St Andrew Dung-Lac and Signs of the Light, Homily at the Ordinariate Mass, Church of the Most Precious Blood, The Borough, Southwark, 24 November 2016

The Emperor Minh Mang, at whose behest St Andrew Dung-Lac was executed, ruled Vietnam in strict accordance with Confucian philosophy. Its stress on the importance of family and social harmony did not rely on a spiritual or supernatural worldview for its values. There was religion, of course, with temples, gods and offerings to be made to them; but it served to conform the divine powers and unseen forces to the needs and priorities of humans, rather than the other way round.

The activity of Catholic priests in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries told a rather different story. Here was word of a king whose Kingdom was not of this world, who had set about making the earth into a realisation of heaven, and who was not an unseeable mythical hero, but a man of flesh and blood, recognised as God among us because He banished the power of evil and injustice not by the imposition of power, but by His absolute self-sacrifice. His Cross was thus more powerful than any earthly lord, however much they might strive to establish order and harmony, because it unlocks unbounded love, and the vital preceding steps of unconditional forgiveness and the gift to trust in God. Here was a king not just to be revered, but to be loved. Here was a man who did not think He could rule heaven and manipulate it for earthly objectives: here was The Man who embodies heaven and changes the world to heavenward aims.

You can imagine St Andrew Dung Lac in 1839, and others like St Joseph Marchand, who went before him to martyrdom in 1835, St Pierre Borie likewise beheaded in 1838 and St Jean Charles Cornay in 1837: they were seen as subversives, unsettling the harmony of society and turning “proper religion” upside down. No wonder that Emperor Minh Mang called Christianity “the European Darkness”. Not for the first time were Christians seen as impious, and enemies of the plain light of the common good.

But the Lord has told us in the Gospel (Luke 21. 20-28) that you will only see the Son of Man coming in power and the great light of glory, out of a sun and a moon and stars that have been darkened by signs of agony in the world, menaces that fill people with fear, and misery and violence across every land. In other words, when we read the adversity in our times and our lives for meaning, we Christians are to look into them not for vindication, or revenge on the enemy, but for the working out of the purposes of God in the world, according to the pattern of His own life when He lived it in our own flesh. As we pray each year, Christ “went not up to joy but first He suffered pain, and entered not into glory before He was crucified”. Thus the same Christ who walked in Galilee and gave Himself for our sakes in unreserved love and forgiveness, is the Christ who is active in the world now and who will come at the End of Time; there is no other Christ. And we know in our hearts that this is our life, too: no Cross, no Crown.

Yesterday at Westminster Cathedral, Aid to the Church in Need arranged Red Wednesday, when it was bathed, in common with many other Church buildings, in red light to recall the bloodshed of the martyrs. This is not for pity, or bitterness, or even for special Christian pleading, but to confess our trust in Christ and the innocent blood He poured out for us, when He went before us to perfect our faith. Present at the Mass was the Syriac Orthodox patriarch, Mor Ignatius Aphrem II, whose community in Syria and Iraq alongside the Catholic, Orthodox and Assyrian Churches has borne the wood of the Cross to follow Christ as He foretold. But what is remarkable about the Christians of the Middle East and their bishops like Mor Ignatius Aphrem who encourage them is the faith, the confidence in God, and the joy that never ceases to shine through. It was Pope Tawadros of Alexandria, head of the Coptic Orthodox Church, who noted that when the possessed Islamic State murdered his migrant-worker flock on a Libyan beach, the young men simply said, “Lord, have mercy,” before they died. They knew that their Redeemer lives and that in their flesh they would stand and see God in His Presence, behold Him not a stranger. No words of revenge, no unforgiving curses, no bitter defiance. Just the appeal of sinners to have the grace to be forgiving, that we may likewise find forgiveness, and bring into the world slightly more love than there is at the moment.

This is the life of heaven: to be free not only of sin but of grudges and hate, free of belief in power that can strike down, freed up for the enduring, imperturbable, inexhaustible impetus of love.

To the world, this is obscure, mysterious, convoluted, twisting reality. How can the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch smile and profess his unshakable belief in the Resurrection of Christ and humanity in the flesh? How can he spout this when all around is death, and the worst abuse and destruction cries out for redress? How can he speak of forgiveness from such weakness? But this Christian darkness is just to us how things are in the light of the Light of the World.

“Let your light so shine before men,” He said, “that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” Let your works be goodness, virtue, mercy, forgiveness, love and persevering trust in Christ and His promises, and the Son of Man’s glory will be seen in who YOU are, and HOW you are, and how you act. The Kingdom of Christ the Son of Man will be seen coming in power and great glory for now by no other means. Then the Light will shine in the world through you.

St Andrew Dung-Lac, pray for us.
Martyrs of Vietnam, pray for us.
Martyrs of Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya, pray for us.
Martyrs wherever Christ’s goodness and forgiveness are hated, pray for us.

And wherever darkness calls itself reality, wherever it withholds mercy and calls it justice, wherever it shrouds people so they cannot see their hope, as God the Word spoke first to our Creation: “Let there be Light.”

Doctor Strange and the Miracle from within: Homily for the Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family of London, 13th November 2016

Those who have been to see the wonderful super-hero film Doctor Strange, will be aware of the tale of a virtuoso neuro-surgeon, who is brought down in the midst of his pride, after crashing his car. Losing the skill of his hands, he turns to the supposedly mystic east for arcane wisdom and supernatural powers, in order to recover his dexterity and thus his former self-image. He meets a spiritual master, who tells him that his problems arise from his conceit, and that he must undo all that he thinks and believes, and start with genuine humility to learn to be who he is meant to become all over again. As the story unfolds and Doctor Strange unlearns his self-centred life, he discovers not only the difference between good and evil, but also the hidden moral force for good that guides and guards the universe, the potency of which he begins to harness.

But as his hands acquire different new powers, we begin to scent that all is not as it seems. Doctor Strange defends himself from the attacks of supernatural enemies; he contains their activities; he slips in and out of the different overlapping universes; he rolls back time to restore good and out-manoeuvre the evil consumed with bitterness, vengeance and violence. He resets history. And then it begins to dawn on those who have contended in the struggle for good to prevail over evil that, while they won, the power they drew upon was the same as the power drawn on by evil, and that they have broken the morality of their code not to subvert the laws of nature in pursuit of good. Finally, it is laid bare that the spiritual master who has provided a moral compass throughout must thus herself be deeply flawed. She has nurtured and protected Doctor Strange; but the powers to circumvent the order of the universe that she has forbidden to her disciples are those which she has relied upon to achieve for herself a life eternal.

As I watched the film to the unravelling of its moral, I kept thinking, “The end does not justify the means” and those who say “Let us do evil that good may come of it” (Romans 3.8). I also thought that the eternal life promised by harnessing the hidden force at the heart of creation is only the promise of Satan to Christ on the mountain height – “Fall down and worship me, and all this will be Yours” (Matthew 4.8-9). In other words, the Kingdom, whose blessedness we sing and aspire to so often when we celebrate the Divine Liturgy, does not come by force, and power imposed on people from outside and beyond the world. It is the solidity of virtue grown and resilient from within the soul of each heart and each society. Even in The Lord of the Rings, the good wizard Gandalf’s powers are futile, when it comes down to a straight battle in the world between real good and real evil. Again and again, the evil power of Sauron forgets the lesson he is forced to learn only after he has been defeated - evil gets exhausted; it runs out, while virtue and holiness arise out of the limitless store of freely given love that is the principle on which the universe is created and sustained as it proceeds. This is what is meant by Aslan, the redeeming and self-sacrificing Lion in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, when he speaks of “the Deeper Magic from Beyond the Dawn of Time” (The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe, chapter 15): God works His power upon us, to soften our hearts, achieve his miracles of the new life, and to bring in His Kingdom, from within nature and from deep inside us. Indeed there are miracles, and visions, spiritual experiences, and moments of direct confrontation between the human being and the mysteries of God; but they are rare. But even these come from within the workings of nature as it is restored by God’s grace, from within the soul as it repents and turns to look for God and trust Him.

Think of the Parable of the Sower, which is today’s Gospel (Luke 8. 5-15). Jesus speaks of His own working in our souls: “the seed is the Word of God”. God the Son does not impose the outcome of the Kingdom – the establishment of peace, the achievement of justice and righteousness, the vindication and prevailing of all that is good. It comes from within. He continually sows seeds for it, to find the good earth in every person where it may sink in, take the time it needs to germinate, draw on the nurture and nutrients it needs to gather strength, put forth tender shoots, and grow from one season to another, until its ripens and the fruit is borne. It is often missed that Our Lord implies this to be a process in us that has to happen time and again, over and over: the never-ending cycle of our growing in the Kingdom to harvest time, when the Sower comes round again, never giving up on His purposes, or on the hope that next time around the barren ground will let the seed sink in, that now the thorns will not choked it, that it will not die because of the aridity of our spirits. It was Blessed John Henry Newman who recognised that “miracles are no remedy for unbelief” (Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 8, Sermon 6): there is no resetting of history and nature to command our belief or our virtue. If we look to Christ, we look in vain for a Super-Saviour, like Doctor Strange with his startling, magical, evil-busting but morally ambiguous powers, defeating the dark consequence of violence only because of an even more potent effort of destruction. To the wicked and corrupt generation who say, “Give us a sign” (Matthew 16.4) and “He said He would destroy the Temple and raise it up in three days; let Him come down now from the Cross, and we will believe in Him” (Matthew 27. 40, 42), Newman says, “Let us … put aside vain excuses; and, instead of looking for outward events to change our course of life, be sure of this, that if our course of life is to be changed, it must be from within.” Yet, he continues, “We have desired and waited for a thing impossible,—to be changed once and for all, all at once, by some great excitement from without, or some great event, or some special season; something or other we go on expecting, which is to change us without our having the trouble to change ourselves. We covet some miraculous warning.” Instead, it is enduring, self-sacrificing, goodness, virtue, longing for holiness, determination to seek the good – refusing to do wrong in the hope that good may come of it – that mark the grace of God, sinking within and finding fertile fruit until the fruits of His Kingdom are harvested season after season. For, as Newman concludes, not unnatural intervention, but “love of heaven is the only way to heaven.”

In today’s Theotokion, we are reminded that, as this has happened in humanity before, it can happen with us. St Anna is seen as the barren one who gives birth to the Mother of God. No longer the stony ground, by the seed sown from the Kingdom she becomes the mother of the Mother of the Saviour and thus the nourisher of our life. Likewise, in today’s Resurrection chants (Tone 4), we view the grave, but not the existence of death. It is not the tomb that has been hollowed out, but death itself. It has been “plundered” and robbed of the Lord Whom it held back behind its gates until the third day. We, too, are being excavated from within, as the sin and resistance to love are steadily removed. The gates of unlovingness and our lazy hope for some magic to come along and change us, are “shattered”. What happens next is what St Paul found had happened to him: “I have been crucified with Christ,” he says. “And it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ Who lives within me” (from today’s Epistle, Galatians 2. 16-20).

So here we are, with no Gandalf, no Doctor Strange, and only the Sign of Jonah to the wicked and corrupt generation: the Son of Man Who dwelt in the heart of the earth, came forth to Resurrection not through a dazzling display of worldly might or other-worldly magic, but by transforming His creation from within, from the beginning, step by step, by being born in it, by dying on one of its Trees, by taking on our sin and undermining it, and by nurturing the earth to bring Him forth as its own fruit, out of the sheer determination of love. The Deeper Magic does not inflict itself, nor does it meet violence with smarter violence. Love of heaven is the only way to change the world and its affairs; for we know that it is the only way to change ourselves. And we will know Who our Saviour truly is when we can say, “I have been crucified with Him; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives within me.”

 

Can the Ordinariates represent Christian Unity

This paper was delivered at the Third Receptive Ecumenism Conference at Fairfield University, Fairfield CT, in June 2014 and then substantially developed at the suggestion of Professor Paul Murray to set the discussion of historical origins, Anglican patrimony and ecumenism of life in the context of the crystallised and phased method of receptive ecumenical learning that he had set out in 2011 at Bose, for the inaugural session of ARCIC III.

It also draws on two earlier talks given to two "groups of Anglicans" in early 2010 - the first on the ecumenical significance and potential of the Anglicanorum Coetibus, and the second reflecting more on what constitutes the Anglican patrimony and the mutual enrichment of Anglican becoming Catholics and Catholics drawing from Anglican tradition in a forthcoming ecumenism of life together - and contribute to the ongoing ecumenism of the Catholic Church with the Anglican Communion.

The full paper can be downloaded here.

St John the Theologian on a Sunday of Tone 7, Homily at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, London, 9 October 2016

We remember the Beloved Disciple John today, above all the apostle of the eternal life and love of God. But, being Sunday, we invariably commemorate the Resurrection, for week by week we are given a constant experience of the reality that we enter into and that enters into us. To this end, we have eight sets of hymns, one for each musical tone, that we sing each week in turn over a couple of months. This Sunday we sing the hymns of the seventh tone, last week the sixth and next week the eighth. In this way, the hymns are always familiar when they come round; but they are always fresh, too, because each week we move from one perspective to another. We do not get used to just one set; and with each new week we are surprised by a different angle upon Christ.

In this week’s troparion, we say to Christ our God, “You opened paradise to the thief, You turned the myrhhbearers’ lamentation into joy.” We go on to proclaim that this is because He is risen, and He replies – through the apostles and the Church’s songs – “Yes, I am risen, for I am merciful – that is the reason why.” In the kontakion, we go on to imagine the Saviour saying to us, “Now come forth to Me – Come to the Resurrection.” So it is not just that the Merciful Lord came to us at Bethlehem, went up on the Cross to bring mercy to us, or came up out of the Tomb to bring the Kingdom to us. His outward movement towards and into us is also about our coming to Him, being brought in our movement towards and into Him: “Come into the Resurrection!”

In a talk at the fascinating conference on paths to Christian Unity that has preceded this Liturgy, we heard how our shared Christian faith is not just a matter of body and soul, but of heart and imagination too. In the beautiful and striking hymns that we have sung in turn since the first millennium, we in our eastern Church for our part are taken, then, into this realm of imagination by which we enter the Kingdom of the heart of Christ Who adores us more than we can possibly adore Him. Here, we can meet, and love and worship together, with and in the Church of heaven which is invisible to us but where there is no division from Christ. As the Orthodox Metropolitan Platon (Gorodetsky) of Kiev, said, in words of pioneering mystical ecumenism that inspired Father Paul Couturier to reimagine the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, “The walls of separation do not rise as far as heaven.” So, perhaps the eastern imagination of the life of resurrection and being brought into it week by week – “Come into the Resurrection” – with our very visual worship and its movement of colour and image, and fragrance and sound – is something we can humbly offer to our fellow Christians, adding to the dimensions of body and soul, heart and imagination in the Life of Christ that we lead in His Body.

For the power of the liturgical and spiritual imagination – which is of course something that belongs to all our traditions in different ways – takes us back to reflect on the meaning and nature of God’s love with St John the Beloved. In the Catholic and Orthodox Churches of the East we often call him St John the Theologian, not just because of the words and mysteries he wrote out, but because it was the disciple whom Jesus loved that spoke to God, who has as a result spoken of God, and whom God has spoken to, close to Him, right to the heart. St John thus says, “No one has ever seen God” (Epistle – I John 4.12-19); and then he meditates profoundly on the perfect life of love in Christ as nonetheless the very vision of Christ in God. We have not seen God, but God has seen us. We have not loved God before He first loved us. We are to be seen, then, as those who are loved by God. More than that, what is seen us is none other than the love and eternal life of God, none other. “No one has ever seen God”; but they can see us.

And so, this angle that we have on Christ that I spoke about before turns out really to be His angle on us. We imagine we behold Him in His risen glory – and we are excited by love and life to the full. But while this is so deeply true of the nature of things even in this world, what we are really seeing is Him beholding us out of mercy. It is the Merciful who is risen from the dead, and our own resurrection from Him will be because we too have been changed into Mercy, that is the living vision of God’s life of eternal love. For when we say, “Save us,” it is from being merciless, being unloving, and thus unliving in Christ that we cry to be kept.

May this Christ, who is that Mercy Itself, save us; for He is good and He loves mankind.

The Sweepings of the Wheat: Homily for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday of Year C, Most Precious Blood, Southwark, 18th September 2016

Unless my memory is very much mistaken, when I was a little boy doing errands for my grandmother, I am sure I noticed the hand of the greengrocer on the scales as he weighed the potatoes. It all happened so fast – potatoes rumbling into the pan, an array of weights onto the balance the other side and – I am sure – the greengrocer’s hand never left the potatoes. Was he holding them down? Was he making them seem heavier, so we got fewer than we paid for? It is easy to play tricks on a child, but something was suspect and you never forget these things.

The prophet Amos (Amos 8.4-7) tells us people were cheating with weights and measures two thousand eight hundred years ago. He is scathing, too, about those who try to charge for the sweepings of the wheat. Yet, it never ceases to amaze me how much we are prepared to pay for dross and junk, for food that is bad for you, for bad service, mad fashions, services that are no longer good enough, or even there; but we still pay out.

Then again, the apostle Paul (I Timothy 2.1-8) talks about those who are being saved; and into our religious imagination piles this idea that Jesus is collecting us like every little piece of cash and putting us in the bank, saving us up, not allowing us to be spent up as a wasted resource – either by others’ ill intentions or our own – so that a tidy sum can be built up, to buy something really worthwhile. Our Lord has a wry tale (Luke 16.1-13) about a steward who first creams off the top of his employer’s income to line his own pockets, then reinvents himself as a dodgy benefactor with someone else’s money. His boss lets him off, but Jesus makes the point that if you cannot be trusted with other people’s interests, how can God trust you not to ruin what he has already given you? St Paul’s image of Jesus the only one who does the saving, recalls Our Lord’s own clear advice: “Store up for yourselves treasure in heaven – for where you treasure is, there your heart will be too.”

So we have two human tendencies contrasted – the instinct to get what we want quick by cheating and exploitation, and the instinct to build up the resources that we need, by patient preparation and calculation based on trust. Perhaps St Paul and Jesus, with this talk of saving and accounts, are thinking of that wonderful story told by Jesus about the man who finds out that there is a pearl of great price buried somewhere in a field, and so he goes to the owner with all the money he has, to buy the whole field and be sure of getting hold of the treasure that lies unseen within it.

Jesus is speaking of course about our spiritual lives and making clear that (first) the Kingdom of heaven lies buried deep within our world and deep within our souls; and (secondly) that there are no short cuts to it. We can only get it to emerge by patiently working the soil, digging our own hearts, minds and souls over, so that the Holy Spirit can cultivate us, with the people and society around us, until the beauty of Christ in all His glory and power flourishes in the lives of those who live justly, compassionately, generously, truthfully, peacefully from the greatest to the least in all that we are and all the we do.

When I was a young man, a kind but earnest protestant friend asked me, “Are you saved?” He knew I went to Church but he did not think that Catholics or Anglicans came up to his standard of proper Christians. What he meant by “Are you saved?” was saved ”from” sin, saved “from” damnation, saved “from” myself. But this is not exactly how Our Lord and his apostle tend to use the idea of salvation. They mostly mean it as saving positively “for” something – for the Kingdom of God’s power to come as an experienced reality, saving for future hope, saving not for imminent judgment but for present blessings of confidence in what He promises, saved for being instruments of forgiveness and the good in the world. We know the worst of us, and we know the best too. So we know that this is all within reach.

Yet, looking at the world around us, it is easy to think that this could be Christian wishful thinking. We may talk still about the good of Christ saving us, but even those with a sense of spiritual desire dismiss the idea of needing to be saved as strange or presumptuous. It strikes me that nothing is either new in this. It is not news that people still waste their gifts and futures, people still hoard up the wrong treasures, only a few have the right priorities and values in life, only a few see where and how the hand of God is at work, only a few are actively involved in working their lives like that field that will one day flourish, and produce not just any old crop but the fruits of the Holy Spirit when the buried pearl is at last found.

It should not surprise us. God tends not to work on the grand public scale of dramatic shows of overpowering strength. He always works from within, and from the little scraps of what is left over from what we have. From within is how he came into the world through a single individual, Mary. He rescued the mere remnant that was left of His once faithful people Israel. Through brave, honest souls he brings healing and peace, transformation and hope. To this day, His miracles come from wIthin nature and not like magic against it. So, when the Church can seem to be a declining minority, all that is left of a spiritual life in Christ that was once second nature to everyone, it is easy to think that religion is a private viewpoint, a matter for the individual or a small group making a path through life, rather than the true account of the sheer basic fact of how the entire universe has been built and operates by Christ. It is easy to think we are a sideshow, mourning our loss of influence or relevance. It is easy to wonder if we have a future at all. Why would anyone wish to talk about Christ saving us?

But it is not like that. For the irony is that, when Jesus spoke of setting your heart on treasures stored up for heaven, He meant His own heart, Whose treasures are we human beings He is saving up to adorn His heaven. We are just like the sweepings of the wheat from the floor that no one in their right mind would buy, let alone invest in; and yet God has been prepared to pay for us the highest cost. We are pearls of great price, for whom Our Lord has paid up everything in His hands to buy the field we are in. We are part of his tireless labour of sheer determination to work the land, so that what it brings forth is seen to be full of goodness, of trust in what He has promised, His creative power to bring justice and delight, to keep on passing through adversity and emerge with inexhaustible forgiveness and the light of life.

To bring all this about there is no tipping of the scales, no short cut. It is not so much about our lonely perseverance, as about Christ’s painstaking labour in the field he has bought, working on us from the inside out until we produce the costly value buried within, to make His Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. That it may be happening in you and me, is because the whole earth is the Lord’s, being worked on constantly, inch by inch, soul by soul, heart by heart.

Every year in Holy Week, we recall the words from the Lamentations of Jeremiah (1.12), “Is it nothing to you, all you that pass by? Behold and see if there is any trouble like my trouble?” No, this trouble is not nothing – deep down, it is the happening of everything at the hands of Christ Who fills the universe and makes it to exist only for love.

Seek first the Kingdom of God: Homily for the Third Sunday after Pentecost, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London, 10 July 2016

Seek first the Kingdom of God (Matthew 6.34). These words insistently return to the mind in the midst of the constitutional and moral crisis in which the United Kingdom is now embroiled following the referendum, after a majority of those voting approved by a narrow margin withdrawal from the European Union.

In the weeks and months before this fateful vote, unlike at General Elections, there was no collective guidance from the Catholic Bishops on the issues at stake in terms of Catholic social teaching, or indeed the interests of the Holy See and the Catholic Church in this country. This is doubtless because there was an honest case from the point of various Catholic Christians’ faith for either choice. The Church stands above the political fray, since its wisdom applies to this world from the Kingdom of heaven. But, after the result was known, it was clear that great bitterness and resentment was unleashed, with some terrible mutual recriminations – young versus old, north versus south, Scot versus English, British verse foreigners, even white versus those of other colours. Cardinal Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster and President of the Bishops’ Conference, immediately called for calm, “respect and civility”, appealing to our better nature as a country, and to its implicitly Christian civilisation when it comes to a generous “welcome for the stranger and shelter for the needy”.

Let us now set the referendum decision and its aftermath explicitly in the context of Christian faith and discipleship. Since we as Catholics strive for the communion of all in Christ in the Catholic faith, and by leading truly a spiritual life in union with Him, it is important that we look forward to the next year, with its undoubted upheavals ahead, with our eyes fixed firmly on Jesus Christ our pioneer on the life we pass through in this world (Hebrews 12.2).

This last week, I have heard of a Spanish restaurant in south London vandalised with offensive graffiti, and we all know of the similar attack on a Polish centre in north London. I also learned of a British charity for the needy, which has built up considerable work in other European countries, now considering a new office in Germany to protect its work across borders; and a Belgian colleague speaking Flemish to relatives on the phone on a bus, was confronted in public with a threat that her job was shortly to come to an end. Among us we know of numerous other incidents of physical and verbal assault, ranging from the xenophobic to the unvarnished racist.

To this we say that the Kingdoms of the World have become the Kingdom of the Lord and of His Christ (Apocalypse 11.15), and that the Kingdom of God transcends all our ideas of patriotism, nationality, nationalism, state-interest. “Here,” says St Paul, “we have no abiding city... for our true homeland is in heaven”. (Hebrews 13.14 & Philippians 3.20) And the Lord Himself says to "seek first the Kingdom of God" (Matthew 6.34). At Vatican II, the Church taught that the authority of the Church and of civil society are not subject one to the other, but are free to achieve their highest aims as they operate in their respective spheres. This does not mean that the Gospel and the authority of the Church to proclaim it fail to apply to the world, and that the Church must refrain from interfering in the affairs of society. On the contrary, it is the teaching of the Church that the objective of both Church and State, Religion and Society, is to serve the realisation of God’s Kingdom on earth. It is thus the Church’s prophetic duty to call the world, its leaders, its governments, its cultures, its societies and each individual member to constant repentance, to return again and again to the principles of the Beatitudes, to strain repeatedly to ‘hear the Angels sing’ of glory to God on high and peace on earth to those of good will, and thus to orient the entire world toward the blessed state that is ours by virtue of our creation in God’s own image.

Secondly, it is vital to recall that, in the beginning, what has now become the European Union (whatever you think of it) was established largely by Catholic Christians intent on realising this Kingdom of God in the hands of the remaining people of good will, transcending states and languages and divisions, so that the resources of Europe could never again be used for making war, or for oppressing the free dignity of human beings to live to the full before God, in faith and hope and love. No more Fascism and Nazism; no more atheist materialist communism. Everywhere confidence in truth, in goodness and justice.

What has emerged in the last few weeks has clearly been lying under the surface for years and now feels unbound and empowered to assert itself. Perhaps it is a catharsis that will soon be over as the poison is dissipated. Perhaps we face a more lasting darker outlook, recalling that such attitudes were once commonly assumed and potently pursued before the Second World War in this country as elsewhere. So we must remember that the Lord Who said, “Seek first the Kingdom of God,” went on to say, “and His righteousness.” It must therefore be the heartfelt duty of every Christian, who believes above all else in the Universal Reign of Jesus Christ over all peoples and nations, to withstand all thoughts, words and deeds that contradict His design for humanity’s perfect liberty in Him, and that contradict the dignity of all human beings, regardless of colour, race, religion, age, sex, or language, or outlook. It must be that Christians who “seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness” declare unrighteous, unChristian, all that stands against Christ’s will for us all, both to be one in His own single humanity and to thrive as He has appointed us in His single creation with all our differences and backgrounds and origins. For we see that by the Holy Spirit He has both been penetrating our societies so that they may providentially become more like His Kingdom, and is even now redeeming from them all their ills, oppressions, cruelties and acts of spiteful pride and wickedness, by the power of His holy Cross.

I fear that this will require of us great strengths in the time ahead as we make a new history. Perhaps we are in an unreal calm before a coming storm, or perhaps, as we hope with the Cardinal, we will prove after all to be good neighbours. Perhaps, though, when we insist as we must upon Christ’s bearing on the world, it will involve the further vilification of the Church. Perhaps to exalt the Kingdom of God and righteousness will involve profound sacrifices for the sake of the truth, of justice and the love of God. But the evil at work will not prevail. It must bow. For “the earth is the Lord’s with all that is in it” (Psalm 23.1) and “the Lord alone … will be King” (Zechariah 14.9); and “He will reign for ever” (Apocalypse 11.15). Him alone do we serve (cf. Matthew 4.8 & 10).

 

Homily for the Sunday of the Fathers of the First Council of Nicaea, Sunday after the Ascension, Ukrainian Cathedral of the Holy Family, London, 12 June 2016

Nine years short of 1700 years ago, bishops representing the whole Christian Church in the Christian Roman Empire gathered to agree the wording by which we still declare our faith, in the Creed proclaimed at the Mass and the Divine Liturgy throughout the Catholic and Orthodox Church. This is the faith that Christ is of one substance with the Father - they share the same nature equally; just as any earthly father and son do, so do the Heavenly Father and Son.

It was the first time the bishops had needed to be called together, because an unprecedented controversy between good people threatened to tear the Church apart and even finally undermine it. For the consequences were all or nothing. Could a human be divine in the same way as the Father? Could someone who had been born in time, also be the Son from all eternity, before all ages? A priest called Arius had concluded that Jesus was the first of all God’s creatures ever to be produced, and He was divine only in the sense that His divinity had been given Him by the Father. It was not His own divinity, but someone else’s, lent to Him. Thus the Son may live eternally with the Father and the Spirit now, but He had a beginning, and there was a time when He did not exist. In Arius’ thinking, even though Jesus had a divine nature, he came after His Father. But others argued back – if He was inferior to the Father, how could Jesus be the one who reconciles us with God?

Various theories were proposed, to make sense of the belief that everyone shared, that Christ is both divine and human. From direct memory, He was a real human being who was born, and lived and died, and then rose again, ascended into heaven and sent among us His Holy Spirit. But how could a human being also be God? Is not God a spirit? Is the Father the spirit who inspired a human being, and filled him with His own divine life, making Jesus His Son, so that His sacrifice on the Cross is acceptable and wins our forgiveness and salvation, so that we, just like Him, can be adopted by the Father, and receive a share in God’s nature as His children? The explanations for how this could all add up were many and inventive. Thus, Jesus had a nature that was like the Father’s. But does that mean he was unlike us? Or, He was a human that became divine too, by adoption. But does that mean He was in the end unlike God? Or, He has a human and a divine nature – they are united with the Father by a single will, or energy, or character. But does that mean he was half-God and half-human, unlike any other human being, or unlike God at all? There had even been those who said that the Father and the Son were one and the same Person, but in different forms for different times and reasons. Like a telescope sliding in and out, first there might be the Father, in the Old Testament; then the Father is followed by the Son in the Gospels, and afterwards comes the Holy Spirit.

None of these explanations is adequate. They only go part of the way to explain what we recognise in our life in Christ within the communion of the Holy Spirit in His Church. Or else they lead to distortion, leaving us without Three Persons in the Trinity, or offering us a Christ who is either a human like no other, or a heavenly being who only appears to be human but who isn’t God either.

So we keep coming back to the explanation that was settled upon by the Fathers at Nicaea. First, they agreed that, if the work of the Cross and Resurrection genuinely brings about our forgiveness, our redemption through Christ’s Bloodshed, and our reconciliation with the Father, then it had to happen physically, in our own, real, human flesh. If it did not, it was a mirage, a myth. There are plenty of stories about the interventions of heavenly figures like Hercules or Shiva –these are religious myths, but they do not have any effect – they are not a fact of life in creation. So Jesus had to be a real human being with a completely human nature.

The second thing they considered was, if a real human being died on the Cross and rose again, how did it connect with God? If it was just a miracle visited upon one human being from outside, it may be an inspiring, symbolic story, but where is the effect involving the rest of us? So the Fathers agreed that the incarnation of Christ, and His Cross and Resurrection, to bring about our salvation and our reconciliation with God, was not just a human event. It had to involve God too. Otherwise, how did a human Jesus unite us with God on His Cross?How did His own resurrection take any of the rest of us any nearer God from out of our mortality than we were before? How were the difference and the distance between God and humanity overcome? So, they agreed, Jesus must have been God too, God the Son, united with His Father from all eternity, and united with us – true God, true Man.

Arius still could not bring himself to say this. He saw nothing incomplete in saying that Jesus the Man embodied the Word of God that He had received, so that His sacrifice for us was acceptable, and the resurrection vindicated it. Perhaps he was recalling his own father with honour, and pictured a Divine Son who was lower than God the Father - God as he is in Himself. But the Fathers of the Council of Nicaea, said no; this was not enough. If Jesus Christ is not God as He is in Himself in the same way as the Father, then the connection between us and God is not made, and we are not saved. If God did not become man, then man cannot become divine as Christ promised in the Gospel - which we read every year both at the time of the Ascension leading up to Pentecost, and in the days of Holy Week leading up to the Cross – when he said, “All mine are yours, and yours are mine.”

So the Fathers of Nicaea insisted that Jesus did not merely possess a divine kind of nature; he did not have a nature like the Father’s. His nature is the same as the Father’s. This is why, especially in the Christian East, we unequivocally and repeatedly say that Jesus is Our Lord and God and Saviour.

There is still a tendency in the West to think that, because Jesus is Son of God, He is somehow on a lower rung in the hierarchy of heaven. It suits the world we live in to imagine that He belongs in the world of the religious imagination, a mythical heavenly being. Or, He is just the same as other great religious leaders in history. But Christians assert something entirely different, when we stress the full force of what we mean every Christmas when we hail the birth of Emmanuel, the Son of God who is God among us. It is fully God that is born. It is fully in our flesh that Jesus, who is our God, died on the Cross and rose again to buy us back to be one with the Father as He Himself is one. This is not mere spirituality. This is not a religious point of view. It is the Christian understanding of human nature, bearing the full impact of Christ our God. It is the Christian understanding of what human nature has been made into and that we are thus becoming.

In the Lord’s Prayer, of which today’s gospel is an elaboration (John 17.1-13), we ask daily for the Kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. We often think of the concept of heaven on earth and how it is realised, or struggled for. It is thus easy to think of heaven in earthly terms, while we pass through the world in expectation of its perfection beyond this life. Yet the hard part is the most demanding. It is not to live in this world as if in the next. It is to realise that where we actually live we are in heaven already. This radically affects our behaviour and our outlook. We do not follow Christ out of duty. We do not keep his commands out of exhortation and obedience. We do not long for the Spirit out of inclination. We live in the Kingdom because we already and permanently face into its blessedness. We follow Christ out of love and because we are caught up in His blessedness. We keep His commands, not out of obedience but because we love nothing else more. We long for the Spirit, not merely as an exercise, but because our entire being is taken up with Him.

The renewal of the Church and its perseverance in the faith is thus not down to our effort, as we constantly imagine, but always down to the action of God, as He unites with humanity in Christ, so that when they ask for a description of God’s identity, His Name and His work, we reply, “God is with us”. He does not just bring heaven down to us on earth, but makes earth penetrate heaven. Thus here in this space we are in no other place than before the Throne to which Christ ascended in glory.

This week, across our Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, we pray for our parishes to be vibrant, to be places where human beings may encounter the living Christ, to be bodies of people, individuals, who are themselves encounters with Christ in heaven. Imagine what it would be like if coming to Church was not just about us coming to worship Christ our God. Imagine what it would be like if it was about Christ coming into us, so that He could make himself seen by others in us. Imagine what a change it would make of us.

Archbishop Michael Ramsey used to explain the faith of Nicaea – about how the Father is like the Son and the Son like the Father. He would say that we get it all the wrong way round. Instead of getting people to think how Jesus was the likeness of God, consider that in God is as He is in Christ, that in God there is no unChristlikeness at all. Now imagine what it would mean if we could say, in David, in Sarah - whatever our names - in me there is no unChristlikeness at all.