The Prayer Rock at El Santuario de Chimayó | November 2008
Here’s a continuation of the excerpt from NT Wright’s For All God’s Worth, pp. 18-22:
It is because people forget this that much nonsense is spoken and written today. From time to time in the UK certain journalists enjoy mocking the Church of England for having lost its nerve. We are hopelessly divided, they say, heading for ruin, going round in circles like a rudder-less ship, with our leaders in disarray and our people in confusion. The evidence they cite consists, often enough, of quotations from each other, and from a suspiciously short list of would-be spokesmen (they’re usually men) from the church.
I wonder which world these people live in? Where is it written in scripture that we can expect the church to be free from financial problems, from doctrinal controversy, from difficulties about leadership, from deep personal and corporate anxieties? Where is it written in history that there ever was such a church? Where is it written in theology that God demands such perfection? Go back to Paul’s second letter to Corinth and you will find that it concerns exactly these issues. And Paul addresses his readers in Corinth, not with carping criticism, but with the power of love; not with sneering put-downs about what a shabby lot they were in Corinth, but with the gospel of Jesus; not with cynicism, but with the cross.
And the cross – as the very shape of the cathedral, like so many churches, reminds us – the cross is the be-all and end-all of the gospel. It is the cross that generates celebration and offers healing. It is all God’s work: the cross speaks of the God who didn’t send someone else to do the dirty work but came and did it himself; of the God who lived in our midst and died our death; of the God who now entrusts us with that same vocation. Because of the cross, being a Christian, or being a church, does not mean claiming that we’ve got it all together. It means claiming that God’s got it all together; and that we are merely, as Paul says, those who are overwhelmed by his love. A cathedral is not the triumphalistic sign of a careless power and prestige; it is the covenant sign of a suffering love, the symphony in stone in honour of the Servant King.
The Crucifix at El Santuario de Chimayó | November 2008