Christ Church

In the Shadows of the Cross

Reflections for the Church Parade at Christ Church on Wednesday in Holy Week,
(Tenebrae), April 16th, 2025

In the western Christian traditions, this week is Holy Week and brings us to Easter. Unusually, and somewhat paradoxically, it was also the week in which there was the Annual Cadet Church Parade of the 254 King’s-Edgehill Cadet Corps at Christ Church. What follows are the reflections read by students, including two from Maasland College in Oss, Netherlands, who are visiting the School. Students from our Corps have participated in their commemorations of the liberation of the Netherlands. It is lovely to have students from Oss with us. The reflections focus on aspects of the School’s history and purpose as seen ‘in the shadows of the Cross’.

Everyone loves a parade! But what kind of parade? There are all kinds of parades: parades of military might and power, parades of cultural pride and social identities – from St. Patrick’s Day Parades to Pride Parades, parades of protest and advocacy, parades of national celebrations and anniversaries, parades of solemn mourning and remembrance, parades of religion and faith. What kind of parade is our parade? Is it about calling attention to ourselves? ‘Look at us looking at you looking at us?’ That would be merely self-referential. Is it not something more that reminds us of the principles of the School and its connection both to the immediate community and the wider world?

The School is a Corps on parade today. A corps is a body, a living body, not a corpse. Our parade bears witness to the ideals of service and sacrifice that belong to the history and purpose of the School. This is expressed in the founding mottoes of King’s and Edgehill: Deo Legi Regi Gregi and Fideliter, ‘For God, for the Law, for the King, for the People,’ and ‘Faithfulness.’ Together they provide a counter to the culture of privilege and self-interest. They promote the qualities of commitment to the good of one another and to the ideals of thinking and living beyond oneself.

This is the 144th year of the 254 King’s-Edgehill Cadet Corps in the 238th year of the School. Students and faculty of King’s and Edgehill have been part of many of the defining struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries in many different places all over the world: Egypt in 1801, the War of 1812-1814 with the USA, the 1815 Battle of Waterloo in Belgium, the 1837-1838 Rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada, the 1854-1855 Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the 1885 Riel Rebellion in Western Canada, the Boer War of 1899-1902 in South Africa, the Great War, World War I of 1914-1918, and, subsequently, World War II in 1939-1945, the 1951-1953 Korean War with UN Forces, and the Vietnam War of 1955-1975. Quite a litany of wars in many different parts of the globe and with respect to various conflicts and divisions! Students from the School, men and women, continue to serve in the Canadian Forces to this day, and in other militaries as well. The shadows of the darkness of war have been a constant and continuing feature of our School’s history and our global world, it seems.

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Not knowing what we want or do?

Passiontide is the term for the last two weeks of Lent in the western Christian traditions. Quite often the cross is veiled, at once present and known yet obscured and not fully known. It symbolizes an important principle that belongs to the educational project. Knowing that we do not know impells the quest to know. Our knowing is at best partial and at worst misguided and erroneous.

In a remarkable scene in Matthew’s Gospel read this week in Chapel, the mother of Zebedee’s children comes to Jesus “desiring a certain thing of him.” He asks her “What do you want?” She says, “Grant that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom.” She seeks what she thinks is best for her children. No doubt all parents do and, no doubt, all of us seek what we think is best for ourselves. But do we always know what that is? What does her request mean? It means positions of privilege and power, of status and prestige for her sons. But that can only mean something for them at the expense of others. It is simply a desire for power for some over others.

There is a truth in her request but only insofar as it recognizes the power and truth of God in Jesus. But it is incomplete and misguided. How does Jesus respond? With the simple words, “ye know not what you ask.” It is at once gentle and devastating and a direct and clear statement about an important aspect of our humanity.

“There are known knowns,” Donald Rumsfeld famously observed in 2003 as the US Secretary of Defence. “These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know that we don’t know.” This was, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek pointed out, a piece of amateur philosophizing which leaves out what is most significant. What is that? The “unknown knowns,” the things that you know but don’t know that you know.

Socrates’ great insight was that “I know that I do not know.” This is the beginning of wisdom; the complement to the biblical idea that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Our not knowing belongs to our desire to know but in the recognition that there is always more to know and that the more we learn the more we realize how much more there is to know. This is not to suggest that knowledge is simply quantitative, a mere adding up of bits and bytes of data or information. There are also ethical implications.

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Striving with God

When we hear the word ‘Israel’, we probably think of a place or a country in the Middle East. We forget that it is actually, first and foremost, a name and one that belongs to religion and theology. “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed” (Gen. 32.28). Jacob wrestling with God becomes Israel. All the promises of God to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob become the promises to Israel, the people of God who will be known as ‘Israelites’. Not the same thing as ‘Israelis’ which is a modern term for citizens of the state of Israel.

Jacob changes from being a figure of deceit and cunning – tricking his brother Esau out of his birthright and deceiving his father Isaac – to becoming the figure of faith and insight into the truth of God. His vision of angels ascending and descending a ladder extending from the earth to heaven is complemented with his wrestling with God and being renamed Israel, meaning “one who strives with God.”

This is more than simply a matter of tribalism. Through Israel – as with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – all nations of the earth shall be blessed. God is not simply the property or possession of any one group or identity. Perhaps nowhere is that more profoundly seen than in the encounter between the Canaanite woman and Jesus in the lesson read this week in Chapel. As I like to say, we do not possess the truth, the truth possesses us.

The Canaanite woman is from outside Israel, a non-Israelite. Yet the encounter will reveal her as a true Israelite because she strives with God, not against God. She has a powerful hold on the truth which she perceives in Jesus which she will not let go. She comes seeking him and seeking from him the healing of her daughter, “grievously vexed with a devil.” Not a healing of the body but of the mind or soul. It may not be the language of the therapeutic culture in terms of mental health, but it speaks to the ways in which we in our minds can be obsessed, even possessed with thoughts that are destructive of human personality. She senses in Jesus the power of God that alone can heal her daughter; an insight into the nature of God himself as Creator and Redeemer, of Jesus as Lord and Saviour. One who knows us better than we do ourselves.

She will not be put off in her quest. She is the image of humble perseverance and faith. But the encounter is quite disturbing because the scene is equally a critique of Israel, meaning the people of Israel pictured here in the disciples. The dialogue with the Canaanite woman reveals a distorted or mistaken view of the vocation of Israel. To put it bluntly, the dialogue criticizes the idea that God can be owned by any one group or another. In other words, the insight of the Canaanite woman is that God is the God of all human beings, not just some. Her insight is about the universality of God.

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Be it unto me according to thy word

I know. You did not hear those words in the Scripture reading this week. You heard the parable of the prodigal son, the one who wasted his inheritance only to come to himself in a far-off country, poor and destitute, where he “comes to himself” and returns. It is a powerful story of homecoming.

It is captured in what is probably the last painting by Rembrandt called the Return of the Prodigal Son and which hangs in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, having been acquired almost a century later by Catherine the Great. The Return of the Prodigal Son is the title, too, of a wonderful meditation by Henri Nouwen about the painting and the parable as a story of homecoming. It is really all about the journey of our lives as embraced in God’s providential love.

You have all just returned from the March break. Some of you have, perhaps, gone to far-off places. I hope you weren’t left poor and destitute! You have now returned to the school, your alma mater or nursing mother with respect to intellectual and spiritual matters. We left just at the early beginnings of Lent and now return to find ourselves in mid-Lent in the patterns of spirituality and prayer that belong to the Christian understanding. In the Islamic world, this is the last week of Ramadan, equally a special time of prayer, fasting, reflection and responsibilities towards one’s community in the Islamic understanding. These religious themes contribute to our lives in community in our commitment to the ethical ideas of love and service.

But why this text, “be it unto me according to thy word”? Some of you will recognise that these are the words of Mary, the blessed Mother of our Lord, the theotokos or mother of God in the Christian teaching. What does it have to do with the idea of homecoming? What does homecoming mean? At the very least, it suggests a sense of purpose and connection about who we essentially are in our common humanity. But as the story of the prodigal son shows, homecoming belongs to who we are in the embrace of God’s love. The son who has rejected his father’s home and thus his father himself in going off to a distant country has forgotten who he is but “comes to himself” in a beautiful image of repentance.

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They understood none of these things.

“Behold,” Jesus says in the Gospel which sets us upon the spiritual pilgrimage of Lent, “we go up to Jerusalem.” Wednesday was Ash Wednesday and marks the formal beginning of the forty days of Lent, a time of renewal and reflection, of repentance, and of prayer and study of the Holy Scriptures. Dust and ashes are strong reminders of our being created from the dust of the ground and of the necessity of repentance which is our turning back to God in whom we find the truth and dignity and freedom of our humanity, knowing even as we are known in the divine love.

Something of the meaning of Lent is set before us in the Gospel reading from Luke about going up to Jerusalem, read along with Paul’s powerful hymn of love. It is really all about the divine love setting our human loves in order.

Jerusalem is more than just a place on a map, more than a historic city caught up in a long, long sequence of the endless conflicts of empires and cultures. It is important for Judaism anciently and at present in the state of Israel politically. It has been a place of conflict and conquest during the Crusades, thus indicating its significance religiously for Jews and Christians and Muslims. It remains an important place geopolitically in terms of the tensions that belong to the international global order. But beyond those things, Jerusalem holds a special symbolic meaning as the image of heaven, heavenly Jerusalem, we might say. It is an image of the community of our humanity’s highest good. Yet, as the Gospel passage read in Chapel makes clear, to go to Jerusalem means the hard lessons of sin and evil out of which comes the wonder and the glory of love.

Jesus tells the disciples exactly what going up to Jerusalem means. It means the awful things of his Passion. He speaks of his death and resurrection. But “they understood none of these things.” It is a profound statement that relates directly to the educational project. Things are taught but not always immediately learned or known. Yet our awareness of our not knowing is a crucial feature of our coming to know, especially concerning the things that matter most. To know that we don’t know, as Socrates famously taught, is the condition for our pursuit of knowing. Not the despair of learning but the passionate desire to know, what Plato calls the eros of knowing.

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Joseph and his brothers

The story of Joseph and his brothers ends the Book of Genesis on the poignant and moving idea of reconciliation. It is in that sense a wonderful illustration of what the poet George Herbert calls “the two vast and spacious things” which are most needed to be pondered and known, “sin and love.”

Joseph, as we saw last week, was hated by his brothers because he was the favourite son of their father, the problem of sibling rivalry, on the one hand, and the limitations of human love, on the other hand. How to love our children in ways that respect each in their own particularity? How to avoid the temptation to quantify our loves, our likes and our dislikes, about who loves who more than others? Do we need to let the love of one for another consume us with resentment and envy? Yet it so often does when love becomes a matter of competing for attention either on the part of children or for that matter, of parents, as in Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear. “Which of you,” he says, using the royal ‘we’, to his three daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia, “shall we say doth love us most, that we our largest bounty may extend?”

Joseph, who was not killed by his brothers despite their intent, was thrown into a waterless pit, his coat taken by his brothers and smeared with the blood of a lamb to deceive their father, Jacob, about his death. Unbeknownst to them, he is sold into slavery in Egypt where he rises after various adventures to a position of authority in Pharaoh’s government where he stores up food in anticipation of a period of famine. Years later during the time of famine, his brothers came to Egypt seeking food. Joseph sees them but they do not know him. What will happen in that encounter? Will it be an occasion for Joseph’s revenge on them for their evil intent?

Marilynne Robinson notes that the Book of Genesis “is framed by two stories of remarkable forgiveness, of Cain by the Lord, and of his ten brothers by Joseph.” Cain who killed Abel is protected from being killed himself. Out of his lineage will come Enoch and Jubal, the one who will, like Elijah, be taken up into heaven, and the other, who is the father of musical instruments. While the concept of a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a kind of measured revenge as a form of human justice, appears in Genesis, it is constantly questioned. As Robinson nicely puts it, “Whoever kills a man will be killed by a man. Adam kills Adam for killing Adam, an image of God destroys an image of God for having destroyed an image of God,” suggesting that this is “the fundamental absurdity even of punishment limited by strict equivalence.” It is a human way of looking at things which contrasts with the sense of divine restraint that operates in so much of Genesis and which qualifies the simplistic view of divine retribution. Even the story of the flood ends not with the complete annihilation of the human world which has so abused creation but with a renewal of creation and the setting of bounds to human behaviour in the form of covenant and law. In this sense, Genesis as a whole acts as a check on revenge and violence.

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Two vast and spacious things

The Book of Genesis is a rich theological text. It is foundational for the scriptural and philosophical traditions of Judaism and Christianity especially. It is not a scientific treatise nor a collection of fables and myths haphazardly thrown together. It is theology, a commentary on the overarching justice or righteousness of God in creation and human experience despite the repeated and constant failings of our humanity. As the theologian and novelist Marilynne Robinson notes it is really “a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil” that “acknowledge[s] in a meaningful way the darkest aspects of the reality we experience” and undertakes to “reconcile them with the goodness of God and Being itself against which the darkness of our world stands out so sharply.”

Much of Genesis is the story of sibling rivalry, a story of brothers. There is the story of Abraham and Lot, the story of Isaac and Ishmael, of the sisters Leah and Rachel, of Jacob and Esau, all of which ultimately culminate in the story of Joseph and his brothers. The tensions and divisions that these stories present are the setting through which God’s goodness and will, his purpose and patience, are glimpsed and known. It is all the grace of providence at work in and through our sins and failings. The first story after the fall of our humanity from Paradise is the story of Cain and Abel, the first murder. The last story of Joseph and his brothers, so beautifully and movingly told, is about forgiveness and reconciliation. Ultimately, it is the overcoming of the resentments and envy, and even violence that are so often a feature of sibling rivalry.

Joseph is the youngest son and the so-called favourite of his father, Jacob, of which the coat given to him by his father is the constant reminder, it seems. This excites the hatred of his brothers towards him especially when he tells them his dreams which they think proclaim his superiority over his older brothers. They conspire to kill him and throw him into one of the pits in the wilderness near Shechem and to tell their father that a wild beast has devoured him. Only Reuben intervenes to prevent them from killing him, planning to “rescue him out of their hand, to restore him to his father,” as the text puts it.

Joseph is left in an empty and waterless pit only to be found by Midianite traders who sell him to the Ishmaelites, in one version, or to an Egyptian officer of Pharaoh, Potiphar, in another. In any event, he is not killed but instead rises to prominence in Egypt through an intriguing set of events related again to his dreams which are really about prophetic insight.

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A Love Song for all times

“Let me sing for my beloved a love song.” St. Augustine long ago spoke about the Scriptures as “letters from home,” a lovely image. They are ‘love letters,’ we might say, writings that speak to us about the love of God who seeks the perfection of our broken and disordered loves. That is signaled in the Scriptures as a whole and rather pointedly in a number of texts that are explicit about the underlying theological idea of God’s love for our humanity in the face of the disorders and disarray of our world and our hearts. In that sense, the love letters of Scripture encourage a spirit of inquiry and self-criticism that act as a check upon our self-righteousness or pride and our self-obsessions and the divisions and animosities which they so often occasion.

In Chapel, the readings and reflections have often revolved around the love of God and the love of neighbour, what is known as “the Summary of the Law,” to illustrate the way in which the divine love shapes, orders, and re-orders our human loves. That theme is clearly present in Paul’s great ‘Hymn of Love’ in 1st Corinthians but in many other texts as well. Isaiah 5, verses 1 to 7, is a beautiful love song which convicts our consciences in order to awaken us to the divine love which Paul celebrates in his paean of praise to charity, the love that binds our humanity together as a body, a community of love. As John says in a passage frequently heard in Chapel, “God is love and he that abideth in love abides in God and God in him.” This consolidates and concentrates the overarching theme of the Scriptures overall.

Speaking in the first person, Isaiah says, “Let me sing for my beloved a love song concerning his vineyard.” God here is ‘the Beloved’. What or who is “his vineyard”? It is us as God’s creation. “My beloved,” he says, “had a vineyard.” He goes on, speaking now in the third person, to describe God in relation to his vineyard. “He [God] digged and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he [God] built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it.” It is a lovely image of God as the gardener or vinedresser of creation. “He looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” Ah! Trouble in paradise, in the vineyard, it seems!

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Light in the dark, Love in the ruins

Not the same thing as love in ruins! Sunday just past was Candlemas. Whatever one makes of groundhogs and their shadows, Candlemas marks a significant transition of the year in a number of different registers: astronomically, historically, socially and religiously. It is the meeting, hypapante to use its Greek title, a coming together of Law and Prophecy, of the Old Testament and the New, a meeting of ancient Simeon and aged Anna the Prophetess and the very young, of the infant Christ and his young mother, Mary, in short, of men and women and a child. A meeting in the Temple in Jerusalem.

The full title itself joins together the practices of Eastern Orthodox and Western Christianity. The former marks that day as the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, forty days after Christmas; the latter as the Feast of the Purification of St. Mary the Virgin; in short, a joint festival of Mary and Jesus. Since the fifth century, it has been observed with lighted candles, and, hence, the more convenient moniker, Candlemas. It was a 17th century Anglican Bishop, John Cosin who joined the titles in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the mother Prayer Book of the Anglican Communion.

Candlemas looks backward to Christmas and ahead to Holy Week and Easter. As such it marks the transition from light to life. Astronomically, February 2nd is one of the cross-quarter days in between Christmas Day, Dec 25th, and Lady Day, the Annunciation, March 25th. It falls roughly half-way between the winter solstice (December 21st) and the spring or vernal equinox (March 20th). Already we have seen some of the quantum leaps in sunlight and the lengthening of the days.

Yet the themes of Light and Life meet in the greater wonder of Love. Christmas in the Christian understanding never loses sight of Christ’s sacrifice and thus to the underlying principle of the divine love which seeks the ultimate good of our humanity, even in the face of the disorders, chaos, and evils of our hearts and our world.

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Something rich and strange

“Be still and know that I am God,” the psalmist says (Ps. 46. 11). It speaks to the life of the School in the recognition of the need to be still and quiet within ourselves in order to begin to think reflectively. Such is Chapel. Quiet moments that are not about this and that in the busyness of our daily lives, not about the competing concerns that stir up emotions and excite distress and discord, but a time of contemplation and quiet about the universal aspects of our humanity.

We have been considering, in the context of ‘epiphany,’ the idea of ‘complementary universalities’ as opposed to conflicting or ‘competing universalities’. One example is the universality of suffering common to the human condition in one way or another but differently addressed by the various world religions and in the competing social and therapeutic ideologies of contemporary culture. We have tried to connect “the gift of myrrh,” in the classic Epiphany story of the Magi-Kings, with Jesus in the Temple making known to us that he “must be about [his] Father’s business,” and with the first miracle, “the beginning of signs” which turns upon his “hour,” an explicit reference to his passion and death out of which comes resurrection and life. All three speak to the radical meaning of ‘epiphany’ as the making known of the essential divinity of Christ and the idea of God’s will and purpose for our humanity. God seeks the ultimate good for our humanity which is not found simply in the circumstances and actions of our lives but in our being found in God’s all embracing will manifest as love. This way of looking at things has parallels with other religions and philosophical traditions.

Diotima, the fictional female philosopher in Plato’s Symposium, argues that “the object of [our] love,” meaning our desires, “is that [we] should have the good” and to “have it forever.” “Love,” she says, “is the desire to have the good forever.” Good here is not simply something subjective and personal. It concerns the good of all within which we find the good of ourselves. But how to attain that ideal? That is another question and one which the Epiphany stories undertake to show by way of the motion of God towards us that complements our desires for something universal. Epiphany is miracle, the miracle of life itself in God who is the source and end of all life. In the Christian view, this focuses on Christ. “In him was life; and the life was the light of everyone.”

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