The Kingdom of God is Justice and Peace
The Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem. (Credit Paul Bowman)
The Embrace Lent Study Guide this year explores Jesus' message of justice and peace as proclaimed in the gospels. The Very Revd John Witcombe, Dean of Coventry Cathedral, wrote the Foreword of our Guide and here he reflects further on the need for reconciliation and a just peace in many parts of the world today.
Font at Coventry Cathedral.
Coventry Cathedral has a remarkable font, formed from a large limestone boulder brought to the Cathedral from the hillside above Bethlehem for the consecration in 1962. It’s a living link between the Cathedral, a symbol of both destruction and rebuilding, and the land of Jesus, so broken and so in need of the reconciliation which is embedded in the Coventry story. It’s a paradox that the one who brought reconciliation to the world walked a land which now epitomises so much of humanity’s need to find a way to embrace one another across the dividing lines of history.
It is a striking fact that so many pilgrims seek to walk in the footsteps of Jesus in search of a spiritual experience, and seem to fail to hear his call to speak into the truth of what they see in the land through which they travel on pilgrimage. The peace for which all God’s people seek is found not in a superficial escape from the challenges of the world, and especially the world of the holy one, but by searching for God’s reconciling work in the midst of the world. That’s where Jesus is going to be discovered, at work in the world today.
When I was invited to interview for my current post as Dean of Coventry, I was asked to reflect in the interview presentation on Micah 6.6-8. I had applied for the job, amidst much uncertainty and self doubt, the day before leaving the UK for a month’s course based in the Tantur Ecumenical Institute, between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. The text inviting me for interview arrived as I stood on the rooftop of a convent in Nazareth, looking down at the Basilica of the Annunciation. My task for the panel was to offer a ‘spiritual and theological reflection’ on Micah 6.6-8, to do justice, love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God, and I couched it entirely in response to my experience of visiting Hebron with the remarkable EAPPI volunteers. In that city, which epitomises so much at the heart of the challenges of Israel Palestine there is, as many readers will know, a street called ‘Shehada’, or witness - which makes its way past inhabited Jewish Israeli settlements and empty Palestinian shops and homes. It’s only a stone’s throw from a teeming city, but there are roadblocks and checkpoints protecting access to the street, patrolled by young soldiers. What does it mean to walk humbly with God down that street - and to do so in a way that serves justice, with mercy, for all those caught up in that nation’s history? I realised that it meant listening to stories on both sides of the conflict, being ready to form real relationships, and moving forward together towards a shared future.
In the Community of the Cross of Nails, with its home in Coventry Cathedral, we share with around 250 partners in the ministry of reconciliation. It was born out of our experience in this city where we experienced the devastation of destruction, where our predecessors recognised that the hope for humanity’s future had to lie in learning to be reconciled with one another, and that reconciliation depended upon God. The first crosses of nails were made of the long medieval nails which had fallen from the burning roof on the night of the Coventry Blitz in November 1940, scavenged from the rubble, and bound together as a symbol of Christ’s presence in the midst of destruction - a symbol of both judgement and hope. There are crosses today in hundreds of places which have shared our experience, and where others have been inspired by what God did here to bring reconciliation between bitter enemies.
Over the years our Coventry work of reconciliation gathered itself around three priorities: healing the wounds of history; learning to live with difference and celebrate diversity; and building a culture of peace. These three held us on track in the journey of reconciliation, which we have come to define as ‘journeying from a fractured past towards a shared future’. But during the ten years that I’ve enjoyed this job, we’ve come to recognise that the third priority needed a little more bite. We have taken the decision to introduce the word ‘justice’ to that priority - to build a kingdom of justice and peace. The peace which God gives is not a superficial, papering over the cracks peace - the sort that says, “I just wish we could all get on.” It is a just peace, a demanding peace, which listens to history as well as the present, and seeks to build a future on solid foundations. Justice without peace is also inadequate: it doesn’t do the (re)building of relationships which is part and parcel of the Kingdom. And, as Paul goes on to say in Romans 14.7, the Kingdom of God which is justice (or righteousness) and peace, is also about joy in the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the ultimate gift from God for those who pray for the coming of the Kingdom, as I explained in the Foreword to Embrace’s Lent Study Guide.
My last day in Israel Palestine started before dawn at the Wadi Qelt, and the walk down to Jericho, before leaving my group to travel back to the airport to catch a re-arranged flight home for the interview, where I simply talked about the impact on me of the preceding month. And now in the Cathedral I return again and again to our boulder, a place of new beginnings and a solid symbol of all that God has done in our world and in me, bringing me to this place where we pray for the peace of Jerusalem, for the peace of Kyiv, for the peace of Coventry - and for God’s help to make peace with justice, his Kingdom for all.
