Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Fifth Sunday of Lent 2024

I consider myself to be an amateur cosmologist. Therefore, of all the great thanksgiving services that have taken place in the Abbey, it was the one for Professor Stephen Hawking in 2018 that I shall never forget. His was a huge contribution to physics and cosmology, filled with deep understanding and startling originality—all made under his own daunting physical condition. Thursday marked the anniversary of his death. 

Do see if you can spot his memorial stone on your way out—just West of the Quire Screen and 6 feet from that of Isaac Newton. "Here lies all that is mortal of Stephen Hawking."

Hawking’s greatest work was in the field of black holes: Regions of spacetime exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that nothing—not even light—can escape their pull. At the heart of every black hole must be a point where the mathematics of space and time themselves break down—a point known as a singularity. 

In order to understand the beginnings of the universe as a whole, Hawking directed our attention to black holes, for the universe itself, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, began in a singularity.

The singularity is both the end of matter, and the beginning of matter.

You may remember those fuzzy but never-before-seen photographs published in 2022 of the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy.

A black hole hides its singularity with a boundary known as the event horizon. Nothing that crosses the event horizon can ever return to the outside—everything gets sucked in; it is the point of no return. 

There is much about Passion Sunday—the 5th Sunday in Lent—which feels like our Event Horizon, our point of no return; a crucial and liminal moment. Like an astronaut that has strayed too close to a black hole, there is a decision to be made today.

Remain here, on the threshold of the Holy City—Jerusalem. Or choose to ride in, knowing, as we do, that to go in is to choose agony and arrest and trial and scourging and crucifixion and death … and more still: an encounter with the black hole that is the gates of Hell itself. We are rather like those cavalrymen of the Light Brigade. We can espy the plateau in the distance—the Garden of New Life. But between it and us lies the valley and its gardens—the gardens of Gethsemane and Gabbatha and Golgotha. 

Stephen Hawking theorized that with the loss of matter sucked into a black hole would come a necessary loss of information. E from that famous E=mc2 equation. E would be lost. Energy, information or, to use a Greek term, ‘logos’, is lost as it spirals down the plug hole of the black hole towards the singularity.

But, being the superlative scientist that he was, Hawking was prepared to admit when he got things wrong. His mistake, he realised, was in only considering general relativity, which asserts that nothing can escape the grip of a black hole. 

That changes, however, when quantum mechanics comes into play. According to the weird world of quantum mechanics, fleeting pairs of particles and antiparticles are constantly appearing out of empty space, only to annihilate and disappear in the blink of an eye. When this happens in the vicinity of an event horizon, a particle-antiparticle pair can be separated - one twin then falls behind the event horizon, doomed to meet the singularity, while the other escapes, leaving them forever unable to meet and cancel each other out. 

These orphaned particles stream away from the black hole’s edge as radiation—Hawking Radiation. Hawking’s greatest contribution to cosmology is the prediction that black holes emit radiation. This radiation, a faint snippet of information; news of what is going on in the heart of the singularity.

When pairs of particles and antiparticles spawn near a black hole's event horizon, each pair shares a connection called quantum entanglement. This is the phenomenon of quantum mechanics that states that particles are so inextricably connected that the quantum state of one cannot be described independently of the state of the other, even if the particles are separated by a large distance. Spooky action at a distance, Einstein called it.

So, what then happens to this link and the information it holds when one of the pair falls into the black hole, leaving its twin to become a particle of Hawking radiation?

We don’t know.

Jesus, in John’s Gospel, gives voice to the gravitational pull of what lies ahead, and also to the twin aspects of our singularity. ‘Lifted up’ is reference to the Crucifixion when Jesus will be hoisted up on a Cross. But ‘lifted up’ is also the Resurrection when Jesus will be raised from the tomb. These are inextricably entangled, even down to the quantum level; you can’t know one without the other. Ours is the crucified resurrected One; the resurrected crucified One.

And the singularity is both the destruction of all information—of all meaning—of the Logos … and the moment a new Creation—of new meaning—of Good News. Likewise, the lifting up will “accomplish” both the crushing of the demonic powers that threaten us … and the inauguration of the new epoch in which we shall learn to live without those powers, as the Crucified Resurrected One gradually draws all of humanity to himself.

The anniversary of Hawking’s death fell on Thursday—the 14th—this last week. That also happens to be the anniversary of Einstein’s birth. And, with a beautiful happenstance, were we Americans, we would date last Thursday as 3.14—popularly known as Pi Day. Pi—3.14—that most famous of mathematical constants. The ratio of the circumference to the diameter of all circles. An irrational number (in that it cannot be expressed as an integer fraction) and a transcendental number (in that it is not the root of any integer polynomial and its infinite string of decimal digits have no repeating pattern in them).

Hawking, I think, would love that. Hawking’s tombstone has engraved upon it his most famous equation. The equation for Hawking radiation. That is, the radiant energy or ‘information’ of a black hole. I shall not pretend to understand it, but I have just enough Physics to appreciate the significance of it. The equation contains big G - Newton’s constant, which clearly incorporates the world of classical Newtonian physics. It contains h - Planck’s constant, which betrays the world of quantum mechanics at play. It contains c - the speed of light, which is the talisman of Einstein’s relativistic physics. It contains k - Boltzmann’s constant, which is the herald of the physics of thermodynamics.

Here are the four major branches of Physics—all contained in Hawking’s famous equation. The presence of these very unresolvable constants hints at a theory of everything, in which all physics might be unified. It is tantalising to say the least. This is the holy grail of physics—the Grand Unifying Theory that would unite Einstein’s relativistic physics with the quantum world and the classical world.

For us Christians, we look to Good Friday for that resolution of the irresolvable. Our irrational and transcendental problem addressed. God and humankind resolved and reconciled in those two orthogonal dimensions of the cross. The very heart of the blackest of black holes—the moment of complete loss and abandonment ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"), and the moment of a paradoxical resolution ("It is finished; it is accomplished!") which is a moment of New Creation.

"If we do discover a complete theory of everything … then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.” (Hawking)

Hawking qualified that statement towards the end of his life. He meant ‘god' in a metaphorical rather than literal sense. We would be god.

We Christians might be willing to concur in one important sense in that we believe that in sharing in the death and resurrection of Jesus—as we did in our baptism, and as we do each time we share the Lord’s Supper, and each time we enter into the black hole of his Passion—in doing so we also share in his divinity.

But where we might part company with Professor Hawking is in his conviction that this is a theory to be devised, a formula to be worked out, an equation to be solved. The mystery of our salvation is not a formula; it is a liturgy. It is not something to be worked out; it is something to be undergone. 

Treating these ultimate questions as formulas suggest that they are ideas that can be grasped - and once you’ve grasped them, you’ve ‘got it’. Whereas a liturgy is something that happens to you and at you. 

At that is why we must enter into the blackness of the Passion, for the answer lies in the doing.

So let us cross the Event Horizon and enter in.