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The Passion of Remembering and Forgetting: six addresses for Good Friday, by Jessica Martin

1st Address: The Scent of Water

‘Why do you turn your eyes towards human suffering when you could enjoy the immeasurable prospect of your own endless being? If you fix your gaze upon mortals, all you will see is mortality.’

This is the question Job asks his God. It’s not a question about justice. Job makes no claim for fair treatment. He’s thinking about something more fundamental than that. He is asking whether there can be any real relationship between beings so unlike as God and man: between the immortal judge and the living piece of ephemera which inhabits God’s created world so faultily, so fleetingly. We can’t even hold a conversation, says Job; how do we share the faculty of judgement, how can we begin to connect, let alone join, the way you and I see the world? You have all the power, all the life, all the goodness. You appoint stringent human limitations: people fade away into nothingness so quickly that to the immortal eye they are barely a stir in the dust. In what way, then, are we made in your image? What have we got even to talk about? Leave us alone.

There is no better time to ponder Job’s question than on the day God dies - mortal, wounded, hated, abandoned. When he cries ‘why hast thou forsaken me’, whose voice may we hear? Is not Job’s question somewhere in that cry? The covenant promise stands from Abraham onward: I AM with you. Job questions how that covenant may even be; and the fact of death is the main ground he offers for why it is impossible. How can the unclean, the fleeting, converse with the eternally pure? Jesus, the place where they meet, hangs now upon the cross; and his agony is that God is not there.

But he is there.

Job is a clever rhetorician. He is not really playing fair. He asks the question, for one thing - so he must be able at least to imagine the possibility of an answer. He is like the wounded partner in a married couple, announcing that the relationship is all broken in the hope that somehow saying so might impel the other one to fix it. His version of despair is actually a kind of hoping against hope. Is this it? Job asks, tacitly; is death really all we’ve got? If we are going to vanish as if we had never been, what price your gaze upon us? Why did you bother to seduce us with your self? Should not immortal attention mean an immortal relationship for us both?

Job has noticed that when you talk with God about death and life, mortality and immortality, then in relationship terms you are actually talking about forgetting and remembering.

When the immortal gaze looks upon his creatures they are held in life, from moment to moment remembered. When it turns away they are - just not there. Not even dust. Mist, or smoke; less than a puff of air.

When God notices us, we thrive. Even as we suffer and die we are seen and known by the divine heart. If he were not to look our way we would not just be gone: we would be absolutely irrecoverable. All the many fleeting lives whose passionate relationships filled their own worlds: forgotten. The past like a waterfall dropping off the edge of the universe into nothing. Job rejects that thought. He turns to God as to a King in which all power is held, and he uses ‘remember’ as a formal term, as a way of describing how a King might re-instate a courtier fallen from favour, or a master issue manumission to a slave: ‘appoint me a set time, and remember me’. His voice fills with longing: ‘All the days of my service I would wait until my release should come’. Re-membering is just what our English word says it is: it regenerates a lost being, remakes a lost body. It brings us from nothingness into something. We re-emerge into the gaze of life.

Job, for all his sorrow, is toying with the idea that in God’s sight there is more to life than death. He reaches for an image of water, because water is where life happens. Are we just gradually drying up, he asks, like a silting lake or a river in drought? Will we blow away on the viewless winds? Or do we share in the hope of a felled tree, ‘that at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant’? If death is part of a cycle which leads again to life in God’s countenance, he says, I can wait as long as it takes.

The ‘scent of water’ is a mysterious phrase, for water, like spring, has no scent. But the hidden working of new life, its possibility and promise, are vivid in it. Of all our senses, the sense of smell, unwilled, makes the vanished past present to us more powerfully than sight or hearing ever can. The smell of spring is a real thing, a curious mixture of grass and earth and rain and sun and the greening of trees. The smell of a running stream is different from the smell of a desert landscape. What we scent becomes our not-forgetting, the past recollected and lived in the mixture of present pain and joy we call memory.

Below the barren ground the water is rising, a bare trickle; in the dry wood stirs the sap. Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? Where God dies, there the impossible relationship comes together as one: divine with human, eternity with time, the dying man with the living God. And through that dying man, our salvation, crying out in agony: ’My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Because his cry meets with no answer, we are put back into intimate conversation with the divine heart. We have been remembered, and are alive. We are held by the divine hand. At the scent of water we bud again, all because of the wood of this dry cross-tree.

If mortals die, will they live again? All the days of my service I would wait until my release should come.

2nd Address: Remembering

When Jesus was born, before his retentive mind knew anything at all about how he was or what he was, before he possessed language or benefited from the way its structures fix the images of memory, before he knew who he belonged to or whether he was, or was not, his mother; before all those things, he was laid in a manger. He was heavenly food in a feeding trough. From his first breath, from before he knew as well as from after he learnt the stresses, the breaking points of his earthly work, Jesus inhabited human time in order to be broken and given away, to be poured out like a libation or like a fountain soaking dry ground. Whole and pure, he came into being in order to be fragmented and scattered abroad. Emptying himself of power, he was handed, utterly vulnerable, into the love of a young girl, - and into the marginal, often dangerous, family role of stepchild.

Now Jesus sits amongst those who love him. They are meeting to celebrate the Passover. They are bringing into the present moment a night when a lamb was ritually slaughtered in order to save the first born of Israel, the beginning of the release of its people into freedom. The present into which their remembering brings that story is a difficult one, for again the people of Israel are possessed by a foreign power. At Passover the people dream dangerous dreams of freedom and of violence, and the streets are uneasy. ’I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you’, says Jesus.

But then he interrupts himself. He sets himself aside from the group of men and women sharing their story of liberation. Whatever part he must play in the unfolding purpose of the Exodus story, it is neither that of the freed slave nor of the prophetic leader. He says, with sudden, unnerving detachment, offering the cup of wine: ’Take it and divide it among yourselves’. The nourishment he offers is not, after all, going to nourish him. ‘From now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes’. He speaks like one who is already cut off from the living; he speaks like the sacrificial Lamb. Past and future merge and flow together in the charged present of the shared sacred meal: ‘I have eagerly desired to eat…I will not eat until the kingdom of God comes’. ‘Take [the cup]…from now on I will not drink…until the kingdom of God comes’. The prayer he offers as he takes and breaks the bread offers himself, again and always, as food: ‘This is my body, which is given for you’. In the fragments torn from the warm loaf dwells every moment of given-away life, from the overshadowing of his conception to the last breath his words look towards, every act, every word, every healing touch, every sign of God’s life working to renew the weary, bad, dying world.

Then he looks at his friends, and offers a new and even more riskily fragile token of love. He asks them for something. Even as the shadow of isolated suffering to come draws him away from the warm circle of the living, he speaks longingly, as the dead might speak, calling out of Sheol into the dreams of the living.

He says, remember me.

Job noticed that we live and flourish when God remembers us. But what does it mean when God asks us to remember him? What can our mayfly eyes and minds, our unstable and betraying hearts, possibly offer God? It is not for us to open the prison in which the dead are shut up, or to grant God manumission.

The world is full of people for whom we can do nothing. Many are dead - those we have loved for whom we grieve, or strangers (now or in the past) whose stories make us weep uselessly. There are those who are alive but who are imprisoned in different ways: some with walls and bars, or with arbitrary exclusions from those good things necessary to life. Others are imprisoned in bodily miseries, through stroke or other injury to body or brain; for others the pathways for the faculty of memory degenerate, leaving them progressively more unknown to themselves. What price remembering for those who suffer so cruel a diminution? Why visit someone who will not recall a day later that you ever came?

And we can do nothing for Jesus, as he looks towards his own slow breaking. But last requests are sacred, and the unwilled responses that love makes don’t calculate how useful something will be, or even if it will be useful at all. If our dying Lord says remember me, then we will remember. Like the women standing afar off and watching him die, even if we cannot alleviate his suffering we can hold him in our gaze, and when we do that for him, every isolated and suffering person there ever has been or will be is remembered with him and heaven hears us saying, you are part of us. You are not alone. Intercessory prayer is the work of remembering the whole body of God’s children, but especially those who are forgotten by the world or who can no longer remember themselves. Cicero said of crucified criminals that they should not even be had in mind. Jesus asks us to ignore such brutal fastidiousness, and to remember.

Jesus is not only asking for our remembrance. He asks it in a context which brings the past into the present, where the signs of remembrance become the continuing actions of Christ’s sustaining life. ‘Do this’ he says, and again the little word ‘this’ re-enacts the whole world of Christ’s life from its first beginnings to its ending on this day. We remember him not only in our hearts but our bodies, the Word of God burgeoning in the remembrance of his children - not just in sharing bread and wine but in every act following our sending out into the world, the broken fragments of the Body of Christ feeding the world soul by soul, each one both whole in itself and a fragment of the larger whole which is the community of Christ’s spiritual siblings.

John Donne, writing meditations upon the prison of human isolation, once famously said ‘Every man’s death diminishes me’. But I tell you that the other side of that is that every act of remembering - whether of the dead or of the lost living - participates in the living gaze of God, holding those we love within life, making them present in a community of love which brings the past, living and active, into the present and gives it into the loving purposes of the eternal Now. We are called as servants to kneel and wash our neighbour, so that the scent of water might bring the living sap rising through feet distorted by the weight of time upon them. This is how we give ourselves away to those who have, through sorrow, misfortune or damage, forgotten what it was to be themselves, who are cut off from their own stories.

And the day I falter and forget my history and my purpose, lost in the labyrinths of my own damaged brain, the remembering of the rest of the Body of Christ shall, by grace, carry me towards life,

While we can, we will remember Christ, And, when at the last we fall into forgetting, he will remember us.

3rd Address: What shall I cry?

Do you remember, when you were little, what it was like to have a sheet of blank paper in front of you that you planned to fill with something wonderful? Perhaps a story - just the right shape, not tailing off when the plot got out of control or full of unintended diversions ; - perhaps a picture, with the proportion and perspective correct for once and the colour laid on evenly, with a subtlety you can in fact never really get from felt pens. The longing to begin, its sense of possibility, was one of the purest pleasures of my own childhood; and though nothing I wrote ever lived up to the joy of wanting to I was not deterred. I could hear the voice saying ‘Cry out!’ with beautiful clearness and was confident that in the rushes and flashes of constant lived experience there was so very much I could say in answer to its invitation. I didn’t have much technical skill to worry about, because I hadn’t mastered much, and the process of turning experience from something fleeting into something fixed and unfading looked as if it would be easy. Even now, deep down, on the other side of discovering just how impossible, partial, and fragmentary this whole business of using language is, I still have an irrational belief that the truth of experience can be spoken in all its complexity if I just concentrate well enough on what needs to be said.

The speaker in Isaiah is young enough to hear the voice’s invitation, and old enough to know that there are few unfading words. In the constant slippage of mortal living the words we speak, even those we manage to record in some stable form, suffer their sea-changes in the flow of time, becoming something we never quite meant or slipping out of meaning altogether. The scripture writer, whose name is probably not Isaiah and whose writing was intended for another context than ours, begins to wonder whether time’s slippages mean that nothing can really be said of the eternal - nothing except how implacably its presence reveals us to be ephemeral.

But then he changes his mind. From the very slippages and shifts, the decays and mutations of what can be said, from the depredations of time itself, God speaks, transforming each small death of meaning, each lost bit of story, into something richer and stranger than our limited intention can imagine, pointing onwards at mystery. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand for ever. The eternal continually breaks into the flow of time and touches its creatures with unexpected, unlooked-for blessing.

Once upon a time the Word of God was expressed as a single human life, the life of Jesus. In this man, named after salvation and heralded with bright, mysterious signs, that Word appeared. It was perishable as flesh and slippery as blood. He told us he brought good news. He cherished the poor and valued the marginal, healed the sick and rebuked the powerful. In him the kingdom of God came near, lighting up the fleeting world. These things happened, and their meanings transform our living.

In him this day, the day of his death, the Word of God is wounded, destroyed, silenced. His love becomes love unknown. He joins the swift passage of human ephemera obliterated by circumstances, lost among the dead, lost with all the rest of us, beyond praise and longing and prayer, beyond righteousness and remembrance, beyond any of the meanings of breathing, thinking, feeling life. In his acts, unrecorded in his lifetime, in his obscure death, eternity writes its messages in dust.

But still we hear them. We remember that the eternal Word of God visits and redeems the forgotten bodies of the innumerable dead and raises them up to praise.

O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, ‘Here is your God!’

4th Address: Forgetting

We remember our lives in a story-shaped way. We order our lives into story through the structures of language, and especially those which mark the passing of time. It may be that the material we are ordering appears to us more like a series of mental pictures, but they are slotted into adjacent frames and joined together by explaining what came before what, or how that picture was altered or enriched or even cancelled by some other more significant picture.

And once we have that framework, we will also find ourselves deciding that this or that detail, this or that scene or moment, does not belong. Human beings are as much editors as they are makers. As soon as you set up as a storyteller, your memories settle around that story’s shape. The memory becomes the story, and in order that one kind of memory may be preserved you will have to set about some deliberate forgetting. Then, after a while, you may find that your deliberate forgetting has become actual forgetting; your story structure has become so powerful that the things which don’t fit fall away altogether. Forgetting is necessary to the process of remembering, always. The most powerful element in ordering memory is the kind of story you have decided to tell.

Much of what we forget is stuff which doesn’t matter. You will not be particularly diminished if you can’t remember what you had for dinner on the 25th March two years ago. But people edit other stuff into forgetting besides the trivial. What about the experience you cannot bear to look at, the possibility you can’t bring yourself to contemplate, the telling detail or event which shows you that the person you love most has begun to slip out of recognition, the painful scene which tears at your heart so deeply that you excise it altogether in order to protect yourself against the experience of constant pain? These are also the stuff of forgetting, and although they are often merciful they are all signs of our spiritual fragility, of our eye-blink refusals to participate in God’s work of remembering from the depths to the heights of human experience, from the meaningless to the most charged of our utterances, acts and moments. We are too frail, and we cannot do it,

‘Pray that you do not come into the time of trial’ Jesus says to his companions. He does not ask them to pray for him. He looks at their vulnerability and he removes himself and his agony from their direct sight; when he speaks to them he suggests that they pray for deliverance from the traumas which may distort or break them, may make them unrecognisable to themselves, through fear or pain, torture or failure. Death is very terrible, but more terrible is the trial of contemplating the means, the time, the prospect of extinction; more terrible is alienation, isolation, hatred, becoming less than human in the sight of another’s eyes. These are the trials from which we pray to be released every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer; and they are not good things, not character-building things. They are the terrible possibilities of every human life, and they break spirits before they break bodies. At the point where Jesus’s own spirit bends and groans under the weight of the future, at the point where he looks at the breaking of his own body and the burden of hatred he will carry to his cross, he thinks only, and tenderly, of the needs of his friends, and offers them the sovereign remedy: prayer. Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.

Jesus is already there.

And Jesus’s disciples know it. They don’t sleep just because it happens to be late at night. They sleep ‘because of grief’. Even though Jesus, in compassion, removes himself from their immediate sight, they know what is happening and they can’t bear to look, can’t bear even to think, what it might be to face towards the whole world’s grief and carry it until, slowly and bit by bit, it destroys you. That is the cup which Jesus will drink, the cup which he asks his Father to spare him, if possible. And his friends’ spirits cannot contemplate it. They go to sleep. They forget.

Imagine, now, that all the things which our self-protective spirits have slept through are regarded by that compassionate eye, now in the agony in the garden. The stuff which does not fit the seemliness of public stories. You do not have to go far afield, or search for the too-visible sufferings of the wider world. You will not have to travel more than a mile or two from where we are sitting now. Somewhere close under the lee of this Cathedral church someone has been told they are going to die; is walking through the severe discipline of learning to let go of child, spouse, parent, the bright hopes of future actions, future making and doing and being.

Someone else nearby is leaning forward to speak to the person they are closest to in the world, when they discover that the words they imagined they said have come out as nonsense, and the troubled smile on their beloved’s face tells them that they are shut out from the joy of conversing, now and ever. They will, perhaps, remember that this has happened before, over and over, and that they themselves keep forgetting how impossible communication is, that their real and present grief is warded away by their beloved companion, who cannot bear to experience it daily, and so both forget, are complicit in forgetting, day after day, that they are cut away from each other, that the bridge of shared language is down and will never be rebuilt.

In a nearby hospital there will be people calling out for parents long dead, wandering on hiking trails which disappeared forty years ago, fighting wars long over. Someone is trapped in a temporal loop in the brain which brings up, over and over again, a terrible event as if for the first time, and those who stand by hear only the continual crying and shut it out as best they can.

Someone in a place near here has won a victory against a destructive habit which is killing them, and knows already that the victory is so temporary as to be invisible. Someone in a place near here has tried to make a cup of tea and has lost the names of all the utensils, the algorithm of what must be done with cup and teabag and spoon, and stands wondering at the meaningless shapes on the once-familiar tabletop. Someone near here endures patiently the impersonal care of men and women who assume she understands nothing, and that the words she speaks - however passionate, however deeply meant - must therefore be discounted, weightless. She might have no voice at all. Worst of all, she understands that sometimes - but not always - they are right. When she dies, her patience and self-restraint will disappear out of her told story: ‘at the end she was away with the fairies, poor darling’. No one will know what a hero she was, or the number of times she had to forgive her neighbour.

In the agony in the garden, Jesus is sustained by angels. Part of that sustenance is the tears wept for him by the woman who saw his sorrow and was courageous enough to meet it with her own, wiping them away with her hair. Do not always forget, Try to remember when you can.

Beside him Jesus’s friends absent themselves because of grief. But as they, and we, sleep, the Lord of life drops tears of blood for the forgotten sorrows of the whole world.

5th Address: Pools of water

We live when our God remembers us, because in his presence is life. But not all remembering brings life, and not all forgetting is destruction.

When Judas betrayed his Lord to death, his acts and their consequences were pressed upon him so continually that he could not support his existence. He said to the elders, as it is told in the Gospel of Matthew, ‘I have sinned by betraying innocent blood’, and he attempted to give back the guilt with the blood money: thirty pieces of silver. Thirty pieces of silver is the amount which which the book of Exodus gives as the price for the accidental death of a slave. The elders refused the responsibility by refusing the money, and Judas was driven to throwing it upon the ground because no one would receive it.

He was in a state of mind where no mercy of forgetting was possible. No ritual act would empty his mind of what he had done, neither the acknowledgement of his sin, nor of his victim’s innocence, nor the restitution of the derisory sum of money he had agreed to receive. None of this undid what had happened. It filled the foreground of his thoughts and pressed upon his chest on awaking. Memory became present torment, and forgetfulness a final good he most desperately sought. He looked for death as one who seeks the relief of being nothing at all. His life had become bent around this one act, the act for which he is remembered, when he pursued the betrayal of his Lord in a spirit of contempt, and brought it to fruition in a kiss, mimicking the gestures of love in the service of hatred. Allowing himself to be possessed by evil, he discovered himself to be more absolutely enslaved than he could possibly have imagined.

Although human beings must shoulder the interim judgements of life spent in community together, it is not given to us, thank God, to usurp the final divine judgement of any other person whatsoever. And today of all days is not one for pronouncing human judgement, for that would shout down the prayer our Lord offers for his killers as he is dying: ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’. One of the enduring characteristics of sin is to become unknown to oneself, unrecognisable in one’s own acts and thoughts. Even Judas may have imagined that he was doing something quite other; he may have imagined that he was saving the lives of Jesus’s companions, or averting a major incident, by offering the authorities a single ringleader. Or he may not have thought at all, driven by extremes of feeling. We do not know.

In contemplating the tragedy of Jesus’s death our office is to recognise ourselves in every one of the players. The torments of guilt following an irreversible act of betrayal are not unique to Judas; nor is the despairing desire to be made nothing, the sense that death might be the only cleansing act of forgetting that is left. These are real and bitter parts of universal human experience, for which there is nothing to be done but to throw ourselves upon the mercy of God.

Yet when all we can do is to remember, it is the mercy of God to forget - if we will allow him. Beyond the stony ground of tragedy and its consequences lies an unimaginable compassion. ‘I, I am He who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins’ (Isa.43.25).

There is no reason for God’s mercy; it is not part of the logic of human acts and their outworkings. It is a pure gift, offered for the sake of his loving being. It is a fountain of water in the desert, springing up to heal and restore the parched and thirsty soul. It is the baptismal flood which invites us to leave sorrow behind, forgotten, dissolved into the saving water, through which, by the grace of God and the life and death of Jesus Christ, we may be reborn, restored, freed from the barren torments of memory into fruitful living. For even in the vale of misery the pools are full of water (Ps.84.6).

God dies now before our eyes stretched upon a cross of dry, dead wood. Yet rivers of mercy flow down from it; and the ground upon which they fall is transformed from a barren waste to a land full of living and gracious trees:

I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive; I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together, so that all may see and know, all may consider and understand, that the hand of the Lord has done this.

6th Address: The Passion of Remembering and Forgetting

“Simon, Simon, listen! Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith will not fail; and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers”. These are Jesus’s words to Peter at the Last Supper as Luke tells it, before the Gethsemane vigil and Jesus’s arrest. Peter’s response is characteristically impulsive, instinctively loyal: ‘Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death!’ But Jesus knows that Peter’s are words of the moment, part of the grandstanding of love. They have not counted the cost or truly faced the prospect they gesture towards. Yet they are generous, even if they are the largesse of a debtor. Jesus sees both their virtue and their inadequacy, though he can’t fail to notice that Peter has missed his point. And that’s not surprising; Jesus is trying to give his friend hope and strength to sustain him beyond a failure which hasn’t happened yet.

We have just heard that failure happen. Peter, faithful enough to follow his Lord to the gate of his temporary prison, does not find the courage, in the dark hours just before dawn, to affirm his love and loyalty. His rejection deliberately widens the gulf between the imprisoned Jesus and his still-free companions; although the trial is still to come, we are aware from this moment that Jesus is a dead man walking, cut off from the living: they of mine acquaintance were afraid of me; I am clean forgotten, as a dead man out of mind.

Peter thrusts Jesus from his mind. He declares an absolute forgetting: no, no, this relationship never existed at all. As if a small god were to announce, ‘I do not remember you’ and the creature so cursed were to become as if it had never been. Most mercifully, Peter is not God, and his terrified attempt to save himself by consigning his friend to oblivion has limited force. Jesus himself mends it, then and there, by refusing to disappear. He looks across the courtyard and meets his friend’s eyes. This is not accusation. He does it to renew the relationship Peter’s words have attempted to destroy. ‘Then Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said to him, ‘Before the cock crows today, you will deny me three times.’ And he went out and wept bitterly.’

Peter’s tears are the pools of water in the dry ground of his betrayal. They are the way in which, in Jesus’s words at supper the previous night, he ‘turns back’ from self-protective destruction. This ‘turning back’ is sometimes called ‘repentance’ - a specialist word which just means ‘turning back’, or even ‘metanoia’, a yet more specialist word which means ‘absolute change’ or ‘reversal’ - a transformative change of heart. Jesus’s gaze upon Peter holds him in mind and recalls him to himself; God incarnate looks upon him and saves him from the torment of becoming lost, a stranger to his own heart. But it is Peter’s tears, his metanoia, which water his renewal, his turning away from sin and towards life.

On the transformed other side of tragedy Jesus and Peter will stand together again, a brazier of coals between them, and Peter will again be asked a question three times. Jesus will ask him, ‘Do you love me?’ And Peter will answer, ‘Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you’. Jesus’s response points him outwards: ‘feed my lambs’. It’s the same commission as the one he makes before Peter’s betrayal: ‘when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers’. It’s the same commission we also receive: re-member your love for me by carrying that love outwards. Give it to others. Carry it across the world. Remember that Christ looks out of the eyes of every condemned man and every rejected soul. Feed my lambs.

Here is the Passion of remembering and forgetting. We are remembered in God’s sight, and we join ourselves to that life-giving memory when we remember Jesus, in his life, in his death, in his example taken, broken, blessed and given out to others in our lives and actions. The agony of our Lord remembers the sorrows we cannot contemplate and honours them in his own passion, alone in the garden. Last of all, he remembers us when we become lost and forgotten to ourselves, and in his loving gaze we are found again. When we cannot forget our sins he washes them away with life-giving water, until they are removed as far away from us as the east is from the west, until they are blotted out and utterly forgotten.

We will remember Jesus, on this day of all days, who dies upon the cross for our merciful forgetting. We will remember Jesus, on this day of all days, who remembers us when we cannot. We will remember Jesus, on this day of all days, in whose blessed death all our sins are forgotten. We will remember Jesus.

Preached at Bury St Edmund’s Cathedral, Good Friday 2016

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