The Light that Lightens Everyone - Homily for the Second Sunday of Great Lent, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London, 11 March 2017

Last week on the first Sunday of Lent, we observed the Sunday of Orthodoxy. This recalled the time when, after years of controversy during which the Byzantine Imperial authorities had banned representations of Christ and the Saints, a new Emperor restored them; and the icons were solemnly processed back into the Hagia Sophia, the Great Church of Constantinople on 11th March 843. Also known as the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, it was a victory for the true Christian belief that God, the Kingdom of heaven and our salvation are not just ideas but something we touch, and see and the hold on to us. Our faith is in the Incarnation, in the Incarnate Word, God who did not stay a Being to be guessed at, but who revealed himself in the Son of Man. Our faith is about a creation through which God encounters us, heart mind and soul, but also body. He became human with us, that we might become divine with Him. To make and see the icons, to touch and behold them, is not to exalt a mere earthly creation and enthrone it where God ought rightly to be, but it is to encounter - in the process of their preparation and painting, in their consecration and veneration - the living work of the Holy Spirit bringing God into our midst and all the Kingdom of Heaven with Him.


If we do not believe that this is so, and that Christ and the Mother of God, St Joseph of the Holy Family, of St Nicholas and St John Baptist, St Mary Magdalene and St Gregory Palamas are not present to us and we to them, in this moment and by this means, we are saying, “Thank you, Rabboni, but we do not believe You and Your Kingdom of God can physically touch us now; we are inspired by the ideas and believe the faith coming to us from the past, but we are rational people and it makes no sense that you can be found in the things of the world today, or that the things of the world can bring us into contact with You, least of all these representations; except symbolically, of course.” It is as thought we are saying, “Yes, our logic tells us that since You and Your saints are not shining out of the icons, You can shine out of us either.” In other words, we are holding back from Christ, and holding back from our salvation in which we humans may shine with the light that comes from God Himself. We believe Him with our minds, we love Him with our hearts, we hope to be instilled with Him in our souls, but we say the opposite of St Peter, who said, “Do not wash just my feet, but my entire body and all over”. We are doing the opposite of St Mary Magdalen whose faith-instinct was to reach out and hold onto the Risen Lord. We are thinking differently from St Thomas who said, “Let me put my hand in His side.” This is why the icons meant so much to the Orthodox of the ninth century – the icons were their hold on Christ and His Kingdom, and Christ’s on them in the here and now; the tangible sign that they were being saved, the living evidence that the Saints were impinging on the world, as the Christians in the world were likewise being drawn into the heaven of God Himself. Here is the iconostasis, never a barrier but always the Veil of the Temple that is torn in two, so that Christ’s sacrifice may take its effect in creation. It is the porous membrane through which from heaven the Lord and His saints look upon us with God’s mercy as we behold them, too, aspiring for the glory that is theirs to be ours, even now where we are.


It makes sense, then, to have celebrated a kind of Feast in the beginning of the Great Fast, because what we are observing is the path of our redemption taking effect, how Orthodoxy - which declares its faith in the unity of the Creator with His creation - keeps us following the Incarnate Christ as we step through this world and in the next world at the same time. So we make our way through constant turning to face the Glory as it shines its Light on us, and so we pass from disobedience to new life.


Today’s gospel (Mark 2.12) reflects the same theme. It is not an iconostasis or a Veil through which the Lord bursts in with the glory of His Kingdom, but a roof. The paralysed man is lowered through it; and Christ sees the faith of his friends and the hope of the man in the power of God to heal and save humanity for the New Reign that is coming. It renders disbelief and sin beside the point. The people place their confidence in Christ, and Christ bestows on them His faith in them. They enact a kind of burial, and the body of the paralysed man encounters not death in a grave but the Lord of life. The man stands up; he rises like Christ. And touched by God he pursues no earthbound life, but passes into new life, and leads them all to behold and love, to praise and gaze on, God in His glory.


St Gregory Palamas we commemorate today for a Second Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy. This is because he is the one in the Eastern Church who taught the Christians to dwell upon this glory as the Light that lightens every one. See the halos on the icons; they show the brightness of the Kingdom but cast no shadow. The same light came from Christ at His transfiguration on Mount Tabor, as the apostles were more thoroughly converted to behold it. In our world of now, we too, in our prayers and contemplation but also in every corner of our being, may know God and stand in His uncreated light, as once the paralysed man beheld the glory and wonder of Christ. St Gregory’s opponents said that God in His essence is unknowable, mocking him for saying that you could see what was invisible. But Gregory insisted that they were missing the point: God is not just wisdom and spirit; He is Person, too – making Himself known in the Christ Who appears as both man and God to the paralytic and to Peter, winning their heart and mind to the core of their being. He is the Person who shows Himself to the disciples on Tabor, as much to His mother in the cradle at Bethlehem. He is the One Whose Light is beheld in the physical reality of the Icons, and in the illuminated life of those whose loving hearts can dwell on the Lord Who dwells in them. St Paul realised this when he saw Christ’s Light fill every corner of his soul and frame. He said, “It is not I who live, but Christ Who lives within me.” In the way of thinking, in the West, about this Light that lightens every one, we could ask ourselves, as Thomas a Kempis did throughout The Imitation of Christ, not “What would I do if I were Christ?”, but “What would Christ do if He were me?”


Perhaps you will see, then, the breath-taking importance of these two Sundays as we make our spiritual progress through Lent, for they come back to the same question. Did Christ die on the Cross two thousand years ago for an idea of God, for spiritual Wisdom, or for a vision of human spirituality? Or is it that He is all there is to life of heart and mind, of body and soul; that He feels and is to be felt in every touch, that His light looks and is to be looked upon in every mind’s eye; and that there is no darkness that His Light coming into the world does not take in, that there is nothing of us that is beyond and outside Christ who fills the universe to make God Himself known, nothing that can lie beyond His Kingdom visible on earth as it is in heaven, nothing in us in the end that holds back from “His Presence and His very self, His essence all divine”, closer to us than our own breath?


Michael Ramsey, the great Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, who dwelt constantly in the Light of the divine Glory, said, “God is as He is in Christ, and in God there is no unChristlikeness at all.” In these two Sundays of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, by the same token, we are able to say that “God is in us, so in us there is no unChristlikeness at all.” If only it were so, we can hear ourselves thinking – but unless our hope is in vain it is the only possible reality for humanity that there is.

The Prodigal Son, Homily at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London,12th February, 2017

Every year, as we make our journey towards Lent, just as we complete the last week in which we are supposed to eat meat, we hear again of the Prodigal Son as his hunger begins to bite (Luke 15.11-32), but also of his father who slew the fatted calf for a feast to bring him back home.

But this is a story of deprivation, heavy fasting leading to repentance, and loving restoration only on the surface. For, if you look at the parable as a whole, one of the longest in the Gospels, it is a story of God the Father and God the Son, of the Passion and the Resurrection. Toward this aim we keep to the track of Lent, and it is why we recall the prodigal every year at this early point on our path to the Cross and then to new life, and by the Ascension to the Kingdom of blessedness in the Spirit.

But, you will protest, the prodigal son bears no comparison with Christ. The prodigal son was selfish; he split his family estate and impoverished his brother’s inheritance; he lived beyond his means and squandered everything that once supported half his entire family on high living and satisfying his physical urges, as he misused the women he encountered. How can this person resemble Christ the Father’s Son?

But, if you remember, what St Paul said to the Church at Philippi (Philippians 2.7-8), you will see what I mean: “He made Himself of no reputation, and emptied Himself into the form of a bond-servant, found in the likeness of a humbled man.” And St Paul gets to the heart of the matter when he write to the Church at Corinth (2 Corinthians 5.21): “For our sake, He made Him Who knew no sin to be sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” In the Gospel today, then, we see a human son who is sinful, but someone from whom the Divine Son refuses to be separate, even in the moments of the young man’s furthest separation from his father – especially in the moments of his furthest separation from his father. We see a wasted and then broken man, with whom God the Son has identified and, even though He is sinless, taken on that man’s sin, and turned it inside out to face the light and overjoyed love.

Slowly, in the degradation from honour, to abandon of self-respect, to waste, disgrace, humiliation, the pains of acute hunger, of calling out in utter loneliness to his father, the final brokenness, we see the steps that Christ too would come to take in His own work of saving what was lost, and redeeming it back. Christ is God the Son, likewise as a man resolved to take a journey that entails an exile from His Father, so that at the sorest moment He too will cry out for His Father, “Why have you forsaken Me?” Thus, to the sin-filled prodigal, the Son who knew no sin lends His own righteousness. In abject isolation the prodigal is joined by Christ. Within that disfigured humanity, the Humanity of the One who will go to the Cross to be disfigured too, instils the deepest instinct of the life of the Trinity itself and causes him to set his mind on Resurrection and Ascension: “I will arise, and go to my father”.

The righteousness of Christ in the heart and mind of the sinner who has destroyed his own life, grows and changes; it flourishes and gives rise to hope. The prodigal son who was regarded as dead comes to life. His father is likewise taken up with the momentum of redemption, and runs out to find what was lost restored to him. He exclaims, “The son is come to life again.” He proclaims and foretells the Resurrection that leads all of us who are still picking our way through our sin. But it is the younger son, whose new life speaks of what has been going on unseen within him, in mystery, behind the scenes. To allude to St Paul again, the prodigal son, by his humanity restored from its living death and set on glory rejoicing, says, “My life has been crucified with Christ. It was not me who was alive in that pit of mine, but Christ who was living within me.”(cf. Galatian 2.19-20). “He Who knew no sin, became my sin for my sake, so that I might become His righteousness.” (cf. 2 Corinthians 5.21).

So, when St Paul, as he does in today’s Epistle (1 Corinthians 6.12-20), exhorts us to fasting from food and warns us repeatedly about fornication, it is never in a life-denying way or to induce guilt and misery, still less to take away pleasure and enjoyment in the Creation God has made and in which generation after generation is designed to take its part. Like the father in the Gospel going after his firstborn son to come back to the feast of forgiveness and restoration, Paul asks us what we really want, what ultimately satisfies us. What brings us the fulfilment of our deepest aspirations, what is the cause of our lasting joy? Is it what we feel are our just reward; is it food and an ample way of life with plenty of resources? All these run out. Is it physical gratification to fill the void of loneliness? We may be made this way, but how it ebbs and flows. So what is the great connection that brings lasting happiness and God’s intended sheer joy of being alive? Judging what this is, is what we in turn are to be judged on. St Paul says it is this: being united with Christ who paid the highest price for you, sacrificing Himself so that you might no longer be lost to death, becoming your sin so that you could become God’s own glory, in every corner of you, heart, mind and soul; body, spirit and eternal life.

In other words, turn inside out and face your coming glory. If you yourself cannot turn your heart and your outlook from the dark inside, let Christ within you push His face through your sin to look out and see God’s light. Let the voice of the One Who knows no sin be the one to say by your lips, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.” Even if you call yourself unworthy, even if you are not ready, let the Christ within you stand forth in you, for His Father to run and embrace you, and clothe you in that robe of joy restored. Let Christ’s be your eyes to behold His Father’s coming judgment on you, looking back at you, adoring you and weeping over you, loving you back to everything that is His, because all that He has is for you.

This inexhaustible, unconditional love is the judgment that dissolves impenitence and going round in earthbound circles without hope. So let Him Whose Cross takes away the sin that destroys you, be your endless Resurrection – your heaven on earth for now, but your place in the blessed Kingdom for ever.

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.