Enter the Mystery

“God can work through our weakness,” says Fr Richard Green in his homily for the Feast of St James on Day 2 of our Pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham

---

One of the many joys of joining this pilgrimage to Walsingham every year is that I get to have a whole week without any meetings. Most clergy, and probably quite a lot of lay people, will tell you that church meetings can often be the bane of our lives.

Occasionally, you have a real corker of a meeting, where everyone is on topic and loads of stuff gets decided and achieved. But I’d be lying if I said this happened every single time.

I often wonder what proportion of my 22 years as a deacon and a priest has been spent in meetings, and what proportion of those have been really really exciting – though I think I’d rather not know in case I get too depressed!

The people who are part of a meeting can of course make or break it, and looking around the room is often a fascinating psychological case study. I don’t know if you read the Church Times, but Dave Walker’s weekly cartoons are always good value. He once did one entitled “The PCC”, and it described the people who are part of it. Here are some of the characters he drew, with their captions.

There was the Vicar – often the chair, gets sat on by the churchwardens.

Treasurer – it is their job to say “no”.

Young idealist – plans to change the PCC, the church and ultimately the world. Will last 5-6 months.

Inspirer of tangents and pointless discussions – adds 37 minutes to average meeting.

Clock watcher – job: to ensure meeting finishes an hour before last orders. Usually fails.

Dissenter – spots the faults in all proposals and asks difficult questions at the annual meeting. A little harsh maybe, but surely more than a grain of truth in there!

I would have loved to have had the mother of James and John, maybe the brothers themselves, and St Paul on a church committee together to watch the dynamic unfold. We have this woman – according to some scholars Blessed Mary’s sister Salome and therefore Jesus’ aunt. She is brash and bold, unafraid to make a crazy suggestion to the chair. “My two boys would be ideal for this position” she effectively says.

The boys themselves, James and John, sit quietly in the corner, perhaps mortified by their mother’s antics, or maybe having put her up to it in the first place. They mutter quietly to each other.

Then you have St Paul, who, if our passage from 2 Corinthians is anything to go by, is the negative one, continually saying how hard things are: “We are afflicted in every way … perplexed … persecuted … struck down…” What on earth do you make of this collection of individuals?!

The key, to this, to today’s feast in honour of St James, to every church meeting and indeed perhaps to the entire Christian faith can be found at the very start of that beautiful passage from 2 Corinthians. “We have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us”, Paul writes. The nature of the treasure, Paul had spoken of in the previous verse: “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”.

A clay jar. Something fragile, easily broken. That’s you, and me, the mother of James and John, the two brothers, the other disciples and even Paul himself. We can be weak, we can be proud, we can talk too long in a meeting, or not speak up at all, we can think too highly of ourselves or not highly enough.

And, of course, as fragile clay jars we can be broken by others, put down or spoken harshly to, mistreated or abused by our fellow Christians, society or the church as a whole. And yet, and yet …. Paul is absolutely clear that God chooses us precisely because of our weakness and our fragility and our brokenness to be the vessels through which his extraordinary power shines out into the world.

Another reason why I love this pilgrimage, apart from no meetings, is that we can come before the Lord in all our brokenness and weakness and simply be ourselves. We can make our confession and be assured of God’s love and forgiveness; we can come to the healing liturgy and receive those powerful signs of his grace, the laying on of hands, anointing and sprinkling.

We can simply spend time gazing on his presence in the Blessed Sacrament. As clergy, we can step back from always having to be on show (unless you’ve been asked to preach!) and be ministered to.

As MAC members, or people with roles in your congregation, you can simply attend church and not have to worry about the latest complaint, the leaking roof, or if the reader will turn up or not. Here on pilgrimage we can once again allow that wonderful light of the Gospel to shine through our weak and fragile clay shell.

Having a St James’ Church in my group I’ve heard many sermons on this feast. And they often focus on James’s weaknesses, his lack of understanding of what it meant truly to be a follower of Jesus. Yes, he didn’t quite get it. Yes, it was a preposterous request, to sit at Jesus’ left or right in his kingdom. Yes, he shouldn’t have asked his mother to speak up for him. Yes, he sparked an almighty row with the other disciples. But surely this makes him authentic. He is a clay jar just like us. And yet of course, the extraordinary power of God, the light of the Gospel, did ultimately shine through him. He did drink the cup of suffering that Jesus spoke about.

The Acts of the Apostles tells us that he was beheaded by Herod, so becoming the very first of the 12 to die a martyr’s death. God turns our weakness into strength, our fragility into power and our suffering into glory, for his sake.

I was a little unfair to Paul earlier. He doesn’t just dwell on the negative side of things. He talks, yes, of the troubles he faced, but also says that despite all this he is not crushed, driven to despair, forsaken or destroyed. If even in a small way, our clay jar likeness echoes the suffering of Jesus, then surely the power of his resurrection will be at work in us also.

I’m sure that Mary knew only too well what is was like to be a fragile clay jar as she said her “yes” to God at the Annunciation. She would have been only too aware of the difficult path that lay ahead for her and her son; she saw at first hand the suffering that he endured for our sakes. And yet, despite all of this, she was still able to say “God has gladdened my heart with joy”.

The joy comes from knowing that he has chosen us, you and me, weak and fallible and prone to failure as we are, to make known his purposes to the world. So, next time you’re in a church meeting and it’s dragging on too long, or someone is waffling off the point, or raising objections to everything, or causing a row, or proposing something totally crazy, just think to yourself: “Yes. This is how it is supposed to be. We are clay jars, prone to weakness, prone to error, prone to cracking.”

This is not to excuse bad behaviour, but it is to say that God can work through our weakness, just as he did with James and so many other saints in the history of the church. This is the power of God; this is the true joy of the Gospel – to him be glory for ever and ever. Amen.