Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.
Matthew 28:20
It is nearly five am American time and I have been up most of the night. I have just boarded the airplane on the way home from England, where the choir of our Cathedral is in residence at Ely. I have spent the past five days visiting some of the most beautiful Cathedrals in the world and listening to sacred music.
I picked up New Yorker article on the way home. Once more, a brilliant writer questions the topic of Jesus’ divinity. With eloquence and charm, he winds his way around the usual arguments of how the gospels must have been written many years after Jesus’ life and not in his native language. He wonders if Jesus was a stoneworker rather than a carpenter and aptly suggests that “Verily I say unto you” may just mean “Look, listen up!” and that the “Son of Man” might just mean “one of us guys.” The arguments are solid and I have heard them all before. They are good intellectual fodder and most of us Anglicans have pondered them all in depth. After all, if we claim that you don’t have to check your brain at the door to be Anglican, then we must entertain these arguments and consider them seriously. They are not threatening to faith, they are just part and parcel of it. It is necessary to wrestle with such thoughts. One can’t help but consider them.
However,all the rational arguments in the world pale in the face of the majestic beauty of the Cathedrals that I have just witnessed. Pictures of Jesus’ life and the stories of his miracles, crucifixion and resurrection, shine forth in stained glass windows and their light penetrates across the centuries. How could a simple peasant, a stone-cutter or carpenter or rabbi, how could that simple person ever have had such lasting effects across the centuries without the presence of God? God’s presence in Christ is the only way that I can make sense of the beauty that lay before my eyes. God’s presence is the only plausible reason why humans would build a Cathedral so high and so lofty that they would die before seeing it completed. Only God Himself could engender that kind of selfless devotion. Only the Incarnation of God who did, in fact, rise from the dead.
At the highest point of Ely’s Cathedral, sculpted into the ceiling, is a painted carving of Jesus. He is blessing all of us. He looks down upon the entire vast expanse of the chancel and nave with a smile on his face, as if to say, Bless you all, down there. I am watching over you.
