Sunday of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, Homily at the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, Cathedral of the Holy Family, London, 11 August, 2019

The Feeding of the Five Thousand is so very familiar that we can miss all that St Matthew is telling us (Matthew 14.14-22).

First, note that the disciples describe the place Jesus had retreated to as a desolate place. We are being reminded of the Lord’s Forty Days in the wilderness battling with the Deceiver, but also communing with the Father, before He begins his public ministry. But the readers and hearers of the story are also being pointed forward: to the forthcoming retreat of Jesus into the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before He died, truly desolate and alone, as the apostles fall asleep and there is no human force to prevent His divine intention to be betrayed into the hands of sinners and to go for our sakes to His Passion and His Cross that we may have life eternally, and not death.

Secondly, note that someone has worked out where Jesus in His boat has made for across the water; they have passed the message on, and the people follow him, walking round the lake or crossing in their own craft. We are being reminded of the Pillar of Cloud by Day and Fire by Night, which led the People of God out of captivity in Egypt across the Red Sea and into the wilderness, from there to reach the Promised Land across the river Jordan. For “a land flowing with milk and honey”, read loaves and fishes. In the same way, the Hebrews in the desert and the Jews in a desolate part of Galilee eat and are satisfied. St John tells us from memory of the sort of thing that Jesus would say to His disciples: “Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness. They are dead. Whoever eats of this Bread shall live for ever.” (John 6.49, 51) Do not forget that before the Tent of the Holy of Holies that the Hebrews carried round with them in the wilderness, in which the Lord dwelt upon the Ark of the Covenant when He was not leading them in the Pillar of Cloud and Fire, there was a table on which were placed the twelve loaves of the Bread of the Presence, fresh every Sabbath as a memorial of the twelve tribes of the people, as an offering to the Lord, and as a consecrated meal by which the priests commune with God. This sacred rite was continued in the permanent Temple in Jerusalem. St Matthew had just referred to Bread of the Presence of the Lord a little earlier in his Gospel, recalling how King David and his starving companions entered into the Holy Place of the Temple and took the loaves to eat, even though they were not priests. St Matthew’s message is not that the people with Jesus in Galilee are not breaking the divine Law in being given the Bread from Heaven by the Son of David, but that they are being invited into the Presence of the Lord God Himself, to the place of the priests before the Holy of Holies, as the barrier between earth and heaven, God and man, is dismantled, since the Holy of Holies is now where Christ is, and in Him all come into the Kingdom of God, “on earth as it is in heaven”.

Third, note that it is evening. We are being reminded of at least four events in the future, and the allusion explains them, and they in turn interpret the miracle. It was an evening when the Lord gathered the disciples in the Upper Room and took the bread, said the blessing and told them the secret of the Kingdom – “This is My Body; this is My Blood.” The day was also far spent and the evening almost come, when darkness covered the land, the Lord yielded up His spirit, and the veil of the Temple was rent in two. So here at by Galilee we have the enactment of broken loaves that become His broken Body, not because of a catastrophe but through His deliberate blessing. And it was another evening, St Luke tells us, that a Stranger walked with two disciples on the road to Emmaus. At the end of the day it was the way He took bread, said a blessing and broke it, that He made Himself known to them, and they knew it was the Lord that had been crucified after telling them how to recognise the secret of the Kingdom. Then, again, it was an evening, the evening of the first Sunday that the disciples had locked themselves in a room in Jerusalem, only to find Jesus among them, giving them the peace of resurrection, the blessing of the Holy Spirit breathed upon them, and the power of forgiveness that comes from saying, “This is My Blood of the new covenant poured out for you.”

So, in a mere nine verses, St Matthew has told us the entire path of salvation from the captivity of the people of God in Egypt, to the foundation of the priesthood in the wilderness, to the coming of God to dwell in humanity in the Person of the Lord, to HIs Passion and the Cross and the Resurrection, and then to the arrival of forgiveness and the blessing of the Holy Spirit. It is all made known in the Breaking of the Living Bread, at which the old veil in the Temple was broken in two, so that the priests may bring the Lord into the souls of the people who are filled and satisfied by Him, and thus bring the people into the presence of the Lord. Thus they may live the life that is always directed upwards by Christ’s Ascension, to God and His Kingdom. As St Paul puts it in today’s Epistle (Romans 6.18-23), “You were slaves to sin … but now that you have been set free from sin, and becomes slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end – eternal life.”

It is no accident that our Divine Liturgy follows the same pattern as in that lonely place not far from the sea of Galilee. We follow the Lord out of the ordinary world into His presence in the next, which is this world as it more truly is, beyond sin and shortcomings, and our own dead end. We see the bread that has been set out in His presence about to be brought in to Him for blessing. We listen out for the words of the secret mystery revealed, that indeed it is His Body and His Blood, as the Holy Spirit that he breathed out for the forgiveness of sins rebounds upon the gifts to translate the whole Church and the whole creation, even without it noticing, into the dimensions of heaven, not just those of the world. In a scarcely visible act, the Bread is lifted up and broken, and the priests share it as in the Temple - except that in the Christian dispensation the veils and doors of the Holy of Holies are opened up, and the Bread is brought out and shared with the all the people who are in that moment brought into the Kingdom.

The Feeding of the Five Thousand provides us with the Living Bread that comes down from heaven and indeed we eat our spiritual fill and are satisfied. But more than this, we are drawn into living life according to the sequence and pattern of Christ’s life, from new birth, to suffering and bearing through our sin, taking up our Cross and being raised from the dead. This Cross we take up daily to follow Him. But, like His Body, it is our body that is broken to be remade, from the impurity and “natural limitations” that St Paul speaks of today, into His likeness. “The Bread which we break – is it not a participation in the body of Christ?”, says St Paul (I Corinthians 10.16). Indeed; and it costs us not less than everything if the old human is to go, and the new is to be made by the amalgam of what is redeemed from loss and what is given in grace.

But you and I know that, when we come down from this mountain of the Divine Liturgy, and we leave the Lord to be, in His solitary Majesty in that “desolate place” of the Trinity’s communion once near Galilee, or another time in Gethsemane, or Golgotha, or the cold Tomb, or today when we leave this Church, that we will think to ourselves that we have to return to reality, resigned to thinking of the heaven of which we have had an inkling but which is not yet. It is as though we are hypocrites, living one life in Church and another in the world. The Lord tells us about this, and his prayer is all about keeping earth and heaven together in the constant communion of forgiveness and our daily reliance on the Living Bread. But, back to those “natural limitations” and the world is quick to accuse of our double standard. We rebuke ourselves that our open Christianity, our worship with hearts lifted up, and our belief in following Christ are all, despite our efforts, constantly rumbled as putting on act. But have a better hope. The truth is that, not our worship and our discipleship, but our sin, our shortcomings, our impurity, our spite and our unkindness that is really the unnatural act we are putting on. Our life in the Liturgy, following God round the lake to hang on his word, to be filled and satisfied, to be blessed and changed by forgiveness: that is our true self. That is why we are here and that is why we constantly come to face the Lord and, in His Presence, give up the act of being what we should not be. And when we leave here, we do not return to “limitation” for our in our mind and our heart we are still turning round to face the Altar and the Iconostasis from which our Lord and His Mother look out into us, insisting we say over and over again until it becomes second nature, and then our first, “Hallowed be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive …”

Sunday of All Saints of Rus'-Ukraine at the Cathedral of the Holy Family, London, 14 July 2019

For today’s Feast of All Saints of Rus’-Ukraine St Paul exalts the eternal purpose of God (Romans 1.12-18) to identify those whom He will call, those he will make righteous as he conforms them to the image of His Son, and thus those He will fill with glory as all things work together for good by the power of His love. Who shall separate us from this our destiny, asks St Paul?

These few verses are luminous in the spirituality of what we Christians mean by sanctification, God’s holiness coming on us to make us His saints. We look to the officially canonised saints, and especially the Mother of God, as the evidence that human beings can become saints. This is not because they have become super-humans, but because we see in them that it is possible for mortals to be what the Lord had intended at the time of Creation, before we turn to the ways of deliberate imperfection and our preferred habit of falling short of the glory of God, something that we know as sin. We counteract this, as we pray for forgiveness and the restoration of our lost state, with a million, “Lord have mercy”s in our lifetime. Yet the popular expression in response to human self-indulgence or fallibility is, “You are only human”. But there is nothing “only” about being human. For it was his plan from the outset to clothe himself with the humanity He first given to us, and to take it for himself, so that, God becoming human by means of the indissoluble union that we worship in Christ the Son of God born of Mary, humanity may participate in the very life of God.

“Who shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus?” demands St Paul. It does not in the end make a difference to the divine plan to take our flesh - and be united with us so that we could be united to Him - that we disobey his fatherly law and erred from His love. As we know from the parable of the Prodigal Son, it intensified His resolve never to part Himself from us, however much we exerted our wills to part ourselves from Him. As in Francis Thompson’s poem The Hound of Heaven, we know that it is the nature of God to pursue those who have fled Him. Thus a famously consoling English hymn sings, “O Love that will not let me go, I give Thee back the life I owe.” And in Psalm 138 it is the same:

O Lord, You have searched me out and known me … You hem me in behind and before, and lay Your hand upon me. Where shall I then from Your Spirit, or where shall I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, You are there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall Your hand lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me.”

This was always the plan, and the fact of our sin does not change the intention of God to unite us to Him, since what is added is our forgiveness, our redemption, our forgiveness and our restoration to place us back on our original track of reconciliation.

It cost the Lord not less than everything, of course; and we recognise the superabundance of his core self-giving, which is the very nature of the Persons of the Trinity, not only in miracles and blessings but in His blood shed and His life poured out upon the Cross. God’s justification for doing this is not only to free us from the power of guilt and sin, but because he was always going to do this - to live like us that we might live like him, letting nothing ever ultimately stand in His way. Thus the Cross is the road to the empty Tomb. Thus the thorough rout into the depths of Death and back is the road to ascending humanity into the glory that God always intended for it. Thus the resurrection into which we were baptised makes the Cross - contrary to worldly appearance - glorious and life-giving. Thus the kingdom of heaven long ago became the nature that abhorred such a vacuum left by the removal of the bars and gates that kept us pent up in death.

When I went to a Methodist service one day, I remember the expectant moment after the first hymn has gathered all together in dedication to the Lord, and the minister addressed the people with the dramatic words of the Apostles from the Letter to the Hebrews: (12.22-23):

You have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to myriads of angels in joyful assembly to the congregation of the firstborn enrolled in heaven, You have come to the Judge of all, to the spirits of righteous people made perfect.”

Who does he mean? He means us! Think of it: here in our Divine Liturgy, as we move around the altar and come in and out before the presence of the Lord, we are surrounded by the saints at worship in perpetual love; and we see that people no different from ourselves have been made righteous, not through any merit of their own but by the sheer outpouring of goodness that is infinite to overcome our failings and our preference for something else. There is nothing “only” about being human, destined to be filled to overflowing with this grace. And then, as St Paul says to us, “Those He destined to be changed to conform to the image of Christ from the beginning” - that’s you and me – “He next called. Then after He had made them righteous” – not by our merits but from His own reasons to make us no different from His Son – “He made them perfectly the same. He glorified them.”

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist spiritual tradition, was inspired by the Eastern fathers of the Church. So in his preaching and the classic Wesleyan hymns he stresses not so much the problem of our sin but the magnificence of Christ’s sinlessness, and his full forgiveness by the power of the Cross to free us from ourselves and the evil that we do. To Wesley, since we are forgiven and free, what holds us back from becoming united with God in Christ even now? And if we can truly find this unity with the Lord, no wonder we can say with St Paul that we have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to the joyful assembly of the congregation of those enrolled in heaven. So Wesley follows St Paul to the great conclusion: If Christ by His power as God makes has impressed His own image into us and we are the very coinage of His Love, His buy-out conquerors in His competition with death and sin, what is there next but for Him to perfect what He has begun and make us perfectly holy, even starting here and now. So He works into us His holiness as He works out of us all that is amiss, making us His saints glorious as He is glorious. Saying none of this is to boast. As St Paul reminds us, “God forbid that I should boast save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ by Whom the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.” (Galatians 6.14) For to hope for glory and holiness in the midst of this life is to tell the truth of our sins and our need for God’s redemption and restoration.

In our Eastern Church we rely on those who have gone before us on this very same road. We know that they followed their Lord, passing through adversity and disrepute, scorn and unbelievability. Yet we see the saints as glorified, just as St Paul told the Romans. Their images on the icons show them not in earthly portraits but in their glorified state. These all knew their sin, yet hoped in the holiness that was to come. And at the forefront of them all, the Mother of God, most pure, immaculate and sinless, was made righteous throughout her existence by the pre-ordained purpose of the Lord to come to her above all others, for the taking of our flesh from her so that in the same instant we might be one with Him. So we touch her icon, as she touched the foot of the Cross. So we touch the icons of St Olga, St Vladimir, the monks of the Caves of Kyiv, St Josaphat, Blessed Klement Sheptytsky the Martyr, and so many others, because their hold on life here was the same as Christ’s, and because the prayers of them all are heaven’s hold on us.

At the end of our Divine Liturgy after Communion we shall give glory to Christ for being our sanctification. So we understand that what is true of the saints in the icons must become true of us - and it has already begun. We are to be the new icons, the new reliability of prayer for those who are to come after us. We are the spirits of righteous people made perfect. We are the congregation to which new people in Christ will come in joyful assembly, and say, “We have come to Mount Zion, to the City of Living God.” There is nothing “only” about being human. All is for His glory, and all His glory is for us to be holy, to be his saints defined by the very quality of the “nothing” that ever can separate us from the love of God in Christ, the Love that will not let us go.

Christ among us: Homily for the Sixteenth Sunday of the Year, Roman Catholic Church of the Most Precious Blood, The Borough of Southwark, 21st July 2019

The great mystery, hidden for ages, but now delivered to us is: Christ among us, so that we, His creation, can be brought to completion and made perfect.

In St Luke’s Gospel today (Luke 10.38-42), we vividly see Christ among us, and the effect on Mary and Martha. Their altercation is renowned. You can sense Mary losing track of time, spellbound by Jesus’ parables of the Kingdom of heaven – the mustard seed, the sower, the Good Samaritan, the e Prodigal Son – while Martha is no less absorbed in the pressured preparation of the feast. Both are intent upon Him, but in different ways. Many see this Gospel passage as a contrast between a practical Christian discipleship and a contemplative, spiritual one. After all, does not Our Lord say that Martha, the listening one, has chosen the better part than her active sister?

But there is a spiritual side to the practical activity. Even in hardship, our activity can proceed on a different plane when graces opens it up to our spiritual dimension. Otherwise something is missing; we are not being “holistic”. Thus Mary sits unmoved in the presence of the mystery, but she is being prepared for her form of service. The Lord says to her sister, “It shall not be taken away from her”; and to Martha it is indeed a mystery. But as St Paul explains, it is the “mystery hidden for generations … and now revealed to His saints” (Colossians 1.24-48) - “Christ among you”, Emmanuel (Matthew 1.23). Thus Martha understands, that her active preparation and serving come to the same point: to find purpose and meaning when she comes to a stop in His presence. As St Paul puts it, “This is the wisdom in which we thoroughly train everyone … to make them all perfect in Christ.” (Colossians 1.28)

The call to come and be trained for moving into the practice of being disciples, because of the impression made on us by Christ in Person, may not be something we feel, or even remember. But it is what is familiar to us in every encounter we have with God in worship. We say that a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”. The spiritual within has outward form – and our outward life is formed by the spiritual reality of Christ’s grace among and within us, to “train everyone … and make them all perfect” in Him. We understand this as our sacramental life, where sacraments are not objects, or events that happen to us. Instead they form the shape and dimension of our existence. It is not that we were baptised and confirmed in the past, but that we are perpetually the baptised and the confirmed: existing in the new life of Christ, not some old one. We are not so much breathing in the Holy Spirit, as if He were “top-ups” from outside, but, like Christ on His Cross, breathing Him out from where He dwells within us (II Timothy 1.14); and, like Christ raised in His Tomb, breathing Him as He gives our mortality the over-riding quality of Resurrection (Romans 8.11). Furthermore, it is not that we just come week by week for the infusion of strengthening grace from His Body and Blood. It is far more than that. We become the Communion we receive. St Paul says, “His Body, you are. Each one of you is part of it.” (I Corinthians 12.27) And he goes on to say, “It is not I who live but Christ Who lives within me.” (Galatians 2.20).

In other words, we are not just people who come to Church, or listen to Christ’s words. We do not merely attend upon Him here, or seek His blessings, or follow Him in our hearts and our conduct. As Christ our God became human, so we are humans who are become divine. We live the life of His Body. We think the thinking of His mind (Philippians 2.5). It is not an earthly life we live now, but that of the Son with His Father. The old life is gone. St Paul tells us how it is: “You have been raised… Set your minds on things above, not on the earth. Now your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3.1-4)

“Hidden with Christ in God” is what St Gregory of Nazianzus called the rotation around one another of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is where we, who are made in the image of God, find that Christ is among us. He is not just among us here; He has also transferred us to be among us where He lives (cf. John 14.3 & I Peter 2.9) in the divine life of the Trinity. He is training us to be joined in as part of it, and He is bringing us to our completion, in living God’s life as He has lived ours.

This is what Abraham was confronted with at the Oak of Mamre (Genesis 18.1-10). He saw the three, but beheld one. We are often told that the Trinity is difficult to understand, that it is a mystery. Of course it is, if we are approaching it as a theory to grasp, or an idea to try and envisage. But it is none other than how life is in Christ. For in His Church, God has come near to us, surrounded us and entered into us, that we might come near to Him and enter into Him. What Abraham saw beneath the oak, is what was at play at the Lord’s incarnation. The Holy Spirit overshadowed the Virgin Mary as He once covered the firmament in the moment of creation; the Angel was sent with the Word of the Father; and the Word took flesh in the womb of the Mother of God. And at the Lord’s baptism, once again: three Persons, one God. The voice of the Father was heard; the Holy Spirit descended over the Lord like a dove; and Christ was unveiled as God the Son of God the Father. When He was transfigured, the Father’s voice was heard; and the Holy Spirit shines the glory of the Lord through Christ’s form, to reveal that Christ must suffer to fulfil the Law and the Prophets before His resurrection and ascension.

At the Lord’s Crucifixion, we heard the thunder just as the witnesses heard at His Baptism, assuming it was the voice of the Father. Christ breathed out with the Spirit; and, in the moment of His death, tore the veil of the Temple that He might mystically enter the Holy of Holies from the Cross and complete the atonement for our sins, then to emerge not only with forgiveness and healing salvation, but resurrection and eternal life. Three Persons, One God. Once again, at the Ascension and Pentecost, the Holy Spirit covers the mountain top. This time the glory of the Lord takes the form of the cloud, which we remember from the Passover of the Hebrews out of slavery to the Promised Land, as the Son ascends to the Father. Then the Son sends into His own People, His Body in the world, the Spirit from the Father, to ensure His abiding presence, the “Christ among us”. “Baptise in the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” He has told us. For thus, “I am with you always, to the end of time.” (Matthew 28.19-20)

How can we know this? When the Lord disappeared from view at His Ascension, where was He to be found? In us, who have been incorporated into Him by consuming the Eucharist. At every Mass, we see all these mysteries of “Christ among us” played out again and again. Christ offers Himself to the Father in sacrifice; His words are spoken; and in the priest’s hands the Holy Spirit covers the Lord’s gift of Himself and He makes Himself known to us in the breaking of Bread. We receive Him; and in the same moment in heaven He receives us. We are joined up into the rotation of Father, Son and Holy Spirit around one another, where Christ is among us, training us to perfection.

This is why we may not sin. This is why self-righteousness, or special pleading, or self-justification, self-advancement, or shortcomings or excuses, or deferring our attention upon God until later, have no place. They may all have a reason here; but there they make no sense. Our confession of sin is not an apology to a judge. Instead, it is a perpetual turning of the heart and mind towards God, away from all else and into His life and the joining in of us all with the Persons in Trinity.

It is also why we must waste no opportunity for coming into the presence of “Christ among us” while we are also here in the world. Mary came to rest in silence as she listened to Jesus and absorbed His words about the Kingdom. She does not avoid work and service; she is prepared. She goes on to anoint the Lord’s feet and wipe them with her hair, preparing Him in turn for death and burial (John 12.8). Martha, too, prepares a house, but also herself, to receive Jesus. She works and waits on Him. Seemingly she receives nothing, until she in turn comes to be still before Him and recollects the mystery that stands among them. It happens in a different order, but it is the same rotation of the Persons of the Trinity. It is the same surrounding of one another that we are being joined into, for the day of our ultimate completion, “hidden with Christ in God”.

Every time we come to Church, then, it is no occasion for us to be talking to each other socially. It is a rare moment in this world for us to be in Absolute Quiet, to be in the presence of “Christ among us”, with all our attention turned on Him and nothing else - just as all His attention is turned on is. In numerous French churches, where just as with us there is much talking before the service, while some people try to make their devotions, there is a notice which reads, “Si vous parlez ici, où priez-vous?” – “If you talk here, where do you pray?” If Christians do not pray, or practise now being in the presence of God for eternity, why should anyone believe us, or follow the path we are on? What is the point; how is it different?

But the difference that has been made to us is that we desire, with all we love, to be at the heart of the mystery, Christ among us. So we fall to silence in His presence, to absorb all His speaking to our hearts and our consciences. We anoint his feet with the tears of returning to our long-lost Friend. And we enable Him to train us, to perfect us, to put into effect our service as His disciples all our days, unready as we are, until we are brought to our completion, joined in for ever with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The Rule of Peace: Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Corpus Christ, Maiden Lane

Peace feels like a gentle word. Peace in English and Friede in German, can mean stillness, the banishment of disturbance, the relief at the end of hostility. Yet we talk of winning the war but losing the peace; and so we have an inkling that peace can be uneasy and unsatisfactory, lacking resolution and perpetuating the injustice that caused the strife in the first place. We are still living with the consequences of short-sighted fixes from the First World War onwards. The massacred Armenians of Turkey and the Mediterranean were never given their homeland. The Christian Assyrians, inheritors of a 2,500 year-old civilisation, are still at the oppressive mercy of Islamic Kurds, Arabs and Persians alike. The Greeks and Turks dispossessed of their ancient foothold in each other’s lands seem perpetually irreconcilable. The price of peace in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa has been modern boundaries to states that do not unite people but force some into dispossession and migration, or oppression and persecution under the yoke of others. Without naming them, all are the results of poor peace-deals that have led to unending conflict.  So forgive me if I place a question mark against our instinctive definition of peace.


If, however, you turn to Latin you will see that the idea of peace is not necessarily so gentle, but comes with force and impact. Indeed, impact comes from the Latin word pax. You can tell that this word is hard-hitting – pax in Latin, pace in Italian, paz in Spanish, paix in French, and our own English words derived from Latin – pact, impact, compact,  impinge, punch, pacify. They all come from the idea of fastening things tight together, and thus making a binding agreement you could never wriggle out of. At the time Our Lord Jesus was born, St Luke tells us that the Emperor was Augustus and he had brought the whole world to peace. This “Pax Romana” was a peace imposed by authority and force of arms, after decades of exhausting and ruinous civil war for control of Rome and the riches of its expanding empire. St Luke evidently thinks such a condition in the world was a herald for the coming of the Prince of Peace. To St Luke it was a force for good, but a force none the less. When he records the song of the angels that at Christ’s birth there is not only glory to God in the highest but peace on earth, he means no mere gentle sentiment or merely the absence of war, or even its abolition. He means a new driving force, to be constantly at work in the world leaving nothing unchanged.

Each of today’s readings refers to peace in exactly this way. Let us see if we may understand their meaning by using a different word for peace that still comes from the Latin word pax.

• The prophet Isaiah (66.10-14) says, “Rejoice Jerusalem. For thus says the Lord, Now towards her I send flowing with impact like a river, and like a stream in spate, the glory of the nations.
• The Lord says to his 72 disciples, “Whatever house you go into, let your first words be ‘Impact upon this house’. And if a man lives there who has already experienced this impact, your own impact will go and rest on him; if not it will come back to you. Cure those who are sick and say, the Kingdom is upon you.” (Luke 10.1-12, 17-20) He goes on to discuss with the disciples the impact that the very mention of His name had had on the devils who had fled from them.
• Lastly, St Paul tells the church at Galatia, a group much like our own this evening looking to Christ for the answers to life, that peace comes to all who follow the rule that the true cause of transformation in the world is the Cross (Galatians 6.14-18). For once we have been struck by the Cross and the Lord Who was crucified on it, we are now a new creature. We new creatures have marks all over us: not of what or who we were, but the same as those on Christ. Peace to St Paul is therefore the most massive impact on our souls and bodies. It changes how we think. It changes our vision of the world. It alters the way we speak. It turns the way we behave inside out. Peace is not the disappearance of difficulty; it is the beginning of an impact taking its lifelong effect. Its mark we can never erase. It is the mark of the Cross on our forehead at baptism. It is the wound that became a scar that everyone ought to be able to recognise as soon as they catch sight of us.

But there is more. In the Hebrew, Aramaic and Semitic world in which Christ and the apostles lived, “peace” is a normal, everyday greeting. We know it as Shalom in Hebrew, Salaam in Arabic, and Sliem in Maltese. It can mean tranquillity and wellbeing, wholeness and completion, concord and harmony, just as peace does in English. But it can also mean something pacified, something atoned for, something submitted to and accepted. There is a clue in the word Islam, which speaks of achieving peace only when you have submitted to the one God. For the followers of Jesus Christ, who is that One God, he reconciles everything in harmony, resolving all things that were at odds, abolishing our evil that is hostile to God’s good, bringing wholeness to the world of people, and achieving completion to His work of creation by one means alone: He makes peace by His Blood shed on the Cross (Colossians 1.20-22). The greatest peace of all, then, is that river in full spate of which Isaiah spoke. It is the impact of the Blood of Christ which no other force can withstand. It is the arrival of the new creation which is the Kingdom of God, coming with all its force and impact, whenever the Christian utters the name of Christ and announces the effect of the Cross.


“Peace, be still,” cries Christ above the storm and it is still. How often do we call out with His Name as a curse of casual indignation or the bare-teeth howl of attack. It is not always easy to be a man of peace, or a woman of peace, even with that Name on your lips.


But in our quieter and most clear-sighted moments, the Name of Jesus Christ is not only the tranquillity and wholeness for which we long. It is the lifelong and sustained effect which transforms us, and the whole world of people among whom we belong, into the Kingdom. We believe in Christ because of His impact on our every thought, word and act - whether they have originated from His Kingdom, or whether they are what needs immediate correction so that we are set back on the course that is true. We believe in Christ, not just because it is our culture, or a personal belief. We believe in Christ because this is how the entire created universe has been constructed. It is there we can see that Christ is its universal King ruling everything, especially everything hostile that disobeys Him. It is there we can see how everything fits together to make His Kingdom, which we pray will come on earth as it is in heaven.


When we pray for someone who has died, we say, “May they rest in peace.” But this peace is no escape from the world or a departure from its struggles. It is to witness by Christ’s light the impact of His Kingdom taking its effect in every soul one by one, as they are won for Christ in this world and the next. Thus in a few moments’ time we will worship the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world to grant us peace. “Peace,” says the Lord, “not as the world gives,” but the peace that is to see the Father in Christ, and to know the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send, so that we may always dwell in Christ. Do not be afraid of this, he says, because these words are part of the last conversation Jesus has, before He is betrayed and condemned to shed His Blood for us on the Cross. It is no wonder, then, that the Lord told us that if we would be His disciples we must take up our cross daily too. “Peace to all who follow this rule.”

Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearers: Homily at the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London, 12th May 2019

Why are we looking at the visit of the myrrh-bearing women to the Empty Tomb today, a fortnight after events? Their role was noteworthy on Good Friday, when we knew that there was a matter of hours between Jesus’ death and the beginning of the Sabbath for Joseph of Arimathea to procure the Holy Body, wrap it in linen and fragrant spices, and lay it in the Tomb. There is not enough time for the women to anoint him, but, like Joseph who lived in expectation of the Kingdom to come, they follow faithfully beyond the end, witnessing the place where He is laid. On the Sabbath morning when nothing can be done, in the midst of death, all they can do is to cry out, “O Christ as You foretold, show us Your resurrection.”

It is twenty-four hours before they can come to anoint the buried Lord properly. Thirty-three years earlier, three wise men had come with gold for a king, frankincense for a God, and myrrh for anointing the one who is to suffer and save us. Likewise on the first Pascha, Mary Magdalen, Salome and Mary the mother of James come as Wise Women to replay the scene in the cave of the Nativity in the cave of the Burial and see it borne out, honouring the one whom they recognise as The Lord, the Divine Son, and the Servant who must suffer. But although they have been told of the Resurrection like the other disciples, and desire with Joseph to see it , they do not expect it when it comes.

This is why we have waited for two weeks to hear the account of what confronted them, for it to dawn on us as it needed to dawn on them.

The Gospel we have heard today is from the close of St Mark’s Gospel, widely recognised to be the earliest of the Gospel texts to have been written down. Famously, there are several versions of how it ends. In our Church, we have the long ending, which summarises The Lord’s appearance to Mary Magdalen who then goes on to announce the resurrection to the mourning apostles (which is told in fuller detail in St John’s Gospel) , then His appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (which we know from St Luke’s Gospel), and finally to Peter and the other Ten remaining apostles exhorting them to baptise the whole of creation and bring those who believe into the Kingdom of heaven (which we hear in St Matthew’s Gospel). What we have in St Mark’s Gospel is the presentation in the hours and days immediately after the astonishment of the resurrection, a vivid moment in which The Lord is both drawn up into heaven and remains working with the apostles to confirm their words by new miracles - in other words by the Holy Spirit that He sends and gives in power. But only a few verses before, are the words describing the first reaction of the myrrh-bearing women, the last words of St Mark’s Gospel on which all authorities and Churches are agreed:

They went out and ran away from the Tomb, trembling with amazement. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Why should the gospel end there – which of the endings is original – have we lost the true ending? Well, that is not how to look at it. The entire thrust of St Mark’s Gospel, which relies so heavily on the direct witness testimony of St Peter himself, is how those who are drawn to follow Jesus genuinely believe Him and everything He says about the Kingdom of God (some of it very difficult to hear); and, while they accept that it must all be true, because of the casting out of evil forces and the miracles that confirm His words at every significant turn, but that they barely have faith in Him until after the resurrection. Until that confronts them, they fail to grasp what He means about the coming of the end that will lead to the coming of God. It has not sunk in about the God Who will endure through and beyond it all (Mark 13.31), Who will be seized and made to suffer because His prayer in the Temple alone is valid as that of the Divine Son of Man, Whose appearance as the true Messiah is made clear not because He curses a fruitless fig tree, but because the attachment of His body will bless the Cross that will kill Him, yet be the source of inexhaustible forgiveness and salvation. They cannot absorb His principle that only through entering into this dark reality can one age end and another achieve its inauguration. Indeed the disciples believe His words and love His talk of the reign of God, His Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven; but it is not the faith by which their lives are shaped - until they have been through what is to come and come out the other side.

So James and John the sons of Zebedee asked Him (Mark 10) if they could sit on either side of Him in the glory He kept talking about in the Kingdom; and He replied that they would have to be baptised with His baptism, and drink the cup that He must drink, and become a slave bound to the service of all - a ransom for the release of all the rest, and not His own, if He would truly be set free. To drive home the point, The Lord straight away goes on to heal a blind man, who has cried out, “I want my sight back”. The message could not be louder: the disciples are sunk in complete mystification; despite everything they have heard, they are dazzled by a fantasy. Instead, it takes someone who is physically blind to perceive that here is a simple question of faith. Can The Lord endure, can He be trusted to save, can He be relied on to turn the impossible inside out? The blind man has foreseen the Cross, because He trusts that Jesus’ mercy can cause His fruitless vision to wither, like the fig tree did, into the clear sight of Christ in His true light. The disciples had seen this on the mount of Transfiguration; they worshipped, but in that moment they only saw the light, without realising where the light was to come from and how it would shine in our side of the firmament of creation. For the One Who is all Glorious Light in Heaven must in this world inevitably take the form of a human body beaten on the head with dead wooden sticks and disfigured on the beams of a tree.

Those with faith like the blind man, those who had been along the same path of sorrow yet knew to trust and endure, had an instinct that the light of Transfiguration, the darkness of destruction in one age, and the beginning of the new, were all part of one piece; a seamless robe, so to speak.

Mary Magdalen, Salome, and Mary the mother of James had been through it all with Jesus, to the Cross, to the Tomb with Joseph, and now came back to be first witnesses that the Tomb was empty of burial and death. Their belief and trust was transformed by the Cross and the resurrection into the life of faith. It is too great to absorb, so they run away and say nothing out of sheer fright and shock. But they do go to Peter and tell him of the new beginning, back in Galilee where it had all started out. Thus Peter, who denied the Christ he followed, becomes a man of faith in the Risen Lord Who endured the shame to give His life as a ransom for the release of all. Thus the wise women who kept seeing and recognising The Lord anoint not the buried Christ, for he has been raised. Instead, their anointing is realised in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit for the new age that is the Church, producing for ever more not just believers and followers, but people who have embraced the whole of Christ as He has embraced the whole of them, people of faith whose entire life and mind and soul has turned on this point, that The Lord who was dead is risen.

It took the three women hours to deal with this realisation. It took the other disciples and apostles days. It took St Thomas a whole week. We have been given two weeks to absorb that the Son of Man risen from the dead dies no more and what that means. This changes everything about how we view the creation, the purpose of our belief, other people in it who do not follow in this belief, the nature of religion, our relationship with the Person of God the Son, and the entire dimension and trajectory of human nature. Our faith is not some department of our personality, an add-on belief system. Since Christ is not dead but raised in our own flesh, our faith is simply how life is. As the man who wanted his sight back realised, Christ has turned the impossible inside out and the resurrection is now in our nature.

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.