I simply wanted to join in with what God was already doing and what he had been doing for the last two thousand years.

I hope the reader will indulge me here, but I want to try out a series of blogs on things I used to believe and how changing my mind about them has changed me and changed my life. It might be that I will work this up into some kind of book at some point, but this blog seemed a good place to start.

“The Church has been wrong for most of its history.”

The First Thing I Stopped Believing

I can’t remember anyone ever explicitly telling me this, so why did I believe it? I think perhaps by inference. It goes something like this:

• We are simply reading the New Testament and especially the Book of Acts and copying the template that is laid down for the Church and for its theology in those books.

• Other churches are clearly very different to ours, including churches from Christian history.

• Therefore other churches are not biblical.

• Therefore the historic church was not biblical and was wrong.

• Therefore something must have happened pretty much immediately after the close of the New Testament to bring this state of affairs about.

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Reading Life - ‘The Shape of the Liturgy’ by Dom Gregory Dix

I’ve had a copy of this book on my shelf for about seven years. It was given to me by Fr John (RIP), a priest in Nottingham, who was dissolving his theological library in his old age. He referred to it as “The Shape” when he gave it to me.

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I was very grateful to Allen and Sarah in particular for their comments under that piece. Some of Allen’s comment:

I’ve increasingly come to think that endless email, fragmented attention and screen-based administration create a kind of nervous-system fatigue that sleep and exercise alone don’t fully solve. Especially for reflective or relational temperaments.

Ironically, the modern world assumes sitting at a computer all day is “light work”, but many of us find it more exhausting than physically or socially demanding tasks.

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I’ve returned again to The Way of a Pilgrim, a mystical work about the Jesus Prayer, written by an anonymous Russian peasant of the nineteenth century.

In the (to me largely incomprehensible) introduction to my copy, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh writes of the author:

…the book was written by a Pilgrim endowed with a simplicity and wholeness which are rare at any epoch but very difficult to experience in our own day. Therefore I would like to warn against any attempt simply to ape the Pilgrim, free from family life, unhampered by any concern, even for his own survival. Always on the move and completely unattached, the Pilgrim had an inner freedom which few enjoy or would probably care to possess at the cost paid for it.

The book starts with the Pilgrim hearing the words of St Paul in 1 Thessalonians, “Pray without ceasing” and setting out (literally) upon a quest to uncover the mystery of ceaseless prayer. As Metropolitan Anthony notes slightly further on, this is done with the help of a starets, who acts as a spiritual guide for the Pilgrim. He learns the Jesus Prayer in quite a simple form - “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” - and, to put it bluntly, says it a lot. This practice leads him into a state of abiding union with Christ.

But, as the Metropolitan says, a huge part of this journey is possible because of the Pilgrim’s complete lack of attachment to anything and his commitment to finding the answer to this question: How can I achieve the prayer that does not cease? How can I make my whole life a continual act of prayer?

He is completely entrusted into the hands of God, setting out upon his path without money, without food and drink sometimes, and receiving from God provision and guidance in the forms of the people who cross his path.

There is something deeply Christological about the way of the Pilgrim, therefore, because his is a life that is wholly given over to God and almost entirely free of material concern.

The obvious thing to wrestle with as a reader is the question of how such a ceaseless search might be applied to my own life, when there is so much to worry about!

For me personally, I often think that in many years time, I would like to give up most of what I am doing (maybe all of it) and devote myself to ceaseless prayer, but what to do in the meantime?

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Last weekend, I was invited to a small conference at Chichester Cathedral, hosted by my friend Edward Dowler, who is the Dean. The theme of this conference concerned the retrieval of visual beauty in the Church.

Apart from anything else, it was very nice to be amongst people within the Church of England - including higher ranking clergy, academics, up-and-coming intellectuals, and others with specific and impressive expertise - who are not inculcated into the modern ideology. There were a lot of quite funny things said as a result.

At one point, during a shared discussion, someone said, “If somebody dropped a bomb on this room, then we really would have no hope because half the sound people in the Church of England are here”. Considering that there were only about forty people there, that might not sound too encouraging!

This is a Tweet from my friend Madeleine Thiele, one of the directors of the Visual Theology conference I’ll be speaking at next week. She quotes here from Book X of St Augustine’s Confessions. The words “Beauty so ancient and so new” are the origin of the title of this conference Antiqua Nova. The image is of the cathedral as seen when one steps outside of the Dean’s house. Not bad.

I have to say that I was really encouraged by this conference. Being around mostly sound people from the Church of England was good. I picked up the sense that there is a more general revival of interest in the arts, in the liturgy and sacramental aesthetics of the Church, in the Church’s catholicity, and so on. This revival of interest is being manifested in both the ordinary parish churches and in the academic realm, as young people are increasingly drawn to engagement with these themes.

In fact, on Sunday (just after I’d returned from Chichester) we once again had multiple visitors to Holy Trinity, some of them in their early twenties, deeply interested and engaged in questions of this sort. Laus Deo!

I also had a frisson of wonder I suppose at all the talk of music, architecture, liturgy, the sacraments, the antiquity of parish churches, and so on. It’s hard to describe, but I somehow felt renewed by it all.

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…there is quite a lot of talk at the moment of revival and a renewal of interest in Christianity. No doubt there are various boardroom meetings in centralised locations, considering how this propitious cultural moment might be seized for the benefit of the Church. Good questions to ask perhaps. But the only answer is Christ and the Scriptures. We do not need think tanks and diocesan strategies and complex vision statements to understand this. Christ tells us plainly. Preach the Gospel! Preach the Scriptures! Christ says to his shepherds: You have orders. Obey them! To the sheep: listen for his voice and follow!

“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber. But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.” This figure of speech Jesus used with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.

So Jesus again said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

John 10:1-10

A Critique of Inadequate Shepherding

To understand the words of Jesus in John 10, we must observe that John 10 follows immediately after John 9, the story of the man born blind. In that story, Jesus healed a man born blind. And yet the Pharisees, a group of religious rulers, did everything in their power to debunk this miracle and therefore to reject Christ as one sent from God. The blind man was eventually cast out from the Synagogue for not going along with them. At the end of that story, there is an exchange between the blind man and Jesus, overheard by some of the Pharisees in which Jesus tells them two things about themselves: firstly, that they are in fact the ones who are blind, meaning that they have no spiritual insight or understanding. And, secondly, that, although they are blind, they nevertheless say that they see, and so their guilt remains.

He follows this saying with what is said in John 10: “…he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber”. In this saying he identifies the Pharisees as those who do not enter the sheepfold by the right way. We might say that he means that they approach the task of shepherding the people inappropriately.

What they ought to do is to enter by the door. For, as Christ says, “…he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep and leads them out”.

The door, then, is Christ. He will say twice slightly later in verses 7 and 9, “I am the door”. The shepherd represents the good spiritual leader, who enters by Christ. And he enters the sheepfold, which is the Church. The sheep are God’s people. The doorkeeper, who opens the door is surely the Holy Spirit, the one whom Christ said would lead his people into all truth (John 16:13).

Some of the Church Fathers believed that the door could represent both Christ and the Scriptures and this seems a good interpretation. John Chrysostom, for example, said, “The Scriptures He calls the door. They call us to the knowledge of God, they protect the sheep, they shut out the wolves, they bar the entrance to heretics. He that useth not the Scriptures but climbeth up some other way, i.e. some self-chosen, some unlawful way, is a thief…Some other way, may refer too to the commandments and traditions of men which the Scribes taught, to the neglect of the Law” (John Chrysostom, Homilies on John).

That is a very insightful observation. In Jesus’ time, there were those who shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces by teaching commandments of men that were on the surface meant to help people to live by the Scriptures. But, in fact, they lead people away from the true meaning of the Scriptures, and so separated them from the God. The greatest extent of this, of course, was when they refused to acknowledge that the Scriptures were really all about Jesus, and that they pointed towards him.

But the preaching of something else other than Christ and the Scriptures can take many forms. We must heed the message of John 10: there are wolves and they do seek the lead the sheep of God astray. This is part of the reason that we have John 10 in our Bibles: it is to exhort us to listen for the true voice of Christ in the Scriptures, as preached by faithful shepherds, and to listen for and to that voice, and not to follow the voice of another.

It is one of the great tragedies of the modern Church that preaching the Scriptures appears to be some kind of novelty! Friends, there is no point in preaching if we do not preach the Scriptures and if we do not preach Christ. The Holy Spirit will not bless such preaching. The sheep will not listen to it. Their hearts will not be stirred to love for God and for Jesus. They will recognise it for the emptiness that it is and they will look elsewhere and go elsewhere to find true nourishment.

A quotation from the English Puritan, Richard Baxter, comes to mind: “We speak as dying men to dying men. There is no time for embroidery.”

I have no time to say anything else to you – anything that proceeds from my imagination or from my opinion or from my own blessed thoughts. You may be interested to hear about these things in other contexts. But here, as I stand before you, I have only one task, one duty, one burden, which is to deliver the message to you - the message that comes from God himself. Woe to me if I stand in the way! Woe to me if I let my ego or my insecurity eclipse the glory of Christ which is revealed in the Sacred Scriptures. Friends, do not listen to my voice, but listen for the voice of the true and Good Shepherd!

Again, there is quite a lot of talk at the moment of revival and a renewal of interest in Christianity. No doubt there are various boardroom meetings in centralised locations, considering how this propitious cultural moment might be seized for the benefit of the Church. Good questions to ask perhaps. But the only answer is Christ and the Scriptures. We do not need think tanks and diocesan strategies and complex vision statements to understand this. Christ tells us plainly. Preach the Gospel! Preach the Scriptures! Christ says to his shepherds: You have orders. Obey them! To the sheep: listen for his voice and follow!

The sheep will hear his voice and they will follow because they will know that they will find true spiritual nourishment. So cancel the diocesan think tanks! Cancel the boardroom meetings! Cancel the complex vision statements! Cancel the political virtue-signalling. And let one notion reign supreme and entire: the Gospel, the Scriptures, Christ above all!

The Chief Shepherd

And yet all of this is incomplete without one further recognition: and that is that the true Shepherd, the chief Shepherd of all, is Christ himself. Our reading this morning is curtailed before Christ reveals this to us: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” And this is contrasted with the previous statement: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.”

God has given the gift of the pastoral ministry to the church: bishops, priests, teachers of the faith. These are essential ministries because the people need to hear the Word of God taught, explained, and proclaimed. And yet we all have to remember – people like me more than anybody else – who and what we are proclaiming. As the Apostle Paul said, ‘We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord’ (2 Cor. 4:5). This is what it is all for: the Scriptures, the preaching, the Sacraments, the Church itself - it is all meant to point us to Jesus Christ.

The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. Yes, the pastor of the people of God must sacrifice for them and for their good. He must protect them and lead them. But ultimately, we all must follow after the Chief Shepherd, who is Christ. And we all must remember that he laid down his life for us, that we might know forgiveness and everlasting life. And it is essential to recognise this about pastors and teachers, so that we avoid the error – prevalent in the first century church as much as it is today – of celebritising and venerating the shepherds of the Church in place of Christ himself. Ultimately, you do not follow me, or another priest or pastor, or a YouTube influencer. You follow Christ, as I do also.

Today, we frequently encounter what could be called “The Cult of Leadership”. I do not believe that “leadership” is a biblical word. Use it if you like, but it speaks more of a secular, bureaucratic or even political approach than true pastoral ministry. The true shepherds of the Church do not sit on top of an organisational hierarchy, issuing commands and bossing people around as apparently omnicompetent CEOs. Rather, they preach the Scriptures, sacrifice for the flock, protect them from wolves, and they always remember that they are in fact part of the same flock, the same flock that follows the true Shepherd, Jesus Christ.

Abundant Life

“If anyone enters by (the door),” says Jesus, “he will be saved and will go in and out and find green pasture”.

This is a beautiful image, which reminds us, of course, of Psalm 23:

‘The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:
he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.’

And Christ’s saying here can be interpreted in different ways, but the main point is quite clear: entering through Christ the door and the Scriptures, the sheep will be led out to pasture. They will find food and rest, and they will be lead to a place of peace and restoration.

One of my favourite interpretations of this passage comes from St Augustine:

‘Going in must refer to inward cogitation (that is meditation; considering the Scriptures, contemplative prayer and so on); going out to outward action’. And then he quotes from Psalm 104:23, ‘Man goes out to his work and to his labour until the evening’.

In Augustine’s interpretation, going in represents the spiritual practices of encountering Christ in the preaching of the Church and in meditating upon Christ in prayer and contemplation. Going out represents our daily activities: our work, our labour, our interactions with the world and with other people. In both our meditation and in our action (in prayer and in work), Christ tells us that we will find green pasture in him, that is spiritual food, fruitfulness, and the restoration of our souls.

He says this in another way in v.10 of John: “I came that they might have life and have it in abundance.”

Again, this can be interpreted in different ways, but the basic point is clear: Christ came to give us something wonderful that is only available in Him. Regular attenders of this Church have probably heard me say before that there are two words for “life” in the Greek New Testament: one, bios, refers to biological life, which we share with the animals and the plants. The other, which is zoe, refers to spiritual life, the life of the heart that is made alive by the Gospel and the by the power of the Holy Spirit. This is the life that Christ offers us. Yes, he may bless us with abundance in the material realm, but, even more than that, he offers us life that never ends; that life that is union with Christ and with God.

Again, when he says, “abundant life”, or “life to the full” as it is sometimes more loosely interpreted, he could be referring to two things: one is eternal life, the life that we enter when we come into God’s presence upon death. This is the life that we all long for and desire, even though this desire is often not recognised for what it truly is. This is the abundant life that our life now merely hints at, but which will one day become reality.

And abundant life can mean something else too: namely, the abundance of life we receive here and now in Christ. Might I be so bold as to say that the Christian life is a better life than the life we might have otherwise. Even if it entails the loss of all things, we nevertheless gain Christ, and this is worth more than anything we might have had had we not known him. It is not that we gain Christ plus everything else that the world holds so dear. It is that we gain him, and he alone matters. He alone is what counts. Again, we might remember the words of the Apostle Paul: ‘For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ’ (Phil. 3:8).

I understand if you listen to this and can’t quite work out what it means. I am sure lots of people were perplexed by the words of Christ when he spokes them at the time. These are the sort of holy mysteries that we can only know by approaching in faith and asking God to open our minds so that we might understand. Let us then approach the altar of God this morning, whether we come up to receive the body of blood of his dear Son Jesus Christ, crucified for us, or if we are not quite in that place yet and seek merely God’s blessing. Let us do so in faith, praying that we might hear the voice of Christ and be led out to find green pastures in him and to receive eternal and abundant life.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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It’s been three and a half years since this post:

(My beard was absolutely crazy at that point for some reason.)

And now an equally joyful announcement can be made. On Friday 10th April, we welcomed into our home Maisy the Golden Retriever.

So far, she likes gambolling in the garden, sleeping and strokes.

It is my ambition to tutor her in the ways of righteousness.

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And it came to pass at the seventh time, that he said, “Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.” And he said, “Go up, say unto Ahab, ‘Prepare thy chariot, and get thee down, that the rain stop thee not.’”

1 Kings 18:44

This piece argues that the perceived wisdom is wrong: the Church should not liberalise and/or modernise. To the contrary, the future is orthodox and traditional.

Something is happening out there. I am becoming surer of it by the day. But it is not a revival of Christianity in general. The revival of interest (it is far from a full-scale revival) appears to me be around traditional worship and orthodox doctrine. If you look at the churches that are growing they tend to have one or both of these features in common.

Fifteen years ago, when I was deeply involved in the Charismatic Evangelical world (I am now an Anglo-Catholic priest), there was not much interest in traditional worship. It was seen as dead religion for old people. I never met anybody young who was into it. Now, I meet young people all the time who are thinking about becoming Greek Orthodox, or who go to a Traditional Latin Mass, or who listen to Jonathan Pageau and are learning how to write icons. I met a guy after our Good Friday liturgy who is in his early twenties and is looking to switch from the Charismatic Evangelical space to Orthodoxy or some form of traditional Christianity.

When I was transitioning from low to high Christianity myself, I knew nobody who was treading the same path. In fact, it took me many years to work out where I wanted to be because nobody was showing me the way. My first real contact with hardcore Anglo-Catholicism was a college placement when I was already training for ordination at St Barnabas’ Church in Oxford, with my legendary (now) friend Fr Jonathan. It was St Michael and All Angels and I was blown away.

When similar questions arise for young people now, I think it will be much easier for them to find what they are looking for because so many people are moving in the same direction. It appears to be the movement of the Holy Spirit. Praise God!

When I was questioning all of this, I remember a very intelligent colleague who was working with me as a Cathedral verger observing that evangelical forms of worship, though very popular now, won’t last into the future because they are such a radical departure from the way that the Christian Church has always worshipped. I thought to myself that, if that is really true, then, at some point, we will see a shift of interest away from these types of churches and towards more traditional forms. I was not seeing this at the time. I believe that I am seeing it now.

That said, we are not talking about thousands of people. We are talking about a modest amount of interest that was not there previously but is there now. Some of this interest is coming from Evangelicals, but some of it is coming from unchurched people.

There is some evidence also that there is a small uptick of growth in Church of England churches. But again that appears to be concentrated around (broadly-speaking) orthodox and/or traditional churches. There is also the fact that overall attendance in the CofE suffered catastrophically as a result of the Covid shutdowns and that some of this uptick can be explained as post-Covid recovery.

Holy Trinity Church Winchester - Growth and Interest

I have observed this uptick of interest in multiple places of which I am aware but take my context. I am Priest in Charge at Holy Trinity Winchester. We are a traditionalist Anglo-Catholic church in the heart of the city. We are a resolution parish, so we hold to the traditional view of ordination, meaning that we believe that holy orders can be held by men only.

I am a part-time time priest and have a house in remuneration for my duties. I am helped in my priestly ministry by my retired colleague Fr Phil. But there is no stipend in this parish. I make my money mainly by writing this blog and doing my podcast, Irreverend: Faith and Current Affairs. My wife and I also have four children and we home educate them.

Before I came here there had been a five and a half year interregnum. Meaning no stipendiary ministry of any sort, no house for duty priest, no priestly or clerical oversight of the parish. My friend Fr Phil, mentioned above, and Jan his wife, along with some other helpful clergy, kept the place running. But, during that time, there was no significant investment from the diocese.

This is quite normal in the Church of England, by the way. When I was in the Southwell and Nottingham Diocese, I served one Anglo-Catholic church that had been in an interregnum for eleven years. I sat in multiple meetings in which they were promised help which never materialised. Whilst I was still there they moved their Sunday Mass out of the main church and into the vestry to save on heating bills whilst the empty promises continued.

Some years ago under the previous bishop here, a plan was proposed for the diocese to take over this church and leave our congregation (quite small at that point) with the chancel (the very east end of the church building) for worship. A feature of that plan was to pave over the large green space in the church yard to enlarge the car park. Fortunately, the parish council said no to the diocese.

To return to the theme, the perceived wisdom within the Church of England appears to me to be that the Church needs to get with the times, that we need to ally ourselves to ostensibly ameliorating political concerns, such as climate change and Net Zero and slavery reparations, that we need to liberalise on issues such as women’s ordination and gay marriage. The thinking around this again appears to me to be that, if we change to match the culture’s current view on these things, we will be seen to be inclusive and relevant and people will be more inclined to go to church.

My point is that everything on paper looks like it shouldn’t work. The critics would say that we are worshipping in an irrelevant and inaccessible style, that ours is a form of dead and boring religion, that we are misogynists who discriminate against women and gay people (all lies of course). Moreover we do not have the resources to grow because we have no stipendiary ministry, and the only priest employed by the diocese has to split his time between working for the church and raising his own income (including enough to support his wife and four children). The situation has been deemed so dire in this place that the diocese has essentially tried to close the church and turn it into diocesan offices, paving over the church yard to create an enormous car park. According to the old logic and perceived wisdom, this should not work.

But, contrary to the perceived wisdom, our church is performing well and seeing year-on-year growth as the below chart demonstrates.

Since 2021, the average Sunday attendance in this church has increased from twenty-four to sixty-three. We have gone from zero children to an average of almost eleven. I came mid-2023 and Fr Phil and Jan deserve huge credit for keeping this place going and even seeing growth during the years immediately following the Covid fiasco. Again, we are not talking about huge number but, if growth were to continue here - and in similar places - at the same rate, we would soon be talking about traditionalist churches in the hundreds or even thousands.

Since I’ve been here, not only have we seen this growth but the demographic has shifted significantly younger. I don’t have the stats for this but we now have five or six families regularly worshipping with us, a community of young people mostly in their twenties and early to mid-thirties (one is eighteen in fact), and an even spread in the generations upwards from there. We do not have many “youth” currently though let’s hope that changes too.

The Triduum is the three service sequence ending Holy Week and leading up to Easter Sunday. This is the high point of the liturgical year and we do it very “high church”. The following graph shows again a steady though unmistakable increase in engagement in the Triduum along with principal festivals.

In the same time period, Maundy Thursday has increased from 21 to 29, Good Friday from 28 to 36, the Easter Vigil from 22 to 33 and Easter Sunday itself from 39 to 88. Again, small numbers, but extrapolate out into the future and it seems that something is definitely happening.

Another feature of this that may be drawn out is the level of enthusiasm. At our Good Friday Liturgy this year, we practiced the veneration of the cross. People are invited to come forward and venerate a cross held by the priest. They often bow, kiss, genuflect or even prostrate themselves before it. Such was the fervency of devotion this year - particularly amongst younger people - that my colleague Fr Phil described it as, “like the Toronto Blessing for Anglo-Catholics”. Personally, I was deeply moved to see lots of people come forward and to prostrate themselves and kiss the cross. I remember also one of our younger people in floods of tears as she took Holy Communion shortly after the veneration. It really is a beautiful thing to see people touched so deeply through this powerful liturgy.

I am not sure I have much more to say. I see the same thing happening (but more advanced) in my curacy church in Nottingham - St George’s in the Meadows - which has a very similar vibe to us. I see it at Pusey House in Oxford and I am sure that my friend Fr Jonathan is experiencing it at St Peter’s London Docks. Again, both very similar vibes. This is mostly anecdotal. But it feels new to me. And it is exciting. I can’t help recalling the kinds of things that were frequently said during worship services in the Charismatic world back in my time there. When the Holy Spirit was perceived to be moving, a worship leader or a pastor would get on the mic and cry out, “More, Lord!”

The following is a brief reflection connecting the understanding of Original Sin articulated in an earlier post called The Aesthetics of Original Sin with the cross.

The Cross as the Refusal of Original Blessing

In a piece called ‘Worship in a Secular Age’, the Eastern Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann writes: ‘The term “sacramental” means here that the basic and primordial intuition which…expresses itself in worship…is that the world…is an epiphany of God’.

The world does not simply give us the idea of God as a rational cause but ‘truly “speaks” of Him and is in itself an essential means both of knowledge of God and communion with him’.

Worship is, thus, an offering back of the world to God by means of the world that God has given us. This is the revelation of the meaning of the world, the restoration of its essence. This is what happens, then, when we offer bread and wine back to God in Holy Communion. It is not only a memorial of Christ’s death but a re-offering to God of what we were made to offer him in the first place: the world. This is not a spiritual irruption into an otherwise inert material realm. Rather, it is the unveiling of the true nature of Creation. We see that the whole world is sacramental, insofar as the whole world is meant to be offered to God.

This represents a symbolic refusal of worship that comes to us from the story of Adam and Eve. The taking of the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is the use of God’s creation for self-knowledge, self-worship and not the worship of God. It is like an inversion of the Eucharist: an eating for which no thanks to God can be given.

This is why a Second Adam was necessary: to reverse this idolatrous misuse of God’s creation by the complete and perfect offering of a human life:

Christ is the fulfilment of worship as adoration and prayer, thanksgiving and sacrifice, communion and knowledge, because He is the ultimate “epiphany” of man as worshipping being, the fulness of God’s manifestation and presence by means of the world. He is the true and full Sacrament because He is the fulfillments of the world’s essential “sacramentality”.

Alexander Schmemman, ‘Worship in a Secular Age’

But this is also why Christ was crucified: as Adam chose not to offer the world back to God in worship, so mankind rejected the Second Adam who offered the world to God perfectly.

The world rejected Christ by killing Him, and by doing so rejected its own destiny and fulfillment.

Ibid.

And, yet, in the mystery of Christian Baptism, we see that even this rejection of Christ is turned to the salvific purposes of God because, in dying, Christ took upon himself not only his own death but death as such. And, through rising again, he has, to use the Eastern Orthodox phrase, ‘trampled down death by death’ and brought about a new type of life, the life of the resurrection, which lives eternally to God and can never be snuffed out.

In him, then, we die to sin, which is ultimately the refusal to offer ourselves and our world to God in worship, and we walk in newness of life.

And so a very Happy Easter to you all for tonight or tomorrow (depending on when you are observing this wondrous moment). Thank you for subscribing to this blog and supporting it. May you know the joy of Christ’s resurrected life this Eastertide.

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From a sermon preached at Holy Trinity Church, Winchester on Sunday 29th March, 2026.

The Week of Weeks and the Transformation of Time

Isaiah 50:4-9(a), Philippians 2:5-11, Matthew 27:11-54

The Transformation of Time

The week of weeks begins today. But what exactly does it mean to be a Catholic Christian who observes the liturgical calendar? And what is the significance of Palm Sunday and Holy Week?

To begin with, we must recognise that we have been inculcated into a certain view of time: the time of the secular. Secular time implies that all time is the same and that one event simply follows other. We are cut off from the seasons and their festive observances because of technology and advanced infrastructure and thus we experience our lives as a succession of moments that tragically lead to annihilation and death. We can fill time with pleasure or kill it with distraction, but it can hold no more meaning for us than this.

But t’was not always so. The pagan world, into which Christianity was born, knew its own pattern of feasts and festivals as of course did the Jewish religion. This pattern was taken up by the Christian Church and transfigured in the light of the Gospel. We are its heirs. And we can keep the flame alive, even in the darkness of the surrounding culture.

But we must recognise that there is no neutral view of time. Nor is there a neutral way to inhabit time. We are faced with a choice: secular time or Christian time.

Christian time does not see things as one moment after other with the present slipping into the past and the future leading nowhere. It sees time as transfigured in the light of eternity. This is most obvious when we consider the story of the Incarnation, and of Christ’s death and resurrection. For, in these events, we see the eternal breaking into the midst of ordinary life and giving it an eternal meaning. Our everyday reality is transfigured. Nothing can be the same. Life is not just one thing after other. Rather, it is a journey with Christ through this world and, from this world, into eternity.

Palm Sunday and Holy Week

Perhaps that sounds somewhat vague. So let’s consider Palm Sunday and Holy Week. The liturgy that we have already enacted together has taken us from Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem to his trial, condemnation and crucifixion. We have been part of two crowds: one shouting “Hosannah to the Son of David!” and the other demanding that a murderer be set free instead of Christ and crying out, “Let him be crucified! Let him be crucified!”

This is a powerful illustration of what I’m talking about. Through the liturgy, we are inhabiting the lives and actions of these characters. We welcome Christ and we praise him. We give him thanks for his goodness to us. But, through our sin and our desire to be free from a life with God, we crucify the Son of God afresh. We would prefer Barabbas to be free than Christ. So, we cry out, “Let him be crucified instead!”

As we recognise the fickleness of hearts and how our loves go astray, we are broken inside. We become like Peter who betrayed Christ and denounced him. And we are brought to deep contrition and sorrow for our sin. Our love has faded like the morning mist. How has it come to this? How could we have wandered away from Jesus in this way?

Again, we do not just remember these things. We participate in them. They become a reality to us, here and now. And this is supremely true during this week of weeks. Through the liturgy of Holy Week, we stand in the places that Christ and his disciples stood. We are in the Upper Room as he washes his disciples’ feet, and our hearts are moved by his great humility. We are thrilled and perplexed at the institution of the Holy Eucharist. We are cut to the heart as we stand in the shadow of the cross. We kneel before it in sorrow and profound contrition. Our hopes are drowned in agony as Christ is buried in the tomb with death and evil appearing to have the final word.

And we stand with Mary Magdalen outside the tomb, perhaps not even sure why we are there. And then we hear the resplendent and happy news (which I will not even utter at this moment). But, suffice to say, that we are made one with this joy. Our hearts are lifted and we are changed.

We are changed. Time is changed. The world is changed. And, from this place of transformation, we enter back into the world with a message of a different kind, a different story, a different and better hope. This is the purpose of the liturgy.

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Have this mind among yourselves…

I have probably said enough. I hope you will continue with us on this magnificent journey. Indeed, it is the greatest journey every taken, the greatest story ever told.

Above all, let us identify with Christ, if we may be so bold. Let us seek to walk the way of the Incarnation and of the Cross. I close with a brief meditation on the words of the Apostle Paul in Philippians 2:5-11.

Whilst they are in the midst of their everyday squabbles, Paul reminds the Philippians of Jesus. “Have this mind among yourselves…” he says. In other words: identify with Jesus. Not only, “Be as Jesus was”, but allow his Spirit to live in your hearts and embody that Spirit in your lives now. Be a living embodiment of Jesus Christ.

And what does he remind them of specifically? That Jesus was in the form of God, but that he did not count this equality with God something to be held onto. That he emptied himself by becoming a servant to us and by becoming one of us. This “emptying” of Jesus has been the subject of much speculation. But, suffice to say here, that it does not mean that Jesus ceased to be God. Rather, he retained his Godhood and was still God when he became a man. He emptied himself by taking up a human life and suffering as we do. This suffering he did not know in Heaven, but he accepted it out of love for us.

Again, we see this supremely this week, as we remember the rejection of the crowds, the mocking of the soldiers, the agonising pain of the cross, the cry of desolation, the yielding up of his spirit, the tomb. This was the fullest extent of Christ’s self-emptying. It could not have been complete than this.

Additionally, this demonstrates Christ’s humility, which he displayed by becoming obedient to the will of the Father, and that to the point of death, even death on a cross.

And, due to this, God has exalted him and given him the name that is above every name, that, at his name, all creatures will bow and take his name upon their lips.

May you, then, be like this, says the Apostle Paul. May you be united to Christ in his humility, in his obedience, in his love, and, because of all of this, in his exaltation. For, he who humbles himself will be exalted.

Friends, let us have all of this in mind, as we journey together through this Holy Week to the Upper Room, to the cross, to the tomb, and to the glory of the resurrection.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Time as a Sacrament

Secular Time and Secular Christianity

Last week, I was writing about the offering of creation to God and how this is the original priestly duty of man which was lost at the fall. The loss of what might be called “original blessing” is especially present in the secular world because the secular mindset sees matter as nothing but material. It is not creation. It is not spiritual. It is not multivalent. It is just what it is. And, therefore, it is ours and we can use it for whatever we like.

In a sense, time is very similar. In the secular world, time is just time. There is nothing else to it. Of course it is. As Charles Taylor writes:

“Secular” time is what to us is ordinary time, indeed, to us it’s just time, period. One thing happens after another, and when something is past, it’s past.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (Harvard University Press, 2007), p.55

Again, that’s just the way we see it now.

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WE beseech thee, Almighty God, mercifully to look upon thy people; that by thy great goodness they may be governed and preserved evermore, both in body and soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

From a sermon preached at Holy Trinity Church, Winchester on Sunday 22nd March, 2026.

I am the Resurrection and the Life

Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Our Old Testament reading from the prophecy of Ezekiel is one of the most stunning passages in all of the Bible It describes the prophet being led by the Spirit of God into a valley of dry bones. Ezekiel is told to prophesy over the bones that they may live and, as he does so, the bones rattle and come together. Skin, sinews and flesh appear on them. Then he prophesies again and breath enters into them. ‘And they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army’ (Ezekiel 37:10).

For many centuries this prophecy was interpreted exclusively as referring to the return of the people of Israel from exile in Babylon. It was describing the renewal of Israel’s spiritual and national hopes, that they might be a people again and that they might be restored to their land. By the time of Jesus, different views about Ezekiel 37 had emerged.

In short, by this point, some schools of Jewish thought had come to believe that the Scriptures (what we call the Old Testament) hinted at an event that would happen at the end of history, at which point all human beings who have ever lived would be raised from the dead. As it says in the Book of Daniel: ‘And many of those who sleep in the dust shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt’ (Daniel 12:2).

And some of those groups had come to associated Ezekiel’s vision of a valley of dry bones with this same event. Ezekiel’s vision not only described the return of a people from the death of exile to life in the new land, but it spoke also of a literal resurrection that would happen at the end of history.

This belief is what is behind Martha’s comment in our Gospel reading from John 11. When asked about her brother’s death, she says, “I know that he will rise again on the last day” (John 11:24).

But what we are to see in this Gospel story is a foreshadowing of something nobody expected. It was indeed a fulfilment of those developing hopes of resurrection and eternal life, intuited by some groups of religious scholars at the time, but it was something far beyond those hopes, something that would break apart their categories and expectations and change the world forever. For, in Jesus, the resurrection that many were expecting at the end of history was entering into the middle of history. In Jesus, the resurrection had come early and with it the greatest surprise imaginable.

The Sickness unto Death

John 11:1-45

At the beginning of our story, Jesus is told that Lazarus is ill. His response reminds us of the story of the blind man from John 9, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that God may be glorified through it” (John 11:4). We know that Lazarus would go on to die, and Jesus knew the same thing. It is therefore shocking when we hear that Christ waited a further two days to go to him. Why did Christ do this? It was surely so that his eventual raising of Lazarus from the dead would be an undeniable work of God’s power. Jesus must also have known that this raising of Lazarus would provoke the Jewish leaders into their final plan to rid the world of Jesus altogether: namely, his judicial murder.

Friends, let us pause and take this into our hearts: this story is given to those who saw and those who hear. It is for us, so that God may be glorified as we see in Christ the power given to him to raise the dead. As Jesus said to his disciples, this is done “so that you believe” (John 11:15).

Martha and Mary

In this story, we encounter the figures of Martha and Mary. These are the same sisters who appear in the Gospel of Luke in the famous story: Martha, the activist, who grows impatient with her sister; Mary, who sits at the feet of Christ, contemplating Christ’s divinity in rapt attention; Mary, who would also go on to anoint the feet of Jesus with expensive ointment and wipe his feet with her tears.

True to her character, after her brother’s death, Martha came to Jesus and said, “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you”. The Patristic Fathers are unanimous in seeing here a partially developed understanding in Martha that grows into full spiritual illumination. At this point, she thinks that Jesus will pray and operate according to God’s power given to him. She does not understand that he is the power of God.

“Your brother will rise again,” he said to her. At which point she makes her comment about his rising at the resurrection on the last day. As I said earlier, this was the hope of some Jews at that time.

And here Christ says something astonishing: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet he shall live, and everyone who believes in me shall never die” (John 11:25-26).

The Greek formula ego eimi would have been automatically linked in the Jewish mind with the appearance of God to Moses at the Burning Bush in Exodus. There, God revealed himself to Moses by the name, “I AM”. This formula, ego eimi, was the Greek translation used for that passage. It means the same: literally, “I, I am.” So Christ, by saying this, was directly equating himself with the God of Moses, Yahweh himself.

Christ was saying more: he is the resurrection. Not just, he will bring about a resurrection or even that he himself will be resurrected, but he is the resurrection. Translation: Christ has power over even death itself.

The next figure to appear is Mary, who repeats the same words as Martha to Jesus: “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died”. In this instance, there is not an exchange of words but a response of profound compassion and sorrow on the part of Christ.

‘When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled’ (John 11:33) And, again, at the sight of the place where Lazarus was laid, we hear in the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept”. Jesus wept with the compassion of God and in the pain of a human life.

The translation of the words for “deeply moved in his spirit” could also be “groaned in his spirit”. Christ groans and weeps in the face of death, and we are reminded of the power of death that holds sway over our lives and our world.

We may experience God’s love, his forgiveness, his comfort and blessing in this life now, but we will still taste the bitter sting of death as we await the great renewal of the resurrection. And we see in this story that Christ drank the same cup of suffering as all of humanity. He knew the sorrow not only of his own death, but of the death of others. And he grieved as others did and as we continue to do.

“Lazarus, come forth!”

Lazarus lay in a tomb with a stone laid against it. At his instruction to move the stone, Martha warned him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odour, for he has been dead four days” (John 11:39). Jesus reminds us of the purpose of this miracle, “Did I not tell you that if you believe you would see the glory of God?” (John 11:40). And, after thanking his Father that he always hears his prayers, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!” And Lazarus emerged, bound with linen burial strips, his face still wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him and let him go” (John 11:41-44).

For those who will receive it, we see in this moment the revelation of many great things. Firstly, we see that Christ has authority over death, to command it with a word, in and through his own power. We remember also that Christ’s power would once again be manifested, when he himself would stand up, as Lazarus had stood up, and walk away from his garden tomb on Easter morning. And, of course, we see ourselves in all of this. We understand that we too have been raised from the death-like state of sin and godlessness to new life in Christ. And we recognise that, even though we may die in this world, yet we will live with him forever in the power of his resurrection. We see that, though in life we are in the midst of death, yet, because of Jesus – the resurrection and the life – we too may have life and look forward to life. Our death has been transformed into life in him.

Consider yourself, then, to be like Lazarus or like a pile of dry bones in the valley of the vision of Ezekiel: you have been called forth from absolute death and given eternal life. The new life that flows through you is a perfect gift of new creation. After this death and resurrection, you know that the life that you have is entirely new, entirely supernatural, entirely a gift. Again, consider Lazarus and his life after he was raised. Could he have forgotten for a moment the new reality that had been made known to him? Could he have doubted for a second that everything, every second of his continued existence, was anything other than a sheer gift of God’s grace, supernaturally brought about by the power of Jesus? Would not his life have been completely transfigured by all of this?

Friends, if we will have eyes to see, we will recognise that things are not so different for us. We have been called out of nothingness into existence. We have been given new life in Christ through our Baptism. And, even though we may die, we know that we will live because we trust that Christ is the resurrection and the life and that, at that great day, we will hear his voice as he calls us to come forth from the tomb.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Before the meat this week, a quick plug for my appearance on Tuesday 24th March at the Oxford Literary Festival. This will be at 2pm at Pusey House.

I’ll be on a panel with Bijan Omrani and Nick Spencer. And the panel will be chaired by Professor of the History of Religion Jane Shaw. The topic is ‘Ignoring Christianity at our Peril? Can Christian Faith Save the West?’. They’ve obviously invited me to speak because of my book The Great Return: Why Only a Restoration of Christianity Can Save the West. I’ve met and interviewed Bijan, so I know that we’re on a similar page, although his analysis is specifically to do with England rather than the whole of the West. I imagine that, in the academic environment of Oxford, there will be some questioning over the scope of my claims. But hopefully I’ll be able to articulate something of my view, which is that, as the West departs from the faith, it will take up another, which is a kind of post-Christian faith with its own post-human anthropology and culture of death.

Anyway, if you would like to come along, you can book tickets using the link below. And please do say hello.

https://oxfordliteraryfestival.org/literature-events/2026/march-24/ignoring-christianity-at-our-peril-how-christian-faith-can-save-west

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Dear subscribers. This is just quick plug for an interview I did with Fr Leander Harding, Dean of the Cathedral of All Saints - Albany, NY.

Dean Harding is a senior Anglo-Catholic priest within the Episcopal Church, USA. I found him to be an exceptionally gracious and godly presence (even via video link), and clearly a very deep intellectual. We connected particularly over a shared awareness of the resurgence of interest in traditional and sacramental forms of worship. And we discussed why this appears to be appealing to young men as well as women.

I don’t know how Dean Harding heard of me but I’m pleased he got in touch. He also sent me a complimentary copy his book To Persevere in Love: Meditations on the Ministerial Priesthood from an Anglican Perspective which is where I take the title for this entry from.

Please watch and share it around if you like it. Thank you for subscribing.

Zen explains nothing. It just sees. Sees what? Not an Absolute Object but Absolute Seeing.”

Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite

Zen and Mystical Union

Thus with all due deference to the vast doctrinal differences between Buddhism and Christianity, and preserving intact all respect for the claims of the different religions: in no way mixing up the Christian “vision of God” with Buddhist “enlightenment,” we can nevertheless say that the two have this psychic “limitlessness” in common. And they tend to describe it in much the same language. It is now “emptiness,” now “dark night,” now “perfect freedom,” now “no-mind,” now “poverty”…

Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite, New Directions Books, p.8

In Meister Eckhart’s account, creation implies a metaphysical oneness with God. This is not to say that creation is the same as God but that it shares his life. It participates in him. The difference between creation and God is that creation could not be without God, but God can be without creation. And this is what it means when we speak about God as Being, with a capital ‘B’. Creation is, in that sense. God IS.

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We beseech thee, Almighty God, look upon the hearty desires of thy humble servants, and stretch forth the right hand of thy Majesty, to be our defence against all our enemies; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

From a sermon preached at Holy Trinity Church, Winchester on Sunday 8th March, 2026.

Living Water

John 4:5-45

So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.

A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”

Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you seek?” or, “Why are you talking with her?” So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” They went out of the town and were coming to him.

Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest. Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.”After the two days he departed for Galilee. (For Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his own hometown.) So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, having seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the feast. For they too had gone to the feast.

In both our Old Testament reading from Exodus and our Gospel reading from John, we hear about people seeking water. In Exodus, the people are in a waterless place called Rephidim quarrelling with Moses and putting the Lord to the test. In the Gospel of John, we read of a Samaritan woman of a town called Sychar, coming to Jacob’s well to draw water at the sixth hour, that is midday.

Samaria was a region north of Jerusalem between Judea and Galilee. And the Samaritans were a mixed race of Jews and Gentiles and were traditional enemies of the Jews. They worshipped the same God but only accepted the books of Moses. And they had built their own temple on Mount Gerizim, which had been destroyed by the Jews in 128 BC.

This Samaritan woman encountered Jesus, who was resting next to the well of Jacob on his journey from Judea and Galilee. This exchange would have been inappropriate on multiple levels: the Jewish-Samaritan hostility, the face that unrelated men and women were not to talk to one another, and the public nature of this conversation. But we will see that it was Christ’s divine compassion that led him to minister to this woman’s deepest needs.

“Sir, give me this water…”

There is a big difference between the attitude of the Israelite people in Exodus and that of this Samaritan woman. At first, she is just as literal-minded as they are. Jesus asks her for a drink and speaks of his ability to give her “living water”.

“Sir, you have nothing to draw water with,” she responds, “and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?”

We often hear things like this in the Gospel. There was something similar last week when Nicodemus said, “Can a man be born a second time by going back into his mother’s womb?”

At this point, the woman has not recognised who she is speaking to. Her mind is on the basic necessities of life and her own physical needs.

There is nothing to be critical of here. It was the middle of the day, and the woman had the difficult task before her of drawing water from a deep well and taking it home.

But this literal-mindedness does speak to us of our predicament as human beings, and particularly, I would add, of the kind of world that we live in today.

It is natural to be concerned about the needs of the body and about physical necessities. But our natures being what they are, it is very easy to forget that there is another, more enduring part of us, that also needs to be tended to and cared for.

Again, we live in a prosperous culture in which all of our physical needs are met quickly. Our advanced technology and scientific insight give us the impression that the material reality perceived by our senses is all that there really is and all that really matters. And yet, we, like this woman, know that our souls are disquieted and that there is something else that we really need.

We may apply these observations to the season of Lent. This season gives us an opportunity to cut back on the instant gratification of material need and pleasure. Not because these things are bad – indeed, rightly used they are gifts from Heaven. But to remind ourselves of their relative value compared with what is offered to us by God.

We actually see something of this later on in our reading from John 4. The disciples are aware that Christ has not been eating, and so they urge him, “Rabbi, eat.” But he says to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about” and “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work” (John 4:31-33).

There was, for Christ, a deeper satisfaction in carrying out the Father’s will and fulfilling his mission. Foregoing food was a sacrifice that he was more than willing to make to accomplish this task.

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“A spring of water welling up to eternal life…”

Let’s move to what is the heart of this exchange. Responding to her questions about literal water, Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

It is clear that Christ speaks here no longer of literal, physical water. There is no water of that type that causes all thirst to cease. He speaks, therefore, in spiritual terms of a different kind of water, the water of the Holy Spirit.

This is confirmed for us slightly later in John’s Gospel, when Jesus stood up at the Feast of Booths and cried out, ‘“If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” Now this he said about the Spirit’ (John 7:37-39).

The water of the Holy Spirit is the result of coming to Christ and believing in him: “Let him come to me and drink…Whoever believes in me…”

Secondly, we see that this kind of water truly satisfies the one who drinks it. Jesus said to the woman that the one who drinks it “will never be thirsty again”. In my opinion, this translation does not quite capture the meaning of the Greek words. Rather, the word “again” here might be better rendered as “forever” or “eternally”.

It carries the sense that the thirst of the person who drinks this water will not continue forever but will be satisfied. And it relates to the eternal and inexhaustible source of this water, which is the Holy Spirit of God.

So it is not that Christ promises constant and felt spiritual “fullness” in this world now. Rather, he is telling this woman and us that there is available an inexhaustible supply of spiritual water that can slake any thirst through the presence of the Holy Spirit. This water can satisfy us in this life now and it will go on satisfying us forever into eternity.

Again, it is not that Christians necessarily always feel refreshed or know this as a reality. As with literal water, we must come to the fount of living water and drink from it. As we heard in John 3 last week, there is a mysteriousness to the activity of the Holy Spirit, but we nevertheless know that we can encounter the presence of God in prayer, through meditation upon Scripture, in silent contemplation, in the Sacraments of the Church, and in acts of love and charity, done in the name of Christ.

Again, the water is available, but do we drink it? If we do not do so, we will remain spiritual dry and thirsty.

Many of the Patristic commentators observe also that this woman’s drinking of the spiritual water results in her going back into the town and witnessing to the people there: “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?”

The water of the Holy Spirit overflows like a spring, bringing the blessings of the Gospel to others. This friends, is how we witness to the living reality of Christ in our lives and in the world: we drink from the fount of the Holy Spirit, and are so filled that people see Christ in us.

You do not need to force it. Much of the time you do not need to say anything. It is not so much what you do as what you are. If you drink of the water of the Holy Spirit, you will become Holy. And, deep down, holiness is what every person wants and needs.

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“Sir, give me this water…”

To return to the story, the Samaritan woman finds attractive the prospect of living water and says to Christ, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

Christ’s reply seems at first harsh, perhaps even legalistic: “Go and call your husband.” She reveals that she has no husband and Christ, with divine insight, tells her that she had in fact had five husbands and that the man she is living with is not her husband – an arrangement that was forbidden at the time and a violation of the moral law.

What is going on here? Is Jesus saying that the only way to receive the Holy Spirit is through living a morally pure and virtuous life?

I would suggest that Jesus is not introducing a legalistic criteria for the reception of the Spirit. Rather, Christ’s is a deeply pastoral approach. Christ can see into this woman’s life and into her heart. He is the great physician, and he knows that she needs soul surgery so that she might be healed and know true joy.

We might speculate on her predicament and her feelings: what would life have been like for her? Five husbands. What happened? Did they all leave her? Did she leave them? Did she have multiple children by different husbands? Why was she living with yet another man and why was this mean treating her with such disrespect as not to marry her?

We don’t know, but she has all the hallmarks of a woman who is worn out and worn down by life, looking for peace, contentment and satisfaction in all the wrong places and never finding it. Instead, life had been a bitter disappointment for her, and she had come to an end of herself.

Christ sees all of this and he offers her something different.

Throughout the Scriptures, the metaphor of water occurs constantly. In John 4, we see a contrast between the stale, standing water of Jacob’s well and the living water given by Christ which is the Holy Spirit.

It is reminiscent of the second chapter of the book of Jeremiah,

Be appalled, O heavens, at this;
be shocked, be utterly desolate,
declares the Lord.
For my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living waters,
and hewed out cisterns for themselves,
broken cisterns that can hold no water.

Jeremiah 2:12-13

Friends, like this woman, we have all done the same thing. We have sought to satisfy our deepest thirst through the things of this world. Sometimes this is sin. Sometimes this is simply indulgence in things other than God. Again, during Lent, let us cut back on the things that we rely on to distract us or bring us peace.

We do not know when the penny dropped for the Samaritan Woman. But drop it did, as she realised something of who Christ was and what he offered to her. As with this woman, when we come to an end of ourselves, we realise that none of these things can truly satisfy us. None of it can quench our deepest thirst or meet our deepest needs. It makes us sick. It makes us ill. And we need to be rehabilitated and detoxified.

May you continue, then, to drink from the living water of the Holy Spirit, given to us by Christ. May you rely less and less on the things of this world and cleave to him with greater zeal and joy. And, in doing so, may your thirst be quenched eternally.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Apophasis - On Not Naming Things or God

There is an immediacy of awareness in centering prayer. It is a path to the rediscovery of the simplicity of childhood. As an infant becomes aware of its surroundings, it is not so much what it sees that delights it as it is the act of seeing.

Thomas Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel (Bloomsbury, 2006), p.82

The other day, my son Alexander came into the house with something.

“Look, daddy!” he shouted with delight.

I looked at what he was holding. It was a small blue ball with some mud on it. He had found it partially buried in the garden.

Instinctively, I said something to him like, “That’s a muddy ball. Take it out of the house.”

Who was wiser: my son or me?

In a sense, I “know” more than he does. (Although he probably does know what a ball is by now.)

But, in a sense, his knowledge is much greater than mine. For him, he does not look at this object and think, “This is just a muddy ball.” For him, this is a manifestation of pure Being. He has no conceptual category to intervene between himself and the object that he has found. He does not, in that sense, distance himself from it with words. It is just a Thing that instinctively causes him delight.

This is part of the interplay between parents and children. Children are always finding things and wanting to touch them because they are fascinated by them. Adults are always saying, “Don’t touch that. You will break it. It is dangerous. That’s not for you. etc…”

What we, as adults, often fail to recognise is that the world is full of wonder for children. And this is principally because they haven’t yet learned to see things as concepts. Rather they just see things. Their active, analytic minds have not yet kicked in. And, all things being equal, life is bliss for them.

In Christianity, the mystical experience of God is often spoken of in the same breath as the rediscovery of childlike wonder in the miracle of Being.

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Almighty God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls; that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

‘So Abram departed, as the LORD had spoken unto him.’
Genesis 12:4

From a sermon preached at Holy Trinity Church, Winchester on Sunday 1st March, 2026.

Living Faith

Genesis 12:1-4

Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” So Abram went, as the LORD had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.

Living Faith

The theme that ties our Scriptures together today is faith and the effect that faith has in our lives. Faith is a gift and a calling. Once we receive it, we can never be the same again.

The Call of Abraham

We begin with the call of Abraham. We heard last week of the fall of Adam and Eve in the second and third chapters of Genesis. Here we reach the twelfth. In the intervening chapters, mankind has fallen into deeper and more pervasive sin. In Genesis 6, this culminated in the unnatural union of fallen angels with human women to create a race of giants called Nephilim. This seems to have been enough for the LORD, who flooded the earth completely, preserving only Noah and his family. After the flood, there was one more narcissistic attempt by mankind to set himself up as the king of the universe - the building of a great city and a tower at Babel. God dispersed the men who built there and confused their languages. Even the recreation of the world seemed not to have made any difference.

And, then, in Genesis 12, we see the beginning of God’s rescue mission.

‘Now, the Lord said to Abram (as he was called at the time), “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing…in you all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Genesis 12: 1-3).

Abraham was an old man when he was called, being seventy-five years old. Born of Terah, married to Sarai, who remained childless, he had gone out from Ur of the Chaldeans and settled in the land of Haran.

We are not told precise details about Haran in Genesis. Ancient accounts associate it with the worship of the moon god Sin (Seen) which links Haran closely with Ur, another centre of Sin worship. This is the staging point for God’s call to Abraham.

Abraham is told by God to leave his country, kindred and his father’s house. He is told only to go to the land that God will show him. No further details are given. Abraham was being called to give up everything that was familiar to him to receive a blessing from God.

The Gospel to which we are called to respond is often just as radical. When we are called by God to follow Christ, we must understand that this involves sacrifice. This involves the sacrificing of sin – those things that we know are evil in God’s sight and which separate us from him. But, even more than this, it involves the sacrifice of our lives and of our very selves.

We may be persecuted or rejected for our response to God’s call. We may be ostracised from our homes. We may have to embrace things that are unfamiliar to us and uncomfortable.

This sacrifice involves a willingness to respond to God’s calling and to go to the place that he calls us, whatever and wherever it is.

We remember Christ himself, who said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:25).

And, yet, this calling is not for nothing. It is given so that God may bless us with a rich abundance of life. Again, we see this in the calling of Abraham. For God promises to make him a great nation and to bless all the families of the earth in him.

Similarly, Christ promises us, “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

Finally, we see Abraham’s response. We are only told the bare bones; ‘So Abram went, as the LORD had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran’ (Genesis 12:4).

The Father of all who Believe

In our New Testament reading, the Apostle Paul says of Abraham, “Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:3, quoting Genesis 15:5).

If you did not catch the precise meaning of this reading earlier on, don’t condemn yourself. It is a knotty passage. But the heart of Paul’s meaning is, I think, quite simple: he is speaking about the Law that was given to Moses. And he is making the point that Abraham, who was considered the father of the Jewish people, was not justified by keeping Moses’ Law, since it hadn’t been given when Abraham lived.

Instead, Abraham was justified by faith. That is, he was made righteous in the sight of God by believing in God’s promises, even though it might have seemed very difficult at the time. Our New Testament passage today is cut off before the real meat: ‘In hope (Abraham) believed against hope, that he should be the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.” He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead…or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No unbelief made him waver concerning the promises of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised’ (Romans 4:18-21).

It seemed impossible. It seemed outlandish. It seemed crazy. And, yet, Abraham believed in the promise anyway. He believed because he trusted the one who spoke the promise to him. He believed God and his faith was counted to him as righteousness.

And notice that his faith was not merely mental assent. But his faith overflowed into obedience and action.

This is a very important point because we can talk a good game and we can say that we believe. We can even make a superficial commitment to our faith by coming to church every once in a while. But it is really how we live that demonstrates what is in our hearts.

Now, we know that we are not made right with God by working harder and trying to curry his favour. The faith that he calls us to begins with God’s calling and it is a gift of grace. But it is through obedience that we demonstrate the faith that justifies and, indeed, that we grow in our faith.

Faith is never alone but faith is expressed through a changed heart and life.

The Predicament of Nicodemus

John 3:1-17

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.” Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Let’s consider now the predicament of Nicodemus. We hear of him in our Gospel reading. He came to Jesus and expressed faith in him, saying he believed that he came from God. And, yet, we are told that he came to him “by night”. In other words, he was afraid that he would be seen

Nicodemus was “a ruler of the Jews”, a high-ranking Pharisee. He was undoubtedly worried that his peers would see him entertaining ideas about this upstart, travelling Rabbi. Perhaps he would be cast out of the Synagogue and lose his exalted status. Perhaps he would be ostracised from the religious world and lose all that he knew?

We can often feel the same way about our association with Christ. Our witness to him can make us stand out in a world of unbelief. It takes courage to continue to speak of him and live for him when everybody around us is doing a different thing. We are challenged here to have the courage to live differently.

Christ’s response to this enquiry is intriguing: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” And, slightly later, “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:3,5).

It is clear to us that Christ here speaks of a new birth that is brought about by faith, symbolised and brought into reality through baptism and the reception of the Holy Spirit.

Again, consider this metaphor of new birth. Nicodemus took it literally: “How can a man be born when he is old?” (John 3:4). And, yet, we understand that Christ is calling all people to a new type of life, a life characterised by a complete change of outlook.

Like Abraham, who was called to leave his country, kindred and his father’s house, so we are called to depart from sin and godlessness, and to set out in search of union with God through Christ.

There are various other things that could be said about this exchange but we must mention the climax of it all. Jesus said to Nicodemus, “…as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14-15).

In the Book of Numbers, the people sinned against God and God sought to destroy them by sending fiery snakes among them. In his mercy, God gave Moses an image of a serpent, which he lifted up on a pole. When the people looked at the image of the serpent, they were cured from the bites of the poisonous snakes and delivered.

In the same way, Jesus tells us, he will be lifted up on the cross. As the people looked to the serpent to save them, so now those who believe will look to Jesus and to the cross and they will be saved.

This sets the scene for the most famous verse in the Bible: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

“For God so loved the world” – in other words, God loved the world in this way: by giving his only Son as a sacrifice for sin, so that, by looking to him and entrusting ourselves to him, we might be saved.

A Final Word on Nicodemus

What all this meant for Nicodemus we can only speculate. But it must have meant something to him. For Nicodemus, it seems to have taken time. We are not told of an instant conversion experience. He does not seem to have broken with his old life and his old certainties to follow Jesus. Faith is always a process.

But we do see evidence that Nicodemus’ faith grew over time. A few chapters in John later, we are told that Nicodemus made a bold stand in the Sanhedrin, a gathering of high-ranking Jewish leaders, to defend Jesus against their accusations. And, after Jesus was crucified, Nicodemus appears to have joined Joseph of Arimathea in asking Pilate for permission to entomb our Lord’s body. We are told, pertinently, ‘Nicodemus also, who earlier had come to Jesus by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds in weight’ (John 19:39) – an extraordinarily large amount for a single entombment.

There are ancient sources outside of the Bible that tell us that Nicodemus would eventually be baptised by the Apostles Peter and John, that he would be expelled from the Sanhedrin, that he would be forced to flee Jerusalem, and that he was eventually laid to rest in a common grave alongside another sympathetic member of the Sanhedrin, Gamaliel, and Stephen, the first Christian martyr.

Whatever the truth of these later stories, it is clear that Nicodemus’ faith had transformed him.

Friends, in the same way, may our faith bring about a transformation within us.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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This is one of the obvious books to read to learn about the interplay between Christianity and Buddhism from a Buddhist perspective. There’s much in it that I would question. But there is also much that is good and enlightening.

The main feature of interest for me is TNH’s comparison of the life of Buddha and the life of Christ. And there indeed many intriguing parallels.

I want to focus on the concept of the “Living Christ” which is something TNH makes a lot of in this book.

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Adam and Eve and Christ

From a sermon preached at Holy Trinity Church, Winchester on Sunday 22nd February, 2026.

The Temptation of Adam and Eve

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.

As is usually the case on the first Sunday of Lent, we are given the story of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness for our Gospel. But, in order to understand the symbolic significance of this story, we must go back to the book of Genesis and to the temptation of Adam and Eve.

As the story of Genesis tells us, God created a good and glorious world and, within it, he placed a garden paradise. In that garden, he put a man and a woman, Adam and Eve. The first two people, made in his image and given dominion over all the creatures of the earth, given the commandment to be fruitful and to multiply.

At the beginning of our reading, we are told that the Lord God put the man in the Garden of Eden, to work it and to tend it. God gave the man every tree of the garden, except for one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God said to the man, “Do not eat of this tree, because, in the day that you do so, you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:15-17).

We may wonder why the Lord God set up Adam and later Eve in this way: was it a trick or some cruel test of submissiveness? We speak here, of course, of deep mysteries, but it seems reasonable to say that God was seeking a response of obedience from Adam. In other words, he was looking for Adam to exercise his freedom to obey God and therefore to draw closer to him.

This is an important observation because it relates to all human experience: God has given us freedom to choose. We can choose how we live. We can live righteous or unrighteous lives. We can be good or evil. Most fundamentally, we can offer our lives to God in faith and obedience or we can ignore God and live as though he were not there and as though he does not demand anything of us.

Consider how profound this work of God is: our will – what we decide to do – is most truly the thing that is ours. God has truly given this into our hands. Everything else belongs to him except this. All we can say to God is that we offer ourselves to him. We have nothing else to give.

…Or indeed, to withhold. And this is precisely how the story unfolds. The tree is given so that Adam and Eve might obey God. And yet, slightly further on in the story, we hear of a serpent in the Garden speaking to the woman, Eve. The serpent represents the devil, who we meet in the story of Christ in the wilderness. In the Garden of Eden, he begins by contradicting God’s words and saying that by eating of the tree the man and woman shall not die. And then he says something very interesting, “God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5).

The devil is crafty. He is a liar, but he mixes lies and truth together to confuse and attack Eve. For it is true that God’s purpose in creating humanity was to make us like him. And the devil repeats this truth to Eve. Likewise, to have her eyes opened and to know good and evil was, in a sense, what God intended for her.

But there is a crucial difference.

God’s purpose for the man and woman was to know good and evil by rejecting evil through obedience.

The devil’s purpose, on the other hand, was for them to know good and evil by embracing evil through disobedience and therefore knowing through direct experience what it was to disobey and to know evil.

There was, in other words, a sense in which Eve would become like God. But it was not the sense that God had in mind – quite the opposite, in fact. For disobedience – then, as now – would separate Adam and Eve from God, whereas obedience would have united them with him.

The Christian life is filled with temptation. We want that which is immediately pleasurable or pleasing to us. Through the grace of God, we can often embrace what he gives us as a gift from his hand. But there are many, many times when we must say, “no” to what is placed in front of us.

Observe the dynamic: We have some kind of desire in life. Perhaps it is something unfulfilled – a desire for success in one’s career, a desire marriage and family, the fulfilment of some childhood longing. It could simply be a desire for pleasure or gratification of some sort.

In order to have these desires fulfilled, we are often presented with a choice: the wrong thing now or to wait until the right thing presents itself.

The wrong thing will be instantly gratifying but will lead us away from God and lose the lustre with which is shone in the beginning.

The right thing may be difficult but it will lead us towards God and will make us receptive to whatever he has for us in the future.

Adam and Eve made the mistake of going for the first option: disobedience, gratification, followed by desolation and spiritual death.

Because of their example and the power of their actions, we follow in the same way. And thus we are destined for the same end.

This is a sad story but it is not the end of the story.

The Obedience of Christ

Matthew 4:1-11
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.

And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”

But he answered, “It is written,
“‘Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written,

“‘He will command his angels concerning you,’
and
“‘On their hands they will bear you up,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”

Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written,

“‘You shall worship the Lord your God
and him only shall you serve.’”

Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.

We turn now to Christ’s temptation in the wilderness.

Immediately, we see that it was a work of the Holy Spirit to take Christ to the wilderness to fast forty days and to be tempted by the devil. We see that this is a retelling of the story of the Garden of Eden. Like Adam and Eve, the man, Jesus Christ, was put in an uncultivated place by God to abstain from food and to be tempted by the devil.

Christ, then, is re-enacting the story of Adam and Eve, but doing it in the right way. It is like he is another Adam but, instead of disobeying God by the listening to the serpent’s voice, he is obeying God by contradicting it.

The Early Fathers of the Church called this concept “recapitulation”. And the point of it is that, whereas Adam and Eve disobeyed God, Jesus uniquely and perfectly obeyed the voice God, living a perfect life and offering it in sacrifice to God upon the cross. In doing so, Jesus thus opened up a new way for humanity to be united with God.

In our New Testament reading, Romans 5, the Apostle Paul speaks of Christ’s righteousness which is given to us.

The Greek word that lies behind the words “righteousness” and “justification” in the New Testament is vigorously debated by scholars. But the essence of this word is to say that the perfect life of Jesus – and his perfect obedience – are, in some mysterious sense, transferred to us.

And thus we are brought to God through Jesus and we are given power to live in a different way. We are given power to be obedient to him and to grow into ever closer union with him.

Union with Christ

And, yet, this gift of righteousness is not simply something static, like a kind of title which means very little and makes no difference to our lives.

Rather, the gift of Christ’s righteousness transforms our hearts so that we desire to grow in union with God through Christ. We understand that what is being offered to us – in comparison with the deceit of sin and evil – is true life, true joy, true peace. And so we choose that instead. And we go on choosing that as we grow closer to the one who offers it to us.

This is why Lent, really, is such a joyful time – because it gives us an opportunity to make that decision (to prefer God to other things) over and over again. Lent is not just about putting away obvious sin. That is, of course, very important and Lent is a good time to focus on this.

But Lent is really an intensification of the entire Christian life, which is a stretching out for God, a desire to grow closer and closer to him, with every act of sacrifice or abstinence offered in petition that this may be the case.

And, as we do these things, an unworldly joy emerges within us, a stillness that does not depend on the gratification of the flesh or the lust of the eyes or the pride of life. We glimpse the ultimate reality, our peaceful destination, our true home. And we recognise that we are willing happily to do without anything to arrive there.

And so friends, we give thanks for the work of Christ in rejecting the temptation of the devil. We give thanks that he lived a perfect life for us and laid it down in his death. We receive his gift of righteousness. And we stretch out to grow closer to him and to God this Lententide.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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