good morning and welcome to the dinner garden at canterbury cathedral on this morning of tuesday the 20th of july it's going to be another very hot day and today we've sought shelter in the shade of the trees here just outside the the deanery itself as we say our prayers together there are various things that we're going to have to concentrate on in our prayers simply to begin with and we'll come back to that later but uh let's begin by saying we're still remembering in our prayers the people who've suffered so much in the flooding in northern europe and also the citizens of south africa and at this time we pray urgently for the people of myanmar burma where the situation there both in terms of the pandemic of human resources and the political situation deteriorates daily and has been out of the news really the last time i think we were remembering them was when we thought about the brave nun who knelt in front of the the military as they were chasing young people who taken refuge in the convents there but situations like that are happening daily at the moment with all kinds of aid agencies being shut down and it's difficult to get good news but what we do know is that the deterioration of the situation there and the dangers for people who can simply disappear is growing daily so please keep myanmar burma in your prayers as we do here and at the same time we think of those who whose uh both property and lives are in danger in huge forest fires in the west of the united states uh particularly in oregon the the the as it's so-called bootleg fire which is burning at the moment it's 300 000 acres and is is very very difficult to control all these situations of great danger some some natural disasters across our world showing how fragile our humanity is in the life of the planet at this time and then let's think of the welfare of one another at this time so many um big stores have have rushed forward to assure people that precautions are still being taken for their safety even though we've stepped forward in a particular way out of certain restrictions and it's become a matter of personal choice and yet that personal choice must contain as we've tried to do in the cathedral the welfare of each other and as i was saying yesterday in our reception of visitors and of worshippers we shall be fine tuning daily to see where anxiety lies in the the best possible way of allaying people's fears and keeping every one of them safe from the pandemic so let's begin our prayers on that very serious note on this day and offer whatever other prayers that you have wherever you are in the world and concerns and names in your hearts as we say our prayers together oh lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise may christ the true the only light banish all darkness from our hearts and minds blessed are you creator of all to you be praise and glory forever as your dawn renews the face of the earth bringing light and life to all creation may we rejoice in this day you have made as we wake refresh from the depths of sleep open our eyes to behold your presence and strengthen our hands to do your will that the world may rejoice and give you praise blessed be god father son and holy spirit blessed be god forever the night has passed and the day lies open before us let us pray with one heart and mind does we rejoice in the gift of this new day so may the light of your presence o god set our hearts on fire with love for you now and forever amen our psalm on this 20th morning of the month is psalm 103 bless the lord o my soul and all that is within me bless his holy name bless the lord o my soul and forget not all his benefits who forgives all your sins and heals all your infirmities who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with faithful love and compassion who satisfies you with good things so that your youth is renewed like an eagles the lord executes righteousness and judgment for all who are oppressed he made his ways known to moses and his works to the children of israel the lord is full of compassion and mercy slow to anger and of great kindness he will not always accuse us neither will he keep his anger forever he has not dealt with us according to our sins nor rewarded us according to our wickedness for as the heavens are high above the earth so great is his mercy upon those who fear him as far as the east is from the west so far has he set our sins from us as a father has compassion on his children so is the lord merciful towards those who fear him for he knows of what we are made he remembers that we are but dust our days are but as grass we flourish as a flower of the field for as soon as the wind goes over it it is gone and its place shall know it no more but the merciful goodness of the lord is from of old and endures forever on those who fear him and his righteousness on children's children on those who keep his covenant and remember his commandments to do them the lord has established his throne in heaven and his kingdom has dominion over all bless the lord you angels of his you mighty ones who do his bidding and hearken to the voice of his word bless the lord all you his hosts you ministers of his who do his will bless the lord all you works of his in all places of his dominion bless the lord o my soul a wonderful psalm of the dominion of the creator and the way he deals with us and if you think you're not included well just look at verse 21 bless the lord all you his hosts you ministers of his who do his will in that in being a minister a servant of others we can choose to be included and that it will be our intention through this particular day let's turn to the gospel of saint matthew as we go back to the point that we left yesterday now we've come to a very significant chapter i'm about to begin chapter 26 and i'm just going to read the first 13 uh sorry the first 16 verses of that excuse me when jesus had finished all these sayings he said to his disciples you know that after two days the passover is coming and the son of man will be delivered up to be crucified then the chief priests and the elders of the people gathered in the palace of the high priest whose name was caiaphas and plotted together in order to arrest jesus by stealth and kill him but they said not during the feast lest there be an uproar among the people now when jesus was at bethany in the house of simon the leper a woman came up to him with an alabaster flask of very expensive ointment and she poured it on his head as he reclined at table and when the disciples saw it they were indignant saying [Applause] why this waste for this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor but jesus aware of this said to them why do you trouble the woman for she has done a beautiful thing to me for you always have the poor with you but you will not always have me in pouring this ointment on my body she has done it to prepare me for burial truly i say to you wherever this gospel is proclaimed in the whole world what she has done will also be told in memory of her then one of the twelve whose name was judas iscariot went to the chief priests and said what will you give me if i deliver him over to you and they paid him 30 pieces of silver and from that moment judas sought an opportunity to betray jesus [Applause] here is the beginning of the matthew passion it starts with one of matthew's special sentences at the end of a discourse when jesus had finished all these sayings and we've just finished a very long discourse including the three lentzy parables which are either special to matthew or else shaped in a particular way by matthew because of the situation his own christians were facing at that time and here we are with the usual sentence at the end of a discourse when jesus had finished all these sayings and then on we go with the narrative and at this point i'm going to rescue a precious mug otherwise i think our feathered friends may uh may do some damage when matthew begins this he is going to tell this story in a particular way much of this is taken from mark but it's so so different the chronology is the same as marx and if you compare the two then you will see that but matthew gives us certain details which are special to him and at the same time he gives us events which are special to him well let's start with that see how with this he causes jesus at the beginning of this after his sentence when jesus had finished all these sayings he said to his disciples you know that after two days the passover is coming and the son of man will be delivered up to be crucified jesus is setting his lifting up instant matthew's gospel at the feast of the passover and then we have a scene change and it's a scene that you don't find in any of the other gospels we are at a council which has been informally called by caiaphas the high priest now caiaphas was high priest we know this from historic records between 1880 and 36 a.d and uh if we are to listen to luke's chronology and jesus was at this time 33 years old and we can then begin to piece together different sorts of data but to matthew this is unimportant the important thing is that the high priest caiaphas has called together not only the chief priests and leaders of his particular party but also the elders of the people and what's their reason they certainly want to make sure that jesus is is finished with so to speak they've already plotted to kill him several times but they also don't want it on the feast and so things have to be done fairly hurriedly if that is going to be the intention and of course the worry of the high priest is that if all this happens on the feast and riots start and everything else then the roman imperial power will have all the excuse in the world to step in and take the authority of the high priest to themselves and he's a clever diplomat caiaphas we see that through particularly in the gospel of saint john but here he is sitting in his palace and has called the meeting together which only matthew describes this early meeting and he says with the people not during the feast lest there be an uproar among the people clear as that and then we go somewhere else we go to bethany and we know from this gospel and the gospel of saint mark that and even the gospel of saint john that uh bethany was a place special to jesus and a place where at the house of mary martha and lazarus he felt at home here they are at the house of simon the leper we've no idea who simon the leper was it possibly was someone whom jesus himself had healed but it's in bethany we get that fact and now some some more facts from other gospels disappear and matthew finds them not important the woman comes up to him with an alabaster flask she's not named at all it's just a woman comes up and nor does he give the sum he says it's just a pot of very expensive ointment and she pours this over the head of jesus and in this gospel it's all the disciples who say why this waste for this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor and then jesus looks at them and he doesn't say she is the only one who in the depths of her heart and spirit realizes what is about to happen to me physically and how my own physicality my own human flesh and we know this from gethsemane shrinks from that even though in heart and spirit i know that in my humanity i must fulfill the father's will i'm putting words into jesus's mouths but here is the woman she has anointed my body and prepared it for burial that's what that means i know that she in all insight realizes exactly what is about to before me and that now i said about the psalm if you think you're not involved well think again here if you think you're not involved think again here we are truly i say to you wherever this gospel is proclaimed in the whole world what she has done will also be told in memory of her unnamed it doesn't matter for matthew but the woman has stepped forward and performed a ministry more important in terms of sympathy and physical activity than any of them had managed to do and therefore she's done what jesus is called jesus calls a beautiful thing for me i hope that that we have chance daily to do beautiful things for one another inspired by the fact that we are those whom jesus is actually talking about wherever and he could have said whenever this evangel this good news this gospel is proclaimed in all the world in every land what she's done will be remembered and it's for that reason then one of the twelve whose name was judas iscariot went to the chief priests and said and this is different what will you give me if i deliver jesus over to you and they paid him 30 pieces of silver that's only found in matthew the only one who mentions 30 pieces of silver and that of course if you in a passion narrative as we might do on good friday talk about this the 30 pieces of silver appear in our minds and hearts there is in every gospel now this is matthew and he's wanting prophecy fulfilled and wants it to be set down the prophecy is fulfilled and 30 pieces of silver is the price they paid for the betrayal of the son of man the son of god the son of david the anointed one whatever title you we we choose to use 30 pieces of silver is given to us from saint matthew well how much more could we say about this this morning in reflection and i'll leave you to reflect on that but at the same time um i think that we ought to remember that when we say the matthew passion in our minds comes first of all that huge piece of music written by j.s spark it was written for saint thomas's church in leipzig and it was first performed in i think 1727. the church traditionally has always and if we look at our own episcopal anglican book of common prayer the gospel of saint matthew is set out to be read on palm sunday the sunday before the passion and in the old roman missal exactly the same and the passion of saint john reserved for good friday that was the traditional way of doing it and the passion of sin matthew although the book of common prayer doesn't use all of it it's a long section anyway it uses the whole of chapter 27 traditionally 26 27 are the on the passion of saint matthew and bach uses that and sets it as one of the finest pieces of choral music ever written and yet it's a narrative it's a history taken from one of the gospels just as his john passion is taken from one of the gospels and what does bark cause us to do he causes us to reflect on it the whole narrative is that sung by the evangelist and starting exactly where we began this morning at the beginning of chapter 26 it will end at the end of chapter 27 and the the the evangelist will sing the role of the narrator and other solo voices will sing in the narrative the roles of others and and collective voices will sing the voice of the crowd but in the middle there are choruses and arias and above all else almost like stepping stones corrals which we use as are hymns particularly when we're singing the passion corral but bach's corrals with orchestral accompaniment are some of the glories of his writing so in this we're being taught to reflect on the passion in our own way and that music helps us of course but we can do it ourselves because there are so many things rather like isaac watts is him the other which we we remembered a few days ago when i survey the wondrous cross music can help us the earth can help us the gospels can help us but we are asked by all evangelists in different ways to reflect on the passion and passion comes from that word of being passive as jesus is handed over into the hands whose will for him will be fulfilled he opens wide his arms for us on the cross says one of the prayers of consecration and open wise his his arms to the will of the creator whom he calls father and teaches us to do the same but also to the will of those who believe they are accomplishing their own purposes and by so doing accomplishes accomplish god's purpose all these things in the matthew passion as it sees its way through and for the next few days except when interrupted by our saint stairs we shall from time to time be interrupted we shall consider those two huge chapters 26 and 27 the matthew passion which the church has always valued as the beginning narrative of holy week well there's several things i could be talking about today but there's really only one date i wanted to remember and that is that on this day on the 20th of july 1910 dame veronica wedgwood was born better known as as she liked to be named c.v wedgwood she was an historian and she also had a wonderful way with narrative it was said of her that she like a novelist could tell a story while holding on to the dimensions of history she talked about the role and value and study of history and i'll talk about her history in a moment but these are her words the whole value of the study of history is for me it's delightful undermining of certainty it's cumulative insistence of the differences of points of view it is not lack of prejudice which makes for dull history but lack of passion and then her insistence on the fact that the role of the individual in history did have meaning rather like the individuals we've met today in saint matthew's gospel the woman without name who was the one with the total insight of the role of the anointed one and what that meant to him and what support that needed she wrote the individual stupendous and beautiful paradox is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things i prefer this overestimate to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of an inhuman sea or pulverizes the fallible surviving records of human life into the grey dust of statistics no grade asked about the way she wrote but she concentrated herself and she was a great scholar and received all kinds of plaudits and distinctions which she tended to set aside in imagination she was the great great great granddaughter of the famous wedgwood josiah wedgwood the potter and abolitionist and she valued that descent but she concentrated on the european history of the 16th and 17th centuries and even more so on that defining time of our own nation here in the british isles the civil war how many countries and so many of you are in different parts of the world how many countries have been shaped and formed by civil war and when we're going around the house on days when we have so many seminarians or bishops from different parts of the world going around the portraits of the various deans and dealing with the civil war we stop and just have a reflection on how different countries have been shaped and formed by awful civil wars which can be so full of bloodshed and it becomes a family strife if one thinks of the extended family of a community and nation well she concentrated on that period of the 17th century and she did so in a wonderfully dramatic way which held on absolutely to scholarship she also loved to write biographies she wrote a book biography of william the silent of of oliver cromwell of cardinal richelieu um and these biographies which he wrote the earl of stratford she wrote a biography of but essentially her great work and i've got my first edition of her first part of the great work was a work called the great rebellion here is the first volume the king's piece i remember reading this and i'll read just her little introduction the king's piece is a narrative history of the british isles for the four years in the reign of king charles the fest which immediately preceded the civil wars i hope in later volumes to describe the course of these wars and the republican experiment that followed them the story is not simple it involves three separate countries england scotland and ireland and two civilizations of a wholly different type the normanized anglo-saxon and the celtic she doesn't mention welsh there because of course uh wales there because of course it was it was in the um kingdom of england at that time but later on she she she mentions how the welsh rose up and was at that time intensely favorable to the king because of what was going on but uh england scotland island very very very different nations and she would she would walk the course of so many of the places there and spend herself sink herself entirely into that and i remember reading her second volume the king's war in the middle of a long vacation when i was earning some pennies to go later on holiday by bicycling a little distance and mostly uphill to help with the gardens at the house at thor martin and the long hill when i reached the top was already there and i i took uh the book in my my um bicycle saddlebags and there i would allow myself one cup of tea from the flask that my mother had prepared with with lunch i'd eat later on and at lunchtime too could read the king's war and that war had been fought all around where i was sitting on that long hill near to the bathstroud road and then not far from where the battle of lansdowne was fought and as i read it i would look around that huge landscape of south gloucestershire and behind me somerset and imagine the cornish armies coming up through and what devastation was wrought by that civil war and her book taught me that but it also taught me how to balance history with individuals and how to insert new facts and all of those things and yet she never lost the passion for that going on she said of the the um king's war and king's piece and the third book the trial of charles the first um she said of that participants in most of the civil war were talented amateurs when it came to military maneuvers and she found herself depicting half the time sheer confusion and nameless individuals became important in the decisions right or wrong they made on the hoof as we might say now i'm saying all this not only because i'm very grateful to her for all the history that she gave of our own nation here and opened up all kinds of imagination but because we're doing this all day long in terms of our reflections on the way in which each different evangelist tells the story is it a history is it a a biography is it a it's difficult to say because there's all kinds of different reasonings going on and we've seen that as the preface of the matthew passion which we're about to start was read this morning so veronica wedgwood to me is a lovely figure in terms of what she gave in her histories but we ourselves are invited to follow the same kind of principles and to have passion about our reflections of our lord's passion and at the same time to respond to it that's what the evangelists want as i've said this morning about the story of the woman who poured the ointment we are actually involved in that even in our lord's own sentences she has done a leave the woman alone she's done a beautiful thing for me and wherever and whenever this story is told throughout the world she will be part of it she will be remembered so let's give thanks for the passions of history and also the way in which new facts and new truths quite often partial truths and the way people tell stories being so different as the historians go on but let's say our prayers on this morning now and give thanks for our own roots and cultures and the way in which the evangelists all four of them give us that story in the same way that the epistles do just by inference so often let's say prayers this morning for where are we the diocese of dallas in the episcopal church of the united states as we pray for the anglican communion and also in our own diocese as we pray for archbishop justin and archbishop and bishop rose of dover and bishop tim at lambeth we pray with our diocese today for the ministry to children and young people and for ben hatfield the diocesan children and young people's ministry advisor so let's use the collect for today and call to mind all those situations with which we began our thinking this morning serious situations throughout our world lord of all power and might you're the author and giver of all good things graft in our hearts the love of your name increase in us true religion nourish us with all goodness and of your great mercy keep us in the same through jesus christ our lord amen so in whatever language you like to use we say the prayer our savior taught us our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom the power and the glory forever and ever are men image of silence now as we say our own prayers on this day um [Applause] so [Music] [Music] so the peace of god which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of god and of his son jesus christ our lord and the blessing of god almighty the father the son and the holy spirit be upon you upon those whom you love and upon those whom you would pray for today and always amen