Sermon: Lent 5 - 17 March 2013

Preacher:

Nicholas Thistlethwaite

Date:

Sunday 17th March 2013

Service:

Eucharist

One of the most celebrated and frequently-reproduced religious paintings of the twentieth century is Salvador Dali’s,  ‘Christ of St John of the Cross’.  I expect you’re familiar with it.  Painted against a dark background, the monumental figure of the crucified Christ hovers above the earth, and we (the spectators) look down on him from above.  The rays of the sun illuminate his shoulders and outstretched arms, and far below, Dali has painted the Mediterranean coast of Spain, with a fisherman’s boat drawn up on the beach.

           The painting was acquired by Glasgow Art Gallery in 1952.  Much comment was provoked by the price (£8,200) and by the artist’s individual interpretation.  Critics described his technique as ‘skilled sensationalist trickery’, imbued with ‘calculated melodrama’ (not a compliment), and Osbert Lancaster said that it had ‘about as much religious feeling as “Through the night of doubt and sorrow” played on a Wurlitzer in the interval of a dog show’.  The public, however, loved it, and they flocked to see it – more than fifty thousand in the first two months.  Its impact was remarkable.  One reviewer noted, ‘Men entering the room where the picture is hung instinctively take off their hats.  Crowds of chattering, high-spirited school children are hushed into awed silence when they see it’.

           Dali’s interpretation was certainly unusual – the strange perspective, the dreamlike quality of the work – but the excitement it aroused is a reminder, not only of the public’s taste for novelty, but also of the power of its subject – the Cross. 

           Scholars tell us that the oldest connected narrative in the Gospels consists of those passages telling the story of Jesus’s Passion.  In St Mark’s Gospel, it’s chapters 14 and 15, beginning with the anointing at Bethany and concluding with the entombment.  We shouldn’t be surprised that the earliest Christians felt an urgent need to set down an account of the last days of Jesus’s earthly life.  For them, as for us, the events immediately connected with Jesus’s death were the fulcrum of their faith – indeed, they believed they were the central point in the whole history of God’s dealings with the human race.

           As a result, intense interest focused on this part of the Lord’s

ministry.  One writer has put it like this:

The Crucifixion had to be pictured.  Men must see it and feel it, imaginatively entering into the sufferings of Christ and sensing the awful significance of what happened on Calvary.  The story of the Passion must be told in such a fashion that the stark reality of it be felt and the full redemptive meaning of it be realised.  (J. Knox, quoted Nineham, Saint Mark: 365)

And so Mark, Luke and Matthew probably incorporated an existing Passion narrative into their own more comprehensive accounts of Jesus’s ministry.  Their Gospels tell the story with economy and power.  Unquestionably, the climax – not only of the Passion narrative, but of the Gospel as a whole – is the Cross.

           Telling the story is one thing.  But what of its meaning?

           This was the question that the second generation of Christians had to wrestle with.  Reading the story of Jesus’s Passion is a bit like attending a performance of ‘King Lear’.  No one can remain unmoved by Lear’s tragedy or Jesus’s fate.  Everyone senses that mighty events of profound meaning are unfolding before their eyes.  More difficult is finding the key that releases their meaning.

           For St Paul (one of those second generation Christians) the key was the Cross itself.  In the Gospels, the Cross is rooted in history.  It is made from timber that some workman has felled, it has been roughly fashioned by a carpenter and selected for its grim purpose by a Roman soldier or a Jewish collaborator who has a cosy relationship with the occupying forces.  The Cross is history.  It is this Cross (this wooden gallows) that the Empress Helena would claim to rediscover three centuries later in Jerusalem; this Cross which provided all those splinters and fragments of the true cross that were so valued and venerated throughout the Middle Ages.  Solid timber.  Solid history.

           But in St Paul’s writings the Cross is transformed.  Of course, Paul never doubted the historical reality of the Crucifixion.  Yet he goes beyond the simply material and re-interprets the Cross as a theological idea (a mystical reality).  For Paul, those two spars of wood are not only the gruesome means by which the death of the Son of God is accomplished: they also point to its meaning.

           At the heart of Paul’s theologia crucis (theology of the cross) is the conviction that God is known in the Cross of Christ and experienced through suffering.  This shocking assertion – shocking because unexpected – has a further consequence.  The God who reveals himself through such unlikely events is a hidden God, who tests faith by accepting humiliation and placing himself in the hands of cruel men who subject him to mockery, torture and death.  Some God.  Yet only through such self-emptying (such weakness) can God reveal his true nature and the unconditional love that he has for men and women.  And so the Christ preached by Paul, in his Gospel, is always Christ crucified.  The crucifixion is the supreme moment of revelation, and, for Paul, the Cross is the symbol both of what God has done for us and of what we are called to do for others:

Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.  (Gal. 6:14)

           This means that the ‘word of the cross’, as Paul (significantly) terms it, is a radical word which immediately identifies a gulf between worldly values and Gospel values.  Worldly power proclaims itself importantly – divine power is something hidden, even elusive.  The world celebrates strength, glamour, success – the Gospel declares, paradoxically, that true strength is found in weakness.  The world dreads death as the end – the Gospel affirms joyfully that it is the beginning.  Paul’s ‘word of the cross’ is shorthand for all this.

           What does this mean for us as we today enter the most solemn season of the Christian Year – Passiontide?

           There is no doubt that one of the greatest intellectual problems of the modern world is the problem of suffering.  Its existence is nothing new.  But primitive notions (which surface in the Bible from time to time) that suffering is deserved punishment have no place in our moral universe: we have to do better than that.  And if we want to declare that our God is a God of love, we need something to say about this.  The development of modern communication systems, which bring us shocking pictures of the consequences of natural disasters and of the butchery in Syria or Afghanistan, and the frightening technological possibilities for inflicting suffering on a massive scale, make the question all the more urgent.

           There is (of course) no easy answer.  But what the Cross reveals to us is a God who does not reject suffering, or recoil from it, or remain impassive and uninvolved with it: the Cross shows us a God who embraces suffering in order that he may (in some mysterious way) overcome it.  Christ embraces suffering out of love for the Father, but also out of love for us.  And so in all human suffering there is the possibility of redemption because (in all human suffering) God is present.  That is the life-changing truth that Passiontide has to teach us.

           Salvador Dali’s crucified Saviour floats effortlessly above the earth.  Perhaps for that reason it isn’t a very profound interpretation of its subject: the Cross loses its power if it isn’t rooted in the earth, in the humiliation, impoverishment and pain of a suffering humanity as it struggles with the question, ‘Why?’.  Let me end with some words of the late Cardinal Hume:

There are no quick answers [he writes].  The mystery of God is too great, and our minds too small, too limited to understand his ways.  But I cannot, and will not, doubt the love of God for every person, a love that is warm, intimate and true.  I shall trust him, even when I find no human grounds for doing so.  Left with the question, ‘Why?’, I discover a light that begins to shine in the darkness, just a flicker but enough for me to say: '‘ know where to look when still unable to see clearly'’  I look at the figure of Christ dying on the cross.  And I know that if I look long enough, I shall begin to see …’  (Mystery of the Cross: 12-13)