01.04.2018
Easter Asks Many Questions of People of Faith in Today’s Ireland – Archbishop Michael Jackson’s Easter Day Sermon
“They asked her, Why are you weeping? She answered, They have taken my Lord away, and I do not know where they have laid him.”
Easter Day was marked with a Festal Eucharist in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, this morning (Sunday April 1). The Archbishop of Dublin, the Most Revd Dr Michael Jackson presided and preached.
In his sermon the Archbishop looked at the interchange between Faith Communities and the political world in the light of The Passion of Christ and the Resurrection which, with the help of the Transfiguration, point to dynamic change. He said this interchange remained important to civic life “because religious expression has not disappeared with the rapidity and the finality a secular society has hoped and assumed”. He focused on political progress in Ireland, North and South, and the work of Stephen Hawking.
Archbishop Jackson said Ireland North and South was finding that progress was a tiresome friend. “Twenty years of The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement have shown us that The Peace is very hard work and always requires encouragement, hope, forbearance and love in order to set its compass and plot its course. The last of these – love – no longer seems to be a public virtue. One Hundred Years of Independence bring their own difficulties in terms of the word: progress also. The past is easier to commemorate and its social constructs are easier to seek to tear down than the future is to create. Again love no longer seems to be a public virtue. Everybody speaks of the need for patience and vision and I think that we are entitled to ask the question: What are the components of such love as a public and a civic virtue and vision?” he asked.
He suggested these components should include: A tolerance that expands and enlarges beyond toleration; A respect that already is greater than respectability itself; A righteousness that goes beyond regulation; Most of all: a connection of the individual with the personal in his or her life and in the life and dignity of The Other. “All of these ask much of people of faith but being asked much of is what we are called to do. This is the vital role of Faith Communities to public and to civic life,” he stated.
The Archbishop suggested that living a life of faith in the post–Hawking era was never going to be easy. He said Stephen Hawking had done more in our day than any other single individual to show us all that science is not going away.
“Religious people in the post–Hawking era cannot pretend that science does not exist in a world that we seek and strive to understand theologically. Hawking sought to explain it non–theologically. Since 2010 Hawking held that, given the laws of physics, nature drags itself into existence and there is no need for a creator. In expounding this argument he effectively seems to hold that religious people think of the universe as being like a model railway track and God as setting the train going. However, from a theological point of view, creation out of nothing is not about setting procedures and processes in motion; it is to assert that God is at work at all moments and it is to concentrate on relation as pivotal to a theological understanding of the universe. God is not someone we, as theological beings, would expect to find at some temporal edge. To engage actively with Hawking’s removal of a temporal edge does away with an initial moment when God might be confused as one more cause in a chain of causes, for those of us who believe in God. I am not asking supporters of Hawking to agree with me; nor am I suggesting an easy eliding of what he teaches and what Christian faith teaches. That would be to do him an injustice when he has no right of reply. What I am saying is that for a person of faith, the cosmology of Hawking asks more not less of us as people of faith in relation to three fundamental questions coming directly out of Easter: Who is my neighbour? What is my community? Who will call my name?” he said.
He concluded: “Hawking challenges us to set aside the rhetoric of denial that is such a feature of The Passion through which we have just now travelled and which still ricochets so noisily through Irish life today. The courage of Hawking to shed light in dark holes and to journey fearlessly into and through knowledge is an inspiration of the human spirit. People of faith cannot escape, nor should we want to escape, the expansion of perspective on the cosmos that he has given us. It is for us to grapple with his wisdom and to set it alongside the verse from Scripture where our exploration of humanity began not so long ago on Christmas Day: In the beginning was The Word … (St John 1.1) The resolution of these on Easter Day is not his problem, it is ours.”
The full text of Archbishop Jackson’s sermon:
Easter Day Sung Eucharist Christ Church Cathedral; 01 April 2018
Reading: St John 20:1–18
St John 20.13: They asked her, Why are you weeping? She answered, They have taken my Lord away, and I do not know where they have laid him.
sermon preached by the archbishop of Dublin, The Most Reverend Dr Michael Jackson
COPING WITH THE DIVINE ABSENCE
One of the questions addressed in the many responses to The Resurrection in The Gospels is: What do we do in the time of divine absence? For this reason I take us today to the seemingly down–beat words of Mary Magdalene in response to the question posed by Peter and John:
They asked her, Why are you weeping? She answered, They have taken my Lord away, and I do not know where they have laid him.
Whether or not, as individuals in a modern world, we feel we can accept word for word what we hear and what we read in The Scriptures, on historical or scientific grounds, this interchange is entirely human. In an entirely human way, it begins in tears. In its context, it reflects a human response to a divine absence, the absence of God become human. There is an innocence, a human innocence, in the instinctive response of Mary; she still thinks of The Lord as her Lord; what lies ahead of her is the same gradient that lies ahead of all of us in the work of spiritual imagination – recognizing that the best of what is mine is God’s gift to everyone, that the Lord is everyone’s Lord. Believing and belonging take on a new range of meanings in the risen life. They mean that as we are called to discipleship today, we will find ourselves grappling with the glory and the suffering as we have just now grappled with the suffering and the glory in Holy Week. Both remain – tears and responses; suffering and glory; God and human.
THE ARMENIAN KHACHKAR
As you step outside this cathedral church, I suggest that you turn right and right again. Close to the railings that run along the street leading us to the River Liffey, you will find an Armenian khachkar. It stands out against the granite because it is carved in a reddish Armenian stone. It was worked in Armenia by an Irish–Armenian stone–carver. It facilitates not only the Irish Armenians but also all visitors to this cathedral and to Dublin to remember The Armenian Genocide of 1915. This we commemorate in the cathedral annually in April and as close to April 24th as possible. It is an international tragedy of incalculable depth and resonance. We are honoured in Christ Church that the Armenian people in Ireland chose to place the memorial here in the grounds of this cathedral. It is a constant reminder of the imperative of remembering in the midst of forgetting; of the integrity of response to God in the midst of pain and death carried from one generation to another; of the indomitable character of the human spirit that can rise through a history that is only recognized in part internationally as having in fact taken place at all. The stone tablet has a relief cross. The cross is carved with swirling and enveloping floral decoration. Yet this decoration is more than decorative. To a deeply religious people, to a people whose national conversion to Christianity is understood to date to 301AD, this decoration carries a theological meaning. It depicts the Passion of Christ as life–giving rather than as life–removing, because the vegetation and the flowers swirl around The Cross of Christ and the cross of the Armenian people and by extension the cross of people who suffer everywhere today. It is not without reason that the khachkar has become a place of individual pilgrimage also, a place where people lay flowers and snatch silence in line with their own religious affiliation or personal conviction.
A COMMUNITY OF RESURRECTION
The interaction of the three people in The Garden who knew one another well is worth sticking with, as we ourselves seek to explore the meaning of resurrection today. Two of them, Peter and John, simply go home. One of them, Mary, remains. The one who remains is wrong–footed by the presence of someone whom she takes to be the gardener while he is in fact The Risen Christ. The advantages of remaining are clear to see because we observe another development taking place: mistaken identity results very quickly in friendship restored through the recognition of a voice and the use of a name. Personal encounter is the first recorded stage of creating a community of resurrection following on from the community of watching and waiting at the foot of the cross. This is not a change from inaction to action; it is an inner transformation in terms of discipleship and trust. The continuity is in the hands of Mary Magdalene. These moments may seem to us, in a contemporary culture that is celebrity–driven beyond the church and activity–driven within the church, to be insignificant. For the formation and the foundation of the Christian community, these moments lead us back to a word you might well remember, and we heard it on the Sunday before Lent; it is the word: transfiguration. The Transfiguration of Jesus Christ is offered to us as a way to interpret Lent and Easter.
TRANSFIGURATION
The Sunday before Lent is a long time back now: dark days of February and everyone reluctantly getting up and getting on with it, credit cards staggering back into functional use, but with something very interesting happening in the pages of Matthew, Mark and Luke in the form of: The Transfiguration of Jesus Christ. There is a significant similarity in these accounts. Transfiguration is a great help in understanding Resurrection. Jesus is seen in The Transfiguration differently, while continuing to be recognized as the same person. He stands with Moses and Elijah, who represent The Law and The Prophets, the pillars of stability and creativity in the Israelite tradition. He is seen differently from before by Peter, James and John. Nothing is quite the same thereafter. Transfiguration is different from that catch–all word: change. Transfiguration points to a dynamic, energetic change from within. I suggest that this is what we are looking for in our living out the life of resurrection. The suffering of Jesus Christ is the centre–piece of transfiguration and resurrection; it is the suffering of Jesus Christ that enables us to be changed on an annual basis while remaining the same people and living a life of difference as the same people.
FROM GLORY TO GLORY …
One of the great cries of hope that comes through in a much–loved hymn is the phrase:
… changed from glory into glory, ‘til in heaven we take our place …
This is the voice of glory we need to hear as we move from Lent to Easter and on to Pentecost because it is the voice of transformation and of transfiguration. It is the positive voice that shows us that who we are is a gift of God and something created within us for that very reason. It is by our engagement with the gift of God that we become better, not by our waiting to become better to become worthy to receive. After all: Christ is Risen!
The Transfiguration helps us with using the gift of resurrection on an annual and on a daily basis. The key lies in the two qualities represented there in Moses and Elijah: stability and creativity. Many people are confused and irritated by change for the sake of change and therefore they go on to resist change that is change to a good and an essential purpose. The movement between stability and creativity, The Law and The Prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures, is the backdrop essential to our grasping what is going on in resurrection. Taken out of their specifically religious milieux and into a civic space, these ways of doing things offer us a way forward in contested space, space that in fact belongs to everyone but space which today is highly competitive space. The interchange between Faith Communities and the political world remains important to civic life because religious expression has not disappeared with the rapidity and the finality a secular society has hoped and assumed.
PROGRESS IS A TIRESOME FRIEND
In Ireland North and South we are finding, and probably not for the first time in our history, that progress is a tiresome friend. Twenty years of The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement have shown us that The Peace is very hard work and always requires encouragement, hope, forbearance and love in order to set its compass and plot its course. The last of these – love – no longer seems to be a public virtue. One Hundred Years of Independence bring their own difficulties in terms of the word: progress also. The past is easier to commemorate and its social constructs are easier to seek to tear down than the future is to create. Again love no longer seems to be a public virtue. Everybody speaks of the need for patience and vision and I think that we are entitled to ask the question: What are the components of such love as a public and a civic virtue and vision? I simply suggest the following to get us started:
A tolerance that expands and enlarges beyond toleration
A respect that already is greater than respectability itself
A righteousness that goes beyond regulation
Most of all: a connection of the individual with the personal in his or her life and in the life and dignity of The Other.
All of these ask much of people of faith but being asked much of is what we are called to do. This is the vital role of Faith Communities to public and to civic life.
POST–HAWKING
Living a life of faith in the post–Hawking era was never going to be easy. Stephen Hawking, whose book A brief History of Time sold more than ten million copies, has done more in our day than any other single individual to show us all that science is not going away. Religious people in the post–Hawking era cannot pretend that science does not exist in a world that we seek and strive to understand theologically. Hawking sought to explain it non–theologically. Since 2010 Hawking held that, given the laws of physics, nature drags itself into existence and there is no need for a creator. In expounding this argument he effectively seems to hold that religious people think of the universe as being like a model railway track and God as setting the train going. However, from a theological point of view, creation out of nothing is not about setting procedures and processes in motion; it is to assert that God is at work at all moments and it is to concentrate on relation as pivotal to a theological understanding of the universe. God is not someone we, as theological beings, would expect to find at some temporal edge. To engage actively with Hawking’s removal of a temporal edge does away with an initial moment when God might be confused as one more cause in a chain of causes, for those of us who believe in God. I am not asking supporters of Hawking to agree with me; nor am I suggesting an easy eliding of what he teaches and what Christian faith teaches. That would be to do him an injustice when he has no right of reply. What I am saying is that for a person of faith, the cosmology of Hawking asks more not less of us as people of faith in relation to three fundamental questions coming directly out of Easter:
Who is my neighbour?
What is my community?
Who will call my name?
Hawking challenges us to set aside the rhetoric of denial that is such a feature of The Passion through which we have just now travelled and which still ricochets so noisily through Irish life today. The courage of Hawking to shed light in dark holes and to journey fearlessly into and through knowledge is an inspiration of the human spirit. People of faith cannot escape, nor should we want to escape, the expansion of perspective on the cosmos that he has given us. It is for us to grapple with his wisdom and to set it alongside the verse from Scripture where our exploration of humanity began not so long ago on Christmas Day: In the beginning was The Word … (St John 1.1) The resolution of these on Easter Day is not his problem, it is ours.
Colossians 3.2: Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.