If someone were to ask you – What do Anglicans believe? – you might be hard pressed to come up with an answer.  I suppose you might go to the 39 Articles of Religion, the foundation document of the Church of England.  Certainly it was the intention of the compilers who wrote the Articles in 1562 that they would establish a common consent about what true religion was.  In these days of conflicting opinions in the Anglican Communion we might therefore be wise to re-acquaint ourselves of their content. Except that not everything in the Articles has worn well  and some articles are perhaps a little offensive in these ecumenical days.  If your working knowledge of the Articles of Religion is a little rusty, I’m sure that is not true of the Catechism which, until comparatively recently, was required learning for any to be confirmed. At least, in the Catechism, we are very clear what we believe.  I won’t however put this to the test in case one or two of you might be thinking – ‘in your dreams’.

Where then do we discover Anglican belief?  The answer lies less in documents which set down the rudiments of our faith, nor in learned works of theology, but actually in our Prayer Books. More than any other Church, our beliefs are interwoven with our worship. We believe what we pray and we pray what we believe.  Anglican worship is a carefully constructed cycle of prayer and bible reading which, if we participate faithfully, will instruct our faith.  We are what we pray and prayer is not about documents of faith but about forging a real relationship with the Living God.

Such a relationship was the desire of those Greeks who came to the Passover Festival at Jerusalem. They had clearly heard others talking about Jesus and they sought out one of his disciples – Philip who, because he came from Bethsaida,  close to Greek-speaking territory, and who had a Greek name, probably understood them.

“Sir,” they said, “We wish to see Jesus.”

Note that they didn’t say, tell us about Jesus – they weren’t interested in knowing ABOUT Jesus – even from one who lived close to His master – they wanted to SEE Him for themselves.

We don’t know whether they actually got their wish because when Andrew and Philip seek out Jesus to tell him of the Greeks desire, Jesus launches into a fairly detailed prophecy about what is going to happen to him, and includes a prediction about his death which will draw people to him – the I, if I be lifted up saying which is a clear reference to his death on the cross.

The Greeks are instantly forgotten and yet their appearance is pivotal to the entire Gospel. John wrote for a Greek speaking Community who had come to faith after the Resurrection and, as the New Testament was first written in Greek, we can assume that it was in the Greek-speaking world that Christianity first took root. What is even more significant is that after the appearance of the Greeks, the mission of the Church turned rapidly away from the Jews and even the Samaritans and sought its home in the Gentile, Greek-speaking world.

Perhaps the only purpose, therefore, in introducing the Greeks at this point was to signal that Christianity was a Universal religion, appealing to all. We could make this assumption too because in the prediction of His Passion, Jesus speaks of drawing all people to himself – not a specific mention of Jews but a prediction that all the world would both hear of him and respond to him.  But I want to stay with these Greeks and their desire to see Jesus.

We can presume that as they were in Jerusalem for the feast – either as tourists or because they were interested in Judaism – then they would be present at the Passover Festival itself . They would therefore be in the city during our Lord’s trial and subsequent Crucifixion. Public hangings at festival time would certainly draw the crowds and the death of Jesus – a well-known preacher and teacher – would not go unnoticed by anyone. You may recall that when, after his Resurrection, Jesus joined the two disciples on the Emmaus road, they expressed surprise that he didn’t seem to know about the Crucifixion – You must be the only person in Jerusalem who doesn’t know about this.

So, it is reasonable to say that the Greeks got their wish in the end  - they saw Jesus – but not in the way they had hoped. They saw him dying on a cross – the fate of a common criminal.  I have no idea what effect this had on them.  But let’s suppose that, as John introduced them into his narrative for a particular reason, so their presence during the Crucifixion might also have a purpose.  For though their arrival on the scene produced a theological meditation from Jesus about his own Passion they were not party to that. They didn’t hear  what we now hear and they were untouched by the theology of the Crucifixion, a theology which, in our Lord’s own words, is bound up with an illustration from the world of nature of a seed seemingly dying in the ground before it can sprout forth and bear fruit. Nor did they hear that this death would be a manifestation of God’s glory.

Perhaps it is just as well because, though no doubt familiar with the Greek love of philosophy, it would hardly have answered their inquisitive desire to actually meet Jesus.  What this points to is that there is a world of difference between knowing ABOUT Jesus and actually KNOWING him.  I know a lot about a great number of people but unless I meet them, talk with them, hear their views, I cannot ever know them.

Sadly, too often in our world today we make judgements about people whom we have never met and that must always be flawed. It doesn’t seem to prevent some from making all manner of outrageous comments about others. Nor are we immune from this in the Church. I am often amazed at what I hear about our Church leaders, for example, based on hearsay or, more wickedly, on embellished but ill-informed opinion.

As an Abbot once said to a monk who confessed his bad habit of repeating gossip – “Repeating it wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t keep trying to improve on it!”

We can only KNOW someone if we enter into a relationship with them and, it seems to me that, if those Greeks really wanted to See Jesus – to know him – then they would most certainly have had to experience His death on the Cross. That is not just true for the Greeks but for all of us.  For this is where the relationship between God and human beings is truly forged.

“We proclaim Christ Crucified” says St. Paul in tonight’s reading from 1 Corinthians and we can only do that if we understand something of what the Cross means for our faith and for our life as Christians.

Now, of course, the Cross is central to our faith and we know this intellectually and theologically.  The real engagement with the Cross must be, however, an experience and not a theory.  One of the difficulties we have is that the Cross has become a symbol. We wear it round our necks, hang it on our walls, use it in our publicity, sing about it in our hymns and songs, parade it through our streets, and much more. But how close do we live to it? And how can we turn it from being a symbol into a reality.

Those who have known acute suffering in their lives could probably answer that they have lived very close to it.  For many it can become something which is more than a symbol. Those who suffer can often identify with its deeper meaning. Many who are praying through particular moments of hurt or suffering are standing in the Cross at that place where the  pain of this world meets the love of God as it is poured out from Christ on His Cross. This is where pain and the healing power of God meet.  But not all who suffer sense this.

I have often quoted from a moving book by Elie Wiesel called Night which is a personal record of life in a Nazi death Camp during World war Two.  There is an introduction in that book by the French novelist, Francoise Mauriac who met Weisel after the war and heard from him of the horror of his experience.  For Weisel, his suffering had led, perhaps not surprisingly, to a complete loss of faith in God and Mauriac was moved to write:

And I, who believe that God is love, what answer could I give…What did I say to him? Did I speak of that other Israeli, his brother, who may have resembled him – the Crucified, whose Cross had conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine…

He could not say these things because they would have found no resonance in the soul of this tortured Jew.

Mauriac’s final paragraph deserves repeating:

We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him. This is what I should have told this Jewish child. But I could only embrace him, weeping.

Mauriac’s experience of the Cross bore no comparison with Weisel’s living experience but in that moment, when he embraced the young Jew there was a meeting point – perhaps not then of faith – but of a common humanity which became entwined by love.  It was in that embrace, more than in any words, that Mauriac preached Christ Crucified, and whether Elie Weisel recognised it or not, it was at that moment that he saw Jesus.  Because whatever we make of the Cross – and it has spawned a hundred different theologies – at the heart of it is a gigantic statement from God about the immensity of His love for each one of us.

We can talk about what human frailty, evil, sin and death did to Christ in condemning him to death on the Cross but, as Michael Stancliffe, a former Dean of Winchester, puts it – the real message of the Cross is what Christ has done to sin and death.  If we want to get to the heart of the meaning of the Cross – we have to SEE it for what God intends it to be – and not theorise about it with high-flown theology.  And what God intends it to be is a demonstration of His love. A love so intense that it burns up all that is not love in our world, and in ourselves.

We may look at the Cross and weep for a dead Christ, be horrified by the cruelty of his manner of dying and be shocked by its violence but we shall only really begin to SEE it, experience it, when we discover that from it, Christ, with the deepest love possible, embraces each one of us, weeping.

'Sir, we would like to see Jesus' – not to satisfy curiosity or to write a postcard home that we have met a famous person – but because until we see him and experience his loving embrace – and know that this Love is for you and you and you – we shall never understand the Cross or the Crucified, nor will we preach Christ Crucified because the language of the Cross is not to be found in words but in a prayerful loving relationship with a Crucified God who speaks most powerfully in this amazing deed of Love for each one of us.

'I, when I am lifted up from the earth', says Jesus, 'will draw each one of you to myself and show you' – not tell you, - 'how much I love you'.