Inhabiting a long history: A reflection for Holy Week

Look what happened. Years later, I wrote to Mr Christopher to tell him that I had become a priest. I was a Vicar at the time, in North London. Now I am writing this in Westminster Abbey, where I am the Dean. My back door opens into the Abbey, these days I certainly do live in a house of faith.

I also inhabit a long history. It is a story that gives me a past and future. It is a history in which I have to find my place. Over a thousand years ago, Westminster was an awkward, uncomfortable spot, sand, gravel and thorns. A community of monks made it home. Then, King Edward the Confessor set up a royal home here – the Palace of Westminster – and built a royal church. Dying, he was buried in that church and William the Conqueror came to be crowned as successor by right. From thorns to thrones.

The Abbey is a story that keeps growing in the telling. The Confessor was later made a saint and his tomb became a shrine. Henry III thought that that was a story of sovereignty and sanctity, law and grace and well worth telling. So, he rebuilt the Abbey to make the point and in the years that followed kings and queens of England were interred around the Confessor’s shrine. Henry III, Edward I and Eleanor, Edward III, Richard II, Henry V. So, now we are a church and shrine - holy ground. We are royal, a place of coronation, a nation’s church. We are a house of memory, a great gallery of memorial. We are a place of gathering in times of sorrow, and in times of celebration. We are the nation’s parish church.

This matters to me because I knew long ago, before I was a priest, that I was a historian, hooked on explanations, on narrative, on beginnings and endings. At school I was a History Boy, of the kind Alan Bennett made famous, wondering about how you fit in. The maverick teacher, Hector, in Alan Bennett’s play says:

'The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.'

History, Westminster Abbey, the Christian Faith all helping us discover we are not alone. Each insisting that we live in history and in a community of truth.

A History Boy, it is probably no surprise that I have read detective stories for years – more stories with explanations. So, I first knew about Dorothy Sayers because of the Peter Wimsey novels. Only later did I know that she was a Christian apologist and quite a good one. She wrote a play in 1946, imagining an airman killed in the second world war arriving at the gates of heaven.

What the airman sees is familiar. Faith does not leave you untethered. He recognises this city as his native Lichfield; he has come home. Then the recording angel asks him Can you recite your creed?

The airman begins I believe in God… and a great chorus instantly joins in …the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. It is a moment of inclusion, an 'in-gathering'. The airman, however, is startled and unhappy. He does not think this great chorus of faith is his. This is not his inner voice, it is not private, not personal. He wants to be seen as individual and special.

As his protests, the Angel at the gate responds crisply, What is speaking in you is the voice of the city, The Church and household of Christ, … Did you think you were unbegotten? Unfranchised? With no community and no past?

It is a modern idea that I should strive to be myself. Indeed, in its most vivid forms it is a heresy. Scripture and the church are sure that we find our place in community. There is a reason why all the images of heaven are corporate – a city, a kingdom, a harvest, a feast… We look for our place in the community we live in and within the multitude that has been this way before us.

So, I relish life in the Abbey and the story that binds the many into one. The poet Seamus Heaney once described his childhood passion for wells: 'I loved the dark drop… the smells of waterweed'.

Older and more dignified he no longer has his hands in the green slime – instead, he says, ‘I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing’.

I feel that way about history and theology, about faith. I do this to see myself and to see that I am not alone. The story matters. Think of the beginning of the gospels. Think of John striking sparks in the darkness and offering a narrative that begins before the beginning of anything. Think of Luke telling a story with a time and a place - Bethlehem, Galilee, Golgotha, in the days of the Emperor Augustus, when Pontius Pilate was Governor of Judea. When we read the gospels, we are reading descriptions that sweep up past and future, they are intended to gather us in, persuade us that we have a time and place.

In Holy Week and at Easter that story gathers pace and reaches its climax. We are slightly tempted to focus on mere moments – a supper in an upper room, an arrest, a crucifixion. In the hands of the gospel writers though, Christ’s passion is a sequence and we should spot the really long narrative that Christ himself understands. Arriving in Jerusalem, with his disciples, he is there to keep the Passover Feast. There to rehearse the old history of the exodus from Egypt.

That is done in a crowded city. Tens, hundreds of thousands of people squeezed into every home and hostel, and living in tents outside the city walls. That's why the disciples were anxious about where they would find room to eat their meal. With them had come the Passover lambs. Everywhere you went you could see, you could smell, you could hear it was Passover. It was oppressive. It was volatile.

The focus of all this energy was the Temple, and hard up against it was the Antonia, the Roman fortress: foreign soldiers, foreign accents in the street. Now, Passover is a festival of deliverance. Everything arranged to remind the faithful that God had brought them out of slavery, into freedom. At every Passover meal. The host tells the story of oppression in Egypt and the great climax:

'and the LORD heard our voice, and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression; and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm'

In the Temple, over and again, the psalter laboured that theme. The Passover Hallel, was all for deliverance:

'All nations surrounded me; in the name of the LORD I cut them off! They surrounded me, surrounded me on every side; in the name of the LORD I cut them off!'

Again and again, a crowd sought urgently the one who would come in the name of the Lord. The symbolism is urgent too, the bread was unleavened bread, the sort you can make in haste before a quick departure. The wine was a taste of the good things to come, it was, and always will be, the wine of the kingdom, the wine Jesus promises to drink with his followers. They looked to the future that night, looked for deliverance. Woven together that night was the story of Jesus Christ, the story of Exodus and the story of anyone and everyone who has longed to be free at last. Here is a story in so many of us really might find a place.

So, what a surprise then to find this grand narrative begins to fall apart before us. The longed-for Saviour is betrayed. He doesn’t deliver the people he is delivered up himself. It all goes so horribly wrong. The centre cannot hold, things run contrary.

A second century bishop, Melito of Sardis, wrote:

The Judge was judged
He whom loose the bound was bound
He who created the world was fixed with nails…
He who gives creatures life died
He who raises the dead was buried.

The paradoxes are heaped, one on another. The happy ending is not delivered. It is not what was expected, it is not how the story was supposed to go. The Dominican friar, Timothy Radcliffe explains:

Bizarrely, it is this story, now so gone wrong, rooted in failure and seemingly meaningless, that turns out to be the one story that matters. Indeed, this is the only explanation that works, the only hope that can redeem us. The truth we need, the truth we can rely on, is the truth that meets us when the shutters have come down, when despair rises up to meet us. We don’t believe because it is easy, we believe because belief serves us when life is difficult and harsh.

Just a few months in to my time here, we shut the doors of the Abbey during the pandemic. I was locked in. I was confined to a church determined to keep people out and it was a terrible place to be. In the Abbey, where we rely on visitors for our income and on a rhythm of worship for a steady heartbeat of activity, we struggled.

Walking round the empty church, it slowly dawned on me that the Abbey had already proved itself resilient in bad times. Bombed in 1941, a church changed by Civil War and Reformation, an abbey ravaged by plague, it endures. It is built for the long story, the one with twists and turns. It is built for the storm.

The Passion of Christ, the events of Holy Week take us deep into agony, betrayal and death. They take us into the horror where meaning is lost and hope falters. In a medieval passion play the centurion provides a commentary as the nails are hammered home. 'Flesh', at the first blow; then, 'bone' as he hears the second; and finally 'wood'.

Crucifixion was a very physical thing. The point is that redemption is won bitterly, from hard, unyielding things. Christ wrestles salvation from unwilling flesh, bone and wood. Truth is worked out in extremis. It is a truth that is robust enough for the hardest questions, it is stronger than death.

We must never sell that short. Jesus betrayed and dying in agony faces the great moral crisis all of us feel when we cannot find off the dark; the crisis in which we worry that there may be no story to tell. The moment is distilled in the famous cry of dereliction from the cross.

'At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?' which means, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'                     
- Mark 15:34

So much ink has been spilled in explaining what he said and why he said it. There are those who hear those words, imagine that scene, and assume that dying, Jesus is at his most fundamentally human. He feels alone, he despairs, Jesus doubts. Surely, here we see our common humanity and the fear we share? Surely this is the Jesus we should know? To say that though, misses the point completely.

The cry torn out of Jesus, 'My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?' is not conjured from despair or from doubt. This is not the troubled, inner voice of a man in doubt. These are words from Scripture. It is a quotation. It comes from Psalm 22.

'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?'
- Psalm 22:1

The Psalms are a prayer book. In that last pitch of pain Jesus did not doubt, he prayed. He still found a hope and a meaning. He still found God. In human agony and human anguish, he did not lose his way. It is intriguing that wanting Jesus to be a Saviour we still try to make him in our image. We want him to doubt because we doubt; we want him to share our fear, and enter into our failure. Jesus, however, did not take flesh to be like us. Jesus took flesh so we could be like him. It is his story that we tell in Holy Week so that we can become part of it.

I turn to these Passion Narratives knowing that what I meet there is an account of being human. It is a humanity that faces despair and even death and still claims the right to go on believing, go on hoping. The grim and bloody scenes in Jerusalem are not an awkward appendix to the real story of Jesus’ teaching and healing; this is the real story. From the beginning Jesus was the Lamb of God, the one who would die. The whole story of the gospel is the story of the cross.

As the seventeenth century bishop, Lancelot Andrewes put it:

'In this all, so that, see this and see all… '

Andrewes continues:

'It is well known that Christ and his cross were never parted, but that all his life long was a continual cross. At the very cratch (the crib), His cross first began. There Herod sought to do what Pilate did even to end his life before it began…'

A life lived in meaning and hope, a life that confers meaning and hope. A life lived completely, a life completed. That’s why we hear, in John’s gospel, Jesus’ speak last words that tell us it 'It is accomplished' – it is finished. It is an extraordinary moment. You see, I think we fear to die because we feel that we have something to lose. We worry that we will die incomplete with some part of our story not told, there will be things not said, not felt, there will be experiences we have missed. We do not feel that our lives are an accomplishment, nor that they are complete.

Christ said it is finished there was nothing that he wanted to keep. He had found his identity within the life and love of God. His life was yielded up. Think back to Eden and that first sin, it was a sin of possessiveness; Eve took the apple. Now Christ gives everything up. We struggle with this as we try so hard to be what we are. Christ did not struggle at all, accepting rather what he would become. He did not take, he received. This is fundamental, God would give us the Kingdom but only if we will have it in preference to what we have now. Life has been a gift and can be surrendered. To receive eternal life, we must first let go.

Facing his own death, a former Dean of Westminster, Michael Mayne, wrote:

It is accomplished and the great work of God is done. Life has taken hold of death and death loses, even death will live now. In the words of an early liturgy, Jesus will live slain. It is accomplished.

It is accomplished. Jesus has fleshed out the presence and mercy of God. That work was an agony. Make no mistake, the narrative that leads from Palm Sunday to Good Friday, a narrative that embraces wild, misplaced enthusiasms, fractured loyalties and agony and death is what Jesus knew and felt. He dreaded this in Gethsemane and lived it as something monstrous and vile. But what we see here can be seen nowhere else. In this ending, in this defeat, there is still purpose, still a future. In Rowan Williams’ words:

'Jesus has made himself translucent, the burning glass through which God’s light comes to set the world on fire.'

That is why we must see this. That is why the church is rooted forever to the foot of the cross and that is why Holy Week matters so much to me, because of what we can see here and nowhere else. Jesus faces the worst that we can be, the worst that can happen to us. He dies and he gathers death itself into his identity. The man, the human being, Jesus shows us what humanity looks like.

It is the interesting, exciting thing about Christianity, here is a faith that does not direct us first to a book, or to a feeling, we are directed to encounter the one thing we have the best chance of recognising, a human being like ourselves. Hope looks like this, faith looks like this, God looks like this. And that full humanity of Jesus believing, hoping, loving, living, suffering dying gathers up all that we are and claims that all of it is offered to God, all of it is from God, and all of it is gathered into God.

So, in Westminster Abbey, over Holy Week, I, and thousands of others, will hear this story that is both human and divine told again. I will preach on it as I have done before, I will inhabit the liturgies of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and I will keep an Easter Vigil. I will understand this as story about Christ and about me and the vocation to live a fully human life.

Years ago, when I worked in Cambridge, I got to know another Dominican Friar, a man steeped in the study of Thomas Aquinas with additional infectious enthusiasms for Irish whiskey and conversation. I learned a lot of my theology in his company. I learned to be interested in the story and in the nature of the story teller. Perhaps, however, the phrase of his that surfaces most often is a reflection on that business of a humanity that is shaped by Christ. McCabe explained it like this:

'If you do not love, you will not be alive… If you do love you will be killed.'
- God Matters, p.218

Faith as the exploration of what it is to live, live as fully a human life as Christ lived. Christian living as a matter of life and death. Life and the primacy of love. That is the way of the Cross, that is Passiontide in Westminster Abbey, or anywhere else.

That, I think is a description of faith that might stand the test.

Now, I would not say that my faith has faced its greatest tests while I have been living and working in Westminster. The pandemic was a challenge, it is true, and the responsibilities that have come our way have certainly been daunting at times.

My faith however was tested more, and shaken more, when I was a curate ministering for the first time to a family that had lost a baby, or when I was a college chaplain at the bedside of an undergraduate who would not live long. I struggled in Bristol in the midst of a long Occupy protest outside the Cathedral door.

I discovered then that, whenever I tried to be still and pray, the sheer difficulty of our predicament shouldered out all my piety and practice. That was hard. So, there have been other places, other times when faith has been difficult. There is, though, a particular challenge here in Westminster.

I now live and work in a place in the midst of things. I arrived in November 2019. Parliament Square, on my doorstep, was a place of jostling opinion, recently filled by one of the largest marches in British history, a place to argue whether we did, or did not, want to 'get Brexit done'. Extinction Rebellion had just won an action against the Metropolitan Police that opened the way to further protest, some of which took place pretty well on my doorstep. I did not know it then, but my first year would be full of the sound of dissenting voices, protests of many kinds would be a feature of life here. There so often seemed to be helicopters overhead and chanting voices carrying on the wind. It felt as though nearly every time I ventured out, I was asked or, more often, challenged for an opinion. The clamour was constant. Living at the Abbey I lived within our own long history and in a present and angular political discourse. I was in the midst of things and struggled with the challenge of comprehension.

Comprehension - the need to understand (and in the midst of complex problems that is hard). Also though, comprehension as the determination to include, to make the Abbey a place of 'in-gathering'. I want us to be a comprehensive place and in the carnival of contemporary opinion (that is hard too). Once, as a boy, the ambition was to marshal the facts and explain. I am, perhaps, less confident than I was. Explanation does not seem as easy as it was.

I wrote earlier of some of the experiences that shook my faith. I mentioned being a college chaplain, spending time with a splendid young student who was wise beyond his years. He did not have faith, so we did not talk much about that. We both loved poetry and we built our conversation of life, love and death around that. He had already read widely and knew the work of Louis MacNeice, a poet I have also relied on. MacNeice himself did not have much of a faith, but he had a father who did. Hailing from Northern Ireland, MacNeice was a son of the manse. Duncan introduced me to a poem written one winter’s day standing in that manse watching snow through a window.

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think

Snow, and on the windowsill a vase of roses. World is crazier and more of it than we think. That is a pretty good description of living here and trying to comprehend more difficulty and variety than I can easily hold in my head.

I do not think only of the gospel and its impact on me. I have to think more broadly. Westminster Abbey is the Theatre of Coronation and the place of a State Funeral. It is a House of memory where we have buried queens and kings, poets and politicians. It is a royal church, a gathering place of nation and Commonwealth. In the Abbey we mark great occasions of State, and we meet to acknowledge great joys and sorrows. I think about how we do that, about what it feels like to do that, about the way we provide setting and commentary for a national story.

One of my teachers in Cambridge, a man called Nicholas Lash, whispers in my ear now and then reminding me that I should never find it easy to talk about God. He warned about the danger of insulating yourself, isolating yourself to fend off all the difficultly. He said:

'Theological insulation creates the illusion amongst Christians that what they have to say is really quite simple and straightforward… it only seems easy in that measure that we insulate [ourselves] from the complex and disturbing world.'
- Nicholas Lash, Theology for Pilgrims, p.33

He is right, but in this heady, chaotic mix a life that is not insulated is beyond any explanation that I can muster. I live with difference, paradox even. It is hard to comprehend. The Abbey was been facing that challenge long before I got here. The building is awash in difference, diversity and awkward angularity. It was a Catholic, Benedictine monastery, it became a protestant, collegiate church. James I arrived, buried Queen Elizabeth I in some style and then, in a tomb nearby, interred his mother - Mary Queen of Scots, the woman Elizabeth I had executed. We have memorials to great opponents, Gladstone and Disraeli, Pitt and Charles James Fox. We have Archbishop Ussher who was sure that creation took place on 23rd October 4004 BCE and we have Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking who beg to differ.

We also contain stories that are out of kilter. Our memorials say more about the money made from transatlantic slavery, that vile trade in human misery that was, than about those who suffered and overcame its consequences. We speak of bravery and elide violence; we seem to admire imperialism and need to set the record straight. We have a long way to go before we comprehend.

The truth is that we are and always will be a work in progress. If the story we tell, the faith we preach, is going to persuade us and sustain us it needs to be brave enough to face all the difficulty and all the pain. If we really do want to comprehend we must be clear how bad it has been, how bad it still is, and how much we must repent. More than that we will need to fall silent sometimes when the paradox defeats our logic. The story of Holy Week will help us do that – it is strong on pain and sin, it too encounters paradox.

The story we tell also needs to offer us the resources for hope. We must all, urgently, learn to imagine what peace and justice look like. We must describe the better and the best and then strive make them real. The story of Easter, the undefeated life of Christ is the place to start that conversation. Our full humanity, the humanity of Christ, lives and dies and rises in glory. We need the words for despair and for hope. All of that and the humility that knows its limits. I have always liked Richard Wilbur for saying:

'All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know'.

There are days, plenty of them, when that is a stretch, when it is hard to contain the anger and frustration all around us. There are times when the particularity of the Abbey, our assumptions, our history, our liturgy strain at the seams. A service to mark the fifth anniversary of the fire at Grenfell Tower was not easy for any of us. Nor should it have been. We test ourselves; others test us too. As I said, we are a work in progress.

There are occasions though, when we seem to embrace the challenge more easily. The State Funeral, in 2022, was perhaps such a moment.

We brought the Queen’s coffin into the place of coronation, the 'House of Kings'. As I took my seat near the High Altar, I knew that we spoke of her, remembered her, prayed for her near the burial places of King Edward the Confessor, Queen Eleanor, Henry III, Henry V, and so many more besides.

So, we held the Queen in our long history. More importantly, from that first sung sentence 'I am the resurrection and the life' we were more than personal. We spoke of life and death and Christian hope. We looked beyond the details and the memories to a shared faith that begins with creation and ends with judgement and the promise of glory. We told the story in which she has a place and so do we. Our Late Majesty now became 'our sister'.

'We may rest in him, as our hope is this our sister doth'

The Queen was brought to Westminster Abbey as a member of the community of the saints; and as a sinner like us all. Elizabeth, by the grace of God, Queen and also a child of the Kingdom of God. The Queen in our prayers. The Queen in eternity. It is the fact that we can speak, in the Abbey out of our faith and out of our past with confidence, of life and death and a hope beyond death, that makes these things possible.

The novelist Niall Williams writes:

We all have to find a story to live by and to live inside or we couldn’t endure the certainty of suffering. That’s how it seems to me.
- Niall Williams, This is Happiness, p. 371

It is that story I depend upon, the story told in the gospels, preached and inhabited in the Abbey. The poet Rilke says something a little similar, writing about autumn:

The leaves are falling, falling as from far,
as though above were withering farthest gardens;
they fall with a denying attitude. And night by night, down into solitude,
the heavy earth falls far from every star. We are all falling. This hand’s falling too–
all have this falling-sickness none withstands. And yet there’s One whose gently-holding hands
this universal falling can’t fall through.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Trans. J. B. Leishman