The Four Last Things

 

Last Judgment by Jan Provoost, oil on panel, 1525. Groeningemuseum in Brugge.

Sermon at Parish Mass, the First Sunday of Advent 2021

Jeremiah 33.14-16

1 Thessalonians 3.9-13

Luke 21.25-36

 

“The end of the world is nigh!” You might have seen that, or something like it, on placards waved by street preachers. Or how about these billboard advertisements from America, “Jesus is coming – look busy!”. And, “ ‘Don’t make me come down there!’ – God”.

None of that sounds terribly Anglican. The Second Coming of Christ can seem to be both too big to comprehend, and too abstract and distant to be concerned about. It seems a long way removed from parish affairs. Meanwhile, various sects and cults are left to have a field day with obscure and apocalyptic passages of scripture, confidently predicting imminent dates and lurid disaster-movie endings of the world.

But it is a great mistake to leave the Second Coming of Christ to the errors of fundamentalists and sectarians. It is a vital Christian doctrine. We say that we believe it, in the Creed, and it is the great theme of this first part of Advent, often considered under the heading of “The Four Last Things”: death, judgement, heaven and hell.  So it is good to remind ourselves at this time of year of what the Church believes about the Second Coming of Christ, and how that is set out in the story of Scripture.

The first thing the Scriptures say is that Christ has not gone away. He promises, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” The parable of the sheep and goats speaks of Christ present as the one to whom all our actions and choices were ultimately directed, and by which they will be judged. Ephesians speaks of Christ, the origin and end of all things, ascending to fill all things and to gather all things in him. He lives in his Church, which is his body in the world. He is present in the Eucharist in which his self-giving sacrifice is renewed until the end of time.

So how can there be a “Second Coming” if Christ has not gone away? The Biblical word “parousia”, often translated “second coming”, really means “presence”, a kind of intensified royal presence. In Christ’s Ascension his visible presence was removed, but he became present in new ways. Similarly, the Second Coming, the Parousia, will not be a return from absence, but a kind of seeing, a breaking through, of Christ’s royal presence, which has been there all along. At the Ascension the angels say to the men of Galilee, “This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven”.

The faith of the Church is that we will all see Christ, firstly, at the end of our lives, when our mortal bodies wear out and the veil falls away. “It is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgement”, says Hebrews. Our souls will enter into Christ’s light, and we will see ourselves as we are, and Christ as he has always been, present all along, at every fork in the road.

His light is both truth, which judges, and mercy, which saves. However painful and searching it may be, for all who will receive it, it will be a sharing with Christ in his saving death and resurrection. It will be a sharing, too, with all God’s saints and all the redeemed who already praise God in the one communion of love in heaven. And, although we do not see them, the Church on earth is already one with them in that communion of love, as we celebrate in every Eucharist. One fellowship, above, below.

But what of those who refuse mercy? The scriptures, it is true, have vivid images of eternal punishment, flames that do not go out and worms that never die. But this is imagery, not literal description. We are made for love, and love must be given and received in freedom. Therefore, we have to be free to refuse love. “Hell” is a word we must use cautiously, it has so many misleading associations. It is not devils with pitchforks, but absence, the absence and rejection of love in a soul created for love. Theologians have wisely said that there is nobody “in hell” except those who want to be there, and the only thing keeping them there is their own will. And it may be that, in the end, there will be no-one there at all. Christ is the Saviour, and he knows what he is doing.

Christians also look forward, beyond our individual lives and judgements, to a new heaven and a new earth. This is the resurrection life into which Christ has already entered, a life which is embodied, but spiritual and incorruptible. We believe that this present universe, which is passing away, was created by God out of nothing. Likewise, the scriptures look forward to a new creation in which all will be restored and the mortal will put on immortality. We cannot imagine this, of course – but could we have imagined the creation of this universe, before it happened?

When and how this will come to pass is something known only to God. But, however it happens, the final universal revelation of Christ will also be both judgement and salvation. All creation will see Christ and be drawn into his resurrection life and made new. Scripture tells us that in the new creation righteousness and justice will dwell, in a way that here we can only long and pray for. The “powers” that have been at work behind nations and history will be judged, and Christ will be triumphant.

The Second Coming of Christ, then, is not just about an event in the distant future. It is also, very much, about the principle of Christ’s presence in time and history, and therefore about how we live here and now. How we live, with a consciousness of Christ’s royal presence in ourselves and in all things, a consciousness formed in us through prayer and sacrament and love and service to others. Every eye at last will see him; but can begin to see him by faith here and now as we follow the path of discipleship. This is to live both in the expectation of judgement and in the hope of salvation. And this is the rousing call, and the expectation, and the hope, of Advent.

Sermon at Parish Mass, Christ the King 2021

 

James Tissot: Christ before Pilate, 1894. Brooklyn Museum

Daniel 7:13-14

Revelation 1:5-8

John 18:33-37

If you don’t like changes in Church, perhaps this won’t be your favourite feast, as the Solemnity of Christ the King is a relatively modern addition to the calendar. It was invented in 1925 by Pope Pius XI, who wanted to assert the sovereignty of Christ against the increasing nationalism and secularism of his time. He was also making a not too subtle point about his own claim to sovereignty as the Vicar of Christ the King, still a sore point for the popes after they had lost their temporal power in the previous century.

In spite of these ultramontane beginnings, Christ the King is a feast that has grabbed the imagination ecumenically, having been adopted not only by Anglicans – for whom it supplants the much-loved “Stir-Up Sunday” – but also by quite a few protestant denominations, and some Russian Orthodox.

It seems to have taken on a life of its own. If you institute a Feast of Christ the King, then you have to assign Bible readings to it. Which inevitably will bring you up against Biblical ideas of kingship, and specifically the kingship of Christ, that will challenge the assumptions of power out there in the world.

As we see in today’s Gospel reading. This is a scene of contrasts, Pilate and Jesus standing for two radically different understandings of power. Pilate represents the earthly power, that of the Emperor, by whose authority Jesus in the end will be put to death. But Jesus reveals a different power.

He says, “My kingdom is not from this world.” To which Pilate asks, “So you are a king?” But Jesus gives no direct answer. Pilate’s understanding of the word “king” is completely different from that of Jesus. So, instead of answering, he bats the question back, “You say that I am a king”. Jesus then goes on to say what his real purpose is, and how any question about Jesus being a king has to be answered, and that is “to testify to the truth”.

It is here that the Kingship of Jesus is to be found. It is here that we need to examine, and transform, all our ideas of earthly power and leadership. The Kingship of Jesus is about truth. In a way that the kingdom of Pilate is not.

There is a lot about truth in John’s Gospel. Jesus says that he, in person, is “the way, the truth and the life”. He tells the disciples “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free”. He promises the gift of the Holy Spirit, who “will guide you into all the truth”. He prays for the disciples, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth”.

If the Kingship of Christ is about truth, then that means, first of all, that the exercise of power depends on truthfulness and integrity. Unlike the power exercised by Pilate, who ends up asking, “What is truth?”, and condemns a man he knows to be innocent to the will of the mob. When earthly rulers fail in truthfulness and integrity, the consequences can be disastrous for communities and nations, as the past season of remembrance has reminded us.

But Jesus is more than simply a person who is truthful. He is the truth in person. With our dominant rational western mind-set we can tend to think of “the truth” as a set of facts we have to agree to, and certainly facts matter. But Jesus shows us that the fullness of truth is a person, and a person requires personal encounter, real attention and engagement, a process of growing into and getting to know more and more fully.

He who is the truth in person is also the Word through whom all things were made. Which means that truth is woven into the fabric of human communities, our world, and the universe.

I was at a talk last week by Professor Rob Gilbert, who is a professor of Biophysics at Oxford University and a priest. He spoke of the scientific endeavour to seek the truth. Although science is always questioning and refining its discoveries, scientific discoveries are nonetheless truthful. They uncover something that is beautiful because it is a facet of what is true.

Professor Gilbert spoke of the delight in scientific discovery as being like the recognition of an old friend. Which is the language of personal encounter, not simply of ticking off facts. It is relational language, and relationship changes you. From the perspective of Christian faith, every discovery of the truth is an encounter with the Word through whom all things were made.

So when Jesus speaks of the disciples being led into all truth, that they will know the truth and the truth will set them free, he is speaking of truth as transforming relationship. His kingship, which consists of testifying to the truth, is about being drawn into relationship, that relationship in which we become fully who we are meant to be.

The Kingdom of Jesus is about delight and joy, discovery and recognition. It is the kingdom in which we are led into the whole truth until we know as we are known.

Yes, his standard of Kingship means, as a starter, that truthfulness and integrity are necessary in human life. Necessary, for the life and relationship that builds up and does not destroy. Which means turning away from, repenting of, all that demeans and obscures human life, the truth of every person made in the image of God. But necessary also as the starting point for the journey into all the truth, the discovery of who we are meant to be, and are becoming, in Christ.

The First Letter of John says, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is”.

Truthfulness and integrity in our lives are where we begin, where we acknowledge the Kingship of Christ, and this is where the work of repentance is to be done. But this then opens us to a journey of encounter and recognition, in which every discovery of truth, in the world, in science, in human communities, and in faith, draws us closer in to relationship with Christ who is the truth in person. And at the end of that journey, if we can speak of an end, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.

“You are a priest for ever, according to the order of Melchizedek.”

 Homily for the London Chapter of the Society of Catholic Priests

18 November 2021

Votive Mass of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Eternal High Priest

 

Laurent de La Hyre  (1606–1656): The Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek

From the tabernacle of the Capuchin convent in the Marais, Paris.

Eucharistic Lectionary: 1 Maccabees 2.15-29; Luke 19.41-44

One of the, I think, weirdest arguments I have ever heard against the ordination of women came from a former priest of the US Episcopal Church, a woman, who had renounced her orders and joined one of the continuing churches. She had come to the conclusion that the essence of priesthood was offering sacrifice, that is, killing things – and killing things was the business of men.

For a less impoverished theology of the priesthood of Christ, and therefore of the Church, we need to look more closely at the New Testament. In particular, it is the Letter to the Hebrews which is the exposition par excellence of the priesthood of Christ, of the way in which he is a priest, and what his priesthood means:

“You are a priest for ever, according to the order of Melchizedek.”

That is Hebrews 5.6, quoting Psalm 110, which in turn looks back to Genesis 14. These are the only places in the Bible where Melchizedek appears, but, for the author of Hebrews, he is critical to understanding the priestly ministry of Christ.

Hebrews does of course go on quite a bit about the priesthood of Aaron, the tabernacle, the sacrifices, the sprinkling of blood and the rite of atonement. But after all these elaborate analogies the point, in the end, is that the priesthood of Christ is not like that.

The Aaronic priesthood offers blood that is not its own (Hebrews 9.25); indeed, the origin of the priesthood, according to Exodus 32, is in an act of savage violence: after the Sons of Levi had slaughtered 3,000 Israelites for worshipping the golden calf, Moses says to them, “Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of a son or a brother.” A scene which has echoes in today’s reading from Maccabees, and its assumption that sacred violence is the correct response to people worshipping in the wrong way. But which contrasts with Our Lord’s lament over Jerusalem because the ways of peace were hidden from its eyes.

Christ’s priesthood is radically different from that. It arises from a different source, not by descent but by virtue of a life that cannot die, a priesthood not like that of Aaron but like that of Melchizedek.

The figure of Melchizedek just pops up in Genesis without explanation. He has no ancestry or later story attached to him, which enables the author of Hebrews to stress that he is literally “a priest for ever”. What Hebrews does not mention, but perhaps simply takes as read, is the kind of offering that Melchizdek makes: not blood sacrifices, but simply bread and wine.

And, if it is correct that the first Christians read the epistles with the other scriptures at their gathering to celebrate the Eucharist, then the connection between the Eucharist and the priesthood of Melchizedek would have been obvious. Indeed, Melchizedek is there in the Roman Canon, parts of which are very ancient indeed; Aaron is not.

But the unique nature of the priesthood of Christ is something that needs to be stressed again and again. The work of René Girard uncovered how sacred violence tends to evolve in human societies and becomes veiled in myth, its threat contained in regulated cults of sacrifice. Christ, by his offering of himself on the cross, blows open the whole disguise of myth and shows what has really been going on all the time.

In spite of that, human beings tend to revert to type. Our original flaw needs a lifetime of grace and more to be healed. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the Church can tend to forget the unique nature of Christ’s priesthood, and seek to re-establish cults of sacrifice in its place.

This has been going on from the beginning. After the Last Supper, St Peter clearly understands that he has just been ordained as some sort of priest, because the first thing he does is to try and kill someone. He has perhaps missed the clue, that Jesus, in ordaining the Apostles, had handed them bread and wine: the priestly sign of Melchizedek, not of Levi.

It doesn’t take much thought to identify ways in which the Church today can slip into imagining itself as a priesthood which offers blood that is not its own. In the appalling crimes of clerical abuse. In the ways in which the broken Clergy Discipline Measure still blights the lives of so many. In the seemingly endless recognition of, but failure to deal with, misogyny, institutional racism, and homophobia.

As priests, this gives us I think a particular call to be continually discerning the nature of our priesthood. Which is, of course, the priesthood of Christ, shared with his Body which is the whole Christ, and given particular expression in the ordination of its ministers.

This priesthood is radically different. The bread and wine given to us to carry are the signs of a subversive peace-making that, because they come from the Lord, will continually probe and expose our complicity with the structures of sacred violence. And, as this is the priesthood of Christ, it is both prophetic and costly for those who exercise it. But, because it is the priesthood of Christ, it is the means of the redemption of the world, and of the Church, from all the violence that, in spite of its persistence, is not of God.

Sermon at Parish Mass, The Second Sunday before Advent 2021

 

David Roberts  (1796–1864): The Siege and Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans Under the Command of Titus, A.D. 70

Daniel 12.1-3

Hebrews 10.11-25

Mark 13.1-8

 

‘Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’

After the First World War, people looked back and remembered the almost unbearably beautiful and idyllic summer of 1914. The golden summer before the world that they knew came tumbling down. The carefree golden youths who little knew that, for many of them, it would be their last summer.

Perhaps some people saw it coming. But it seemed to take most unawares. Historians can help us to look back and understand the causes of war and conflict, to trace the path by which these things come about. We can see in hindsight things that could have been done to prevent such disasters. But it takes a prophet to look forward and see them coming.

A prophet, in the Bible, is not primarily someone who makes mysterious predictions from another world. Prophecy is, rather, the gift of seeing clearly what is going on in the present time, and where it is heading. And, just as importantly, seeing the hidden powers that are at work in human affairs. This is why the cry of the prophets so often is to repent, to turn aside from the path that leads to destruction.

Jesus, in the Gospel today, speaks words of prophecy. Jerusalem is doomed, because its rulers would not know the way of peace. And at the heart of Jerusalem was the Temple, the most awe-inspiring monument of all, of which not one stone would be left standing on another.

What was the Temple about? It should have been, as Jesus said, a house of prayer for all nations. Instead it had come to focus and symbolize the oppressive powers at work in Jerusalem. It was a place of sacred violence, both in the cult of sacrifice and in its exploitation of the poor. It was the power base of the elite, and was hugely rich – but it never ceased devouring the substance of the poor, right down to a poor widow’s last coins.

Because it was a place of power, the Temple was the touchstone for all the simmering violence between the Roman occupiers and Jewish nationalists. It focused hatred and fear of the other, which taken far enough even enables you to kill them when you stop seeing that they are the same as you.

Jesus saw with clarity the tragic future of Jerusalem and its Temple. In the year 70 there was a rebellion by Jewish Zealots, religious fundamentalists who wanted to purify the land by driving out foreigners. They proved no match for the might of Rome and ended up besieged in Jerusalem. The resulting destruction and massacre of the inhabitants were terrible. They were all killed, and Jerusalem and the Temple were completely destroyed.

All this is in Jesus’ mind, when he says that not one stone will be left here upon another. But this was dangerous talk. Imagine if a radical preacher of our own day were to stand outside Parliament, or the Bank of England, and say, ‘Do you see these great buildings? All this is going to be thrown down.’

I imagine the security forces would pay close attention if they heard that sort of thing. As indeed they did when Jesus said it. Because, after all, it sounds like a threat of violent revolution, something that Rome always feared.

But Jesus is different. His message has been, consistently, that he is destined to suffer and be killed, and that his followers must renounce violence and love their enemies. The violence that he prophesies is not his, but what he sees already building under the surface of society.

The disciples come to Jesus privately to ask him more about the destruction of the Temple. They ask, “when is all this going to happen, and what will be the sign”. As so often, they have misunderstood. They want to know when the starting gun for the revolution is going to be fired. But Jesus says to them, “Beware that no one leads you astray!” There will indeed be wars, and rising of nations against nations, and earthquakes, and famines. But, crucially, these are not the signs that the disciples are to look for. And, if anyone says that they are, they are being led astray.

This is absolutely central to Jesus’ message. The violent convulsions that engulf the world, the anguish that afflicts the nations, are not the signs of God.

God is not like that. And that is so difficult for the disciples to get their heads around because for millennia people have been imagining God in the shape of their own violence.

But Jesus shows that love, not violence, is the ruling principle of God’s Kingdom. God in Jesus has come to those who do not know him, who hate him, who in the end will reject him and kill him. So that they can be forgiven. So that they – we – can be loved back into friendship with God and with one another. So that we can come home and live in the love of God who made us for himself.

Fear of the other chokes and poisons society. It has been the root cause of so many wars and atrocities. The Gospel shows us a better way, the way of love. And it is the only way of true and lasting peace.

Last week, I visited Colindale Primary School as part of a multi-faith day, in which representatives of all the major different faiths spoke to the year groups about what they believe and practice. And it was wonderful to see, in all the year groups, children of all those different faiths learning together.

The way of Jesus, the way of love, is not impossibly distant or hopelessly idealistic. It is offered to us, a choice that we can make, in the ordinary circumstances of everyday life. In the daily commitment to love our neighbour. To build bridges rather than walls. To rejoice in the diversity of our world and all its people. And by following the way of Jesus, by committing ourselves to love and renouncing violence, by embracing the other and building a society of peace, we too will become his disciples.