Love so Amazing: Thoughts on Good Friday Evening

At the end of the Good Friday service at the Cathedral, we sang Isaac Watts’ great hymn ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’. When we got to the last verse, ‘Love so amazing, so divine / demands my life, my soul, my all’, there was an unexpected sunburst over the great cross that had been processed in and set up at the front of the nave. Until then, it had been one of those bleak, grey days we have endured for most of March. So this unexpected light felt like a transfiguration, an epiphany. Nature imitated liturgy in the words of another passion hymn we had sung: ‘Tree of glory, tree of light’.

You can have Jesus’ last words from the cross bleak and agonised as in St Matthew and Mark.  You can have them peaceful and serene as in St Luke. You can have them victorious and triumphant, as in St John’s ‘It is accomplished’. All these are valid ways of reading the cross. Golgotha means many different things. But on Good Friday, the liturgy chooses the passion according to St John. His gospel tells of a man destined for a victorious throne where he is ‘lifted up’. It is nothing less than the cross where he finishes in triumph the work he has come to do: the work of love.

Love. For me there was another, more important, epiphany earlier in the service. The preacher was speaking about the cross as the eternal sign of God’s love. In the course of a powerful sermon he said that the problem with ‘punishment’ theories of the atonement is that they are experienced not so much as focused on divine love as on my own sin, my guilt, my shame. In this we are self-concerned, driven by the need to placate angry gods who deal only with forensic transactions without which there can’t be forgiveness or reconciliation. This sinful idée fixe subverts the very idea of love freely given.  

Let me go on in my own words. This is not to deny the central place that forgiveness and reconciliation have in the gospel. Far from it. ‘I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly’ says Jesus in St John. It’s a question of how we understand love. If we see it in punitive terms, God exacting a penalty in his own Son for the sins of the world, we miss the fundamental point about the nature of love. Its categories are not legal or ceremonial but personal.  It is self-forgetting, self-giving, self-emptying. There is no higher category with which to define it. Love is simply what it is. He loves us because he loves us. It costs everything and gives everything. William Vanstone puts it like this in words we also sang, drawn from his profound book Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense:

Love that gives, gives ever more,

Gives with zeal, with eager hands,
Spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
Ventures all, its all expends.

I have lived too long with punitive theories of the atonement. I don’t deny that they have a long pedigree in the church (though I do dispute the view of an online conversation partner today that substitutionary atonement is ‘orthodox’: there's never been an orthodox definition of atonement as the preacher pointed out). Nor do I deny that the New Testament draws on legal and ritual categories, nor that it affirms the idea of a victim freeing another person by standing in his/her place. I have defended the place of this imagery in some of my writings. But the point is precisely that these are ways of speaking: imagery, analogy, metaphor. They are not the heart of the person-person relationship which is where in human life we learn everything we know about the character of love.

At the Archbishop’s enthronement at Canterbury last week, we were invited to sing a song that contains the line ‘the wrath of God was satisfied’. I am not alone in questioning whether it can be right to speak about a Son who placates an angry Father. It drives a wedge right through the Trinity. It collapses God’s love into an impersonal transaction. Anyone who has ever loved knows that this is not how love is. It is more costly, more risky and more generous than that. 

The cross shows us what it means to love to the end. As Vanstone’s hymn has it:

Therefore he who shows us God

Helpless hangs upon the tree;
And the nails and crown of thorns
Tell of what God’s love must be.

On Good Friday, the darkness is transfigured and the sun breaks through the clouds. We recognise love enthroned on the cross and say 'yes' to it with all our hearts in the hope, the conviction, that one day it will be enthroned in all the globe. For amor vincit omnia.  Love overcomes in the end. 'Love so amazing, so divine.'

Four Days by the Sea

I have been away on a kind of retreat.  I spent four days last week in a sunny, airy environment being well looked after by a kind team of staff.  I shared a room with five other men. My bed was by the window from which you could see the sea.  Fledgling pigeons were learning to fly from the ledge outside.  Next door was the church where my wife’s parents had been married 75 years ago, so I felt a family connection to the place.  

These days brought rhythms and routines very different from what I was used to.  Some of them meant uncomfortable physical and spiritual challenges.  But this was true for my companions too.  When we struck up conversation they turned out to represent a rich and colourful kaleidoscope of life in the north-east. I spent much of the time reading: a life of one of my favourite saints, a history of railways, a contemporary novel.  I slept a lot. 

You’ll have guessed that I am talking about a spell in hospital.  I was in the Sunderland City Hospital for surgery.  I’ll spare you the details.  The procedure was routine for everyone except me: I won’t pretend that I didn’t contemplate this ordeal with some anxiety.  It’s behind me now and I’m grateful to be in recovery mode at home. But the quality of care on the NHS is splendid.  Nurses, consultants, orderlies, meal attendants, chaplains were all exemplary.  I want to thank the hospital staff who took such trouble.  It was my first time as an in-patient and it was a good, wholesome experience. 

What are my thoughts about it a week later? 

First, I reflected a good deal on the nature of a hospital as a ‘place of truth’.  This was something made much of when I went on training courses as a part-time hospital chaplain in the 1980s.  There was nothing life-threatening about my surgery: others were in for more serious reasons than me, and this made me realise I had a lot to be thankful for in a lifetime of good health.  Yet every procedure has its risks, and I was talked through these carefully and honestly.  I always knew what was happening to me and why.  I thought, if only every institution could deal with its ‘clients’ in this way: schools, governments, universities, financial institutions, churches (and yes, cathedrals).  The world would be a better place without smoke and mirrors. A place of truth is also a safe place because truth holds us.

Secondly, I glimpsed in a new way the pressures the NHS is under. One night there was pressure with emergency admissions, a patient who needed constant attention, another patient who fell out of bed. All the staff coped magnificently, yet it seemed that there was no slack in the system to deal with a crisis.  Add to that the systemic challenges of funding cuts and efficiency drives, and all the normal stresses and strains any organisation knows about, and it is amazing to me how good humoured the staff were.  When I was about to go under the knife I quipped with the surgeon and the anaesthetists that it felt rather like an episode of House.  ‘Oh, we really hope not!’ they said.  Their laughter was the last thing I remember. Yet as we all know, our Health Service faces big questions and, despite what politicians say, an uncertain future.  It deserves our complete confidence if we still believe in being a caring, compassionate society – which we do, don’t we?

Thirdly, I learned something about the spirituality of being a patient.  One part of this is the way your world collapses down in a hospital ward.  In this narrow space, you notice everything with heightened intensity: who comes, who goes, the smallest changes in routine, above all what's happening to your own body.  'Out there' with its hum of traffic noise, the line of the sea, the pigeons wheeling in the sky, is a far-off realm, another country where they do things differently.  Even a much-admired orchid sent by friends which took up residence on the window-sill seemed only half to belong to this little world inside.  It's easy to become self absorbed within the confining horizons of the walls of your ward.  Prison literature, the monastic experience both teach the importance of inhabiting a confined space generously, becoming as 'detached' as possible from the things it is so easy to obsess about. Or as Hamlet says, 'I could be encompassed within a walnut shell, yet count myself the king of infinite space'.  An idea rich with possibilities.

Then there is the aspect of being not just a patient, but ‘patient’: allowing the healing processes to take their time, not to be in too much of a hurry for my ordinary life to be given back to me, listening to what my body was telling me. The saint whose life I read was Francois de Sales, the 16^th century Bishop of Geneva.  He said: ‘desire nothing; refuse nothing’. That summed up how I needed to be.  Canon Bill Vanstone wrote an influential book called The Stature of Waiting whose themes kept coming back to me.  The central one is that in his passion, Jesus gave up autonomy and control; instead he was 'handed over' and instead became ‘done to’ by others.  Passion means renouncing the active mode for the passive.  This is where healing and redemption spring from.  That helped me not to worry about all the things I wasn’t able to get on with: unfinished tasks, missed meetings, hundred of unanswered emails, letters not written, work piling up.

‘Desire nothing, refuse nothing’:  there is a lifetime of spiritual wisdom in those four words. Recovery means learning to live thm in a fresh way.  I’d like to think that when the time comes to return to work, it will be the richer for having made this journey.  There has been a lot to think about in my four days by the sea.