Sermon: In Praise of Bede

Six years in Durham, and I have not yet preached on Bede.  It is time to put that right, for tomorrow is his feast day.  Happily, it falls once again in Ascensiontide.  For he died on the eve of Ascension Day in the year 735.  He had sung the antiphon on which the collect for today is based: ‘O King of Glory, who triumphing this day ascended above the heavens: leave us not orphans, but send to us the promise of the Father, even the Spirit of Truth!' Abbot Cuthbert tells us that on his death bed Bede was as he had been throughout his life.  He was still instructing his brothers.  He was still translating the scriptures.  He was still radiating thankfulness and joy.  He was still praying with the simplicity and humility for which he was loved.  Then he sang the Gloria and died.  It is a wonderful thing when a good man or woman dies as they have lived, when the act of dying shows how their hard-won holiness and devotion to God are intact.  Such deaths are never forgotten.

What is it about Bede that we admire so much?  Not the scale of his intellectual achievements alone, albeit that he is the only native English doctor of the church.  It is more how sanctity and Christian character shine through all his writings, be they poetry, astronomy, biblical commentary, theology or history in a rare alchemy of temperament and talent.[1] The historian David Knowles captures this elusive quality: ‘There is no brilliance in Bede, but much steady clarity; no overtones and undertones, no subtle intuition, no twilight mystery, no lightning flash of genius.  He lives and writes in noonday sunshine.  If we search for a simile to fit him, we do not think of steel and diamond, of the opal or of quicksilver; rather, perhaps, we think of the mellow purity of gold.  Simple, sane, loyal, trusting, warm-hearted, serious... because Bede was a good man [he could], as he himself said, live without shame and die without fear.'[2]  And if it is through an oddity of history that a monk from here stole his relics from Jarrow and we at Durham have found ourselves the guardian of his bones for a thousand years, we do it with a sense of privilege and honour.

Bede would not wish me to dwell on him but to apply myself to the New Testament text given to us today, for one of his legacies is a great commentary on St Luke's Gospel.  Somewhat at a venture, let me see if I can draw out of the second lesson some insights that reflect Bede's life of learning, discipleship and prayer.  You recall that Jesus has emerged from the desert and returned to his Galilee where he begins to teach in the synagogues.  Much is made in this passage about his Galilean roots: ‘he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up' says Luke; and later the crowd demands that he do in his home town the things he has done elsewhere.  ‘A prophet is not without honour except in his own country' he says.  The strong sense of place that runs through this episode is a feature we immediately recognise in Bede, especially in his last and greatest work The History of the English Church and People. It is a book every English Christian should read often.  We call Bede ‘the father of English history' but the book is much more than simply a chronicle.  What he achieved was to give meaning to Englishness by telling how God's providence had dealt graciously with this land through the goodness and sanctity of its holy women and men.  In Bede we see a distinctively English embodiment of faith that lies at the heart of the identity and tradition of this land.  Christianity, he believes, will civilise and unite the nation and be a life-changing power that will redeem it and make it whole.  Sense of place is one of the gifts of an embodied, incarnational faith. 

But it is more than a matter of Christian identity.  It is also about vocation.  Jesus' first synagogue sermon is the declaration that he embraces his vocation with joy.  ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.'  Jesus is taking up the oracle we read as the Old Testament lesson in which a prophet looks forward to the rebuilding of Israel's shattered homeland after the exile.  So here is the anointed one announcing his call to bring life and salvation to a people who long for hope.  For Bede, living close to the relics of ancient empire and civilisation associated with Hadrian's wall, there must have been a sense of departed glory, for all that his native Northumbria was a civilisation famed throughout Europe for its dazzling cultural and intellectual achievements.  But for Bede these are not where the glory of a nation lies. It lies in a people's obedience to God.  Bede attaches special importance to the vocation of people in public life: think example of how he dwells on the conversion of Edwin, the first Christian king of Northumbrian, and on King Oswald's role in fostering of the mission of Aidan in Northumbria. Their obedience led to the transformation of a people: that is his story.  But, he says, vocation belongs not only to the greatest but also, and especially, to the least.  Bede himself exemplified it in his lifelong obedience to the religious life from the day he was given to the monastery as a boy.  His History will only have achieved its purpose if it succeeds in getting each of us to consider our own obedience to God's call today.  For in baptism, every Christian not only can but must say with Jesus: ‘the Spirit of the Lord is upon me'; for like him, it's the vocation of us all to bring hope to a broken world. 

And here is a final observation from our lesson.  Jesus ‘stood up to read'.  Reading matters to Luke, the most literary of the gospel writers: for it was Luke more than any other New Testament author who elevated Christian narrative writing into an art form.  So when he tells of Jesus taking the scroll, reading from it and commenting on it, he is honouring the hermeneutical activity of encountering a text and eliciting meanings.  But this is not simply any reading.  Jesus was in the synagogue, the place of prayer.  So it is holy reading, lectio divina.  From Jesus the Reader, Bede took his cue.  Immersing himself in the library Benedict Biscop had created at Wearmouth-Jarrow, Bede became the first Englishman who by reading began to bring knowledge human and divine into a coherent whole, and so begin to be at home in the three worlds he inhabited: human history, creation and the life of faith.  By reading the classics, he saw how his nation could inherit the civilised order of the Roman world and the Latin church.  By reading the natural philosophers of antiquity he understood the patterns inherent in an ordered universe.  By reading the scriptures and the fathers, he recognised order as being theological in character, originating in the God who shapes all things and governs the destinies of human beings.  To gain insight in this way was more than a personal aspiration.  It was a programme for an entire people called as he saw it to spiritual, moral and scientific intelligence.  I do not need to tell you how important it is to cultivate a deep, informed religious literacy. It matters in every age, but perhaps never more than ours; and not simply for professional theologians and clergy: it is too important to be left to them.      

Another word for this would be wisdom.  Recalling how the scriptures closely associate the Lady Wisdom with Hagia Sophia, the Holy Spirit, we come back to today's text, with Jesus opening a book and announcing that ‘the Spirit of the Lord is upon me'.  It's the vocation to be wise, and to lead others into wisdom.  This is ‘wisdom and ministry' for a few; it is wisdom in thinking, speaking, praying and living for us all.  A beautiful prayer of Bede makes this its focus, and I end with it.  We entreat you, O Lord, that as in your mercy you have given us grace to drink in with joy the word that gives knowledge of you, so in your goodness, grant us to come at length to yourself, the source of all wisdom, and to stand before you for ever; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Michael Sadgrove, Durham Cathedral, 24 May 2009 (Isaiah 61; Luke 4.14-21)

[1] Southern, R.W., Medieval Humanism and Other Studies, 1970, 3.

[2] Knowles, David, Saints and Scholars: twenty five medieval portraits, Cambridge 1962, 17-18