30th August, 2020.
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My dear friends,

During the Coronavirus pandemic there have been many television programmes (of fairly mixed quality, it must be said) about the British Royal Family and its history. Several programmes have been about King George V and Queen Mary, who have not always enjoyed a very good press since their deaths (principally because of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson, and George VI’s speech impediment). I came across quite a lot of documents connected with George V and Queen Mary during my research into Archbishop Lang, and I came to think rather highly of them as monarchs. May I share two stories with you about George V and Queen Mary from the First World War.

Queen Mary spent most afternoons during the war visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals around England. One of the ladies-in-waiting who accompanied her (I think it was Lady Bertha Dawkins) recalled afterwards that Queen Mary was very sensitive to suffering. As the royal car stopped outside whichever hospital she was visiting and the car door was opened, Queen Mary was always almost sick – retching – with anxiety. She would compose herself, put a bright smile on her face, and step out of the car to shake hands with the waiting doctors and matron. As she was shown around the wards, Queen Mary developed a sort of sixth sense and came to realise when the doctors were only showing her the presentable wounded soldiers and were concealing those who had been more grievously wounded or badly disfigured. The Queen always insisted on being taken to visit them as well. Visiting the wounded never got any easier for Queen Mary – she was still almost sick every time – and yet she carried on, week after week, throughout the four and a half years of the war.

(I am afraid I cannot remember where I heard the next story about King George V – it isn’t mentioned in his official biographies). It is well known that the British Empire lost a little over a million men in the First World War and that another two million were wounded. This was the age of big families. Someone told George V that there were a great many women around the United Kingdom who had lost six or more sons. In late 1918 or probably early 1919, the King invited these grieving mothers to visit him at Buckingham Palace. They stood in an enormous circle around the ballroom. The King entered, wearing his khaki field marshal’s uniform. In silence, he made his way around the room, pausing in front of each woman, looking at her in the face and giving her a salute. I don’t know how the King managed to complete the circuit – I’d have been in tears long before the end. The King couldn’t give them back their sons, he couldn’t take their pain away, but with a simple gesture he did what he could. I daresay those poor suffering women remembered for the rest of their lives the day they went to Buckingham Palace and the King saluted them; just as the wounded soldiers will have long remembered the afternoon when Queen Mary visited them in their hospital wards.

When we are confronted with the sick and suffering, we sometimes feel so helpless and inadequate. Some people seem to have such difficult, unfair, pain-filled lives. We are all in St John because we want to help people and make them better. We do what we can to help, and we often wish we could do much more.

We have to lift all these thoughts and experiences up to God, knowing that He wastes nothing of what we offer Him. God takes our small actions and uses them to fulfil His good and loving purposes in the world. So, a smile from us, a kindly word, a little joke or humorous remark, may have enormous consequences. Someone may be completely down in the dumps, lonely, tired after experiencing pain or shock; and a cheerful little word from us may pierce the bubble, as it were, give them hope and help them to move on. The entire direction of someone’s life can occasionally be changed by a sentence. We also have to let God support us in those difficult moments; and speak to Him in simple words of our deep feelings and concerns.

The badge of St John is the Maltese Cross. The Cross reminds us that at the heart of Christianity there is the pain of Good Friday and the inexpressible joy and wonder of Easter Day. May Jesus Christ, who is both Suffering Servant and Risen Lord, bless, support and strengthen all of us in St John as during the Coronavirus pandemic we seek to care for ‘our lords the sick.’

With continued prayers and kindest regards,

The Rev. Dr ROBERT BEAKEN, County Chaplain
TRINITY 12 – 30th AUGUST 2020.
 
Gospel: St Matthew, chapter 16, verses 21-28
   In last week’s Gospel reading we saw St Peter take a big step of faith at Caesarea Philippi. In answer to Jesus’s question, Peter told the Lord that he believed him to be the Messiah. Jesus admitted he was indeed the Messiah, and went on to tell Peter that he was going to be the rock upon which he would build his church. A little while later, Jesus started telling the disciples how he must go to Jerusalem and be killed, and rise on the third day.

            Peter tried to protect Jesus from such a fate: ‘God forbid it, Lord, that must never happen to you!’ Jesus, however, rebuked Peter: ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.’  

            Poor Peter! How shocked and upset he must have been. He didn’t mean to get in Jesus’s way; but for the life of him he couldn’t see why the Lord had to go to Jerusalem and be killed.
As we have seen elsewhere in the Gospels, the disciples didn’t really understand Jesus’s messiahship. They still thought of the messiah as a sort of mighty warrior and Davidic prince. It was only after the Resurrection that they came to see that all along Jesus the Messiah had also been the Suffering Servant, offering his life in sacrifice upon the Cross to take away the sins of the whole world.

            Jesus went on to tell the disciples that if they wanted to follow him, they had to take up their crosses, too. As I re-read this the other day, I was reminded of someone called Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Fulton Sheen was a very gifted American Roman Catholic priest and later bishop. He had a weekly radio show, and later a television programme. He wrote lovely books – 73 of them – about Jesus and Christianity.

            Towards the end of his life, Archbishop Sheen said something very profound. ‘Wherever the Gospel has been preached,’ he said, ‘it has led to suffering.’ Well, that’s hardly an ad man’s dream, is it? ‘Become a Christian and suffer!’ They’re hardly going to come packing in to church for that.
And yet, old Archbishop Sheen was quite right. Following Jesus Christ means taking the rough with the smooth, and some stages of our pilgrimage of faith can be very rough indeed. The world and the devil don’t much care for Christianity. I had a phone call a while ago from an upset teacher. He told me how his headmaster had deliberately poked fun at him during a staff meeting because he was a Christian. Much of the modern education service, he went on to say, is antagonistic towards Christianity, even to the point where there is a reluctance to talk about right and wrong. Well, the teacher had had a bad experience, and I am sure that not all schools are like that; but some are.

            Equally – and it grieves me to say this – Christian history is full of Christians who have suffered at the hands of other Christians. St Benedict and St Francis are two well known examples. Similar things still happen today. I am reminded of the Lent hymn:
 
                                                Take up thy cross, the Saviour said,
                                                     If thou wouldst my disciple be;
                                                Deny thyself, the world forsake,
                                                     And humbly follow after me.
 
Being a Christian means shouldering our crosses for a good part of the journey. It isn’t always easy. I spoke to a college chaplain about some of the churches in Oxford which are always packed with university students. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they are in term time. But many of those students lapse once they have left the university and got jobs in the City or elsewhere. It is all right in Oxford, when they are surrounded by all the students and have mutual support, but when they are alone, and there are problems, or there is money to be made, many of them lapse. Sometimes they marry someone who doesn’t share their Christian faith, and the price they pay is that they have to stop going to church. Their faith sometimes hasn’t gone very deep inside them.’

       I am sorry to say I think the chaplain was probably right in many instances; but I remind myself that though the students may have forgotten God, God hasn’t forgotten them – and lapsed Christians can sometimes return to the practice of their faith, sometimes decades later in their lives.

       But inevitably, faced with Archbishop Sheen’s reflection that ‘Wherever the Gospel has been preached, it has led to suffering,’ we find ourselves asking: Why bother? Why soldier on? Why bear a cross? Why put up with being despised by the world? Why not go with the flow, avoid the problems, make money?

            Well, there is the Carpenter from Nazareth, and his Cross, and the strange business of God’s truth. Right at the end of today’s Gospel, Jesus said something very interesting.
 
For the Son of Man is to come with his angels, in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what he has done. Truly, I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.
 
Some people have interpreted the last line to mean that Jesus believed that the world would end soon, and that within the lifetime of his disciples he would return in glory to judge the living and the dead on the Day of Judgement. However, the Hebraicist Dr Margaret Barker has suggested another, very plausible explanation. What if Jesus was not talking about the Day of Judgement, but instead was talking about the Transfiguration? The Transfiguration occurred shortly after this incident in the Gospel, when Jesus was indeed on his last journey up to Jerusalem, where he would be arrested and crucified. The point of the Transfiguration for Jesus was that it strengthened him for the suffering ahead.

But what, we may ask, was the point of the Transfiguration for the disciples? Peter, James and John witnessed Jesus being Transfigured. The point – this is most important – is that they saw Jesus as he actually was, bathed in divine light, with no doubt at all about his identity as the Son of God.
So we shoulder our crosses. We humbly follow after Jesus Christ, our Lord and our God. We naturally hope the way will not be too stony or difficult, or at least not for too long. But we pray Thy will be done. If we wobble and sin – and we all do, from time to time – we repent and carry on with the journey.  We put up with nasty remarks, repress the wish to lash back, and seek God’s grace to forgive others, as we hope to be forgiven by Him. If there is sometimes pain and suffering to be encountered along the way in the Christian pilgrimage, there is very much more peace, joy and hope in believing. For we have Jesus; and Jesus has us. And in Jesus, we have treasure indeed.