Sermon: Mattins - 3 Oct 2010

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Sunday 3rd October 2010
Service:: Mattins
Readings:: Luke 12: 1-12

‘When a crowd of many thousands had gathered, packed so close that they were treading on one another, he began to speak, first to his disciples’

The opening verse of the twelfth chapter of Luke brings us to one of those interesting literary contrasts in the picture the author is giving us of how Jesus taught: first, crowds treading on each other, and second, the inner circle of the disciples, to whom he speaks first, and a whole series of familiar teachings. ‘Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees; I mean their hypocrisy … To you who are my friends I say: Do not fear those who kill the body and after that have nothing more they can do … Are not sparrows five for twopence? … Everyone who acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man will acknowledge before the angels of God’, and so on. A collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, brought together in the twelfth chapter of Luke as a kind of litany of the familiar, so familiar that we hardly hear them speak for very familiarity.

In 1896 Pope Leo XIII pronounced Anglican Orders ‘absolutely nul and utterly void’ in his Encyclical Apostolicæ Curæ. There’d been a flurry of interest in Anglicanism because of a more confident Roman Catholicism and in an earlier letter of 1895, Ad Anglos, the Pope had encouraged Anglican aspirations to union as promoted by Lord Halifax, but this came to nothing. Behind the condemnation of Anglican Orders was a resurgent, vigorous and confident English Roman Catholicism, where, since the erection of Roman Catholic hierarchy and vast Irish immigration, it was important for the more ultramontane Roman Catholics to be clear that they were the only Catholic Church in this country, and that although for legal reasons their new Archbishop could only be called the Archbishop of Westminster and not the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury simply did not exist - he was an impertinent layman pretending to be a priest, let alone a bishop. John Henry Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, which he himself described as the parting of friends, opened a deep fissure within English Christianity of the Catholic stamp.

The recent papal visit has been fascinating at many levels. And I want to suggest that the image of Luke of the crowds treading upon each other to get near to Jesus, a scene of confusion from which the inner circle of the disciples closest to Jesus are singled out for his special attention and teaching, is a good one, a picture of how things are now in a way in 2010 in England. Pope Benedict XIV, the descendant of Leo XIII and his condemnation of Anglican Orders as ‘absolutely nul and utterly void’ is there on the crowded canvas of late Victorian English self-understanding. How angry and defensive we were at that condemnation. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York wrote a learned rebuttal of the papal condemnation in fluent Latin. But, like all apologies in the newspapers, not many people read it. We were left with this picture of a crowded Victorian canvas, Roman Catholics condemning Anglicans, Anglicans defensive.

But look what’s just happened! Pope Benedict XIV, no mean scholar and certainly a deeply conservative theologian of a highly intelligent class of mind, is received in Westminster Abbey by the Dean, and during Choral Evensong embraces the Archbishop of Canterbury. Does the Pope think this Archbishop, Rowan Williams, is a mere laymen, dressed up in a cope and mitre pretending to be a bishop? And what about the ring? Clearly shown on the photograph on the front of the Daily Telegraph, the ring the Archbishop of Canterbury is wearing as he in turn embraces the Pope. It’s the emerald and diamond ring that Pope Paul VI drew from his own finger and placed upon the finger of Archbishop Michael Ramsey, as that Pope and that Archbishop emerged from a great service of Christian unity at the Basilica of St Paul-outside-the-walls in Rome.

I do not believe a man of intelligence, academic rigour and obvious spirituality, like the present Pope, would have taken part in a charade. The words of the condemnation of Anglican Orders remain, but they are only words, something else has happened. And the something else that has happened takes place both on the crowded canvas of public life, largely through television and the newspapers (television undreamt at the end of the 19^th century when Leo XIII so confidently condemned Anglican Orders), but also within the group of those who get to know each other, the band of the disciples, all given an immense push forward by that unlikely figure, to make friends across the Tiber, Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher, who made against every possible Vatican opposition a formal visit of courtesy at the end of his Primacy on Pope John XXIII. Then in 1960 the Vatican wouldn’t even allow a photograph to be taken and refused to call the Archbishop of Canterbury ‘the Archbishop of Canterbury’, but rather ‘an Anglican clergyman named Dr Fisher. But the Archbishop was undeterred by this discourtesy, refusing in his headmasterly wisdom to regard this as insolence.

Then came the next Pope, Paul VI, another man of intellect and culture who found fellow-feeling and mutual respect in Michael Ramsey, ‘scholar, priest and friend’, as his memorial at Canterbury so accurately describes him. Those of us who remember Paul VI and the Archbishop of Canterbury sitting on identical chairs in the Sistine Chapel before Michelangelo’s Last Judgement will have noticed the echo of that splendid pageantry in the identical chairs placed on the great Cosmati pavement before the high altar of Westminster abbey, where Paul’s successor Pope Benedict and Michael Ramsey’s successor, Rowan Williams, sat together and exchanged the kiss of peace. Of course it is enormously important to value words and to use them carefully - that’s what professional ecumenists do. It’s why we’ve been able to reach such measures of agreement on doctrine between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism, through the International Anglican/Roman Catholic Theological Commission.

But something else can happen, which even the crowd can participate in, those of us who watch, as it were, from the street. That’s the importance of the symbol and the ceremony. It may be that more has been achieved by John XXIII keeping Archbishop Fisher a long time, far longer than the Vatican had allotted in his library on that first unofficial visit, and that far more was achieved by Pope Paul arranging for identical chairs for him and the Archbishop in the Sistine Chapel, and that more again has been achieved by the reappearance of the papal ring given by Pope Paul to Archbishop Ramsey and worn again by Archbishop Williams as he embraced Pope Benedict the other day in that very embodiment of Anglicanism, the Collegiate Church of St Peter in Westminster.

So, the crowd has its place, as do the disciples, and Jesus speaks to both, but speaks more loudly by what is done than anything that is said, for the blood of Christ speaks more loudly than the blood of Abel and at Christ’s death there was a great silence and in that silence redemption was wrought in the universe, a speaking silence that speaks yet.