Sermon: The Means of Grace and the Hope of Glory

It amuses me enormously that I am unique amongst the Cathedral clergy in having been trained in the only theological college in the Church of England so high church it was once shut down!  At the beginning of the twentieth century a certain Fr Bown was at the helm of St Stephen's House, then in the heart of Oxford at the end of the Broad where the New Bodleian Library now stands.  He was known as a first-class practitioner of the dark arts Anglo-Catholicism, and also as a man of outstanding personal holiness.

    Unfortunately, the then Bishop of Oxford, Charles Gore (who would go on to co-found the great monastery of the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield), bitterly disapproved of Fr Bown's popish methods.  So he inveigled himself into the rôle of the House's Visitor and set about gathering evidence.  Illegal devotions to Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament were being celebrated in the House chapel, and, worse still (tell it not in Gath), the House had a monstrance hidden in the sacristy for the purpose.  His Lordship made it clear that the House could no longer continue to train men for Holy Orders in the Church of England under its present Principal.  Fr Bown resigned, and in 1917 the House was closed.

    At Michaelmas 1919 the House was reopened on a new site.  The work began in Norham Gardens in the north of the city, with Fr, or ‘Pop', Mitchell at the helm.  Pop was rather more recognisably Anglican in his Catholicism than poor Fr Bown.  The illegal devotions were not resumed, and he could be deliciously scathing on the more florid extremes to which his students might like to go.  Asked once what he thought of the Assumption of Our Lady that we celebrate today, Mitchell is said to have replied rather tartly that it was like taking a beautiful statue and crowning it with sham jewels. (Some of us have never seen the problem with sham jewels, and like wearing them in our cuffs...)

    Once I would have agreed with him.  During my time at Staggers I used to delight in reminding my confreres that we were not Roman Catholic exiles in the Church of England, and that we could perfectly well accord to Our Lady her proper place of honour without seeming to treat her like a goddess.  I am ashamed, now, to remember my revulsion on my first visit to Walsingham, thundering that it seemed to me to have precious little to do with the Catholic Anglicanism that I had grown to know and love here in Durham.  But I recognise now that my starting point was wrong.

    I had made the classic mistake of failing to understand that the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary centres on God.  All the miracles of grace revealed in her reveal the work of God in and through her.  I think I only truly realised this when I read the last statement of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (arcic), Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ.  It is a short, highly readable, eminently sensible document, and the cool reception which the Church Times gave it at the time of its publication says more about the wooliness of Jezebel's Trumpet than it does of the work of arcic.

    If I may paraphrase what the statement says (in the hope that you will read it yourselves, if you haven't already), it is something like this.  The entire witness of Holy Scripture is to a trajectory of grace and hope, a trajectory that reaches not only forwards but also backwards: Creation and Resurrection are inseparable.

    Sometimes our reading of that trajectory comes as a surprise, and causes us to realise that grace has been at work for longer than we had thought.  Consider the Archangel St Gabriel's greeting of Our Lady as ‘full of grace': this came as rather a surprise to her, and I should think she certainly had no notion that, like St John Baptist, she was graced by God from the first moment of her being with the ability to exercise the ministry that God wanted to entrust to her.  This is basically what the 1854 Papal definition of the Immaculate Conception is trying to say, albeit in rather quaint terms.

    What is true of her beginning of her life is also true of its mid-point.  The ancient tradition of the Church rooted its teaching that Christ was fully human like us in his being bone of Mary's bone and flesh of her flesh, and his divinity in the fact of her virginity.  It is because the eternal Son is born of a human mother that the Council Ephesus calls her Theotokos: the God-bearer or, more usually in English, the Mother of God.  It is the miracle of grace at work in Mary that discloses the truth about Jesus of Nazareth.  And the same is true of her end.  After a life of exemplary faithfulness to the will of God, reflexion on the implications of the Resurrection coupled with the sense of the dignity of her ministry was what led, after not many centuries, to the understanding of her being assumed into heaven at the close of her earthly life.  It is only right that she who had borne Life itself in her womb should emphatically share in the victory of his Resurrection and the glorification of his Body, the Church whose beginnings lie in her, hence the 1950 Papal definition of the Assumption.

    The point here is not that we are claiming an exaggerated place for Mary, but that we recognise in the mighty acts of God in her life the hope which he holds out to all humanity: that she is, in the best sense, an example.  By reflecting on her role before the distortions of late mediæval Scholasticism and Protestantism, arcic has managed, like the Second Vatican Council, to recover our perspective on what the Church genuinely believes about Mary, such that there is no longer any sound reason why all Christians alike cannot rejoice on this great summer feast of the Blessed Virgin.

    My mind turns towards the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery.  At the top of the stairs hangs Botticini's Assumption of the Virgin, two and a half yards high and four yards wide.  From that foot of that great flight of steps one gazes up at the Apostles gathered around Our Lady's lily-filled coffin, their faces captured in every possible emotion.  High above, in the highest circle of heaven, Our Lord raises his hand in blessing over his Mother, as she wears the crown of the Queen of the Saints and Angels.  It is an ingenious placement.  In ten square yards of tempera on board one can glimpse what the Incarnation and Resurrection of the Son of God mean for the destiny of our race, focussed in the person of a woman like us.

    With one's feet on the ground of bustling Trafalgar Square, in the noise and hubbub of the world into which Christ sends us, one's eyes and heart and mind are sent soaring into the realms of glory, where God calls his faithful servants to be when their work is done.  It is one of those moments when one is grateful for the theological journey one is on, when our communion of the Church Triumphant and the Church Militant feels most real.  And one's heart cannot help but say, ‘Pray for us, O holy Mother of God: that we, too, may be worthy of the promises of Christ.'