Sermon: Eucharist - Third Sunday of Easter

 

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford Photograph of Victor Stock

Preacher:
Victor Stock
Date:
Sunday 18th April 2010
Service:
Eucharist
Readings:
John 21:1-19

‘Then the Disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord”’

The twenty-first Chapter of John is a curious collection of what the Church calls ‘Resurrection Appearances’.  Verse 1: ‘Jesus showed himself to his Disciples once again by the Sea of Tiberius’, verse 4: ‘Morning came, there stood Jesus on the beach, but the Disciples did not know that it was Jesus’.  How strange this is!  Whatever the Resurrection Appearances are, they’re not obvious or straightforward; they follow on from the same scene in Chapter 20 with Mary Magdalene: ‘“I do not know where they have laid him”.  With these words she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but did not recognise him’. 

This world of lack of recognition in the closing chapters of John’s Gospel, written towards the end of the first century when the Church thought long and hard about what the Resurrection meant (and indeed had begun to live within what felt like Resurrection life, a new way of being), have in them hints, clues, pointers to our own situation today.  When the journalist looks at the Roman Catholic Church and the child sex abuse scandal, does the journalist see Jesus?  When we look at those Latin letters signed by Cardinal Ratzinger, seeming to us to be putting the good of the Church and the prevention of scandal before the layicization of a guilty priest, a priest who had asked to be layicized, returned to the lay state, because of what he’d done to young people – do we see Jesus?

This isn’t a cheap bit of anti-Romanism, for the statistics being unearthed are horrifying for all of us.  Child abuse amongst married clergy of non-Roman Catholic denominations is a fact, as, of course, statistically we know that most abuse of children happens within marriage by parents and others in the home, so that in this horrible scandal there is a certain self-protective projection.   We always like a scapegoat.  Nevertheless, the theological question remains: what is St John saying about the risen Christ that made him so unrecognisable and is this tradition in John’s theology a pointer or clue to our own situation as human persons, men and women, who say we are Christ’s body, but to so many and so often don’t look like it.

Here in the Cathedral we have a designated Child Protection Officer, the Canon Pastor, Angela Weaver.  Those of us who have contact with children are required to undergo CRB checks (Criminal Records Bureau).  We have chaperones in place every day for Choir practice and even during Choral Evensong.  We take our responsibilities seriously.  But perhaps, and I say this with a certain temerity, Anglicanism, Greek and Russian Orthodoxy, and the Protestant denominations, all of which have had married clergy for hundreds and hundreds of years, are more comfortable about the central fact of human sexuality than the Roman Catholic Church which has imposed celibacy on the members of the Latin Rite, the Western Roman Catholic Church, since the Lateran Council of 1215.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, as I’m sure many of you have, as these stories unfold; stories which require us to focus on the victim, not on the institution; on the boy or girl who’s been abused, rather than on the abuser.  I’ve been thinking about the honoured place of marriage within our denomination.  Think how many writers, poets and scientists, musicians and teachers, judges and prime ministers, have been sons and daughters of the clergy.  The married clergy have been an honourable estate in England and far beyond, and in the Russian and Greek Orthodox Church it is impossible to be a parish priest without being married. The Bishops are taken from monastic orders in Orthodoxy but the parish clergy combine the Sacraments of Matrimony and Orders.  Therefore, it may be that Anglicanism is able to discuss the vexed and complex issues of adult same sex partnerships in the way the Roman Catholic Church finds impossible, because at least we’ve been used to heterosexual marriage for hundreds of years before we’ve begun to be used to Civil Partnerships.

A further point.  The need for intimacy is fundamental to what it means to be human though this desire is not always expressed sexually, nor is it appropriate that it should be, but without intimacy, trust, security, affection, human persons are in trouble, indeed they are crippled.  For you know and I know that the hand on the shoulder, the grasped hand, the hug, the kiss, can say far more than our inadequate words to express human solidarity, that solidarity that leads to human flourishing.

So, back to this last chapter of John with its enigmatic Resurrection Appearances.  Note in passing what is to us an amusing aside in the twenty-first Chapter of John: ‘“It is the Lord”.  When Simon Peter heard that he wrapped his coat about him for he’d stripped and plunged into the sea’.  In order to be presentable to Jesus, Peter had to put his clothes on, because the fishermen in the Sea of Tiberius on a hot day had sensibly taken their clothes off.  The difficulties the Roman Catholic Church in particular finds itself in today are difficulties for all of us as human persons, the difficulties of being sufficiently honest, sufficiently sensible and sufficiently kind to be recognisably the followers of Jesus Christ.  For what attracts or repels is our likeness to Jesus, which, though of course not physical, is incarnated in the kind of persons we are, how we are with each other, how open, honest and self-giving, and yes, risk-taking for the good of others, we’re prepared to be. 

What a comfort it is in these days of Easter 2010 to read in the tradition that even those who’d known Jesus in his flesh before the Crucifixion were so dazzled by his newness of life after the Resurrection that they could no longer recognise him, even the Disciple so prominent in Western Christianity that the tradition has made him the first Bishop of Rome, Peter himself.  No, it was that other Disciple, who looking, knew: ‘The Disciple who Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord”’.  So, despite all our anxieties and fears, at the heart of the matter there is no escaping love.