Art of Loving” and which still today has enormous impact and relevance, says this: “To love is to give oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.” Jesus had that kind of love and belief in those he loved. He brought out before them the full reality of their significance. Through him Mary learnt that true motherhood was to be able to give rather than demand, to be there when needed, to share suffering without bitterness or resentment of Jesus for landing her in that position. John learnt what is later expressed in that First Epistle that bears his name that “Perfect love cast out fear”. He too could learn to be just there and available without demand. Also in those words from the Cross Jesus draws attention to a lesson which modern civilisation in the West often forgets, that the needs of age and youth are interdependent, not in contradiction. Sometimes in our society, unlike wiser Eastern civilisations, we act as though only the demands of youth are important. But age and youth need each other, as this generation will increasingly discover: Mary needs John, John needs Mary. Both find their unity in their love of Jesus and from Jesus.

Yet real love is very fragile and vulnerable. In that famous poem “The Prophet” Kahlil Gibran writes, “Even as love crowns you, so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth, so he is for your pruning”.

Sometimes we seem to try to take away from Jesus his full humanity. If Jesus had no ordinary loves, no sexual feelings, no preference for one person as against another, he would have been less than human and so no good to us. You could argue that in his earthly life Jesus loved humanly at least three people: his mother Mary; a woman, Mary Magdalene; a man, John, often called the beloved disciple. In this era when novels have been written speculating on these relationships, I am not going to speculate about the specific nature of these relationships – the biblical record is properly reticent here – but I think one might say that in these three relationships all human love is good and redeemable, be it for man or woman, be it same or opposite sex. For each of these conditions of relationship is patent to abuse and corruption. Also Jesus shows us that on the human spectrum of male and female, it not a matter of extreme but of balance. Jesus shows us that to be fully human we need to acknowledge and cultivate both the male and female qualities that lie within each of us.

And to love humanly means also to know the cost of love. Jesus knew that, much as he loved his mother, he had to leave family relationships for the wider world of love. He knew he could not spare his mother nor others who loved him the torture of seeing their human lover torn from them by crucifixion. He knew that John and Mary Magdalene would find their true greatness without his human presence rather than with it: their stature would grow when he had left them. This is a lesson we must all learn and it is a painful one. To be able to let someone you love go, when you would long for them to find their fulfilment by remaining with you, is one of the sure signs of a true love.

There is also another reality of love which is selfless and generous. We find that reflected in that other Word of Jesus from the Cross, “I thirst”. The love I mean is where there is a response yet no personal relationship between the one who needs love and the one who gives it, but the giver is sensitively responding to a situation of pain, or misery, or victimisation. This is the reality of love, because it is love knowing how to respond to those in need of love. So often people’s response to those who are suffering is very negative. It’s easy to adopt an attitude of blameworthiness: “The unemployed are feckless and lazy”. “Those who get raped usually entice the rapist”. “Those who beg on the streets and outside stations are just druggies”. It’s the sort of reaction that one can so often find endorsed or indeed whipped up by the morally self-righteous tabloid press. It is always so easy to slip into the attitude, as though misfortune were the result of a person’s sin, especially if it is of a sexual nature. Not only does it make us feel good, but it establishes and backs up our belief that God runs the world according to the lights of our understanding of rewards and punishments. We feel more secure by trying to shift the blame and we bargain with God: he will be good to us if we keep the rules. But the truth is, it isn’t so. All are in need of repentance without exception. None of us is without sin. None dares cast the first stone. Those who are judged most severely in the Gospels are the hypocritical, the self-righteous, the unloving and the deliberately destructive towards others.

Or our response might be to shrug off responsibility: it is “their” responsibility, the anonymous “they”, the Government, the Council, the Social Services, the Health Service…the Diocese! Projection is the name of the game. There again we might be afraid, so we distance ourselves and don’t want to be involved: we walk by when we see someone being attacked or bullied in the street fearful that they may turn on us or give us a mouthful of abuse; we take no notice if we hear screams of a battered child or wife next door, because we don’t want any unpleasantness with the neighbours.

These are not dissimilar to reactions that Jesus himself experienced. The religious authorities stood and condemned: he had deserved it. The mob of people cried “Crucify”, because that is what the manipulators of opinion wanted. Pilate refused to be involved – it was no concern of his. One of the thieves crucified with him distanced himself from Christ even in his dying. But when the cry “I thirst” came, one of the soldiers who had no connection whatever with Jesus save that of doing a distasteful duty responded and put a sponge to his lips. It was the response of those good-hearted people who offer help or accommodation when a local disaster strikes; or those who make it their business to visit and befriend those in prison; or those who respond generously and automatically write a cheque when another catastrophe or disaster causes an emergency appeal to be launched; or those who give of their time to help those young people who have been rejected and kicked out of their own homes, their school and feel utterly rejected. Frequently those who respond in this way are not members of the Church, who can often act very differently and find themselves allies with the religious authorities of Jesus’ day.

But those who respond to the cries of “I thirst” are those who become voluntary pain bearers, absorbing the hurt and anger and pain of others and giving back acceptance and care. They are usually the people either who instinctively know what compassion and love in a given situation demand, or those who in a deeper way are aware of their own failures, sins and inadequacies and in their loving of the wounded, whether physically, morally or spiritually, are admitting in a creative exchange that they too are wounded.

So the reality of love is to know and love ourselves in the understanding of ourselves. Then to be able to give that significance and worth to another which I have now found in myself. And then, because love is costly and vulnerable both in personal love and in the love which responds to the cries of “I thirst”, to be able to say with the poet Gibran:

“Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.

But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:

To know the pain of too much tenderness, to be wounded by your own understanding of love and to bleed willingly and joyfully”.

Or as one of our more recently composed hymns puts it:

“I will weep when you are weeping;

when you laugh I’ll laugh with you;

I will share your joy and sorrow

till we’ve seen this journey through”.

It is in the bearing of one another’s burdens, the sharing of one another’s pain, the knowing of one another more deeply that we begin to understand what Christ did for us on the Cross and he now invites us to take up our own and follow him.

The Reality of Being Human

Address by Rt Rev Ian Brackley, Bishop of Dorking Good Friday 2012

The Denial of Peter and the Reality of being Human

The story of human life as we read in the Bible seems from the beginning to have been a history of split consciousness. On the one hand we find humankind described as made in the image of God, endowed with power from God, made by God steward with responsibility for all of God’s creation. This is the reality. On the other hand from the beginning in that great myth of the Fall, the unreality is revealed: although made in the image of God man and woman are not happy with that. They want to dispose of God, they want to be gods themselves and they want it, like everything else in life, to be without much effort. The serpent is very understanding of this fundamental human weakness. He says, “You can be gods, it’s dead easy. All you have to do is to stretch out your hand and take the fruit, eat it and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The first bit of unreality has been made and, as a consequence, the first separation from the God whose power lies not in omnipotence but in powerlessness and love. This same unreality has been pursued ever since. For once we begin to imagine that we are gods, then we begin to worship success, power, results or whatever other deities we aspire to. Once they might have been deities of fertility or good hunting, but now in the last hundred years or so they have been fatherland, race, class, profit motive, consumer economy, the cult of youth, even human rights. Moreover, because we want to be gods and gods must not be attacked or criticised, we tend to regard any attack on our own thoughts or ideas or those of our group as attacks on ourselves, which then have to be resisted, often with fatal aggressiveness.

As long as we identify ourselves with gods then we cannot recognise the differences of others. We tend then to love only what we like and we only acknowledge people who believe and think as we do. People like ourselves support us and we feel comfort and strength from them and, of course, it confirms our own superiority – our own godlikeness. People who differ from us disturb us, because they question our godlikeness. So we tend to love those who love us and hate those who are different from us. This is exactly what Christ encountered and what drove him to the Cross. He reflected neither the religious authority of the Pharisees and Sadducees nor the civil authority of Pilate and Herod. And as Peter, who had so willingly taken up weapons in Gethsemane, was to find out, Christ would not fight against any of them. He only reflected the reality of God, who does not judge by results or by what makes us feel good and strong, but who rather goes alongside us in our weakness. And it was Peter’s weakness to deny the very one whom he professed to love and serve – three times. Would we have been, are we any different? But this incapacity to accept those who are not like us runs all through society; to love only what is like oneself is narcissistic.

But since the Fall the human animal has been narcissistic. We find it in politics both international and national. We have to have our allies and our enemies and what the first does is accepted but what the second does has to be treated with suspicion, even though in fact both may act in the same way when threatened. We find it in the antagonism and adversarial stance between political parties in their godlike status, in which nothing they do is wrong, all wrong is done by one’s opponents. The same hatred of the different reveals itself in the phobias of human beings: towards Jews, Muslims, black people, or those of a different sexual orientation: all seem to threaten our own superiority, lest that which we hate should appear in ourselves.

The same runs through all our ideologies and institutions, even the Church itself. The more strongly human beings decide what kind of divinity they will worship – fundamentalists of all persuasions, Anglo-Catholic, Protestant – the more authoritarian the cult, the more there will be persecution, intolerance, quite bitter struggles, as we have witnessed in Northern Ireland, or indeed in parts of the Muslim world. The really dangerous moment is when we pass from “This is what I believe” to “This is what you must believe”. John Habgood, the former Archbishop of York got it right when he said some years ago: “The people who worry me in life are not the uncertain but the too certain”.

The other alienation from reality lies in what Freud called the conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. And here religion is at one with Freud. Either human beings remain dependent on the pleasure principle, that is, on life as the instant satisfaction of their infantile wishes, or they mature into accepting the reality principle and come to terms with reality. To go back to the myth of the Fall, the bribe of the serpent “You shall be as gods” contained no effort. It was rooted in the pleasure principle – just stretch out you hand, your wish to be like God will be instantly satisfied. We are rooted in the pleasure principle in our society – instant credit, instant food, instant ease in everything at the touch of a button. But the reality of life is not like that. There are no instant godheads where all will be well with no effort. When Jesus says, “You shall be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect”, he meant such perfection is only reached through the many deaths of life towards eternal life – something very different from the promise of the serpent. If we seek for maturity in living this life, then we seek it through coming to terms with pain, suffering, loss and identification with the weak and the poor and not by the avoidance of reality. For Christianity has never preached life by the avoidance of death, but only life through death.

Notice also where this temptation to be instant gods led human beings in that myth of the Fall. First it led them into the incapacity to face reality in themselves. They had to cover their bodies with the symbolic fig leaves we see depicted in Renaissance art. The openness, the nakedness with each other and with God was no longer possible. They had to form stereotypes and could not feel secure unless they could hide behind them. Gradually these stereotypes become the ones that society expects of us and so we conform to them. Jung speaks of this when he says: “Society expects every individual to play the part assigned to him as perfectly as possible, so that a man who is a parson must not only carry out his official duties objectively but must at all times and in all circumstances play the role of the parson in a flawless manner. Society demands that each must stand at the post allotted to him be he teacher, priest, policeman, shop assistant.” Of course it is probably desirable that in a general way we should conform to the role or fig leaf assigned to us. But when that becomes so fixed, that we see ourselves as identified with it, so that whatever in us does not conform has to be suppressed or hidden, then an intolerable burden is placed upon us. So careful are we to place the “good front” to the world, that we do not know what to do with our shadow side, which does not fit in with this marvellous front. Or rather, we DO know what to do with it: we project it onto others. Hence the last bit of the myth of the Fall: the incapacity to take responsibility for their actions. The man blamed the woman, the woman blamed the serpent, the serpent probably blamed God for putting the tree there in the first place. This is the first example of that most frequent tendency of human nature and of almost every bureaucracy – “passing the buck”. This constant projection onto other people of that which I do not wish to own in myself is a very common failing of human nature. It accounts for that strong element of judgmentalism which many Christians have, especially towards those who are felt to be beyond the pale of respectable society. In fact it seems to work mostly in areas of sexuality or political opposition. It is fairly easy to see why I should want to project on to others. For when I project my shadow self on to another, they become the stereotype of what I fear, despise or dislike in myself. I am able to maintain a good opinion of myself because what contradicts my self-image is projected on to them. “Surely you are one of them”. No, I am not ‘one of them’. No, I am not, I am not ‘one of them’. And the cock crew.

Good Friday Third Address: Interrogation before Pilate and the Reality of being Human

How then can we move away from those unrealities – our fallen nature - that I mentioned in my last address towards our true nature which is to be made in the image of God? Once again we have to look at the reality of God as distinct from the unreality. As long as we tend to think of God along the classical Greek philosophical lines where God must be impassible (is not affected by feelings), immovable, perfect, omnipotent, a being who cannot in anyway be concerned with the dark side of ourselves and who cannot even understand that side until we change, then, of course, we must try to pretend and to deceive God. We must be successful because our God is all powerful; we must be respectable because our God is respectable; we must be judging and blaming the more disreputable sinners because our God is a God of Judgment. We can only please him if we are like him, so if we conceive of him as respectable, successful, judging and condemning, we shall be like that too. Indeed, as I look at the history of religion, it is all too obvious what extraordinary ideas of God people have had, because what extraordinary people religious people often are and how grim and lacking in joy! No wonder the poet Swinburne could write “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean, the world has grown grey with Thy breath.”

But as we have seen, this is not the crucified God. The crucified God enters into man’s sin and man’s Godforsakenness. He stands crucified between two criminals with whom he shares the humiliation without separation. He speaks to the mocking crowd and to the religiously respectable, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. Pilate could not understand such a thing. He may have tried at first to get Jesus released, but this was because he saw a man in front of him who was weak and very unkingly, not at all the usual tribal kings that the Romans hoped to make their allies and use as buffers against an even more hostile world beyond. And to the thief beside him he promises a place with him in the life of Paradise (the between world to complete unity with God which is heaven). In his death on the Cross God is saying that love is not separation from the sinner, not religious respectability, not judgment and condemnation of the outcast, but unity with the sinner, identification with the outcast and the disreputable. Once again Moltmann makes the point so well, “God does not become a religion so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings; God does not become a law so that man participates in him through obedience to a law; God does not become an ideal so that only by constant striving do we get near”. This is not a God that Pontius Pilate can understand. Do we?

The incarnate God is and can be experienced in the humanity of everyman. No one need dissemble and be other than he is to experience the fellowship of God with him. Rather he can lay aside all dissembling and become what he is to this human God crucified outside the gate of respectable society. So I do not need to be successful, careful, or wear a mask of conventional goodness. If I am loved when I have little to give, when I am not very useful, when I am all too conscious of my many defects, when I am not respected, not needed, not able to cope – if I am loved when I am like that, then I can really feel that love is the power that moves the universe, because there is nothing of life which God has not taken up and become one with. God has taken upon himself all of life, real life as it stands under death, sin and guilt. So I can accept all life, whole and entire, the shadow or death parts in me and outside me and I am taken up into the life and suffering, the death and resurrection of God and in faith participate in the fullness of God.

See then what a difference this can make to our relationships with others, to the reality of our relationships with our fellow human beings. Instead of screaming out our pathological fears at them like some extremist protest group; instead of standing in judgment and condemnation of the AIDS victim; instead of making ladders of sin in which we stand in the middle looking up occasionally and wistfully at the blessed saints above but more usually and disdainfully at the disreputable sinners below; we can accept the truth that we fail, admit the shams and pretences and the lying and the pride and also the shabby sins too. We can accept that much failure comes from not knowing how to love well and we can then relax, cease to exhort others to be good like us (which usually fails anyway) and instead of a cold moralism extend the warm hand of a forgiving and crucified God within ourselves. We can let laughter and tears well up from our being and replace judgmentalism and separation with compassion. We can shake away the fear and become warm and loving. We can, as people who are like Jesus, living and bearing our own and others’ guilt and sorrow, cry out to our fellow men and women across political frontiers, across race frontiers, across sexual frontiers, across religious frontiers, “Father forgive – today you shall be with me.”