Meditation on James MacMillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross[1]
Wednesday, 1 April 2015
Salisbury Cathedral

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church

James MacMillan writes to transform the listener. That’s usually the idea behind most speech, preaching, and public discourse. But MacMillan goes farther, to say that he intends the listener’s transubstantiation, that we might literally become a different reality, a different stuff. It’s a word normally used of the bread and wine at communion, which is also intended to work a change in the substance of those who eat and drink. Christians become what they eat, that we might be Christ for the world. Might we also become the Word we hear?

MacMillan invites us to approach this work in silence, with open ears and hearts, that this music may work something holy within us, that together we may be or experience or become sacrifice. Those who would be made holy in this encounter must prepare for that encounter by purifying or clearing our minds – setting down prejudgments, letting go of tomorrow’s ‘to do’ list, putting aside our captivity by the clock, and all our varied anxieties. We can’t ever do that perfectly, or for more than a few minutes, yet the intention prepares the heart.

Intention and attention are part of sacrifice. Intention to open the door of our hearts, and attention to keep it from slamming shut or shrinking in fear. How to prepare? As you would for prayer, for an intimate and loving conversation – or a painful one. As though to say, ‘I know this is of deep import, and I want to be fully present.’ Breathe deeply, draw in life and possibility, and then breathe out, exhaling what is unnecessary or distracting right now. Sit up, erect and aware, without strain, yet open to receive whatever may come. And keep breathing.

The seven movements of this work explore the last agony of Jesus of Nazareth, as he awaits death, hanging from the Roman Empire’s cruelest machinery of execution. He is there for sedition, for challenging the power of that empire, for claiming that God rules this world rather than an earthly Caesar. He hangs there for teaching people that God loves us beyond imagining, eternally, no matter what error we might fall into, and that God intends for us all to live together in peace, and justice is a necessary condition for that peace. That message continues to threaten the powers of this world, two millennia on. That message has made many martyrs through the ages, from Alban to Oscar Romero and Martin Luther King, Jr. It has something to do with why John Maundrel, William Coberley, and John Spicer were burned at the stake here in 1556.[2]

Seven movements – a sacred fullness. Seven words of farewell, of “God be with you,” and “God be with me.” Seven-fold sacrifice, God with us.

• Jesus begins his farewell: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ Who is placed in a wasteland of desolation today? Who is being delivered to the lions to devour? Think of Pakistani Christians, living in fear of the next church-bombing or the next charge of blasphemy. Consider the Amish community in Pennsylvania whose school-aged daughters were shot by a crazed and suicidal gunman. That community forgave the murderer and support his widow and children.

• ‘Woman, behold thy son! Behold thy mother!’ Behold the love in this world. Open hearts and minds can lead to new and unthought-of conceptions of holy families. The Western world’s obsession with nuclear families has meant the loss of intergenerational and extended family relationships, as well as the possibility of intimate friends who become reflectors of the divine to one another. ‘Who is my mother and my father and my sister and brother?’ Jesus asks. ‘Those who do the will of God, loving others as they love themselves.’ How might our hearts expand to gather those others in? Who is my son, my mother, my sister and brother?

• Behold the wood of the cross – the tree on which hangs the lover of us all. That lover claims his neighbor for the garden paradise, the robber who asks to enter the kingdom.[3] What sacrifice is required of us to do the same? It begins with imagining the possibility that people we love to hate may enter that garden before us, for its doors are open to all. What a holy-making it is to fling open the doors and gather the world in as sacred harvest! The lover of the world has led the way.

• ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ ‘I am alone and bereft, lost and frightened unto death, where is my helper? I walk the lonely path through the valley of the shadow of death. The light is gone, all is black. Where are you?’ Hear the keening lament of the mothers of the disappeared – in Argentina, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, the mothers of the fallen in Palestine and Israel, the mothers of all who die by violence. Jesus weeps for himself and for the world. Transformed and transubstantiated, he becomes succor for all who are fed from his body.

5) I thirst. He has shed blood and water, become living water for the world, and for his mortal thirst he is offered bitterness and the acid bile of revulsion. ‘I cannot swallow this cup, take it from me.’ Cruelest cup, acid taunting, most bitter rejection – when have we offered vinegar? Where have we tasted bile?

6) It is finished. ‘All is lost, there is no hope within me. Wherever I turn there is none to help.’ Who cries thus but the slaves of ISIS and trafficked women, the child soldiers of Africa’s warlords, or rootless young men lost behind bars or imprisoned by drugs? Why do we fail to hear the shackles snapping shut, or see the bodies stabbed and mutilated? Each a sister or brother – who will be family to them, who will accompany their agony? Let it be finished!

7) Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. I return my breath and spirit whence it came. The pain is ended, the veil drawn. If in the beginning a wind from God blew over the waters of chaos, that breath has been withdrawn. Chaos remains… yet it is now a blessed and holy chaos … awaiting the wind of God, moving again over deep and dark…

[1] 1993 Cantata for choir and strings

[2] Salisbury’s Protestant martyrs

[3] Luke 23:39-43