The gospel-text chosen for today’s feast (John 17, 9—19) gives us the interpretative key we need in order to understand what it was that motivated the life of St Thomas at the deepest level. It discloses the point of departure from which that life began to take on shape and form. ‘Consecrate them in the truth,’ says our Lord on the evening before his death. By this prayer of his, he transformed the Old Testament liturgy of reconciliation into that ‘liturgy’ of the New Testament which consists in the Lord’s own living and dying.

‘Consecrate them in the truth’. The word ‘consecrate’ is founded on the term sacer, ‘sacred’, and ‘the Sacred’ is the characteristic being of God, the untouchableness of his majesty. ‘Consecrate’ signifies: make man, this poor and finite creature, able to enter into contact with God in his immense glory. How can man dare to approach God, with impure hands lay hold on the Untouchable One, the Pure One, the Infinite? The world religions have created ritual systems in order to qualify man for dealing with the sacred so as to resolve the tragic enigma whereby man needs contact with God in order to live, and yet is incapable of bearing that light inaccessible.

That synod on the laity expired quietly on Friday October 30 unloved, unmourned, largely unreported. Most of those who were inside put on a brave front, tried to salvage something from the wreckage, and claimed to have had an intense experience of ‘affective collegiality’. This is the warm glow that comes from brothers (and a few sisters) celebrating their unity, and hugging it to themselves. It is contrasted with ‘effective collegiality’, in which Pope and bishops combine to get things done. So far this pontificate has been stronger on affective than effective collegiality.

Archbishop Roger Mahoney gave the game away in a casual remark as he departed, early, for Los Angeles: ‘It doesn’t matter what the Synod is about, what matters is that it should meet.’ Mahoney was a papal nominee at the Synod, so he probably is privy to the mind of the Pope. But what contempt this remark reveals for the laity who in some countries were extensively consulted in advance of the Synod. The four bishops from the United States, for example, held elaborate and costly meetings involving over 200,000 laypeople. Their speeches to the Synod in the first week faithfully reflected what they had heard. They had done what the Synod Secretariat told them to do: consulted. The results of their consultation were spurned, mocked, one could almost say.

‘Nobody comes to the Father but by me’ (John 14 : 6b). Can we really take that literally? Can we even take it seriously? ‘Nobody’ (he is talking about the whole human race) ‘comes to the Father’ (he means God) ‘but by me’ (he means himself).

There are, I think, around four or five thousand million people alive today and countless millions have lived in the past; and most of them—apart from a few eccentrics—have thought about God one way or another, communally or individually. I mean they have thought about the mystery that things are, the mysterious purpose of human life, or however they have put it; and they have sought to come to God. There have been great religions devoted to meditating on these things, whole civilisations sustained by some kind of worship of God, there has been endless striving to come to the Father. And now, amongst all these teeming millions, it is being asserted that, after all, nobody comes to God except through this individual carpenter in Palestine.

The egoism is breathtaking. Surely there must be some mistake.

Let us then think about this for a minute or two.

First of all, St John is not saying that nobody sees or understands God except by getting to know Jesus of Nazareth. People can seek to understand God, they can wrestle with this problem or explore this mystery quite apart from faith in Jesus Christ. John does not think they will get very far, for he says ‘No one has ever seen God’; but having faith in Jesus Christ will not get them any further.

Thinking how I should contribute, from the biblical perspective, to this discussion of whether there is change in God, there first came to my mind not biblical passages but two quotations from Anglican religion. First of all, the doleful words of H.F. Lyte in his hymn ‘Abide with Me’: ‘Change and decay in all around I see; O Thou who changest not abide with me.’ Secondly, words from the first of the Articles of Religion of the Church of England, which speak of God as ‘preserver of all things’.

My reason for mentioning these quotations is not so much because of any inherent theological value they may have but because of the kind of use to which they can be (and have been) put. Lyte’s words about God’s unchanging character are particularly appealing in a world where change is everywhere apparent. The quest for peace, security and a changelessness in God can satisfy the troubled spirit when there seems to be nothing stable in the world in which one lives. That means, of course, that those institutions which bear witness to the unchanging God must themselves be unchanging, a piece of heaven on earth, a reflection of the eternal. Similarly, the words about God being ‘preserver of all things’, heard when an Anglican incumbent entered on his ministry, reinforced the people who wanted to believe that the God whom the incumbent had come to proclaim was a God who changed nothing and preserved the status quo.

A lecture given on the 23rd March 1987 at Sion College in the City of London as one of a series related to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Report ‘Faith in the City’.

Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God!
His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth,
Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great king.
Within her citadels God
has shown himself a sure defence.
Walk about Zion, go round about her, number her towers.
Consider well her ramparts,
go through her citadels;
that you may tell the next generation
that this is God.
(Psalm 48)

It might not seem too misguided to look upon the whole vast biblical narrative, and much subsequent Christian writing as well, as one stupendous epic, a Tale of Two Cities: Jerusalem the holy city of God, upon the one hand, ‘Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of her impure passion’ (Revelation 14:8), upon the other. Long after the historical Babylon had ceased to matter in the least to Jew or Christian, and long after the historical Jerusalem had ceased to matter all that much to Christians at least, the symbolism of the two cities lives on, and new Babylons continue to be denounced, new Zions, new Jerusalems continue to be built in Europe, America, Africa and elsewhere.

In the mid-1950s I recall hearing Joseph Fichter, the prominent American sociologist and Jesuit, say off the cuff at a large gathering of Catholic sociologists in Belgium that there was no such thing as Catholicism. He substantiated his remark with words something like: ‘There’s American Catholicism, there’s French Catholicism, Italian Catholicism, and so on, but there’s no Catholicism.’

Until very recently the Catholic Church presented, to the outsider at least, a totally different picture. It was one of the Church being a monolithic structure, the biggest international organization of the world, the most uniform in policy and ideology, and the most efficient to run. Doubtless this image was deliberately encouraged by the hierarchy and by those of an Ultramontane outlook so that the world should see the Church in such terms. And if the image emerged by accident, the hierarchy made no effort to modify it. Emile Durkheim saw it in this fashion but for him it was not a glorious achievement but un monstre sociologique.’ A debating opponent, Abbé Hemmer, replied to Durkheim’s comment, which was also made off the cuff in an academic group, that the assertion proved the divine nature of the Church. It was divine because it was able to transcend sociological laws. The Church was thus a miracle or mystery as much in theological terms as in social reality. Durkheim’s judgment was hardly value-free. From the viewpoint of his unwavering commitment to something which approximated to humanism, the Catholic Church was a sociological monstrosity, in part due to its enormous size, but more importantly because it exerted controls over independent nations and tried to weld together diverse and perhaps hostile groups.

Take this scenario: I sin and so I offend God. He is angry with me, and I fear the wrath of God. Then I kneel before him and beg for his forgiveness, saying that I know I have done wrong and do not deserve his friendship; but will he take me back all the same? Then the wrath of God is appeased; he changes his mind and is no longer angry with me.

Now this is a perfectly good story, or picture, of God and ourselves. If we are going to imagine God at all we should sometimes imagine him as very angry—especially angry about injustice to his special people, the poor and the helpless. This is a very important image of God, but it is one image. We have to set this image alongside the image of the God who relents, the God who endures our sin and forgives us all the same.

What reason is there for belonging to the Catholic Church, or to any other church, for that matter? An answer that some people would give is: there may be plenty of good reasons, but there is no rationale. A good reason for belonging to the Catholic Church would be that you had always been a Catholic and that you felt at home in it; another would be that you were living in a Catholic country, and no other Christian church amounted to more than a sect there. These, of course, are personal reasons, applying to some people and not to others; as such, they contrast with any purported rationale. A rationale, if there was one, for belonging to a particular church would be a proposition holding good generally and not relating to certain individuals more than to others, that, in virtue of its truth, constituted a reason, perhaps a compelling reason, for belonging to that church rather than any other. Is it plausible to hold that there is no rationale, in this sense, for belonging to the Catholic Church, or, conversely, for not belonging to it?

We know that men and women have died rather than renounce, or rather than adhere to, the Catholic Church: if there is no rationale in the matter, they were pitiably deluded. There is no sense to be made of the history of Christianity unless we regard one proposition as held in common by Catholics and Orthodox, and rejected by Protestants.