How sweet are your words

Exodus 17.8-13 ‘Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed.’

2 Timothy 3.14-4.2 ‘That the man of God be complete, equipped for every good work.’

Luke 18.1-8 ‘God will give justice to his elect, who cry to him.’

 

How sweet are your words on my tongue!

They are sweeter than honey to my mouth.

(Psalm 119.103)

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This morning’s second reading, with its reference to the scriptures, is a good opportunity to reflect on the word of God, as read in the Bible, and how that word is, to quote Psalm 119, ‘is a lantern to my feet and a light upon my path.’ (Psalm 119.105).

I hope also it will inspire each of us back to reading the Bible, or reading and hearing the Bible in a fresh way.

Each of us will have a different relationship with books.

Some of us will be novel type people, some preferring thrillers or detective works.

Some of us will be non-fiction readers, some preferring biography or meaty history.

Books can open up new worlds for us and allow our imagination to run riot.

Some people are described as ‘bookish’ meaning that they always have their head in a book, and the implication that they are so in a book they’re not in this world.

A song of my youth, in the late 1980s, had this line:

I bought you a book

Now you can read, yes

Get the experience without having to bleed (The Bolshoi, ‘She don’t know’, 1987)

Could it be that, sometimes, Christians are to be so caught up in a book, the Bible, that they’re not in this world, that they don’t know how to bleed?

We read the Bible as ‘the word of the Lord’, and know Jesus Christ as ‘the Word of God, the Word made flesh.’

The reading of the Bible is to bring us into a vibrant and living relationship with the Word Made Flesh, with Jesus Christ the one whose life blood was poured out for us.

Writing to Timothy, St Paul, speaks of being ‘acquainted with the scriptures’.

What a beautiful phrase.

Being acquainted with something or a person means to be at ease with them, familiar with them and deeply affectionate.

I wonder if that’s how you feel about the Bible?

Are you at ease with it, familiar with it, deeply affectionate towards it?

The sad fact is that Christianity in the modern world has gone down two routes, both of which would be unrecognisable to St Paul or the Fathers of the Church.

One route is the ‘Biblicist’, where the Bible is to be taken literally without nuance or appreciation of context.

The other is the ‘Bibliosceptic’, as I’ll call them, are those who say that the Bible is a text from a remote past, that has some inspiring phrases, but that’s about it.

Both take the Bible literally but not seriously.

One sore point for Biblicists and Bibliosceptics alike is part of a verse from Paul’s second letter to Timothy which was read this morning: ‘All Scripture is breathed out by God’ – that means the Bible claims to be literally true they cry!

Taking it literally one uses it like an instruction manual, and also taking it literally the other effectively bins it.

It’s tempting to quote Jesus’ words to the Sadducees: ‘You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.’ (Matthew 21.27)

Only one bit of the Bible was inscribed by God on tablets of stone, that’s the Ten Commandments.

The rest is breathed out by God and captured by human writers.

That is not to diminish the Bible, but to be real about it.

We are to be acquainted with the Bible, at ease with it, familiar with it, deeply affectionate towards it, because through the scriptures we meet Jesus Christ, ‘the word made flesh.’ (John 1.14).

Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1960s, said that ‘Christians are the people, not of a book, but of a person, himself described as the Word of God’.

And what Jesus, St Paul and others call ‘the Scriptures’ refer to what we call the Old Testament.

That is the first witness to Jesus Christ, as he himself makes clear to the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus on the Day of his Resurrection:

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. (Luke 24.27)

That’s what the apostle Philip did on the road between Jerusalem to Gaza with an Ethiopian man when he asked about what the prophet Isaiah was on about:

Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus. (Acts of the Apostles 8.35)

When this was opened to them on the road to Emmaus, and then Jesus broke bread, the two disciples declared:

“Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” (Luke 24.32)

The Ethiopian heard Philip’s interpretation and asked immediately to be baptised.

We don’t read this book to get the experience without having to bleed, but we read the Scriptures to take up the cross of the One who suffered for us.

So, the Scriptures, that wonderful collection of texts, different in genre, written over centuries, are the reliable witness that the Church has to the mighty acts of God in Christ.

Their purpose is that we come to know Jesus, the Word Made Flesh, in the power of the Spirit, so that with him we see the Father’s face.

May we each renew our acquaintance with the Scriptures, cherish them, be at ease with them, love them.

As we come to taste the Living Bread from heaven may we also say of the Scriptures:

How sweet are your words on my tongue!

They are sweeter than honey to my mouth.

 

 

A Funeral Homily for the late Angela Bond RIP

 Homily preached at the funeral of Angela Bond, Croydon Minster 14th October 2025. Mother of a young child, Angela worshipped weekly at the Minster and worked in the parish office for 4 years. She died last month.

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A funeral is a time when we come together to remember, give thanks for and commend to God a person we have known and loved.

We are doing that today for Angela.

And we entrust her on a journey, begun in this life and continuing now to the very heart of God, in the hope and confidence that she is led by the hand of Jesus Christ – the way, the truth and the life - to the place prepared for her, as our gospel reading promises.

The promise and hope is offered to us that death is the birth into a new life, a life we glimpse through acts of faith and hope and love, and revealed uniquely in the life, teaching and resurrection of Jesus Christ, through whom we are promised a heavenly dwelling place.

In the introduction to the service booklet I have written a few words saying what a funeral is and, hopefully, helping us reflect on some of the feelings we have here today.

The horrible reality is that we are here because someone we love, Angela, a child of God, made in God’s image and likeness, has died and we can no longer share our lives with her on earth.

A funeral is a time of remembering, of giving thanks, of grieving and of giving and receiving comfort. It is also a time of healing and reconciliation.

When we come to our prayers shortly that is a good moment to whisper before God, things said and done that are now regretted, or things we failed to say or do for which we seek forgiveness too.

A funeral is never an easy experience, especially when the person who has died is one so relatively young, like Angela.

Here we are faced with our own mortality, that none of us will live for ever, and we are presented with the challenge of how to live our lives well and to the full.

Do go back to those words, and the words of our readings, for they seek to proclaim also something very important about today.

That proclamation we read in the scriptures is that ‘many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it’ (Song of Songs 8.6).

For Christians this love is the love of God, embodied in Jesus Christ; the floods of death could not drown his love, which endures because of his resurrection from the dead.

Angela shared that hope.

Sunday by Sunday she was here in this church, as along with Alex, she brought their daughter to learn what faith is and to know the enduring love of God: what a gift to give to a daughter.

Angela is, as we know, both a mother and daughter, and I can’t help but reflect on that picture above the desk she worked at for four years in our church office.

It’s a detail of Philippo Lippi’s  Madonna and Child. There is a glorious, golden background but in Mary’s face we see the tenderness of a mother and the sadness the will overwhelm her as she stands at the foot to the cross watching as her son dies, seeing his pain and mourning her loss.

May Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for Angela, for Hilda, for her daughter.

Finally, given Angela’s love of, commitment to and involvement in theatre, a quote from Shakespeare is not out of place.

In Hamlet Ophelia is distributing herbs to others and says, ‘there’s rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray, love, remember.’

Today we have remembered Angela.

Though separated now, we still love her – mother, daughter, sister, cousin, friend, colleague – knowing that many waters cannot quench God’s love for her.

And we pray for her, that she may rest in peace – healed and forgiven – to be perfected in God’s image, before we commend her finally to God’s mercy.

Rest eternal, grant to your servant, O Lord,

and let light perpetual shine upon her.

 

Prevention of restlessness - the collects of Trinity 17

 

Today I want to offer what you could call ‘A Tale of Two Collects.’

First, what is a collect?

Very simply put it is a short prayer that ‘collects’, or brings together, intentions into a single, focused petition.

Collects are assigned for each Sunday, high days and holy days throughout the year.

At the Eucharist the collect concludes the opening of the liturgy before we sit to hear the readings.

At Matins and Evensong, the collect is one of the concluding prayers of the Office.

So, the first of the two collects I want to reflect on tonight is the collect appointed for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity in the Book of Common Prayer, which is today.

It has been sung this evening.

It is beautifully pithy, and is a translation by Thomas Cranmer of an early Roman collect from a ancient source, the Gregorian Sacramentary.

Here’s the text:

Lord, we pray thee that thy grace may always prevent and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

It has a cause of some confusion to many due to a change in how we use a word.

To ask that God’s grace may always prevent and follow us, sounds odd, until we learn that prevent is not meant in the way we use it now.

If we prevent something, we stop it happening, we put an obstacle in the way, so what is God’s grace preventing us from doing the good works we pray to be able to do?

Well, that’s not what it’s saying.

Latin scholars will spot this.

‘Pre-vent’ is an English word that comes pretty much straight from the Latin meaning ’to go before’, pre-venire. 

So, we’re actually praying that God’s grace goes before us, and well as follow us, so it’s wrap-around grace, that free gift of all that enables us to glorify him in all things.

It actually gives us a beautiful balance of God’s grace, a free unmerited gift to us, and our response to that grace which is to be shown in the concrete actions of life, the capacity to do good, as opposed, to bad works.

The second collect today is in the Common Worship prayer book.

There are no linguistic tricks, but equally beautiful riches:

Almighty God,

you have made us for yourself,

and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you:

pour your love into our hearts and draw us to yourself,

and so bring us at last to your heavenly city

where we shall see you face to face;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

This collect is relatively new to the Anglican tradition, but is actually an ancient prayer.

It is a prayer of St Augustine of Hippo, one of the great early Church Fathers, to whom we owe so much, from his famous book Confessions.

Confessions is not about indiscretions that need to be confessed, but there is certainly some of that, but primarily a confession of faith.

This collect, this prayer, gets to the heart of Augustine’s predicament and to the experience of many people throughout the ages.

It is a sentiment that the new Pope, himself an Augustinian, has picked up on in this prayer.

Let’s take a look at it.

Almighty God,

you have made us for yourself,

Augustine sets out the frame of meaning for human existence: we don’t exist for ourselves, we don’t exist for other people, we exist for God.

The Westminster Confession of put it like this, ‘Why did God create humankind’ but to ‘glorify God and enjoy him forever.’

That is our purpose, and that is God’s grace preventing – going before – us.

We are made, fashioned us of the dust of the earth, in God’s image and likeness, to glorify our Creator and enjoy him forever.

What a beautiful vision, until human restlessness is brought into the picture.

This restlessness is so terribly of now: an ongoing itch that can never be scratched, the ache that will never be relieved, the hunger that is never really satisfied.

Only God’s grace, preventing us and following us, will be able to draw us back to him, who is the source of tranquillity and peace.

As Augustine says:

our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you:

Wow! Doesn’t that express something deep within us today.

 

Rest is not found gazing into the screen of a smartphone, or a bit of ‘me time’, or overindulging in a whole host of things.

Our existential restlessness is relieved by love going before us, and following us, into God’s presence:

pour your love into our hearts and draw us to yourself,

Pour your love: God’s love fills up the depleted wellsprings of our hearts, that by our own merits, without God’s grace run dry.

This re-forms, refashions, renews us, into a human being who lets go, who no longer resists being drawn into presence of the One for whom we are made.

This draws us into what the Fathers, and the Anglican Divines of earlier centuries call, the Beatific Vision, the vision of blessedness, the vision of God, hence the prayer continues:

and so bring us at last to your heavenly city

where we shall see you face to face;

In these two collects we have found our beginning and our end, the Alpha and Omega, the purpose of our creation and our final consummation in God’s presence, a presence that by grace has prevented – gone before – us and followed us.

On earth may we be given to all good works; in the heavenly city may we gaze gloriously on the face of the Beloved; and in both may we seek only that his kingdom and his will be done.

Amen.

 

 

Harvest Thanksgiving

Preached at Harvest Thanksgiving

Deuteronomy 26.1-11 I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.

Revelation 14.14-18 The clusters of the grapes of the earth are ripe for harvest.

John 6.25-35 I am the bread of life, says the Lord.

 

Do not let your hand be stretched out to receive

and closed when it is time to give.

(Sirach 4.31)

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Two fundamental principles undergird our celebration of harvest thanksgiving today.

The first is that everything we have – our possessions, property, life itself - is a sheer gift from God.

The second is that in response to the gift that is life, possessions and property, we offer something back to God to acknowledge his greater gift.

The tithe is the supreme example of this in the Bible: offering a tenth of our income to God.

This is applied by many in church, to give a tenth of one’s income to serve the mission and ministry of Christ.

Giving is good for us; generosity is a virtue that we need to make a habit of, in response to God’s generosity to us.

This is all captured by Job’s words when he meditated on the catastrophic loss of possessions and all that was dear to him:

Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. (Job 1.21)

It’s no accident that those words are used at a funeral to express that all we have in this life is God’s gift: we mustn’t fool ourselves into thinking that what we have is by our merit and that we can take it with us, we have to relinquish control and ownership at some point!

Harvest, like a funeral, is also a time of accountability.

At harvest the farmer measures and weighs the fruits of his labour, just as at the end of life our deeds are accounted for before God.

But the work of harvest is not just about the end, but about how the land and its planting was prepared, cultivated, watered and tended.

So it is in our lives.

That’s why the old customs of rogation are so important – that’s actually when we ‘plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land’, not at harvest, despite the traditional harvest hymn.

The poet TS Eliot puts it more intriguingly:

Take no thought of the harvest,

but only of the proper sowing. From Chorus in The Rock

A good harvest takes long, slow, patient cultivation just like our lives.

We have God’s gift of life: how are we going to use it? How will we be fruitful? How will we multiply what God has given?

It is in our hands.

Literally.

Wheat needs human hands to be made into bread.

Grapes need human hands, or feet possibly, to be made into wine.

The gift of life is shaped by you and me; what does it become in your hands?

So, harvest thanksgiving is about giving thanks for God’s gift and giving in response.

It is also about thanksgiving for those people whose skills transform that gift into something we can make use of: farmers, craftsmen, brewers, cooks, workers: the human hands that transform the raw gift into something edible, beautiful, functional for our use.

Harvest thanksgiving subverts the human tendency to make everything into a transaction: to buy and sell, make profit, always looking at the bottom line.

The Eucharist is, in a mundane and eschatological sense, always a harvest thanksgiving.

In other words, it celebrates the fruit of the land and points us to judgement.

All is encapsulated in Jesus’ free, gracious, sacrificial offering of himself to us.

Our gospel reading speaks of the miraculous bread, the manna, given to the Israelites in the wilderness.

They did not deserve it, they hadn’t earned it, yet God provided it.

Jesus connects this to his own giving of himself, the Bread of Life.

Whoever comes to him will never be hungry, whoever believes in him will never be thirsty (John 6.35).

There: no transaction, no sale, but a free gift for salvation and life.

We stretch out our hands to receive that life in Holy Communion with Christ, the Bread of Life, mindful, I hope, of the sentiment of the book of Ecclesiasticus:

Do not let your hand be stretched out to receive and closed when it is time to give. (Sirach 4.31)

Finally, our reading from Deuteronomy spoke of the gift the Israelites were to give in response for their deliverance from Egypt.

Today we are invited to bring forward our own gifts for St Alban’s Foodbank and the Skylight Project for those experiencing homelessness.

Don’t trudge dutifully forward at the offertory but joyfully, recalling these words:

You shall set [your gift] down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. (Deuteronomy 26.10)

It’s more than ‘helping out’ or ‘doing a good turn’ – and it is doing that – more fundamentally it is a freewill way of offering back to God all that you have had received from his abundance, in service of those in need:

Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house. (Deuteronomy 26.11)

 

 

 

Fr Michael and the angels

Preached at Choral Evensong on the Eve of the Feast of St Michael and All Angels and welcoming Fr Michael Walcott to the Parish of Croydon as Associate Vicar and Chaplain in the Whitgift Foundation.

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Tonight, we begin the celebration of the feast of St Michael and All Angels.

In the ancient custom of the Church a celebration starts on the eve of the feast.

Tonight we celebrate Saints Michael, Gabriel and Raphael and all the angels of God, his messengers.

To speak of angels can sound a bit weird and whacky, even New Agey, something you might think that rational Christians left behind years, if not centuries, ago.

Except we’re faced with the presence of angels in the scriptures and in the liturgy of the Church, and so they can’t be readily dismissed.

And what we see there is that the angels are protectors and connectors: they protect us from Satan (a fallen angel) and connect us to God.

Our first reading may have sounded obscure but it accounts for the beleaguered king of Israel facing the rampaging army of the king of Syria.

Nothing can save him now, until through the prophet his servant sees something he would not otherwise have seen.

The Lord opens the servant's eyes, and he sees that the mountain is full of horses and chariots of fire surrounding Elisha.

Thus is revealed God's invisible, protecting, and powerful heavenly army.

As a protector, we name the archangel Michael, as protector against the armies of Satan.

Think of the Book of Revelation:

Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon fought back, but he was defeated…that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. (Revelation 12.7,8a,9)

What a powerful protector!

And, as our second lesson, told us, Jesus speaks of the protection of children whose angels see the Father’s face in heaven.

These are often termed our Guardian Angels.

They protect and connect personally: they protect us from evil and connect us with the vision of God.

And that connecting role of angels is at the forefront in the birth of Christ.

Think of the involvement of the angels in the connecting of heaven and earth in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

That’s when the archangel Gabriel comes to Mary to announce to her that she is chosen by God to be Mother of the Lord.

It’s when an angel says to shepherds, in a glorious and luminous presence:

Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord. (Luke 2.11)

And then ‘a multitude of the heavenly host’ - angel upon angel - fills the skies praising God and singing:

Glory to God in the highest,

and on earth peace among those

with whom he is well pleased. (Luke 2.14)

It’s no accident that in the ceiling of the quire of this church, and moving towards the sanctuary, are figures of angels, recalling that our earthly worship connects to the heavenly worship.

In the Liturgy of the Eucharist we praise God, and join in the worship of the heavenly Temple (cf Isaiah 6.3):

Therefore with angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious name, evermore praising thee, and saying:

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts;

Heaven and earth is full of thy glory!

Hosanna in the highest.

Angels connect us with the worship of heaven, because they are heavenly bodies, not human ones.

But angels are not remote from human beings.

Angels and human beings are all creatures of God; they are part of the God given order of things in creation, and they’re on our side.

As our collect for this great feast prays:

O EVERLASTING God, who hast ordained and constituted the services of Angels and men [humans] in a wonderful order: Mercifully grant that, as thy holy Angels alway do thee service in heaven, so by thy appointment they may succour and defend us on earth.

Still, the angels are distinct from us, which is why the question, ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’? is a pointless one (excuse the pun!).

One person can’t dance on the head of a pin, but given what we know of the multitude of the angelic host, they probably can, because they are not embodied as we are.

And their strongest message is of the dignity of the human body - as worthy of protection from evil and connection with God - that is most powerful, and why they are so associated with God taking human flesh in Jesus Christ.

On this feast we are delighted tonight to welcome a priest.

And his name is auspicious: Michael Angelo Walcott.

A priest has, in a sense, to be angelic – not to be prissy and remote, or off the set of a nativity play - but as a protector and connector: someone who presents God to his people, and his people to God.

Angels are powerful indeed, and all too often churches want a priest with the combined talents of the archangels; but priests are also human beings.

God gave us Fr Michael, not St Michael!

God works through our humanity to be the face of his Son today: that is how we can be ‘angelic’.

Fr Michael mustn’t be laden with over expectation, but to use his priesthood to place God before God’s holy people, and God’s holy people before the Holy God, in the presence of angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.

Fr Michael, may the Heavenly Father, send His angels to watch over you and your loved ones. Guard you from all harm, danger, and evil, and cover you with Your divine protection, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen

God or Mammon: it's one or the other

Amos 8.4-7 Against those ‘who buy the poor for silver.’

1 Timothy 2.1-8 ‘Prayers should be made for all people to God, who desire all people to be saved.’

Luke 16.10-13 ‘You cannot serve God and money.’

 

‘You cannot serve God and money.’

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The Bible is really quite black and white on many matters.

For example, in the book of Deuteronomy we hear, ‘today…I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse.’ (Deut 30.19)

The direction is to choose life and blessing not death and curse.

It is often noted that Jesus adopts this either/or approach too.

So, in today’s gospel reading the Lord makes a hard-hitting point: you cannot serve God and money.

It’s one or the other; it really is a black and white, binary choice.

That doesn’t often sit well with Anglicans, and there are some times when creative ambiguity or lack of precision in some matters is helpful: but not here!

Of course, people have tried to fudge the ‘God or money’ choice over the ages.

We fool ourselves into thinking that we can serve God and money, or ‘mammon’ as the older translations put it.

Mammon. It’s a good word, for a bad thing!

Mammon is not just about having money – we all need money and at its best make it work for the good - but mammon is wealth that becomes a distraction and corrodes the soul.

It’s not just cash and gold that distract us from God.

We’re talking here about the sin of avarice - one of the seven ‘deadly’ ones - which is an extreme, obsessed greed for material wealth.

The sort of mantra that came from the financial markets in the 1980s, and lives on: ‘greed is good.’

When we’re in that territory, and that is the master we serve, then Jesus is clearly quite right: we cannot serve God; in fact we’ll despise God as a brake on what really drives us.

And when we do that then we despise the poor, because we start to believe that they are contemptible because they have neither money nor the power to make choices that we, the rich, have.

The poor - to which we might add the young, the old, the disabled, the ‘unproductive’ - then are a burden on the rest of us making money and living our cosseted lives, and why would be give a thought to them?

This goes further in the dangerous, frankly heretical, path known as the ‘Prosperity Gospel’, which connects material wealth with spiritual power and links more money with more blessing from God: that is plain wrong! it is contrary to Jesus’ Christ’s Gospel!

Not only does Jesus say that serving money takes us away from God, but the prophet Amos reminds us that money is not simply to serve ourselves; it is also to serve the poor.

What we receive as a gift and blessing is of true value when helping the poor and those in need.

Money is a necessary but dangerous and highly toxic part of human life and society.

Money empowers, but power can corrupt, and when it becomes an idol we worship, then God disappears off our radar.

So: life or death, blessing or curse, money or God?

The choice, as they say, is yours.

Identify the Highest God and pursue it single-mindedly.

This choice, this decision, comes before us today in Holy Baptism.

Baptism for each of us, and today for Mya-Rose and Asharn, offers blessing, life and God.

In baptism we turn away from sin the world and the devil, which we see in the deathliness, curse and allure of material wealth and acquisition.

As Jesus says, do not seek ‘treasures upon earth, which moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal’ (Matthew 6.19) but seek the eternal treasure.

May that be our quest, in the words of the psalm, ‘The law of your mouth, O Lord, is dearer to me than a hoard of gold and silver.’ (Psalm 199.72)

Mya-Rose, Asharn, everyone: may that be the treasure for which you yearn; the endless abundance of life in God’s presence.

 

Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Evensong on the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, 14th September 2025.

Isaiah 63.1-16 ‘It is I, announcing vindication, mighty to save.’

1 Corinthians 1.18-25 We proclaim Christ crucified

 

‘But far be it for me to glory except in the cross of our Lord, Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.’ (Galatians 6: 14).

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I am currently reading a book by a Greek Orthodox writer called ‘The Crucifixion of the King of Glory’.

The title of that book would have been a mystery to the both Jews and gentiles at the time of Jesus’ death, and it is pretty mind boggling to many people today who, if they think about it all, see the cross as a piece of branding or a sign to represent Christians and the Christian faith.

The Romans would be astonished: crucifixion and crosses were for executing common criminals, slaves, rabble rousers and those who weren’t Roman citizens.

A noble Roman execution - yes, they thought of it that way, noble and ignoble – a noble Roman execution, would be to be beheaded by sword.

That was the fate of St Paul, author of our second lesson, at his martyrdom, because he was a Roman citizen.

So, to think of crucifixion, kings and glory in the same breath is a bit of a stretch until it is considered through the eyes of faith.

That’s the point St Paul made in our second lesson as he speaks of the message of the cross appearing to be foolishness to Jew and Greek alike; but to those who hear the proclamation that Christ crucified the cross reveals, no, is, the power and wisdom of God.

As Paul says in another letter, the one to the Galatians, “But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. (Galatians 6: 14).”

Something is transformed on the cross; the logic of power and the extent of love as understood and operated by you, me and human history is overturned.

This how St John Chrysostom, the fourth century Bishop of Constantinople, saw it.

In a phrase attributed to him says of the Crucified Lord on the Cross, ‘I see him crucified, I call him king’.

Above each crucified criminal the Romans would write the accusation against the victim.

So, we read in St John’s Gospel:

Pontius Pilate [the Roman Governor of Palestine] also wrote an inscription and put it on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” Many of the Jews read this inscription, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek. (John 19.19,20)

You see this above a crucifix to this day: Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudeorum, the Latin letters INRI.

And in this crucifixion is a proclamation.

This proclamation transforms the instrument of death.

As a prayer in Holy Week, the time when we are intensely re-living the passion of Christ, puts it:

O God, by the passion of your blessed Son you made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ.

By Christ’s suffering for us, an instrument of death becomes the means of life; folly becomes wisdom; a stumbling block becomes a foundation – that is why we can speak of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, why we exalt it in our proclamation and in our hearts.

In this transformative proclamation, there is something important we can learn from our Orthodox Christian siblings when it comes to the cross.

In the West we have tended to emphasise the pain, agony and disfigurement of the cross and what crucifixion is, and we are not wrong to do so: it was real; it was horrible; it was torture.

Nevertheless, when the Orthodox represent Christ on the cross, they proclaim more than an agonising death: they portray Christ serene, stately almost, and priestly.

‘I see him crucified, I call him king’.

Instead of INRI over his head - which is what it said - they place what we proclaim: Ὁ Βασιλεύς τῆς Δόξης (Ho Basileus tēs Dóxēs): The King of Glory.

This is the one who is glorified on the cross, the cross that becomes his throne of glory.

That’s what we’re about when we talk about the cross.

It’s not a bit of branding, or an accessory, we bear the cross because we rejoice that something so terrible should have been transformed into a means of redemption for the whole human race.

‘But far be it for me to glory except in the cross of our Lord, Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.’ (Galatians 6: 14).