Pitch A Comment

This is a transcript of a sermon delivered by The Rev'd George Pitcher at St Bride's, Fleet Street, on Palm Sunday, March 16th, 2008

I'm honoured - though a little intimidated - to conclude this Lent series today, following such a distinguished line-up of theologians. A list, I might add, that is distinguished not just because it was put together by our rector, but because it included him.

David has kindly, but dauntingly, given me what I consider to be pole position - not just because it's the last Sunday of Lent and, therefore, offers me the Last Word, as it were - with all the dangers of temptation that that involves - but also, of course, it's pole position because this is Palm Sunday, the start of a week that commemorates - incomparably - the greatest climax in human history.

When David asked me for my title - and therefore for the answer - to the question "Where do we find authority in today's church?" I very deliberately went for the simplest and the pithiest of answers - "In Christ."

Forgive me if that seems simplistic or unnecessarily obvious. It is hardly going to contradict anything that has gone before in this series - and it may seem unduly general, unhelpful in that it's a truism, offering no practical solutions to the challenges faced by our 21st-century church.

But I offer these two words - in Christ - the most obvious statement of faith, because, as Jesus of Nazareth enters the gates of Roman-held Jerusalem on the back of a borrowed colt, everything else now begins to be stripped away. Over the coming few days, like the disciples who followed him through the gates of Jerusalem, we are going to lose everything to this man - not just our worldly cares, but also our hopes, our faith and our love - as this week leads relentlessly to Calvary.

And, after that, nothing left but the Christ. We know, thank God, what the disciples who followed him into Jerusalem that day could not know, the great paradox of that phrase: Nothing left but the Christ. We know that on the third day after it was finished, after it was all over, that nothing was left but the Christ and that that meant that nothing was left but everything. The resurrected Christ, the Word, the eternal and living truth. The only authority we need.

So we're at the start of a week that sees the decline and fall of Jesus of Nazareth in the Roman Empire and the risen Christ in his place. History replaced by eternity.

We often talk, without making this distinction between history and eternity, of "Jesus Christ", as though Christ is his surname (which would, whimsically, make Jesus his Christian name). As though Mr and Mrs Christ had a son called Jesus. But let us make this distinction - Jesus of Nazareth rides through the gates of Jerusalem this Palm Sunday, on a mission that, within a short week, will reveal the Christ. Quite a climax.

Two weeks ago, I was privileged to attend the premiere of BBC Television's The Passion. The first episode is tonight - and I do commend it to you. I am so struck by it that I'm glad to say that we'll be showing episodes 2 and 3 - dealing with the climactic events from the last supper to the crucifixion - here on Good Friday as part of our Devotions at the Foot of the Cross (and I hope as many of you who can will join us for that, so that we might reflect on it together in the context of our Good Friday music and prayer).

Now, one of the many things that struck me about this production was the way that the writer, Frank Deasy, made the point that Jesus was a relatively unknown, Aramaic-speaking preacher from Galilee when he entered Jerusalem - like someone coming from the northern provinces to London - and, within the week, in Frank Deasy's words, was transformed into " a pivotal figure in western civilisation".

And how does the man, who this week is transformed from preacher to Christ, set about achieving this? Well, he arrives by mule, causes a minor disturbance outside the Temple, washes the feet of some of his followers, has supper with his friends, has brief and unaggressive conversations with the Jewish and Roman authorities (though largely remains silent) and gets himself tortured and crucified for reasons of simple political expedience, his disciples having abandoned him.

Not an impressive week of leadership. And this is the man, I suggest, who this week reveals the Christ, who is the single and absolute authority for our faith. And I say that for this reason: The human who transforms into the triumph of the Christ this week has relatively simple things to tell us. And as well as listening to those listen to what he does not say. Listen in the silences of Gethsemane and in the Christ's silences before the competing worldly authorities of the high priest Caiaphas and Pilate.

Listen to these injunctions, so shocking that the authorities of that time had to do away with him: There are no other laws but these: Love God as much as you can and love your neighbour as yourself. This commandment I leave you: Love each other as I have loved you. Father, forgive. And then, when it was all done: Peter, do you love me? Feed my lambs...

Try as some of us might, we do not hear the voice of the Christ tell us to form committees to decide who and who cannot take the bread and wine at his table. We do not hear, in the silence, rules about who is allowed in our church, but rather "Not my will be done, but yours". We do not hear that only Christian children should be allowed to go to our schools. We do not hear that people are to be shut out because of their religion, sexuality or gender. Thy will be done, indeed.

So our authority in Christ has as much to do with listening to what he doesn't tell us - listening to the silences - as to do with what he does. Believe me, this is not a licence for a privatised faith, an individualism that does away with our church - but it is to say that our church is not an authority in itself, but a household of faith whose members have one authority and that authority is in this Christ. It is a principle, after all, that our forebears established in fighting for a reformation - rejecting church authority in favour of a church itself that is justified by its members' faith in Christ alone.

It's that sole authority that we acknowledge this week, as we listen in the silences in which God does not condemn and bear witness again to the miracle by which an artisan preacher from Galilee came to Jerusalem with a rag-bag of followers, whose hopes were dashed in brutal and abject failure, but whose witness of the Christ changed the course of human history forever. Amen

Posted by George Pitcher on March 17, 2008 8:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An edited version of this review by George Pitcher appeared in the Financial Times on 15th March 2008

There is a convention that people like me - signed-up and pro-am disciples of Christ - are meant to be offended by screen representations of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. But I can't work up any offence from the latest dramatic contribution from the BBC. Quite the reverse - I'm very excited when a new version of the Passion appears and get in a six-pack with the DVD. And I like this one in all sorts of ways. I plan to show a chunk of it at my church on Good Friday.

I don't think my lack of outrage will disappoint the BBC. It has not set out to offend. Writer Frank Deasy and Producer Nigel Stafford-Clark insist that they wanted to make a drama in the realistic context of its time and to release characters such as Judas, Caiaphas and Pilate from their clichéd roles as "bad guys with big hats". So far, so secular.

But the problem that the BBC has is that it is impossible to put Jesus on screen without raising matters of theology - whether Jesus was the son of God (incarnation), why God allows evil and suffering (theodicy) and whether the Christ defeats death (resurrection), to name but a few.

As I say, I find the public and secular raising of these issues exciting and revealing. But there are those of my pro-am brothers and sisters whose self-appointed role it is to condemn, as if the story belongs to them. Throwing the first stone in a public place this week - predictably enough given his blasphemy action against Jerry Springer-The Opera - was Stephen Green, the national director of Christian Voice. He told the Daily Telegraph that Judas, Caiaphas and Pilate sent an innocent man to his death: "These are bad men," he intoned.

Leaving aside his judgment of a 2,000-year-old legislature under the Roman Empire by the standards of our own day and ignoring whether Mr Green is without sin as he throws his stone, it seems to me that this sort of Evangelical response spectacularly misses its own point.

Evangelicals have been fond of wearing bracelets with the letters WWJD inscribed on them: "What would Jesus do?" The BBC is respectful, even faithful, to the scriptural uiniversality of Jesus's mission when it has him engage with the whores outside a Jerusalem brothel, tend to the outcast sick at the Pool of Siloam and defend the temple guards from his disciples' violence when they come to take him in the Garden of Gethsemane.

So, what would Jesus do with Judas, Caiaphas and Pilate? Condemn them as "bad men" for all time? I think the BBC gets it rather more right than Christian Voice in its portrayal of Jesus's relationship with Judas - he holds him close, tells Judas he's sorry for the role he has to play and even instructs his betrayer in that role. Simply to condemn the baddies in this story is to miss the transformational nature of unconditional love. Without Judas, Caiaphas and Pilate, we'd have no Golgotha - and where would our Christian voice be then?

Which brings me to the crucifixion. Again, there is a breed of Christian who meets you at the church door, with arms open and a beaming smile, saying something like "Good news! Jesus died on the cross for your sins!" I can't buy that. For one thing, how can torturing anyone and then nailing them to a wooden beam and leaving them in the sun slowly to die be "Good News"?
I agree with Dr Jeffrey John, the Dean of St Albans who was barred from the bishopric of Reading in the early days of Dr Rowan Williams's archbishopric and who continues to be pursued by ghastly elements of the Christian right-wing as much, in my view, for his honest sexuality as for his theology, when he said on BBC radio last Easter that a god who demands the sacrifice of his son is an abusive, psychopathic god who makes no sense.

The BBC seems to agree. Unlike Mel Gibson's gothic battle between God and Satan, this Passion has Jesus's desperate prayers in Gethsemane met with the silence of the night (though Joseph Mawle brilliantly plays the strength and re-assurance that Jesus takes from this private communion), followed by the sheer banality of the cruelty meted out to him the following morning. This, I contend, is closer to most people's experience of God - one who transforms the worst that humanity can deal out through love, faith and hope.

These eternal qualities are, of course, best demonstrated by the women of the story, who are the only disciples to turn up at the cross (with the honourable exception of John, who may have gambled that the Romans wouldn't bother with a boy). I was initially disappointed by the low female headcount among the disciples, as if the BBC was following the patriarchal line, and with the two-dimensionality of their portrayal (hang in there - it improves). But not nearly as disappointed as The Madonna Fan Club, which turned up the BBC's premiere at a London cinema.

We had just been shown the first episode, in which Jesus's mother has travelled alone from Galilee to Jerusalem to tell her son, in an achingly touching scene...well, in short, that he's a very naughty boy. As her frustration builds, she complains: You were in my belly before I knew." The unofficial Madonna Lobby in the audience was having none of this. One woman said that Mary had "the right to choose", as though immaculate abortion was an option. (Really? Centuries of apostolic denial of women off the back of Mary's graceful obedience would seem to contradict that).

But there's a wider point here about faithfulness to scripture. Mel Gibson not only presented his Passion in Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin, but famously claimed that all the words his Jesus uttered were in the gospels. This is not true - witness "See, Mother, how I make all things new" from the Roman Catholic tradition. By contrast, the BBC doesn't attempt to be a verbatim transcript and is candid about its dramatic interpretation. I think it gets the balance between scripture and drama about right.

So we get just three of the scriptural "Last Words" from the cross, for instance, and two new ones. One of the replacements is a controversial one - the gospel of John's dying words from Jesus are "It is finished", which implies that Jesus's mission is complete and the Hebrew prophecies fulfilled. Deasy replaces it with Jesus declaring his love of God "with all my heart". I think that's a shame.

But I don't criticise the BBC for it. Partly because of the dramatic imperative that it must serve, which means that it is entitled to make such artistic judgments, but mainly because the story is no more mine than it is Deasy's and the BBC's. The story of the Christ is nothing if not universal and belongs not to me, nor to the Church, nor even to Christian Voice, but to everyone, including secularists, those of other faiths and none and the BBC.

This Passion shows Jesus repeatedly telling his disciples that they must let him go, just as he does in the gospels. And so must we, the household of faith, let him go, because he doesn't belong just to us. As the old movie cliché has it, if he loves us he'll come back.

The BBC's great triumph, whether it intended it or not, is to portray a Jesus for normal people, rather than one constrained by cultic Christians. And if anyone finds that heretical, then let me say that I believe in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. That's Christian jargon for saying that not only is there God, but that this story shows us entirely what God is like. In that, the BBC and I are making common cause. And, though the BBC isn't in the miracle business, its simple, human Passion paradoxically succeeds in showing the biggest miracle of all - how an artisan preacher from Nazareth came to Jerusalem with a rag-bag of simple followers, saw their mission collapse in abject and brutal failure, but whose witness changed the course of human history forever.

The Rev'd George Pitcher is curate at St Bride's, Fleet Street, London

Posted by George Pitcher on March 16, 2008 7:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)