Don't Forget the Cross

Oh dear, poor Archbishop Justin can do nothing right this Easter. A peevish appearance on Youtube last week implying that keeping clergy out of church buildings seemed to be the biggest issue facing the See of Canterbury was matched by an Easter Day sermon to the nation described by one thoughtful commentator as ‘quietly disastrous’. In fact there was a link: Abp Justin couldn’t help stressing on Sunday that the Resurrection gives us ‘a hope that is surer than stone; than any architecture’. Take that to mean, ‘You don’t need churches, do as you’re told.’ But that was a minor if noticeable lapse; more serious was the quite striking secularism dressed up in religious language.   

When he wrote his short article ‘Easter and the End of Christianity’, Mark Vernon only had access to Lambeth Palace’s initial taster for the Archbishop’s sermon, but the full version didn’t change the picture. ++Justin ran with St Peter’s speech in Acts 10 to draw the lesson “the resurrection of Jesus is the solid foundation of all hopes for a better world … the first Christians were empowered with the resources to live in ways that brought abundant life to rich and poor, strong and weak, the privileged and the rejected … Even in the dark days of this Easter we can feed on hope. We can dream of what our country and our world will look like after the pandemic … There needs to be a resurrection of our common life … In the new life of the resurrection of Jesus, we dare to have faith in life before death”. “Hope”, he states, “is the Christian distinctive”. The Archbishop clearly wanted to speak to the moment, to our chaotic and uncertain circumstances.

“The message sounds commendable”, says Dr Vernon, “the words of a civic leader fulfilling his responsibilities. But it turns bishops into exemplary citizens, not heralds of another country that’s already here … Jesus did not preach a better life”. I’m not sure I’d go along with that completely, remembering John 10 – “I have come that they may have life and have it fully” – but there is certainly an abiding tension in Christian thinking between an otherworldly and a this-worldly focus. The question is what 'new life' means, and where it comes from. 

The ‘new life’ to which Christians are called in Christ can’t be completely disconnected from what happens to us in this world. Living in Christ has consequences in terms of relationships, resources and social organisation; it does indeed mean recognising the unique value of others as beloved by God, immersion with thankfulness into a life which cannot at heart be bad because the eternal Son came to share it. God is concerned with what we do. Yet the risen life means, above all, being committed to never-ending change; and the central metaphor for change in Christianity is death, dying to our sins, to our delusions, to the falsehoods that distort life. Ultimately there is actual death to face, an experience (if our faith is up to it) transformed by the knowledge that Jesus has been there first. The first Christians were indeed empowered to live in different ways, but what empowered them was the death they underwent, the dying to selfhood that they took on board when they bought into the death of Jesus. It wasn’t the hope of reforming everyday experience that drove them forward, but the revolution in relationships and the order of priorities brought about by God in Christ. It wasn’t a case of saying ‘Christ is risen, we can build a better world’ but ‘Christ is risen, his Kingdom comes’. The Cross isn’t just a horrible accident reversed by the Empty Tomb so that we mop our brows and conclude ‘that’s all right then’: both are part of the same experience. The great paradox at the heart of Christian experience is that you die and receive life back, but a life transfigured by the crucifixion, and leaving out the Cross nudges Christianity towards the this-worldly end of the scale. The one and the other sound similar, but they’re not. 

I can’t imagine ++Justin doesn’t know this, so perhaps he just felt it was a little hard to express to the millions of unchurched souls hungry for hope who would be listening to him. He wouldn’t be wrong if so. I am wondering what deaths I am being summoned to die currently. 

I’ve been deeply disheartened at times since the churches were shut and worship stopped, and I’ve become aware how much of my own productivity is driven by external pressures rather than by anything I choose to do; only today I suddenly realised that the lockdown casts a paralysing shadow over my thinking, exaggerating a tendency I have always had of coming up with reasons for delaying this or that task until something else becomes clear. I wonder where that particular sort of procrastination comes from. I’ve dipped into envy and despair. None of this is new, but it comes at me with renewed force because of the removal of some of the outside forces that usually operate on me. I found it exceptionally hard to pray for the Prime Minister when he was ill; perhaps he will discover he is called to change aspects of himself, too. Hope, after all, is the Christian distinctive.