Welcome to The Weobley & Staunton Benefice

During a recent visit by school children to Weobley Church, a young lad asked me: ‘Why did Jesus have to die?’ It was, at the same time, a wonderfully naïve and profound question, and one that has exercised theologians for centuries.  My reply centred on Jesus choosing to die so that we might have life. One writer who captured this idea eloquently and personally was John Donne, in his poem from 1609, Resurrection.

Moist with one drop of Thy blood, my dry soul
Shall—though she now be in extreme degree 
Too stony hard, and yet too fleshly—be 
Freed by that drop, from being starved, hard or foul, 
And life by this death abled shall control 
Death, whom Thy death slew ; nor shall to me 
Fear of first or last death bring misery, 
If in thy life-book my name thou enrol. 
Flesh in that long sleep is not putrified, 
But made that there, of which, and for which it was; 
Nor can by other means be glorified. 
May then sin's sleep and death soon from me pass, 
That waked from both, I again risen may 
Salute the last and everlasting day.

I hope and pray you have a blessed Easter season.

Philip

As we move toward the end of the Lent and anticipate the events of Holy Week, we encounter a gospel reading (fifth Sunday of Lent) that both startles us and points to the mystery of Easter Sunday. This is John chapter 11, in which Jesus raises Lazarus from the tomb. We see the figure of Lazarus, emerging from the dimness of the tomb, swathed in bandages, stumbling forward slowly into the light of day. He shuffles forward from death into life, foreshadowing Jesus’ own resurrection on the horizon. ‘Unbind him’ Jesus says ‘and let him go’.

The event is a disturbing one, both for Jesus followers and for his critics, because it defies the ways in which the witnesses would have perceived (and imagined) the world and the operation of their faith. While the Jews of Jesus day believed in a bodily resurrection, this was something regarded as happening at the very end of all time. Jesus’ miraculous raising of a man from death demands a veritable reimagining of faith itself, as it brings the eschkaton (last things) into the realm of the present. The theologian Judith Wolfe observes that a life of faith is not merely a way of making sense of the world. It is also a way of acknowledging the nonsensicality of the world: neither to deny nor prematurely to resolve it. * Our temptation, as those who crave the security of certainty, is always to try and resolve the contradictions around us. But all Christian theology is oriented to a future which is not yet realised and continually climbs upward to seek a better view of a new creation which lies beyond our imaginative or practical control. Ultimately, even Jesus was baffled by the events that unfolded around him on the way to the cross, and it was only in the most earnest moments of prayer that he was able to find a way forward.

Our journey of faith is always a practice of unbinding. God continually asks us to unwrap and leave behind our preconceived notions, our false expectations and the limitations of our imaginations in order to embrace the beauty and mystery of the life to come.

Rev’d Philip