Tag Archives: Julian of Norwich

Love is his meaning: A Sermon for Easter 6A, 2026

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May 10, 2026

         Today is the twentieth anniversary of my ordination as a priest in the Episcopal Church. Remarkably, nearly 17 of those years have occurred here, as Rector of Grace Church. Looking back, I am enormously grateful for all those who have accompanied me on this journey, to Corrie especially, to all of those clergy and laypeople who encouraged me as I was discerning my call and preparing for my ordination, and all those who have supported and prayed for me, and those who have been ministers alongside me, clergy and laity alike.

         It was the culmination of a long process. I had sensed a call to ministry during my college years but it became apparent that ordained ministry in the religious tradition in which I was raised would not be possible. Soon after joining the Episcopal Church in my early 30s I began exploring ordination but the bishops of two different dioceses seemed unwilling to work with my unique situation. So by my 40s, although I had a strong sense of call, it seemed the church wasn’t hearing that call as I did. I joke that I finally found a bishop who didn’t think I needed to go back to seminary in order to become a priest, since I had a doctorate and had even taught for a year at an Episcopal seminary. Even so, the ordination process took five years to complete, which was frustrating and demoralizing. The process, which is meant to ensure that well-qualified candidates are ordained by the church is fallible and can be dehumanizing. 

         Still, it’s all been worthwhile as well as challenging, intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally. I’ve found myself growing in ways and directions that have been surprising. Just this week, for example, I’ve worked with our new partners in ministry: Catalyst for Change, as they have moved into our basement space and begun to take over the work of Off the Square Club. I’ve met with the team from Historic Window and Door who are about to begin the repair work on the stained glass windows on the Carroll St. side of the nave; and I’ve met with someone from another denomination whose daughter is about to be confirmed in the Episcopal Church and he wanted to learn more about the Anglican tradition and how it differs from his own. 

         Among all that, and everything else, I found myself taking a bit of time to revisit my academic past. Friday was the commemoration of Julian of Norwich in our liturgical calendar and in preparation for the midweek Eucharist I refreshed my memory concerning her life, writings, and theology. I pulled out the volume of her writings that I’ve had since grad school. It’s a paperback, so it’s falling apart now. Its pages are full of notes and underlinings from successive readings for class as a student and as a professor; something of an archaeology of my own history with the text, as a scholar and as a Christian. We’ll come back to that later.

         Today, on this Sixth Sunday of Easter, we heard again from the 14th chapter of John, part of Jesus’ farewell discourse to his disciples, set at the Last Supper, as he prepares them for his imminent departure them and for his continuing presence among them in different modes. In Jesus’ words, and in the beautiful phrases of the collect for the day, our attention is directed to God’s love and all the ways in which our love of God is grounded in God’s love for us. 

O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good
things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such
love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above
all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we
can desire; 

         The collect reminds us that the love we have for God is itself a gift from God, and made possible by God’s love for us. A similar note is struck in Jesus’ words here: 

 They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

The same theme is expressed in the words of the gospel hymn we just sang; written by Bianco da Siena in the 14th century: “Come down, O love divine, seek thou this soul of mine.” We love, because God first loved us.

         That love is also made manifest in the Holy Spirit. Here, Jesus uses the word Advocate in our translation. It’s an attempt to render in English the Greek word “Paraclete” which means someone who is called to be alongside another, often as a legal representative; so in that sense, “Advocate” is a perfectly acceptable rendering. But there are other nuances in the term. One of them is “Comforter” which was the word used in the King James version here, and connects the gospel to our gospel hymn again: “O comforter, draw near…” we sang. Jesus assures the disciples that the Paraclete, the Advocate “abides in them” striking that other dominant theme of John’s gospel, of abiding, but now, it is the Advocate abiding with the disciples in the absence of the bodily Jesus. 

         As I reflect on my twenty years of priestly ministry, I am deeply moved by all those among whom and to whom I have ministered—the babies and adults I’ve baptized; the couples I’ve married, the faithful Christians I have buried. I reflect on the outstretched hands of all those to whom I have said “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven” as I have distributed Christ’s body; the people I’ve prayed with and for.

         I think also of all those who have accompanied me along this journey; members of altar guilds, vestries, acolytes, musicians, staff members. I consider all the ways God’s love has been present along the way, even when it seemed profoundly absent.

         Our journeys are curious, surprising things. The encounters we have; the circumstances in which we suddenly find ourselves from time to time; the changes and challenges of a culture that is experiencing rapid and disorienting transformation. Sometimes I wonder whether I bear any resemblance to the person I was forty or fifty years ago; sometimes I wonder whether I’ve changed at all.

         At the outset, I mentioned spending some time with Julian of Norwich this week. Julian was a 14th century anchoress and mystic      who experienced a series of visions when she was around thirty years old and spent the rest of her life reflecting on and trying to make sense of those visions. These reflections culminated in what is one of the greatest and most profound works of Christian mysticism of all time. And as she pondered and reflected on what it all meant, Jesus spoke to her words that encapsulate the good news, for the 14th century and today:

         What, do you wish to know the Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. Remain in this and you will know more of the same. But you will never know different, without end.

Love is its meaning: A Sermon for Good Friday, 2023

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Calvary, Golgotha, the cross. Holy Week has been building toward this moment. The arc of salvation history has bended toward this day. The cross is the center point of history. For medieval Christians it was also the center point of the universe.

Though we know that the cross is not the center of the universe as pre-modern people may have imagined, the cross remains the center point of our religious world and our spiritual lives. And so we come to contemplate on this day, the events so long ago, we say familiar words and familiar prayers, we sing familiar hymns, and we ponder the mystery of a God who became human like us, and becoming human, took on human suffering and pain in all of its extremity. And we wonder, why?

The power of the story lies not only in the words on the page, or the words as read aloud, but in all the images that are evoked in our minds as we hear them. The cinematic adaptations we have seen again and again since our childhoods; the countless images of crucifixion upon which we have gazed, whether in reproductions in books, or in art museums or in churches like our own. Our hymns are also full of such imagery, powerful, emotional. And there are the ways all of these images reverberate across our culture: crosses worn on pendants, crosses on tattoos, crosses burned on lawns. 

The violence of John’s version of the passion jumps out from the page. There is the violence of language—mocking and scorning; the violence of humiliation, flogging and the crown of thorns. There is the violence of the crucifixion itself—execution by torture as it’s been called. The state violence of this form of capital punishment; displayed publicly for all to see and to understand as warning; the constant presence on the outskirts of cities throughout the Roman Empire of these instruments of execution on display and the bodies of victims as well. 

The text conveys other violence, the virulent anti-Judaism that is woven throughout John’s gospel, but especially here where the gospel writer does everything in his power to divert attention and blame away from Rome and onto the Jewish community. So violent, so anti-Jewish, in fact, that many scholars and theologians advocate abandoning John’s passion gospel on this day. The history of anti-semitism and its resurgence in recent years; its presence in contemporary political and cultural discourse leads me to consider alternatives for future years.

Even if we can ignore or set aside the text’s anti-Judaism, the other violence of the text continues to work on us. We may internalize it, transforming it to guilt and shame, or project it onto a vengeful God who demands blood sacrifice. 

But there are other ways of reading this story, other themes that we might emphasize:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten son…

Or the verse we heard in last’s night gospel reading: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” 

Ponder that statement. “He loved them to the end.” It is the same word that lies behind Jesus’ last words on the cross in John’s gospel: “It is finished.” It has been completed. Was that the end to which he loved them, to that final point, to his death? It is the end to which he loves us and the world, a love which brought him to this point, a love that reaches out to us and to the world from his arms outstretched on the cross. 

For all the violence and hatred in the text, there is also, and above all, love. In Jesus’ last conversation with his disciples, he says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. The cross is about suffering, yes, but we should never lose sight of what stands behind that suffering, God’s love for us, Christ’s love for us. It is love that brought Christ to us in the incarnation, love that he showed his disciples and those to whom he ministered, and love he shows most profoundly on the cross. 

The violence may repel us. The bloody depictions throughout Christian history may make us avert our gaze, to turn away, to turn inward, but even if we do, we should not let that violence and suffering obscure God’s love.

I’m reminded of the great medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich, who lived in turbulent times, including the Black Plague, who herself suffered illness unto death, and on her deathbed had a vision of the crucified Christ on which she reflected for some thirty years. The vision and her interpretations were replete with graphic descriptions of Christ’s body on the cross. She writes:

And from the time that it was revealed, I desired many times to know in what was our Lord’s meaning. And fifteen years and after and more, I was answered in spiritual understanding, and it was said: What do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love.”

         Love was his meaning. Love is the meaning of the cross. My prayer for us all today is that we experience that meaning in all of its profundity and power, that love suffuses us, fills us, and draws us closer to Christ. May love be our meaning.

Julian of Norwich, May 8

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Julian of Norwich

Julian is among the most beloved of medieval mystics and visionaries in the twenty-first century. Her sheer joy in the love of God in Jesus Christ, her vivid writing, and her use of maternal imagery to understand and explain God’s love have all endeared her to contemporary Christians and seekers. What’s often ignored in contemporary appropriation of her thought and spiritual wisdom is how profoundly late medieval her sensibilities were. Whatever we find compelling in her today is dependent on piety and psychology that are deeply alien to us.

To wit:

She begins her Revelations of Divine Love by describing her desire to a “bodily sickness … so severe that it might seem mortal.” She wanted her illness to be so serious that she would receive last rites and that she would have “every kind of pain, bodily and spiritual, which I should have if I were dying, every fear and assault from devils, and every other kind of pain except the departure of the spirit…”

She was granted her desire, received her illness and last rites. It was during the last rites that she received her first vision, as the body of Christ on the crucifix carried by the priest came to life and began speaking to her.

She describes her visions in great detail, especially with regard to Christ’s suffering and blood:

… I saw the body bleeding copiously in representation of the scourging and it was thus. The fair skin was deeply broken into the tender flesh through the vicious blows delivered all over the lovely body. The hot blood ran out so plentifully that neither skin nor wounds could be seen, but everything seemed to be blood. And as it flowed down to where it should have fallen, it disappeared. Nonetheless, the bleeding continued for a time, until it could be plainly seen. And I saw it so plentiful that it seemed to me that if it had in fact and in substance been happening there, the bed and everything all around it would have been soaked in blood.

And near the point of death:

After this Christ showed me part of his Passion, close to his death. I saw his sweet face as it were dry and bloodless, with the pallor of dying, then more dead, pale and languishing, then the pallor turning blue and then more blue, as death took more hold upon his flesh. For all the pains which Christ suffered in his body appeared to me in his blessed face, in all that I could see of it, and especially in the lips… The long torment seemed to me as if he had been dead for a week and had still gone on suffering pain, and it seemed to me as if the greatest and the last pain of his Passion was when his flesh dried up.

By all means, Julian should be read and meditated upon. We have a great deal to learn from her but the fullness of her witness should not be silenced by our modern sensibilities.

Julian of Norwich, May 8

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Today we commemorate one of the great mystics and visionaries of the Christian tradition. Julian has become enormously popular in recent decades because her theology is well-suited to twentieth and twenty-first century sensibilities. Some quotations from her Revelations of Divine are widely disseminated, like these:

All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

 

What, do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. Remain in this, and you will know more of the same. But you will never know different, without end.

My Good Friday homily this year concluded with these words.

She is beloved for her deep devotion to Jesus Christ, the infusion of the love of God throughout her works, and for using maternal imagery for God.

For all her appeal to contemporary people, she remains elusive to modern scholarship and elusive to all attempts to appropriate her for contemporary spirituality. We know very little about her that doesn’t come from her own writings. While there’s evidence that she was popular in her lifetime (Margery Kempe describes a visit to her, and several wills mention her), we are certain of neither the date of her birth or her death. Her works survived only in several manuscript copies–suggesting that there was relatively little interest in her writing after her death. It was only in the twentieth century that scholars and then the wider public began to take an interest in her writings.

Contemporary readers of her Revelations may be inclined to overlook her vivid descriptions of the sufferings of Christ as well as her own stated desire to suffer. For example, here she describes the moment of death:

“After this Christ showed me part of his Passion, close to his death. I saw his sweet face as it were dry and bloodless with the pallor of dying, and then deadly pale, languishing, and then the pallor turning blue and then the blue turning brown, as death took more hold upon his flesh. For his Passion appeared to me most vividly in his blessed face, and especially in the lips. I saw there what had become of these four colors, which had appeared to me before as fresh and ruddy, vital and beautiful. This was a painful change to watch, this deep dying, and his nose shriveled and dried up as I saw; and the sweet body turned brown and black, completely changed and transformed from his naturally beautiful, fresh and vivid complexion into a shriveled image of death.

Her writings are rich in detail and in theological insight that bear close study and meditation. But ideas, images, or themes that may seem appealing in the twenty-first century should not be extracted from the context that inspired her–a deep devotion to the passion of Christ and a spirituality that began in the attempt to enter into the passion as fully as possible. Her visions of Christ’s suffering helped her to experience his pain, profound grief at his suffering and death, and as she reflected on those experiences, she began to understand the depth and power of Christ’s love.

(all texts from Julian of Norwich: Showings. Classics of Western Spirituality. 1978)

 

Love was His meaning: A Homily for Good Friday, 2013

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Is there any symbol more ubiquitous in our culture than the cross? We see it everywhere. Although the crosses here in the church are veiled, we can detect their outlines behind the veils. We wear them on pendants around our necks; we see it in ads; some even have crosses tattooed on their bodies. Most of the time, when we see a cross, we don’t give it another thought. It may not even have religious significance for the one who wears it as jewelry. Continue reading →