Sermon for Blessing of Lady Chapel Altar and Reredos

26th June 2011

I found myself on the rooftop of a Christian restaurant in Jerusalem, watching Moslems in a running battle with Israeli police. The crackle of gunfire was all around. In the best British tradition, I sat there calmly sipping my beer and feeling a complete charlie. In Israel-Palestine archaeology is high politics. A ramp up to the Dome of the Rock had collapsed. Immediately, the Israeli authorities cordoned off the spot. The riot was started by a rumour that Israeli archaeologists were digging under the ramp, looking for evidence of the Temple. Were such evidence to be found, it is believed, the Israelis would almost certainly reclaim the whole area from the Moslems. In Jerusalem now there are ultra-Orthodox Jews who have assembled all the furnishings and implements required when the Temple is restored, including the knives for animal sacrifice.

The Temple in Jerusalem in the time of Jesus was more like an abattoir than an abbey. The combination of animal sacrifices and burnt offerings meant a smoky and blood-spattered place. You can read the ritual laws in the Book of Leviticus. What is more, the Holy of Holies contained the Ark of the Covenant which was so holy to touch it meant instant death. So, to visit the Temple was not a touristy thing to do. It was a raw encounter with the dangerous majesty of God. Many Jews long for this to be so again. They have waited since the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD by the Romans under Titus.

If you want a powerful picture of sacrifice, come forward nineteen hundred years to the Millennium in 2000. The defining image of the Seeing Salvation exhibition at the National Gallery was the Zurbaran painting of the Trussed Lamb, an image of the sacrifice of Christ. As Christians we believe that we have no need to long for the restoration of a sacrificial system of any kind, because every sacrifice has been fulfilled and cancelled out by the one true and final sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. He offered himself once for all to the Father. Every year the high priest went into the Holy of Holies to atone for the sins of Israel. Now Christ has destroyed the final death of sin. Although we are sinners, we are forgiven and saved by the blood of Christ, not through any merit of our own, but through God’s pure gift of love. Jesus is the Lamb of God, a powerful image used by John the Baptist to characterise who Christ was even at the beginning of his ministry. In our response to this sacrifice as Anglicans, we are drawn to the refinement of sacrificial theology which we read in the Psalms and the Prophets which highlights the interior sacrifice of a broken and contrite heart, what our Eucharistic prayers affirm as our sacrifice of thanks and praise.

One of the issues for today, nonetheless, is that an altar is a symbol of sacrifice, the symbol of our continuity with the faith of Israel. What sacrifice are we talking about and enacting? Our Eucharistic Prayers are our clearest statements as Anglicans that Christ died, once for all, on the Cross. But the contrast between the sacrifices of the Temple and what we do in the Eucharist is not about good taste and tidiness. The Eucharist is not a concert with light refreshments. I heard of a tea-total priest who inherited a cousin’s wine cellar. He used all the wine for the Holy Communion and could not understand why the congregation grew so large as people came to sample the latest vintage. It’s a good story but it keeps us back from recognising that we have not sanitised our encounter with God: we still expect to encounter his dangerous majesty. In our case, we are not trying to appease a threatening deity. We are approaching the glory which has taken human shape in the Son of Man. Heaven has come near with perfect assurance of forgiveness. The danger of that majesty is in the invitation to change and leave our places of safety.

When the Jews keep Passover they are, of course, remembering events set in the real past. But this is a meagre understanding of the Passover: as the Jews re-tell the story of their deliverance from Egypt, they have the dust of Pharaoh’s brickyards in their hair; they are on their way to the Promised Land. What is important is not that they are remembering but that they are being re-membered, made one body of many members as God’s people. In the light of this, Jesus wanted his disciples to know that when he said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me’, it was not just to be a memorial of a sacrifice made  long ago, but the active re-presentation of a sacrifice which is eternally valid and to be appropriated by every penitent heart forever. The Eucharist is the foretaste of the heavenly banquet right now; it is about living the heavenly peace of Christ right now; it is living right now the eternally present sacrifice of the Son to the Father. Like the Jews, we are being re-membered into one body, the Body of Christ. This is what makes us a holy nation, a royal priesthood a city on the hill whose foundation is Christ.

So the altar is a sign of sacrifice. It is also a representation of the empty tomb of Christ. One of the powerful features of the Lady Chapel Altar is that you can see into and through it, like Mary Magdalene and Peter and John looking into the tomb and seeing that the Lord was not there. Every altar is a sign that the New Creation has been inaugurated in the resurrection of Jesus. We are eating the meal of the kingdom of God and toasting Lord’s victory over meaninglessness and death. We are equipped by our feeding on Christ to be agents of his transformation in the world, ourselves being changed from glory to glory. At the end of the Eucharist, we are sent out to love and serve the Lord. Paul rightly tells that approaching the table requires us to sort out our forgiving and being forgiven. It also gives us a mandate we dare not fudge to be salt and light both in the counsels of the Church and in the affairs of our society. Before ever Jesus was actually born, he was already drawing the Magnificat out of his mother, Mary. You can go straight from Mary’s song to see why Jesus overthrew the tables of the money changers in the Temple. That particular baby both taught and learnt in the womb.

And this goes to the heart of the Eucharist and today’s celebrations for me because the altar is also a sign of the manger throne of Christ. We participate with the priest in the Great Thanksgiving as we call down the Spirit upon the gifts not to perform magic but to make local, real and intimate the universal presence of Christ, so that the dangerous majesty of God is placed on our lips and in our hands. The incarnation of Christ continues in the Eucharist and flows out into the world through our service. ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’, said some Greeks to the Apostle Philip. Well, we see him under the forms of bread and wine every time we celebrate the Eucharist and look into the faces of those making their communion alongside us. In John 6, Jesus is talking about really feeding on him in the language of chewing. This is the real food which brings us to eternal life.

All through this sermon I hope that you have been picking up allusions to Scripture. We know about the Eucharist both because it has been the continuous practice of Christians since the Last Supper and because of the reference to the sacramental life through the gospels and the letters of Paul. The difference between the virgin birth of Jesus and other claims of such births, is that this birth was the fulfilment of what was foretold in the Hebrew scriptures. Our Lady Chapel was one of the most magnificent and highly decorated visual and liturgically formed expressions of a religious building of the high Middle Ages. Since the Reformation, it has undergone a great transformation into a symbol of a sparer, plainer faith more rooted in the Word of God. What we celebrate today is a wonderful fusion of these themes. We rejoice in the continuity of the acoustic of the Chapel as a place to sing God’s praise. We are thrilled that under the lime wash of the centuries, the original colours of the Chapel have shown through and have been incorporated into the reredos. Most particularly, we thank God for giving John Madison the vision to bring together into balance the physical reality of the Incarnation through Mary with the revolutionary declaration of Scripture that the word was made flesh and dwelt among us. A glorious space has been given its proper heart once more. Amen.

Bishop Stephen Conway, Bishop of Ely.