on Phoenix night, which I hope has not fallen into abeyance. Every child was invited to write on a piece of paper anything and everything in the past year that made them sad or sorry or ashamed. Then they gathered round the fire and, as a sign of their intention by God’s grace to make a fresh start, they crumpled up their pieces of paper and threw them into the flames.
I don’t know whether Phoenix Night at St Andrew’s school ever coincided with Ash Wednesday, but what was affirmed that night resonates with what Ash Wednesday should mean for us.
On Ash Wednesday we enter what T. S. Eliot described as ‘the time of tension between dying and birth’. Our purpose at this time is to rid ourselves of illusions. We pray with Eliot: ‘Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood.’ On Ash Wednesday I hear words that the world around me conspires to drown out. As I receive on my forehead the sign of the cross, imposed in ashes, the minister says to me, ‘Remember that you are dust and that to dust you shall return.’ The words are said to me personally. This is not something that ‘only happens to other people’. I, John Pridmore, am the one who is dust and I am the one who shall return to the dust.
The Victorians were better at facing the fact of death than we are. I do not have a skeleton by me as I say my prayers, as many a Buddhist monk does, but I do have close to hand a copy of a children’s book that sold in its hundreds of thousands in the nineteenth century: Mrs Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family. Old Rogers, the Fairchild’s gardener dies and the children are taken to see his body. ‘You never saw a corpse, I think?’ says Lucy’s father. ‘No, papa,’ answered Lucy, ‘but we have a great curiosity to see one.’ Do we dislike the tale because we disapprove of what we see as a morbid preoccupation with death – or because we continue to mock ourselves and our children with falsehoods, the most mischievous of which being that you must keep young and beautiful if you want to be loved?
On Ash Wednesday I confront the reality that I am a sinner under sentence of death. But sin is not merely what individuals commit. Nor is death only what happens to sentient beings. There is social and corporate sin, the wrongs in which we are complicit by our membership of larger groups. Such groups – the crowd at a football match, the lads out together on a stag night, the nation that declares an unjust war – can behave in ways in which the men and women who form them would never do. We need to find ways of corporate repentance, ways more costly than the token apology from someone in high office.
‘Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.’ The words said to us individually apply to our institutions too. Nobody lasts, but nothing does either. Institutions often find it hard to recognize that the time has come to let go. For example, we feel sad when a church closes, but if that church has had a useful life and has done some good then our sadness is misplaced. It looks as if the institutional church is in terminal decline, but if it is not that is not because it is immortal. Again we make Eliot’s prayer our own: ‘Teach us to care and not to care.’ Nothing lasts, save the love to which, as rivers to the sea, all we are and all we do returns.
On Ash Wednesday we face reality. We face our own sinfulness and mortality and that of the fleeting show of things, our religious structures included. And – very deliberately – we turn. We repent. We draw near to God and – like boys and girls throwing balls of crunched-up paper into a bonfire – we ask that all that is ill in us may be consumed in the inextinguishable fire of his love.
Monday of Holy Week
Isaiah 42.1–9; Hebrews 9.11–15; John 12.1–11
THE GENTLE WAY OF THE CROSS
There are many paths to the cross. Our readings for Holy Week provide one such path. These scriptures lead us to Calvary. Today, and on Tuesday and Wednesday, we are invited to consider one who, like Jesus, comes to us as one unknown. The pattern of his life too was cruciform. He is the subject of a series of poems, written four centuries or more before the time of Jesus, to be found in the later chapters of the book of Isaiah. Often he is just called ‘the servant’ and the poems that speak of him simply described as ‘the servant songs’.
Today we read the first of these ‘servant songs’. God delights, we read, in his servant. He describes what his servant will do. The servant’s purpose, we read, is to bring ‘justice to the nations’. In the Hebrew Bible, justice is not so much what is secured by an impartial judicial process. It is, rather, the result of God’s action to save the vulnerable and oppressed.
When Jesus of Nazareth sets out on his mission he makes the servant’s programme his own. In the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus announces that he will fulfil the servant’s role by bringing good news to those who rarely hear good news, namely the poor, by restoring sight to the blind and by liberating the enslaved (Luke 4.16–21).
What is remarkable about the servant is the way he works. The servant’s method, which will be Christ’s method, is not the means by which most would-be liberators operate. The servant’s way is not an exercise of power but a display of gentleness – even of weakness. Certainly it will look like weakness to those watching. It is, in a word, the way of the cross.
The servant does not ‘cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street’. Nor does Jesus as, bearing his cross, he makes his painful way from the Antonia Fortress, where Pilate has condemned him to crucifixion, to the killing field outside the city where the execution will take place.
The servant’s way will always be Christ’s way. It is ‘not to break bruised reeds’. The Christ, who is so like the servant, does not impose yet greater burdens on those already near breaking point. So it must be for those who seek to serve the servant Christ. The disciples of Jesus, says Paul, are to be known for their master’s gentleness (Philippians 4.5). The implications of the principle of ‘not breaking bruised reeds’ are far-reaching. To begin near home, the Church that preaches this Biblical ethic would do so more persuasively if it did not overload its own clergy so badly. Maybe it is right to ask the Christian minister to go the extra mile, but not if you have already broken his back.
The servant does not quench ‘the dimly burning wick’. Nor does the servant of Christ. It is easy to snuff out a feeble flame, whether that flame be some first stumbling step of faith or a tentative attempt to lead a better life.
Our readings in Holy Week are chosen, first, to bring us closer to the cross and, second, to guide us on the path of the cross which will be our pilgrims’ way until our life’s end. We ask what it is about ‘the servant’ that determines Jesus’s understanding of his mission and that must shape our own discipleship. This at least we learn from the servant and from Christ: that in worlds as harsh as ours, their way was gentle. Which gentleness we crave.
We are directed to the servant songs in Holy Week. We are sent too to John’s Gospel. Today we watch and ponder the gentleness of Jesus towards Mary whose extravagance and outrageous conduct incensed Judas and – if the parallel Gospel stories are anything to go by (Matthew 26.6–13, Mark 14.3–9) – angered others present too.
But we notice Lazarus as well. Lazarus, recently exhumed and brought back to life, is an object of macabre fascination. For some, their fascination has turned into faith, faith in the one who has made good his claim to be the resurrection and the life. For others, Lazarus back from the dead is a threat they must eliminate. They realize that there cannot be a stronger sign that Jesus is who he says he is than having someone lately a corpse walking around for all to see.
We read that ‘they planned to put Lazarus to death as well as Jesus’. Did they succeed in doing so? History does not tell us, but they may well have done. Again, we are bound to reflect what a mixed blessing it was for Lazarus to be restored to life. Lazarus’s death and resurrection were his baptism, his participation in the dying and rising of Jesus. All of us, when we are baptized, are set free from our grave-cloths to become Christ’s soldiers and servants to our lives’ end. For Lazarus, that end probably came soon enough.
Tuesday of Holy Week
Isaiah 49.1–7; 1 Corinthians 1.18–31; John 12.20–36
THE BROKEN KING
In the closing pages of T. H. White’s magisterial