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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homily for the Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearers, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London, 15 May 2016

Sometimes this Sunday is called the Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women, but in English we do not need to be “gender specific”, because what Mary Magdalen, Mary the mother of Joses and Salome were doing is part of a larger story, in which even more people figure, men as well as women (Mark 15.43-16.9). For in first-century Palestine there were groups of people, like charitable guilds, whose task was to care for the dead, prepare for the burial and help the bereaved in their mourning. The Myrrh-Bearers formed such a group of righteous people, along with Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus.

We recognise what they were like as people, from the same kind of people who always help out in parishes with funerals, or who, when a crisis happens, you can always rely on someone to know what needs to be done. Thus to this day, burying the dead is counted a “corporal work of mercy”. This does not only mean attending the funeral, but the practical action of laying someone to rest. Many of the practicalities involved are now seen to by the funeral director. But even though many of the arrangements are in such hands, others may still make tasks their own - preparing food, helping with transport, singing and reading at the funeral, making charitable donations. Sending fragrant flowers recalls anointing the body with aromatic spices to overcome the odour of our life’s decay. It is ab act of physical honour to the person whose life has gone from this world. In the Eastern Church, you will have noticed that mourning families come to Church for a special service of prayer for the dead, often after the end of the Divine Liturgy, for which a special loaf of bread is baked and koliva is made, a memorial dish of wheat and raisins. Its blessing by the priest blesses the mourners who will consume it, and it honours the memory of those who are missed and now look to the resurrection to eternal life. In the Western Church this service can take the form of a memorial mass, and people will often make a donation to a Church with a request for the intention of a particular mass to be devoted to the repose of someone’s soul – and a tangible card with the date, the name of the Church, and the signature of the priest will be sent to the mourners as an act of kindness on one level but of faith on another – faith that the power of Christ’s sacrifice will forgive the burden of sin and lead us to everlasting life.

So, even in different ways, we are still setting out to do works of mercy for the dead like Joseph of Arimathea and the Myrrh-Bearers of old. But what were their tasks?

We are told in the gospels that Joseph of Arimathea is granted the custody of the dead body of Jesus for burial. Most of the other disciples are terrified of possible reprisals from the Temple and Roman authorities and are in hiding. St John’s corporal act of mercy is now to take the Blessed Virgin Mary into his own home, there to comfort her in her grief. He has enough to do; but also he may have been too junior to approach the authorities in such a tense moment. So it fell to a member of the Sanhedrin itself to choose this moment of all moments, and seek a rare, personal audience of Pilate the Governor. Aided by Nicodemus, he puts together one of those groups from among the nearest disciples, willing to perform the accustomed tasks for burying the dead. But the imminent setting of the sun means the Sabbath is about to begin and there is little time. Joseph has bought a new linen cloth to wrap the Lord straight from taking Him down from the Cross. There is a treasured tradition that at this moment the Mother of God takes her Son into her arms for one last time, just as she had first held Him after he was born and wrapped in His swaddling cloths. But there is hardly any more time. St John tells us that myrrh and aloes were wrapped on the Lord’s body and held in place with the linen. He will have seen this, perhaps. There is not a moment for preparing the spices to anoint Him. Everything else will need to wait. The stone is rolled in place and the Tomb is sealed. A guard is set up by the authorities, and no one is allowed near until Sunday morning.

If there had been time, Joseph, Nicodemus, the Magdalen, Mary the Mother of Joses, and Salome would have taken the body away to one of their houses. There the spices would have been mixed and steeped in olive oil. Then they would have anointed the Lord’s body in its horrifically injured state, to relax the tensed muscles and sinews, soothe the bruises and wounds with aloes, to clean and disinfect it with the myrrh and other spices. After this they would have bathed it in water, rinsing it of the dried blood, the sweat and uncleanliness, to restore to it some human dignity. After that, they would have bound His body in the linen with more of scented spice, before taking Him, within a matter of hours of His death, for a proper burial attended with open mourning from those who loved and followed Him.

But, whenever you read the Gospels, you see that nothing happens without a reason; and nothing falls without the Lord’s own plan for events and people, each fulfilling God’s purpose.  Thus it is neither possible nor necessary for Jesus to be anointed with myrrh and spices after His death for three reasons:

1. He has already been prepared for His descent into death by the Magi, one of whom presented Him with myrrh when His incarnation was first revealed
2. A woman at Bethany - whom St John identifies as Mary the sister of Martha and the much-loved Lazarus that Jesus had just raised from death - had already anointed the Lord in preparation, He said, for His imminent burial
3. Jesus was already the Lord’s Anointed, for the Spirit of God had been seen to rest upon Him, and the Father’s own voice had declared Him to be the Divine Son of Man, the Lord Himself.

And it was neither possible nor necessary for Jesus to be bathed in water for three more reasons:

1. He had already been baptised in the Jordan, and there revealed as the Lamb of God, Who would be slain and revealed as Worthy to be the true King in the reign of God’s Kingdom
2. In the city of Nain, where Jesus had raised from death a distraught widow’s son, another woman covers the Lord’s feet with the water of her tears, turning to Him with complete repentance, so that He grants her forgiveness on the depth of her faith in Him and the sacrifice He is about to offer on the Cross
3. Water was brought to Jesus at Cana in Galilee, we are told, on the third day. This water He turns into wine, as He re-sets of Creation with the first of His miracles. So it is that, on the night before He died, He took the cup and says He will not drink wine again until He drinks it new in the Kingdom. And it is on the Cross that He takes wine turned to vinegar in the moments before His death, when water with blood flows from His side. On the third day, He rose again. He cannot be washed with water ready for His tomb, because the New Order of God’s Kingdom is inaugurated on the Cross, and the steps leading to the Resurrection have already been set in motion. The water has flowed, and it is already the time of New Wine, on the third day. 

It is as though people, time and events have been suspended while all this takes its course. No one has time to react to Jesus’ death in the way they know how. Joseph is entirely consumed with making arrangements urgently before sunset; he has not given a thought to grief. It is the same for the women. Pilate, who only a few hours ago had guilty misgivings about condemning a plainly innocent man under public pressure, is surprised and worried about what trouble may happen next. The apostles are mostly afraid and in hiding; they will not even know about Jesus’s death until later from St John. Only Blessed Mary and St John have time in these first hours at the beginning of the Sabbath to go away and mourn and weep. And when the reports of the Resurrection first come in, by turns terrified, joyful, and astonished, they are met with alarm, inability to get the words out, anxiety and even adrenalin-fuelled running to see. Hardly anyone has had time to make sense of any of the events that have occurred.

It is this moment that the Myrrh-Bearers are caught up in, when the consequences of believing in Jesus dawn. Belief is not just in the mind; it takes physical bearing too and there are practical consequences. Those who carried linen, water, oil, myrrh and aloes are frustrated in the performance of their righteous office. They had to set everything they brought aside, and now instead must take up a story of bold faith, of being unafraid and forgiven, of a new Order. Those who were there to take down a body from the Cross and lay it in a Tomb, were told not to hold on to the soon to be Ascended Lord, but take up a cross and follow for themselves the path He had just trodden. Those apostles whose hands had bolted a door behind them, frightened out of their wits at what might happen because the Lord had risen and who would come through to get at them, would with the same hands take bread and wine and make the Lord known in the Breaking of Bread, and so from that day to this.

This moment of realisation matters and on it hangs all else. Last weekend, I was sitting at bus stop and a man who had enjoyed a very good lunch came and sat beside me. My fears of an inebriated and fruitless conversation softened, as I conversed with this rather clear-minded person. He began as I expected: “Of course, I am not religious. I don’t hold with it. I cannot see how there can be a single Creator being.” We were now on the bus. We’d established I was Catholic priest. Then he asked, ”Do you believe all that stuff happened?” As I reflected on an adequate answer, he shouted out, “Ah! Ah! No funny answers, No ‘It depends…’! Tell me what you think. Do you believe it all happened or not?” So I said, “Unequivocally, yes. He rose from the dead. If He was not Who He said He was, then it is all just another religion, one path of spirituality to choose among others. If He did not rise from the dead, if there is some tomb somewhere in which He still lies, then nothing I believe in stands. If indeed He rose from the dead, it changes everything – not just about my opinion, but about everything in creation. You may not believe or feel it. But if it happened with Jesus, it happened in the whole of humanity. Some of the things in the way we speak are metaphors, some analogies. But this? This is the simple truth. So, without any prevarication, yes, I believe it all happened.” Then he told me that he was glad to hear once more a Catholic answer to his question.

To the Myrrh-Bearers, the Angel said, “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth Who was crucified. He is not here; He is risen. Go and tell His disciples that He is going ahead of you.” This command rejoices not only their hearts and ours. It conveys the simple truth about humanity and the created universe that it is re-set for a new Order, the Kingdom of God where this natural body of ours is sown and a spiritual one rises up to eternal life (I Corinthians 15.44). Its echo even the unbeliever strains to hear is still there.

 

Fourth Sunday of Great Lent - St John Climacus, Homily at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, London, 10th April 2016

One of the strands of the Gospel readings through Lent and into the Fifty Days after Pascha is the power of Christ faced with our limitations and not so much altering our condition as making humanity transcend it.

Here is the map of the journey we are on. Before Lent we have the Pharisee (Tenth Sunday before Pascha: Luke 18.10-14) and the Prodigal Son (Ninth Sunday: Luke 15.11-32) who cannot recognise how threadbare is their own sense of entitlement and self-sufficiency. Then we have Nathanael who cannot see anything good in the Nazarene until the Nazarene sees something good in him (Sunday of Orthodoxy, First of Great Lent: John 1.43-51). Then we have the paralysed man let down through the roof in Capernaum to be healed by Jesus, whereupon Jesus makes him stands on his feet by the power of forgiveness - a dazzling foretelling of Christ’s own descent from the Cross, His burial and resurrection and all that they will achieve (Second Sunday of Great Lent: Mark2.1-12). After Good Friday and Pascha, we will hear again of the reservations and then the faith of St Thomas (Sunday of St Thomas, First after Pascha: John 20.19-31), the astonished blindness of St Mary Magdalen upon finding in the Empty Tomb “The Young Man Sitting on the Right Clothed in White”, not recognising before her the Angel of “The Forever Young One Who is Risen and Enthroned at His Father’s Right in Glory” in the Holy Trinity (Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women, Second after Easter: Mark 15.43-47 & 16.1-8). Then we will hear of another paralysed person whose human impediments will be overcome at the Pool of Bethsaida by the power of faith and forgiveness, both coming from God in Christ (Sunday of the Paralytic, Third after Easter: John 5.1-15). We will hear, too, of the woman at the well in Samaria with an answer for everything, until Jesus plays back to her the truth about herself - until she sees herself as Jesus sees her, a person made for the worship and love of God (Sunday of the Samaritan Woman, Fourth after Easter: John 4.5-42). Then the man born blind will trust Jesus’ directions to bathe at the Pool of Siloam, and let Jesus touch him, so that the first thing he sees is not the physical world he is never beheld before, but the Man from God whom he falls down before and worships (Sunday of the Man Born Blind, Fifth after Easter:  John 9.1-38). This will bring us to our own encounter with the Lord at His Ascension, and then St John’s explanation (Sunday of Pentecost:  John 7.37-52,8.12) that the Christ Who came from Bethlehem, was the Light Who dispelled the darkness of humanity in Galilee, before all was perfected in the glorification that took place in Jerusalem – the Cross, the Tomb, the Rising from the dead to the new Jerusalem out of which He will pour the rivers of living water: no more pools, wells, Galilees and Jordans, but the Holy Spirit Himself.

It is for us to identify with each of these people, each of these scenes and each of these events. It is for us to place ourselves within them, and see ourselves as we are seen by Christ. We go on a journey thus from conceit and self-pity, from lack of lively faith and dynamic discipleship, from inability to perceive what is standing before us, from self-deception and wounded pride. Along the way, we are warned to look for the signals of Christ coming His Kingdom, its majesty hidden in plain sight (you might say) in the realities around us (Meatfare Saturday, Luke 21,8-9, 25-27, 33-36). We are told to be discerning about ourselves and our true dispositions, and how Christ makes himself appear in our midst – sheep or goat, King or outcast? Which is it, and who like Him are we supposed to be (Meatfare Sunday, the Eighth before Pascha:  Matthew 25.31-46)? We are told to be forgivers if we expect to be forgiven, and to pile up treasures in heaven and not here (Cheesefare Sunday, the Seventh before Pascha:  Matthew 6.14-21). The greatest treasure, we come to learn is the beam of the Cross that we will heave up onto our shoulders and lose everything else, but not that (Sunday of the Holy Cross, Third of Great Lent: Mark 8. 34-39). We will realise that like the sons of Zebedee we have nothing to say other than that, yes, we are prepared to drink the cup that Jesus drinks, and, yes, to seek for ourselves His baptism into death’s unknown (Fifth Sunday of Lent: Mark 10.32-45). We too will end with seeing Christ at the point of completing His work, realising that we are the ones who have been kept by the Lord and not been lost - learning every step of the way to keep to His word, until we see everything else fall away and what is liberated is the joy (Sunday of the Fathers, Fifth after Pascha: John 17.1-13).

The point we have reached today is the experience of the young man overwhelmed by a spirit that makes him undergo seizures, taking away his ability to speak and hear (Fourth Sunday of Great Lent: Mark 9.16-30). To the father and his family, this is the work of an unclean spirit, alien to the boy’s wellbeing and survival. We may recognise his symptoms as possible epilepsy, but this is not to explain away the story. What Jesus reveals to us in this, and in all the stories and words He uses, is that inevitably we come up against our shortcomings and our limitations, not least the aspects of our personal existence and factors surrounding our lives over which we have no control. We meet them in our sin, and our pride, in their impotence. We our thwarted by them in the limits to the capacity of our bodies, to the limits placed on our egos, our ability to get our own way, and to our never-fully satisfied passions and appetites. We are frustrated, too, by the forcefulness of others, their egos and neediness, their sin and worldliness; and we are not above returning the selfishness. We are confronted, too, by the oppression of intangible forces, whether they come from deep-rooted systems and habits of injustice in the world and how it works, or the influences of whole societies and cultures, or the powers at work in life and nature that we cannot see, still less understand.  Jesus is pointing out to His disciples that the adversity of concrete, material living is inseparable from the world of the spiritual. It is not that something wrong with our spiritual lives shows up in an effect on our physical bearings and experience, although this can sometimes be true. Jesus is telling us something much deeper than that. Soul and body are neither divided compartments in life, not operate on different planes.  He is saying that it is all of a piece – we humans are both physical and spiritual, and we must live lives both in the world and in the Kingdom of the Spirit.

Seeing that we are not the masters that we imagine ourselves to be in our own lives, let along the world where we seek to prevail, what are we do? We do not have complete freedom, so are we are to enslave ourselves to the world? We imagine ourselves to be fine and righteous, and yet cannot see we need to seek forgiveness; so do we resign ourselves to self-satisfaction or serial imperfection? We do not recognise the spiritual side of life and we trust what we can hold onto rather than what it staring us in the face, as heaven accosts us in the eyes and mouth and hands of its Only Son. So is all we have to be mournful at what we have missed out, defeated by finding out our lowly place in the scheme of things? Or do we do take the journey to come to the light, to know the power of Christ’s forgiveness at work in us, to “keep to His word” and to let all else fall away so that what stands free at last is His own joy? (John 17, Fifth Sunday after Pascha)

To act as our own master is futile as well as misleading and even dangerous. But, with all our limitations and shortcomings, to place all that we are, everything that has formed us, good and adverse, any gift or aptitude that we have, all our personality, our incomplete faith but our instinctive adoration at the service of the Master Himself, this is the breakthrough to humanity that He came to bring about. St Paul says that dying to sin we are alive to God (Romans 6.11). Jesus Himself tells us to pray that the Kingdom will come not in some next world or other, but on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6.10). So what, says Christ, if the Kingdom can come not just as a phenomenon on earth but as the joy in people, His own joy at coming to the Father? (John 17.13)

Today we recall St John Climacus, author of “The Ladder of Virtues”. In the icon portraying the spiritual path he set out, you will see the ascent of the Christ-seeking soul, step by painstaking step. Some souls you will see have deceived themselves and fall down, while others attain to the Divine. Jesus promised Nathanael that he would see that Christ is the Ladder on which the ascent to heaven is made (Sunday of Orthodoxy, John 1.51). But He also says that the angels who conduct us to God by ascending also descend. The Light that we look up for also enters down to shine into our darkness. It is not overwhelmed by sin and human shortcoming, but pierces it, transfigures it – makes it look different from how it appears, to make it look like what it truly is designed to be, patterned on the Son of Man.

For as Christ is divine and became human, so we who are human become like Him. Human and spiritual, material and filled with God because of His image within us, we live even now the resurrection. Though dead in one dimension, in reality our lives are hidden with Christ in God (Colossian3.3). Here the Spirit flows His living waters through our hearts (John 7.38, Sunday of Pentecost), so that what we were is washed away by what we shall become.

Sunday of Forgiveness: Homily at the Divine Liturgy, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, London, 12 March 2016

In the icon before us today, we see a penitent hermit in the desert of Judaea. There is the hill country into which Mary the Mother of God went after the Annunciation to visit St Elizabeth, the mother of St John the Baptist. There is purifying hyssop in the vale, blown in the wind that is the coming of God in Person (Psalm 28.5). There is the desert river whose flow returns, marking the turning round of our captivity, just as the Psalm tells us (Psalm 125. 5). There are the walls of the city of Jerusalem and on a famous outcrop of rock stands the Cross of Calvary. Looking up to the city and the Tree that surpasses all others is the entrance to the remote cave made into a monastery dwelling, where the hermit can fast and pray, and store up his heavenly treasures in secret (Matthew 6.21). We recall, too the Lord’s advice to His disciples to pray not for public attention, but for the loving intimacy of a child with his Father in a private place (Matthew 6.6), a sanctuary for the heart.

It is easy for us to imagine that this kind of life of prayer and returning to God in penitence is for experts and professional Christians, like monks, nuns and priests. But Jesus’ remarks on how, when and where to pray were for all of us. All of us need to find these opportunities, these moments, these words and silences, these places and spaces, where we can stand alone before God, just as He stands facing towards us with a heart and eyes only for us, each one of us, child to Father, Father to child. This is what we are concentrating on today, the last of the Sundays that herald the coming of Great Lent, the Sunday for repentance, for seeking God’s face, for coming back to him, for asking forgiveness.

Now, one of the criticisms that the Eastern Churches have about the Catholic Church - especially the Latin Roman Catholic Church - is its view of sin and repentance, forgiveness and virtue, in terms of law and duty, transgression and guilt, the mechanism of humanity’s Fall from grace and systems to repair it. Where is the Holy Spirit, and the compassion of the love of God when the talk is of breaking the law and observing the rules? Of course they are there in abundance in the western Catholic tradition; Pope Francis’s proclamation of the mercy of God, and St Margaret Mary Alacoque’s ardent devotion to the merciful and sanctifying Sacred Heart of Jesus both attest to this. But let us for a moment follow some thoughts on how the West’s approach looks to the East.

Saint Augustine, a Father to the Churches of both East and West, teaches about our standing in total need of God's grace, for no effort of our own takes us forward without His own. From Augustine's teaching, the Catholic Church takes the view that humanity as a whole fell from God’s grace, that this is part of humanity’s condition and experience, and that thus only by Baptism in Christ and His sacraments can the stain that in our nature that we have inherited be removed. The western Protestant Reformers exaggerated this. While rightly stressing our reliance on God’s grace and redemption for everything, John Calvin in particular went further than St Augustine and spoke of our "total depravity" – the complete corruption of our nature by sin, obscuring the image of God within each person. In response, the Catholic Church stressed how the image of God within every one of us bears the Light that the darkness cannot overwhelm (John 1.5) and remains sovereign beyond the power of sin, to urge our free will to turn to Him and seek His face. So we are not by nature completely wicked at all, but always open to God’s gift of faith and the workings of His grace. The great Catholic celebration of this insight is belief in the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the first of the redeemed. It sees the guilt of Adam’s Original Sin as broken by the power of Christ’s redemption to be worked on the Cross. By God’s choice, Mary is the first to receive this grace that makes her entirely free from the ancestral corruption of sin. So her life is entirely open to God’s gift of faith, and thus to the Incarnation of God the Son in her womb.

The Christian East puts it slightly differently. Yes, Adam fell from grace but, then, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3.23). His disobedience leaves its mark on us, and we have inherited his tendency to sin, and our sins are our own. Yes, Our Lady, the Mother of God, is Immaculate, without sin, and “all-glorious within” (Psalm 44.13), and this is entirely the gift of God. But just as much a part of human individuals’ situation of being mired in our ancestors’ tendency to sin is the inclination toward a new life in the Kingdom of God, to our true existence now, in the heights of Christ’s resurrection.

Think of what we have sung in today’s Troparion (of Sunday, Tone 8):

You came down from on high, O Merciful One, and accepted three days of burial to free us from our sufferings. O Lord, You are our life and our resurrection.

In other words, while the Western Christian tradition appears at first sight to stress law and obedience, the Fall, transgression and how amendment is made by redemption, the East, including the Eastern Catholic Churches, stresses the dimension of the liberation that is achieved by living Christ’s own risen life, by the power of the Holy Spirit in the Kingdom of God. What is on high comes down and is buried in the earth, so that what is earthbound rises and becomes lodged in heaven. This is what Our Lord meant when He said in today’s Gospel, “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6.21). Of course, the Western Latin Catholic Church believes this too – both East and West recall the apostle’s description of “Our true homeland in heaven” (Philippians 3, Hebrews 11). And the East believes that we are sinners constantly in need of making repentance, and seeking forgiveness.

As we begin Great Lent this Monday, today is the Sunday on which we think of this repentance and forgiveness. But it would be wrong to approach it all in terms of humanity’s total failure, and the futility of trying to follow Christ only to see that our footsteps will surely falter. No wonder the Protestant Reformers felt confronted by the idea of our total wickedness and powerlessness to do anything about it. It would be even worse to think of repentance as an exercise in de-humanising ourselves, making ourselves abject, guilt-ridden and fearful beings before God Who has already looked upon what He has made and pronounced it good. He took flesh from this, and we know Him as Mercy itself. Of course we have no merits of our own and we rely on God’s power alone: our sins, our characters, our behaviour and our attitudes are an affliction that make us weep for shame. We have all experienced those moments when we have turned back to God with tears of both compunction and relief. But this is not because God has brought us to rock bottom – it is because He is raising us up.

If you look at the Desert Father kneeling outside his room where he fasts and prays in secret, storing up treasures in heaven where his heart is, you will see not someone who is dismal and destroyed. Nor will you see someone going through the duties of religion, because otherwise he is lost and hopeless. Instead, you will see a person with arms uplifted, someone whose eyes are set upon the Cross of Christ with hope-filled vision, an open face, a single-minded heart, and not a craven, downcast spirit. What you see is adoration; it is love. It is joy at being forgiven; it is the sheer sense of unworthiness at finding oneself lifted up into the presence of God’s Kingdom and being there and nowhere else - not because of my own efforts, but by the mercy and love of God for the sinner. He is the Judge Who has no use for blame; he is the Justice Who wishes everything to be put back into its true balance, restored to what He deems to be right for each one of us, and in each one of us. Here, then, we who bear His image within us find ourselves - called back to Him, owning our sins and wickedness, pouring out our hearts to Him, finding His forgiveness, freed from the tribulation of this world as a life in the next tis poured into us, to lead already now.

In the Gospels, the word for repentance is not confession or penance, but metanoia. It means “thinking again”, or “changing your mind”. It means not only reviewing our sinful past thoughts, words and deeds, but embracing a completely new perspective on reality, a new outlook on life. Metanoia is also the word we use for the profound bows we make in our Liturgy, such as when we sing the Thrice-Holy Hymn and make the sign of the Cross, saying, “God be merciful to me, a sinner”. In other words, repentance is not about our actions out of guilt and transgression, but the power of God in His holiness and on His Cross to forgive the past and make all things new. During our Liturgy we constantly sing, “Lord, have mercy”. This is not about our abasement in shame, unworthy as we are to stand where we do in God’s presence.  It is about our constant, repeated, never to be forgotten and always being recalled “thinking again” - our taking on a new perspective on reality, a fresh outlook on life. It means a life lived in the joy of the mercy of God. It means the adoration of the sinner who places every hope in the Cross. It means never the burden of law and duty, nor the misery of our fall from grace, but always the treasure stored up in heaven where our hearts truly lie.

Thus the repentance in Great Lent upon which we now embark is the life of the Mother of God without any stain: freedom from sin, and the liberation to enter the Kingdom as she is filled in every part with the Holy Spirit (Proverbs 24.4 and Ephesians 3.9). It is the complete pouring out of the heart and soul to God in love, as He pours Himself into us in the entirety of His mercy, the entirety of “His Presence and His very Self” (Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman, Praise to the Holiest in the Height).

For reflection:

My God, I love Thee; not because
I hope for heaven thereby,
nor yet because who love Thee not
are lost eternally.

…

Then why, O blessed Jesus Christ,
should I not love Thee well,
not for the sake of winning heaven,
nor of escaping hell;

not with the hope of gaining aught,
nor seeking a reward;
but as Thyself hast loved me,
O ever loving Lord!

So would I love Thee, dearest Lord,
and in Thy praise will sing,
solely because Thou art my God
and my most loving King.

No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte, St John of Avila, O.C.D., 1500-1569
Translated to Latin, O Deus, ego amo te, by St Francis Xavier, S.J., 1506-1552
Translated to English, in the Lyra Catholica (1849) by Edward Caswall, Cong. Orat., 1814-1878

Sunday of Zacchaeus: Homily at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, 13 February 2015

At the most telling points in the Divine Liturgy, the deacon calls out to the whole Church assembled, “Let us be attentive”. There it is, just before the reading from the psalms, the Prokeimenon, and the Epistle; and the priest says it, too, just before the Gospel. It is repeated before we say the Creed, and again before the Anaphora, the great Eucharistic Prayer, is offered. Once more it is heard before the Communion, when the priest elevates the Holy Lamb, the Bread of Heaven, as a symbol of Christ lifted up on His Cross, drawing all people to Himself. (John 12.32)

But this is not just a clerical exhortation. Like so many of the phrases in the Liturgy, it shows how our worship grew directly out of the life of the Church described in the Scriptures themselves. For it is the injunction of St Paul himself, encouraging his not long ordained helper and successor St Timothy, as we have heard in today’s Epistle. (I Timothy 4.9-16) “Until I arrive,” he says, “give attention to the reading, to exhorting, to teaching”.

It is just as well that St Paul advises us to be attentive, because the Epistle and the Gospel, at first glance, seem to be saying opposite things. In the Epistle, St Timothy’s example is to be one of love, faith and purity in what he says and how he lives his life. Yet in the Gospel, the example of salvation we are given is a man reviled for what he does. (Luke 19.1-10) Note carefully that nowhere in the Gospel does St Luke say that Zacchaeus actually was an extortionist and defrauder, just that his job had made him rich.  In the thinking of the time, a person’s wealth is seen as a sign of God’s blessing on their righteousness; we still madly re-invent God as the One Who will bestow success if we pray, or believe, or act right, and we still try to strike bargains with God for benefits in return for good conduct. But Zacchaeus is assumed to be corrupt and blamed for his wealth by his fellows Jews, because the office he holds and the business he conducts serve an occupying power that is pagan. He is called a sinner because he is the agent of sinful Roman pagans.

Zacchaeus, who St Luke tells us has come looking for God, will have seen his fortune, however, as a gift from God. In truth, Zacchaeus knows he is rich, but unfulfilled. It is his spiritual emptiness that turns his heart to the Lord. The people’s contempt for him as an enemy collaborator, however, has a veneer of self-righteousness because of the religious dimension. And so he stands before you accused of sin. But really, it is his neighbours who are jealous, envious of what he has.

They have no cause. For, because Zacchaeus desires to look upon the Lord, and because of an open-hearted that eagerly responds to the loving call of Jesus to receive Him, he gives half his possessions away. The bitter and righteous did not attract this out of him, and they have nothing positive to say. But salvation is seen shining in generosity out of a man who has been moved not by condemnation but inspired by the sight of Jesus - the Glory of God in a Man Alive, as St Irenaeus says, adding that the life of man is the vision of God. (Adversus  Haereses, IV, 20, 7).

In The Idiot, Dostoyevsky has Prince Myshkin admiring the portrait of Nastassya, whose reputation is tarnished. He is asked why he appreciates such beauty, and he replies that a face like that is beautiful because there is suffering in it. One of those nearby is having none of it. She says, “Beauty like that is bold. That kind of beauty could turn the world upside down.” In the end, Prince Myshkin’s instinct is to be merciful and to see that the visual beauty he first admired comes not from rectitude, or even from moral conversion, but out of suffering that has turned a person inside out so there is nothing left, a beauty to which the Christlike response can only be forgiveness and unconditional love. Thus the theme of Dostoyevsky’s tale - after all the erratic behaviour and betrayal, the suffering, testing and forbearance, the brokenness and yet the desire for wholeness and purity of love - is famous: “Beauty will save the world”.

Look at Zacchaeus as Christ did, like Prince Myshkin looked at Nastassya. Look not for the sinner, but the beauty of a soul whose suffering has changed its heart. Let us be attentive to the reading. In the Epistle, St Paul tells a St Timothy who is evidently struggling to command respect and teaching authority, “Let no one look down on your youth.” Now see the paradox of the Gospel: Jesus comes by the tree and looks up at Zacchaeus. The Son of Man is drawn to the man in the sycamore and desires to commune with him.

Where else have we noticed this? Think of Zacchaeus in the tree again. See what Jesus saw: “a man despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” (Isaiah 53.3) Think back to the words we so often sing at the Liturgy, the first words that Jesus taught for all to hear, words that Zacchaeus had come to hear for himself: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5.3). Think of Dostoyevksy’s Christ-figure, the “Idiot” prince, looking up at the picture of that beautiful face, not despising its low reputation but seeing a suffering soul in a beautiful light as it desires nothing more than to cast off its burden, the “ancestral condemnation” of which we sang in today’s Troparion. (Resurrection Troparion, Tone 4)

Now look at the icon of this Sunday. We see Christ pointing at Zacchaeus up in a sycamore. But he is really indicating the Tree that He Himself will one day likewise climb, the Tree to which He will be fixed, as another “Man of Sorrows, despised and rejected, acquainted with grief”. It is an image of the mystery of the Crucifixion. Jesus is drawn to Zacchaeus on the sycamore by the beauty of the longing emptiness in the rich tax collector’s life. He indicates that He will likewise “draw all people” to Himself when He is lifted on the Cross, that the beauty of the image of God in man will be transfixed and disfigured, but only thus reveal the beauty that will save the world. Zacchaeus sees his own poverty of spirit and looks to see the Kingdom. The gaze of Jesus finds him and makes him into the very picture of salvation. He recognises the Tree that will claim His life, yet gives to Zacchaeus up in the sycamore not a pre-emptive revenge but the Resurrection itself. As we have considered Zacchaeus arising from the ground into the tree, from our own perspective in today’s Kontakion we have sung, “God has raised out of bondage the children of the earth.” (Resurrection Kontakion, Tone 4). So let us be attentive. The central figure of this Sunday’s gospel is not Zacchaeus, but the Tree, the Cross. The central event is not so much repentance but moving from a living death to Christ’s Resurrection.

Before we leave the scene that Christ has set, almost in passing, there is something more to dwell upon. In showing us the Tree of salvation as the sign of victory, Jesus has shown not only His future, but the state of our lives. The image He has planted is not of Himself on the Cross, but an inadequate, imperfect, struggling, anguished soul – Zacchaeus, you, me - who has turned to Him in exhaustion, emptied of all that earth has to offer. You will remember that, after St Peter and the apostles professed their faith that Jesus is the Lord’s Anointed, in the light of King Herod the Tetrarch’s menaces, Jesus had said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9.23). So Zacchaeus is shown professing his faith in the Christ, taking up Christ’s Cross by mounting the sycamore tree. Jesus saw his suffering, his broken spirit, his desire to see the Kingdom. This is where Christ will see it in us too.

The throngs of people who crowded round Jesus were really hiding themselves behind their show of righteousness. Jesus knew their faith was fickle, that it would let Him and them down when put to the test. We were thinking earlier that, when they turned on Zacchaeus, they were jealous. But really they were hypocrites. They condemned Zacchaeus for working for the Romans and doing well out of the proceeds. But they were no different. They traded with the pagans and prospered; the economy depended on it. Their priests and kings were happy to operate a system with the foreign “sinners”, as long as it gave them earthly power. Their influence even reached throughout the empire. But Zacchaeus alone had the courage to put himself upon the Tree and ask to see instead the Kingdom of God. He was despised not for being a sinner, or on account of the motive of jealousy. He was despised because he attracted the attention of mercy and the sheer beauty of the Lord. The people hiding in numbers in the crowd wanted to see Jesus; they were less keen for any light to shine on them, so that Jesus could see who and what they were. Their cover of hypocrisy was blown. “God has shattered the gates of Hades,” we sang. (Resurrection Kontakion, Tone 4).

When St Paul encourages Timothy, he says, “Do not neglect the gift in you.” He tells him to be attentive to the reading, and to put love, faith and purity into words, and those words into practice. Let us be attentive to this. For in our case it means putting ourselves on a Cross daily to seek a greater sight of God’s Kingdom, so that there the Lord will find us exposing how poor in spirit we are without Him, how nothing in the world brings us lasting fortune or happiness, and how whatever inner beauty we have has come from hurt and adversity, from unsatisfied longing to see the Lord as He passes along our way. From our place on the Tree, like our Lord before us – let us be attentive, as He is raised up -, daily we see Jesus in His transfigured, agonising, crucified glory seeing us in our suffering and our need to be completely free through turning to Him. And we find that it is on our Tree that what comes forth from us is the gift in us that is not to be neglected. Forth come, from us like Jesus, generosity, adoration, goodness, love, full self-offering, forgiveness without reserve, salvation and mercy that never end. This is what it is to be the one the Lord finds; this is how His beauty will save the world.

Sunday 24th January, Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, St Stephen's Anglican Church, Lewisham

When Pope Benedict came to Westminster Abbey in 2010, he called for unity between Christians in their life and faith in the Risen Christ, so that we could give a convincing account of the hope that lies within us. (I Peter 3.15)

In other words, everyone expects there to be rival supermarkets, rival football teams; and no one would stake their life on any claim their fans and advertisers make. But religion is different. Everyone expects the Church to be one. Religion means “tied up with God”, so people of religion are supposed to be people of peace and goodness, people of love and unconditional forgiveness, people of brave hope. Most of all they expect our prayers should get through to God, because God has got through to us, and made us different as human beings. Not better, but capable of seeming to look like the one Lord we worship, the Christ we recommend as the truth and the hope of the world. They are telling us, ‘You pray every day “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”. But on earth, you live in separate heavens. You have your Anglo-Catholic heaven, your Roman Catholic heaven, your Pentecostal heaven, your Evangelical heaven, your Orthodox heaven and many more. Which is the true one? Where is this Kingdom come on earth? How do we find our way to it?”

Pope Francis has been very blunt about this. He has noticed that when the criminal gangs currently posing as Muslims come to murder our Christian brothers and sisters in the ancient Churches the Middle East, as well as in parts of Africa and Asia, they never ask, “Are you Anglican?” , or “Are you Coptic?”; “Are you Orthodox?”; “Are you Protestant, or Catholic?” They just ask, “Are you a Muslim, or a Nazarene?” Pope Saint John Paul, Pope Benedict and Pope Francis have each said that what unites us all is the martyrs for Christ’s Name. Following Christ to the end and what He called “No greater love than to lay down your life for your friends” (John 15.13) achieve complete communion in His own sacrifice, for the martyrs first and the fruit is for us. Pope Francis calls it the “ecumenism of blood”. It is true that it brings us very close in concern for each other, even thousands of miles apart; it makes us realise that what counts before the world is the common account we give, not of our rival institutions, but of one Church, our One Lord, the One Faith, One Baptism and the One God and Father. (Ephesians 4.5)

In today’s Epistle (I Corinthians 12. 12-30), Saint Paul imagines an argument between the parts of the body in which the eye tells the hand, “I have no need for you”, and the head says to the feet, “You are no use to me.” He says, “Instead, God put all the separate parts into the body for a reason”. But we Christians behave as if St Paul really said the opposite, “God put the body into separate parts for a reason.” Yet, the night before Jesus died the Lord prayed, “Father, may they all be one, as you and I, Father and Son are one, so that the world may believe it was You that sent me.” (John 17. 21) He did not say, “May some of them be one”, but all. He did not say, “Anglicans have no need of Catholics,” or tell anyone to believe that their institution was the “one, true Church” to the exclusion of others. He told Saint Peter, out of love for Him, to feed His sheep. (John 21.15).  And He told the sheep, “Listen for My voice and follow Me” (John 10.27) and thus “become one flock with one shepherd, for I lay down My life, which is why the Father loves Me.” (John 10.17)

It is clear then that, to Jesus, the unity of His disciples - the complete and obvious wholeness of His Church - is not just a matter of obeying His words, however much it costs us. It is about the laying down of His own life as the price He paid to gather us into His Kingdom, and give all humanity a vision of its blessed living that lies not in an after-life, but from here and now. The Catholic Church has therefore set itself the task of putting back together again the visible and organic unity of the Church as Christ intended, so that it could really be a genuine picture of God’s own unity, Father, Son and Spirit; so that the world might believe us when we talk about a new life this side of death, real and physical, but also spiritual and already risen from the dead with Christ. Yet even the Catholic Church feels deeply that divisions among Christians make it difficult for her to attain in actual life what it is to be completely Catholic in every way. (Unitatis Redintegratio 4, Vatican II, 1964). So what is to be done?

It all reminds me of a book called Lilith, by George Macdonald, the writer who inspired C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, where a horse and carriage full of people, find themselves dead. A rich man and his wife behave with cruelty to the coachman they employed; the coachman kicks the horse; the horse refuses to move; the others argue, blaming each other in their terrible predicament. As time drags by, they realise that every time they hit out at each other, every time they do something nasty and selfish, a bit of their bodies falls off. Finally, the coachman kicks the horse again and, both reduced to bones, they collapse in a heap. But meanwhile, one of the party has noticed that when there is a word of kindness, a shared difficulty, help and compassion, somehow their sinews seem to grow stronger, the bones knit up, the flesh becomes firm and faces regain their brightness. The selfish man and wife quickly go back to their old ways and start to fall to pieces once more. But one re-learns the lesson and, slowly, comes together again. The other, as the rest resume their journey, is left behind, cursing from his heap on the ground. But what’s this? As the coach moves off again, it too starts to fall to pieces and the party realises that it cannot leave anyone behind. So they return and help the one who is not ready, to find his new life and be put together again. Then, in their resurrected new bodies, they move on from death into the Kingdom, no longer dead but alive.

So it is that the Church, feeling incapacitated in many ways by Christian disunity, urges each body of Christians to be very close to one another, whatever our disagreements, our past history together, our estrangement and such different styles of living in Christ’s Church. Seeing the riches in each tradition, it desires for them to be shared so that all may benefit, not locked up where the others cannot reach them. It presses us to be indivisible in service of humanity in the relief of poverty and the construction of peace and justice in a society that is a manifestation of the Kingdom of heaven.

But, when you look round the world and the Churches, you could be forgiven for thinking that we are getting further apart, with our distinctions getting sharper, with our unity, that once seemed so close we could touch it, now slipping further away as we react to conditions in a fast changing world. But we should not allow this. For there are signs that unity makes progress still. Look at the concerted effort of the Anglican Communion and the Catholic Church to confront human trafficking and slave labour, especially of vulnerable women. Think of the many ways in all our parishes and dioceses, Catholics, Anglicans and Free Church people work together to be of service to the poor. A job of mine during each week is to work with those who help prisoners to overcome their past. One of the best things I know is a wonderful house in Streatham called Nehemiah, run by an Evangelical group helping ex-prisoners to leave drugs and drink behind and make a safe return to society free from the causes of their crime, so they never reoffend. It is very successful at this. Most interestingly, it also relies on a friendship and partnership with the Catholic community, who are seeking to set up more of these wonderful, hopeful houses in other parts. Another example is the Ecumenical Marian Pilgrimage which takes place every two years going to Walsingham for a few days, and in the other years making  a day pilgrimage to some other place of pilgrimage. This year in May we will go to Marian Oxford, visiting Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox and Methodist sites. Your own Father Philip Corbett and I, a Roman Catholic priest, are fellow trustees of this pilgrimage; and it is amazing how, despite everyone’s different Churches and beliefs, how close a spiritual bond is formed, as we go deep together into the mystery of our One Lord’s Incarnation.

At the present time, some of the Churches seem to be determined to set themselves goals that surely cannot be reconciled with unity of faith and life together in the one Universal Church. Your own Church has a famous history of dedication to the Catholic faith, and of love for the good and future of the Church of England, as you witness to the larger Church, the Universal dimension of Christ’s Body, and as you seek to persuade your fellow Anglicans of the vital importance of the communion of the whole Church with the successor of Peter, the Pope. I know that differences within Anglicanism are potent forces seeking to persuade people that is best to live apart from one another, let alone from other Christian Churches. For the Catholic Church people, too, we wonder how union between our Church and the Anglican Communion can ever be achieved. You feel this too, and the same situation applies to the unity hopes of other Churches as well. But it is at precisely such points, where all appears futile and impossible, that we need to be closest to one another. Families disagree and relatives do the opposite of each other all the time. But they are still related; they still love each other; they still keep together. “Blood’s thicker than water”; and another dimension of that ‘ecumenism of blood’ about which Pope Francis speaks means that we are meant to cleave to each other the more we veer apart and seek only our own company. For what Jesus prayed, he commanded: we are not allowed to be separate. The world cannot see us making other plans. It cannot see us like that. It needs to be convinced when we speak of one Christ and one heaven, one Kingdom.

It is for God to bring about His miracle of unity, for that is what it will take. But it is for us to remove all obstacles, and to be as close as we can in love, service, faith and honest hope. In this Anglican parish, part of the great historic Anglican Catholic movement, you believe in the fullness of life in Christ given in the Catholic faith, and, even though we cannot yet share the Eucharist of the Lord together, it is a vital bond that unites us on the way. Fullness of communion is for God to bring about;  but in the meantime, as St Paul reminds us, we cannot say we have no use for each other. We persevere in our faith and witness, but never in a spirit of isolation. Even if it is a lonely path at time, on our journey through this world towards the Kingdom, as the coach and horses people realised, it is heartening that we are going nowhere on our own.