Address for Tuesday in Holy Week. Preached at the Cathedral Church of All Saints, Wakefield at the 7pm Eucharist on Tuesday April 3rd.

What happened between Palm Sunday and Good Friday?

In asking that question, I am speaking on two different levels. What happened, historically – what actually took place on these first days of Holy Week – but also what can have happened to explain that enormous difference between the procession into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and the one out of it on Good Friday?

First of all, it is worth pointing out just how precise the indications of time are in this part of the gospel – the Passion Narrative – as compared with earlier on. And the time framework has proved so fundamental to our history that it has dictated the pattern of our Christian worship, and in the Western world, at least until comparatively recently, given us the shape of our working week.

We know that Jesus died on the day before the Sabbath (Saturday) – that is Friday – and that ‘on the third day’ – that is Sunday – his tomb was found empty. That is why – because it is the day of the resurrection – our principal day of weekly worship, and our day of rest, is the first day of the week, rather than the last.

We also know that ‘the day before he suffered’ (that is, Thursday) he shared his Last Supper with his disciples, and it is from the Passion Narrative in St Mark’s gospel that we get the rest.

In the other gospels, it is not absolutely clear – and nor does it really matter – as to precisely which day of the week Jesus entered Jerusalem. The gospel writers are not journalists and have more important things to tell us. But Mark does, in fact, spell it out. He tells us what happened on the day before the Last Supper (in other words, on Wednesday), on the day before that (Tuesday), and on the one before that (Monday). And he tells us that Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was the day before that – in other words on Sunday.

So let’s look first at the events of the beginning of the week – from Monday to Wednesday – in each of the gospel traditions: the historical part of my question, if you like. And because, as he so often does, the writer of the fourth gospel, John, goes his own way, I shall look at the first three gospels first.

All three accounts tell us that Jesus stayed about two miles outside Jerusalem in the Bethany/Mount of Olives area. This was because the city itself would have been packed with pilgrims for the Passover feast and finding accommodation would have been nigh impossible.

Mark tells us that Jesus came into Jerusalem again on the day after his triumphal entry (that is Monday), ‘and he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons.’ (Mark 11.15). Matthew and Luke also place this incident after Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, but without referring to any particular day.

All three writers then show Jesus as spending a considerable amount of time teaching: first of all in the temple, where his teaching is quite open, and both the crowds and those in authority such as the priests, the scribes and the elders can hear it; but then afterwards, in private to his disciples. A central feature of his teaching to the disciples is a long discourse about the coming destruction of Jerusalem, presented in what we call ‘apocalyptic’ language, suggesting that it might be the start of the end of the world.
Mark places all this teaching on the Tuesday, which is probably artificial but has the advantage of separating the week’s events and so giving them each due emphasis. Matthew spreads the teaching over the whole period from the entry into Jerusalem without any indication of time, and Luke tells us that ‘every day he was teaching in the temple, but at night he went out and lodged on the mount called Olivet’ (Luke 21.37), thus indicating that there were several days between Jesus’ initial entry into Jerusalem and his arrest and trial.

Mark and Matthew both describe the anointing of Jesus with precious ointment in the house of Simon the leper in Bethany on the night before the Last Supper. It was after that, according to them, that Judas went to the chief priests to betray Jesus. Luke omits the anointing, perhaps because he has a similar story earlier in his gospel, but also suggests that Judas’ betrayal was on the day before the Last Supper.

The evangelist John, as I said, goes his own way, and I don’t want to confuse you by exaggerating the differences, which honestly do not matter. John doesn’t have the same conception of clock-time as the first three gospel writers and when he uses expressions such as ‘hour’ and ‘the third day’ they are usually symbolic. Suffice it to say that John moves almost immediately after the Entry of Jerusalem into a long series of discourses by Jesus. Most of them he puts in the context of the Last Supper, so that there really is no impression of the passage of time at all. He also moves the account of the Cleansing of the Temple right to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, precisely because he can explain its real significance more easily by moving it away from its historical position in the days before Jesus’ arrest.

But you can see that, in the other gospels, the basic shape of the beginning of the week is the same: Entry into Jerusalem; Cleansing of the Temple; teaching, which is first public and then private; the anointing of Jesus – in Matthew and Mark – which we are told is to prepare his body for burial; then the betrayal by Judas.

But what happened to explain why that entry in triumph turned into an exit in shame?

The catalyst was undoubtedly the cleansing of the temple, though we shouldn’t exaggerate its scale and imagine the Temple as something like this cathedral, but with the nave full of tradesmen. The Temple was an enormous affair and, in Jesus’ day, not even finished. The traders would have been in one of the many courtyards, and it would all have looked like a bit of a scuffle. But it was both an excuse and also a threat. It was threat to the Temple system, particularly if Jesus really did turn out to have the authority he claimed to have, but there was more to it than that. There was the matter of Jesus’ saying soon afterwards, recorded by both Mark and Matthew, that the temple would be destroyed. They don’t mention the saying about Jesus destroying it and rebuilding it in three days which only John records at this point, but they do know that Jesus must have said it, because they record that it was given as evidence at his trial and they mention it as one of the crowd’s taunts when Jesus hangs on the cross.

Now we know about terrorist threats, don’t we? About discovering evidence that someone intends to launch a spectacular attack. We can almost hear their reasoning. “An attempt to destroy the temple at Passover time, when it’s full of all those people? He’s already been on a reconnaissance trip and overturned the tables, and since then we’ve heard that he’s threatened to destroy the whole lot.” Judas could have provided them with that information, and it might have sounded more sinister if it was a private remark. That’s enough evidence surely? After all, you can’t be too careful. You have to act on serious intelligence in the war against terror.

Then there was the public teaching. A lot of it was quite confrontational as far as the scribes, priests and elders were concerned. There were parables in which, Matthew tells us, ‘they perceived that he was speaking about them’ (Matthew 21.45) and it was all taking place, on their home ground, in the temple. They daren’t act in public, because Jesus was popular with the crowds – though we shall see later in the week, just as we can see in the lives of our own leaders, just how quickly popularity can turn into something else. But there is a growing sense, in all the gospels, that they’re out for the kill.

A later incident is also important. All three gospels mention that question to Jesus about whether it is ‘lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not’ (Mark 12.14 and parallels), and all three tells us that it was meant as an entrapment. The religious authorities deliberately took along representatives of the civil power so that they might trip him up. If he then said you could pay foreign taxes, then it would alienate him from the crowds by whom the payment was loathed as a symbol of Roman oppression. If he said you couldn’t, then there would be witnesses. Luke expressly mentions this as evidence given in the trial before Pilate.

The fact that Jesus didn’t intend to destroy the temple and that he didn’t fall into the trap on the matter about paying taxes is irrelevant. The last thing the authorities – whether Jewish or Roman – wanted at Passover time was any trouble. If they could get rid of the man altogether that would simplest, but they would need to get at him when he was on his own. That unexpected, but welcome, visit from Judas on Wednesday night gave them the lead they had hoped for.

I really intended to end there, but I shall just add a word about Judas’ role, because he is a personality who seems to fascinate contemporary human beings. What I do want to get across was that the disciples and the early Christians just couldn’t understand it. They were, to use a modern expression, gob smacked. How could someone so close to Jesus have done it? And that’s why, at this point in the gospels, his name is followed by the phrase ‘one of the twelve’ or ‘one of the disciples.’ ‘Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them.’ (Mark 14.10). It’s as if they have to keep reminding themselves of the terribleness of it all. It wasn’t just anyone. It was one of the twelve disciples.

But they couldn’t leave things there, so desirous is the human mind of some explanation, some motive. Mark just says that he did it, and that’s that, though he does add that the chief priests then promised him money. But Matthew can’t quite leave it at that and turns it round. “Ah, the money,” he seems to be thinking. “That must be why he did it.” So he makes money the motive, and has Judas ask for it. Luke’s explanation is that “Satan entered into Judas Iscariot,” (Luke 22.3) because he can’t imagine any of the disciples doing it otherwise. And by the time we get to John, Judas has become the baddie. As we heard in the gospel last night, John says it was Judas, and not the disciples in general, who objected to the cost of the ointment at Jesus’ anointing, and then adds his own opinion on the matter: which was that he only objected because he was the one who had the money box, from which he stole anyway! They’re only human, the gospel writers and, I suppose, in the end, we should be thankful for it, as well as for the fact that they show their hand so clearly. After all, in his account of the Last Supper in the gospel we have just heard, John also shows that he realises that there are no simple explanations where betrayal is concerned. Jesus wasn’t the first, and nor will he be the last, to be betrayed by a friend.

Well, that’s quite a bit of gospel detective work isn’t it?  It will, I hope, give you some clues as to why things might have turned out as they did, although we can see now, just as the gospel writers could see by the time they wrote, that even the plotting and conniving of human beings – a Judas, a Chief Priest or a Pilate here; a Peter, another disciple or a member of the crowd there – can be turned and used for good in the purposes of Almighty God. That is why we call it our salvation history. It’s flesh and blood stuff; it’s the story of the Old and New Testaments; the story of the Church; it’s my story and yours.

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Address for Maundy Thursday. Preached at the Cathedral Church of All Saints, Wakefield at 7pm Solemn Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Thursday April 5th 2007.

The words describing the Institution of the Eucharist from tonight’sepistle must surely be among the most familiar of the words we ever hear from Holy Scripture. Week after week and day after day the Church repeats them at the heart of the great Eucharistic prayer, and they have even influenced the way the evangelists tell the gospel story. Yet they are absent from the Gospel appointed for tonight’s liturgy. So I want to go elsewhere in the gospel, in search of those same words in another incident, and once again one which is as thoroughly familiar to us as it was to the early Church.

In the sixth chapter of his gospel, St John recounts the well-known miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. This miracle was obviously amongst Jesus’ most popular, for it is the only one to appear in all four gospels. Indeed Matthew and Mark even recount it twice – the second time with four thousand people fed – so marked was the early Church by its significance. 

But in John’s gospel it is called a sign – the word he always uses where the other gospel writers use ‘miracle’ – one of the seven signs of which the evangelist speaks, and two more of which I shall look at tomorrow in the Three Hours’ Devotion.  A ‘sign’, for St John, is pregnant with meaning, deeply symbolic, and always related to the person and work of Jesus Christ himself.  For John, Jesus’ miracles, his ‘signs’, tell us something about who Jesus is and what he has come to do and yet, conversely, they can only be understood in the light of who He is and that Work which the Father has given him to do.

You know the story well. A crowd has followed Jesus and, having fed them spiritually with his teaching, he now feeds them physically as well, by the multiplication of the loaves. He takes bread, gives thanks, and gives it to his disciples. Familiar words, not only to us, but also to those who wrote and read those early Christian writings which became our gospels. The feeding of the five thousand is not, of course, a Eucharist, but the way the story is told, in all the gospels, is laden with words which for us, and for them, describe the Christian Eucharist. In St John’s gospel, as I have just said, the miracle is even called a ‘sign’ – it points to something deeper than the multiplication of loaves itself, and that something is intimately connected to Jesus’ person and work.

In fact St John even lays it on rather thickly. All the gospels hint that the feeding took place at the time of the Passover, tonight in other words, on the day before Jesus died. But John actually states it. ‘Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand’ (John 6.4), he begins, before going on to recount the event. And the incident begins a whole chapter of teaching about Jesus as the Bread of Life. Verse after verse takes up the imagery of the manna in the wilderness, of Jesus himself being the Bread on which people will feed, of eating and drinking and never being hungry or thirsty again, of this Bread enabling people to live ‘for ever’, and above all, of Jesus giving us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink.  No-one reading that sixth chapter of St John’s gospel can fail to see the connection between the feeding of the multitude and the Christian Eucharist – for both are meant as ‘signs’ of who Jesus is, and as keys as to what he has come to do.

Then at the end of the account of the miraculous feeding, there is a wonderful example of what is called Johannine irony, one of many occasions in the gospel when John is reminding us that you have to look beyond what appears to be happening if you want to see what is really happening. He has already told us that it is the time of the Passover, and that the crowds followed Jesus ‘because they saw the signs which he did’, and now, after they have been fed with the loaves he tells us, ‘Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself’ (John 6. 15).  John intends us to understand, indeed in the verse before he tells us, that, once again, the crowd has missed the point. Impressed by the sign, the crowd wants to force Jesus to become their Messiah king. 

Irony indeed.  The next time we hear those words, even if we have to go to the other three gospels to find them, the next time we hear, ‘He took the bread, and gave thanks’ and so on, Jesus will withdraw once again – to the garden of Gethsemane. And there the crowd, or representatives of it, shall take him by force. All that is tonight. Then tomorrow,the crowd will use force again. They will collaborate with the religious and the political authorities and they will ‘make him king.’  They’ll even make a crown of thorns and dress him up in royal robes, and then they’ll make fun of him, spit on him, beat him up, and nail him to a cross.

And that is the Christian Eucharist. For you see there is one phrase missing in John’s account of the feeding of the five thousand. He tells us that Jesus took the bread; that he gave thanks; and that he gave it to his disciples. But he alone among the gospel writers omits to tell us that he broke it, just as he alone omits the Institution of the Eucharist from his account of the Last Supper.  Because Jesus’ death is the breaking of the bread. That’s the key to the significance of the miracle, and that is why the feeding of the five thousand cannot yet be the Christian Eucharist, and why Jesus withdraws from them. But on Good Friday the crowd will have their way. They will use all the force they can muster and, knowing not what they do, they really will make him King. The King who is the reason why we come to church at all, the King we welcomedon Palm Sunday and will see crowned tomorrow, and who tells us once again tonight to take bread, to give thanks, to break it, and to eat it, ‘for as often as (we) eat this bread and drink this cup, (we) proclaim (his) death’ (1 Cor 11. 26)

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Address for Good Friday. Preached at the Cathedral Church of All Saints, Wakefield at 7pm Solemn Liturgy on Friday April 6th 2007.

‘Almighty God, we beseech thee graciously to behold this thy family, for which Our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed, and given up into the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death upon the cross.’

Today’s Collect – and I have a particular reason for quoting it in its Prayer Book version – is an ancient prayer of the Church. It certainly existed in a written collection by the end of the seventh or the beginning of the eighth century and it was perhaps written long before that. It has been part of the prayer of the Church ever since.

Cranmer would have known it as one of the Postcommunion Prayers for Wednesday in Holy Week but his use of it as the first, and for us the only, Collect for Good Friday was supremely inspired.

For it is unique among Collects. It has no complicated structure of clauses which first describe some attribute of God, before articulating a particular request, and a desired result. It asks for nothing. And it expects no answer. It simply asks God to look at us.

What more could we really ask for on Good Friday? We dare not offer ‘the sacrifice of praise’ on this day when any liturgical offering would seem utterly inadequate. Instead, we have listened to the account of Jesus’ last hours and the choir, on our behalf, has dramatically played the part of the crowd: ‘Crucify him, crucify him!’

If we are honest, we should probably have to admit that if we had been there, it would not have been any different. We should, no doubt, have joined in. But we do not even have to look that far. Although we do not care to admit it for much of the year, on Good Friday we face up to the reality. In the face of the crucified one ‘for us…and for our salvation’ we are forced to say: ‘Just look at us!’

And while we are being realistic, we should have to admit that what there is for God to look at in our lives on Good Friday is not very edifying. It is, as the popular Anglican Communion hymn (NEH 273) puts it, ‘our misusing of (his) grace, our prayer so languid and our faith so dim.’  Yes, just look at us!

But Cranmer, influenced perhaps by the first English translations of the scriptures, has translated those words ‘look at’ by the word ‘Behold’, and that word sends us back to a phrase which resounds through the passion narrative in St John’s gospel, not only in the version we heard today, but in most English versions ever since: ‘Behold the man!’ (John 19.5)

It was quite mundane in the way Pilate meant it. It means what I have just said. ‘Just look at him! Here he is, dressed up in purple robes just for the fun of it, beaten, mocked and wearing a crown of thorns. That’s your King. Just look at him!’

But St John, in the most supreme example of the irony so characteristic of his gospel says something else. ‘Behold THE man!’ Behold the only truly human being there has ever been, in the sense of the most complete, the most conformed to God’s purposes and the most completely in tune with his will. Behold humanity as it should be!

 

And so when we ask God to ‘look at us’ using the words ‘behold this thy family’ we are able to say what the hymn I quoted really says:
‘Look not on our misusing of thy grace, our prayer so languid and our faith so dim,’ but rather, ‘Look, Father, look on his anointed face, and only look on us as found in him.

But dare we say that? Have we the right to say ‘behold this thy family’ when we really feel we can only say, ‘just look at us!’ Can human beings, in the light of the crucifixion, really claim to be God’s family? Do not humanity’s actions really suggest that we are the enemies of God rather than his family – of his own flesh and blood?

Yes we dare, and we can. Because that same word ‘behold’ comes again later in St John’s Passion. In those last few moments of his agony on the cross, just before the ‘I thirst’ for the world’s salvation and the ‘It is finished’ which achieved it, we hear these words:

‘Now there stood by the cross of Jesus, his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, ‘Woman, behold thy son.’ Then saith he to the disciple, ‘Behold thy mother.’ And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home.’ (John 19. 26-27 AV).

Once again this is not some sort of human interest story. It is the evangelist John who is writing, and his words are full of symbolic meaning. On the cross Jesus creates a family, and not merely a human family – a domestic arrangement between Mary and John – though there is nothing to say that Jesus’ words do not mean that as well. It is a divine family, the Church, that is being created in that momentwhich the evangelist calls, for the twenty-first and final time, Jesus’ ‘hour’, and which is always the hour of his death and glorification on the cross.

It is only and immediately after this giving of Mary and John to each other that John continues, ‘after this, knowing that all things were now accomplished….’ (John 19. 28) and leads on to Jesus’ final words, ‘It is finished.’

It is accomplished. What is thus accomplished in the death of Christ is that the Church is born, as the evangelist underlines when he tells us that from his pierced side flowed the water and blood of the sacraments of baptism and the holy Eucharist.

So, yes, Christ was ‘contented’ or ‘willing to put up with’, betrayal, being manipulated and subjected to the lengths to which human wickedness can go. He was ‘was content’ to suffer death in the most ignominious way possible: death on the cross, a sign which proclaims that he was cursed by God himself for this is, as St Luke tells us, humanity’s hour and the power of darkness.  But for the Christ of St John’s gospel, and the inspiration for today’s Collect, it is the hour of his glorification, the hour when God accomplishes humanity’s salvation and the hour when the Christian Church - God’s own flesh and blood family - is born out of the wounds of Christ’s hands and side.

‘Almighty God, we beseech thee graciously to behold this thy family, for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed, and given up in the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death upon the cross, who now liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.’

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First Address for the Three Hours’ Devotion. Preached at the Cathedral Church of All Saints, Wakefield on Good Friday, April 6th 2007

You may not know it, but very few churches actually still have the Three Hours’ Devotion on Good Friday. When I was a teenager, most Church of England parishes still kept it and, indeed, it was probably the central act of worship – if you can call it that – of this solemn and holy day. In those days it was more popular than the proper Liturgy of the Day, now thankfully restored to its central position. Its celebration was so widespread, that you might have thought it was the way the Church of England kept Good Friday.

Yet the devotion only arrived in our Church in the 1860s. There is a record of it taking place in St Paul’s Cathedral in London as early as 1876, but it was in the Anglo-Catholic parish of St Alban’s, Holborn, also in London, that the new Vicar, Fr Alexander Mackonochie introduced it for the first time, more than ten years earlier. He got it, as he got so much else, from the Roman Catholic Church. But even in that Church, it was a comparatively recent addition to the keeping of Holy Week, introduced, as many things are, for pastoral reasons.

For just as we owe our cribs and our nativity plays – so central to the keeping of an Anglican Christmas – to St Francis and his attempts to make the Christmas story real for his contemporaries, so we owe the Three Hours’ Devotion to Jesuit missionaries in South America, who introduced it after a terrible earthquake in Lima, Peru in 1687. Mindful of the real suffering of the people there, they sought, by their preaching, to apply the last words of Jesus to their situation.

For that was the subject of the first Three Hours’ Devotion: the seven last ‘words’ spoken by Jesus from the Cross, on which he hung – the gospels tell us – from noon until three o’clock in the afternoon. That was the subject, too, in any traditional Three Hours Service in the centuries which followed though, nowadays, a preacher will feel free to develop other aspects of the Passion story as well or instead.

The devotion has, I think, long since gone from the Roman Catholic Church. I don’t remember ever hearing of its being held in any of their churches, even when it was common in ours. And it has mostly gone from our own Church too. It remains in a few places, such as this great Cathedral, where you still have the resources to keep Good Friday in several different ways, and I am glad that it is so. Your invitation has enabled to me to preach one for the first time, something I have always wanted to do, though whether I shall still feel that way in three hours’ time remains to be seen.

I also intend to stick to the traditional – and original – subject: the seven ‘words’ spoken by Jesus from the Cross, but I want to present each word in a slightly different way. 

First of all, I shan’t be taking the ‘words’ in their traditional order. You know, perhaps, that none of the gospel writers mentions all seven ‘words’? Their traditional order was arrived at by combining the different gospel accounts and placing the ‘words’ in a logical sequence, beginning with ‘Father, forgive them’ (Luke 23. 34) at the beginning of the Crucifixion, and ending with ‘Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!’ (Luke 24. 46) which, according to St Luke, Jesus utters just before he dies.

What I want to do this afternoon is to take the ‘words’ by looking at them as they are presented to us by each of the evangelists. Why, I want to ask, does Mark or Luke or John, present us with this particular ‘word’? What can he mean by it and how is it related to the gospel he is trying to preach?

This is, I think, a fair approach because none of the ‘words’ are repeated in what we might identify as three gospel traditions. Mark has only one ‘word’ from the cross and Matthew, because he follows the shape and much of the text of Mark’s gospel so closely, reproduces it. So we need to see how this ‘word’ fits in with the general thrust of Mark’s (or Matthew’s) gospel if we are to understand why he records it and why it so clearly expresses what the passion means for him.

Luke, who has ‘three’ words, has a similar purpose. He wrote a generation after Mark and, although he has read Mark’s account, he writes for a more established Christian Church and wants to present his message in way which will be fresh for them.

Then, by the time the fourth gospel – that of John – reaches its final, written form, yet another generation has passed. By now, the Church seems to have well-established patterns of ministry and worship, so that although John’s gospel is positively overflowing with references to and images of Baptism and the Holy Communion, he doesn’t actually feel the need to give an account of Christ’s own baptism or the institution of the Eucharist at all. So we need to see what he might be trying to get across in his three ‘words’ – which are different again from the ones in Mark/Matthew and Luke.

So, as I look at each ‘word’ I shall need to be looking at the gospel as a whole, of which the ‘word’ as such is but a single text. In the case of the first ‘word’ (in Mark and Matthew) and with those in St Luke’s gospel, I can probably do it ‘word’ by ‘word’, but in the case of St John’s gospel, his understanding of the Passion – as with everything else – is so dense and complex, that I shall need to devote an entire address to it, before preaching on each of the ‘words’ separately. Because, as you will see, my method of preaching the ‘words’ in John’s account will not be quite the same as that of the others.

I need to go back to the gospel as a whole each time, because, I believe, you cannot understand the significance of the Passion for any of the gospel writers without some understanding of the way their gospel is constructed. This is because – and this might surprise some of you – all of the gospels are written with the Passion and Resurrection at their very centre.

The most obvious reason for this is that without the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ there would be no gospel. An account of the teachings, parables and miracles of a holy man who came to nothing would be of little interest to anybody. In fact, to be fair, we have to admit that they were only of secondary interest even to the early Church. St Paul’s conversion, preaching of the gospel and early letters predate all four of our gospels, and the fact that any of them got written down at all was probably a matter of ‘setting the record straight’ before the disciples died. In that way the Church would always be able to appeal to authentic written accounts which are reasonably contemporaneous with the events they describe. St Paul himself, for example, doesn’t show much of an interest in the day-to-day life of Jesus of Nazareth at all.

Even for the gospel writers, such detail is hardly central. We really must not think of the gospels as biographies or journalistic accounts of Jesus’s life which conclude with his death and resurrection simply because they came at the end of it. For they were, in fact, written the other way round – with the Passion, Death and Resurrection as their theological centre and the very reason for their being written at all.

When I said that this might surprise some of you, I was thinking of the sheer proportion of each gospel which is taken up with the subject of Jesus’ Passion, Death and Resurrection. Six of Mark’s sixteen chapters – over a third of his gospel – are set in the last week of Jesus’ earthly life. Eight of Matthew’s twenty-eight chapters cover the same period, but then two of his have dealt with Jesus’s birth – a subject not treated by Mark at all. When you take that away, the proportion – nearly a third – is not all that much different. Luke is the writer for whom the details of Jesus’s earthly life take up the largest proportion – about three-quarters – of the gospel’s length, but he wrote two books of the New Testament and clearly intended them to be read as a whole. John sets ten of his twenty-one chapters in Holy Week and Easter Week – that’s nearly half the gospel! – and his is the account from which commentators have sometimes counted the passage of time and guessed that Jesus’s public ministry lasted about three years. So that’s eleven chapters for three years’ ministry, and ten set in just two weeks.

Given the absolute centrality of Jesus’s Passion, Death and Resurrection, you won’t be surprised to hear that this was also, probably, the first part of the gospel story to have been written down. Compared with the rest of the gospel accounts, it is also incredibly detailed, giving us almost a blow-by-blow account of Jesus’ trial and death. And, although there are some very important differences between the accounts of his Passion and Death – and even more in the matter in which each evangelist treats Jesus’s resurrection – the four gospels come much closer to each other in the way in which they report events at this point than they do at any other.

I am telling you all this, in a way, to justify my method in presenting the seven ‘words’ out of their traditional order and grouping them together according to the evangelist who gives them to us. But it is also to underline just how central the Passion is to the gospel message. It isn’t, or at least it turned out not to be, the terrible end of a man who led a good life. For the earliest Christians – and among them were those who wrote our gospels – it was clear that, terrible though it all was, there was a purpose in it all. And not just any purpose, either: God’s purpose. They could only see it afterwards, with hindsight, but it governed and framed the way they were to tell the story. And they are telling it for us. As John makes clear at the end of his gospel, ‘these (things) are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.’ (John 20.30)

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Second Address for the Three Hours’ Devotion. Preached at the Cathedral Church of All Saints on Good Friday, April 6th 2007

‘And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Elo-i, Elo-i, lama sabacthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”’ (Mark 15. 34)

Both Matthew and Mark give us this ‘word’ from the Cross, though there are very slight differences between them in the translation of the quotation from Psalm 22. Mark uses the more colloquial Aramaic language which Jesus undoubtedly spoke, whereas Matthew’s is closer to, though not identical with, the more formal – official, if you like – Hebrew text as it would have been used in the Temple and synagogues. But since, I imagine, you don’t want two sermons on one text, I am going to concentrate on what Mark might have meant by it, and you’ll have to take my word for it that Matthew, though he tones down the stark horror a little bit, does not significantly alter Mark’s point of view.

I pointed out in my first address what a large proportion of the gospel text is set in the last week of Jesus’s earthly life, so central is it to the message they wish to get across. But, in fact, there is more to it than that. We get references to the Passion earlier on in all the gospels. In St Luke, you remember, the prophet Simeon foresees it when Jesus is presented in the Temple, and the myrrh the wise men offer in Matthew’s account of the nativity has traditionally been seen as a sign of the suffering involved in his death.

But St Mark actually structures his account in the hope that we will see just how the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus are the key to it all.

First of all, he is the only one of the evangelists to call his account a ‘gospel’ – he really does give us a title, if you like, unlike the others. It’s a gospel – good news – because he is consciously, in the words of St Paul, ‘(preaching) Christ crucified…Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.’ (1 Cor 1.23) and not just giving us a biographical account.

And then he divides his account into two distinct halves. The first half reads almost like a detective story. As they hear about the mighty works Jesus does, Mark’s readers are meant to ask themselves just who this man is.

‘What is this? A new teaching! With authority he commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him,’ (Mark 1.27) he tells us after Jesus’s first miracle. ‘Who then is this,’ say the disciples, after the calming of the storm, ‘that even wind and sea obey him?’ (Mark 4.41). For, it is precisely in the miracles that Jesus seems to be giving us a clue as to who he really is.

And sometimes he lays it on as thick as he can. When Jesus says to the paralytic, ‘My son, your sins are forgiven,’ (Mark 2.5), the scribes are, not surprisingly, scandalised, because they can see his claim for what it is. But Jesus spells it out, ‘“Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your pallet and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins” – he said to the paralytic – “I say to you, rise, take up your pallet and go home.”’ (Mark 2. 9-11). Mark is telling us who Jesus really is.

Yet, at the same time as he gives us clue after clue as to who Jesus is, everyone who is healed or released from the grip of evil is told not to say anything to anyone. If the demons recognise him, Jesus tells them to keep quiet. The way Mark tells the story, Jesus is both showing us that he is the Messiah, and yet keeping it a secret from everyone at the same time.

You see, Mark doesn’t want us to get the wrong idea of what sort of Messiah Jesus is. The people to whom Jesus came were full of Messianic expectation. They knew that one day God would send someone to liberate the people of Israel from their oppression under Roman rule and establish them as a kingdom of righteousness and peace. And there were plenty of pretenders to the role. You might almost say that claimants to be the Messiah were ten a penny.

But what if they have got it wrong? What if the Messiah is more than that? Not just a restorer of Israel, but the one who will establish a Kingdom of God which is far, far wider than that? The way Mark tells the gospel story, he shows us that, although Jesus acts clearly and openly in his claims to be the Messiah, he chooses a small group – the twelve disciples – in the hope that they might understand that their expectations need to be radically rethought. ‘Privately to his own disciples he explained everything,’ (Mark 4.34) Mark tells us after a series of parables which seem to them to hide as much as they reveal about the kingdom of God.

But they don’t get it. They don’t seem to understand much more than the crowds. So finally, right at the heart of his gospel – the half-way mark, if you like – Mark recounts the conversation between Jesus and his disciples which took place at Caesarea Philippi. He asks them who people are saying he is. And they come up with the suggestions of John the Baptist (come back from the dead), of Elijah, or of one of the other prophets, all of whom they expect to be predecessors of the Messiah. And then he asks them who they think he is, and Peter, you remember, says ‘You are the Christ.’ (Mark 8.30).

So that’s it. The truth is out. Except that it isn’t. First of all, Mark tells us immediately after Peter’s confession: ‘And he charged them to tell no-one about him.’ (Mark 8.31) and then he goes on, again immediately – to use a very Marcan word – to say, ‘And he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.’ (Mark 8.31) And Mark doesn’t leave it there. Up to this point in the gospel he usually tells us that Jesus ‘taught’ them, without telling us really what he taught them, and we have seen that he often seems to have left them in some sort of confusion. But after teaching them this – that is, that he is to suffer and die – Mark adds, ‘And he said this plainly.’

Needless to say, the teaching doesn’t go down very well, either with Peter, who simply rebukes him – “you’ve got it all wrong” – or with the other disciples, who still do not understand. So Mark tells us again – it’s artificial, to be sure, but Mark is preaching the gospel, not writing things up for the Yorkshire Post. He tells us twice more, at one chapter intervals. Three times Jesus predicts the passion, three times he teaches them about true discipleship (and this isn’t very welcome either, being mainly about putting yourself last and being servants, rather than people who sit on thrones), and three times they get it wrong.

If there is a constant underlying theme to the two halves of Mark’s gospel, it’s this. Everybody gets it wrong. The crowds like the miracles, but can’t see beyond them to the person behind them. The disciples, even when Jesus tries to teach them alone, can see that he is the Messiah, but they cannot get beyond their own preconceptions of what they think that Messiah should be and do. They’re expecting a glorious liberator, not a suffering servant. And throughout, the scribes and the Pharisees – the religious officials and the serious practitioners of the faith – are disturbed by what they see. They have their preconceptions too, and Jesus is going too far. His claims are blasphemous. He acts as if he was God.

By the time we get to the Passion Narrative itself, these three groups, in their different ways, turn against Jesus for one reason or another.

The crowds, first of all: the masses, the ordinary people, or whatever other name you want to give them. You and I as well, of course, because we are all, in one way or another, part of the crowd.

It’s amazing, in fact, how popular Jesus has been with the crowds, certainly in Mark’s version. Luke tends to single out the outcast and the neglected for special attention, but Mark presents us with a ‘popular’ Jesus if ever there was one. Crowds like someone who appears to be knocking the establishment a bit and it’s always easier to see any hard words directed at ‘them’ rather than at ourselves. And when they’d heard that he’d probably show up in Jerusalem for Passover, they thought there might be fireworks. So they were out in force, even if Jesus’ entry was rather a comical affair on a baby donkey. And sure enough, there were fireworks. That incident in the temple, then his arrest, and now, unusually, a chance to have their say, even though the trial had already found him guilty. One thing was certain. He wasn’t the one they were expecting. Or if he was, he was a total failure, since the Romans had got him and he was going to be crucified. Well, he got what he deserved! Setting himself up like that and then not giving us what we want! We’ll show him what we do to leaders who don’t deliver! Out with him! ‘Crucify him!’ (Mark 15.13). I have never quite understood the objection of those who say they can’t understand why the crowd changed so quickly. It sounds only too familiar to me. We don’t crucify our political leaders, of course, because we are far too civilised, aren’t we? But we still like to humiliate them, especially when they haven’t delivered.

Then the chief priests and the scribes. The ones – they were the educated religious, after all – who realised what Jesus’s claims actually meant. It wasn’t just that he was very inconvenient – though he was – threatening their power and their authority and the system which suited them just fine. Much more important than that, he was a blasphemer. He was not the Messiah – any scholar could see that – but, by acting as if he were God, notably over the matter of the forgiveness of sins, he was showing himself to be the opposite. He was evil. So for God’s sake, he must be got rid of. In the name of God, he would have to die. They were sure that they were right, as people who do things in God’s name always are. It’s not unfamiliar, is it?

And, finally, the disciples. Well they stuck it a bit longer than the crowds. After all, they were his friends. They would need to stand behind him. Peter articulates their resolve by saying, ‘If I must die with you, I will not deny you,’ (Mark 14.26) just as it had been Peter who put into words their recognition that Jesus was the Christ. But Mark adds, ‘And they all said the same.’ (Mark 14.26). Peter denies, because Peter has, as so often, been the spokesman, in Mark’s mind, they all deny. Judas betrays, but when Jesus tells them that one of them is to do so and they each ask ‘is it I,’ (Mark 14.19) it is only because, as Mark sees it, they are all capable of betrayal. Which is, of course, in a way, what they all do. After the arrest, Mark tells us, starkly, ‘And they all forsook him and fled.’ (Mark 14.50).

There are others involved in the death, most notably the Roman authorities, but in Mark’s view they are simply instruments. Mark makes no excuses for Pilate’s corruption or for his wanting as little trouble as possible at pilgrimage time in a busy city. I suppose he thought that was just what you’d expect from an occupying government.

But the point is that Jesus is totally alone. By the time of his crucifixion, the disciples have disappeared. Everyone who is there, in Mark’s version, mocks and humiliates: the passers-by, the other victims, the soldiers, the chief priests and the scribes. Jesus dies abandoned.

So when Mark records this ‘word’ – which has a remarkable authenticity about it, incidentally, especially as, muttered breathlessly as it probably was, the hearers mistook it as a cry of help to Elijah to step in and save the unjustly condemned man – he is identifying totally with Jesus’s abandonment. It is as if he knows just how Jesus feels. Absolutely everyone has deserted him and thus, in some way at least, connived in his death. And it probably feels as though God, too, has abandoned him.

God hasn’t abandoned him, of course, and Mark sees that and spells it out in the message of the angel to the women at the empty tomb: ‘He is risen…as he told you.’ (Mark 16.8). But at the place of a skull, Mark is telling it how it is. He is showing us just how terrible it all was, just how alone and abandoned Jesus appeared to be.

That is why these words have so often been a comfort to many in despair and hopelessness. It isn’t a matter of saying, ‘Cheer up. Jesus has been there too.’ It is a matter of two complementary, yet apparently contradictory, realities. Jesus’s sense of abandonment was real and total. He had no-one left, that was self-evident. And his cry shows that it felt as if even God had abandoned him. Yet God had not abandoned him. He would die, certainly, practically with these words on his lips. But God would raise him from the dead.

The same reality applies to us. There are, or there will be, times when we feel totally abandoned – by friends, by family, by everyone and by God. That is what it feels or will feel like, and to pretend to lessen the reality of that feeling is not to understand what hopelessness and despair is. But though it feels like that, those of us outside the situation know that that is not the full reality. I can’t speak for friends, family and the rest, but God hates nothing that He has made, as we have been saying all Lent, and he does not abandon his loved ones.

This isn’t something to preach at those who feel lost and abandoned. They feel the way they do precisely because they can, for the moment, only see hopelessness and despair. What we can do is show by our love and support – and hope that others will show by their love and support, should such moments of hopelessness ever befall us – that, on their behalf, we continue to have faith in the God who has promised to raise up, for ‘the Eternal God is (our) refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.’ (Deuteronomy 33.27)

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Third Address for the Three Hours’ Devotion. Preached at the Cathedral Church of All Saints, Wakefield on Good Friday, April 6th 2007

‘And when they came to the place which is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on the right and one on the left. And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”’ (Luke 23. 33-34)

There are, as I said in my introductory address, three ‘words’ from the cross in Luke’s account of Our Lord’s passion and death. And in the case of two of them – the subjects of the next two addresses – I want to do as I did with that first ‘word’ as presented to us by Mark. That is, I shall try and see what Luke could be trying to say to us, in his overall preaching of the gospel, by including these particular sayings. In the case of Jesus’ word to the character we, oddly, call ‘the good thief’, I shall try and do so through a passage earlier in St Luke’s gospel: the parable we refer to by the equally odd name of ‘the Prodigal Son’, whereas in the case of the third Lucan ‘word’, I shall look at it, as I did with the ‘word’ in Mark, by telling you something of the shape and structure of Luke’s gospel narrative. 

But with this first ‘word’, I want to speak a little more generally, for although it is presented to us only by Luke, it could be a title for the Passion as a whole. Indeed, ‘forgiveness’ has been your Lenten theme this year in Wakefield, and you have just had an exhibition, called ‘the Forgiveness Project’, which has brought you face to face with people whose lives, to quote your Lent leaflet, ‘have been shattered by violence, tragedy and injustice.’  I was not able to see that exhibit, but I hope and imagine it amazed and moved you with its stories of those who really do have something to forgive, and therefore know, more than most of us, what they are talking about.

For forgiveness really is the ‘crux’ of the matter, it really is what the gospel is all about. Yet, most of the time, we cheapen it and we show that we do not know what we are talking about. We really never have the right to ask for it, and yet we presume to do so. And presumption is often the appropriate word.

It has become the vogue amongst politicians to ‘apologize’ – though, usually, they can’t even bring themselves to do that – for things that happened a long time ago, rather conveniently before the one doing the apologizing was in power. Please, don’t get me wrong. I am not denying the corporate responsibility of groups as general as the human race, or as particular as Christ’s Holy Catholic Church. And since we are part of both, we do bear responsibility for the sins of both, even though we may not personally have had a role in them. That is not what I mean.

What I am trying to say is that repentance – for that is the Christian word for it and apologizing, to my mind, only adds insult to injury when you’re talking about something as evil as the Holocaust or as wicked as the slave-trade – has a cost and we can cheapen that cost when we are happier repenting of things which are further away from our daily lives than those things which are, unfortunately, only too present in them. We certainly ought to be suspicious of anything which is in vogue amongst politicians in any case. There’s usually a reason for the things they say, and it often involves persuading you to vote for them at the next election.

We ought to start by admitting that the very concept of ‘forgiveness’ is difficult for us, even though it lies at the heart of the gospel, and I shall try to unpack something of what it means in my next address. Again and again, as he does here on the cross, Jesus speaks words of forgiveness. He taught his disciples to pray for their enemies; he taught his disciples, each time they prayed the Lord’s Prayer, to ask forgiveness only to the extent that they were prepared to forgive others; and here we see Jesus putting his own words into practice: ‘Father forgive them.’

These words are spoken over some Roman soldiers and the centurion in charge of the day’s proceedings. Yet in these words the Church has always seen a much wider application. In the story of Christ’s sufferings, Christians see the whole chronic rage of the human race, all those springs of hatred within the human heart that make for war and jealousy, terror, crime and violence, all that focussed on the person of God’s Son. Jesus takes it all into Himself, absorbs the world’s hatred, soaks up its rage, as it were, and draws out the poison. He ‘takes away the sins of the world’ (John 1. 29) as St John puts it, or as St Peter says, ‘bore in his body’ (1 Peter 2.24) the whole of human sin, so that he can meet it all with God’s forgiveness and love. So these words that St Luke preserves for us are, in truth, words spoken over all of us: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’

We know not what we do. This is not just Roman soldiers with their hammers and nails, putting to death they know not whom. This is the whole of the world’s sick, meaningless, purposeless, pointless rage and violence. ‘Knowing not what they do’ is a pretty accurate description of so much that is wrong with our world. And most of us can recognize something of the same impulse within ourselves and, at least from time to time, surprise ourselves by the currents of irrational rage that lurk within us.

And over this world that knows not what it does, Jesus says, ‘Father, forgive them.’ And this is where it gets difficult. Of course, we want to believe that God forgives us. We do not always so readily believe that he forgives other people. There are some people whom we do not want to be forgiven. There are some people we feel ought not to be forgiven.

At the primary school on the street where I live, there is a plaque – as there is on the wall on every school in Paris – stating how many children were taken away from the schools in my local area during the Second Word War and sent off to the camps. Five hundred in this particular case. That might help us understand why at the Mémorial de la Déportation with its thousands of pebbles each representing one of those 200,000 French men women and children (of whom some 75,000 were Jewish) who were taken off to Nazi death camps, there is the inscription, in large letters, of the words, ‘Forgive, but do not forget.’  Some would say that even that is saying too much. Some would say that forgiveness has no place in the face of such appalling human suffering. We would do well to remind ourselves that the message of forgiveness that lies at the heart of the Christian faith is a real stumbling-block to people who think that forgiveness means just turning a blind eye to what is wrong with the world.

But that is not what God’s forgiveness is like. God doesn’t just dispense pardon from on high. God doesn’t tell the world that it doesn’t matter. God takes all that is wrong with the world so utterly seriously that he puts himself with all the victims of violence. He numbers himself among the innocent, and then opens himself up to the rage and hatred of others.

He chooses to live a human life among us, and it ends in death on a cross. It is out of intolerable pain that he offers his prayer of forgiveness. It is forgiveness spoken at a cost we cannot begin to calculate. And when we are confronted with awful, pointless, sickening death and destruction, it is not our business just to talk blithely and glibly about God’s forgiveness for everybody. Because we do not know what we are talking about.

Our business is to turn and look at Jesus on the cross, to see there divine Love submitting itself to rage and hatred and purposeless destruction, and to hear that Love saying, ‘Forgive them.’

Those are God’s words, spoken from the heart of incomprehensible pain. It is our business to receive those words in silent gratitude, to take them to heart, and to be amazed that in the midst of so much violence so much love is possible.

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Fourth Address for the Three Hours’ Devotion. Preached at the Cathedral Church of All Saints, Wakefield on Good Friday, April 6th 2007

‘One of the criminals who were hanged railed at (Jesus), saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23.39-43)

I said in my last address that forgiveness is at the heart of the gospel and that although the saying ‘Father, forgive them’ appears only in Luke’s account of the Passion, it could really be a title for the whole Passion event.

I think the reason it is Luke who records that ‘word’ for us, is that he is the gospel writer who has the most to say about forgiveness. It isn’t that it is absent from the others – far from it – but that in Luke the subject of repentance and forgiveness is looked at in some detail. And since I said in my last address that we should admit that it is a difficult concept for us to grapple with, it might be worth looking at what he has to say about it. There’s a whole chapter about forgiveness in the middle of the gospel, containing three parables which only Luke relates: the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin and the one we call, rather inaccurately, the Prodigal Son. It’s the third of those parables, together with the first verses of the chapter which introduces all three, that I want to look at, to see if it can help us understand what Luke might have meant by including this his second ‘word’ spoken from the cross.

It is a very familiar passage of scripture – indeed we only heard it a couple of weeks ago on the Fourth Sunday of Lent. Nevertheless, I am going to read it to you again.

(Read Luke 15. 1-2 and 11-end)

On one level the parable is quite uncomplicated. It isn’t, any more than any of the parables are, an allegory, but simply a story drawn from the world of Jesus’ hearers, yet we rightly feel that God is almost named in it: ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven (that is against God) and before you.’ (Luke 15. 18 and 21). So while the father in the story is not God, but an earthly father, yet some of the expressions used of and by him are clearly meant to reveal that in his love he is an image of God.

So let me look at the setting for the parable and try to understand its meaning as Jesus preached it, before I try and relate it to that ‘word’ from the cross.

The younger of the two sons in the story asks for his share of what his father will leave him when he dies. In Jewish law (as in the law of many countries today for that matter) this is quite permissible, provided that the father is allowed to live on the land until his death. This is evidently what happens, as he divides his property between the two of them, but continues to live in the house. The younger son – who would probably have been about eighteen, as he is not married – then emigrates. Once again, this was perfectly common. Many, perhaps most, Jews left Palestine in search of wealth in the neighbouring trading ports, and to escape the frequent occurrence of famine in Israel. So there is nothing, so far, which is in any way unusual in his behaviour, and the journey into a far country in the story should not be taken as symbolic of a fall into sin.

The younger son then converts his goods into cash and spends it all. So when a famine occurs, he has to become a slave. That is what the expression ‘joined himself’ means. So he has given up his freedom. We also know that he is reduced to the most degrading level of existence, because he has to look after pigs, and pigs, remember, are unclean in the Jewish tradition. Jesus is really telling us that he gave up practising his religion. Since we are told that no-one gave him anything to eat, it is not unreasonable to assume that he stole what he did eat – a nice link to our ‘word’ from the cross. So he is a slave, an outcast, unclean, a thief and he has stopped practising his religion. You can’t get much lower than that.

When he finally ‘came to himself’ - in other words, ‘turned round’ or ‘repented’ – seeing his life as a sin both against God and his earthly father, then he realises that he has no claim on his father’s estate anymore, not even a right to food and clothing. So, he resolves to earn these basic needs: to become one of his father’s servants.

When he arrives home, we get the impression that his father has been looking out for him all the time, because he runs down the road to meet him. And, though the son has rehearsed his lines, his father doesn’t allow him to get them all out. He interrupts him, and turns the words he had intended to say into the opposite. Far from treating him like a hired servant, he is made an honoured guest. He is given shoes – the sign of a free man, as slaves went barefoot – and  a ring and a robe. And although meat was reserved for special feast days and not eaten every day, a fatted calf is killed and a great banquet is given for the whole household. Everyone – probably the whole community – is invited. No-one is to be left out.

The two images used by the father to describe the complete change are particularly vivid: ‘this my son was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found.’ (Luke 15.24). The whole story describes with touching simplicity what God Himself is like: his goodness, his grace and his abundant and limitless generosity and love. It is a parable of tremendous hope for the sinner, an assurance that though it might seem presumptuous of us to ask forgiveness, we need have no fear in doing so.

But the story does not end there and, like so many of Jesus’ parables, we have to go right to the end of it before we get to the heart of what he is really saying. The elder son – that is the one who has not gone away and squandered his money, the one who has stayed at home and always obeyed his father, the one who is not a thief and an outcast, the one who has not abandoned his religion, but rather stayed and worked hard on the land – he comes home and is, we are told ‘angry’ when he hears that his brother is back and that the party (its music blaring out over the neighbourhood) is being held in his honour.

He refuses even to go into the house. But that doesn’t stop the father. He doesn’t want to exclude the well-behaved brother, so he leaves the house and comes outside and begs him to join them. But the elder son can’t even be civil. He won’t address his father as ‘father’, launching straight into a tirade about the way his father has behaved. Nor can he bring himself to refer to his ‘brother’, calling him contemptuously ‘this son of yours’.

And yet, the father still remains affectionate, never losing his patience and kindness. He calls the elder brother ‘my dear child’ and explains to him that it doesn’t change anything as far as he is concerned. The property is all his now, because it is all that is left of what the father had given to them. But he explains that he too ought to be glad, because it is his brother who has returned. The grumbling of the son (who has, literally, nothing to lose) contrasts remarkably with the unfailing gentleness of the father, who wants both his sons to share in all that he has.

We have to go right back to the beginning of the chapter of which this parable is part to see why Jesus has continued with the story to include this incident – indeed to make it the whole point of the parable – which is why I began there. ‘Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to Jesus to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, “this man receives sinners and eats with them.” So he told them this parable.’ (Luke 15. 1-2)

So the parable is not, primarily, addressed to what the gospel terms ‘sinners’ – that is the lowest of the low – but rather to those who are scandalised by Jesus’ behaviour by eating with them (and thus, incidentally, making himself ‘unclean’ in the process). It is addressed to those who, like the elder brother (and perhaps like the first thief on the cross, though I don’t want to push the parallel too much), appealing to them to join in welcoming all into the kingdom of God.

Just look at the immensity of God’s love, Jesus is saying. Isn’t it wonderful? Now contrast that with your own life. Stop moaning and grumbling, stop acting as though you begrudge God’s kindness to others and want to keep it all for yourself. Indeed, stop thinking that somehow you merit it, whereas you’re quite happy to exclude others you consider don’t deserve it.

Well, there’s something of both brothers in us all, isn’t there? That’s perhaps why there are two thieves (a fact recorded in all four gospels, incidentally) either side of Jesus on the cross. In terms of unworthiness they are both as bad as one another, just like the two sons in the parable. But one seems to want to justify himself, whereas the other just asks to be remembered. And though we all want to indentify ourselves with the good thief and the Prodigal Son, we should remember that we’re sometimes so keen to claim that inheritance that we act, rather, like the other thief and like the elder brother. We think we’ve earned God’s love.

Jesus’ word to the second thief is interesting. Firstly, it is worth pointing out that the tense of the verb suggests that the thief keeps on begging him to ‘remember him’ when Jesus comes in either in his kingdom, or in his regal glory. He doesn’t just say it once.

Jesus’ reply is that ‘today’ – here and now – the thief will share fully, with Jesus, in that royal glory in Paradise. And paradise is a strange concept too. Sometimes the Greek translation of the Old Testament uses the word to describe the Garden of Eden before the Fall. So it’s not quite what we mean by heaven.

Which is apt, of course, because the thieves – both of them – are sharing, for the moment, with Jesus in what seems and feels like hell. While we talk, rather glibly, about identifying with Christ is his suffering, they are actually doing it. Or rather, one of them is. One is still holding to what dignity he feels he has and demanding that Jesus – if he is who he says he is – do something about their plight. But the other is rather like the Prodigal Son. He has no dignity left. So he looks to Jesus and begs to be remembered. Jesus’ reply is that, no matter what it might look like to those without eyes to see, no matter what it feels like to be suffering on the cross, he is sharing completely in Christ’s glory. As St Paul told us in that hymn which forms the epistle for Palm Sunday: ‘though he was in the form of God, (Jesus) did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross’ (Phil 2. 6-8).

Even now, Christ is doing God’s work, so that the good thief, and anyone else who has nothing to lose but their dignity, might share in his kingly glory. As St Paul’s hymn concludes: ‘Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.’ (Phil 2. 9-11)

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Fifth Address for the Three Hours’ Devotion. Preached at the Cathedral Church of All Saints, Wakefield on Good Friday, April 6th 2007

‘Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last.’ (Luke 23.46)

To understand the place of the Passion Narrative in his gospel, you need to remember that Luke wrote two books in the New Testament. In the other three gospels, the accounts of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Our Lord are the culmination of all that precedes them, as well as being the reason for the gospels being written at all. They bring each gospel account to an end, but also to its climax.

But Luke’s account does not end there. Luke continues it, after the resurrection, in another book. In the Acts of the Apostles, he begins with the Ascension of Christ – a first account of which brings his gospel to an end – then goes on to tell us of the replacement of the apostle Judas by Matthias, the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the birth and growth of the Church.

So for Luke, the Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ is not the culmination and climax of his story, it is the pivot on which what goes before – the life of Jesus – and what goes after – the life of the Church – depend. It comes in the middle of his story, rather than at the end of it.

Naturally, Luke arranges the material available to him to suit his purpose in both the gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. It is clear from the beginning of Acts that Luke intended both books to be read as a complete whole, so the structure of his gospel is somewhat different from that of Mark and Matthew.

Those of you who heard my second address will remember how Mark – and, because he follows Mark’s structure closely, Matthew too – divides his gospel before the Passion Narrative into two parts. The first part – a sort of mystery, detective story – builds up to Peter’s Confession at Caesarea Philippi that Jesus is the Messiah – the Christ  The second part is a gradual unfolding of just what sort of Messiah he is, and the Passion Narrative crowns him – but with thorns.

Luke, too, has read Mark’s account and even incorporates almost two-thirds of it into his own. He too records Peter’s confession, though he doesn’t place it geographically, because that particular place isn’t of special interest to him. It happens, as it does in Mark and Matthew, just before the Transfiguration, but for Luke it doesn’t denote a turning point. The first part of his gospel continues quite happily for another half chapter.

Then it suddenly changes direction. In my bible – even though the change occurs half-way through a chapter (though we should remember that chapters and verses were added later by editors) – there is a gap in the text. Then comes the simple, but cryptic, verse: ‘When the days drew near for him to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.’ (Luke 9.51). It is from this point onwards – in the nine chapters that lead into the Passion narrative – that we find most of the material which only Luke records for us.

That single verse gives us everything we need to know about the place of the Passion Narrative in Luke’s gospel. It contains three key themes, all of which will help us to understand that third – and for Luke, final – ‘word’ from the cross. First of all we are told that the days are drawing near for him ‘to be received up.’ Secondly we are told that ‘he set his face’ to embark on a journey. Finally we are told that that journey was to ‘Jerusalem.’

Firstly, that strange verb ‘to be received up’. When the time drew near for ‘his assumption’ would be a more accurate translation, but that might confuse us, given that we use the word in another context. ‘Ascension’ is close, but is the wrong sort of verb. You ascend somewhere by your own power, but you are assumed, someone else does it for you. But you can see that, however you translate it, it doesn’t seem to refer much to the cross and passion, at least not to them alone.

That is because Luke refuses to see the Passion and Death of Christ on their own. In fairness, we should remember that the other gospel writers don’t either, but Luke has a different emphasis even from them. For Luke is our source for that strange ‘event’ which we call the Ascension. He ends his gospel with one attempt to put it into words, and begins the Acts of the Apostles by having another go. And, incidentally, he uses almost the same word as in that gospel text. It’s not that Jesus ‘ascends’, rather that he is ‘taken up.’

The Ascension is the key to Luke’s gospel message. Christ is born, lives his life and is, through his passion, death and resurrection, finally taken up into heaven where he belongs. But God’s saving work must go on and the Holy Spirit – the same Holy Spirit, in fact, which had been in Christ from his very conception – is now poured out on his Church so that God’s same good news of universal salvation might be preached throughout the world.

So, for Luke, the Passion and Death of Christ are but stages in a process. He doesn’t deny their reality – though he does tone down their horror compared with Matthew and, especially, Mark – but he is trying to see them as part of God’s purposes for humanity. All the New Testament writers have to grapple with this – it’s the scandal of the Cross – but Luke is the one who, in two books, structures his narrative to make it clear.

Since Luke sees the Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ as a single event, theologically speaking, it is not surprising that he shows Jesus as ‘setting his face’ in the direction of his journey. It is not that Jesus decides to grit his teeth and get on with it – though there might well have been many occasions when he had to do just that – but that Luke wants to emphasise that it is time to leave behind the local, Galilean, ministry and look forward to Jesus’ universal vocation as saviour of the world. And the expression ‘set his face’ has clear connotations of hostility and opposition. Jesus will have to fulfil his destiny, in spite of those who will try and stand in his way.

So, again and again, from this point in Luke’s gospel, the pace quickens. Immediately after what we might call the ‘turning-point’ verse, we are told that the people in the next village on the road would not ‘receive’ him, ‘because his face was set toward Jerusalem.’ (Luke 9.52) ‘No-one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God,’ (Luke 9. 62) Jesus tells the next person they meet. Phrases such as ‘He went on his way through towns and villages, teaching, and journeying toward Jerusalem,’ (Luke 13.22) and ‘on the way to Jerusalem’ (Luke 17.11) punctuate the text.

Jerusalem, the holy city, God’s chosen site for the holy temple, the centre of all things in the Jewish religion. But, by the time Luke wrote his gospel, all that belonged to the past. We know this from reading his gospel, because he changes some of the detail in the prophecy of the Fall of Jerusalem in Mark account, in order to make it correspond more closely with what actually took place. It’s a bit of a cheat, but at least we know that he’s doing it, and, in any case, he wants to wean his readers off the idea they might get from Mark that it will somehow inaugurate the end of the world. With hindsight, Luke can see a much deeper significance than that in the destruction of the temple.

For Luke, it is not just that the Fall of Jerusalem and the ransacking of the temple by the Romans in AD70 mark the end of a historical era for Israel. It isn’t just that Jerusalem now belongs to the past and Rome to the future. These historical events have a religious significance for Luke. It is all part of God’s plan. God’s promise of salvation doesn’t concern the Jews alone anymore and his promises can’t be tied to Jerusalem and the temple. Historically speaking, they’ve had it. God’s promise of salvation is to the whole world as Luke knew it to be. It will extend to the bounds of the earth or, at least, to start with, to the ends of the Roman Empire.

This isn’t to say that Luke could foresee the conversion of Constantine and the adoption of Christianity as the Roman Empire’s official religion. But he does see the Roman Empire as the field in which the early Church must work. He recounts Paul’s journeys all over it, as well as his life at his final destination: Rome. It’s as though the centre of gravity of the world, theologically speaking, has shifted. Jerusalem – the centre of the old world – must be destroyed, and that is where Jesus’ own destruction takes place. Luke suggests that the real destruction of Jerusalem, theologically-speaking, took place then, with Jesus’ death, and not forty years later when the Romans ransacked it. There was ‘darkness’ or evil over it during the three hours Jesus hung on the cross, and the veil of the temple was torn in two just before Jesus uttered his final ‘word’ and died.

When Luke tells us that Jesus said, ‘Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!’ he is suggesting that Jesus knew that there was more to come. Indeed, he adds the word ‘Father’ to the prayer Jesus quotes from Ps 31.5. It is all in God’s hands. Jesus must simply trust, at this crucial time, in God’s faithful and redeeming love, that his death – and the spiritual death of Jerusalem – are but a part of God’s loving purposes for humanity as a whole and that new and abundant life will be the fruit of it.

That isn’t to say that Luke presents us with a Passion Narrative in which Jesus sails through it all, blithely oblivious to pain and suffering. Though he tones down the horror of his treatment at the hand of the Romans – probably out of respect for the person of Christ – the hostility, the hatred, the suffering is all still there. But it is the gospel in which, by the time Luke wrote and the Church was growing, it all seems to be part of a plan. So, while his vision of the Passion is not as explicitly the glorification of Christ we see in John’s gospel, this final word does remind us that, when Jesus’ process of being ‘received up’ is complete, we shall indeed see that ‘the head that once was crowned with thorns is crowned with glory now.’ (NEH 134 v1)

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Sixth Address for the Three Hours’ Devotion. Preached at the Cathedral Church of All Saints, Wakefield on Good Friday, April 6th 2007

I said at the beginning of this Three Hours’ series of addresses on the seven last ‘words’ from the cross that when I came to the three ‘words’ which the evangelist John includes as part of his Passion narrative, the subject was so dense and complex that I would need to preface my remarks by an address dealing with John’s gospel and the passion in general. And I hope you will bear with me, when I tell you that I am aware that, of all my addresses, this is the most abstract and the most difficult to follow.

I think you will have realised by now the centrality of the Passion narrative in all the gospel accounts. It isn’t just an account of what happened at the end of Jesus’ earthly life. It is the culmination of all that has gone before and which will be vindicated in Christ’s resurrection. And so not only does it take up a large proportion of the gospel text itself, much of what precedes it can only be understood in the light of it. It is there – all the time – in the minds of the gospel writers, from the beginning to the end of their narrative.

Now if that is true of the first three gospels, it is intrinsic to our understanding of the fourth gospel. John is often referred to as the ‘fourth gospel’, because it was written so much later than the other three and, usually – though not, crucially, in the case of the Passion Narrative – goes its own way, doesn’t follow the shape and content of the first three gospels.

I say ‘written so much later than the other three’ though, in fact, we do not know precisely when it was all written. As with the other gospels, parts of it may well have been written down earlier on, but we usually date a gospel by considering its final, written form such as we find it in our bibles today. And the fourth gospel is among the last of the writings in our New Testament, written after all the other gospels and all of St Paul’s letters had been circulating for some time. It comes from not earlier than the end of the first century or the beginning of the second.

This is why it seems, on first reading, to have an artificiality about it, though we should beware of comparing it to the other gospels and seeing them as true accounts of the events and then dismissing John’s as a reconstruction. As I have said, all the gospel accounts are reconstructions. That is not to say that they do not recount true, historical events. They do, but the evangelists arrange the material in a way that will best suit their purpose in preaching the gospel. They are not copies of Jesus’ diary of engagements.

But John shows his theological hand more than the other three. With the others, it is usually possible to make a distinction between the voice of the evangelist as narrator and that of Jesus. With John this is almost impossible. He simply never relates anything which is insignificant, so that significance – meaning – is so totally bound up with the narrative as to be indistinguishable from it.

This is quite deliberate. Those of you who come to church on Christmas morning know how John’s gospel begins. Not with an account of Jesus’ birth. The narrative itself begins, as does Mark’s account, with Jesus as an adult, but before it is placed a prologue of such theological intensity that it must be clear that what is to follow is no ordinary account of everyday events.
It starts even before the creation of the world – hardly where you’d begin to recount a homely story of a life once-lived –: ‘In the beginning was the Word’ (John 1.1) are its opening words, and it culminates in describing the incarnation of Jesus in stupendous terms: ‘And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.’ (John 1.14)

In other words, in the gospel you are about to read you will be given an account of Jesus’ life, death, passion and resurrection not only as the one who is God or ‘the word’ made flesh – something the Church of his day had now begun to see – but also you will see it as an account of his ‘glorification’. There is no sense, in John gospel (not that there is in the other three, for that matter) that Jesus’ death was a hurdle, a temporary blip in a story which would, finally, end happily. Far from being a stumbling block to belief – ‘if Jesus were the Messiah it would never have happened’ – his death is an integral part of God’s purposes. Now, looking back on it, we can see it for what it really was: all part of the process of Jesus’ glorification as Lord of the Church and Lord of the world.

John didn’t invent all this. The apostle Paul was probably the first to see the same truth, long before any of the gospels were written. He was a Jew, he believed in One God, and had traditional expectations of the coming Messiah. But his conversion on the road to Damascus – his meeting with the risen Lord – forced him to rethink it all. What had been a stumbling block – the death of Christ – now became the centre of his preaching. I have quoted these words of his once already, but will now do so again more fully, because they will help us understand something of what the evangelist John is trying to say: ‘For Jews demand signs and Greeks (that’s the non-Jewish world of Paul’s day) seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews (as it had been to Paul) and folly (or madness) to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.’ (1 Cor 1.22-25)

To return to John. If his gospel is, above all, an account of the glorification of Christ, we should expect to find references to that glorification from beginning to end. But there is more to it than this. John sees – just as Paul and the other gospel writers see, in their different ways – that the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ is the supreme moment of this glorification. It is through them that we see Christ as he really is. But the Christ of the Cross is not a different Christ from the one who lived an earthly life in Palestine. So we do see glimpses of his glory, during his earthly life. In the first three gospels this ‘seeing Christ as he really is’ is concentrated especially on his baptism and his transfiguration, neither of which John includes. Rather, it is there throughout John’s account, but you have to have it revealed to you in order to see it. That is what his gospel is trying to do. To show us Christ as he really is, in all his glory.

So, here’s how I am going look at each of the three ‘words’ from the cross with which John presents us. First of all I want us to have two texts in mind – both from St John’s gospel – as we look at each word. The first is the phrase ‘The hour is coming and now is’ (John 2.18) and the second ‘What sign have you to show for doing this?’ (John 4.23).Then in each case I shall be looking at an incident from earlier in the same gospel – rather as I did with the parable of ‘the Prodigal Son’ – and in each case it is an incident which, I think, is directly related to the ‘word’ concerned. 

There is a twofold movement in this exercise. Firstly, I believe, the incident concerned can only be understood in the light of the ‘word’ from the cross which sheds light on it, because each of the incidents at which I shall be looking refer to that ‘hour’ in the first of those two texts. ‘The hour is coming and now is.’ Now, in St John’s gospel the ‘hour’ is not just clock time. It’s the perfect example of what I talked about when I said that for John narrative and meaning are inseparable. Yes, the hour refers to the actual, historical time of Jesus’ death on the cross. But the word ‘hour’ keeps cropping up all through the gospel (21 times actually) and it always refers forward to the hour of Jesus’ death by which he is glorified. It is as if John is saying, ‘If you want to understand the incident I am about to recount, you have got to see it as intimately related to what Jesus does on the Cross.’

But the opposite (being St John) is also true. In the same way that we have to see each of the incidents of which I shall be speaking (and they are Miracle at Cana, the conversation with the Samaritan Woman at the well and the raising of Lazarus) as being only comprehensible in the light of what Jesus does on the Cross, so the significance of the words Jesus speaks on the cross in John’s version of the Passion can only be understood in the light of the incidents earlier in the gospel.

The words of my second text – containing another key Johannine word, that is ‘sign’ – form  the question put to Jesus in St John’s gospel by those who witnessed his cleansing of the temple. Now in the first three gospels this incident occurs – and that is probably when it did occur historically – at the beginning of Holy Week, after his entry into Jerusalem. Indeed it seems to be the incident which, as a sort of last straw, instigated his arrest. In view of what Jesus is reported to have said about ‘destroying the temple and rebuilding it in three days’ – a statement referred to at his ‘trial’ before the High Priest in Matthew and Mark – it must have looked like the threat of some sort of terrorist attack on the building which lay at the heart of Jewish faith. It would have been hard not to take it seriously.

In fact it was no such thing and by moving the incident to the beginning of his gospel John is able bring out its significance. The incident is still said to take place at the Passover, but when placed at the beginning of John’s account, the Jewish reaction to it is not one of running to have him arrested, rather it is to see in such an incident an action which could only be justified if Jesus really had the authority to ‘cleanse’ the temple in the way he appears to have done.  So they ask him for a ‘sign’: some sort of proof that Jesus is the person who alone could have authority to act in that way.

Ironically, St John’s gospel is full of such signs. He only reports seven miracles and he uses the word ‘sign’ to describe them. I based my address last night on one of them. But the cleansing of the temple, in John, comes immediately after the first of them – the miracle at Cana, at which I shall look at in a moment. And it comes immediately before the conversation with Nicodemus about the need to be ‘born of water and the Spirit’ (John 3.5) – another certain reference to Good Friday and Easter Day.

It is in that conversation that Jesus gives his first indication of the real ‘sign’ which is the authority by which he acts and under which we try to live out not only Good Friday but our whole lives. Immediately after his first ‘sign’, and the first reference to his ‘hour’ in the miracle at Cana, Jesus cleanses the temple and elicits that request for the ‘sign’ which authenticates his authority to act in the way he does. He replies by making the statement, which is only hearsay in Matthew and Mark, that he will destroy the temple – ‘of his body’ John, significantly, adds by way of interpretation – and raise it up in three days. The conversation with Nicodemus follows immediately, concluding with the phrase ‘as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up’ – the first mention of his death and, in the reference to Moses, the first mention of what is soon to be the ‘sign’ of cross as a means of redemption.

For that is what it is. The ‘sign’ of the cross isn’t just a liturgical action, something we do with our hands. It is – as John intends to show us – the means of Jesus’ glorification and our faith in the truth that, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,’ (John 3.16) and that is precisely the verse after the one about his being lifted up.

I’m sorry if that all sounds rather dense and complicated, and hope that when we have looked more concretely at the particular incidents to which I have referred it won’t appear quite so abstract. But you really can’t simplify the fourth gospel because in it, as I have said, the text and the meaning of the text are so deeply intertwined.

Before I close, let me read you again those two texts I should like us to have in mind during each of the final three addresses: firstly the phrase ‘The hour is coming and now is’ (John 2.18) and secondly the question ‘What sign have you to show for doing this?’ (John 4.23).

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Seventh Address for the Three Hours’ Devotion. Preached at the Cathedral Church of All Saints, Wakefield on Good Friday, April 6th 2007.

‘When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold your son!” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home’ (John 19. 26-27)

And the two ‘texts’ I want us to have in mind as we look it: ‘The hour is coming, and now is’ (John 4.23); and ‘What sign have you to show us for doing this?’ (John 2.18)

As I said in my last address, I shall be looking at John’s three ‘words’ from the cross, with those two over-riding texts in mind, in the light of three earlier incidents in the gospel each of which, I believe, sheds light on a particular ‘word’ from the cross and, conversely – being St John – itself needs to be read in the light of the ‘word’ concerned.

So I begin with Jesus’ word to his mother and to the beloved disciple which I want to read in conjunction with his first miracle – or ‘sign’ as St John calls them – at the marriage feast at Cana. Let me start by reading you the text.

(Read John 2. 1-11)

Now I could unpack every word in that dense gospel narrative related, as always in the fourth gospel, as much for its significance as for the historical record.  But I want to concentrate on two verses. Firstly Jesus’ word to his mother: ‘O Woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come’ (John 2. 4); and secondly the summary verse at the end of the incident: ‘This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him.’ (John 2.11)

You can already, I’m sure, see some of the links I shall try to make. There is, first of all, in both the miracle and the word from the cross, a ‘word’ to Jesus’ mother; there is, in both, a reference to Jesus’ hour which, you will remember from my last address, is, in St John’s gospel, not a mere matter of ‘clock-time’ but is a reference, literally, to the crucial hour of Jesus’ death on the cross; and the miracle is described as a ‘sign’ which manifests Jesus’ glory with the result that his disciples believe in him.

To take the ‘word’ to Jesus’ mother first. Notice that on both occasions he addresses her, strangely, as ‘Woman’ and not as ‘mother’, a term which John specifically avoids. There is nothing impolite in the term ‘Woman’ – it is a bit like the English ‘Madam’ – but it is never used to address one’s mother, and the fact that John does so use it means that Mary here – and at the cross – stands for something much larger than herself. He tells her that his ‘hour’ has not yet come, thus sending the reader straight to his ‘hour’ of the cross and the only other occasion on which Jesus addresses his mother in exactly the same terms.

What he says at Cana is important. ‘What have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come’ sounds like a disavowal of his human relationship with his mother. Jesus’ relationship with the Father transcends all human relationships, he seems to be telling her : it is to do the Father’s will that he has come, that in doing it he may be glorified. But when that hour does come, as we see now, it is precisely of human relationships that Jesus speaks to his mother and to the disciple.

Mary, the Woman, stands, of course, for the Church, and given that it is a marriage feast at which no bride appears to be present, but only a bridegroom, we can go further and say that the Woman stands for the Church as the bride of Christ: a piece of symbolism which in another piece of Johnannine literature – the Book of Revelation – is explicitly stated.

In his word to his mother Jesus reminds the Church, and her, of the only title under which she may request his intervention. She has, like those who will see him cleanse the Temple, asked for a miracle, a sign, and he directs her to the Cross, the hour of his glorification, the hour when he will do the Father’s will and, as we shall hear in the next address, ‘worship him in spirit and in truth’. Only by virtue of that work will he create the Church, as intimately united to him as a bride is united to a bridegroom, and as a result of that creation the Church can indeed intercede, like him, to the Father, on behalf of the world.

In this first of John’s ‘words’ then, we see him creating the Church. For though, at first, Mary alone stands for the Church, she is given to the disciple and he receives her, so that from that ‘hour’ – notice the word again – they become one household, one family. In the historical sense, ‘from that hour’ signifies that from that moment the disciple accepted Jesus’ mother as his own, but in the deeper spiritual sense we are to see that the glorification on the Cross has enacted the relationship that has just been signified.

This is all prefigured in the story of the miracle at Cana. In spite of the apparent disavowal, a miracle – explicitly called a ‘sign’ you remember – is performed. Mary’s, or the Church’s, request is granted and water is changed into wine. So in spite of the fact that Jesus had said ‘My hour is not come’ the miraculous sign illustrates my two overriding texts. By its very happening, the miracle shows that in it ‘the hour is coming and now is’, and as ‘sign’ it also shows us the authority by which Jesus does what he does: that is, in that ‘hour’, to create the new community which is the Christian Church.

That authority, as I said in my last address, is the fact of his glorification by the Father, and that glorification is centred on the Cross. That is the supreme ‘sign’ – God’s taking the instruments of death and destruction and using them to glorify his Son, and through that glorification achieving the salvation of the world. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.’ (John 3.16)

Both the miracle at Cana and the Crucifixion of Christ are specifically said to take place in the context of the Passover. At Cana Jesus changes the water of the old covenant into the wine of the new, and in that change we cannot fail to see a reference to the Eucharist which is the means by which the community of the new covenant is nourished. In the piercing of Jesus’ side after his death John says ‘there poured out blood and water’, another reference to the life-giving Eucharist as well as one to the Baptism by which we enter into that new community. And for St John, that death takes place on ‘the day of preparation’, the day on which the Passover lambs are killed as food for the feast.  ‘Behold your Son!’, ‘Behold your mother’, but above all ‘Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world’, ‘Behold THE man’ in whom all humanity finds its redemption.

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Eighth Address for the Three Hours’ Devotion. Preached at the Cathedral Church of All Saints, Wakefield on Good Friday, April 6th 2007.

The second of the three ‘words from the cross’ presented to us by John’s gospel: ‘After this Jesus, knowing that all was finished, said (to fulfil the scripture), “I thirst.”’ (John 19.28).

And, once again, the two texts I want us to have in mind as we look at it: ‘The hour is coming, and now is’ (John 4.23) and ‘What sign have you to show us for doing this?’ (John 2.18).

And again, following the same approach I took in my last address, an incident from earlier in the gospel to be read in the light of the ‘word’ spoken from the cross as well as providing us with something which itself sheds light on the significance of that ‘word.’

(Read John 4. 4-26)

As with the incident at the wedding at Cana you will, I’m sure, have already noticed some of the links.  There is no miracle this time, no ‘sign’ in the strict sense in which John uses the word, though my other text, ‘The hour is coming, and now is’ comes from the very passage I have just read.

Jesus is on his way from Judea to Galilee and passing through Samaria, and we are told, rather starkly, that ‘Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.’ (John 4. 9). You may have been told, when preachers have commented on the parable of the Good Samaritan, that relations between Jews and Samaritans were not exactly straightforward, thus explaining part of the shock value of Jesus’ parable. It would be more accurate to say that they were not only difficult, but that the two groups were openly hostile to each other. In recent times, some Samaritans, having, as we have just read, their own shrine elsewhere, had defiled part of the Jerusalem temple and scattered the bones of the dead all over the place, causing enormous offence. It is difficult not to think of relationships between Jew and Arab in the Holy Land at the present time and, while we shouldn’t force the comparison, we might well imagine Jesus, as a Jew, crossing something like Palestinian territory today.

Jacob’s well was there and so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey and the desert heat, for ‘it was about the sixth hour’, that is midday, sat down beside the well. Then, as a woman arrives to draw water, he asks her for a drink.

Once again I could try to unpack every word in this long and dense conversation but I only really want to comment on one word, one that punctuates the passage and which is the central word in the ‘word’ spoken from the cross.

The word ‘thirst’ – which appears more accurately in biblical concordances as translating the Greek for ‘suffer thirst’ and is even defined in contemporary dictionaries as ‘suffering, caused by want of drink’ – is used only by John among the gospel writers, except for Matthew’s reference in the Beatitudes to those who ‘hunger and thirst after righteousness.’  And it is the key to the passage I have just read.

There is first of all the physical thirst which Jesus suffers in the middle of the day in the heat of the desert and in the exhaustion of the journey. A thirst so intense that it drives him to transcend the barriers of race and sex and to ask a foreigner, a Samaritan, and a woman at that, for a drink. It is no doubt the same physical thirst that he suffers, again at the sixth hour – for clearly the time is deliberate and significant – when he speaks that ‘word’ from the cross. The other three gospels do not specify the thirst as such, though they do recount the incident with the sponge. The fact that John does is significant.

But, of course, the thirst is not only physical. Even if we could imagine that intense physical thirst, we should still be only half-way to understanding it. There is something much more than physical need in the thirst of Jesus and it is that, above all, which sets the context for his remarks about worship in his conversation with the woman. Jesus’ thirst when he asks the woman at the well for a drink is not only physical, it is the thirst for the salvation of all mankind, including this foreign woman; it is the thirst for the salvation of all sinners, for it turns out that she is also an adulteress: and it is a thirst for the righteousness of God to vindicate the work that he has come to do and to bring all human beings to that spring which will up in them to eternal life. It is a thirst so intense that he will die with the words on his lips, but it is a thirst so intense that it will in fact bring about the very salvation he desires for us.

For thirst for God and for the salvation of the world is the true worship of the Father to which Jesus refers, and once again the reference is to the ‘hour’ of the cross. For where, on that first Good Friday, was true worship, ‘in spirit and in truth’ offered? Was it in the Jerusalem temple, in its daily rituals and in the complicated preparations for the greatest feast of the year? Was it in the Samaritan shrine and its different traditions?  No, it was, we believe, in the tortured body of a man, nailed to a cross, who said, ‘I thirst.’

Only one man has ever worshipped in this way, in thirst for God and for the salvation of the world, and his thirst, his w