Chrism Eucharist: who do we see?

Yesterday afternoon, I was interviewed by GHR local radio and asked about my Easter hope for communities in Wiltshire. This being Greatest Hits Radio, I told them that I hoped Christian faith would become a tune our country could hum again: where people might not know all the words but its beautiful chorus they would know by heart. I was also asked about disunity and division in our country and communities and why this was. To which I replied (trying to be seasonal) that communities were a little like eggs, in that they can be immensely strong under pressure from the top, but surprisingly vulnerable to side-swipes, where one tap in the weak spot (around fear or mistrust, say) can shatter their resilience.

It is true enough of us as individuals, too, and each of us has our pressure points of surprising vulnerability and weakness, however resilient we can be from other directions. Those of us engaged in public ministry know this well, and fear the consequences if that infirmity is found during a meeting, or in a service, where we might be shamed or undone in some way. Our brokenness revealed. Every minister I know has their recurrent stress dream, in which this is played out. My own finds me in the pulpit wearing pyjamas – and more than that I shan’t divulge!

And so we come, just as we are, to the Lord’s table. Conscious of needing his whole armour, as well as his wisdom and his vision, to serve him as we ought. We come, bringing our precarious trust in his steadfast love, offering our chipped vessels that they might carry some of his overflowing grace and strength. We come, as those who have been taught, like Samuel, to recognise in the night-time call, the voice of the Lord. Who long for others who hear and respond to that call but may be mistaking it for something or someone else entirely: spending their whole life looking in the wrong place.

So do we not praise God for those blessed Elis, who in past years suggested to us: ‘that could be God, you know…’ What a gift to give and give again.

For the Lord we serve is none other than the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of our searching, and who has freed us from our sins by his blood. His saving work accomplished by an astonishing act of self-emptying, of being poured out for the anointing of the world. Dear friends: his strength, his forgiveness, his service, his life, transforms and goes before any that we might bring: any offering or small service we might make in return. And nothing we lack can limit his ability to build the church.

So it is with confidence in him that we come forward on Maundy Thursday and make this annual pilgrimage to our cathedral that always proves so sustaining for the months to come. To hear again of his radical table-fellowship, which upturns the ancient mandates of honour and shame that exclude and castigate the woman anointing Jesus in our Gospel passage: so significant a tradition that it is features in each book.

And in which I am struck again by the Lord’s hard-hitting question of Simon the Pharisee: ‘Do you see this woman?’

He has noticed her, sure enough – appearing to violate the codes of propriety – but he has not seen her as Jesus sees her: as welcome, beloved and forgiven. It would have been so easy, so much less stress to have gone with the grain of prevailing boundaries, with the allocated roles of holiness and of gender, of insiders and outsiders. But instead, with the heroic predictability that must have seen his disciples giving each other knowing looks and ducking their heads! (‘leave it at the parable…’) The Lord addresses the awkwardness head on (‘….So Simon…).

How we need leadership like this: which can enter the place of power and, undaunted, ask – of themselves as well as others – who do we see, or not see? Who presides? Who serves or eats? Who goes without? This Easter we find ourselves in a world more oppositional, more fractious and factional than most of us have ever known, in which old unities are newly vulnerable. A world increasingly governed by intimidation, ridicule and threat, in which Christ’s new mandate of love can appear laughably weak: fragile as an unwrapped eggshell.

And yet. And yet at the very moment of his breaking, he is remaking the foundations of the world: ‘the price of hu­man­kind to pay – and to spoil the spoil­er of his prey.’ Praise God for Jesus Christ – Christus Victor!

And affirm your vows with confidence and courage, friends, that the Lord may renew us in his service. Amen.