Portsmouth Cathedral

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Marked by the cross

Sermon for Ash Wednesday: 14th February 2024

Revd Canon Harriet Neale-Stevens


Today marks the start of our journey together as a Christian community through the season of Lent.

 And we are delighted here at the Cathedral to have an art exhibition running throughout Lent and Easter of work by the late Garrick Palmer on the theme of the raising of Lazarus.  Our intention is that this exhibition will help inform and shape our worship, our prayer, and our study during Lent, and there are lots of opportunities to engage with the art over the coming weeks – through services, a Lent course, through evenings of music and readings, through talks and discussions – all listed in our What’s On guide and online. So do take time to have a look at what’s on offer.

 Garrick Palmer was born and grew up in Portsmouth and as well as being a painter, specialised in print making and photography. He previously had a photography exhibition here in the cathedral in 2006 and many years prior to that, as a young, up and coming artist in the late 1950s, he held a very early exhibition in the Cathedral, showing, we believe, one of the large Lazarus paintings that is currently in the Nave.

Palmer turned 90 last year and there was a celebratory exhibition held for him in the Jack House Gallery on the High Street, but he sadly died just weeks before it was due to open. So this Lenten art display, organised in partnership with the Jack House Gallery, is something he would have approved of – he was, I am told, extremely fond of this building and all that it has to offer.

Interestingly Garrick Palmer was not a Christian, he didn’t profess to have a faith, and yet a significant amount of his work over the course of his life, drew on Christian themes and stories. The photography exhibition he held here in 2006 took the theme of sacred spaces, and the story of the raising of Lazarus was one he returned to again and again in his art through his whole life.

I have been told that when he was a very young man, in his 20s, Palmer became ill and fell into a coma. And from this coma, he recovered, coming back to lead a full and abundant life. It was from this point on that he began to paint and draw and sketch out endless drafts of the raising of Lazarus. Many of them you will see in the current exhibition. And as he moved through different seasons of his life he tried out different colour palettes. The early Lazarus paintings are red and orange, vibrant and bright. And then he moved to using purples, dark blues and turquoises and the stark contrast of black and white, and then finally in the months before he died, he returned to the deep reds that he started with.

Through his artistic career, Palmer looked at the story of the raising of Lazarus from all angles.  In many ways, he stepped right into it; he was Lazarus – a man who died, or who very nearly died, and who came back to life. Perhaps Garrick Palmer’s obsession with Lazarus was an exploration of the mystery of his own life and death – and unexpected new life – an artistic meditation on his own mortality.

Curiously, when asked in an interview in later life about the future, Palmer said, ‘I can only look back with any degree of comfort; looking forward would be unwise.’  An interesting statement from someone who had so readily explored the great themes of life and death in his art.

The liturgy of Ash Wednesday, in which we all participate this evening, offers us a powerful invitation to look back and to look forwards – with the discomfort of remembering that we are no more than dust. ‘Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return’ are words that will be said over us in just a few minutes time. We remember today that death is real, and that we are mortal – made of dust, returning to dust.

Illness or accident or old age may of course remind us of the same, but today’s liturgy is designed, intentionally, to bring death into sharper focus. It’s a rehearsal, if you like, a pre-figuring of the real moment of death which is yet to come. Not only will we be reminded in word that we will return one day to dust, but we will be marked with the sign of the cross in ashes – a foreshadowing of the prayer that will be prayed over us all after death – ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’

But this closer look at death is not to make us afraid. It is quite the opposite. Our liturgy brings us to this place of dust and death so that we might see ourselves for what we are and in doing so, remember God’s mercy and his power alone to make us alive.

I want to invite you to turn now to the image that’s printed on the inside cover of your order of service. This is a work by Garrick Palmer – it’s a preliminary study for a wood engraving – and you can see the originals of both this and the engraving in the Nave as part of the exhibition.

The image referred to in this sermon, Lamentations (study) 1956, can be seen here

Lazarus Raised from the Dead — Jack House Gallery

This piece is called Lamentations, and it depicts the entombment of Jesus. You can see that Jesus’s slightly unwieldy dead body is being held and shifted into a casket by three figures in the background behind him. There are strips of grave clothes over Jesus’s legs, and the marks of the crucifixion in his feet. You might notice also how dark it is, and that this scene takes place within the enclosed space of a tomb. You can see to the right an open doorway and a little flight of steps rising up to day light.

Although this study clearly depicts Jesus, it’s very similar, in many ways, to Garrick Palmer’s other paintings of the Raising of Lazarus. And so we might begin to see in this picture an alternative story. Here perhaps is Lazarus being raised to life again, being helped from his casket by Jesus and his friends, his grave clothes falling away, his body becoming alive and upright once more, the bright dawn of day awaiting him through that doorway of the tomb.

And if this is the raising of Lazarus, could it also be Jesus’s own resurrection, the three hazy figures his angelic helpers, preparing him for the moment that’s about to come when Mary meets him in the garden and the disciples find the tomb and the stone is rolled away, and the grave clothes have all been neatly folded and he is not there.

Does the long rectangular casket, pictured vertically in this scene, not also remind you of our font, here in the middle of this cathedral – our baptism, the watery passage we make from death to life, dying to sin and rising to new life in Christ in the midst of this earthly existence.

And perhaps we might also see the casket resembling the manger, where Jesus is being laid, in the darkened space of the stable, the door hanging open in the breeze.

It’s all here in this picture – birth and baptism, life and death, and the sure and certain hope of resurrection.

Notice that central to the whole structure of this picture is a cross. The vertical stretch from Jesus’s head down to the bottom end of the casket is the upright beam. And the horizontal beam is marked out in lighter tones, like a strike of light across the centre of the picture. You might like to trace the cross with your thumb, in exactly the same way that the ash will be imposed on your forehead in a few minutes’ time.

Contained within that cross is everything – the whole life of Christ laid open for us – drawn in one simple mark on your head – by the hand of God, the author of salvation.