My name is Father Christopher Colven, and I would like to welcome you to this lovely church of St James, Spanish Place in the centre of London, where I am the Rector. It is a privilege for us to be able to host this Holy Week retreat in what is one of the oldest Catholic parishes in this country. In the middle of the 18th century, the Spanish Embassy was situated in the building that houses the Wallace Collection in nearby Manchester Square. In Penal Times, when Catholics could not practise their faith openly, it was the embassies of the Catholic countries that gave them hospitality, and this parish grew out of a congregation which worshipped in the then Spanish Embassy. A first church was built in 1791 and was replaced by our present building in 1890. As you can see, it is a fine example of the neo-Gothic style, full of beautiful artefacts. John Francis Bentley, the architect of Westminster Cathedral, was responsible for several of the altars – of the Sacred Heart, of our Lady of Victories and of St Joseph.
My own special love here in St James’ is the Pieta – the statue of Our Lady cradling Jesus in her arms in death as she has in life. To me, it speaks so powerfully of the humanity of Christ and the mystery of the Incarnation. I would like to place this Holy Week retreat under Mary’s special care. May our Lady of Sorrows share with us something fresh of her sadness through these days – in order that, on Easter Day, she may share with us something entirely fresh of her joy in her Son’s new life.
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I want to begin this reflection in quite a difficult place …Primo Levi committed suicide in 1987. Born into an Italian Jewish family, he had experienced the horrors of the concentration camps at first hand, and through his subsequent life as a novelist he explored the human soul and its reaction to suffering. He gave his first book the title “This is a Man” and it remains unsurpassed as an account of personal survival in Auschwitz. Levi’s position was essentially negative, summed up in the phrase: “the future of humanity is uncertain”. Ultimately he could see no further than his own personal nightmare, and this led to the final act of self-destruction.
Primo Levi occupies an important place in Holocaust literature but he also serves as a modern expression of the age-old questions which have to be faced by each human being. “Does my life have meaning and, if it does, where can I honestly place my hope?” The recent earthquake in Haiti gives sharp focus to those questions. “Is what happens in our world purely arbitrary or is their purpose behind events?” For believers, the dilemma is particularly painful. “How does one square the concept of a compassionate, loving God with the evidence of one’s eyes? How can God allow such suffering”.
For the Old Testament Book of Job no matter what happens God is God – all one can do is to bow down before a Wisdom one cannot hope to grasp. That would be the approach of the Eastern religions, too. Acceptance of what one cannot comprehend. But is that enough? Can Christianity offer any further insight?
The Book of Isaiah, from which the first of today’s Mass readings is taken, has God prophesy of his beloved Son: “
I, the Lord have called you to serve the cause of right. I have taken you by the hand and formed you; I have appointed you as covenant to the people and light to the nations; to open the eyes of the blind, to free captives from prison and those who live in darkness from the dungeon”. But how is this to be achieved? What is God’s answer to human agony? When we cry out in pain, what is God reply?
St Peter was one of those who stood close to the cross of Jesus on Good Friday. This is his understanding of the crucifixion: “Christ suffered for you and left an example for you to follow the way he took. He had not done anything wrong and there had been no perjury in his mouth. He was insulted and did not retaliate with insults; when he was tortured he made no threats but he put his trust in the righteous judge. He was bearing our faults in his own body on the cross, so that we might die to our faults and live for holiness; through his wounds you have been healed”.
St Peter does not minimise the reality of Jesus’ suffering, but he does see what happened on the first Good Friday not as a negative but as a positive. Yes, something of terrifying proportions is taking place, but its consequences allow grace to flow in unimaginable ways. For Christians, the cross is not a symbol of degradation and destruction: rather, it speaks to us of hope and of life. There is redemption here and healing.
Why? How? The key lies in the identity of the One who is being crucified. Jesus could say of himself – “I and my Father are one – to have seen me is to have seen the Father”. By his nature, the Eternal Creator is beyond suffering, but, and this is the Christian mystery in all its incredible depth, God assumes our humanity so that, through his Son, he can identity with us completely, even to taking into his own flesh the experience of pain and fear and doubt and death. Every time we look at a crucifix we know that human pain is now intrinsic to the experience of God, and our question is not just why does God allow suffering, but, how can he allow such suffering when it resonates so profoundly within his own heart?
Pope Benedict writes:
“This is the mystery of God …. He came down to our level in order to suffer for us and with us. We will never be able to understand this mystery finally and completely. God does not simply rule by power. God uses his power differently from the way we use power. His power is that of sharing in love and in suffering, and the true face of God is shown, indeed, in suffering. In suffering, God bears and shares the burden of the injustice of the world, so that in our very darkest hours, we may be sure that God is then closest to us. He comes as someone who touches our hearts”.
In the face of an earthquake which has killed thousands, Christians have no simple, or simplistic, answers to offer. Certainly we cannot identify with those who would blame either an angry God or a vengeful climate. When, in Christ, God walked this earth, seeing Jerusalem in the distance and knowing that soon it would be utterly destroyed, we are told that he wept. That is the insight that we have to contribute to the universal questioning of suffering. God does not stand over and above his creation, the great Judge, the Cosmic Chess player; he becomes part of what he has made – because his creatures suffer, he suffers with them – because they weep, he weeps with them - because their hearts are broken, so is his.
Primo Levi’s experience of Auschwitz led him into a nihilism in which human life became pointless. His answer to the question of where was God in the Holocaust could only be given in the negative. Others had a different reaction. Maximillian Kolbe, St Maximillian, did not survive the death camps, but the months he spent in the gateway to hell he used to minister to others: to help them to live and to help them to die. It was said that wherever he was, and particularly in the days of his execution, there was a light which surrounded him, an indefinable something which brought another dimension. For Maximillian Kolbe that “something” was a “Someone”, Christ crucified, the Man with the wounded Heart who comes to “touch our hearts”. Somehow, it is the knowledge that his own heart is broken open by human suffering that makes our living possible.
[Please join me again in a few moments for our continuing meditation …]
Welcome back to this beginning meditation of our Holy Week Retreat. My name is Father Christopher Colven, and I am the Rector of this church of St James, Spanish Place, in the heart of London’s West End. Before the break we were thinking of how the Passion of Jesus gives meaning to our lives …
At the centre of every Catholic church you will find a crucifix – hopefully, in every Catholic home and above the bed of every Catholic there will also be a crucifix. The cross is the fundamental symbol of our Christian faith and, it is, of course, a double sign. On the one hand, it points to suffering and pain: on the other, it speaks of new life and the hope of glory: death and resurrection – the paschal mystery – two sides of a single coin – differing facets of the one reality.
As Catholics, our liturgy, our worship, opens up for us the things of Heaven, while we are still here on earth. This means that events which took place 2,000 years ago – events which mark the centre point of all human history – are as alive for us on this Monday as they ever were for those who were present in Jerusalem. We stand with Peter and John, we are there in the room with Mary Magdalen and Judas the Betrayer. We are participants, not just onlookers: for, as the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us:
“Jesus Christ (is) the same, yesterday, and today and for ever”.
This is Holy Week and the Church asks us to reflect on all that the cross means to us on our own Christian journey. The key to our understanding of the cross is that, time and time again, we are brought up with a jolt when we realise the identity of who it is who is being crucified. Our belief is that Jesus is the human face of God. When our Creator wanted us, his creatures, to understand what he is like, he sent his Son to us in a way that we could talk to him, and touch him, and listen to him. St Paul expresses the incredible humility of God:
“The state of Jesus was divine, yet he did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave, and became as all men are; and being as all men are, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross”.
The Church teaches us that the One who suffers on Good Friday is both God and man, fully divine and, at the same time, fully human. As Jesus dies in the flesh, which he shares with us, as his lifeblood pours away, his foreknowledge as God remains intact, and, in some way, which goes way beyond our human understanding, his Heart and mind comprehend the sins of our fallen humanity – every single one of them. The children’s hymn sums it up: “
He died that we might be forgiven, he died to make us good, that we might go at last to heaven, saved by his precious blood”. He died for Mary Magdalen: he died for Judas Iscariot: he died for you, and he died for me. Every wrong choice, every evil deed, every failing, every meanness, every venial sin, every mortal sin – all the damage which evil has inflicted on the human condition, from the very beginning until the very end, all that nailed to the cross, crucified, consciously, with Christ.
As we look at the Crucifix, we know that all human suffering already finds an echo, a resonance, in Heaven. The Body of Jesus is marked, forever, with the wounds of his Passion, and all that we are – our every pain, our every fear – is already comprehended, experienced, within the Godhead. In his foreknowledge as God, every human fear has already been faced within his own Heart.
“Dying, you destroyed our death: rising, you restored our life”.
We talk about “atonement”. It is through the wood of the cross that the basic dignity of our humanity is restored and raised to a new level. As Jesus himself says “
God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life”. The loving relationship which binds Father and Son together is now shared with us, and, through what is achieved on the wood of the cross, we become God’s sons and daughters in an entirely new way.
As we begin this Holy Week, it does us well to remember that the redemption won by Jesus in the shedding of his precious blood is a universal invitation to salvation from which no one, no one, is excluded. As an early council of the Church expressed it:
“There is not, never has been, and never will be, a single human being for whom Christ did not suffer”. The consequence of this, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, is that
“every human person, created in the image of God, has the natural right to be recognised as a free and responsible being. All owe to each other this duty of respect”.
But those words have a certain hollow ring about them. We are not a respectful society. Walk down any road, get on any bus, any day, any night, and the indifference, the unkindness, the lack of warmth with which people treat one another, on all sides, is palpable.
As we look up at the crucifix what is Jesus saying to you, to me, to our society? I believe he saying to us what he first said to the apostle Peter. Jesus had come to his disciples in the early morning across the water: impetuous as ever, Peter jumps out of his fishing boat to reach Jesus – but as soon as he feels the full force of the wind, he panics and begins to sink:
“Lord, save me”, he cries. Jesus’ response is as simple as it is profound:
“Do not be afraid”.
We feel the force of the wind today. There is no one who is not aware of the undercurrents of fear in our world. There is so much unease and disturbance around us. For our young people life is full of concern. The subculture of drugs, the over-sexualisation of adolescence, peer pressure to conform. Parents fear for the future of their children, as they fear for their own future. It is impossible not be unsettled by the larger questions about the future of our planet, about tensions between the nations – and, as we grow older, concerns about healthcare and aging matter more and more, which forces us up against the ultimate fear of the process of dying, and how we shall face our own death.
“Do not be afraid", was Jesus’ response to St Peter, and it is his, too, each of us:
“Do not be afraid”.
That is why our Catholic communities are of such vital importance, not just for our fellow believers, but for the wider localities in which we live. We have a responsibility to show how people from differing cultures and backgrounds can co-exist in an atmosphere of mutual respect and concern. Our Catholic parishes should be microcosms of what is possible. Perhaps that word co-existence is not well chosen, for what we are called to do is something much more profound than merely living alongside each other. We are called to interact as brothers and sisters within the same family, sharing the one Father. We are called to love one another, for as the Letter to the Romans reminds us:
“love is the one thing that cannot hurt your neighbour”.
We are sometimes told that we live in a broken society – if that is so (and I believe it is) then we, as Catholics, have a particular responsibility to contribute towards its healing. Let us pray that we may not fail in this duty to build loving parishes and loving communities. And this Holy Week gives us the perfect opportunity to do just that. Our journey with Jesus through these days of his Passion is an individual one, of course – but it is also corporate – it involves our brothers and sisters, too.
The then Mother Teresa of Calcutta once said this to her Missionaries of Charity:
“Now, more than ever, we need to live out the teaching of Jesus: ‘Love one another, as the Father has loved me’. We have to love as the Father loves his Son, Jesus, with the same mercy and compassion, joy and peace. Try to find out how the Father loves his Son, and then try to love one other in the same way. Find out in all humility how much you are loved by Jesus. From the time you realise you are loved by Jesus, love as he loves you. In each of our lives Jesus comes as the Bread of Life – to be eaten, to be consumed by us. That is how he loves us. He also came as the Hungry One, hoping to be fed with the bread of our life, with our hearts that love and our hands that serve. In so doing, we prove that we have been created in the image and likeness of God, for God is love. When we love we are like God”.
And, as St John of the Cross never fails to remind us: “In the evening of life, we shall be judged on our love”.
