When God dies - Songs of the beloved
Let me sing for my beloved....
It was not the Mothering Sunday that Nuala Kerr expected. The chance to have her house full, once again, of all four of her beloved sons - one of whom was journeying back from Australia specially for this day - this was the chance for a family celebration of uncomplicated joy and love. In the event, while nothing got in the way of her eldest son, Cathair, returning from the other side of the world to be with her, it was not the case for his younger brother, Ronan, who had a mere ten minutes’ drive to return to the family home from the town of Omagh.
You will remember as clearly as I how this 25-year old’s life was snuffed out by a booby-trapped car in that ill-fated town - a savage and desperate act of domestic terrorism by hard core extremists who manifestly have no wish to see a peaceful Northern Ireland. And thus this brave young man’s mother was subject to a Mothering Sunday of anguish rather than joy - a day of grief rather than celebration. I cannot begin to guess how I might feel were a similar tragedy to befall Benedict or Linus, but I do not think it understatement to suggest, as one religious commentator has done, that it was the day that Nuala Kerr’s world fell apart. And on that Mothering Sunday, only two short weeks ago, she found the world’s press on her doorstep, and, to use the powerful words of the prophet Isaiah, she found that it was the time to sing - to sing a love-song for her beloved.
It is easy, of course, to sing a love song when all is going well. But Mrs Kerr was not the first, and, without doubt, she will not be the last parent who has had to sing the heart-rending love song of grief - of a grief of separation so awful and profound that it surpasses decent imagination. It is a song of parental grief - or, to be specific, of maternal grief that is hinted at in the gospels, when the aged Simeon warns the young mother Mary that her infant son, in whom she is rejoicing, this same, beautiful, infant son will be a sign that will be opposed by many, and that a sword would pierce her own soul, as well.
Luke’s gospel contains a number of hints that amongst Mary’s many virtues was wisdom, and it is not hard to imagine that the bizarre set of events around the birth of her first child might leave her not just celebrating the birth of a beautiful son, but also with just a hint of the fact that this uniquely unexpected and complex birth might, just possibly, lead to a life that would be unexpected and complex as well. But I wonder if even Mary’s wisdom and forethought could have led to an expectation of just how much cost and pain this child’s birth would bring her. The grief of a Nuala Kerr, or of a Mary at the cross is stark and ultimate, and it should not surprise us if, when confronted with such grief, we find that songs of the bitterest kind come to people’s lips.
On a statue by Heysel stadium in Belgium, where, just over 25 years ago, a wall collapsed and killed almost 40 football fans from England and Italy, on this statue there are poignant words of W.H. Auden, words also used in the film Four Wedding and a Funeral - words of a love song that underlines the awfulness and futility that death evokes for so many people:
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Today - this morning, as we heard, once again, Matthew’s account of the last hours of Jesus life - this evening as we come to worship again, and this week, this Holy Week, we have to come to terms anew with grief and with death. Tonight, properly, is a time to think of the love songs of anguish with which this world has had to live in each and every generation. For whether we think of Nuala Kerr and her so recent loss, or whether we look in holy sorrow at the image of Mary at the foot of the cross, we know that the need for such love songs is a universal and a timeless need.
But it is not, I think, enough simply to take note of such anguish so that we, too, might prepare ourselves to weep at the foot of the cross on Good Friday - worthy and appropriate though such a sentiment might be. For there is a bigger question that lurks around the events of this week, and, in particular, lurks around the powerful readings of tonight’s act of worship. And the question is hinted at, I think, in those desperate words of Auden - for what does it mean to say that you should put out every star, that you should pack up the moon and dismantle the sun and pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. Indeed, what does it really mean to say that nothing now can ever come to any good....
I want to suggest to you that we have just read about some people who truly believed that nothing now can ever come to any good. People who figured in the most provocative parable that Jesus ever told - a parable that made those learned in religion, those who were the leaders of his religion, want to arrest him. For when Jesus told the parable of the landowner and his vineyard, that was the reaction of the chief priests and the Pharisees. But what a strange parable to tell...
Take away from those well known words the blanket of respectability that covers all texts from the Bible - especially texts from the lips of Jesus himself. Forget that you have heard this parable on many occasions, and that, being a mature and educated Christian you understand Jesus is making a point - a big point - about the failure of the Jewish religious leaders of the First Century to build the Kingdom of God. Just immerse yourself in what is actually going on in the parable - for it hardly makes any sense, does it, when you look at it clearly...
The landowner leases his vineyard to some tenants, and they default on the rent, and abuse his servants. And so, eventually he sends his son, in the hope that he will be respected by the tenants in a way in which the servants were not. But what do the tenants say? Nothing about respect or honour - instead they say This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance. Let us kill him and get his inheritance....?
It actually makes no sense at all. Kill the son to get the inheritance? Clearly that’s not going to work, as Jesus goes on to say - the tenants will be put to death and the vineyard will be leased to other tenants. Fine - that’s obvious. So obvious, that you have to why do the original tenants come up with this insane plan that has no chance of working? And there is, I would suggest, only one answer that makes sense of this parable - there is only one interpretation of this parable that can explain the tenants’ behaviour which manages to be both murderous and yet suicidal as well. The tenants clearly believe that the landlord is dead.
The tenants believe the landlord is dead, and thus the inheritance is up for grabs if his son is killed as well. Or, in other words, this parable, at its heart, is about how we behave if we think that God is dead. Jesus is not content merely to offend the chief priests and the Pharisees by suggesting they are failing to produce the fruits of the kingdom - Jesus is actually saying that their behaviour is so terrible that it says to the watching world that the God whom they claim to serve is dead. And, clearly, so Jesus’ harsh words suggest to us, if God is dead, anything goes: greed, violence and murder. Such are the fruits of a world without God, or a world in which God has died. A world, if you like, has fallen apart - not just because of the death of one worthy young man in a senseless act of terrorism in Northern Ireland - a world which has fallen apart because the gravitational pull of all that is right has been extinguished. A world in which the unthinkable has happened - and God is dead.
It is, perhaps, no wonder that when the Pharisees and the chief priests heard this parable they wanted to arrest him. I suspect that if you were to confront Bishop Donald or Rowan Williams and tell them that their behaviour was so unspeakable that it suggested that God was dead, they wouldn’t take your words as a compliment. Especially if you link such a suggestion with an illustration so redolent of greed, violence and murder. And if God is dead; if the unthinkable has to be thought, then the question becomes even more difficult - what love song can you sing then?
Isaiah’s prophecy of the vineyard is one of the most powerful passages of the Old Testament. It is powerful in its condemnation of the behaviour of the people of Israel - the people who should have been God’s pleasant planting, but who produced bloodshed not justice, bloodshed that raised a cry, not a life which yielded the fruits which come from righteousness. Isaiah is speaking, in this passage, about the unspeakable. In the age he lived, he saw the menace of the eighth century superpower of Assyria threaten the Israelites - threaten the very city of Jerusalem in which God dwelled, eternally, in the holiest of holies in the Temple. And although the eventual fall of the city and the destruction of the Temple was, in fact, to come some while in the future at the hands of the next bad kids on the block, the Babylonians, Isaiah is naming and shaming his people with the prospect of the unthinkable - the prospect, in effect, of the death of God. And what love song can you dare sing then?
And by the time Jesus is telling his listeners this most powerful of parables, have no doubt that the game, as it were, is up. He is already in the last week of his life; he has created a huge stink in the Temple by upending the tables of the money-changers; he is well aware of his own future, which, indeed, he has predicted not once but three times to his disciples. Jesus knows exactly how he is going to end up, and, according to Matthew, when the inevitable happens, as we heard in the reading of the Passion this morning, Jesus’ final words are words of utter despair - My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? For Matthew, as for Mark, Jesus dies broken and deserted - deserted not just by his disciples, but, apparently, deserted by God. I’ve no idea what was in Jesus’ mind in the last moments of his life, but Matthew’s account is an account of horror and brokeness. Matthew, I think, is showing us not merely the death of God made flesh in Jesus. Perhaps Matthew is showing us, in the death of the man who more than any other person relied on God in his life, the reaction of someone, who in such desertion, feels that God, too, has died. And what love song can you dare sing then?
Those who grieve tend to make good footage for TV journalists. Those who grieve with real dignity make good examples for the world around them. Nuala Kerr was one such person. With her son being the victim of behaviour that exemplified the dark days of fear and terror that once dominated Northern Ireland, her clear and stated wish, in the first hours of her grief, that terrible Mothering Sunday just two weeks ago, her clear and stated wish was that his death should not be in vain. Despite her world falling apart, despite the murder of her beloved son, she wanted to assure the watching world within and beyond Ulster that we don’t want to go back into the dark days again... That is a remarkable love song to sing for her beloved. That is a love song that sings of God, even if God is dead.
For Auden - well Auden would have been right. It would have been fine to put out the stars, and the moon and the sun. That would be behaviour that would be understandable, if not justifiable, if, as the poem says, I thought that love would last for ever. But, as the poem also says, I was wrong. Because the love song of Passiontide, the love song of Holy Week, the love song of a Thursday night and a Friday afternoon, that is the song of a love that does last for ever. That is a love song that lasts even when we can see, with our own eyes, that God is dead. That is a love song which lasts even when we hear that last, despairing cry, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.
Nuala Kerr is not the first, and will not be the last grieving person to discover that true love does not die, however much her world might fall apart. Ultimately, like the people of Israel before her, and, ultimately, even like those who first followed Jesus, her courage these past weeks is just another reminder to me and to you that love does not die, and that the love song of Thursday night, the love song of Friday afternoon, the love song that gets sung as darkness covers the whole land - that love song will get sung again as the first lights of the dawn break on a Sunday morning.
This week, as we remember God dying on a cross, what song will you have the courage to sing?
Dominic Barrington, Palm Sunday, 2011
