University Confirmation: Love Wins

Yesterday morning I had the pleasure and privilege of confirming some of our finest at the University Confirmation in Corpus College Chapel. Congratulations to

Alun James Ford
Joanna Katherine Miles
Jessica Helen White
Ashley James Cocksworth
Mark William Sampson
Rachel Ambrose Evans
Lucy Patricia Birkett
Emma Kerstin Nuding
Robert Andrew May-Miller
Joseph William Vasudev May
Catherine Elizabeth Moss
David Clifford Roberts
Ian Christopher Waugh

Earlier in the week I had been in one of our primary schools at Thriplow to lead their Easter Communion Service, and our theme was how because of Jesus we are all winner now. Here’s how I developed the theme on this rather more grown-up occasion:

I wonder what you were talking about on your way to this service today? The result of the referendum, and why Cambridge was an island of “Yes” votes in a sea of Noes? The royal wedding, and why Westminster Abbey was so slow in standing up for its cartwheeling verger? The rights and wrongs of the operation against Osama bin Laden? Perhaps it was whatever is going on in your own family right now or perhaps the service itself.

For our candidates there will I imagine be a certain level of anxiety, but also some serious thoughts about their faith and about what that might mean for them in the years to come. And today is also the sort of day on which any of us might find ourselves wondering afresh about our own faith and course of life – and those big out-there questions we began with, which so often take us back to fundamental issues if we follow them through.

That’s certainly how it was for the disciples on the Emmaus Road. The events of what we call Holy Week, Good Friday and Easter were inevitably on their minds, and a good walk gave them the opportunity for a good talk too. It’s not a bad image for life in general – trying to make sense of things as we go along. The data is there – more or less, more or less reliable, more or less complete, more or less easy for us to integrate with our thinking so far. We have a need and desire to achieve that, for things to add up, make sense, have meaning and purpose; but we also find all sorts of problems in trying to help that happen.

The downcast faces of the disciples reveal how it was for them, then. Definitely a less moment, not a more one. Yes, there had been strange reports of the risen Lord, but not ones they could make sense of for themselves, and their main feeling was one of disappointment. Jesus, they say, was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people – and it all ended in tears. He had it seemed been showing them a new way of life, a new way of being themselves and the people of God, a way in which the old order of winners and losers, in-people and out-people, could give way to a world in which all people of all sorts were so alive in the love and forgiveness of God that their love and forgiveness for others went all the way for others too.

So was that all rubbish? Crossed out on the Cross? A literal dead end?

The great answer of Easter is “no”. I was with some children in one of our local church schools last week – at Thriplow in fact. They have started to celebrate Holy Communion in their assemblies from time to time, and had invited me to join them for an Easter celebration, and they gave me the challenge of telling them just what Easter meant for me. Writing a book about it would be quite a challenge: spelling it for five year olds in not more than five minutes was a real poser!

But at the same time I was preparing for the service today and realised that Jesus in his words to the Emmaus Road disciples was doing my work for me, just as Peter was in the first Christian sermon that was read to us as our first reading. Both Jesus and Peter look back at the big story of the Bible and see how in it God had been preparing the way for the Messiah, the Christ, promising him to David, speaking about him through the prophets; sending him in Jesus. And then, the crucial move, vindicating Jesus as Christ by raising him from the dead.

For five year olds that meant giving them medals saying “Winner” on them, and explaining how Jesus in his life-time was helping everyone be a winner – not by winning races over others, but by letting everyone come to him equally and be loved for who they were. And then, just when it looked like the medals were going to be taken away, there was Jesus again, the greatest Winner of all, lifting our hands up too as part of the winning team, the team that included every one of them.

The kids were brilliant – able to go from listening quietly to high whoopees and back to quiet, just like that. They got the point. And as I thought about it I realised that it’s not a childish point either, even if we were celebrating it in a child-like way. The earliest and greatest theology of the Cross was that of Christus Victor, Christ the Winner. The Bible is full of the theology of the resurrection as his vindication, as the recent writings of Tom Wright have spelled out for us. And while the theology of Christus Patiens, the suffering Christ, and post-war and then post-modern reticence about anything triumphant both have their place, we are discovering again in our own times the value and joy of proclaiming that triumph now. Without it we may reasonably wonder whether faith can ever lift us up out of our incessant questioning and habitual depression into freedom and joy.

I was struck too in today’s first reading by how “God” not “we” or “I” is the subject of all the key sentences. God has promised; God has raised Jesus; God gives us our call. Philosophically this is the turn that releases us from the net of our self: the act of faith – and it will always be that – that is not satisfied to leave ourselves on our own throne, apparently in total control but in fact trapped for ever within our own viewpoint and language, culture and chemistry. The act of faith that says no to that and names as the ground of our being, of meaning, purpose, goodness and truth, an Other; and no ordinary Other but an Other whose own nature is totally to give himself away to us all – in profligate but purposeful creation, in personal presence in Christ, in the empowering gift of the Spirit.

That is why we can so celebrate his triumph: because here alone is the Winner whose victory is precisely not a power-play for himself but a promise of life in all its fullness for everyone else.

All he has is ours. All he has (Names) is yours. Today you are choosing his life, choosing him. But he has already chosen you, and gave his life for you long ago. Today you say yes to the God who has said yes to you. Today perhaps many of us can now say yes again in our own hearts too.