Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Holy Cross, Seend
Readings – Acts 10: 34-43; John 20: 1-18
“Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher).”
When we get to the end of a journey, it’s sometimes helpful to remind ourselves where it started.
Fra Angelico, Noli Me Tangere (1440-2), in the Basilica di San Marco, Florence.
Jesus’ public ministry started with His baptism by John the Baptist, then immediately being taken out into the wilderness for forty days. His public ministry ended with His crucifixion, or so it seemed. Because on the first Easter morning, a few of His closest followers encountered Him risen from the dead. They were the first witnesses to the Resurrection.
The season of Lent consists of forty days of fasting that are intentionally modelled on Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. Lent also ends on Easter morning—in other words, it too ends in Resurrection.
So travelling through the wilderness seems to be an essential part of experiencing Resurrection. In the wilderness we are confronted by the sheer scale of God’s creation, and how much of that creation lies outside our normal day-to-day experience. In the wilderness, our illusions of being in control die, and we learn just how limited the power of human beings is.
It seems to me that the Western world is entering a wilderness. The financial crisis of 2008, and the very slow recovery from it, was perhaps first warning signthat the existing political and economic order might be in trouble. Other signs include the ever widening gap between the rich and the rest, the fact that it’s often easier to make money by speculation than doing something worthwhile, and the increasing difficulties even relatively well-off young people have in finding security. All these have been warning signs, throughout history, of civilisations in trouble.
A gathering sense of crisis became acute after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. One thing the two years since have told us is that the Western world is weaker than is thought by our pundits, our politicians, and the lobbyists and campaignerswho try to influence them. Western attempts to hobble the Russian economy through sanctions have, regrettably, been at best partially effective, and have been ignored by the rising powers of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Western fantasies of power and control lie in tatters, and we seem to have entered a geopolitical wilderness.
While it has its flaws, the Western liberal order since the end of the Second World War gave us a degree of prosperity and freedom that would have been unimaginable, until very recently, to even the rich and the powerful. Its end would not be a good thing.
The moral state of this country, too, seems to be increasingly wild. Last week we heard perhaps the grimmest development yet in the Post Office scandal. Its managers spent £100m fighting sub-postmasters in court – many of whom had spent time in prison for crimes they didn’t commit – even after they definitively knew that losses could be coming from IT problems or remote tampering. Its then Chief Executive, Paula Vennells – in case you didn’t know – is an ordained priest of our own Church of England.
At the very least, we are already on the threshold of a moral wilderness. The assumptions that we made about how the world worked and how the world should work no longer seem to apply. It feels like we are coming to a great bend in the road in the history of this country and our wider civilisation.
In my youth, in the 1980s and ‘90s, I witnessed two the collapse of two civilisations, one mighty, and the other small but seemingly impregnable. The latter was the death of Catholic Ireland, the former was the collapse of the Soviet world. Almost nobody saw either of these coming, and even the few who did underestimated how quickly they would happen. There is nothing particularly given about the current Western order. There is nothing inevitable about liberal universalism, democratic elections, and faith in science and technology. The current order might collapse with great suddenness, and we might already be living through the first stages of such a collapse.
How frightening might that wilderness be? There was an article by Matthew Parris in The Times on Good Friday, about assisted dying. It’s clear that this will be one of the big debates – perhaps the biggest debate – in British politics in the second half of the 2020s. I wouldn’t dare presume to tell you what to think about it. You’ll all have had plenty of experience with loved ones who were gravely ill.
Parris is strongly in favour of euthanasia. In fact he thinks that “unless you believe in a divinity who has sanctified all human life” – something he clearly holds to be a bit silly – the arguments against it are weak. He says the strongest argument against assisted dying is that as people get used to the idea, “pressure will grow on the terminally ill to hasten their own deaths so as “not to be a burden” on others or themselves.” Everybody I know who supports assisted dying agrees that this risk needs to be addressed.
But not Matthew Parris. “I believe this will indeed come to pass”, he wrote, “And I would welcome it.”
Another key part of the Western liberal package of the last three generations was its rejection of the importance of anything non-material. I mean, it was OK to believe in God and practice your religion and stuff like that, as long as it didn’t, you know, actually influence your behaviour in any way. Abandoning God was supposed to make us more rational—and perhaps it did, because cold reason can be extraordinarily harsh to the poor and those considered useless. Cold reason is why Matthew Parris wants the terminally ill to hurry up and kill themselves. Cold reason was why the Post Office’s bosses decided to keep fighting people they knew might have been wrongly sent to prison.
Being lost in the wilderness can be a much safer and happier place than being in the bosom of a toxic civilisation. The wilderness has dangers and terrors, but it also has beauties and it has freedom.
Jesus’ ministry began in a wilderness but it ended in a garden, as recorded in this morning’s reading from St John’s Gospel. Mary Magdalene was in a wilderness of the soul after the Crucifixion, where she was one of a handful of followers, all but one of them women, to stay with Jesus right to His death. Two days later, she met the risen Christ in the garden and at first didn’t recognise who He was. She thought he was the gardener, because that’s who she would expect to find there at the crack of dawn. It was only when He spoke to her that Mary put it all together. After the wilderness comes Resurrection.
We have been conditioned not to encounter God, to believe that He was a silly old myth that we were too clever for. Things that were always understood as signs that we had been created by an intelligent and loving being – the grandeur of nature, romance and love, art, music, the human instinct to appreciate beauty – these are all put down to other explanations, or simply left unexplained. As 21st Century Westerners, we are conditioned to look for any explanation rather than God, like Mary seeing what we have been to expect rather than what Is. We have lost our connection with our Creator.
If the wilderness is somewhere where nature overwhelms humans with the grandeur of god, the garden is where humanity co-operates with God to create something out of nature, something that reveals us as being made in God’s image and likeness. The garden is the alternative we should be seeking to the environmentally degraded world that is the defining hallmark of the current political and cultural order. Perhaps we need to enter the wilderness to find the paths that lead to the garden. To guide us through it, we need once again to listen for the risen Christ—and find that he has been calling our name all along.
Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Top banner image—Claude Lorrain, Noli Me Tangere (1681). Hangs in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt.
