Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington
2 Timothy 4.6–8, 16–18; Luke 18. 9–14
“The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people…’”
The Pope and the Queen played an outsized role in the graffiti I saw as a boy. Their titles usually appeared in a three-letter acronym only differentiated by its last letter. The first letter was ‘F’, and did indeed stand for the F-word you’re wondering if the Rector is actually going to use in the pulpit. The second letter was ‘T’, simply for “the”. And the last letter was either ‘P’ or ‘Q’. It was, in a strange way, quite useful to have ‘FTP’ or ‘FTQ’ written on a wall, as if you were somewhere unfamiliar, it gave you an instant visual clue as to what sort of place you were in, and therefore whether you could tell the truth about who you were and where you came from, or whether you had to tell a few little white lies.
The Pope of Rome and the King or Queen of England were our respective bogeymen. You might not have had anything much against them personally, you may even have sort of liked what you saw of them on the TV, but you knew if you were rude about them, you were taking a pop at a sacred symbol of the other side, and you were also warning anybody on your own side who might go soft what was expected of them.
Of course, it’s easy from the security of rural England to roll your eyes at all that and say, ‘Well what do you expect from Northern Ireland?’ But for four hundred years, this division wasn’t just in Northern Ireland, but across Europe and later across the world. One side said there was no salvation outside their Church, while the other loved phrases like: “the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome, and all his detestable enormities”.
One of the mainstays of British national identity was, into the early 20th Century, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Almost forgotten now, it was full of grizzly stories of godly Protestants being burned at the sake and disembowelled, usually accompanied by lurid ink drawings that, in the days before horror movies, were probably part of its appeal. The Catholic minority in England had their equivalent stories of saints being crushed to death, or quartered while alive, and Irish Catholics not only had similar stories but outright dispossession in their own country to draw on.
The saddest part is, all the stories were true, in all their cruelty. Tyburn really happened, and the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre really happened. But people tended to remember the stories of when they were victims, and often chose not remember the stories where they were making the victims. Christians proclaim that Christ, who rejected violence and revenge and conquest and power, is the victim sacrificed for the sins of the world—and then, too often, go out and make more victims in His name. When do that, we nail Christ to the Cross all over again.
