Portsmouth Cathedral

Evensong 30 April 2023

Angela Tilby,
Canon of Honour

Inscribed on the inside of the pulpit of Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge are words that only the preacher can see, words from our New Testament reading, ‘Sir, we would see Jesus’. These words were said to Philip, as our reading tells us, by ‘some Greeks’ who had come to Jerusalem for the Passover Feast.  The words were carved into the pulpit by Charles Simeon, who became vicar of Holy Trinity in 1783 and was massively unpopular with his flock, though he did in the end win them round and in fact stayed at the church until he died, founding the Church Missionary Society. He was a convinced evangelical, gripped by the Gospel. And he reminded himself every time he preached that his task was to help people to ‘see Jesus’.

 I wonder whether he identified the ‘Greeks’ with the dons and students of the Cambridge colleges, regarding them as pagans in need of the Gospel. A friend of mine who was a priest at Trinity College in Cambridge once remarked that Greek Stoic philosophy was the real religion among the Fellows, much more so than Christianity.

 The Greeks mentioned in John’s Gospel were admirers of Judaism, semi-converts. Usually they were not circumcised and they did not keep the Jewish food laws. But they were impressed by Jewish ethics and drawn to the worship of one God.

 But what is truly remarkable about Philip’s request to Jesus us his response. He speaks of this being the hour, the time, of his being glorified and then describes what this might mean: ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit’. Jesus’s teachings and parables are full of imagery drawn from agriculture and the countryside, but I’ve often wondered whether here, he is referring to the mystery religions of ancient Greece, assuming that ‘the Greeks’ were acquainted with the famous mysteries of Eleusis. The mysteries were a long annual procession from the city of Athens in imitation of the goddess Demeter’s search for her daughter Persephone. Persephone had been abducted by Hades the god of death and taken down to the underworld. Demeter eventually struck a bargain with Death, that Persephone would come back for half the year, Spring and Summer,  and then return to death’s gloomy kingdom in the autumn. Jesus, in speaking of his impending death in terms of a grain of wheat dying in the earth in order to multiply might have resonated with these spiritual searchers from the pagan world.

 It strikes me now that we are deep into the Easter season that we are all a bit pagan really. We might want to see Jesus, hear his words, follow him, but often we find it is the cycle of nature that uplifts us spiritually. Here, on the cathedral green, there is such delight as the first snowdrops appear, and then the crocuses, then the daffodils, and now our trees are sprouting miraculously with so many greens. Pagans revere the natural cycle. It is full of wonder and sadness. Life dies, life returns, only to die again. Acceptance of the cycle of life and death helps us make sense of our living and dying. Think of the delight we have in the birth of a new baby, the pride in growth and success, the grief at illness and death, the barren emptiness of losing those we love. It’s not surprising that people beyond a certain age take up gardening in earnest. They know the cycle of nature in their bodies and hearts and minds – it is therapeutic to work with soil and seeds.

 There is an echo of paganism in much of our easter worship and hymnody. ‘Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain, wheat that in the dark earth many days hath lain’. And yes, ‘Love lives again’, surely this is very close to the Easter Gospel and the Easter hope? We die, we grieve, we are born again to live and love. Paganism works well with our familiar habits of thought and resonates with the assumptions of our non churchy friends and relations.

 Scripture, though strikes a different and discordant note. Jesus takes all that nature imagery and applies it, not in a general way, to speak of the cycle of the year, but to himself, to his dying and rising, to what it means to follow him, and to us, to call us to give our own lives away in order to bring life in abundance.

 There is something in the Easter message contradicts paganism and questions our reconciliation to the cycle of death and rebirth. And I think it is this. The problem with paganism, both ancient and modern, is that in the end it is deeply sad. The cycle goes on, but it goes on into futility. Each person, each flower, each creature dies, the earth itself dies in fire and flood, the universe dies. All comes to nothing.

 And you can see this in some of the art of the ancient world. I think of a carved frieze in a victory column in Rome which shows the rain-god pouring down onto a battlefield full of bodies in the mud. There is an expression of such sadness, such stoic acceptance of the futility of it all. The battle was all for nothing, the dead do not return. Others will be born to replace them and the cycle will go on, but the lost, are lost for ever. They do not return again.

 The best we can do is to accept it, to go with the flow, and make what we can of our short time on earth. And this is all so sensible, so comforting, so reasonable that I wonder why the Christian part of me - and I did admit I was semi-pagan - can’t quite accept it.

 We are programmed to believe that sadness and distress are the normal and natural price we pay for being alive at all and that we should just accept this. But the scriptures today suggest that to do so could be to miss the point, that at some point the natural cycle is interrupted by a trumpet cry from beyond and all things are changed. We cannot escape sadness and the corruption that permeates the universe – it is within us and around us. But we need to practice looking beyond it, ‘Sir, we would see Jesus’. And at this time of the Easter season, as we begin to look towards the Ascension we are brought back to Jesus’s prophecy of his glorification. He will be raised above, beyond this world, to glory.

 Properly understood creation points beyond itself to a source that never runs dry, to a life that never dies. ‘Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am there will my servant be also’. When we celebrate the resurrection of Christ, we celebrate the first-fruits, of the new and lasting creation, the first indelible sign in human history that God is truly God. When we see Jesus we get a glimpse into the nature of God: the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. When we wait for the Lord, when we strive to see Jesus, we are renewed, our weariness is transformed into hope, our cynicism into trembling joy, our natural sadness into the stirrings of new and lasting life.

 We have good news about life, good news about death, good news about the human condition, and good news for our burdened souls. ‘We want to see Jesus’, said those Greeks to Philip at the start of the Passover festival. ‘Look to him’, as the psalm says, ‘and be radiant’.