Readings – Colossians 3: 12–17; John 19: 25b–27
“…he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’”
Let me start this morning’s sermon with a verse of poetry:
Morning glory, starlit sky,
soaring music, scholar’s truth,
flight of swallows, autumn leaves,
memory’s treasure, grace of youth.
So begins the greatest poem of Bill Vanstone, seen by many as the most impressive Anglican thinker and theologian of the latter part of the Twentieth Century. At this time of year, with the weather magnificent and the air full of the scents and new life of spring, even in times as troubled as those we are in, one can be enraptured by this sort of mood, simply by being alive. It feels like heaven! Perhaps indeed it is an intimation of heaven.
A beautiful morning for another away match at Holy Cross, Seend. © Gerry Lynch
Of course, even in our brightest moments, that is never the whole story. Many of us will come here this morning with serious problems of our own; even those of us fortunate enough not to be in that position will be deeply worried about serious problems faced by people we love.
Love is the greatest gift given to any of us by God. It is the most wonderful and miraculous and life-giving thing about being human. Yet it also has a tremendous cost. It opens us up to feeling the pains of the people we love. The second stanza of Vanstone’s poem is clear about that cost, as it continues:
Open are the gifts of God,
gifts of love to mind and sense;
hidden is love’s agony,
love’s endeavour, love’s expense.
Some people seem to think that even to celebrate this Sunday as Mother’s Day is somehow excluding and potentially wounding for those without children or whose relationships with their mothers were difficult. Well, as a childless, single man, let me say that it is simply an obvious statement of fact that mothers have a particular and unique relationship with the children they have born in their womb, an intensely physical connection that no male can ever have. Mothers perhaps more than any of us know just how costly and agonising love can be.
With this in mind, let us turn our attention to this morning’s notably short Gospel reading. Jesus looks down from the Cross, and even in his agony his deepest concern is for His mother, for her future and her welfare, which He entrusts to the disciple whom he loved.
How costly Mary’s love for Christ is at this moment. For a parent to have a child predecease them is a horrifying thing in any circumstances. The circumstances of Christ’s death, a brutal public execution in front of his mother, are about as grim and extreme as it gets.
Here we have a very human Christ, human in his love of family, and human in his physical frailty. In John’s Gospel, where Jesus often appears rather otherworldly in comparison with the Synoptics, yet in this most acute moment, His humanity is still clearly present. Jesus Christ, God made human, here gives himself up to the worst that humanity could do in order to redeem humanity. The Jesus Christ presented in the Gospels is a figure like no god of the Graeco-Roman world; those were flighty, arrogant, rather debauched figures, generally contemptuous of and casually cruel towards humanity.
Christianity instead presented God, the creator of the cosmos, as being made human and willing to undergo agony and shame for the sake of love. This should be a statement that revolutionises how we see ourselves and the world. Indeed, according to the Wiltshire-born author and historian Tom Holland, the Christian presentation of Christ as God made human and dying on the Cross did revolutionise how human beings saw themselves. I commend his 2019 book Dominion to you.
The Roman State brought peace and order to millions for centuries, but it did so at a terrible cost of casual brutality. Crucifixion was not merely a punishment, but a means of both achieving and demonstrating dominance. Order flowed from the terrorisation of the weak by the strong, and that was accepted as simply the way of the world. The idea that the marginalised or the underdog was someone to be supported, praised, and empowered was alien; it came only with the Christian revolution.
Like all revolutions, Christianity has often been betrayed by those who claim to support it, but at its core the Christian faith promotes a revolution of love. That revolution gains its energy from the scene that comprised this morning’s Gospel reading: the costly, self-sacrificing love exemplified on the Cross and indeed exemplified by so many mothers.
Tom Holland argues that the supposedly secular society that has emerged in Western Europe and some other similar countries in recent decades is, much as it tries to escape it, still fundamentally a Christian one. It is not natural or obvious to treasure the weak, or seek to make all people equal. He argues that, for example, much of what is sometimes described as the wave of “wokeness” of the last few years represents Christian values continuing to be dominant even in a culture that thinks of itself as secular and rational.
However, compelling as his ideas and writing are, I find myself parting company with Tom Holland on this. I do not think we can have a society based on Christian values for very long without faith that Jesus Christ was the son of God, and was God.
The view from the organ loft at Holy Cross, Seend is dizzying. © Gerry Lynch
For more than a thousand years, the thought-world in this country and all of its neighbours was formed by worship of God in the Christian conception of him. In the last half century or so we have replaced God as the object of our worship with ourselves; our faith is in humanity, and its capacity to continually improve with greater knowledge. At first that seems like a liberating and empowering doctrine – after all believing we have the capacity to solve the major problems of the human race should inspire people to make that belief real and do all sorts of positive things. The problem is that we are never actually capable of living up to our finest principles for very long. We know more things than we did in Christ’s time but are we actually any wiser? Look at the state of the environment or the sheer intensity of modern war.
When we lose a due sense of awe and reverence for our creator, we inevitably find that we make rather a sad idol for ourselves. When that happens, those who start out thinking that humanity is capable of solving all its own problems often seem to veer into having an unduly negative vision of humanity.
Without faith in God, and an understanding of humanity as God’s most precious creation, it seems inevitable that our culture will continue to swing wildly between a naïve overestimate of human capacity and goodness, and a depressing contempt for the deeply imperfect creatures we actually are.
Yet while humanity is not worthy of worship, it is worthy of love. We need to love ourselves for what we are, rather than hating ourselves for failing to live up to our fantasies of what we ought to be. We are worthy enough of love for Christ to pay that terrible cost on the Cross for our sakes.
Love is costly. Mothers know how costly love is. So did Bill Vanstone, as he showed in the final stanzas of that great poem:
Therefore he who shows us God
helpless hangs upon the tree;
and the nails and crown of thorns
tell of what God’s love must be.
Here is God: no monarch he,
throned in easy state to reign;
here is God, whose arms of love
aching, spent, the world sustain.
Now praise, glory, and honour be to God who is with us in the wilderness and on the streets, in times of plenty and times of austerity, in all the earth and for ever and ever. Amen.
