Pilgrims, Visitors; Believers, Doubters, Those Just Passing By, may I speak to you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
What a thing it is to stand in this building. It is a miracle in stone, glass and timber. It makes us look up. It raises faith.
Whole buildings arise from the tombs of Holy People: St Albans; St Peter’s, Rome; the tomb of Jesus at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. A tomb that is - I am glad to report – empty.
This place raises the same question: who could have inspired such a wondrous enterprise as this?
Part of the answer lies just behind the high alter, where there is a shrine to St Cuthbert, whose memory we honour today; and whose life (and death) gave some propulsion to this miraculous construction.
Thanks to the Venerable Bede, whose remains also lie here, we know St Cuthbert was special. His life (and death) packed with admirable action and wonderful works.
It’s a thrilling biography: the shepherd who became a monk, who became a bishop, who became a saint. And who, even in death, inspired faith: his body lying uncorrupted for 400 years.
Bede bears witness to Cuthbert’s great wisdom and humility. His discipline. His preference for the poor. His courage in proclaiming the Good News of the Gospels to a hostile people.
It is a sparkling C.V. even for a saint; but if there is a golden thread that runs throughout his life it is his extraordinary prayer life. And the connection between this and the sheer abundance of supernatural wonders that occur in his story: the visions, dreams, prophesies, and the many healings.
St Cuthbert generated an above average hit rate of miracles. And although it was the duty of a saint’s hagiographer to embellish the life of their subject with miraculous elements, it is impossible to ignore these stories.
Many of them are strange: Otters attending worship; eagles delivering fish; epic prayer vigils that held back Viking invaders; and then there were the healings. There’s a reason St Cuthbert was known as the Wonder-Worker of Britian!
To remove the supernatural element from his story would be to miss the man and maybe even dismiss the God in whom he believed: the God who had once walked this sullied earth and worked wonders of His own.
Miracles are awkward, and embarrassing. Even to believers. Some say the miracles in the gospels were for then not now. They were for a past dispensation. Others see them as embellishments, there to spice up the tale.
But I am not sure that the God St Cuthbert was following, the God who we encounter in the gospels, would agree.
St. Thomas needed to push his fingers into Jesus’s resurrected body to feel the truth. And Jesus graciously recognised this natural reaction to His resurrection and let Thomas feel what his eyes could not compute.
Miracles were no more ‘normal’ in 1st
century Palestine than they were in St Cuthbert’s Northumbria or 21st
century West London. We don’t expect people to come back from the dead.
When my grandmother recited the Apostle’s creed, she apparently refused to say the line, ‘I believe in the resurrection of the body. ‘That’s too much for me,’ she would say.
She could give her assent to the creation of the world, the incarnation, the communion of saints, and the life everlasting: Why stop there, Gran?
Is our capacity to believe a miracle a question of temperament? Or taste? Does the miracle have to have some practical utility? I confess I struggle to see the point of St Cuthbert’s body remaining uncorrupted for 400 years.
Then again, I say I believe in the bodily resurrection. If the incorruptible body of a saint points people to faith in the power that raised Jesus from the dead, why stop there?
Is it for us to set the limits on what God can do in this world? St Cuthbert clearly didn’t think so. He had a high expectation of what God could do. I’d even suggest that ‘high expectation’ was his superpower.
Jesus said to his disciples: ‘You will do all these things and more and I think St Cuthbert took the Word at his word. We too could preach good news, feed the hungry, heal the sick, command nature - even raise the dead.
It is true that saints – with their SAS levels of discipline - can make us feel inadequate. Be intimidating rather than inspiring. My Lenten fast seems paltry set alongside the deprivations of a St.Cuthbert; my prayer life timid and erratic by comparison.
But our relative unsaintliness shouldn’t disqualify us from asking God for anything in faith. ‘Ask and you shall receive’. All followers of Jesus are continually being invited into the possibility of the miraculous.
Resisting the increasing violence of the world may seem impossible; but in our powerlessness we pray. We may not be standing up to our necks in the sea, like St Cuthbert, but we are asking the same God to bring about the miracle of peace.
When a friend falls sick, we ask this God to make them well; when when we break bread do we not say: ‘only say the word and I will be healed.’
At the risk of embarrassing myself and perhaps you, I’d like to tell you a couple of stories about healings I have witnessed. I will try not to embellish them to spice up the tale.
Last month I met an old friend who, 30 years before, was diagnosed with an incurable disease called Amyloidosis. She was told she had weeks to live. I remember praying all those years ago that she would not die.
And here she was, in 2026, in the words of her doctors, ‘a walking miracle’. The longest living survivor of this disease in the world. Did the medical treatment help? For sure. Did the intensity of my prayer make a difference? Maybe. Did God heal her? I believe it.
I didn’t put this miracle down to my saintliness. But I sensed the connection between my earnestness and God’s grace; I had a small expectation of what He can do. It was enough.
When I was 26, I was seriously ill with M.E. and told I might never recover. In desperation, more than expectation, I went to see a faith healer in the town of Narberth in West Wales, where my mum lived.
The man was a chimney sweep by trade; but he had this gift for praying for the sick. It was said he’d once restored the sight of a blind woman. A few years before, I’d seen him heal my sister’s hands of warts.
There was some debate about whether he was a Christian. And what he believed in. But I wasn’t that fussed about his theological credentials. I just wanted to get better.
He lived in a caravan, warmed by a two-bar heater. He laid his hand on my back and prayed, making the sign of the cross. He prayed in words I couldn’t quite make out.
Afterwards, I asked him about his faith, and he said, ‘I’m not much of a churchgoer, but I believe in Jesus. People think this is down to me. But it’s really down to Him. You can do it too. If you ask Him.’
In a matter of a few weeks, I was significantly better. God, in his grace, had healed me. I never looked back. My expectation of what God could do was raised.
A few years later, I wrote my first novel – The Testimony of Taliesin Jones – about a boy who experiences physical healing as the result of prayer, and feels compelled to tell the world about it.
It was a small miracle, but it raised enough faith in him to tell others about it. And of course, he has his faith tested in the face of indifference and hostility.
He encounters the familiar objections: why would God heal you and not everyone else? You would have got better anyway. He learns like St Thomas that ‘people don’t even believe things when they see them with their own eyes, let alone somebody else’s’.
He also discovers that physical healing is a doorway to a quiet but profound wider healing of his family, his community. And it all started with a prayer.
A miracle might just be a concession by God to our condition. But then the whole work that God does in Christ is a concession to our condition, extorted by our need for his compassion – for our healing.
When Bede wrote his life of Cuthbert, he wrote about the miracles in order to endorse the saint, but he also wrote to encourage us. As if to say: Look, the God who worked wonders in scripture, is still at work today.
You don’t have to have much faith to ‘do the stuff’ that Jesus did. Just a mustard seed. And you don’t have to be perfect to pray. Although the praying might be part of the perfecting.
There is a ‘you don’t ask, you don’t get’ element to this faith business. The power available to St Cuthbert is available to us! We just have to take the risk of asking for it. Of becoming naturally supernatural.
When we pause at the tomb of a great saint and say a prayer of thanks for their life, it’s good to remember that they too walked the same sullied earth as us, in the footsteps of the same wonder-working God.
‘You will do all these things and more,’ Jesus said to his followers. By followers I am sure he meant you and me, as well as the disciples and all the saints.
The faith that filled St Cuthbert, and raised this Cathedral, and that brings us together today, is all underpinned and underwritten by faith in the miracle of Christ’s resurrection. That is the foundation of our faith. Yesterday. Today. And tomorrow.