StGeorge&StThomas, Dublin, Easter 1 April 3rd 2016 at 5.00 pm
Readings: psalm 150; Job 42.1-6; St John 20.19-31
John 20.29: Because you have seen me you have found faith. Happy are they who find faith without seeing me.
Sermon of the Archbishop of Dublin at the inauguration of The Dublin Igbo Praise Centre
INTRODUCTION
It is a very long time ago now that I heard a Radio Broadcast Appeal by the then archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Donald Coggan, appealing to people to buy Easter Cards from St John’s Ophthalmic Hospital in Jerusalem. Easter Cards may indeed seem to have been a specialist option but I will always remember his parting line: Shut your eyes forten seconds; now open them again please and thank God for your sight. The Hospital is a Christian Hospital and it is still working. It continues to offer people sight as a gift and a healing of God combined with the best medical personnel in the field. And Easter and sight are deeply interconnected. So, Dr Coggan had a very good point.
Both of today’s Readings from Holy Scripture concentrate on sight and on our deepening and widening of the meaning of sight for the spiritually aware and acute. Today’s Gospel takes over exactly where last week’s Gospel left us on Easter Day. In that Gospel, Mary concluded by telling the disciples: I have seen the Lord. (St John 20.18) Today’s Gospel concentrates on the complexities caused by the sense that Thomas The Twin has missed out by being absent on the occasion when Jesus came to visit the disciples and to give them Peace. Thomas is hard to convince that the Lord is Risen. He wants to see, like the others, and he wants more than their word for it. There is nothing the others can do to help him or convince him or silence him but a week later Jesus appears again and, something we often miss out in hearing this story, he knows exactly the questions Thomas has been asking. He instantly invites Thomas to touch his hands and his side and to believe. Jesus then goes on to say what I have quoted above as my text: Because you have seen me, you have found faith. Happy are they who find faith without seeing me.
The whole of the book Job is an exploration of the limitations of a rational approach to religion if it is not also combined with a believing approach. The Comforters of Job in particular show us the painful and cruel outcomes of always looking for evidence and explanation as an end in itself, rather than as a means to gracious understanding. The complaining of Thomas shows us the very same thing. It is little wonder, I suggest, that Jesus who has died and risen again puts the belief of Thomas in serrated context: you are one of the privileged ones; you needed to see; others will have to develop a new type of sight called faith because it will not be possible for them to see me the way you see me now. It is not so much that they will run out of time; it is more that time itself will run on.
There is something of Thomas in each one of us: If only … then I might give it a try. The whole of our world today runs in the opposite direction from faith as Jesus describes it; but I have really no idea if his world was any different. Technology and communications, however, have combined to make everything we see more immediate, whether it be in the world of nature or a human being walking on the surface of the moon. It is, however and increasingly so, largely the case that the more we see, the less we believe. Seeing today seems increasingly to do away with the point of believing. There is, of course, a rather different way of doing such seeing: it is recognizing in what we see, in its intricacy, its beauty and also its violence along with, in many ways, its seeming un-necessari-ness, that there is something within all of this that is beyond us. Today to think of something as beyond us challenges us to view it as an affront to our self-sufficiency and our dignity. This is, from a longer perspective, a strange way of looking at things because at the very point of knowledge, it gives us a very deep and penetrating self-limitation. It is as if we cannot cope with anything worthwhile that we cannot control.
Perhaps Jesus spotted something of this in Thomas the Twin and, in marking his cards, marked the cards of everyone who is like him in generations to come. At the heart of God’s self-disclosure, the whining of Thomas is a cautionary tale of our self-absorption, a sort of paranoia of evidence when in fact no evidence will ever be enough evidence.
CULTURE AND CONTEXT
This afternoon we gather to inaugurate The Dublin Igbo Praise Centre. Worldwide, in excess of seventeen million people speak the Igbo language in Nigeria and beyond. The story of Igbo Anglicanism begins its life in the Niger Delta in 1870 and the first prayer Book – a version of the 1662 Prayer Book – stems from that time. Faithfully and with appropriate revision since then this has been the bedrock of prayer and praise, daily office and sacraments at home and abroad. Your continuance in this tradition is an inspiration to us and, for the second part of my address, I simply want to look at some of the things that we might listen and learn from one another in 2016. Gathered as we are in Dublin and in Cathal Bruagh Street, we might cast our mind back to the words of prayer spoken a week ago in O’Connell Street by the Head Chaplain to the Armed Forces, Fr Sean Madigan: a new song of compassion, inclusion and engagement, a song of listening, social justice and respect for all, a song of unity, diversity, equality and peace, a song of cead mile failte and of care for our environment.’ His prayer also was for: ‘all the courageous people of Ireland who dared to hope and dream of a brighter tomorrow for our country and all its citizens.’ If this is what we are praying one hundred years on, then we are praying well and generously and Godly. This is the vision of prayer for tomorrow’s Ireland that was unfurled no more than two hundred metres from here last Sunday.
MISSION, SERVICE AND PROCLAMATION
Mission, service and proclamation lie at the heart and core of this prayer and this vision for Ireland. As the Father sent the Son and as the Father sent the Spirit of the Son, so we as disciples, as children of adoption and of grace are sent into the world to be and to do the Way of God. It is proclamation as something painstaking; it is something painstaking as proclamation. There is idealism at the core of it and still there is also a great deal of inclusion and of engagement and of practicality. The sort of revelation that Thomas receives is a revelation that we need to seek and to show to others: My Lord and my God in the service of the world and of our shared society.
IDENTITY, HOSPITALITY AND GLOBAL WITNESS
While a sense of personal identity is rightly important, so is a sense of corporate identity and a sense of civic identity. The church needs to be very careful, and the Church of Ireland perhaps more careful than others precisely because of our small size and minority status, to avoid colluding with hopelessness in the public realm. It is insufficient for us to talk about things, even to talk about them well. We need what I call: worked examples: doings, happenings, things of service, of courage and of change. The Word of God and the Act of God are the same thing in the Hebrew language; in the Christian faith both are Incarnate and Risen in the Person of Jesus Christ. This is all on earth we know, and all we need to know – as someone else said about something else (Keats).The days and the weeks after Easter are times of hospitality and of recognition. In its primary context, Easter refers to disciples and their Risen Master. But it is not about them as an enclosed body; it is about equipping them for sending into all the world and it is on this perspective of global witness that we today must keep our eyes. The Rising of 1916 taught everyone who then held power that colonialism will be and has to be challenged. The Rising of 1916 and the centenary between 1916 and 2016 have shown everyone that independence of mind and independence of activity not only make a difference but make a nation. Political life can and does change radically. So can religious life and religious lives: My Lord and my God.
CULTURE AND CONTEXT, INHERITANCE AND OPPORTUNITY
This is what Easter 2016 is about – a future lived in the hope of community and change and compassion and courage. In Thomas’s greeting and response he uses these words: My Lord and my God. They are words that, in their original context, are words that might be addresses, and indeed were addressed, to the Emperor. My Lord and my God: they have become so domesticated, so clichéd in our cosy, inward-looking Christianity that we would never even think of their political power. In what seems to be a place of private fear and personal inadequacy, these words claim afresh the biggest and the broadest of public space for the Lord and the God who has overcome and conquered – as any Emperor had to do, in a Roman Empire that always needed to expand in order to feed more and more hungry mouths – but who has overcome and conquered death itself. This new life is the re-definition of old political understanding and it is exactly the sort of thing that the prayer of principle and of hope gave us last Sunday at the heart of Dublin for the whole of Ireland. What are we, as Christian people, going to do about it? What are we going to do with people of World Faiths? My plea to you who are people of today here in this church: please do not pick up our inherited and well-polished Irish negativities! This ‘Resurrection Now’ needs work, this needs witness, this needs willingness combined with that coming together of service and leadership, authority and power shown by Jesus Christ for others in life, death and resurrection. This is the deepest and richest hospitality in the public arena to which we as followers of Jesus Christ are called. We need to breathe new life into inherited language; we need to draw new songs out of inherited words; we need to witness to the Resurrection in our own hearts and in the lives of others.
Job 42.5: Job answered: I knew of you then only by report, but now I see you with my own eyes.
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