The Bishop who ordained me Deacon and Priest, Bishop Alfred Holland of Newcastle, gave me many gifts. He was a great scholar, an avid reader and a deep thinker. He wrestled with the task of making the gospel story sing its song to a new age, and was a master of translating and enlivening the story of God’s interaction with humanity. At one and the same time he could, as Cesar Cruz said, ‘comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable’. His greatest gift was something he said on the night before he ordained us priest. In his charge he said, ‘You must trust, trust and trust again. People will take advantage of that trust. They will even abuse that trust. But trust again you must because to practice the alternative will destroy your ministry; to not trust, particularly to begin each relationship from the standpoint of requiring the person to prove that they are trustworthy will mean that your ministry will go nowhere.’
It is advice that I have strived to honour throughout my ministry.
As I prepared for this address and reflected on the fact that today is April Fool’s Day, I realised that Bishop Alfred was not only giving us great pastoral advice, he was also inviting us, in some small way, to be fools for Christ. The fact that it is April Fool’s Day serves to remind us that Holy Thursday night was an occasion on which the foolishness of Jesus and of the foolishness of the God Jesus embodied were revealed.
I have to say that Bishop Alfred’s words, when I have managed to heed them and honour them, have borne great fruit. Over the two decades of my ordained life I have witnessed many people respond to the trust I have placed in them, and to the attempts I have made to deal with them honestly and openly. And as Alfred promised there have been those who have abused that trust: those who have taken titbits out of confidential meetings to give to others, and those who have used confidences to satisfy the hunger of gossips. I have been in teams with bullies who have used the space and grace afforded to them by me and others to continue to play their destructive games; sadly, until it was simply impossible to let them get away with it any longer. And so I have visited the devastating place of getting to the point, with Bishop Alfred’s words echoing in my ears, of telling someone that I can no longer trust them -- that the trust has been completely disembowelled by experience -- and then having to live with the immense feeling of failure that that brings. And then there are the intimate relationships, the most prized of relationships, in which the trust has been exploited in the most devastating of ways. Many a time I have felt like a fool, and a failure, and have been told by colleagues that I have been foolish. That I try too hard.
But this, my friends, is our lot, if we are to honour the invitation to do likewise that Jesus places before us in and through this liturgy. We are to become fools for Christ, fools like Christ. This beautiful, intimate liturgy is beautiful and intimate because of Jesus’ foolishness. The positive effect of his foolishness is so powerful that the liturgy and the events it honours retain their beauty and intimacy despite the foolishness the disciples display.
For in this story there are two types of foolishness on show.
Firstly, let’s look at the folly of Jesus. Foolishly Jesus washes the feet of, becomes completely vulnerable to, those who will hand him over, and those who will deny him; it is an ultimate display of foolishness because he knows that they will do it; he knows that Judas has already put into motion a series of events that will lead to his death. He exposes his heart to those who will prove gutless at the very time he needs them to show just a modicum of bravery. It culminates the foolishness he has exercised during his whole ministry: trusting them, trusting them with treasure they do not appreciate or understand, trusting them with responsibilities they cannot yet handle. Trusting them with information they use to betray him.
The second demonstration of foolishness is that displayed by the disciples as they squander the gifts that Jesus so foolishly gave them. Foolishly they are unable to see where their actions were taking them and taking Jesus. Foolishly they did not appreciate who they were with. Foolishly they did not grasp the significance of all that he was offering them. I have been this type of fool as well. Remaining silent when I should have spoken up, allowing my cowardice to squander gifts of trust given to me. Foolishly I have allowed friendships to cease through busy-ness, or misunderstanding, and have not seen the consequence of some of my actions or inaction. Yet Jesus is foolish enough to stake his life on their capacity, my capacity, and your capacity to be less foolish; a capacity the disciples eventually discover after his death. Following Easter these foolish ones become brave and discover a new form of foolishness; they become as foolish as Christ; foolish like Christ. And that of course is the whole point of the story.
Tonight the foolishness of the disciples and the foolishness of Christ are placed before us so that we can recognise the ways in which we express each form for ourselves. We are shown a form of foolishness that we are called on to emulate and to celebrate, and a form of foolishness that invites us to repentance. We are shown the foolishness that destroys and the foolishness that gives life. Go and do likewise.
+Amen
© Peter Catt
To Comfort The Disturbed, and to Disturb the Comfortable: Onward children of the sun, Cesar A. Cruz, 1997
