Acts
10.34: Peter began to speak to Cornelius and the assembled crowd
in Caesarea: I truly understand that God shows no partiality but in every nation
anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.Lent begins for all Christians worldwide on Ash Wednesday. For me this year it began, as it did for all of you here, on that very same day but it began in a very special and distinctive place, in Narnia.
Throughout Lent, there has been not only a Narnia Exhibition in Christ Church Bray but a genuine Narnia Experience. Thousands of people have joined together in that experience and have had their picture of God and of God’s grace enhanced and enriched in the process.
Human creatures, animal creatures, a waterfall and a ship called the Dawn Treader all were there to be explored, enjoyed and to be pondered upon. One of the most exciting things was that the only way down into the nave of the church throughout this entire period of Narnia was by going up into and walking through the ship and down again. This might seem to be of little consequence but in light of Acts 10 it really is quite important for our understanding the explosive character of Easter and the nature of the church.
For me, Narnia 2013 helped to transform Lent from being punitively gloomy and impossibly worthy to being openly stimulating and colourfully creative. It brought to life the words of the Lenten Collect which we have been using ever since that day until lunch time yesterday: Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing that you have made … Create and make in us new and contrite hearts … Lent is undoubtedly a time of wilderness living but it is not a time of self–hatred nor is it a time of divine destruction. And it was the exuberance of colour, life, joy and teaching in The Narnia Experience which gave shape to this understanding of Lent for me and I will ever be grateful.
The transformation which is effected in Peter by the resurrection is surely a ground for hope for any of us. The person who is too frightened to remain in public view as a disciple of Jesus, particularly when subjected to relentless female questioning, now is seen arguing confidently that God is open to those in every nation who respect him and who do what is right. This message is of real significance to us as we find ourselves facing more and more unavoidably into an understanding of Christianity which has become far too settled in on itself and which is over–anxious about its orthodoxy (correct teaching) as opposed to its orthopraxy (correct doing) in the face of those who genuinely seek to be their best for God and to do their best for their neighbour within their strengths and their limitations.
Christianity has become rather too good at ‘getting at’ people. Easter Day is the day when God’s goodness comes to meet us; it is the culmination of the process of Lent as well as being the next stage in the life of Christ – the triumph of life through the destroying of death in Jesus Christ. This is what gives conviction and confidence to Peter who can now hold together in love and understanding the full ministry of Jesus Christ as it worked itself out in the villages and towns of Galilee and as it swept unstoppably into the city of Jerusalem.
Mary Magdalen is the person of whose encounter with the Risen Jesus we hear most in St John. It is an entirely human meeting and is all the stronger for its air of fragile wistfulness. It has elements of loss and misunderstanding, of recognition and anticipation, of transformation and proclamation. And all of these elements are true to a genuine expression of Christian discipleship and belonging now as then. The most electrical thread of connection between this world and the next is when Jesus uses her name: Mary and when she replies to him by calling him Rabbouni.
The relationship itself here is what matters most and the relationship is what transcends loss and misunderstanding and keeps alive the recognition and anticipation which in turn facilitate the transformation and the proclamation. And so the mission of the Son of God takes off again in Mary of Magdala and someone who hasn’t been ‘got at’ finds strength and joy which she felt had eluded and escaped her.
I ask you to do no more than to cast your mind back to the earliest days of Lent. On Ash Wednesday, Holy Scripture asked us to confront hypocrisy in our lives (Matthew 6) and on
The First Sunday in Lent to confront temptation (Matthew 4). We are asked not to be religious poseurs and we are asked not to be abusers of any part of God’s creation. It is from these self–righteous corruptions that a creative and a contrite Lent will have set us free – not so much for individual perfection but for compassionate responsibility in the care of ourselves and of others.
This surely is a good working definition of what Peter says to Cornelius with new found Resurrection confidence: I truly understand that God shows no partiality but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.
I bring you back to the Dawn Treader in Christ Church Bray. A ship is one of the earliest images for the church and it is St Augustine of Hippo whose basilica, rather like this cathedral church, faced the water and all of the maritime life of its day, who makes the most of this image. He is, of course, writing in the stormy times of the Donatist controversy which, again, is not completely dissimilar from the tensions of orthodoxy with which we grapple today.
Donatism was an understanding of religion which could not bury the hatchet, which had a totally unforgiving memory and which trumpeted the triumph of abstract orthodoxy over the discipleship of our best human efforts to respond to the divine self–emptying and self–giving. An unfussy rubbing along with others and the genuine capacity to compromise – these are the characteristics which Augustine singles out as essential not only to survival but to flourishing on the Ark of Noah in a truly catholic spirit. The vision of Peter in the house of Cornelius enables him to declare all foods to be clean.
In this way Peter is himself released to envisage and to envision the people of Israel as extending into the nations of the earth, very much in the spirit of a number of the prophets, as he sets it out as he warms to his subject. This helps him to see and to say that God has no partiality, no favourites.
Having to walk through the nave of the Dawn Treader to get into the nave of the church on Ash Wednesday in Christ Church Bray was a reminder that on a ship we have to get on with each other if we are to be safe and if we are to be happy.
Confinement brings with it the temptation to be horrid and we are going nowhere in the church by being horrid to one another. I wish all of you a very Happy Easter. I encourage you to take the freedom and the responsibility given you by the Risen Christ to live lives of joy and gladness for yourselves and for others. In the greeting which you share with those whom you meet, I want those people to be aware from you that Christ is risen indeed Alleluia!
St John 20.18: Mary Magdalen went and announced to the disciples, I have seen The Lord; and she told them that he had said these things to her.