O MY PEOPLE

(7)It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter [or: the Defender] will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. 8 And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: 9 of sin, because they believe not on me; 10 of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more; 11 of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged. (John 16)

Deliver us from evil. And then a youngish man detonates his backpack filled with a nail-bomb, and takes with him to some imagined martyrs’ paradise the lives of 22 children, the health and cheerfulness of 60 others, and the life’s joy of countless parents and siblings. And the eternal question knocks, like the Gestapo, at the door of our hearts: how can a loving God permit this?

Change optics, as we say nowadays. Try to get into God’s mind. How can men do this to each other? I gave them life; I gave them love; I gave them my Son, who healed them and died for them; and still they do such things. What more can I give them?

They say I can do anything. They are wrong: I can do almost anything but I cannot be other than I am. I cannot go against my own nature. My deepest self is Love. The Life my creation imagined for them is a lifelong, sustained and sustaining love between them and me. Such a love cannot exist if it is coerced. If love is what we are to have; if love is what we are to be; it must be freely given and freely returned.

I teach them this, and they turn away. I urge them this, and they hate. I show them this, and they kill. They crucify. They torture. When my Son was with them, he healed them by taking their grief upon himself. He identified with them, by choice. He taught them that when they fed, watered and helped each other, they were doing it to him. Now, when they torture, bomb and kill, they are still doing it him. And to me.

This is Love’s vulnerability; this is my vulnerability, my only one. Every child they wound is my child. Every innocent they kill is my child, crucified. Can they not see my tears that fall like galaxies?

The Prince of this world, the Prince of Darkness, is judged. Is judged always already, now and for all time. But he is not yet utterly defeated. Just as we are needed for love, so are we needed for battle. The Spirit, that marvellous third Person, is our Defender. Why is not believing in Him a sin? Because it is the refusal of ultimate Love. Because it leaves the way open for the Prince of Darkness. Not just into my soul, but into all the souls my soul touches, that might have been pulled out of the drowning-ocean by my help. Yes, we are free. Free to return Love, or not. But it is not all one.

The Spirit, our Defender, is the Spirit of Love. If he reproves the world, if he judges and condemns the Prince, it is simply by being here, by manifesting the hideous contrast. The Prince kills twelve-year-old girls before their parents’ eyes, and smiles. And reproves us thereby. Love is here, it exists, it died for us, it was resurrected for us, it showed us that it is immortal and eternal and, in the end, victorious. Whose side are we on?

Whose side are we on? It is no longer a game. If it ever was. It is no longer an intellectual debate. If God says who is not with me is against me, he is not being a bully: he is stating the most painful truth about Love. Love is victorious; Love is powerless. He has given us his Son; he has given us his Spirit to be our Defender. But without us the job canot be done. He is not bullying us: he is begging us. Whose side are we on?

TENEBRAE

John Howe, The Dark Tower

Dark days; and the terror is faceless.

War, and not war: as a scholar put it on French radio, ‘You cannot make war on terrorists; but they can make war on us.’

It is both sobering and useful, in times like these, to read with some care a couple of Prayer Book collects. The first is the Second Collect at Matins, and reads:

O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom: defend us thy humble servants in all assaults of our enemies; that we, surely trusting in thy defence, may not fear the power of any adversaries; through the might of Jesus Christ our Lord.

The second is the Second Collect for Evensong, which reads:

O God, from whom all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed: give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give; that both our hearts may be set to obey thy commandments, and also that by thee we being defended from the fear of our enemies may pass our time in rest and quietness; through the merits of Jesus Christ our Saviour.

I have long noted, and am now reminded, that in neither Collect do we pray for the destruction of our enemies, nor even that their assaults may not occur. In both Collects what we ask to be defended against is fear: ‘that we . . .may not fear the power of any adversaries’, and that we ‘being defended from the fear of our enemies’ may obtain rest and quietness – or, as another Collect puts it, be enabled ‘to serve Thee with a quiet mind.’ A peace which the world cannot give.

This is, as the media have reminded us, more easily said than done; but then, we are not asked to conquer the fear of our enemies ourselves. We pray that we may be defended, in the assaults of our enemies, by God; and defended, not from those assaults, but from fear.

God’s defence is absolute but peculiar. St Stephen had it, but he was stoned to death. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had it, but he was hanged with piano wire. Whatever God’s defence is, it is clearly not what we think or would normally desire. Is it, then, simply courage we are asking for: the courage to submit to atrocities without fear? If that were so, we should be no different from a pagan warrior, or an Islamist kamikaze praying just before he blows up himself and dozens of innocents. Courage is a great good and a noble virtue, but in itself it is as pagan as it is Christian.

No, there is another prayer to be added to those Collects, and Cranmer did not write it. Had he done so, it might have been something like this:

O Lord our heavenly father, who in the passion of thy Son Jesus Christ commanded and taught us to pardon our enemies and to love them that hate us; grant to them, we beseech thee, a true conversion, and to us the courage to conquer all hatred; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  

It is this Collect, or one very like it, that I should love and hope to hear in many churches tomorrow, and often.

Rubens, the Flagellation of Christ