Supposing Him to be the Gardener: Homily for Easter Morning, Catholic Parish Church of the Most Precious Blood, Southwark, April 21, 2019

Every so often I go to a beautiful garden. Over the years, I have got to know the gardeners, the students, the staff and the other supporters there as friends. Some of them are real characters; and not a few of them have pushed through terrible adversity to find in this place an outlet onto their true path in life. They are all incredibly gifted, honing their skills year upon year about every conceivable plant and variety; in what soil it will grow in shade or in sun; the sometimes hidden way it can be propagated; when its seed or bulb or as young plant it needs to be planted months before it grows up and blooms at exactly the right time; what it can grow next to produce colour and form in harmony and contrast. These gardeners are genius. In the seven months that the garden is open each year, they produce six waves of new flowerings in succession, as all the careful work in the preceding autumn, winter and spring results in new compositions of leaf and flower coming through in new colour as others die back, only to yield in turn as they are succeeded by later new flowerings.

Whenever I go to this garden, I am in awe. It is never the same from one year or season to the next. These people know exactly what they are doing to produce this constant cycle of bursts of glory and beauty amid the cycle of dying back and planting into the hidden covering of the earth.

It is no accident in design that the Tomb which this morning we find empty of Christ’s body but emanating from within it the angels, who indicate the activity within us and our world of heaven itself, is in a garden. The latest burial in the earth, this planting in succession to so many others before it, has been prepared from the ages before. Just as Christ was born of Mary at the fullness of time, so His death on the Cross, His burial and resurrection in the Tomb occur at the very moment which is the turning point in history upon which all that comes after hinges. From that instant there can never be un-resurrection from the dead. What Christ worked into our nature by being born, and dying in a body like ours, is the nature of God in his grace and glory revealed in the way that is for us. As St Paul says, we once saw it through a glass darkly, this grace and glory: through miracles and healings, through luminous, unforgettable parables that it takes a lifetime to comprehend, and then in the confrontations around the Temple, the agony in the garden three nights ago, the arrest of someone supposed to be the very Son of Man, the trials, the crucifixion and then the bearing away of the unbroken body to be lain down into death. This is what the workings of God look like in human form as He empties Himself of all but the inexhaustible supply of forgiveness and unconditional love come what may: thus “in the garden secretly and on the Cross on high... God’s presence and His very Self and Essence all Divine.” (From Praise to the Holiest in the height, in The Dream of Gerontius, John Henry Newman)

So, according to this carefully laid plan from before time, after Nazareth, after Bethlehem, then after the baptism in Jordan when we heard whose Son coming to us He was, then in Galilee, then on mount Tabor when we say Him shining out of our human body with the light of His undying ondoing of death and His new life in the Kingdom, then in Jerusalem with the palms and overturning the old tables, then the Thursday in the garden, then the night on trial, then Friday’s rejection by His people, then the way to Calvary, then the Cross, then the death and then the burial within the ground of our planet all in the end within those swift alarming twenty-four hours – comes another day like an eternity passes. At last on the third He rises; and the glory and beauty we see where in the place where it all began: in a garden cultivated from when it was first set out for this very moment of all moments, when the latest flower in succession shoots up, comes into leaf, then buds and opens up never to close again.

Now why was all this? So that after the resurrection there could be no de-resurrection. After dying there could only be undying. After rising again there could be no dying back. For just as he worked the life and nature and grace of His being God into humanity, through his life in our nature from his conception to his death, so what happens to Him now as God in human flesh raised from the dead happens to humanity in all its entirety too. St Paul points us to the garden to show this. He says, “It was sown a physical body; it was raised a spiritual body”. (I Corinthians 15.44) As with Christ, so with you. You live no longer for yourselves, but Godwards, toward God (Romans 14.8; II Corinthians 5.15), to the life of the Kingdom whose quality of living is not towards death but eternity, in the dimension of undying always and which is even now raised from the dead and open to the new life, never to be closed up again.

And how was all this? There is every answer possible to bring you to the foot of the Cross in tears, or to the lintel of the Tomb beside the once closed stone, rolled along its edge to its own opening never to shut itself up in darkness again; or to bring you to silence before the amazing message-bearers from heaven; or to face the obvious signs you can barely understand of some cloths left lying on the rock surface, as if nothing extraordinary has happened here.

Some say it is so that Christ could be victorious over death, and cheat the devouring beast of its prey by devouring it back in overwhelming heaven’s eternal life. Some say it is so that an innocent victim may outweigh the sin, its guilt within us and its power over us, as the Lamb of God takes them away. Some say it is because the outpouring of love is so endless that not even death can exhaust it, or human sin try its patience beyond the limit of God’s compassion, forbearance with us, and forgiveness, for there is no limit. The great poet and hymn writer, Charles Wesley, put it like this:

He left His Father’s throne above,
So free, so infinite His grace;
Emptied Himself of all but love,
And bled for Adam’s helpless race:
’Tis mercy all, immense and free;
For, O my God, it found out me. (From And can it be that I should gain)

I was reminded of what this means when I went to the garden I told you about once. Once when I tried to buy some items in the shop from my friends there, they said, “Your money’s no good here.” I had to accept the gift without payment in the garden in the same way that the woman who came to the Tomb to anoint Jesus could not do Him this last duty, for all was already achieved, and the marvel of our redemption and resurrection into His own new life bought and paid for. As we sing of this:

There was no other good enough,
To pay the price of sin;
He only could unlock the gate,
Of heaven and let us in. (From There is a green hill far away, Mrs C. F. Alexander)

 All we can do is to add ourselves, our souls and bodies, to the endless succession of planting and spring: sown a physical body, raised a spiritual body. St Paul calls this living sacrifice “the true spirit of worship” (Romans 12.1 [logike latreia: reasonable service (in the sense of deeply reasoned and pondered; spiritual service]): it is never our loss to death, but our release from lives imprisoned to the abundance of life in heaven lived in all its abundance, of necessity, here and now. (John 10.10). In the words of Isaac Watts:

Were the whole realm of Nature mine
That were an offering far too small.
Love so amazing, so divine
Demands my soul, my life, my all! (From When I survey the wondrous Cross)

When Mary Magdalen sees Jesus and supposes Him to be the gardener, it is no mere case of mistaken identity. The Lord showed Himself to her exactly as He intended: the One who created our life in His Paradise at the beginning and, with sin and everything else having taken its toll and its turn, the One who has shown the Cross to be the key to unlock the Tomb that leads back into the Garden from which we have been rootless, planted nowhere, flowering poorly. No wonder that He said to the thief who died beside Him, “Today you shall be with me in Paradise”. And here we are, face to face with the Gardener of Eden, holding on no longer to what has passed (John 2.17), but now established where we were always meant to be.

Marked for Repair: A Homily for Repentance Sunday, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, London, 10th March 2019

During the week I was watching American news, and there on CNN was a journalist conducting an interview with a prominent, dark cross of ashes on his forehead. Last Wednesday began Lent in the Latin Church, and it is marked with the imposition of ashes made out of the previous year’s Palm Sunday branches. Our own Lenten fast begins on Monday after today’s observance of Forgiveness Sunday; but we too have the Cross imposed upon us at other times – not with ash but still indelibly on our hearts, minds and souls when we were baptised, when we are anointed with oil at the great Feasts, and most of all when we make the sign of the Cross during our prayers and at the Liturgy.

The CNN interview concerned American politics. Here in the United Kingdom such a bold public profession of personal religion or feelings on a hard-hitting current affairs programme would be discouraged, or the motives doubted as some kind of an act. There would certainly have been complaints. But in the American interview there was no reference at all to the visual demonstration of Catholic faith as in any way out of the normal, as the interviewee confronted with the Cross of Christ on a public Catholic just got on with asking secular questions and explaining some explosive proceedings in the Congress. It struck me that the CNN journalist was, first, being honest about his faith and not covering it up for the cameras lest anyone be offended; and, secondly, he defied anyone to make an issue for their own reasons about something that is normal for Latin Catholics.

Indeed, he was professing his faith in his work and his role as a hard-hitting public commentator. No one turned a hair; and the interview, like his appearance, was entirely matter of fact. But such a declaration of Catholic belief is more than positioning of faith over and against the world. The sign of the Cross is a sign of contradiction not only to the world. Christians bearing or making the sign of the Cross are marked by a contradiction to ourselves, our false image of ourselves that we carry in our heads and that we project to the world. It arrests any hypocrisy. Just like a defective machine that goes back to the shop and is labelled for return to the factory and repair, the Cross is the mark on us to show where the faulty parts of the apparatus are that will be replaced with grace and fortified goodness. It disabuses us of our fantasy that we are good and moral, and perfectly adequate without Christ. And yet it shows the world not that Christ humiliates humanity, but that He judges us worth not leaving on the ground but raising up (cf. Romans 14.4, from today’s Epistle)

This is what seizes our heart with dejection at our sin, our flaws and our failings. This is what leaves us feeling that regret is useless and eats away at us because of dwelling on what might have been. This is what convinces of desire for repentance, which is more than the intense sorrow that our sins provoke in us and in others as well as in God, for in the word used by Our Lord repentance is the whole change of mind, outlook and direction that leads from what was wrong, by putting it right, to the place of relief and remaking. Here we find joy in an honest memory about what was done in the past; on the way here we discover forgiveness by means of the truth about ourselves face to face with God, and we arrive in gladness for acceptance because His love is inexhaustible and cannot be deflected from its purpose.

The Cross with which we make signs of faith, of penitence, of desperation and of hope is realised by the Christians to be the true contour of the image of God in which we were made. Our image of ourselves may enable us to get by, but it is ultimately false. Only the image of God who shaped what human life as lived by God looks like is true. Being God, according to His plan He could resemble a King in no other way. And if this is how God incarnate appears as a human being upon the Cross, taking up the Cross likewise is how a human being must appear being made in His image. This is the objective of His being born. It is the means by which He brings about the Resurrection. It is the path to the glorification of the Old Creation by re-creating it from within as the New. It is the mountain path of Ascension, by which we move even now into His Kingdom as it comes on earth as in heaven.

While we make our way into our fast, and observe the season of Lent, of course we are penitent and, pained by the wrong we have done, we ask for mercy. Of course we deny ourselves with fasting. Of course we are moved to intensify our poor prayers.

But the sign of the Cross reminds us that, before we thought of any of those things, Christ was not waiting for us to show signs of promise. He was there first, giving us what it is that we desire to offer. Before His judgment comes His contradiction of our sinful state and its remedy. Before His sentence He charted the pattern of our rehabilitation. Before our repentance He established the means of His forgiveness. Before our self-reproach and self-abasement, He willed to take our flesh and restore its true dignity. Before our self-denial and fasting, He ordained that His generosity would be of absolutely everything that is His. For prior to his suffering was his endless patience, from that “love that endures all things” (I Corinthians 13.7); and prior to our redemption was His determination before all our ages to see through the work of redemption in each one of us right to the end.

The journalist on CNN last Wednesday, like millions of other Catholics, directed the attention of the world to this principle of the Cross constantly at work in God’s re-constitution of His creation. When I put on this Gold Cross that was given to me to wear by Bishop Hlib, I first kiss it and remember the Lord’s words, “He who would be my disciple, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16.24); and I pray with St Paul, “God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Galatians 6.14). In the same way, whenever you make the sign of the Cross, you say as I do, “God be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 8.13).

With Christ, then, we are drawn into His endless dynamic of giving and forgiving generosity. Our fasting is possible because He has already supplied us with the means of self-offering that on our own we run out of. Our prayer avails not because we are redoubling our spiritual efforts, but because He focuses our fasting and praying so closely on His own. He told His disciples, when they could not cast out devils and eradicate human wickedness, that it could only be done with prayer and fasting. So His gift to us is to bind us to the power of His own determination and will to “cast out our sin and enter in” (from the Christmas hymn, O Little Town of Bethlehem). The Cross imposed upon us, whether visibly in a ceremony in the Latin Church or our prostrations and making the sign of the Cross in the East, or inwardly in our souls and spirits, shows that here is the person who is to be worked upon and by what Wooden Tool.

It marks not only our forgiveness and redemption from sin, but the complete loss and self-sacrifice that Christ has offered, by which we are raised back to the level of being fit for the creation that we marred. He changes the Creation from one glory into a greater glory (II Corinthians 3.18), so that there may be a new reign of Christ, with a new people transformed in our mind, our will and our heart (cf. Romans 12.2), His for ever as He is ours.

St Chad, His Well and His College: for St Chad's College, Durham at Durham Cathedral, 2nd March 2019

Next time you step off the train at Kings Cross, you might take a 10 minute detour east along the Pentonville Road. Go past the Scala night club, take the right fork into the King’s Cross Road; and after the Greek barber and a coffee shop, you could almost miss a tiny passage way on the right. Take it, and in a dozen steps you will turn back into a pavement between the backs of the surrounding buildings. This is St Chad’s Place. Go fifty feet more, and the path is taking you over the Thameslink railway. You have reached your destination. This is the site of St Chad’s Well. Ever since the coming of the railway, it has fed unseen into the now subterranean River Fleet; but for many hundreds of years before that people had come to its mineral waters for healing and health. We do not know that St Chad visited, or preached, or baptised at this spot, which was a crossroads for the Angles and Saxons coming and going from London, no less than it is today. Perhaps the monk with such a breathtaking reputation across all the English kingdoms crossed the bridge over the river here, on his journey down from York to Canterbury seeking ordination as a bishop. There is no record. Yet such was his fame that, when the well was constructed to pool the refreshing waters, there was no one in England that it was going to be named after but our patron.

We have heard of St Chad’s zeal in teaching and learning, and his dedication to serving people in remote places that others had long not got round to. We have heard of his complete lack of interest in putting himself to the fore, and his determination to put Christ first and the bringing of His Kingdom to people so that they could love and be inspired by it: not because they were told they must, but because it had captured their hearts and their wills. The founders of our College more than a century ago chose him as patron because of these very virtues. In a time in both Church and society when students from poorer backgrounds had no opportunity to go to the schools where Latin and Greek were taught, and so could not dream of even entering University to study and train for ordained ministry, our founders identified not just an educational barrier to individuals, but a barrier to the Kingdom of God itself for whole communities, since none of their number could learn to be their pastors and spiritual leaders. Yet St Paul envisages that all of us may be able to present our lives as a “sacrifice acceptable to God” in body, spirit and reason (Romans 12). “Do not be conformed to the world,” he says. That would be to the miss the point and to settle for far less than God desires for humanity. If you want to know the will of God, what is good and perfect, how to love, how to identify what is evil and reject it, how to build the human race, its nations and societies, in mutual honour and self-sacrifice, how suffering is turned into hope, and how evil is made to run out of power because the blessings of peace and forgiveness are inexhaustible, there is one way, says St Paul: “Be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”

This is all very well, but what if no one you know has grounds for imagining that such a transformation as this can be theirs? St Chad’s College changed all that. The founders imagined St Chad in his monastery, taking in the young people with promise and a spark inside them, and starting from the beginning, even with reading and writing, passing on to them everything he knew, advising where their course in life as well as in study was going wrong, and showing them where they would find the right ways. Likewise our founders captured the aspirations and imaginations of those that the world at the time provided little space for. They helped our first generations of students to be ready for study at a university, and they embedded within their College a vivid sense that, here of all places, study, learning and achievement are not just about personal self-fulfilment but always aimed at the service of others. For the renewal of minds is not intellectual, it is spirit and life too. Those students were often going back to the areas that they had come from: to serve and support them, to bring honour and pride to their families, to give leadership on behalf of those without a voice for good, to relieve misery and injustice; but above all to extend the power of love, and faith and hope.

Think of St Paul offering the same prospects to his favourite but most concerning students: the people of the Church at Corinth. His two letters to them are a ferment of rebukes, guidance, inspiration, encouragement, and pointed exhortations and rebukes all over again. He tells them he is coming for a third visit. But he knows that some will be complaining their generous hospitality is always repaid with a robust dressing down. So he tells them “I do not want what you have, but you yourselves” (II Corinthians 12.14). He says that his aim, then, is to build them up so that they should find and do the will of God, and thus the way to peace. And we know that doing the will of God to St Paul is the transformation of minds renewed into whatever is good, and what serves the establishment in human hearts of the Kingdom of God.

The College ceased to be a training college for Anglican clergy after 1974, and by the time I arrived in 1977 we were a rich mix of 170 Anglicans, Catholics, Free Church people, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and people who had no belief in particular. We were very fond, too, of our own resident revolutionary Marxist. Nowadays it is a College for women and men, all people equally; and it is three times larger. But when I returned last year as Chair, one of my contemporaries from the 1970s was already a governor too, and we both agreed: “It’s completely different, but exactly the same”. We are still not a very large village, and in the past we have been through some harrowing episodes and transitions, but there is something in that phrase of St Paul’s that is our motto – “Not what you have, but you yourselves”. It seems to seep into the very being of those who dwell here for any length of time; and it changes the very way that most people who pass through its portals look at the world, our attitude towards other people, to our common home and its sustainable survival, our approach to what work is truly for, and our beliefs that public life, the economy and business, and society all serve a greater good for the sake of humanity fulfilling the highest purposes for which it was created.

St Chad remains the apt patron for the vision of our founders in a College which draws people from all over the world, but is also passionate that the most disadvantaged in our community and region can realistically aspire to come here and be part of the contribution we seek to make through the renewing of our minds. But it is not just because St Chad was a role model, an inspirational teacher, or a hero whose self-sacrificing conduct was spoke volumes to those in authority in Church and state who lorded it over the rest in order to put themselves forward. His young monks told the story of when during violent storms they were terrified, but he without any sense of disturbance would resolutely sing the psalms. It was as though his calmness brought about the calming of the elements. To his monks he demonstrated not just the greatest human qualities, but also to embody life in heaven at the same time. The renewing of our minds was seen in St Chad to open up another dimension, taking the intellectual to the spiritual level of virtue, and mutual good and unstinting service. He embodied something of God’s holiness and yet he was a man. This captures our imagination today as much as in 1904 or in the 7th century. This is what we mean when we pray, ‘thy will be done, thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven” – not just then, not just afterwards, but now, in us.

In the rule for monks familiar to St Chad and his early English students, there is a warning against wandering monks, who have never put down deep roots let alone grown from them, people who make many demands and leave contributing nothing. This is impossible for anyone who belongs to St Chad’s College. In the same way, the Saxons who dug the well near Kings Cross to build a destination of health, healing and renewed living had the same instinct as we have: to find beneath St Chad’s patronage not just a home that is perfectly true of our identity and our hopes, not just a home that nurtured our intellectual development, but truly our spiritual home.

And no matter how far you go, it will never leave you. You will always carry in minds renewed your spiritual home. You will always take with you a glimpse of that holiness that transformed St Chad and still takes up our hearts and changes us, for the sake of changing the world into the Kingdom of peace, of justice, of truth and of ever giving and forgiving love.

Meeting Zacchaeus: Homily at the Ukrainian Cathedral of the Holy Family of London, Zaccheus Sunday, 9/10th February 2019

I have met this man, Zacchaeus.

He is always presented as corrupt, cheating the taxpayers and the Roman empire of their money. This is not what St Luke says (Luke 19.1-10). Yes, he took a proportion of the monies that he levied, but that was legally earned income. It may have been lucrative for him; and people will have resented paying taxes to their rulers. They may not have trusted or liked the taxman; or agreed with what the taxes were spent on, including the wages and perks of public servants – but little has changed from that day to this. No, Zacchaeus may have been avaricious. He may have taken the Emperor’s shilling and been hated for it; but he is not corrupt. Look at the story: he is humble, self-effacing, looking for Jesus; he has a change of heart, and becomes holy.

Jesus says two things about this man. First that it is easier for a rope to pass through the eye of a needle that for a rich man to enter the Kingdom that is ruled by God (Luke 18.25). Secondly, He looks at the coins that people use to pay their taxes to the Emperor and listens to the shifty questions of His own Father’s Law trying to catch Him out. Showing them the head of the Emperor, He says, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”. But he goes on to say, “Render to God the things that are God’s” (Luke 20.25). He poses the Big Question that most of us - who live through a whole life in the world as we hope to live in the Kingdom - never fully answer: “What do we have in our hands that actually belongs to God and that we should give back?”

Yet Zacchaeus, a rich man, works it out, and enters the Kingdom. As the English Christmas carol by Christina Rossetti, puts it,

What shall I give Him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb.
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part.
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

It was observed by Holy Mother Theresa that, when Our Lord says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”, if you only take a quick look at Europe and the West, He is also referring to the rich: with all the affluence, the flow of money, the insulation of commodities and possessions, inside their spirits are empty, or turned rock hard. What will soften them, or what will deepen them as stores of the Kingdom’s treasures from above? Zacchaeus saw it.

I met him once in a well-to-do retired banker in my parish in north London back in the 1990s. He cherished his classic car and enjoyed the fruit of his labours for many years in the City of London. But he was devout and holy at the Altar, a beautiful soul who was kind and generous, especially when no one saw. Again: humble, self-effacing, looking for Jesus, with a heart that was always turning to God, and seeking His holiness. He was completely honest and told me that the reason the economy and society were in trouble was because no one lived by the rule on which the City’s banks and brokers had always depended in the past: “Verbum meum factum” – My word is my bond. Because he lived by his own word, he understood the promises of Christ, too. He loved the Word of God, our God made flesh; and at his funeral we sang the hymn:

O Jesus, I have promised, to serve Thee to the end.
O give me grace to follow, my Master and my Friend.

I have also met a Zacchaeus driving an Uber car. He had come to this country from the East as a student, a clever young man seeking the best future for his war-ravaged country by being trained in international development. One night his fellow-student got into a fight and he intervened to calm things down. But when the police arrived he was arrested too, and sentenced to months in prison. The court at least accepted his plea not to be sentenced to six months, as that would have meant his deportation. But with a judgment of three months serving six weeks, his entire life was utterly disrupted; he lost his place on his course, and he realised with a criminal record he must abandon his hopes of an international professional career. He could not return to his home country; and fortunately his application for citizenship here had already made progress, and someone in authority took notice of him - like Jesus looking up at Zacchaeus trying to see but not to be seen in his tree - and enabled him to stay and build a new life. When he came out of six counter-productive weeks inside, his record meant there was little choice or opportunity for work and rebuilding his life. But he was not downcast or bitter. He remembered that when he was a boy, before his country was ruined, he would visit his friend’s house and spend hours with the family weaving carpets, repairing the threads, dying to the right colours, mending the holes, judging the right threads, be they wool or silk. This man is now one of a tiny number of master craftsmen who can make and repair Persian carpets in this country. I asked him why he needed to drive an Uber, if he was one of the most highly skilled experts in Britain. He explained that there was no end of demand for his work, but it was back-breaking labour, and he could only do it a few days a week, yet still needed to earn, so that he could send funds back to his family in his homeland, as well as look after his new family in England. Again: humble, self-effacing, looking to trust in God, a man whose heart and life had been changed for the worse and then for the better, a man who, even though not a Christian, had found a path of peace and virtue.

I have also met this man Zacchaeus in the same place you have met him. I have seen him in the mirror. I know, as you do, that the heart within is threadbare, empty, hardened like stone. I have seen the eyes of Zacchaeus trying to see Jesus, and I have seen what Jesus has seen in them – dismay at myself; the shame of not standing out in front of people, because I know that people will revile me for being the compromise with the world that I am; the hoping to be able to see Jesus, but never daring to come up to Him and meet Him. But seeing Him seeing me, for what I am – look at the icon of Christ looking at you now – I will hear Him say that, without my repentance, just on the strength of my glance at Him, He is coming to me today. And I break. I hurry to Him as He overcomes my sins. I pour out my pent up spirit, and by giving out what is poor in it, I become rich from Him. “Do not neglect the gift that is in you,“ says St Paul (I Timothy 4.14). He should know, for He was a Zacchaeus too. Salvation came to him, when, on the road to Damascus - just as on the road beneath that tree, and just as in our mirror, and now before this icon - “the Son of Man came to seek out and save what was lost.”

When in the Old Testament, Joshua came to Jericho, with his name meaning, “The Lord is salvation”, he overwhelmed it with the power of the living God. In the well-known story (Joshua 6.1-27), Jericho’s resistance to God crumbled with its walls at the sound of the trumpets and the hosts of the Lord encircling it seven times. In the Gospel, the second Joshua - Yeshua, Iesous, Jesus - overwhelms Jericho with the vision of Divine Glory, in the face of two humans as they encounter one another: one as the man who is poor in spirit and one as The Lord God who brings salvation. And in this Jericho here, with the same sight of one another, the Son of Man comes to seek out and save us, the ones who have been lost along our way. Therefore we may sing:

O Jesus, I have promised, To serve Thee to the end;
O give me grace to follow, My Master and my Friend.
O guide me, call me, draw me, Uphold me to the end;
And then in heaven receive me, My Saviour, and my Friend. (John Bode, 1816-1874)

The Sun of Righteousness: Homily at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, Sunday after the Nativity, 12/13th January 2019

In today’s Troparion of the Nativity (Tone 4), we sang that those who had once worshipped stars were now taught by a star to worship the Sun of Righteousness and to recognise the Dawn from on high.

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss the Wise Men as ignorant or superstitious, because across the whole known world, from the Persian Magi to the priests in the Temple of Jerusalem who were trying to advise an unwise King Herod, the minds of those steeped in the greatest accumulation of knowledge and experience were studying the ordered movements of the heavenly bodies, to see where there might be a divine pattern in creation that could be applied to how we should live and act as humans in the world below. Any variation or unforeseen phenomena were scrutinise to try and understand whether there was evidence of a warning, or a sign of favour, or a command for a new direction, or an old prophecy coming to pass with immediate consequences for the course of the future. It is said that, as well as the offering of sacrifices, the Liturgy of the Temple in Jerusalem was meant to imitate the circular movement of the sun, the moon and the stars, with priests dressed in white and other coverings to symbolise the heavenly beings and the angels, not so as to worship them but to induce here in the world through God’s service among the clouds of incense, the will, the blessing and the living glory of the Lord in heaven. In our worship at the Divine Liturgy, we likewise circulate around the altar; our priests are vested for service amid the angels at the very throne on which Christ our God comes to rest in our midst, and where He reveals Himself vested in the Body and the Blood of the Eucharist so that we acclaim Him as He gives Himself to us, saying “God has appeared to us”.

“We have seen his star in the east,” said the Magi likewise to Herod, “and have come to worship Him.” It seems increasingly to astronomers that the alignment of stars, or a comet or a planet, and the movement of the earth at some time in the period following the Lord’s birth indeed supports St Matthew’s account that the path of a heavenly body appeared to move and so it was matched step by step in the earthly tread of the Wise Men, from their roads out of the east and down to Jerusalem, then on to Bethlehem. For a very short time, I was a student in Jerusalem, where one of the professors took us to Bethlehem not just to see the sacred cave of the Nativity but to attest to the archaeology of an ancient well nearby. “This proves it,” he said.  “This was how the Wise Men were satisfied that the heavenly firmament which appeared alive with momentum to them had now come to standstill. They looked down into the water and saw the star was fixed, by its reflection.” Whatever weight we may give to these conjectures, we gain an insight into the ancient system of reading the universe to discern the Divine Plan that wisdom was not some static body of knowledge, but a dynamic mechanism by which God guides the world by His laws for our good, and projects our way by His light towards His glory.

Thus the star is not an exhibition of glory way up in the heavens, but the sign that shows that the Glory has come to shine in our world. It rests over Bethlehem, not so that we may look up, beyond and away, but so that we may focus our vision with heaven’s upon the world it intends to save - and behold the Dawn of God within the humanity that He has come to obtain from us, and by sharing it to give it a new direction and set it in a new light - one that dazzles and amazes us because it shines not from an external source but has been kindled to a blaze from within.

St Paul in today’s Epistle (Galatian 1.11-19) bears this out with his own story of beholding Christ not following an outside explanation, but by revelation within. He tells of how he, too, went off to follow the discovery of Christ that he was astonished to find was shining out through his life, by a journey into the east, then a return to Damascus and in the end to Jerusalem to confer with the holy Apostles Peter and James. He follows the steps of the fourth of the Wise Men. Paul will have told them of his life-changing encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus; Peter will have borne witness to his experience with James and John on the mount of Transfiguration, when divine light was seen changing the very appearance of humanity within the incarnate Christ; James will have recounted the family’s testimony to the events at his divine Brother’s nativity, and the cave that many said was almost too light to be approachable, yet where God came in proximity to His people and enabled them to enter in and behold Him in the Child. And all will have recognised in each other’s story the same brilliance of Emmanuel, God with us, the Christ Himself.

But, as St John reminds among the first words of his Gospel, “The light shines in darkness.” The Wise Men having seen the Light rely on the cover of the darkness to steal away from impending danger. The Holy Family must conceal the Light from the premature threat of death before the true import of its majesty can be revealed in a new cave of resurrection once its glory has been understood upon the Cross of Life. Instead, the Herodian soldiers emerged out of the dark dream-world of the Magi and St Joseph to visit the nightmare of slaughter upon the Holy Innocent children (today’s Gospel, Matthew 2.13-23).

Yet “the darkness does not overwhelm the Light”. We may not look to the pattern of stars for our clues nowadays to understand the ways of God. But we do believe that God has charted a course for us and that it involves turning our humanity inside out, so that the evil, the harm and the deception that we would prefer to lie buried within us are brought out into the light of knowledge (cf. Troparion of the Nativity, Tone 4). We fear this revelation of who we really are, because we know we are sinful and ugly within. But Christ is a Sun of Righteousness to warm us, and to bleach our guilt in light. Because of this we can endure the shattering of our illusions about ourselves like St Paul did. Because of this, we can overcome the shame of our denial of the light of the world like St Peter beside the lesser fire of the guards who arrested Jesus.  Because of this, we know to be constant in life in pursuit of our own bright and strangely leading star, which is quite simply for us the way of the Cross. As our beloved friends in the Salvation Army and the Quakers say: no Cross, no Crown.

Within a few years, the God of heaven had gone from becoming the child of the house of David in Bethlehem, to be the new Moses bringing the Kingdom of God to the Promised Land once more from out of Egypt, and then to be a Nazarene who would take the trajectory of His life as God made Flesh from life, to sacrifice, to death and a new creation, by which all that is at fault is not ultimately rejected but ascended. By the same token for us, this same unclear path of adversity is also the only path there is. It is the path of hope, of finding your way if you lose it, and of knowing that ultimately the light from heaven that shines above you is never going to depart from you, but will always reveal that Christ is God with us, shining from within to make us holy and the living citizens of heaven on earth. Imagine what it is to look in the mirror and to see that what stands before us God has decided to make holy. Imagine what it would be like, looking round to each other today, if the people we can see, and the people seeing us, are beholding holy people. Imagine the people outside who have no conception of the Kingdom glimpsing it by just a glance at us coming down from Mount Tabor, or emerging from the cave at Bethlehem. This is out of proportion to realistic imagination, but it is no more than what Christ told us would become of us. For as we sang earlier on (Troparion of the Resurrection, Tone  8), “You came down from on high as the Merciful One, to free us from our sufferings – O Lord, our life, and now our resurrection, Glory be to You.”

This is why, because it was the will of the Father for His Son, we must always have the same optimistic and forgiving belief in the worth of humanity, and in the power of the Sun of Righteousness to warm and lighten it into the Kingdom.

God is With Us - Veneration of the Eucharist in the Divine Liturgy: Homily for the Sodality of the Blessed Sacrament, Corpus Christ Church & Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament, London, 10th January 2019

The Catholics who keep the Church’s year according to the old Julian calendar celebrated their December 25^th, Christmas Day, on your January 7^th, this last Monday. So tonight I have the opportunity to greet all here at Corpus Christi from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Cathedral where I serve the English-speaking community with a blessing in the Name of our Lord and God and Saviour at His nativity in the flesh: Christ is born, glorify him.

The Ukrainian Catholic Church is the largest of the twenty-three Eastern Catholic Churches. It is Catholic, but not Roman. It is one of the Greek Catholic Churches, meaning that we worship according to the same liturgy and theology as the Greek and other Orthodox Churches, except to say that we do so in fullness of communion and sacramental unity with the Bishop of Rome as the supreme pastor of the Universal Church of Christ, and thus with all Latin Roman Catholics. I serve as a priest in both the Latin Roman Catholic Church and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, since both are united in the same Catholic faith and life.

Our Ukrainian Greek Catholic numbers approximately six million people in Ukraine, as well as worldwide. That may seem small in comparison with the billion members of the Latin Roman Catholic Church; but when you think that this Church was liquidated by Stalin, its bishops in Ukraine martyred, while the priests and faithful were either forced underground or forced into the Russian Orthodox Church which was awarded their churches and monasteries for forty-five years, the story of its revival has been remarkable. Kept alive in exile, it re-emerged in Ukraine with very little apart from its priests and faithful who had maintained their belief in the Church’s unity and their fidelity to the successor of Peter as the guarantor of the communion of the whole of Christ’s Church regardless of rich and diverse Liturgies, histories, memories and tradition.  Like the English Catholic Church, for the sake of faithful witness to keeping intact the communion of the Universal Church likewise, the Ukrainian Church’s body bears the marks and memory of persecution and suffering; but this Body is none other than that of Christ risen from the dead. The new Cathedral of His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the father and head of the Church in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, is thus dedicated to Christ our Pascha – to the Lamb of sacrifice Who is risen from the dead so that we in Him pass over from death and oblivion to life and new hope. Twenty-five years ago, our Church had no visible existence in the land where it was the mother Church of the Churches in all the surrounding nations, including Russia. Now it is the home of the only Catholic university to exist within the former Soviet Union, a bastion of Catholic social teaching and for imparting the values of truth, honesty and integrity in public service, law, politics, media, commerce and business, as well as for placing the Christian view of humanity and the restored created order into its disciplines of the arts, humanities, sciences, technology and theology. A few years ago, I visited the new seminary of the Holy Spirit in Lviv, where over 100 young men from three only recently non-existent dioceses were training for the priesthood.

So, what has captured the hearts of the young Ukrainians seeking to dedicate their lives to Christ’s service and of the people who have emerged from decades of atheist oppression by the Communists and chosen also to reject the oppressive atheism of western commercialism and materialistic consumerism?

It is the beauty and glory of Christ Who is victorious over everything that is worldly, everything that offers no lasting gratification, or answer to our fundamental questions about life, let alone our needs and aspirations. Even though our Liturgy tends to be served wherever the faithful find themselves and a future for their families, we are rooted in the tradition that transformed the entire Roman Empire of the eastern Mediterranean, and brought about the evangelisation of most of Eastern Europe that remains potent to the present day.

Let me briefly describe the feel of our Church’s Eucharist. I hope you will see that its constant emphasis on the coming of Christ and his presence among His people is something that Catholics in the Latin Church also identify with strongly.

An obvious feature of our Churches is the iconostasis, the great stand of icons before the Altar and across the sanctuary, depicting Our Lord, the Mother of God, St John Baptist, the saints and the angels. This is not a barrier screening off the altar from the people. Quite the opposite, it stands to show the proximity of citizens of heaven to the people of God in the world – immediately close to the Altar, it is the window of heaven out of which the Lord and His saints press their faces, so that we may be drawn as close as possible to them in worship. Thus we are not left to worship on the earth at a distance from God, but situated physically close to the presence of God coming onto His throne in our midst. Here on this earth, then, a space is cleared that can contain all heaven, and we are enabled to step into it. The doors in the iconostasis are not to shield the altar from human view, but to reveal it. Just as in a Latin Church, the altar is the heart of the dedicated Temple. Human beings come in and out of the doors continually to keep company with the angels and saints, taking our hearts and souls in, and bringing out to the expectant faithful the blessing, peace and gift of God Himself.

At the very beginning, before the proclamation of the Word of God in the Gospel and before the gifts of the Eucharist are brought in, the Altar, the icons, the whole Church, the priests and the faithful are generously incensed – to consecrate the whole of the earthly and human environment and to show it as sacred and divine, the place of our reconciliation and restoration. You will see the deacon and the priest offering the numerous litanies and prayers, not with their backs to the people but facing the icon of Christ and the Altar at the head of the people, drawing us all into a movement out of this world at the very moment the living presence of the Kingdom enters in, surrounds us and draws us into its embrace. But you will also the priest coming out of the Holy of Holies to bring into the midst of the world first the book of the Gospels - which we hail as God’s Wisdom Himself - then the Bread and Drink to be taken to the Altar for consecration and sacrifice, along with repeated interventions from heaven of peace on earth, until ultimately there appears through the Holy Doors, the coming of God in His Body and Blood for the sake of the life of the world.

This is not horizontal worship, a religious activity only among humans; yet it draws the faithful together in a common moment of presence before the living God who has come into our midst, for God is with us. This is not vertical worship, only an offering of humans below up to God above, for it exalts humans into the heavenly places to dwell among the saints in light, at the same time as it transfigures and glorifies this world of ours, and we who belong to Christ on earth are shown to be the living manifestations of the resurrection of Christ, passed already from dead-end life to immortal existence through the Cross, beyond the Tomb, into the Ascended reality that we can never evade, since it is not only our final destiny but the way we are to live our live at this moment and every moment we know. This is the meaning of the greatest prayer of the Eucharist to ask for our daily Bread: may “Thy Kingdom on come on earth as it is in heaven” – not in some after life, but daily.

In our Eucharist, which we call the Divine Liturgy – our public service of love and honour to God – the gifts of Bread and Wine are prepared beforehand in a special short service. We use leavened bread, and each loaf is cut into pieces to commemorate the Lamb of God, the Mother of God, the saints and martyrs to be venerated, the Pope, patriarchs, bishops, priests, deacons, religious and faithful, the nations and governments, those in special need of prayer, and the departed. These pieces are set aside, covered and dedicated with incense. Even though they are not consecrated yet, whenever the altar, the icons, the Church and the faithful are incensed, knowing the purpose that they will fulfil, we incense the gifts too. When the time comes for them to be taken to the Altar, the deacons and priests take them, declaring again those for whom they are offered, out through the Church in the sight of the people, before taking them through the doors of the iconostasis to the Altar. They are incensed again. The veil that has covered them is lifted off and waved over them as we recite our belief in the Creed. Some see this is a clearing away of the clouds of our earthly offering of incense so that the Lord in His own unseen light may enter and dwell in them. Others see a symbol of the coming of the Holy Spirit, Who once brooded over the firmament before the moment of creation, and Who once overshadowed the Virgin Mary as she became the Mother of God.

After the gifts are consecrated by the Words of Christ and the invocation of the Holy Spirit, the priests at the altar bow profoundly. And because this is a moment when the Incarnate Lord once again dwells among us in real presence, we recall the Motherhood of God by Mary and again offer incense. After the Lord’s Prayer, the Confession and the Communion of the clergy, the Bread of Life is mixed in the Chalice with the Blood of Christ (we administer Holy Communion in both kinds together with a spoon), the deacon takes the Chalice and comes out through the Holy Doors of the sanctuary and shows the Lord to the people, saying, “Approach with fear of God, and with faith”. The people reply, “Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord. God has appeared to us”.

At the end of communion, the priest holds up the Chalice to the faithful for veneration. In the Eastern Church there is no service of adoration and benediction, nor is the Blessed Sacrament exposed. But here for a moment East and West pause in a similar way with adoration and hoping for the touch of Christ’s blessing. As he holds up the Blessed Sacrament to the love and adoration of the people, the priest says, “Save Your people, O God, and bless Your inheritance”. At the same moment he makes the sign of the Cross with the Sacrament over the faithful. The people respond, “We have seen the true Light, we have received the Heavenly Spirit, we have found the true faith. We worship the undivided Trinity for having saved us.” Then he takes the Chalice to the altar and incenses it. Next he takes the Chalice away from the Altar to the table at the side of the sanctuary from which it was first brought, but on his way, once again, he shows the Lord to His people, saying, “Blessed be our God, always now and for ever and ever.”

The tradition, the customs, the actions in the Liturgy may be very different from those familiar to many of us in the Liturgy of the Latin Church, but it is the same faith, the same love, the same Person. For, while this is unmistakably the worship of God, it is no escape from the world into a religious cocoon, or a refusal to live in an imperfect world. Instead, it is the resolute turning of human attention to the One Who has come into the world not condemn the world but to own it, to love it into becoming the very Kingdom of Heaven come on earth as it will in the world to come, to die for it as well as to live for it, to make us holy, and to restore our world’s direction, correct its purpose, and bring it along its true path as a new creation.

Why did the Ukrainian people turn from the empty promise of atheism and the meaningless gratification of state socialism and western consumerism alike? Because of the beauty and glory of Christ, Who is not only the best of what humanity can become, but, by His grace and forgiveness the image of everything we already are, because with Him even now we are risen, ascended and glorified. In this sacrament that we share, we have seen the true light of God and of “lightening every man” that has come into the world; we have been embraced by true faith and drawn up into the very living of the undivided Trinity, Who has saved us - not just from ourselves, but for the eternal glory that is His reign in our hearts.

The Protection of the Mother of God: Homily at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London on 13/14th October 2018

The feast of the Protection of the Mother of God bears witness to the power of prayer rooted in our confidence in Christ. Foremost in the Church’s confidence in the Lord’s power to save is Mary, Mother of God. Closest to him in the flesh, at His side by His Cross to the end, inseparable from Him in His resurrection, she is surest of His power in nature and grace to transform all conditions and all prospects.

The story from Constantinople in the tenth century tells of a vision in which Mary covers the Christian faithful with a veil of spiritual force, which deflects harm, and deepens trust and hope in her Son. The vision captures the hearts of the Church planted and growing in the lands of the Rus’, the Slavs of the east and north-east of Europe. Thus, when the Turks attack the monastery of Pochaiv and the ottomans threatened all Christian Europe to subject it to Islam in the seventeenth century, it is to the Mother of God’s protecting veil of intercession that the Rus’ turn. For Orthodox and Catholics alike, the intervention of deliverance from the Saviour at the insistent prayers of the faithful led by the Mother of God is a defining moment in culture, society, history and identity for Ukraine, Belarus and later Russia too.

The image of the Mother holding her veil out to protect the people is deeply loved in Ukraine. Today’s is therefore a major feast; and the icon is really an image of the Mother holding her Son our God, in an attitude of prayer and in that same absolute trust with which she said to the servants at the wedding at Cana in Galilee, “Do whatever he tells you,” so that mere water was changed into the new wine of the Kingdom. Her prayer, then, is the communion of intercession with which our Lord “ever lives to make intercession for us.” (Hebrews 7.25)

In our Gospel today (Luke 6.31-36, of the Sunday), St Luke related our Lord’s plea that we “be merciful as the Father is merciful”. Our Epistle (Hebrews 9.1-7, of the feast) recalls the service of the Temple in which the high priest is drawn into the holy of Holies, approaches the mercy seat and at the end emerges with forgiveness and reconciliation. This is much like the pattern of our Divine Liturgy, and we see how the world is thus changed and saved, because we are being transformed in this worship by the power of Christ - to save us from all that is amiss and to save us for the truer reality in our midst of the existence of heaven, in which we like Him “live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17.28) The veil of prayer, which we call the protecting veil, is the image of this unseen dimension which we actually live in as well as in our world, for God is among us (Revelation 21.3 & John 1.14, Matthew 1.23), and our life is hid with Christ in God (Collossians 3.3).

The entire direction of our liturgy this afternoon, then, is a trajectory from the world, through the world, toward heaven and into God, at the same time as Christ God’s trajectory is from heaven toward us, through heaven into the world for us, and back again with us. Our altar is not confined in a separate chamber, but in a space that dynamically and repeatedly opens up the gate of heaven and pushes back the barriers we have erected in the world, so that we constantly see in with hope, can go in for mercy and go out from with forgiveness and a new life. The tabernacle described in the epistle to the Hebrews is the symbol par excellence of not just God’s static dwelling place and judgement seat, but His vehicle that moves, and as it moves projects and conveys the coming of God. It was a tent in the wilderness, and a vibrant fiery edifice in the temple in Jerusalem. But to the Church’s understanding from very early times this tabernacle containing and bringing out our God is formed of flesh - a person, the Mother who extends the cover of the house of God - for “roof cover” is what protect means – she who extends the cover of the house of God’s own dwelling, in order to house the people of God, the community of the redeemed like her in Christ.

As we envisage with the eye of our heart the Virgin Mother covering us with a veil of imperturbable intercession, pleading insistently with her Son for our safety from sin and danger, and our salvation for living in heaven even here, let us know with assurance, that she brings us close to Him as He comes out of his temple with healing and strength, and the judgment of mercy for living faithfully and with hope for the kingdom.

Seeing we are surrounded by such a cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12.1), covered in such powerful intercession by the Mother of God, let us go forth to meet the Saviour (Hebrews 13.13, Mark 14.42 & Matthew 25.6), saying, “Lord, Lord, open the door for us, and come in Your Kingdom!” (Matthew 25.11 & Luke 23.42).