Recognising Christ is not always as straightforward a theological or spiritual task we would like it to be. For reasons that may become apparent, I have myself had difficulties in the past distinguishing Christ from a vicar called Cecil. To my surprise these have recently returned to haunt me.
In the days when I was an Anglican parson, Cecil was the clergyman whom I succeeded on a Croydon housing estate. Originally from Belfast, with his beard and hair worn long – eccentric even for the Diocese of Southwark in the early 1980s – people thought he looked a little like a hippy Jesus. One of his first parochial acts had been to get rid of a rather beautiful crucifix over the communion table. He replaced it with a bronzish sculptured figurine, about a metre and a half in height, (supposedly) depicting the risen Jesus with arms outstretched.
Many of the congregation, as they tried to work out whether they liked it aesthetically or not, remarked that at least since the artist appeared to have modelled it on Cecil himself, it would save the parish from any further expense in memorialising him when he moved on.
My own reservations about this figurine weren’t just low-grade annoyance about celebrating the liturgy literally in the shadow of my predecessor. They were also born of my reading the resurrection passages in the Gospels, and noting that Jesus was not immediately easy to recognise when he was encountered.
The figurine on the wall seemed to imply that we might all recognise the resurrected Christ instantly. Given both his uncanny resemblance to Cecil, and the trouble the disciples had on the road to Emmaus, I was not so sure.
In the Church there has always been the temptation to make God in our own image. None of us is free from this, and perhaps only a time spent reading the Bible and matching what we see there with the lives of saints offers a corrective. The recent “rave in the nave” at Canterbury Cathedral turned my mind back to the challenge of recognising Christ.
The Dean of Canterbury, the Very Revd Dr David Monteith, appeared to have been won over by the blandishments of the entertainment company Silent Discos in Amazing Places. They had promised ticket sales would scoop up £50,000 a night. A counter-protest was organised by Dr Cajetan Skowronski, a Catholic doctor, who described his conversations with the cathedral’s representatives in an interview with Mark Lambert, which is available on YouTube. Dr Skowronski met the Dean and the Precentor, Canon Wendy Dalrymple, to discuss the apparent impending desecration of a holy place.
Dr Skowronski reported that Dr Monteith made it clear that raising money was his primary object. When asked if anything at all was culturally beyond the pale in that regard, he replied that he would draw the line at nudity, since that would be against the law. Canon Dalrymple, who was sent on a mission to appease the protestors outside the precinct walls, was more willing to engage in biblical theology.
Dr Skowronski observed that the Precentor pointed out to the protestors that the Cathedral was simply following the teachings of St Paul who, she said, somewhere, had urged Christians to “eat, drink and be merry”. She appeared not a little irked when it was pointed out to her that in 1 Corinthians (15:32) St Paul was actually talking about how the resurrection changed everything and that “if we are not raised from death, ‘Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we die.’” This was not St Paul enjoying an Epicurean moment.
Since it was then the protestors’ turn to invoke the Bible, Dr Skowronski said, they asked Canon Dalrymple what her views were on Christ clearing out the Temple. Wasn’t that the closest parallel to what was taking place: Jesus, consumed by righteous anger, driving the economic marketeers practising profane money-making out of the sacred space? “That is not a Christ I recognise,” she replied.
I was reminded of another theological impasse from over a decade ago, when the then-Presiding Bishop of the (Anglican) Episcopal Church in the United States, the Most Revd Katherine Jefferts Schori, preached a sermon in which she admonished St Paul for driving a demon out of a slave girl in Acts 16. In doing so, she said, St Paul was “depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness”. This inability to read the Bible, to discern the holy from the unholy, appeared to be not dissimilar from the inability or unwillingness to tell the difference between the sacred and profane at Canterbury. Those disturbed by the cathedral’s detachment from orthodox Christian values stretch right across the religious and philosophical spectrum.
But “confusion of category” and the recognition of Jesus remain an ever-present challenge – even sometimes within Catholicism, as I am reminded every time I go to Mass in my little parish church in Shropshire. There above the altar, where I might reasonably have hoped to see Christ on the Cross, I am faced with a late-20th century bronze figurine. No doubt it is intended to represent the elusive risen Christ – or Cecil, as I know him.
This article first appeared in the March 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.
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