28.03.2013
Chrism Eucharist in Christ Church Cathedral
The Chrism Eucharist was celebrated in Christ Church Cathedral on Maundy Thursday. The service was attended by clergy from throughout the Dioceses of Dublin and Glendalough and offered the opportunity for them to renew their commitment to ministry. It was sung by a consort of the cathedral choir.
The service also included a foot washing ceremony in which the Archbishop and the Dean washed the feet of several members of the congregation. Oils for anointing, baptism and the oil of the chrism were consecrated.
In his sermon Archbishop Michael Jackson drew from St Luke 13.9: The gardener replied, Sir let the tree alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.
“The story of the fig tree is all the more memorable for being anonymous, for having no names whatsoever. I say this because it makes it all the easier for us to apply its content to ourselves at any time and in any place. The story is a simple one and it involves a landowner whose argument is that because the tree has produced no fruit, it should be cut down. But it is the gardener, not the owner, the servant not the master, who speaks up for it. In simple terms he asks: Please give it one more chance, just one more,” the Archbishop said.
“This theme of servant leadership has today become all the more important as Holy Week has taken us into Jerusalem in the company of the Servant King on Palm Sunday and as today, on Maundy Thursday, the Master washes the feet of the servants and changes for ever what the content of leadership is,” he added.
The Archbishop said that the Gospel of John was clear about what was needed for what was needed for his journey of missional discipleship, courageous service and compassionate leadership. “We are, in the best sense of the words, to take the Eucharist for granted and to carry deep within us the imperative to find and to touch those who are lost and forgotten and to wash their feet. We are asked to engage with the self–emptying which was the guiding feature of Philippians chapter 2 on Palm Sunday. We are asked ever so gently and so firmly to let the mind of the master be changed to become the mind of the servant – and to rejoice in this transformation,” he stated.
The Archbishop’s sermon is reproduced in full below:
March.28.2013 Maundy Thursday dioceses of Dublin and Glendalough
A sermon preached by the Archbishop in Christ Church Cathedral
St Luke 13.9: The gardener replied, Sir let the tree alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.
This story will be very familiar to you at this point in Lent. It featured first on the Third Sunday in Lent. It tells of a fig tree which someone had planted in his vineyard and it was not doing particularly well by all accounts. Many of you may by now have forgotten it but to me it is a story which has rather stuck with me this year precisely because it is the servant, not the master, who argues convincingly that the tree, after three years of barrenness, be given another chance to flourish.
In Luke’s account, Jesus decided to tell this story during his momentous journey to Jerusalem, as he gathered along the way the people whom he had come to love and the people who had come to love him and to rely on his type of kingship, his monarchy. It was, to put it mildly, rather unconventional, somewhat radical and not in any way suburban, as we have allowed our subsequent Christianity to become – and much too uncritically. The Redeemed were village and countryside people; they weren’t probably all that grand or even well organised but they were the members of the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom, through their willingness to belong, their response and their need, had come of age of earth and was now ready to claim Jerusalem itself with the Servant King. They had come seemingly from nowhere, they were created and recreated by the love of God, and they were now somewhere inside Jerusalem as the friends of the King of Kings. Together he and they were living in a completely new way and in the city of Jerusalem itself.
The story of the fig tree is all the more memorable for being anonymous, for having no names whatsoever. I say this because it makes it all the easier for us to apply its content to ourselves at any time and in any place. The story is a simple one and it involves a landowner whose argument is that because the tree has produced no fruit, it should be cut down. But it is the gardener, not the owner, the servant not the master, who speaks up for it. In simple terms he asks: Please give it one more chance, just one more.
This theme of servant leadership has today become all the more important as Holy Week has taken us into Jerusalem in the company of the Servant King on Palm Sunday and as today, on Maundy Thursday, the Master washes the feet of the servants and changes for ever what the content of leadership is. The Gospel of John is very clear about what we need and what we do not need for his journey of missional discipleship, courageous service and compassionate leadership. We are not even given the option of luxuriating in darkening clericalism, of lingering in light–flickering sanctuaries and of double–checking the exact length of our exquisitely ironed surplices or even our drip–dry cassock albs. Maybe, as Pope Francis is reported to have said, when they handed him magenta silk and ivory ermine: Please now wear it yourself, the carnival is over! We are, in the best sense of the words, to take the eucharist for granted and to carry deep within us the imperative to find and to touch those who are lost and forgotten and to wash their feet. We are asked to engage with the self–emptying which was the guiding feature of Philippians chapter 2 on Palm Sunday. We are asked ever so gently and so firmly to let the mind of the master be changed to become the mind of the servant – and to rejoice in this transformation.
And whether we like it or not, lay and ordained ministers alike, we are to live every day in this point of intersection between servant and master, master and servant. For some of us, it does not come at all easy. We have been sold an identity of self–protection or even an identity of defiance. All of this we must set aside today and for all days just as Jesus, in the words of St John 13: ‘took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself.’ We are invited to the belonging of renewed identity with the Jesus Christ who set aside his equivalence with God in order to enable us to share his divinity.
Missional discipleship, courageous service and compassionate leadership – what do these look like or feel like in contemporary Ireland? I suggest that we first explore the human relationships which we have within the communities to which we belong. This will, of course, include our parishes but it will also make us ask questions of wider belonging. It will have to involve those who are of World Faiths other than Christianity. It will have to involve a willingness on our part to be changed by those whom we meet while remaining confident in the expression of who we are as Christians. We owe it to those who are poor, in the words of Gregory the Great, to hold true to the conviction that they are the Gospel and equally to share with them and to learn from them.
I like to think of Jesus learning things in his earthly life, not because he is defective in Godly omniscience but because he is fully human as we are, in every way yet without sin. There is, mercifully, quite a lot to humanity beyond sin and for this we have good reason to thank God – and we should concentrate on this a bit more. St Paul gives us the theology of servanthood, of self–emptying and of what we call kenosis. St Luke in the parable of the fig tree gives us an example of how this might work out: Give others another chance and take a little more time before urgency sweeps you forward in its whirlwind of activity and busyness. I know that it is slightly fanciful but I like to trace back to this little exchange of words between the unknown gardener and the unknown master something which is at the core of Maundy Thursday – the master and the servant change places and both are transformed.
I should like to thank each and every one of you for the ministry which you exercise on a regular basis in your communities, in your places of work and in your parishes. Some of this is very public and some of this is very domestic. All of it is offered back to God in a spirit of service and thanksgiving. All of it serves the urgent in–breaking of the Kingdom of God into the kingdoms of this world.
For the present, let us concentrate on those three trees of Lent and Holy Week:
The fig tree which the servant gave a second chance even though the master was unconvinced.
The palm tree which gave its branches to the overlooked people who came to rejoice that the Messiah had indeed come in the person of Jesus.
The olive tree which bears the fruit of suffering and service year after year and shows us that the suffering of Jesus was not in vain.
And let us thank God most of all for that second chance which we are given to serve.
St John 13.35: I give you a new commandment that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.