Message de l'archevêque de Canterbury

So in relation to this, I want to suggest three perspectives that may help us.

First and most importantly, the Christ whose life we recognize in each other is the Christ who has suffered rejection and humiliation at the hands of human agents like ourselves. To borrow the terminology of the contemporary British theologian who has most eloquently developed this theme, James Alison, Jesus has ‘the intelligence of the victim’. He stands where every victim of every act of human aggression and violent exclusion stands. That is to say, he is not simply a figure with whom we can identify ourselves instantly and straightforwardly, as if he just mirrors back to us who we already are: our identification with him is only fully real if it involves identification also with those whom we as particular agents or our culture or interest group may have made to suffer. To stand where Christ stands is to be exposed to his judgement: it is a place where we must change and grow if we are to live, because to claim the name of Christ is to be committed to a willingness to see ourselves as victimisers as well as victims – as sinners as well as holy people united with the Son of God.

Thus, when we are confronted with the martyr who has suffered at the hands of our own ecclesial body, there is a very particular kind of judgement and gift involved. To the extent that our victim has met his or her death in the conviction that they are being obedient to the law of Christ, they address to us a word from Christ, an invitation to acknowledge our own complicity in violence and the skewed perspectives that both generate and feed violence. They invite us to cross over to where Christ is: to the place where violence is endured not inflicted. And in this way they draw us deeper into the life of the Body of the crucified.

Secondly: all this is only the most dramatic and clear-cut example of how the holy person manifests to us the reality of a Body constantly broken by betrayal and falsehood, rather than a finished or timeless holiness. Every saint’s life, as noted already, arises out of a corporate Christian life in which imperfect (sometimes dramatically imperfect) Christians have played a formative part. Thus if and when we acknowledge signs of Christlikeness—of what I called earlier the ‘flow’ of life and prayer towards God the Father—in someone from another Christian confession, then even when we still feel bound to attend to theological and ecclesiological disagreements at the level of ideas, we are bound to see that this one holy life must entail a presence and activity of the Body of Christ in and through their Christian fellowship. An Orthodox Christian recognizing something of holiness in a Calvinist, a Pentecostal recognizing holiness in a Catholic, would be acknowledging that the actual historical and specific fellowship of this apparently foreign Christian body of believers is a conduit of the life of the Body of Christ, whatever its supposed ‘deficiencies’ in [catholic] order or in biblical fidelity.

Thirdly: when we celebrate the saints in an ecumenical context, we are celebrating the Church that will be but is not yet. We celebrate the eschatological Body of Christ in which all those who have truly served Christ and embodied his way and his gospel are equally at home, however they may have been separated from each other in history. And we also acknowledge with gratitude that our own life in Christ’s Body is nourished by many invisible sources – indeed, that it is nourished by this eschatological unity. The Spirit of the age to come, the Spirit who is a pledge, an arrabon of God’s future, works in us through relationships we cannot see or grasp at the moment, acting through the stranger, the victim, the one we cannot now recognize as brother or sister. To celebrate a holy person from the history of another Christian family is at the same time to say, ‘I do not know today whose life may be used by the Spirit today and tomorrow to bring me to the maturity of faith and witness that God has in mind for me.’