Press Releases22 Jul 07

Sermon preached by the Archbishop of Armagh the Most Revd Alan Harper at Clonmacnoise on the Feast Day of St Mary Magdalene 2007

I have somewhat to say on the present madness of the Anglican Communion and the Christian quest to appropriate and to live the life of resurrection. I begin with a text from the Gospel provided for the Feast Day of St Mary Magdalene:

Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb? When they looked up they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. [Mk 16.2b,4]

On this date each year the Church celebrates the faithfulness and witness of Mary Magdalene.

The first witness to the emptiness of the tomb was “that woman!” (as President Clinton might have said.)  

The first witness of the risen and living Lord was “that woman!”

No ordinary woman! Mary was a woman redeemed, so the gospels have it, from seven different kinds of demonic possession. She was a woman who had been forgiven much and therefore a woman who loved much [Luke 7.47].

Traditionally Mary Magdalene has been depicted as a reformed prostitute. Dan Brown and others want to make her the wife or the mistress of Jesus Christ: patent rubbish, but made to seem believable in a media manipulated world.

Nevertheless, if you were seeking a less credible, more flawed, witness to the resurrection, at least in the eyes of 1^st century Judaism, you could hardly do better than Mary Magdalene. Such was God’s choice. She loved the Lord. That was what mattered.

The time was around dawn. The task was to reopen a closed tomb. What madness made women suppose that, without assistance, they could roll away a massive stone? Why not bring strong men with them? Why turn up unaccompanied? What kind of naivety was this?

In the event, the stone had already been removed, and no human agency was involved in removing it. The physical and perceptual impediment to complete disclosure of the victory of God was removed by God in order that disclosure and a new era might begin.

What the stone had, in fact, concealed was not a presence but an absence. The tomb was empty because the old order – what Paul called the law with its commandments and ordinances [Eph. 2.15] – was an empty husk, a deserted chrysalis from which the butterfly had triumphantly flown. Here was a prison whose doors had been blown away to let the prisoner walk free and unconfined.

It is amazing how frequently the empty prison motif occurs in the history of the early Church. Both Peter, the leader of the Church in Judaism; and Paul, the leader of the Church among the gentiles, both were freed from prisons burst asunder by the action of the God whose Spirit refuses to be constrained and whose servants may never be permanently confined under the dead letter of law.

The Spirit of the Living God in Christ Jesus will not be incarcerated within categories of action and thought devised or advocated by the human lust for conformity. Such shackles have been consistently shattered by God who is a God of grace and love, not of law and ordinance.

The first witness of this phenomenon was a woman who had, herself, been liberated and who, herself, now shattered the mould of convention: a woman of dubious reputation; an ineligible and incompetent witness; but the chosen instrument of God.

Thus was the body of a dead rabbi, Jesus Christ, shown to be free to transcend the restrictions of human existence – to appear and to disappear, to be recognizable but unrecognised, and, thereafter, to be known - identity confirmed - by the conclusive marks of suffering.

This new Adam was no old Adam redivivus. He was the first born of all creation and the firstborn of the new creation, even though he was, in person, increate. His reason for being was to proclaim freedom not bondage, self sacrificing love not law and ordinance.

That rolled-away stone, in the early morning, spoke not of one but of two new things that God had done. Mary Magdalene expected and anticipated neither of them.

She expected to have to wrestle with a monstrous impediment but did not. She expected to tend a corpse but found none and did not. The circumstances she was conditioned to expect by background, experience and culture proved wholly invalid. Things had moved on. A new and dynamic dispensation was at hand.

Furthermore, this new dispensation proved to be not a static and historically curtailed revelation, but something continually emerging, an ongoing disclosure that would not stop at resurrection, or even ascension, but would be sustained into the continuing and continuous present of your experience and of mine.

These surprises, these challenges to expectation, conditioned by background, experience and culture, have been carried forward, through the apostolic and the sub apostolic period, into the living present. This, also, is the work of the Spirit: to overthrow conventional expectations and to announce new vistas of perception and truth. The Christian should actively hope for and expect new vistas of perception, new encounters with the unfolding truth of God in Christ.

The physical and perceptual impediment to disclosure, the boulder, was removed for Mary Magdalene by God. The impediments, the boulders of our day, take different and conceivably more formidable forms.

There is, for example, the impediment or boulder of Bibliolatry: the business of mistaking the Word of God for a mere text.

The sublime evangelist St John makes clear from the very beginning of his testimony that the Word of God is incarnate and personified. “The Word” is “He”, not “It”.

The words of the scriptures describe and explore the experience of human witnesses in their attempts to set down what each has known and seen of the action of God in the world. Those written words include, pre-eminently, accounts of the experience and understanding of those who walked the roads of Palestine with Jesus himself. The Gospels are pre-eminent in informing our encounter with the living truth of Jesus Christ. Thus it is “He”, the incarnate Word of God, He alone who is worthy of worship, not the text, which tells of the experience of those who knew, loved and came to worship Him.

The Word of God is not only living, He is dynamic, that is endued with power, and his work continues. John, the Gospeller, concluded his gospel with these words:
There are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were to be written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

In other words, the activity and therefore the unfolding revelation of God go on beyond the written text. Such activity includes the actions of those who, in Paul’s words and theology constitute “the Body of Christ”, the Spirit filled entity, changing and deepening its experience of the love of God over 20 centuries.

They also include direct actions of grace, the prevenient action of the living God, forging ahead, calling into new experiences of the Way, the Truth and the Life those who are the contemporary agents of incarnation, that is to say, the People of God, the Church.

Bibliolatry is a boulder threatening to obscure the dynamic and contemporary truth of the resurrection. It is also the mother of dogmatic fundamentalism. Love for the scriptures is tainted when scripture and not God becomes the object of worship.

A second boulder, which the grace and power of God alone can remove, is division and disunity within the Body.

Recently, I preached at the installation of the first of the ecumenical canons to be admitted to the Chapter of the National Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St Patrick, Dublin (please click here for full text). What struck me then, and what strikes me still, is how immensely difficult it is and how immensely long it takes in the life of the Church, to recover unity amongst Christians, once we have allowed ourselves wantonly to collapse into disunity. Dr Kenneth Newell of the Presbyterian Church and Professor Enda McDonagh of the Roman Catholic Church represent traditions from which we have been separated for four centuries.

How hard it is to heal the wounds of the past and how slow. How swiftly we become blind to and dismiss those with whom we disagree and from whom we determine to separate. Blind to the insights and revelation granted to others, belittling or dismissing their perspectives, we consciously limit the horizon of our own vision and experience. Indeed, we create a new boulder behind which we expect to find interred a lifeless corpse, not a living tradition.

When, by the grace of God, that boulder is rolled away, through the agency of patient dialogue, respect and generosity, the corpse we expected is found to be absent. In its place there is evident a distinctive tradition of resurrection living from which we have been cut off for centuries by our own, or mutual, acts of pride. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of the mission of the Church has been seriously compromised throughout the whole of the era of our divisions.

The recent statement by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, affirming the earlier Vatican statement known as Dominus Jesus, reminds me starkly of the imperfections others discern in the tradition to which the Church of Ireland belongs. It does not (which might have been, in all humility, wiser) reflect chiefly upon the shortcomings of Roman Catholic Church and the obstacles placed thereby to mutual understanding and respect. In the quest to enter more and more deeply into the knowledge and love of God and to live the life of resurrection, it behoves us all first to address the beams in our own eye before presuming to remove the mote from the eye of another.

Often, when the Church finds itself immersed in controversy, the proposition is advanced that one may never sacrifice truth for unity. So simplistic a mantra misses the point.

Where unity is compromised so is a fuller experience of truth in all its wholeness. This is not to say that unity guarantees truth, but rather that disunity guarantees that aspects of the whole truth are concealed or discounted. This is so because one has deliberately chosen to cut oneself off from such aspects of truth as may have been vouchsafed, through the Holy Spirit, to those from whom one chooses to withhold the hand of acceptance.

Furthermore, let us suppose that, in the particular position you hold, you are entirely right about some aspect of the faith and I am wholly wrong. If you break with me, not only will you seriously hamper your own ability to help me to understand, encounter and accept the truth, you are likely to strengthen in me my adherence to my error, and so you will have refused to be an agent of my salvation.

Equally, although in some respect I may be wrong, it may be that there are some insights and experiences that I have which might contribute to the wholeness of your understanding of the love of God and the life of resurrection. In breaking with me you will have cut yourself off from any gift of God that I might otherwise have had the chance to share with you.

It is not then the case that unity is maintained at the expense of truth, but rather that disunity guarantees that access to a fuller knowledge of the truth is consciously inhibited.

I am coming to believe, with William Temple, that division is a greater sin even than heresy!

Patient forbearance was specifically commended by Paul to the people of God. Let our discourse be marked by patience, forbearance and courtesy, a life worthy of the calling to which we have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace…
Each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift, Paul insists, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the Body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ [Eph 4.3, 13].

Has any achieved such unassailable stature? Hardly! Indeed, disunity and open rupture is actually a sign that the full stature of Christ remains absent from the Body, so clearly to be seen is its immaturity and the wounds self-inflicted upon it.

Archbishop Drexel Gomez, addressing the General Synod of the Church of England on the issue of an Anglican Covenant, said recently:
Anglican leaders are seriously wondering whether they can recognize in each other the faithfulness to Christ that is the cornerstone of our common life and cooperation. While some feel there will be inevitable separation, others are trying to deny that there is a crisis at all. That is hardly a meeting of minds. Unless we can make a fresh statement clearly and basically of what holds us together we are destined to grow apart.

I doubt if anyone believes that there is no crisis. Rather, in the context of Archbishop Drexel’s key test, that is, recognizing in each other the faithfulness to Christ that is the cornerstone of our common life and cooperation, a spirit of arrogance on both sides is causing people of genuine faith and undoubted love for the Lord Jesus to bypass the requirement for patience and for making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

I have yet to meet any “leader” who does not treat with the utmost respect and indeed reverence the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament. I have heard no one in this crisis deny the fundamental tenets of the faith as Anglicans have received them. Yet I have heard believing Christians attack other Christians for not believing precisely as they themselves believe. Equally, I have heard believing Christians attack other Christians for not attaching the weight they themselves attach to this biblical text compared with that.

This is not the way of Christ; it is the way of fallen humanity. It is a boulder of our own creation and I do not know who will help us to roll it away.

Some fear, and I am among them, that an Anglican Covenant, unless it is open and generous and broad, may simply become a further means of obstruction: a boulder, rather than a lever to remove what obscures and impedes our access to the truth that sets us free.

The truth is that the tomb is empty and we are called to live a new life in which resurrection and not death is the new reality; a life freed from the narrow constraints of human expectation, predictability and conformity; a life that confidently expects the disclosure of new vistas offered by the God whose very nature and purpose is to make all things new and make us part of His new creation.

Throughout history the way of the Church has been strewn with boulders of her own making. Those boulders conceal from us what God has already done and is continuing to do. They are boulders compounded of pride, hypocrisy and conceit, envy, hatred and malice and all uncharitableness.
    
From such things, good Lord, deliver us! And deliver especially this tortured Anglican Communion of Churches.