Innocence or Redemption?

Just outside Oxford is the little village of Littlemore. One of my predecessors, John Henry Newman, built a church there. Until the 19^th nineteenth century, it was part of this parish – possibly because there was some farmland there which was owned by the benefice in the middle ages. As well as being the parish where Hannah served her curacy, which may have come as a bit of surprise to St John Henry Newman, Littlemore is also known for its hospital, which is now the Littlemore Mental Health Centre. I met a Chaplain who had worked there many years ago. He described a rather disconcerting experience, preaching in the hospital chapel there. One of the patients came to him after the service a couple of times, and said “You know… That's not the sermon I would have preached.” Later, this particular patient got a bit bolder and started to heckle him during the address: “This isn't the sermon, I would have preached,” she would shout out from the back row.

Now, don’t get any ideas. But what do you do? To his credit, the Chaplain decided to take a risk. When it happened again, he said, ‘Right next time, you're preaching.’ In the heat of the moment, he had forgotten that the next service would be on Christmas Day.

Christmas Day arrived, and the moment for the sermon came, and the Chaplain invited the patient to come forward and say a few words. And this is what she said: “I love to come here on Christmas Day, to see the crib, Mary, and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger. It is a picture of such beauty, such wonder, such innocence. And it makes me think of all the burdens, and difficulties, the mess of my own life, and I sit and think, and gaze longingly at the crib. And it looks so warm and comfortable, so inviting, - it makes me want to crawl inside, into the arms of Mary and Joseph, back to the beginning and start all over again. But I know that I can't - and that is my sadness.”

That's all she said, words of seering honesty and intensity of feeling, and the Chaplain to his credit realised that it was probably a better sermon than he would have preached on Christmas Day. But I think that there are some striking parallels with the story from Luke’s gospel, which we have just heard, the story of the presentation of Christ in the temple. Simeon and Anna, these elderly prophets, are confronted by Mary and Joseph, proudly bearing their new-born son. It’s a picture of such beauty and innocence. They recognise the promised Messiah, and Simeon breaks into song, ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. Thy word has been fulfilled…’ We sing these words so often. They are so familiar. The mind wanders and it is easy to let our attention slip away. But it is worth noting that Luke adds this curious comment at the end of this tale. Simeon prophesies about the promised Messiah: ‘This child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel’, and then he turns to Mary and says, ‘and a sword will pierce your own soul too’.

There is this tension between beauty, wonder and innocence – on the one hand – and a recognition of the conflict, the opposition, the suffering and the tragedy that will unfold in Luke’s narrative as he carries us towards the story of the passion. Candlemas marks a significant point of transition not only in the Christian year but also in our theological imagination. We look back at Christmas and forward to Holy Week and Easter. But in that moment of bewilderment and double-vision, we move, almost Janus-faced, from the innocence of the crib to encounter another story, fragile, complicated, more compromised, a less innocent story that hints at mourning, death, and grief.

And this alerts us to a mystery that dominates so much of our lives. We either lament a lost innocence or we seek somehow to recover it. And sometimes, we imagine that religion, or an institution like the Church, serves as the means to recover that lost innocence. And yet the reality is that we discover that it is found wanting. This longing for lost innocence perhaps lies behind those questions the institutional church often faces – how can you belong to an institution that is so corrupt or conflicted in denying the equality of women, or discriminating against people who identify as LGBT+? Think of the recent coverage of the debate about equal marriage or the disclosures about safeguarding, and the repeated attempt by people in senior positions of responsibility to prioritise the reputation of the church over the safety and well-being of children and adults at risk. All that hypocrisy, the cover-up, the collusion of the establishment. We conceal our embarrassment by speaking innocently of Jesus as the embodiment of truth, goodness and beauty, while drawing a veil over our confusion, our complicity and our shame.

The philosopher Gillian Rose, who died in 1995, was perhaps one of the most original and significant philosophers in the English-speaking world in the latter part of the twentieth century. She came from a secular Jewish background, and yet harboured a deep sympathy for both Jewish and Christian religious traditions. At the heart of her philosophical project is a resistance to the easy dualism between liberalism and postmodernism. Instead she seeks to engage with what she describes as the ‘broken middle’. Her work is an encouragement to pay attention to human fallenness, or in old money, ‘original sin’. Rose writes: ‘It is possible to mean well, to be caring and kind, loving one’s neighbour as oneself, yet to be complicit in the corruption and violence of social institutions.’ Our lives are haunted by complexity. We are compromised by our associations and our attachments. Our motives are often mixed. Our witness can so easily be debased by threads of complicity with cruelty and untruthfulness.

And Rose is alert to the way in which we so often fall prey to the temptation to represent ourselves with various fictions of our own innocence – the innocence of the activist, the innocence of the victim, the innocence of the bystander. And sometimes in laying claim to that ‘innocence’, we crowd out the uncomfortable questions, we construct our defences by creating little citadels of the like-minded, rather than cultivating a real sense of solidarity. We construct these defences in order to find every possible way of avoiding the real perils of loving our neighbour, because we know if we do that, we risk our hearts being broken. And the tragedy is that in this anxious self-defence, we risk failing to protect the most vulnerable …. because we have simply left them to fend for themselves.

Gillian Rose helps us to see that our desire for innocence, our longing to be utterly sure of our rightness, arises out of a kind of a stubborn desire for the sort of moral purity that refuses negotiation. It’s a phenomenon that has plagued much of the posturing over Brexit in the course of the last few years. It’s also a phenomenon which is currently playing out in the life of the church over equal marriage. It is tempting to withdraw from the fractious and sometimes trying arena of political engagement, to lament our broken politics, to retreat from the patient work of mediation amidst the bewildering messiness and complexity of the ‘broken middle’, and simply embrace that social media algorithm which will happily reinforce all our own prejudices. 

Rather than imagining the recovery of a lost innocence, perhaps there is wisdom in acknowledging our need of redemption and recommitting ourselves to the costly work of loving our neighbours as ourselves. This is the real ministry of reconciliation. And perhaps Luke is telling us that this ministry demands what the great poet, Geoffrey Hill, described as the ‘intelligence of grief’. To grieve, to mourn, is to claim the freedom to ‘carry out that intense work of the soul, that gradual rearrangement of its boundaries’ that enlarges the heart in compassion and empathy and love.

‘A sword will pierce your own soul too’. These words to Mary perhaps offer a rather sober, serious and disconcerting vision. Perhaps this is not the sermon that you would preach. Perhaps it is more comforting and reassuring to succumb to the restoration of a lost innocence. But, for me, the story that Luke tells speaks of the promise of redemption - and in this story, when Simeon and Anna prophesy, Luke offers us an invitation to share with others in the grace and the hospitality of a God who welcomes and embraces those whose hearts are broken.