God Made Strange - Lucy Winkett (2019)

I welcome thanks for coming I'm sorry about the squeeze from now on only on popular speakers so we won't have this problem anymore my name is Elizabeth Foy I'm the head of our learning here at st. Paul's it's my joy and my privilege but on these events and it's a particular pleasure I sometimes say this but it really is very true today to welcome Lucy wink it back to st. Paul's Cathedral where she was a minor cannon and then press Enter meaning head of liturgy and worship here for really quite a long time really quite a long time ago but 2010 she left she went west she went to st. James's Piccadilly where she's really where she's been wrecked her ever since lucky then welcome to people who can't get an offer and we've missed her ever since so it's a delight to have her back she's going to talk about the cross I hope she might go rogue you never know for about 40 minutes and then going to take Q&A I'd be really grateful if you could keep it to Q&A rather than comments because we've only got 20 minutes what will happen is we're being filmed today Lucy will repeat that the question in case you think but I just said that she's doing it for the camera because the camera may well not pick up your voice going backwards she's she's an extraordinary priests and also extraordinary person I can remember her saying to me once despite the fact that I am a priest I am still a person and we benefited hugely here from her wisdom her kindness capacity to have time every day if we needed her challenges to us the way her theology lived through all her actions and the fact that she was quite tough with us and tough with us all she was she's a completely uncertain barrister as much as possible and look it's worked hand over to her two children thank you very much Elizabeth I've got lots to say about you but I haven't got time it's it's lovely it's lovely to be back I'm going to talk today about the cross as we're entering passion tide and the scandal of the cross and so I'll start just with a few verses from the Gospel of John so they took Jesus and carrying the cross by himself he went out to what is called the place of the skull which in Hebrew is called Golgotha there they crucified him and with him two others one on either side with Jesus between them the cross it's become a thing a phrase we church people use as well as being an event in history the execution of a healer and preacher from occupied Nazareth attested to by the Roman historian Josephus it is a theological category all of its own the cross what does it mean what's it trying to communicate it's possible that for those of us who are churchgoers familiar with church buildings and services we can become desensitized and over familiar with the cross the cross is unique in symbols at the center of world religions it's not a Buddha peaceful and enlightened it's not a holy book or a beautiful colourful depiction of a divine being as a central symbol for a religion it's curiously abhorrent it's an instrument of torture and execution it's like having at the end of your worship space a bunch of flowers on a replica of an electric chair what is Christianity doing having this as something that we're supposed to look at or as the hymn would have us do as we're about to sing no doubt numerous times over the next few weeks survey the wondrous cross in considering this our first task as Christians is to D familiarize ourselves with it we've domesticated it dressed it up made it lovely but the disconnect between over-familiar Christians and the rest of society which has absolutely no point of connection is large now perhaps larger than it's ever been I take that as a huge opportunity to communicate about the distinctiveness of the Christian tradition in that it's a way of life a spiritual practice a religious framework for living that is realistic Christianity is not at its heart rule driven or doctrine heavy but it's a faith based on a life and a death in history the life of Jesus at a particular time and a bracing and unflinching recognition in looking at that life and that death that living in the world as it is is very hard for a lot of people Christianity takes suffering seriously but refuses to be overthrown by its power and so it's important to say right at the beginning that although our subject today is the cross capital T capital C the truth is that the cross makes no sense without the symbol of the empty tomb however you understand that and that these symbols together these events together are the essence of the meaning of the Christian faith even in a society unfamiliar with the Christian tradition interestingly many of the stories and characters around the cross the gambling soldiers the runaway disciples the mother the penitent thief the words said by Jesus are even today resonant as part of a fabric of our common life just this week in the midst of the febrile brexit exchanges in the Commons one very heightened contribution was made by one MP beside himself with fury at other MPs to whom he directed his comment at the end of his speech Father forgive them for they know not what they do a misuse of the phrase of course used by Jesus to beg forgiveness for forgiveness for his murderers and here as very often used as a threat of ominous unintended consequences designed to reveal the stupidity or fecklessness of the targeted person so misused and miss quoted yes but still powerful Jesus's words from the cross the cross and the events surrounding it are so freita dwith sulfurous shame the despair of betrayal and duplicity the abuse of power and the fickleness of a mob toxic and frightening our temptation as theologians and as people of faith is to try to be eloquent about it to try to be elegant and to find rich words and ringing sentences to talk to ourselves about it somehow to smooth it over in the elegant surroundings of a cathedral or a church we struggle to experience now both the beauty and the horror of life in the world and the death of God the chaos and the dirt of the cross catapult themselves into our imaginations this April afternoon if we will let them perhaps then it really is as TS Eliot would have us believe April the cruelest month but still we are somehow desensitized because we can't feel what we often think we should we sit in church trying to summon up the horror that we know we probably should feel but it's hard to familiarity has bred not so much contempt as a sort of spiritual numbness as one commentator on liturgy has put it to know Christ sacramentally only in terms of bread and wine is to know Christ only partially in the dining room as hosts and guests but it begins in the soil in the barnyard and in the slaughterhouse amid strangled cries congealing blood spitting fat in the pan table manners depend on something's having been grabbed by the throat a knowledge ignorant of these dark and murderous gestures charged with soul is sterile rather than elegant science rather than wisdom artifice rather than art it is love without passion the church without the cross a house with a dining room but no kitchen a feast of frozen dinners a heartless life that is faith without the cross this cross with all its chaos and shouting is essential for a living faith or as Rowan Williams has very simply put it if you want to know who God is if you want to know what God does look at the cross and so I want in this short time to reflect on a couple of themes in the light of answering the question what can we do with the cross as the central symbol of our faith three things we cannot look we can look or we can be looked at I'm struck this year as most years by the fact that one of the most googled questions in 2018 was what is love it came in 2018 among other questions such as what is Bitcoin and what is GD P R what is love is apparently a question asked by millions of people alone at their computers maybe with some time on their hands surfing the net what is love the Christian responses this is love churches at their best are places where the things we can't measure the things we can't describe are experienced and celebrated and shared and where every person can be made welcome whatever you've done whatever mess you've got yourself into whoever you are whatever your questions because we ourselves are a mixture of the ones who go out to ask the question what is love the cross reveals to us that we are also the ones who collude with systems that hurt rather than free and there may be parts of ourselves that we hate there may be parts of ourselves that collaborate we know from the gospel of the cross that these are the parts given special attention and taken seriously by God our confusion is held and addressed and the strange hope of change is offered freely and without condition or coercion and so before the cross recognizing the over-familiarity I've mentioned and perhaps in that process our inevitable trivializing of the meaning of the cross our prayer is a shocking one after the example of the medieval mystic mitre at meister eckhart i want to pray i ask god to rid me of god i ask god to rid me of god in order that i will remain unaccustomed to the comfort of knowing that i know what this cross is and what it means such power to define the meaning of the cross is not mine or yours but we will always try because god utter din creation and Jesus uttered on the cross and so we who are made in God's image will always want to try to speak about it at the same time as praying for all our words to be taken away that's the paradox of being in the presence of the Cross and so those three options I mentioned what to do with the cross we cannot look we can look we can be looked at so first we can not look it's long been recognized and discussed on good Fridays over the years that Mary and Mary Magdalene stay standing near this in stark contrast to the male disciples apart from John who run away a fact much beloved of feminists theologians like me Peter denies him Judas betrays him all the others are either locked in a room out of fear or heading off on the journey to other places like Emmaus the women are the ones who stay along with John whom Jesus loved and they are the ones who along with Nicodemus in a few hours take the body down after Jesus died the act of Fiona Shaw came to our church during her run at the Barbican a couple of years ago of column toi beans play the Testament of Mary she performed extracts from the play and discussed the implications of toi beans imaginative and vivid descriptions of Mary's reaction to her son who could have done anything with his misfit friends it was funny provocative and moving Mary in this play disapproves of the raising of Lazarus was being held prisoner by unnamed apostles but perhaps the most confronting detail of this imaginative exploration of Mary was that in the monologue at the end of the play we discover that Mary didn't stay to the end she stayed at the foot of the cross for some of the time but at some point before he died she had to leave in conversation with the actor Fiona Shaw we discussed this point in front of an audience and it proved a really rich seam of spiritual reflection shocking as it was to many many of the mothers in the audience especially some whose children while grown-up had died could relate to and understand this Mary more closely than the perhaps affected vision of motherhood that's often found in paintings of the deposition could they stay to watch their child die some thought they could others knew that they hadn't toy beans imagination may seem like an unnecessarily provocative poke at a traditional Christian interpretation of Mary but what I discovered was that it released people of faith in our audience to be bracingly truthful about the centuries-old teaching that Mary stayed steadfast and silent and that this had been in itself for them alongside being an inspiration also a crushing expectation that many people felt judged by that it was possible to imagine Mary leaving before the end was to them compassion from a religious tradition that often seemed to ask of us just too much confronted by the cross then we always have the option and sometimes we take it like the disciples to look away because standing near to the cross brings with it danger as well as the inevitable inspiration not looking is important sometimes but if we remain not looking we develop fantasies about what's happening when we're not looking and that's a problem it's human nature it's like an expat living abroad for years and imagining things back home are just as they left them if we're not there it's human nature to make stuff up that's why Christianity again takes real actual lived experience seriously not looking can mean for example that we can get more kishle focused on the appalling human details of the story and then we anthropomorphize God and we domesticate God for our own often unacknowledged purposes which given that we're flawed human beings usually have something to do with power one writer who's been hugely influential in this area of fantasies was the Jesuit priest and writer Gerry Hughes he was convinced that the picture we carry around of God affects how we believe but not only how we believe but how we pray and whether we even want to pray and how faith feels intuitively which in turn affects the way we live he once produced an identikit picture of God called good old uncle George based on how in his experience God had been communicated to people who had given up on Christianity and walked away this is the kind of God that grows when you're not looking this is from Jerry Hughes himself God was a family relative much admired by mom and dad who described him as very loving a great friend of the family very powerful and very interested in all of us eventually we're taken to visit good old uncle George he lives in a formidable mansion is bearded gruff and threatening we cannot share our parents admiration for him at the end of the visit uncle George turns to address us now listen dear he begins about looking very severe I want to see you here once a week and if you fail to come just let me show what's going to happen to you he then leads us down to the mansion's basement it's dark it becomes hotter as we descend and we begin to hear unearthly screams in the basement there are steel doors uncle George opens one look in there dear he says we see a nightmare vision an array of blazing furnaces with demons in attendance who hurl into the blaze those men women and children who failed to visit uncle George or to act in a way that he approved of and if you don't visit me dear he says that's where you will most certainly go he then takes us back upstairs to rejoin mum and dad as we go home tightly clutching dad with one hand and MA with the other mum leans over and says and now don't you love uncle George with all your heart and soul and mind and strength and we say yes I do because to say anything else would be to join the queue at the furnace at a tender age deep conflict has set in and we keep telling uncle George how much we love him and how good he is and that we only want to do what pleases him we observe we're told what he wishes and dare not admit even to ourselves that we loathe him uncle George is a caricature but a caricature of a truth that we often construct a God who is in fact an image of our tyrannical selves Hellfire sermons are out of fashion at the moment but they were in fashion a few decades ago they're in fashion in many places around the world and they may come in here again the uncle George kind of God is the kind of God that many has seen in the story of the Cross the wrathful vengeful gods who needs to be appeased by a blood sacrifice to atone for all the sins of the people I suppose my own starting point here is to be curious about this rather than dismissive the world we live in is a world of wonder and delight adventure and abundance it's also the world of Auschwitz Kigali Nagasaki Columbine Passchendaele Mount Sinjar and Aleppo in the face of this more evidence of which is in the news every day the spiritual tensions are almost impossible to hold together judgment with mercy Roth with forgiveness crucially one of the most important things Christian theology wants to say about God is that God emphatically isn't like us only bigger which is how we get uncle George God is unlike is other free disconcertingly so utterly wholly completely undefended the Creator completely given over to relationship with creation in the story of the cross the God we encounter in Jesus is God so utterly given over to the risks and the vulnerability of relationship that we can hardly contemplate it let alone understand it and you and I know because we're human that this is not what I'm like for us in relationship there's always something held back something competitive something defended and suspicious and afraid which comes between me and my maker and me and my neighbor our problem is that we have so often formulated God's relationship to us in the language of good old uncle Jorge that we've jettisoned the notion altogether of a God who is utterly other or resolutely strange this leaves us much poorer spiritually and I want to suggest to leaves us with an equally damaging sort of faith just as damaging as the uncle Jorge fantasy which is what you might call a great-aunt Oprah kind of God a kind of I'm okay you're okay kind of God which can do no more for me than stroke the bruised parts of my ego can do no more for me than can't help me with the damage I do to myself and others this kind of God disastrously simply leaves me as I am and us as we are and it as it is fantasies about God of course are damaging and they flourish when we're not looking but faithful imagination can be incredibly moving and helpful the artist mark Kaz alert when commissioned by a convent here in London to paint a set of the Stations of the Cross imagined together with the Mother Superior what Mary would have done on the evening of Good Friday whether or not she'd stayed at the cross they imagined together that she would have gone to visit Judas's mother two women sitting together at the end of a terrible day remembering their sons both dead in the service of salvation our second option is that we can look it's hard to look hard to look at the cross but the coop the question that confronts us as we do is what are the ethics of watching particularly pertinent perhaps in an Internet age and the first point I want to make is about timing that was then and now is now because a danger we should surely avoid when we're contemplating the cross when we are looking is by way of dealing with our own anxiety and even squeamishness to make it so special to Jesus or something that happens over there or long ago that we forget to look at today's atrocities this flogging and crucifixion is part of the apparatus of modern societies as much as it was of first century or medieval ones there are characteristics in this story of Jesus and the cross that are recognizable across centuries of abusive political behavior from Wolf Hall onwards there's an urgency and pace involved in the questioning and answering demanded of the victim a manufactured energy manufactured urgency we saw this paradoxical and torturous use of time in the false deadlines set by Isis deadlines for executions manufactured urgency combined with a horrifying assertion they have all the time in the world a regime that systematically uses torture such as Roman occupiers of Judea in the first century or England in the 16th century or Stalinist Russia or Chile in the 20th century or according to Amnesty International half the nations of the world in the 21st century regimes that systematically use torture are not so much rooting out opposition to themselves as creating a narrative that characterizes proportions of the population as enemies torture creates enemies rather than punishes them and it isn't just over there and long ago pain is a great isolator as torturers know but as I'm emphasizing the meaning of this death this crucifixion will always be a mystery to those of us who draw near to it and for those of us who do look we can have theories and theologies suspicions and skepticisms but in the end what we have as we have today is a body a story of gentleness betrayed by fear of love given over to destruction and we see the fire of love and forgiveness the iron will of peacemaking destroyed by the forces of fear and death as they are today on the cross God the Son dies with a cry of abandonment and no hint of the Easter promise this is the real experience of people today if torture is an anti rich anti liturgy a sick ritual then the Eucharist is a liturgy that acknowledges and confronts this sickness and subverts it because at the center of our celebration of the Eucharist is the cross the cup of blessing that we bless is it not a sharing of the blood of Christ the bread which we break is it not a sharing of the body of Christ the persistence of contemporary injustice is confronted head-on in the Eucharist where all are fed where the cup of suffering is acknowledged and shared and where all are welcomed and celebrated as part of the precious creation made good by God so contrary to the isolation that tortures torturers wish to inflict on their victims the Christian economy of pain makes the bizarre claim that it can be shared God's pain can be shared we know then that God is different from us and that we in the cross are asked to share in the pain of the world now and that in the Eucharist we share in the new future that the death this death brings a mature spirituality will acknowledge before God that there are some traumas that simply will not mend in this life there are some griefs that will never be comforted and when we look at the cross we also dare to encounter the parts of ourselves like that the parts of ourselves that remain inconsolable it's all the evidence we need to make appalling sense of that incredible quotation from Jeremiah that Rachel weeps for her children she refuses to be comforted because they are no more we know because we live in the world that the world is full of uncomforted mothers and fathers and children so part of our spiritual task when we look at the cross alongside asking for the courage to face those events and the events of a violent world now is also to dare to get to know the uncomforted parts of ourselves the Rachel inside you who still weeps inconsolably our inconsolable selves will be for as many reasons as there are people here but we are given a chance to acknowledge when we look at the cross the losses that we live with the losses we normally suppress in a daily routine that rarely has room for this kind of time and the miraculous reality is that we discover in looking at the cross even in that sulfurous shame and fear that forms what is inconsolable in us Christ is there even there even and while we remain uncomforted when we look especially when we look with the eyes of the inconsolable parts of ourselves we realize with a start that this crucifixion pain of God's is unfathomably as I said earlier capable of being shared with us different from our human pain which isolates us one hugely influential writer whose reflected on the ethics of watching of by standing in society she calls it is the philosopher Gillian rose she died in 1995 too soon from cancer but her work is considered among the very best of her or any philosophical generation what Gillian Rose says to 21st century Europeans reflecting on the Holocaust is bracing she argues that it's easy to develop a solidarity between those of us who think that deep down we're innocent of the world's wrongs she argues not for a solidarity of the falsely innocent but what's called by one of her interpreters the Solidarity of the shaken a solidarity that comes from being made acutely aware of the suffering in the world and also made aware of our own complicity in it but importantly and crucially not becoming overwhelmed by that in June last year thirty of our congregation went from San James's on a pilgrimage to Auschwitz somehow trying to face the bleakest story of our continent but facing it together and we were accompanied in our journey by some of the writings of Gillian rose developing a grounded and Earth's spirituality concerned with now today this room hear me and you awakening to our own spiritual selves by daring really to look at the cross and taking our own life seriously can reveal to us the fantasies we carry around about ourselves and about God when we're not looking and not only recognize them but cultivate the courage in us continually to confront them and reject them because as Chilean rose warns it's precisely those fantasies and myths that are dangerous and lethal sometimes to ourselves and sometimes to others the fantasy for example on a personal level that we're not worth as much as other people or the fantasy on a collective level but we are basically right and everyone else is probably wrong and we're waiting for them to catch up fantasies such as these spawn totalizing philosophies that underpin for example the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of women over 300 years in Europe tortured and executed as witches fantasies about light-skinned people having power over dark-skinned people spawned the totalizing philosophy that underpinned the slaughter and sale of human beings in transatlantic slave trade to face these in these cases European totalizing philosophies and the tendencies in ourselves to be aggressively protective of our own fantasies is to begin to develop this kind of realistic spirituality it is to resist the tendency to want to form a solidarity of the falsely innocent whereas in fact watch is much more authentic is to form a solidarity of the shaken but vitally we are not paralyzed by this realization nor do we let it lead us to become unhealthily obsessed with sin or guilt which is in itself a form of narcissism we gather at the cross not only to look at it and him but also to be revealed as those who need forgiveness we beg for mercy and mercy is poured out on us we're asked at the cross to imagine our own forgiven selves and live that live like that this cross then has a sacramental identity when we look that is itself a sign of a new future that we celebrate every time we celebrate the Eucharist a hopeful and prophetic act of God that cultivates courage and wisdom and embodies nothing less than salvation and so finally we can be looked at it's not easy to stay in front of the cross it's easier to leave although when you've left walking down the road glad to have got out you might feel like you really did want to stay but staying sounds like all the effort is with us it sounds exhausting we might feel particularly if those of you are going to go to a service on Good Friday even for the whole three hours we might feel that concentration is the thing we want to concentrate but then we feel bad or worried when our attention event in ever too wonders but that's not the kind of staying that this or at least I want to suggest is not what it should be this looking at the cross is not a concentration marathon for us making such an effort to look at it it is for us to allow ourselves to be contemplated by the cross itself we don't sit contemplating the cross although it feels like we do the cross contemplates us the movement of God from free-spirited Rampage earth through the universe the brooding whirling utterly generative Spirit of God capable in our imagination of spraying atoms and planets roaring through dark matter this awesome presence underpinning the universe has been confined reduced captured nailed this confinement makes no sense to us it is unalterably strange to us it makes no sense if I like my religion neat and affirming of everything that I already think or do or am it makes no sense if I want a God in control of all the events in my and everyone else's life down to the last detail it makes no sense if I want a God who is non-threatening and nice which I would never admit that I do obviously but is absolutely the case for nearly everybody or a God who is easy to believe in when I want to if I as a Christian want faith to be essentially a mechanism to shore up what I already think or feel about the world then this faith in the cross is not for me this cross is not for me if I want a spirituality that I've chosen with all the bits that I like because it's self referential and self-absorbed and I can become unchallengeable if that's what I want then this cross is not for me if what I'm looking for is a set of beliefs and values that will make me feel that I'm basically right then what I should do now is walk away down Ludd gate he'll take a breath of fresh air and relieved that I've left it all behind this cross doesn't really make sense if what I'm looking for is a spirituality that offers a series of fantasies laced with avoidance but it makes all kinds of sense if you are a human being living in the world who knows that bodies will fail today in hospitals before their relatives can get there to comfort them if you know that we live in a world where hundreds of Muslims are given shelter by a priest in the Central African Republic under threat from machete-wielding so-called Christian militia in a world where that same priest refuses to leave even when he's threatened with being burned alive if you are a human being who carries an inconsolable memory or a shame that doesn't seem to let you go or if you're struggling with the hard yards of watching someone in your family slip away if you have ever felt unutterably alone this cross makes all kinds of sense this cross makes sense if our spirituality is grounded in everyday life if we resist the formation of our best fantasies about ourselves and others and about God it makes sense in our recognition that our own cruelty is ours sometimes we are merciless to ourselves or to the people we love or to the ones that we despite our best efforts secretly despise this cross contemplates us with God's evident and irreducible refusal to dominate or force with the saving presence of God choosing to lose so that no one else has to lose again breaking the cycle of retributive violence this emptying of God's self into the world breaks that cycle and invites us to live in the same way so I'm going to close with a poem by Eric freed it is madness says reason it is what it is says love it is unhappiness says caution it is nothing but pain says fear it has no future says in sight it is what it is says love it is ridiculous says pride it is foolish says caution it is impossible says experience it is what it is says love [Applause] oh thank you thank you I feel you know embarrassing it moved and we're going to take some questions if you want a minute to think about that we could just take her we could take a few seconds just to absorb before we start asking questions we'd like to say let's have you know a few seconds yes Aiden Cavanaugh Aiden Cavanaugh who's a little Theo theologian of liturgy and that was a question I'm going to do this so that was a question about the where was the quotation about the dining room in the kitchen and the church being without a cross if it was a life full of frozen dinners I think with cities yeah Aidan Kavanagh I think it's called baptism the shape of a Christian life are we all on the road to Calvary because I'm just summarizing for the tape so are we all on the road to Calvary is the active sacrifice the kind of controlling action of our lives I suppose perhaps that's that's what you're asking I am I don't I don't think so actually I mean I think the poem the poem that I use and it's only it's ammonia permits a lovely poem by German poet Erik freed he was saying that love is what it is so so his his point is that love is the is the thing and sometimes of course that involves sacrifice so what I would point to is in in Paul's letter to the Philippians Paul is trying to describe theologically what he thinks is happening on the cross which is that this as I was calling it a kind of unutterably strange divine presence that kind of that underpins the whole of the universe is somehow poured into and confined into this cross and pinned there that does look like sacrifice I can I can see that that looks like that and we often use that word I wouldn't want to say that sacrifice is the controlling purpose of our lives however I would say that love is the object because we're made in the image of God and gods can OSIS as Paul says his gods self-emptying is what God does you know that's what that's the nature of God that God pours out God's self into the world which is an act of love and for any of us who've been in love or for any of us who love people we know that from time to time what you want to do is give yourself away so there's a there's a kind of mirroring I suppose in human love of what the divine love is about so I would say love is the thing sometimes on the way that does require some kind of sacrifice which we usually we want to do I'm going to summarize that in my talk I mentioned pilgrimage when we go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land I'm checking down getting this right you tell me for this for getting it wrong when we go to on pilgrimage to the Holy Land we always to the way of the Cross around Jerusalem and you carry the cross and you walk the way and in in London there is often a walking the way of the cross as well there will be on Good Friday and your question was why doesn't the Church of England do that I think my my first answer is it does some some places and what tends to happen is that it's neck humanik all Christians come together on Good Friday so it tends not to be a particular denomination doing it so for example the walk of witness which i think is happening as usual this Good Friday which will involve walking between Westminster Cathedral Westminster Abbey and other churches around in Westminster is an ecumenical walk of witness so it would be all Christians together the Church of England doesn't do it by itself that's what I think so I'm going to try and summarize it's helped to if I'm getting it right so so I was talking about three three hours on Good Friday how that's one way of contemplating the cross how can we as post resurrection people 2,000 years later kind of get into that because we know that there's another part to the story yes I think so right at the beginning I think I do want to emphasize this right at the beginning I said that there to the two events in Christian faith cannot be celebrate separated I'm sorry can't be separated which is the cross and the empty tomb however you understand those two symbols and you're quite right that we we tend to do one or the other and I think one of the advantages of of having a kind of Holy Week where you really do walk through the events is that you're almost it's almost a self-denying ordinance isn't it so on Good Friday like many of you I will be in church between 12:00 and 3:00 and you know for a lot of for a lot of that time there's a kind of internal tug of not war love tug of love inside which is to say stay with it I know that there is that but actually they didn't know that and so to have compassion for the people who ran away to understand Peter who was terrified at the fireside it deepens my compassion and broadens my sympathies if I can remember that they didn't know at the same time I think it's really important which is what I was saying in the second second bit which is to look that we connect with people who are in that Good Friday now because in whatever way that is so it's it's an aunt also to connect with the inconsolable parts of ourselves and I think it's not it's not unchristian to say that there are some traumas and there are some jagged interventions in human relationships that simply do not get mended in this life and there is some forgiveness that is not ours until we die so I think that the kind of putting together the cross and the empty tomb doesn't just it it does say that that that somewhere the battle is over and somewhere the weapons have been laid down and somewhere you know the songs of peace are being sung but I in my life and you in your life and countless millions across the world will not hear that this side of eternity I don't think it's unchristian to acknowledge that so for me I went to see Mel Gibson The Passion of the Christ not because I wanted to because it was horrifying but I thought I should because I thought somebody was going to ask me but updated those in fact I went when I was here at supports oh dear we've hardly recovered from it and I thought it was what I thought it was more Kish but actually that the the reason what happened after that film was not that I came out thinking about Jesus actually even as a priest that wasn't my focus I came out and I subscribed to Amnesty International my reaction to it was that's happening today and those people are made in God's image and it's blasphemous it's not just cruel it's blasphemous that that's happening to people today because they are they have the know the image of God in them so that was helpful for me also then to connect to to connect a Good Friday not to keep it over there but to bring it here to bring it here today and to know that for some people Easter Sunday doesn't come this side of eternity somebody who's fairly new to Christianity I love hope forgive me for repeating you're not that impressed with what Christianity is up to and how it's going at that's brilliant thank you for saying that and also how how we can look at because it's not what did you say clean it's not clean so what stands in the place of looking at is going to church and doing the certain rituals and I did mention the Eucharist so I fess up you know that I thought I was saying that that is one way that we can look at I think I mean it for me then I would say I mean I'm not here am I hid I'm not here to defend the Christian the institution although I've just defended the Church of England over there inadvertently but I'm not here to defend to defend Christianity as a whole I don't think because I completely agree with you that the institution is highly checkered and all of us are flawed and the church can only ever be a human institution I mean we we hope that we're trying to really hope that we're trying to share and build relationships and community that is divinely inspired however we are only ever going to be a human institution so we need to lower our expectations I think at the same time my answer would be in the churches solidarity and actually not know not just solidarity with but that the church is the people who are suffering in the way that Christ suffered on Good Friday so it it's not that the church wants to express sympathy for or go and talk to or help those people over there who are suffering it's it's both an internal task of of finding a point of connection with the person who is inconsolable in here with that with that experience and a communal response which is what you're critiquing quite very helpfully I think a communal response which isn't just about having Eucharist in the dining room but is going to the kitchen and understanding that there's a slaughterhouse but out back and that that is where this Good Friday experience finds traction in actual people's lives so the communal response the Eucharist can only ever be authentic really if it's a if it's a kind of prism through which the real communication and relationships are being made but but I'm very I really want to emphasize this I think it's because often the church the church representatives like me stand at the front and talk about being in solidarity with the poor or whatever it is we are we are and if if people are if our congregations are not inclusive of people who are actually in those situations then we are we're in real trouble spiritually how do you read a good Christian devoted life I think it's a huge challenge I couldn't claim to be doing it but I think the only way to do it is to do it together and to try to check stuff out so of course I can give you the Pat answer which is read the Scriptures talk with other Christians give yourself away as far as you are able to in the light of Auschwitz and Yemen how can we speak of the victory of the Cross my my sense of the New Testament a whole of the New Testament Gospels and letters of Paul which is where that phrase Paul is talking about the victory of the Cross is that those writers then as now were essentially trying to answer the question what was that what happened then and so for me I find quite a quite a kind of dialogue and actually disagreement an argument about what the cross means in the New Testament one of the ways in which its describes is the victory of the cross that is never been a way that I want to that's not the controlling way that I would understand what the cross is but it is in Scripture so we've got to take it seriously and I think because I haven't been in those in those situations myself what I would say is that when I listen to some people who have been you know it's the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide at the moment we're hearing lots of extraordinary stories of resilience and well from people who survived obviously when I listen to sometimes there was a woman I heard recently talking about her survival and how she survived and the hope that she has in humanity and the absolute determination that that suffering would not win ultimately that she wants to be a peacemaker there's a there's an intimation of victory there may be but it's not trumpets and drums and it's not celebration services that big cathedrals is it thank you thank you thank you [Applause] you you

Channel: St Paul's Cathedral

Views: 5,577

Rating: 4.8064518 out of 5

Keywords: St Paul's Cathedral, Lucy Winkett, the cross, Holy Week, Christ, faith, Christ crucified, Easter, Christianity, suffering, empty tomb, Jesus, betrayal, theology, death, sacrifice, love, God, Mary, Mary Magdalene

Id: WAsgPfHlwps

Length: 56min 19sec (3379 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2019