The feast of Saint James, Sunday, 25 July 2021

For a number of years, I’ve been fascinated by the crystal clear insight of the German c.19 philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Famously announcing God is dead, he could see the true implications of this. Dostoevsky, a contemporary of Nietzsche, put it starkly: if God is dead, anything goes. There is no ultimate sense of right and wrong.

For Nietzsche, this led to a reappraisal of Judeo Christian morality – in short, he didn’t think much of it. He despised the notion that we should show compassion and care for the weak and vulnerable. The Darwinian struggle showed that it was the powerful and strong who took their rightful place. The idea of the Ubermesch was taken up by Nazi Germany as legitimising a biologically superior Aryan – and we know what happened to the Jews, along with the weak, the disabled, and those like homosexuals who were considered deviant.

And here we arrive at the heart of the matter. Nietzsche’s supreme value as the main driving force in humans was the ‘will to power’. It’s the natural order of things that the strong are on top.

Now, what an earth has all this to do with the feast of St James we are celebrating today. Well, the episode with James and John’s pushy mother brings the issue of authority and power to the fore. She wants her boys to have prime positions of power in the Kingdom of Heaven. In politics we know that attaching oneself to a rising star means that when they get in power, you’ll be rewarded handsomely for your early allegiance.

Whilst it is easy to spot political shenanigans and to point the finger at others, we must be very careful to recognise it within ourselves. I wonder whether we use others as scapegoats, politicians for example, to avoid reflecting upon where in our lives we have an unhealthy interest in power, prestige? And we know what happens when anyone or any institution has power – it all too easily leads to corruption and an abuse of power.

One of the traditions that lives on about James is that before he was martyred, he went on a missionary trip to Spain.

Following his martyrdom in Jerusalem, legend has it that his body was buried in the Church at Santiago de Compostela. It’s become a place of pilgrimage at the westernmost tip of Europe. While church attendance in Europe has been in decline, pilgrimages are on the increase. The pilgrimage to Santiago is 100s of miles. Pilgrims travel by bicycle, horseback or foot - they converge at Santiago with half of Spain for the Feast of St James on 25 July.

For many people this pilgrimage provides the chance to re-connect with the soil beneath one’s feet, have the chance to gain a deeper spiritual perspective, perhaps take time to come to terms with some life-crisis. For others it’s about allowing the slower, gentler pace to give a sense of what the human journey is for. Who are we, where are we going? So far so good.

But there is shocking element to this pilgrimage that raises deeply disturbing questions – returning to the theme of power.

In the Cathedral there’s a huge sculpture of St James on horseback - and he is brandishing not the sword of the Spirit (eg a Bible) but a literal sword. Underneath the sculpture are hapless Muslims being massacred. Because St James, the son of thunder, was adopted as the moor-slayer, the patron saint of the Reconquista. Muslims entered Spain in AD 711 and Christians, under the banner of St James, attempted to violently drive Islam out of Spain for the next seven centuries. The cathedral authorities now are rightly uncomfortable with this history and hide the lower part of that sculpture with flowers. But the point this makes is that going on the pilgrimage in the middle ages was a very definite political act.  It stood for the church's power over another faith community, a power that was brutally expressed in battle and bloodshed. 

This is an expression of the church militant that sits very uncomfortably with Jesus’ kingdom of compassion, justice for the poor and the oppressed and peace.

Richard Dawkins has a list of crimes committed in the name of God. And all of them are cases in which religion has been used to conquer, control or intimidate. They’re all expressions of the will to power.

This, if anything, is the root of all evil. That’s why the supreme and radical challenge of Christ is humility – it’s the opposite of the will to power.

In the topsy-turvy world of the Gospel, we learn a different way. Christ came to re-draw the lines between love and power. He denied James the seduction of lordship and gave him a martyr’s crown.

Thankfully, the church has stopped wielding a literal sword. And yet, there are still ways that the church continues to express its power, and that’s in the way it excludes. Whose faces have we not seen or side-lined across history?  Whose perspectives do we still deem unworthy of prophetic authority? 

Over the last few months, I’ve attempt to reflected upon how the church in this country had side-lined and ignored those from black and Asian communities, as well as those from working class communities. The artist Grayson Perry puts it like this, ‘I often feel discomfort in spaces dominated by the middle and upper classes in a very bodily way. I have had more negative and sarcastic comments about the way I look in Church of England spaces than I care to mention.’

My prayer for us, as individuals and as a church, is that we may be a humble church, willing to learn, willing to acknowledge mistakes and ask forgiveness. A thinking, generous church with doors wide open. A community of difference and diversity, held together by love.

Sign outside St Mary’s Barnet, C of E -   "WARNING: Here we practise the inclusive Gospel of Jesus Christ. This means you may be mixing with tax collectors, adulterers, hypocrites, Greeks, Jews, women as well as men, female and male priests, homosexuals, lesbians, the disabled, thieves and other sinners, the dying, white people, black people, Asians and people from other races, Muslims, Bishops, bigots, people of other faiths, strangers, heretics and people with no particular faith etc. etc. In fact, anyone like those with whom Jesus himself mixed. So beware—this is not a private club. Welcome to all."