'If I perish, I perish'

Esther 4.6–17; 1 Peter 5.1–11; Luke 22.24–30

A sermon at the Chrism Mass in Durham Cathedral, Maundy Thursday (April 9) 2009
by the Bishop of Durham, Dr N. T. Wright

Twenty years ago today, on Maundy Thursday 1989, I happened to be in Jerusalem, and I attended three contrasting but equally powerful events in quick succession.

Early in the afternoon I was taken by one of my Jewish friends to his synagogue for the celebration of Purim. Purim is the festival when the whole book of Esther is read out dramatically and re-lived as the story of the Jewish people under the threat of their lives because of the plots of Haman, and of Queen Esther acting at the risk of her own life to turn the tables and rescue her people. I then went to St George’s Cathedral for the early evening ceremony of the footwashing, conducted by the Palestinian Anglican Bishop, Samir Kafity. And I then hurried off to listen to a performance of the St Matthew Passion in the Lutheran Church in the Old City, a few hundred yards away from the site of Calvary itself. That day has remained in my mind and heart as a peculiarly rich and painful moment, as the tensions then, at the height of the Intifada, could be felt on the streets and in the very different communities I was privileged briefly to share.

And it seems to me that we could do worse, on this Maundy Thursday, than take that swirling set of themes and focus them on the challenge which Jesus makes to his followers as they sit at table with him, the challenge which is then refocussed by St Peter in his charge to his fellow-elders. Without wishing to be melodramatic, we live in times that are as disturbing and threatening as I have known in sixty years, with the world teetering on the brink of economic meltdown on the one hand and ecological meltdown on the other, with wars and rumours of wars which we’ve forgotten why we started but can’t figure out how to stop, with the secularists alternately sneering and screaming that they want us wiped off the map and with the fundamentalists trumpeting their righteousness and plotting their next bomb. And our gathering here this morning can therefore not be at all a cosy retreat away from the world, a pleasant holy gathering to console one another. Like Jesus’ last supper, it tells of where we’re going, and why: we are going off to stand with Jesus in his trials, and then to find ourselves sitting on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. But in case we suppose that that’s going to be rather fun, and give ourselves airs and graces on the basis of this coming rank and task, we are reminded, as we are throughout the gospel, that in God’s kingdom the judges are the servants, and the rulers are the slaves of all. We come here to be reshaped as kings and priests in the way that Jesus was King and Priest, in the upside-down way which is actually the right-way-up way, the only way in which the world will be healed and brought into the wise order which God longs to see. The story of Jesus at the table, washing the disciples’ feet, and going off to face the darkness on their behalf, saying, in effect, ‘If I perish, I perish’; that is the story into which we all, now, come to be enfolded.

The task of the elders, the under-shepherds – you and me, in other words – is then the task, as Peter reminds us, of humility. Humility is one of those Christian virtues which the ancient world simply could not understand. It stands along with charity, patience and chastity, being formed by and in turn forming those other three. And in our dangerous and contested world, where we are called to be ministers of the humble suffering love of Jesus Christ, this humility is not simply a necessary adjunct to that ministry, an adornment on the top; it is the powerful weapon which overcomes the world, in the way that resurrection is the powerful weapon that challenges the tyrant’s last weapon of death.

That is why the self-discipline required of those who are called to be ministers of Jesus Christ is all-important. It isn’t just because we are required to be holy if we are ministering the Holy One. Rather, it’s because, in the spiritual warfare that is increasingly becoming shrill and in-your-face in our society, in Parliament, in the media, and all around us, the pressure is on to make us conform to the mood of late secularism, to hide our gospel behind a cloak of easy-going social respectability, to become, in the wrong sense, merely chaplains to whatever mood our world wishes to play with next, expected to bless what people already intend to do and promise them what they already want. And, when in prayer and discernment you try to resist those pressures, and to be a bridgehead for the life-giving counter-culture of the gospel (in hospital or hospice, in prison or school, in public statements about asylum seekers or sexual morality or euthanasia, in teaching your people the way of costly love), the spiritual warfare will work its way back into your own souls. The besetting temptations of which, this Lent, you have been uncomfortably aware will strike when you are most vulnerable, to try to keep you from reflecting the humble, wise, patience, chaste, loving gospel of Jesus into the world.

Hence that string of bracing commands in Peter’s letter: humble yourselves, cast your anxiety on Him, discipline yourselves, keep alert, resist the devil, steadfast in your faith. Each one of you is holding a bit of the line, and the rest of us need to you stand firm at your post. You will each know, better than anyone else, what it’s costing you right now to do this. As under-shepherds of the chief shepherd, your own struggles in ministry, in holiness, in loving and self-giving service, are caught up, in ways we will never understand but merely observe fleetingly from time to time, in his. We continue with him in his trials even when we don’t realise it. That is how the gospel does its work in the world.

All of which brings us back to Esther. Notoriously, the word ‘God’ doesn’t occur in the entire book of Esther, but as people have often pointed out that’s because the sense of God’s presence and providence is all-pervading. Esther, Mordecai and their friends, who go to prayer and fasting as they face the threat of annihilation, have a strong belief in Providence. ‘Maybe’; ‘perhaps’; these are the words which indicate that God has a purpose even when we can’t see what it is. ‘Who knows? Perhaps you came to the kingdom for just this moment.’ This belief doesn’t mean they know what God is up to or that they’re going to like it when it happens; it simply requires that they be faithful in both senses, trusting God on the one hand and trustworthy followers of his on the other. And it is in that spirit that Esther goes into the king, the moment in the story when she is most clearly a signpost pointing forward to the royal figure of Jesus himself, going in to face the tyrant whose names are sin, pride, arrogance and death itself, so that his people may be rescued. ‘If I perish, I perish’; and the faith of Esther going to plead for her people becomes the faithfulness of Jesus, obedient even to death, the death of the cross, pleading for his people and rescuing them from the threatening enemy.

And it is our vocation, for which once again we sign on today in fear and trembling, to follow him in this path, whatever it takes and wherever he leads. I cannot tell what battles you will face in the coming year, battles as your living and preaching of the gospel comes up against the hard, sneering world, battles as the struggle is fought out in the secret and silent places of your own heart and mind and soul, battles which if they’re not addressed will turn, as displacement activities, into the unnecessary and damaging battles that can arise within the church itself. But I do know that if you’re doing your job those battles will be there, and I do know that the only way is Esther’s way, Jesus’ way: fast and pray, and get others to fast and pray, and then settle it in your mind that you will do what is necessary for the sake of the gospel, for the sake of your people, for the sake of the glory of Jesus. Who knows? Maybe you have come to the ministry for such a time as this. Let us learn the lessons of the necessary confrontation between the gospel of life and the power of darkness. We are going to need those lessons in the days to come. ‘Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour; resist him, steadfast in your faith. . . and after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace will himself restore, support, strengthen and establish you.’ That is the God whose table we come to share, whose healing oil we come to bear, whose robe of humble love we come to wear. Let us, like Esther, take courage and follow him. To him be the power and the glory for ever and ever. Amen.