Plenty people tell me they don’t need an imaginary friend to help them get through life. I’m not sure I do either. There’s nothing imaginary about the events of Holy Week: they happen all the time.

Take the Passion narratives—three obvious headings: (1) failure to confront reality, that is to say, denials; (2) mob justice; and (3) evasion of responsibility.

Denials. Peter’s denials saved his skin—but only for that moment. Later, he wept, overcome with remorse. It’s hard to hear today’s news without being confronted by denials. How can a head of state deny his part in a situation that sees the bulk of his people starve while he lives in luxury? How can a politician say what is self-evidently not the case? Is anyone guilt-free? Who has not tried to get something for nothing, or used work time for personal business?

Mob ‘justice’. Men fighting in Manchester car parks on the news yesterday. FaceBook bullying. One story from 2007 sticks in my mind. In March of that year, The Times reported, a young man was surrounded by a gang with wooden sticks. Witnesses say that teenage girls egged on the attack with shouts of “Kill him, kill him.”

Evasion of responsibility. Pilate wriggled out of responsibility and washed his hands, the act of appeasers everywhere. Pilate needed to please his superiors. Sound familiar? Do you know a public service that is quick to take responsibility for its cockups? A politician? A banker? It’s easy to pick on them because they set themselves up for it.

We all make mistakes. We’re greedy. We want the dividends if we’re lucky enough to have money invested. Our pensions depend on them. We’re all complicit in all this, the sin of the world, and the consequences will run and run for generations. I accept that, and I can’t and don’t condemn anyone for faults that also afflict me. But the arrogance and lack of remorse that we see in public life is something else. According to the Gospels, Jesus was censorious about very little, but always, always, always about hypocrisy and complacency. Do you remember Josef Fritzl who locked up some of his family for almost 30 years? Even he seems to have acknowledged, eventually, the enormity of his actions after being confronted by his daughter in court. If you want Fritzl on a big scale, think of North Korea, where people are walled up for their entire lives.

The three headings can in truth be compressed into one: the sin of Adam—trying to be what we are not. The fig leaf has nothing to do with covering up our genitals, but is about covering up our naked selves by putting on a mask, a persona to hide our true faces. We deny the truth because of our need to save face, but it’s not the face that suffers. It is the inner self that I harm when I deny what is evident to others. This inner self that is, in my theology, the Christ within, the Divine within. When we harm others, we wound the Christ within them and we wound the Christ within ourselves, as surely as any nail on the cross.

Life is a struggle, and for most people on the planet it’s more of a struggle than it is for you and me. I look around and see the beauty and fragility of creation. One man’s illness results in the death of a plane load of people. Creation is constantly beset by terrible acts of evil, appalling events everywhere. Hundreds of innocents are slaughtered in power struggles: one group of people trying to control others. I hear of it even in my own land, my own town: abuse, slavery of one sort or another. “At times it almost seems as if the very stars are being wrenched from heaven by some evil force” * — which is exactly how the events of Good Friday are described in the Gospels.

This urge to the inhuman is in us all somewhere. Evil, badness, cruelty all begin as a thought in someone’s mind. When someone decides to support the things that evil people do, that decision begins as a thought in someone’s mind. When we are tormented by what to do, when beads of sweat start forming on our foreheads and drop like grapes to the floor, we are experiencing something of the mental agony that we hear of in the Garden of Gethsemane.

All this because we have the power to choose, wisely or unwisely. The power to choose actions that might fracture (diabolic), or might build up (anabolic). The power to choose actions that might increase the amount of misery in the world, or that attempt to decrease it.

The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden attempts to explain why we humans so often get it wrong. It illustrates that when we choose for selfish reasons rather than for selfless reasons, we disturb the cosmos. It explains why we so often hide behind masks, spiritual cosmetics, spiritual fig leaves, rather than stand in full frontal nudity before the Divine.

Every choice begins as a thought. We need to be aware of our thoughts because we need to choose wisely, to have courage to stand for truth and right, to have courage to be nonconformist, and stand up to those who try to persuade us to do what we know we should not. We may be laughed at, scorned, cast out, sneered at. But from this suffering we grow in self-knowledge, and growing in self-knowledge, with all the shame and joy that such growth brings, is a step towards growing into the Divine. We have a guide.

* thanks to The Revd Elizabeth France

Curved space-time

A homily for Passion Sunday

Picture an egg timer. The sand in the top chamber is time and space before the Christ event. People are reliant on ‘the law’ and on rules, ticking boxes to get details right. It’s a monochrome world where the punishment fits the crime, where earthquakes signify the anger of the God(s), where illness is viewed as a consequence of transgressions, where people use force to assume abusive positions of power and control.

The sand enters the part of the upper chamber with sloping sides. Imagine Gabriel’s visit to Mary—that is, the Incarnation—happening as the chamber narrows. Imagine that the Nativity, the life of Jesus, the Passion, as the chamber becomes more constricted.

Imagine that the orifice between the two chambers is the death on the cross. Imagine that the time spent by the sand passing through that orifice is Jesus in the tomb and the harrowing of hell.

The sand enters the lower chamber. As the chamber widens out we have Ascension and Pentecost. If at the moment of crucifixion Christ becomes unrestricted by locality, then at the Ascension he is unrestricted by space, and at Pentecost by time. Cosmic Christ. The lower chamber becomes infinitely big, multicoloured, completely unconstricted. A wide place.

Now turn the egg timer upside down, and instead of thinking of sand falling from top to bottom, think now of it passing from bottom to top. Ascending. At the Ascension our humanity is lifted to the Divine. Made like him, like him we rise (Charles Wesley). The ascension is the vital part of the story, the resurrection merely part of it. Through the Ascension, man approaches the Divine. ‘God the Logos became what we are, in order that we may become what he himself is’ (Irenaeus).

Incarnation to Pentecost, the Christ-event, is all one, indivisible into sections. Just as for any one of us birth, growth, adolescence, prime, maturity and senility merge inseparably into one another, so also for the Christ event.

Maybe this egg timer doesn’t work for you. Try a cosmic image with the universe contracting down into a black hole, Golgotha, then bursting forth into a new colourful glorious renewed and resurrected universe. Imagine everything before Christ being concentrated into him in the black hole, and taken at the moment of crucifixion into a new world. ‘When the eternal word assumed human existence at his Incarnation, he also assumed temporality. He drew time into the sphere of eternity. Christ is himself the bridge between time and eternity … In the Word incarnate, who remains forever, the presence of eternity with time becomes bodily and concrete’ (Ratzinger).

Or, if that doesn’t work either, then try bathos. Think of Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins jumping through a dull London pavement into a brightly coloured new world where everything is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. No, maybe not.

Is this true? Is it merely poetry, or myth, or allegory? It’s all these things—without the ‘merely’.

It’s not just something that happened 2000 years ago. It happens every day of our lives. It happens every time the penny drops about a situation that has troubled us. It happens every time we realize that we need to reassess priorities, to think again. it happens when circumstances force us to change direction, when we realize that we are at the end of a road, when we are at the end of our tether (Blessed are the poor in spirit), and that giving up what we once held dear will release us to possibilities as yet undreamed of. When we realize that the seed must die in order to flower. When, in psychological terms, we let egotistic self give way to selflessness. When I sacrifice ‘all the vain things that charm me most’, I move into new, more open, territory.

If we want to see Jesus then we must look this death full in the face. If we refuse to acknowledge the reality of death, we refuse to see Jesus. Confronting these deaths is some of the most difficult work we ever do. It is soul troubling. It is sweat inducing, headache making, wringing out Gethsemane work. But only then can the balloon begin to ascend, and the imagination take flight.

Resurrection as imagination. Compassion, enjoyment and fun begin to replace seriousness, separateness and superiority. Caterpillar to butterfly. Larva to imago.

What died on the cross? Self.

Union with God is a mystery that is worked out in human persons. The personal character of a human being who has entered on the way of union is never impaired, even though he renounces his own will and his natural inclinations. This is how the human personality comes to its full realization in grace. (St Isaac)