Palm Sunday: Vinea Mea Electa – Canon Victoria Johnson, Precentor

Title: Vinea Mea Electa (My chosen Vineyard)

Preacher: Canon Victoria Johnson, Precentor 

Date: Palm Sunday 1 April 4.00pm 

Readings: Psalm 80, Isaiah 5:1-7, Matthew 21:33-end

‘Beer is made by man’, said Martin Luther, the church reformer.

‘But’, he said, ‘wine is made by God’. I tend to agree.

If God makes the best wine, we might assume that God takes an interest in vineyards as well.  Just imagine the vineyards that make the beautiful wine: beautiful vineyards, full of choice vines and gleaming grapes, sun-drenched vineyards which are carefully tended and cultured, the soil rich, the terroir bountiful, the land a treasure passed on from one generation to another, imagine the vineyards which produce the most fruitful wine which is both a gift and a blessing from God.

The symbolism of wine, and the vineyards that produce it, are peppered throughout the scriptures, good wine is often seen as the fulfilment of God’s promises. The prophets look towards the time when the Lord of hosts will prepare a lavish banquet for all peoples on the holy mountain; a banquet of aged wine, choice pieces with marrow, refined mature wine, a gift and blessing from God.

We see that gift and blessing in the story of the wedding at Cana, when Mary pleads with her Son to fix a shortage of wine at a family wedding, and in his first miracle recorded in the Gospel of John, Jesus transforms water into the most beautiful wine, the best wine, which is to be shared as part of a banquet, a celebration, and which becomes a sign not only of Jesus divinity, but of God’s generosity and love.

Jesus also refers to himself as the vine, and his disciples as branches, and time and time again, we, his disciples of today, are encouraged to work at bearing good fruit, seeking life in all of its fullness and abundance, we too are called to be a gift and a blessing and a sign of God’s generosity and love.

On the night before he died, Jesus shared a meal with his friends, he took a cup of wine, and after giving thanks, gave it to them saying, ‘Drink this, all of you; for this is my blood of the new covenant, which is poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.’  Jesus takes this nectar from the fruits of the earth, and places it at the heart of his church.

However, this is not what we have heard in our readings this evening.  The images in our readings are of ruined vineyards, vineyards which have either not produced the expected harvest, or vineyards which become a focus of malicious and selfish gain, through appalling violence.

The parable that Jesus tells us from the Gospel of Matthew, is of a landowner who owns a beautiful vineyard and lets it out to tenants. When he sends his slaves to collect the harvest they are killed. Then the landowner sends his son to collect the harvest, and this time the tenants kill him, in order to gain his inheritance. The vineyard has been ruined, it is no longer a place of plenty, but a place of terror. No good wine can come of this.  There is no mention of the grapes, nor of the beautiful harvest, rotting on the vines, languishing in the sun, thereby preventing the production of the most beautiful wine that can be shared at celebrations and family meals for years to come.

The parable is of course figurative, it speaks of humanities reluctance to tend and nurture and grow and our propensity to reject that love which helps us produce the best harvest in our lives. The very gifts that can bring so much joy and that can share so much grace: we diminish, we reject and we destroy. So often the inclination of the human heart seems to be towards greed, hatred, selfishness, violence, when Jesus is always so very clearly calling us towards generosity and love. Christ comes to help us see the Father’s love for us, so why do we as human beings, so often reject it?

Today we begin our journey to the place where we learn what true generosity and true love is.  We see God giving us his son, nailed to a cross, as a sign of his boundless love for the world. The cross stands there in the vineyard of our hearts, saying to us, there is another way, there is a beautiful harvest waiting for you, which will produce the very best wine.

It is there on the cross, as he waited to die, that the sour wine given to Jesus is transformed through God’s love into the most beautiful life-giving wine.  The blood pouring from his side, becomes for us the new wine of the new Kingdom, shared from a cup at the banquet which celebrates the new creation, where death will lead to life, sins will be forgiven, hope will be restored and our vocation in Christ will be affirmed.

Christ comes to us, only in generosity and love, to invite us to the banquet,

where wine will flow in abundance, the best wine, 

wine which is a gift and a blessing from God, 

who offers us a cup, and longs for us to take a sip

Palm Sunday: The Crowd’s Last Word – The Very Revd Dominic Barrington, Dean of York

Title: The Crowd’s Last Word

Preacher: The Very Revd Dominic Barrington, Dean of York 

Date: Palm Sunday,  2 April 2023  10.30am 

Last words are for fools who believe they have not yet said enough, remarked Karl Marx on his own deathbed. You might agree with that, although it feels a slightly aggressive way in which to take leave of this life. I suspect that, when the time comes, my own preference might be closer to that of the economist John Maynard Keynes, who sadly remarked I only wish I had drunk more champagne!

Or it might prove to be the case that we are overwhelmed with regret, and echo a sentiment more in keeping with the last words of Queen Elizabeth I, who is reported, wistfully, to have said All my possessions for a moment of time.

But whatever faces us at the end of our own lives, today, and throughout this week of weeks, we are called by God and by God’s Church to work out what our last word is when faced, as we are right now, by the Cross, and by the death of Jesus. Because it is no use claiming to be a follower or a disciple of Jesus, if you have nothing to say to the world about the Cross – for the Cross stands not just at the heart of our religion. For the Christian, the Cross stands – the Cross must stand – at the heart of the life of the world.

And it is not just Christians who can find themselves confronted with the Cross. In 1972 the American Jewish author and rabbi Chaim Potok wrote a remarkable novel entitled My name is Asher Lev, about a child born into an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family in New York, a family very like his own. And it turns out that this child is blessed with the gift of truly remarkable artistic talent.

But, while you or I might delight to see such talent in one of our own offspring, in the context of a devout, ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, this was very far from welcome, for art, painting and drawing do not sit well in Orthodox Judaism, which takes very seriously the prohibition on making graven images.

But so very talented is this child that, with the eventual encouragement of their rabbi, his parents arrange for their son to have lessons in art from a non-religious Jew who possesses similar talent.

The climax of the story comes when the teacher tells his ever-blossoming pupil that if he wishes to be a truly great artist, he must go down to the Met – the Metropolitan Museum of Art – and gaze at, and study, and sketch, and reproduce all the great paintings of the crucifixion in the museum.

The boy is horrified at the idea that he, an Orthodox Jew, should be encouraged to immerse himself in pictures of the ultimate expression of the Christian faith. But his teacher is clear – no other image in the world, he says, has the significance in the entire history of art as does the crucifixion of Christ. To be a truly great artist, whatever one’s faith or beliefs, one must encounter the cross of Christ.

In other words, this committed, observant Jew is called to find his ‘last word’ on – of all subjects – the Cross.

This morning, as we begin Holy Week, we find ourselves faced with a body of people that the evangelists refer to as the ‘crowd’. And because of the curious, unique nature of today’s liturgy we have had not one but two snapshots of the crowd in this morning’s service – which is both helpful and necessary if we are to understand what being part of a ‘crowd’ can really mean.

Just now, as we gathered outside the Minster, we acted out the crowd’s behaviour as it followed Jesus down the Mount of Olives, celebrating his arrival in a Jerusalem turbo-charged with religious fervour at the celebration of the most significant Jewish festival of the year. And, as the evangelist reminded us, so excited is the crowd, it is shouting Hosanna, and calling Jesus the Son of David     , and claiming that he has come ‘in the name of the Lord’.

But crowds are easily swayed, and – as we see all too often in our own volatile political and social climate – people can veer from being superstar to public enemy number one in little more than a heartbeat. When the going gets tough, both 2000 years ago, and all too often today as well, a crowd can change its communal mind and change the chant of Hosanna to the hideous last word that cries out, Let him be crucified.

And so, today, God asks us, God demands of us once again, to work out what the Cross really means to each one of us. God asks us what it is that we might say to the world around us about the Cross and about the death of Jesus. Are we outwardly going to shout Hosanna, but let our inner thoughts and our behaviour call out Crucify? How will we fashion our own response to the Cross?

I want to suggest that if you – or I – properly wish to answer this question, the ultimate question of Holy Week, then you need to walk with Jesus throughout this week through the great liturgies of the Church. For if, after this morning, the next time you set foot in a church is next Sunday morning, I am not sure that you will properly have understood what it is that God in Jesus has done for you, and I am not sure that you will fully understand what it will mean to celebrate resurrection on Easter Sunday.  And that is why the Church of God has, for many many centuries, offered unique and powerful liturgies to help us enter into this ultimate, great drama of hope and of salvation.

And so I invite you to join us in the coming days. To join us tomorrow, and Tuesday and Wednesday, as we are reminded of Jesus’ last days of teaching his disciples and friends as the situation around him ineluctably comes to a head.

And then to join us in the solemn darkness of a Thursday night, replete with its bread and wine, and acts of service; to join us in the bitter darkness of a Friday afternoon, complete with an agonizing and undeserved death; to join us in the expectant darkness of a Saturday night, as the light of a single candle will illumine your life more brightly than you could have thought possible.

And if we are faithful to God’s call, and make such a journey, then we will comprehend so much more clearly what God has done for us on the Cross, and then can we frame our own last word to help us speak – as we are called to do – speak to the world of the death of the Son of God.

For now, right now, the crowd chants Crucify…Let him be crucified. Is that going to be your last word?

Those who love their life lose it… – The Very Revd Dr Frances Ward

The Very Revd Dr Frances Ward (Dean Emeritus of St Edmundsbury)

10.00am Sung Eucharist

Passiontide begins today. We turn ourselves towards the events that are to come.

The Gospel reading reminds us of what lies ahead for our Lord.

He talks of grains of wheat, of lives lost and found, warning those around him of what sort of death he was to die. The losses to come would be hard and many, not only his own dear life.  He sought to reassure them that they belonged within a greater story, the story of God’s saving love for the world.

What was to happen was of cosmic significance.   The death he was to die meant the judgement of this world and God glorified in love.

And I, says Jesus, when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself

Passiontide draws our minds and hearts towards this cosmic, saving action of God in Jesus Christ.

But what are we to make of those enigmatic words of Jesus? “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life”?

One of the delights of six months at Mirfield, as my husband trains there for the priesthood, is the weekly sessions of Greek I’ve attended. We look at the gospel reading for the Sunday to come and make our way through, drawing out the resonances and meanings in the original.

And so I discover that today’s gospel has the same word for ‘life’ – as in ‘Those who love their life lose it …’ – and ‘soul’ – as in ‘Now my soul is troubled’. ‘Psyche’ is the word in Greek – from which we get any number of familiar derivatives: psychology, the most obvious. Translated here, really rather differently, as ‘life’, and ‘soul’.

Interestingly, there’s no biblical Greek word for the ‘self’ as we commonly use it now. There’s a Greek word for the reflexive sense, as in ‘myself’, to be sure – but no word, apart from ‘psyche’, to describe who I am. My inner self.

As Jesus prays with troubled soul, he warns his disciples that unless they are prepared to sacrifice their lives – their very selves – for his sake, they would not know eternal life.

Perhaps, today, he encourages us to reflect on our Western world, and its intense focus on the ‘self’. We talk of self-esteem, self-awareness, self-belief, self-love, self-respect.  And now, we have ‘selfie’ too.

Attitude specialist Janice Davies introduced a National Self-Esteem Day in New Zealand in 2006, which is now international, renamed Selfday.

In the UK, in response to concern about the detrimental impact of selfies, the first TrueSelfie Day was held in July last year. Designed to mark the 20^th Anniversary since Princess Diana died, the intention is to give young people a platform to celebrate their individuality. The motivation is well meaning, but illustrates how deeply engrained preoccupation with the ‘self’ is in contemporary culture. The website[1] tells us that there are over 1 million selfies taken each day. TrueSelfie fears that the individual person is getting lost. That young people are very concerned with body image and self-esteem, with around half of girls and up to one third of boys dieting; that over half of bullying experienced by young people is because of appearance. The Diana Award has created #MyTrueSelfie, to boost self-esteem.

If we are nationally – internationally – obsessed with our selves, I’m not sure creating a website that encourages young people to take even more selfies is going to help very much. It all sounds rather nightmarish.

An over-preoccupation with self can leave us in a living hell.

In his 2017 book Selfie[2] Will Storr interviewed CJ. She is an extreme product of what he calls a self-obsessed age. Not every young person is like her, but her story is credible. It describes what life is like for some young people today.

CJ is twenty two. She was bullied at school, which make her parents anxious. ‘My parents just wrapped me in a bubble,’ she told Storr. ‘They were like, “You’re not going anywhere.”’ At home CJ could do pretty much what she liked; her happiness ruled. Her mother was ablaze with admiration. “You’re amazing. You’re sublime. You’re a prodigy.” CJ began to think, “Yes, I am.”

CJ now has a selfie habit. She is up to 4 a.m. editing, adding filters and selecting only the finest to post on Facebook and Instagram, alongside captions such as “Hypnotising, mesmerising me”. She spends £35 a month of storage on iCloud. She wakes at 7.30 a.m. to think about her hair and make-up, how it will look in pictures. She’ll take selfies everywhere. She’s really delighted when someone – particularly a celebrity – wants a selfie with her. She’s taken selfies at funerals. When her mum told her she was being inappropriate, CJ replied, “I look good, it’s always appropriate.”[3]

An extreme situation? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It won’t surprise you to hear that CJ also self-harms, as so many young people do today. A way of feeling something amidst the suffocating narcissism that a self-obsessed culture perpetrates.

Of course – not all young people are caught up in this way. And it’s not just young people either. Selves are everywhere in western culture today. We see ourselves – whatever age we are – reflected back from the black mirror of my smart phone, or computer screen. The bleak possibilities are there for us all: the dark mirror that draws us in towards that over-preoccupation with self.

Our understanding of humanity is at the heart of this.

Today, as Passiontide begins, perhaps we can think of self-love, self-absorption, in this context. That when we are seduced into the selfie world – as CJ was – we do indeed lose our life, our self, our soul by loving ourselves too much. You remember the ancient story of Narcissus? How he was 16, and very beautiful. He aroused great love in all who met him, including the nymph Echo. He rejected her, as he rejected all advances, and she wasted away to the haunting voice we hear in rocks and cliffs. One day, Narcissus lay down to drink at a quiet pool in the woods and for the first time he saw his own reflection. Immediately he was entranced, besotted. He fell in love for the first time. Whenever he reached out to touch, though, the image rippled away. He could not draw himself away from the beauty before him. He wasted away, as Echo had done. No body was ever found, only the white and gold flower that nods in the wind at this time of the year, the narcissus flower.

It’s a myth with an ancient and contemporary warning. Particularly for any in danger of losing their humanity in a selfie world that can so quickly get out of hand. Someone said “When it comes to the web, we think we’re spiders, but really we’re flies.” We’re all affected – and we should be careful. We might lose more than we think. The young people around us might never know how empty existence has become.

To find our humanity, as it is shaped by Jesus, is to turn away from that world and find ourselves as we love and serve others. To hate our lives in this world sounds extreme. But there is a central Christian message here about self-forgetfulness for the sake of others that we need to learn again, and again. It’s great when so many young people get involved in voluntary action. When they campaign against violence. When – as more and more do – they put their phones away and engage with what’s around them. It’s worth encouraging this as much as possible. The place to begin is me.

To turn away from the black mirror, and turn towards Good Friday and Easter beyond, is to allow ourselves to be shaped by the Passion. It is to look on Cross and see ourselves reflected there. Reflected and shaped in our humanity by the Christ who focuses not on himself, but who radiates God’s love, for the sake of the whole world.

The cross holds the depths of human life. It is where the sin of self-preoccupation is devoured by the holiness of God. The lives, the selves we promote in this world, all our self-obsessions and narcissism taken up. Our self-absorption, self-promotion, self-this, self-that, transformed into the humanity that is shaped by Jesus Christ.

Over the next few weeks, whenever you gaze on Jesus Christ on the cross, recall your self. For it is reflected there. Our humanity finds itself in God’s love. Our true reality is here, as we forget ourselves and are drawn, through Christ, into God’s being, into the fullness and abundance of life and love. Jesus gazes at us from the cross with the eyes of God and we are seen as we truly are: our selves, our life, our soul.

We are bathed in the love that pours upon us from Jesus on the cross. It’s then that we receive humanity. We are given life. What is asked of us, is that we, in turn, give it away as we love the world. Self-giving and self-forgetful in acts of kindness and compassion.

This is the cosmic action in which the God of love makes us whole.

We find our life in the passion of Christ. The soul of our humanity. As we give as he gave, we live eternally.