11th October, 2020.
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My dear friends,

I was sitting in my seat in the chancel of St Mary’s church, Great Bardfield, after saying Evensong last Thursday evening, when I suddenly spotted some graffiti scratched onto the famous stone rood screen that stands between the nave and the chancel.
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Before you all rush to telephone the Police or write to the local newspaper, let me hasten to add that this was medieval graffiti and about six hundred years old. I must have walked past it hundreds if not thousands of times and not spotted it; but on Thursday afternoon the sun was low in the sky and it illuminated the graffiti on the side of one of the stone pillars.

St Mary’s has quite a lot of medieval graffiti dotted around the interior stonework. My mind was drawn to the list of vicars of St Mary’s at the back of the nave, and I wondered which fourteenth or fifteenth priest came into church one afternoon, only to find that some bored medieval teenager had been busy scratching a pattern on the stone rood screen. Did they ever find the culprit?

I then found myself thinking further about my imaginary medieval teenage graffiti artist. He would undoubtedly have recognised our white Maltese Cross on a black background, and would probably have been more familiar with the medieval knights hospitaller of the Order of St John than many teenagers today are familiar with St John Ambulance. In those days, the Order of St John held property in Essex or was responsible for supplying clergy to the churches at Bradwell, Broxted, Carlton, Chingford, Finchingfield, Foulness, Fryerning, Great Maplestead, Little Maplestead, Havengrove Island, Prittlewell, Rainham, Rivenhall, Rochford, Stebbing, Sutton, Temple Roydon, Terling and West Thurrock. The Order had other property nearby in Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and Suffolk.

Life, for our medieval teenager, would have been tough and difficult. He would probably have lived during the time of the Black Death. If he was born after that particular pandemic, there were still periodic outbreaks of plague every decade or so. Our medieval teenager would have heard of the medical care and pastoral work carried out by the Order of St John. He might well have walked or hitched a lift to one of the Order’s houses to consult the infirmarian (think of Brother Cadfael), the nearest thing he probably had to a GP or Accident and Emergency department.

Suddenly, the past does not feel quite so far away after all. I am always anxious to make the point that just because people in the past did not have as much information as we have today – no computers, newspapers, telephones or radios in those days – it does not follow that they were somehow stupid. They had exactly the same sort of brains in their heads as we do, and it is often amazing to discover just how much they did manage to accomplish with the information available to them.

Similarly, people in the past felt and thought very much as we do today. Illness, death, sin and misfortune affected them, in just the same ways as they also affect all of us. Love, kindness, generosity, forgiveness, encouragement and good humour also meant the same to them as they also mean to us.

The medieval members of the Order of St John dotted in all those places around Essex had to cope with just the same sort of problems as we do today; indeed, we do well to remember that difficult though Covid-19 undoubtedly is, the Black Death and subsequent plagues and epidemics were worse.

I find it both moving and inspiring to think that we today are carrying out the same sort of work today in SJA as our predecessors in the Order of St John. The circumstances change over time, but the human needs remain the same. The medieval members of the Order of St John offered practical Christian love and medical care to ‘our lords the sick’, just as we do today.
 
I, like you, am very proud to wear the white Maltese Cross on a black background.

With continued prayers and kindest regards,

The Rev. Dr ROBERT BEAKEN, County Chaplain
TRINITY 18 – 11th OCTOBER 2020.
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Gospel: St Matthew, chapter 22, verses 1-14
In today’s Gospel, we read that Jesus compared the kingdom of heaven to a wedding party. We sometimes imagine that heaven will be a bit dull: lots of hanging around, being pious and decorous. Not a bit of it. Heaven, says Jesus, will be like a wedding banquet given by a king for his son: this was probably the most wonderful event someone in first century Palestine could have imagined. Heaven, we are to infer, will be hugely enjoyable.
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            Well, that’s good news. But Jesus goes on to give this image a twist. He pictures a royal wedding banquet. The king has invited what the French call le gratin, the upper crust, the top figures of society. You would think they would be there like a shot. But not a bit of it – they were reluctant to attend, pleading other commitments, business engagements, etc. The king sent two lots of servants to summon the guests before the costly food became spoilt, but they mistreated the servants, indeed, they killed some of them.

            A by-now furious monarch next sent his soldiers, who killed the ungrateful wedding guests and burnt their property to the ground. After this, the king threw open the doors of his palace and invited the poor people from the streets, who feasted on the king’s food instead of the original guests who had ignored their wedding invitations.

            Well, rather a strange story from Jesus, and not a very comfortable one. It is possible that Jesus was anticipating the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70, and the emergence of Christianity out of Judaism. If that is the case, the guests who could not be bothered to go to the wedding banquet symbolized the Jews who ignored Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As a consequence, they were displaced: in the future, what mattered was not being born of a Jewish mother, but having faith and trust in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

            On another level, Christ may have told this parable as a cautionary tale. When we look at it closely, we see that the problem with the wedding guests was that they made light of the king’s summons to the banquet. The obvious inference is that they made heavy of other things, and we read that one went to his farm and another to his business. It is a tale of wrong priorities, leading to a dreadful result: final destruction.

            In this way, the parable of the wedding guests conveys a similar message to the parable of the sower; and it shines a bright beam into each of our lives, and asks us one or two penetrating questions. Have I, or you, made light of the important things of God, and at the same time made heavy of other, less important things? Have these kept us away from God? I don’t know about you, but in my case the answer must be a loud and penitential ‘Yes.’

I am reminded of a letter in the Church Times from a Lay Reader from Surrey, who observed that most members of Church of England congregations would say that they went to church every Sunday, unless something cropped up. The trouble was, he wrote, things tended to crop up on an awful lot of Sundays. If we don’t go to church in order, say, to go shopping, or to cook lunch, or to go to a sports match, what does this parable of the wedding guests say to us? We Christians are supposed to go to church on Sundays simply because Jesus Christ calls us to do so. He needs us to go to church so that he may nourish us, and through his Holy Spirit work on our hearts and lives.

            At the end of the Gospel there is another, separate parable about a man at a wedding banquet who was not wearing a wedding robe. ‘“Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe,”’ asked the king, ‘and he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” For many are called, but few are chosen.’

            We are inclined to feel sorry for the man who turned up without the right clothes, until we learn that at Jewish weddings the guests were each given a special wedding robe to wear at the feast. This man has deliberately refused to wear his robe. It is the height of rudeness and rejection. He is in the king’s palace, and he is happy to eat the king’s good food, but he cannot be bothered to do what the king asks of him.

Now, recall that Christ has told us the wedding feast symbolises the kingdom of heaven. He tells us in this parable that heaven is great; but also that God has certain standards which He requires of us if we are to be admitted. We are to be Christians according to God’s definition of what it means to be a Christian, and which may well be different from our own ideas and preferences. We must be clothed with the wedding garment of faith and trust. It is the same message as the earlier parable of the wedding guests, but from a different perspective.

            So, we have in these two parables some positive teaching about the kingdom of heaven, a warning about what can go wrong, and an exhortation to try to follow Jesus Christ properly, and not half-heartedly. We are not to make light of that which is very important, and should avoid placing too much emphasis on that which is of transient significance.

            There is sometimes a discrepancy in all our lives between what we say and what we do. Jesus Christ warns us that it is no good saying we are Christians, but then behaving in a different way. We must get our priorities right and our values straight. The wedding breakfast awaits.