THE PARISH PROGRAMME FOR LENT, HOLY WEEK AND EASTER 2010

Ash Wednesday:   Eucharist with Imposition of Ashes 
Noon at the Parish Church; 7.00pm at Holy Trinity;  7.30pm at the Parish Church
Daily Worship:(at the Parish Church)
8.30am  Morning Prayer;    Noon     Eucharist;  5.00pm  Evening Prayer
Compline will take place each Tuesday in Lent starting on 2nd March.
(For Morning,  Evening Prayer and Compline use small door behind Pakeman, Carter and Catto)
Stations of the Cross followed by the Eucharist (Holy Trinity Church) every Wednesday at 6.30pm

Special Evensong Sermons
There is a very ancient ‘cross head’ that is normally kept in the Lady Chapel in the Parish Church. It has four crucifixion scenes.  There will be a series of Evensong sermons based on this cross head, called ‘Four Faces of the Cross’. We will look at what the bible has to say about the cross from the perspective of the four gospels. These are all on Sundays in Lent at 6.00pm

Feb 21st – Lent 1:  The cross ‘prefigured’ in the Old Testament.  Preacher: The Revd. Canon Leonard Doolan
Feb 28th – Lent 2:  The First Face – St. Mark.  Preacher: The Revd. Janet Williams
March 7th – Lent 3: The Second Face – St. Luke.  Preacher: The Revd. Dr. Jan van der Lely
March 14th – Lent 4: The Third Face – St. Matthew.  Preacher: The Revd. Rosemary Franklin
March 21st – Lent 5: The Fourth Face – St. John.  Preacher: The Revd. Howard Gilbert
March 28th – Palm Sunday: St. Paul’s view of the cross.  Preacher: Mr. Eric Sutcliffe

School of Faith
There are two School of Faith programmes running during Lent.
Lent Lunchtime Talks  Surprised by God  (1.00pm at the Parish Centre)
24th Feb:  Sheila Stevens
3rd March: Bill Davidson
10th March: Aphra Busk
17th March: Simon Reading
24th March: Don Pines
No need to book for these. A donation is requested for the home made soup.

Touching God: An Introduction to the Mystical Traditions
A course guided by Janet Williams.
Wednesdays at 7.30pm at the Friends Meeting House in Thomas Street.
24th Feb:  The Mystery of Christ ;            3rd March: The Way of Negation
10th March: The Way of the Heart

4 Faces of the Crucifixion – Lent 1 Evensong.

The great season of Lent allows us to gaze in the direction of the cross. We have used up our Epiphany allocation of great revelations of the glory of God in the signs and wonders done by Christ, and we now turn to the glory of the cross - the crux of the work of God in his Christ.

During Lent the sermons at Evensong will follow a pattern. Basically we will be observing the ways in which the writers of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, present to us the cross. Each gospel has its own nuance. In this sense in the relating of the story of Jesus and his crucifixion, each gospel presents its own face of Christ. Same event and story, different witness statement and accent.

To assist us in this Lenten exercise we will use and an aid the ancient ‘cross head’ that usually inhabits a fairly anonymous place on a window ledge of the Lady chapel. More than anything it highlights the point we are making with this series of sermons.

On each of the facings of the cross is the same subject matter, however none are identical. The sculptor is not mass producing a version of the cross from a mould, but rather he is using the skills with his hands to sculpt the means of death of his Saviour, and because he cannot replicate each one identically, each is just slightly different. That difference does not detract one bit from the overall work. Everyone knows what each of the facings is. It is simply that they are not identical.

This lack of being identical opens up the possibilities of being creative in the way we view the crucifixion, just as the four gospels do. So often we are tempted to look at the crucifixion in a somewhat one dimensional way – we look at a cross or a crucifix and we get a single perspective. Walk round this cross head and we have three - dimensionalism, indeed we might even say four dimensionalism.  

Archbishop Rowan has been talking of this three dimensionalism in his address to the General Synod. He introduces it in the context of how we overcome difficulties in understanding each other, relating to each other, reconciling differences with each other. We have a tendency to look on another person and see only one thing. We see someone who opposes us on women bishops, on the place of gay people in the church, on the authority of the bible in our church. All we see is this – a one dimensional image, yet in our brothers and sisters in Christ there is a great deal more to see and discover, and we may even discover that there is a common picture, a common vision, but with a slightly different nuance or accent. We are one in Christ, but we are diverse in how we experience him, love him, commit to him, witness to him. The richer way, the Christian duty, is to find Christ there and discover the three dimensional person in front of you.

This cross head opens up for us a mental conversation. A conversation with the object – don’t just look at it, walk round it and look round it. For each face we have a brief description of four of the Christian doctrines of what it is we understand God to have done in Christ on the cross. We call this the Atonement. There are many theories, but only one Christ and one crucifixion. So a conversation will open up with the cross head; a conversation will open up when you read of four very different theories of what God is doing in Christ; a conversation will open up in your understanding of the four faces of Christ and his death presented in four very different gospels. I hope a conversation will open up too with each other. Like all our sermons, this series will appear in print on our website.

The pattern of the sermons is as follows – this evening is an introduction. An introduction to the cross head, an introduction to the idea of the multi-dimensionality of the crucifixion, the differentiatedness of the four gospels. But also I am introducing the Cross and the Old Testament. The next four weeks will look at each of the 4 gospels in turn, and lastly, week 6 there will be a sermon on how St. Paul presents the cross. We might then all meet together for a coffee and discussion about the whole series.

So what about the cross in the Old Testament, that body of literature that resulted from the Israelite experience of God, and which also informed the faith of Jesus, and of the culture in which he taught and ministered.

As a first step I would like to deal with a reference to the cross in Ezekiel 9, 4. In this passage the prophet Ezekiel speaks of the angel with the seal, and the angel makes a sign, a mark, on the foreheads of all those who were to be protected from judgement. This mark is the Hebrew letter tau, and that time the tau was written in the form of a diagonal cross – we would know this better now as a St. Andrews cross. It was also known that this mark of the cross, tau, was present on the turban of the high priest when he entered the holy of holies – it was literally the mark of the name of the Lord.

It is important for our purposes tonight to dissociate ourselves with the cross of the high priest’s headwear, as it is likely to tempt us down the route of making too many connections that may be spurious.

Instead I would prefer to concentrate on the cross that was the typical Roman way of punishing people at the time of Jesus. Roman occupation brought this form of punishment, and it would have been unknown to the Hebrew culture of the Old Testament until Roman influence began to engage with the cultures of the middle East. It is worth saying that the cross of Jesus is unlikely to be a stylized cross as we would know them in our churches, and it would certainly not be of polished mahogany. It is likely to have been a single upright with a cross bar at the top. This would have looked like a capital T in the Roman or Greek alphabets, and with we would recognize as a capital T. We must not confuse this with the Hebrew letter tau. On the crucifixion fields of Roman occupied Jerusalem such crosses would have been plentiful. The cross as such is not a feature of the Old Testament.

However the cross hangs over the Hebrew scriptures rather as the cross hangs over the world in that famous Salvador Dali ‘John of the Cross’. The cross of the Dali painting illustrates a profound reality about the nature of the very creation itself, namely that at the very heart of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God is wounded in his Son; wounded by his innate capacity to love; wounded by the sin of  human choice freely given to us. The cross (suffering) is present in creation, and the cross is a central reality in the life of God’s creatures. There is a way in which it overshadows the history and religion of the Israelites. It both overshadows and foreshadows in the Old Testament, for there is much that predicts the suffering of the Messiah. Such texts are picked up in the Gospels, and by St. Paul and other authors of the letters, almost as proof texts for how and why Jesus should suffer and die before rising into glory. The gospel writers even quote such OT texts on the lips of the crucified Christ before the moment of his death.

There is of course all the Christianization of the Passover meal, established in Exodus 10, but of all the OT texts appropriate to this it is surely Isaiah 53 that stands out. Here the prophet speaks of the one God will raise up and exalt, but he is not to be raised up until there has been suffering and death, an image picked up most powerfully in the 4th gospel.

The words are powerful: ‘He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account…But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.’

This surely resonates with the one we are now focussed on this Lent. We gaze towards Good Friday, and through this Lent the Cross will be what stitches together our Lenten thoughts and devotions.

The Cross head reminds us of the differences in our experience of Christ; it reminds us also of the three dimensionality of our engagement with the cross of Christ. The Cross hovers over the pages of the Old Testament, until God’s work has begun and is completed in Jesus Christ. He died for us, so that God’s glory should be revealed in resurrection, reconciliation, ransom, liberation, and much more besides – all so that we could be AT-ONE with the God who creates us and redeems us.