“There is no greater love
than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” John 15.13
I hope you enjoyed the
great British Bank Holiday last Monday. If you were in London you will remember
that it was cold, wet and dark.
Unfortunately I was entertaining
a guest from out of town. So instead of staying indoors with books, films,
fortifying spirits and unhealthy food, I found myself battling through the rain
and heading for the Museum of London in the Barbican.
The Barbican is seen at
its best I feel in driving rain under leaden skies.
So ever the cheery host
and like thousands of families out on the streets with girning children, I put
on a brave face and tried to take the scenic route to the Barbican from the
Tower where I now live.
And that’s how I found
myself in that little-known patch of grass called Postman’s Park, the old
churchyard of St Botolph Aldersgate. It was next to the General Post Office and
many postmen took their breaks in the park.
There are 53 ceramic
tiles, decorated and bearing a simple and often poignant sentence. Although
nothing much was added after 1931, the Diocese of London gave permission for
another tablet to be added in 2009.
That memorials reads: ‘Leigh
Pitt, Reprographic operator, Aged 30, saved a drowning boy from the canal at
Thamesmead, but sadly was unable to save himself. June 7 2007’
Some of the early memorials
sound rather quaint to our ears – locally, across the roadhere, ‘William Drake
lost his life in averting a Serious Accident to a Lady in Hyde Park whose horses
were unmanageable through the breaking of the carriage pole. 2 Apr 1869’
Jesus says to his disciples in a phrase that has entered into our cultural consciousness, “There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
Now many of the
incidents recorded in the tablets on the Memorial wall tell of men and women
who laid down their lives for strangers,
not friends.
And of course most of these
heroic deeds were not premeditated. They were spur-of-the-moment decisions to
take bold action without thinking too much about the consequences.
You stand and read the
wall and can’t help but think: “What would I have done?” And of course you
don’t know.
Maybe we would be heroic
and act instantly. But maybe we might hesitate long enough to consider the
possible outcome of any action and simply wring our hands.
Most of us recognise and
admire those who take such actions. And of course the children and men and
women who were saved will always carry a burden of gratitude to their saviours.
But what was Jesus
talking about in today’s Gospel? He was certainly talking about the heroism
that Watts sought to encourage by his memorial.
And he was certainly
talking about his own impending death, which was to be a means of ‘saving’ his
friends and indeed the whole world.
Yet the death of Jesus
was different. It was not like these people listed on the tablets.
It was not like brave St
Alban, the first English martyr, feigning to be the Christian priest he was
protecting and executed by the Romans in the priest’s place.
No one was about to be
killed when Jesus was crucified.
Yet still Jesus taught,
and Christian theology has insisted, that it was necessary for him to die.
There’s a Jesuit
theologian, Jack Mahoney who has recently attempted to look more deeply into
the issue of Christ’s death and how it is traditionally interpreted.
Especially to look again
at that idea of an angry God who will not forgive us unless blood is shed to
appease him. It somehow doesn’t ring true to the God we see in Jesus.
This is a particular
aspect of a doctrine known as penal substitution. Philip Bliss’s hymn, written
at about the same time that Watts was planning his wall, has these lines: “In
my place condemned he stood, sealed my pardon with his blood.” (Man of Sorrows)
The theology of the
redemption of you and me through Christ’s sacrificial death is at the heart of
Christianity and of this mass.
And as we ponder it
there are always more layers of understanding to uncover.
So Fr Jack Mahoney in
his book Christianity in Evolution: an
Exploration (Nov 2011) develops what he calls "a Christian theology of
altruism".
He emphasises that
Christ’s death was not so much to deal with ‘original sin’ but that it was to
teach us how to imitate Trinitarian altruism – giving ourselves for others.
We are "prone to
self-concern and even self-obsession", he writes, but this is not
attributable to "some primordial moral disaster" in a garden of Eden.
Christ by example shows
us how to overcome these natural evolutionary characteristics so that his death
and resurrection – and here I quote Mahoney - "can be seen as a major evolutionary step
in the moral advancement of humanity, and an indication that universal altruism
is the moral invitation and evolutionary destiny of the human species." (The Tablet Blog.)
Well it’s an interesting
book, but you’ll be relieved to hear that there are limits to what you can do
in ten minutes on a Sunday morning.
Sufficient to say that
Mahoney is encouraging a fresh understanding of living for others.
Not in that joyless way
that CS Lewis describes: “She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you
can tell the others by their hunted expression!” (Screwtape Letters)
A moment before Jesus
spoke of laying down one’s life for friends he had said: “I have said these
things to you so that my joy may be
in you, and that your joy may be
complete.” (John 15.11)
This talk with his
disciples is all about joy and loving one another – giving ourselves to one
another – laying down our lives for our friends.
It was the outspoken journalist
and literatus Malcolm Muggeridge who
said in a moment of candour:
I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness; or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.
“There is no greater love
than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” John 15.13
