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Whatever you might think about living under a monarchy, the British monarchy is very odd. We live in an age which is passionate about equality, equal opportunities, controls and checks on people’s performance in their jobs, a dislike of class difference and deference, and so on. We attempt with great commitment to apply these things across the board, but the monarchy doesn’t satisfy any of them. And yet many of the same people who are passionate about these standards are also glad to have the monarchy. What is going on here? Something is happening which bypasses our normal methods for organising life according to the best principles. What we find in so many people is that in this particular case something is engaging the imagination so strongly that it can override them. You don’t have to be a supporter of monarchy to recognise this. For many people it touches some deep things in the imagination. At least, so long as it is working well enough. It’s like the bumblebee, which defies the laws of aerodynamics.

A few days ago I was asked to talk in Wakefield Cathedral about celebration. In everyday life celebration is about being pleased with something, about being thankful for something which gives us pleasure or a sense of satisfaction. Opening bottles of champagne if you can afford it, having a knees-up, having a happy time.

When it comes to Christian celebration, it doesn’t fit. Christian celebration covers both joyful things and sorrowful ones, successes and failures. It celebrates our redemption, but is a very important part of that, it celebrates something as dark and dreadful as the cross – and this must puzzle many non-christian people. It’s not simply that we celebrate the cross because it brought about great good – Christian celebration includes entering into darkness and even evil. The Psalms take us there – the Psalms often put lamenting into our mouths and in one or 2 places they take us to dreadful places in human experience. Rowan Williams has said that Christ has entered into even these darkest of places to share them. If you think of funerals today, secular celebrators, as they are called, struggled to be honest about the departed, they tend to avoid being open, because there is nothing in the commonly shared tradition to undergird it, to give it significance, resonance, to touch the imagination deeply in a way that is healing. The Christian tradition can do this because it accepts that both joy and sorrow and even dreadfulness can all be found a place in Christian celebration.

And so we bring these 2 things now together: monarchy and its ambiguities, and celebration and its ambiguities. Christ is our king all-glorious, but also he is our king humiliated and tortured and killed. The feast was of course instituted at the time when politics was particularly toxic, the time of the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. As a feast it is especially powerful and poignant because its texts and prayers bring together the glory of the ascended Christ crowned and seated at the right hand of the Father, and the Christ who suffered the passion and the cross and the ignominious death. There is more in this than a simple statement of belief – it operates further at the level of the imagination. It is sometimes said of Rublev’s icon of the Trinity that the 3 figures have joyful faces but you can also see in them a profound sorrow – or perhaps rather a profound seriousness. The church today is very tempted to facile jolliness, and to worship that aims to give you a good and happy experience. It’s not often that a service is praised for being serious.

What we see in this feast is Christ taking the imperfect kingship of the old Israel and of all earthly monarchies and showing that they are but foreshadowings of something much bigger and deeper, if not cosmic, to do not just with kingship but the mystery of the Holy Trinity. What it does for earthly kingship it does for us too – so that even at something like a funeral we are much bigger than we thought we were.

You might have seen the sketch in Morecambe and Wise in which they do their own version of ‘Singing in the Rain’. Ernie is enjoying himself playing the Gene Kelly role, singing and dancing (and we’re reminded how good those two were at both, having started in music hall), while Eric is a hapless police officer who manages to stand under a drainpipe at the wrong moment and gets drenched, his protestations of ‘I’m wet through’ being completely ignored by his co-star who is, and wants to be, the focus of attention. I was once rather earnestly asked who I considered had influenced me most in terms of liturgy and preaching. I think the questioner was expecting me to say something appropriately dignified like ‘Augustine’ or ‘Lancelot Andrewes’ or ‘Austin Farrer’, or, of course, ‘Walter Frere’, all of whom with many others have certainly been extremely significant, but what I actually said was ‘Eric Morecambe’. Quite why I said this I can’t quite remember, and I was probably being a bit mischievous (never!), but I think it had something to do with timing, attention to detail, and rehearsal, all of which were key to the success of Morecambe and Wise – what seemed to be ad lib or spontaneous was in fact carefully rehearsed at Morecambe’s insistence. And it is in this way that the bystander, the police officer, actually and ironically becomes the focus of the sketch. Attention is drawn to him in a way that isn’t present in the original but plays on our sense of irony and in a way the dignity of the underdog, the apparent also-ran, in whom actually is to be seen something of ourselves – in this case our sense of the ridiculous, the puncturing of any pretension, and the need to laugh at ourselves in that respect. It occurred to me one day that in laughing at Eric Morecambe, I was actually laughing at myself, and that he was helping me to do it.

All this came to me, well, sort of, while I while I was reading this morning’s Gospel. The Gospels generally are full of bystanders, figures who make fleeting appearances and then disappear, never to be heard of again. Just think of the Passion narratives. They are sometimes, in fact often, unnamed. But that doesn’t mean they are unimportant. Here, the various relatives and co-workers of those Jesus calls to follow him seem just to stand there and watch as they abandon their nets and go with him. One of the antiphons for St Andrew dramatically changes key as the word ‘immediately’, or ‘straightway’ in old money, is sung, making the text speak of the necessary immediacy of the response of the growing band of disciples. No time for dithering – we need to get on with it. Yet these others stand and look on. You could forgive them were they to say ‘hey, hang on a minute, you can’t just take these people away with you, we’re working here’, but what we actually get is silence (and the silences are another key part of the Gospels – what isn’t said is as capable of pointing to the truth as what is spoken). We will never know what they did next, just carried on with their fishing most likely, but they are not irrelevant to the central focus – the call to discipleship. We do not exist for ourselves alone – we exist in a complex web of relationship with those dear to us, those who have influenced us for good, but also, and here’s the difficult bit, those who are not dear to us, those we would run a mile from, and those whose influence may have been detrimental to, even abusive of, our human dignity under God. This is the risk of being human in God’s created order, and this is the reason we give thanks for what is good and at the same time ask for forgiveness of our own failure to honour the dignity of others, for reconciliation and healing, and, in our fractured and imperilled world, justice, equality, responsibility and peace. Our lives are full of encounters with bystanders, positive and negative, in a way that can obscure the fact that in the face of each is the face of Christ. I think I learned that the hard way when, as a young priest, after a long conversation sitting on the churchyard wall with a man who had been released that day from prison after serving a sentence for violent behaviour, it became clear to me that he was about to hit me. In the end he didn’t, and I won’t here tell the rest of the story, but for reasons bound up in the mystery of God’s way with us, that encounter has stayed with me and become part of me, and although I was quite terrified at the time, I can now give thanks for it and I find myself wondering more what happened to him and praying that he’s found that peace to which I earlier referred. I suppose that means I’ve been reconciled to the memory of that day, and my fear has been turned into a greater confidence in God’s larger purpose. But 25 years later I have to keep working on it!

And what we do today in this Eucharist is itself a reminder of how the bystanders are often us. The Roman Canon of the Mass refers to ‘omnes circumadstantes’, literally ‘all those standing around’. It sounds a bit casual and uninterested, yet that is most definitely not what it is and is not what English translation might make it sound like. Those who stand around,  though unnamed unlike the representative martyrs in the same prayer, you, me, anyone present both here and with us online, are given dignity by being placed at the very heart of the Eucharistic action, an indispensable part of what is happening, the people of God doing what they are called to do – worship and thanksgiving, with the distinct and equally essential implication, at the very least, of going and doing something about it, not as mere spectators but participants with all the senses of costly self-giving that the roots of that word imply.

And so, the bystanders, the onlookers, in today’s Gospel, are not insignificant. Mark is very careful to identify them and the relation they bear to those whom Jesus calls to follow him, even the so-called ‘hired men’. Everyone has a part in the picture painted for us, and we are in that picture too. Why be so specific unless all present are part of the new thing that God is doing in Christ Jesus the Lord? They may not know what it is yet, but the reality remains. We may not know what it is yet, not fully anyway. The incarnation, to which our attention begins to be drawn afresh liturgically as we approach Advent, is nothing unless it is all-enfolding, making insistent the call of the Lord to each of us, the possibility of having to lay aside in the wider service of the Kingdom whatever metaphorical nets we may be tending, confident that the Lord who calls is faithful.

      The Fourth Sunday before Advent

       Deut 6.1-9        Mark 12.28-34   

  Preached by Fr Crispin Harrison CR

The lesson which we heard at Mattins, is part of an ancient Jewish prayer that devout Jews recite daily. ‘Hear O Israel the Lord our God is One Lord.’ Jesus Christ recited it every day all his life. It is called the Shema YIsrael. The prayer continues: ‘and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart soul and might.’

Jesus said this commandment is the first of the Greatest Commandments and he went on to add the second ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ This command is found in Leviticus 19.18b.

But how are we to keep these two commands? How can we love God totally and entirely? How can we love everyone?

Tomorrow we will celebrate the festival of All Saints. Tonight is All Hallows Eve. The saints can show us how to love God with all our hearts, soul and might. Their lives were wholly committed to God and dedicated to serving all kinds of human need. The saints show us how to love our neighbours as ourselves.

In the early centuries of the Christian era there were many martyrs. United to God in their sufferings and death with Jesus they showed their total love for God and brought many blessings on the human race.

Last Monday we remembered the martyrs Saints Crispin and Crispinian, whose name I took when I became a novice in this Community. They were brothers, ordinary laymen who lived in Rome in the 3^rd century. They worked in a shop mending and making footwear. Their trade brought them into contact with many people and they used the opportunity to tell their customers about Jesus Christ and the good news. Inevitably they were reported to the magistrates, tried for being Christians and put to death.   Their relics are enshrined at Soissons in France and their memory has been celebrated in England since Saxon times. Like them we should use opportunities of social contact to witness to Christ and Christian life and values.

Another famous saint was the apostle and martyr, Peter, who died at Rome, crucified upside down because he said that he was unworthy to be crucified like Jesus. Ist He preached boldly after he received the Holy Spirit but the Gospels also tell us that when Jesus was arrested he denied that he was a follower of Jesus. Every saint has been a sinner. They knew that and asked God’s mercy and help. So God loved them and enabled them to return love for love.

Not all saints have been martyrs. Some have been great exponents of the faith and by words and writings rejected falsehood and helped Christians to have a true knowledge of God.

Earlier this month we observed the festival of the 19^th century Carmelite nun, Theresa of Lisieux. In her autobiography she tells how just before her profession she felt very depressed and unsuitable because she did not know what God wanted her to be. Her doubts were settled when she read St Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians chapter 13. ‘I will show you a more excellent way. God’s greatest gift is love.’

‘Charity is the best way of all because it leads straight to God.’ Theresa exclaimed! ‘Jesus my love. I‘ve found my vocation and my vocation is love’. Indeed that is our vocation as well, the vocation of everyone; to love God and to love our neighbour.

The Calendar of Saints commemorates by name those the Church remembers with thanks to God.

Holy men and women, bishops, priests and deacons, religious, both monks and nuns, kings and queens, and all saints are wonderful examples of love in action. They worked among the poor, the destitute, the sick, the uneducated and still do. Their love has transformed lives and inspired many followers to join them in their works of charity and mercy.

Especially we must acknowledge blessed Mary, Mother of God and queen of Saints for her great love.   She showed her love of God in the gift of herself, heart, soul and might, in obedience to God and love for Jesus her Son. On the cross Jesus made her our mother and the mother of all the human race. We turn confidently to her for help. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

One of the most popular television sagas of recent times – was Line of Duty.

It provoked weekly speculation throughout the land as, week by week, the intriguing plot unfolded in twists and turns.

The country developed a whole new set of sayings, expletives and abbreviations…. a whole glossary of new terms.

You may remember the infamous OCG. ……Organised Crime Group.

The idea of organised crime is not new to us and we have all, surely read novels or watched films that feature the Mafia.

Human beings worked out, long ago, the power and effectiveness of working together – of “collaboration.”

Fortunately, most collaborative initiatives are well-intentioned and bear little comparison to the brutal OCG but organised groups often form a self-protecting brotherhood or kindred.

They develop their own codes of conduct and there is honour even among thieves.

Line of Duty revealed a powerful sense of loyalty to one another among members of the OCG but an utter ruthlessness about perceived outsiders, traitors or “rats.”

My wife will tell you, I can be a glass half empty person and I have begun to dwell on the negative but so much that is positive is born of collaboration:

Time and again, people have worked together for the Common Good as people have understood it.

Guilds, hospitals, schools, trades unions, universities, the NHS, the hospice movement and food-banks are all fair examples & the list must be endless…

And yet so many of those institutions have fallen foul of the pervasive errors and crimes that have proved endemic to society.

Most of them have been found wanting in respect of racism, sexism, and various types of abuse.

“The World” has been found wanting – and the Church has sometimes been found to be too much of that world…..too much a party to those prejudices or indulgences upon which an established order was built.

The Church has been found wanting around matters that have always been Gospel issues.

In Christ there is neither male nor female, neither Greek nor Jew.

This evening, the College commemorates it’s foundation on the feast of Simon & Jude, two members of a twelve-strong apostolic band.

The twelve – entrusted with the Great Commission – were to make disciples of all people, baptising them in the name of the Father and of The Son and of the Holy Spirit.

They were to initiate what was to be a collaboration empowered by the very source of creation, the Spirit of God who first moved over the face of the waters to bring order out of chaos.

Of course, the twelve were imperfect and scripture bears witness to their disagreements, their attempts to gain special privileges over one another, their slowness to comprehend and sometimes their lack of faith.

The enterprise of the Church was never likely to be one of utter perfection, and always in need of the Spirit’s renewal and reform.

Matthias renewed the number after Judas.

The rules surrounding food are reformed – through Peter’s dream and in response to the growing number of gentile Christians.

Dissatisfaction with and within the church has – at various times and in various places – has led to reformation.

Not everything in the history of reformation has been praiseworthy or purely motivated, but change has often been necessary.

Today, the Church of England continues along an organised programme of Renewal and Reform – less a steady process of conversion of heart – than a managerial exercise in structural reorganisation – and like previous reformations, it will not end in perfection.

Jesus, whose hands flung stars into space, has come into conflict with people of his making .

One way or another, they have assumed power and authority.

They have used their personal gifts to order the world – or at least their part of it – to their own ends rather than for the good of all, and they react negatively, aggressively, to Jesus’ call for renewal and reform.

Like the OCG, they will go to considerable lengths to preserve their position and the status quo.

The World, which has discovered the power of collaboration and frequently put it to good purpose, has sometimes allowed that good to be degraded by the infiltration of selfish desire or by failing to make changes when time and fresh understanding have required.

No one “set out” to warm the planet.

I doubt many people set out to keep the poor poor or to deprive them of life’s necessities ….or of medical assistance……

They just fail to change when they find it serves their comfort (and greed) to let the injustice continue.

The structures which provide cohesion in some parts of society – and indeed of the world – cause misery in others.

There’s an imbalance and an injustice whereby one part of humanity exploits another…..or continues to do so after recognising the truth.

That passion for justice, which once fired people to put an end to slavery, to apartheid and more recently to the sexual abuse of children is as much a part of the Gospel for today as it always has been.

The categories of the victims of oppression, exclusion, abuse and degradation may have changed, but the structures of society need breaking and resetting today as they always have; they need renewal, reform and healing.

A church that rushes to reconciliation before addressing the claims of justice, may find itself simply papering cracks and sweeping evil under the sanctuary carpet.

The ministry to which members of the College are called today will continue to be sacramental and pastoral, but it will also have that quality of challenge – prophetic challenge to people within and beyond the church, to be renewed and to be reformed in response to the claims of justice.

It will require priests to challenge people to change – and it will require collaboration with people who do not profess Christian belief but who understand the need for justice.

Responding to those claims of justice in Britain and far beyond may see us treated as Jesus was before – and that is his teaching for us this evening.

But responding to the challenges of justice will leave the church more renewed and more reformed than any managerial exercise – and if that is so, as Hastings might say, we’ll be sucking diesel!  

Mark today has brought us with Jesus’s entourage to the last staging post before Jerusalem,

the last moment before the climax begins in the city of David and in centre of Jewish life, the Temple.

This last staging post is the very ancient town of Jericho, city of springs and palms.

From there it will be a winding climb of 3000 feet for the excited, weary, apprehensive disciples.

There is a buzz as they set out, a large crowd.

And from the edge of this throng and the dusty road-side, and across 2000 years of history, a voice makes itself heard – insists on making itself heard:

“Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.”

This is not the cry of an anonymous sufferer;

the gospel names him – a man who appears this one time only –

and gives him the unlikely name of BarTimaeus, part Greek, part Hebrew.

Perhaps Mark has heard Bartimaeus tell his story, maybe many times. The NT scholar Richard Bauckham thinks so.

In hearing this vivid Gospel this morning we may be as close as can be to being in that crowd around Jesus – closer certainly than the famous 6 degrees of separation.

And what do we find as we stand at the side of the road out of Jericho that spring morning?

That the presence of Jesus, his proximity, causes this man to overthrow all the routine that he relies upon, all that brings him income and, maybe, comfort.

Bartimaeus could let the celebrity pass by, rake in the offerings from an excitable crowd and continue his days in the familiar way. We would never have heard of him.

But no. The faith that the God of Israel is the saving God,

the God who leads his people out of exile to a better world,

the God who sends help – power allied to holiness – this faith is too strong for Bartimaeus to remain sitting there silent.

The real desire of his heart rises from the dust.

And it speaks these words: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.”

Utterly bold; utterly humble.

Bartimaeus abandons the false familiarity of his day-to-day life,

the life of a struggling Jew in an occupied land,

for following Jesus on the way,

a way that includes the tensions and emotional roller-coaster of Passion Week up in Jerusalem.

This way is what the letter to the Hebrews tells us is “for all time”: – Jesus, our great high priest of the permanent Temple, is able to save those who approach God through him, always, perfect, for ever.

One moment in time that changed a man’s life.

– And, through his testimony, has helped change much else, many others.

A miracle, that has the shape of the call of a disciple.

Does Jesus tell Bartimaeus, “Your faith has made you well?” or “Your faith has saved you?” The translators can’t decide; the word for both is the same.

This healing holds before that crowd, and before every crowd that has heard Bartimaeus’s voice since then, the shape of our salvation:

“Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.”

The prophecy of Isaiah we heard at Mattins also speaks of the distinction between desire that does not satisfy and what is everlasting.

It sounds too good to be true: “You that have no money, come buy … wine and milk without money and without price.”

Too good to be true, and far outside what a Jew exiled to Babylon might expect.

At this low point of the Jewish nation’s fortunes, their God, speaking through his prophet, tells them of the everlasting covenant in the Lord’s steadfast sure love for David;

for … “my thoughts are not your thoughts”: they are higher – higher as the heavens are higher than the earth.

The people need only “return to the Lord, that He may have mercy on them.”

Boldness and humility.

Mark’s gospel teaches us more about this.

He places Bartimaeus’s experience soon after that of the Rich Young Ruler, about whom Fr Tony spoke here 2 weeks’ ago.

That young man could not enter the Kingdom, Fr Tony told us, because he was loaded, loaded with wealth and loaded with religious merit.

He went away shocked and grieving.

In fact he is the one who stays blind in the dust.

Bartimaeus, the beggar who springs up and throws away his cloak, is the one who gains insight and follows on the way:

“Son of David, have mercy on me” proves to be not easy for everyone to say.

And how about for us?

Well, note that Bartimaeus tells us not that he gained sight but that he re-gained it.

He had seen and had ceased to see,

and trusting Jesus, he was given the gift of new and true sight.

We tend to think as a Western society we have understood things hidden from past ages.

Our world has improved.

We try to look after people with medical and social care.

Our laws are made to treat all people equally.

We are learning to see anew around human identities and relationships.

We are just beginning to realise that the planet is a stupendous delicate eco-system which we can and should take care for.

Sight re-gained.

But … what will future ages tell us we have been blind to?

In the same way in which recently we have discovered blindnesses

through Black Lives Matter, through the Me Too movement, through uncovering past abuse of children.

What do we want the Son of David to do for us?

Do we truly want it? Do we want what satisfies?

Do we dare to receive the gift of seeing anew?

And, if we do, the way is not the way of being loaded with achievement and certainty,

but is utterly simple and utterly bold.

It is that same prayer of Bartimaeus,

which has been the unceasing prayer of Christians since Mark first chose to write it down:

“Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” Is this what the world needs to see aright?