I think the best way to begin is to ask why Christ died on the cross. That we can give some kind of answer to this question in terms of the meaning and purpose of the life of Jesus is presupposed by the Christian activity of ‘preaching Christ crucified’ two thousand years after the event. For our purposes, then, we can rule out the idea that it was all a tragic misunderstanding which need never have happened ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do’, said Jesus of his executioners; but even if this means that they misunderstood him, the misunderstanding was not fortuitous. It was a misunderstanding that was in some way to be expected. In the gospels Jesus is presented not, indeed, as seeking his death or courting it but as realising that it was unavoidable. It is this unavoidability that we shall be looking at here, in Part Two of this ‘long sermon’.

Scholars dispute about the circumstances of the death of Jesus but two facts seem fairly well established: Jesus was executed by the Romans because they found him a threat to the precarious stability of their colony; and they were encouraged to do this because Jesus was rejected by the leaders of his own people. I think that, in the end, the reason why he was thus rejected was that he claimed to ‘speak with authority’; that is, he regarded attachment to his own person as more significant even than belonging in the ordinary way to the People of God in accordance with the Law.

There is now general agreement that Christians, in virtue of their Christian commitment, should engage in social and political action, particularly on behalf of the poor and oppressed. That is the presupposition behind liberation theology. At the same time the conviction persists that social and political action is not properly religious action, but, strictly speaking, only the consequence or overflow of religion into a non-religious, secular sphere. Hence the felt necessity, especially on the part of those with religious authority, to qualify the acceptance of liberation theology with frequent warnings that the Christian religion should not be reduced to social and political action.

More widespread among ordinary religious people is the manner in which the perennial need for reflection becomes a devaluing of social and political action in favour of interior contemplation as alone truly religious. People are urged to withdraw at regular intervals from their social involvement, which is dubbed external activity, in order to find God once more in the properly religious activity of personal, meditative prayer. The religious life is seen as the inner life in contrast to the outer life. The locus of the Transcendent and of religious experience is identified with the realm of interiority. To work for the liberation of the poor and oppressed may be demanded by religious faith, hope and love. It is applied religion, but it is not of the essence of religion, which is found in the inwardness of union with God.

This tendency of the Christian religion has been strongly reinforced by interest in the Eastern religions.

On August 31st 1984, ten women arrived at Blue Gate, the entrance to the American Cruise missile base at Greenham Common to do the night watch for the peace camp there—and simultaneously to keep the vigil of the Passion based on the gospel of St. Mark. It so happened that that weekend was the anniversary of the women’s peace camp—three years since it had been set up in 1981. The camp had been evicted and destroyed many times. But the women return and remain, gathering around the fire, huddled under sheets of polythene at night and in the rain. Old prams stand at the ready for the women to wheel away their few possessions when the bailiffs come in the morning—as they do most days.

The women of the camp welcomed the night watchers and extended the hospitality of their fire, before going off to sleep under the polythene sheets. The vigil women remained around the fire to keep the watch, gathering each hour on the hour to face the guarded gates of Greenham, to sing a psalm, read from the bible and pray. Towards morning at 6.00 a.m., as dawn came up over the base, and Mark’s gospel told of Jesus being led away and delivered to Pilate, the night watch prepared to depart. Meanwhile, another woman was getting up in London and going to continue the vigil in the church beside her house.

Without the presence of the women’s peace camp at Greenham, this theological initiative for peace on the part of Christian women would not have taken place.