Holy Hankies, Anointed Aprons
A sermon preached by The Very Revd Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury
Sunday 6 September 2026
Ezekiel 12: 21—13: 16
Acts 19: 1–20
When pilgrims enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre they can turn to the right and climb up the rock of Golgotha. Or they can turn to the left and queue to enter the empty tomb. But the very first thing they see, right in front of them, is a limestone slab raised a few inches above the floor, held in place by a low parapet of marble. This is the Stone of Anointing, on which it is said that the body of Jesus was laid after his crucifixion, and where it was prepared for burial by Joseph of Arimathea.
Pilgrims gather around the stone. They kneel in devotion. They touch it and press their foreheads into it. They weep and pray over it. And they take from their bags the cloths that they have brought with them for the purpose. Scented oil has been sprinkled upon these, and pilgrims rub them against the stone’s smooth surface and then stow them away with care.
My colleague Denise, a Brazilian academic, was deeply moved by what she saw. So she bought some scarves as gifts for her devout aunties and brought them to the Church. There she knelt and rubbed them against the stone before packing them for the long flight home.
How should we respond to this devotional custom? There is, after all, little archaeological evidence to connect the stone with the body of Jesus. At the earliest it dates to the Crusader period. And Scripture is remorseless in its condemnation of customs that claim to be rooted in that which is authentically divine but which is not. Ezekiel condemns false visions and lying divinations, the pronouncements of those who wrongly claim divine authority for their own high-sounding words. The ministry of Paul in Ephesus reaches its climax with the public burning of a vast quantity of magical texts. Their value reaches an astonishing fifty thousand pieces of silver. The Son of God had been sold for just thirty.
And yet…and yet…we are told that ‘when the handkerchiefs or aprons that had touched [Paul’s] skin were brought to the sick, their diseases left them, and the evil spirits came out of them’. When cloths that have come into contact with Paul come into contact with the sick, they are healed. Now: Paul is the quintessential preacher of the Word and the quintessential writer of words. He is the Church’s first theologian and its greatest theologian. His name is forever associated with the reformed conviction that we are saved by what God does and not by what we do. Holy hankies and anointed aprons are exactly the sorts of things that are denounced in his name fifteen centuries after his death.
Yet we are told that something that has touched him brings wholeness to others, and the author of Acts clearly distinguishes this phenomenon from the phenomena associated with the magicians. This is not the misuse of the divine name practised by the seven sons of Sceva; nor is it the windy rhetoric called out by Ezekiel. This is the healing power of the holy.
Paul has not sought to wield God to his advantage or mould God to his liking or manipulate God to his purposes. Remember the road to Damascus: he has been found by God; he has allowed himself to be found by God. Now, God speaks, God works, through him. Our second reading began with the note that Paul comes to Ephesus ‘…while Apollos was in Corinth’. When Paul writes to the Corinthian church he writes, ‘What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe…no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ’. Paul is the servant through whom the Corinthians came to believe; the foundation of their faith is not him or Apollos but Jesus Christ.
This is holiness: being the one ‘through whom’. To say that Paul is holy is to say that in Paul, God is present; in what Paul touches, God is present; and from the place where God is present evil spirits flee and disease is banished.
So – what of the pilgrims who kneel around the Anointing Stone?
They come, heirs of a tradition which claims that holiness can been given tangible form, that holiness can be felt, and handled, and pressed into. They come, kneeling in a place where millions have knelt before them, and behave there as millions have behaved before them. They come to touch not the body of Christ but the place that best articulates the conviction that that body once lay somewhere. They come, weeping over the place, leaning into it, uttering the prayers of their hearts, and longing to take away with them some tactile reminder of that place and that moment. If we are indeed saved by what God does, then what they do bears eloquent witness to the hope they have in what God does.
I imagine Denise’s aunties unwrapping the scarves that were her gift to them; feeling the softness of the fabric against their faces; closing their eyes as the scent of the Church fills their nostrils; and being assured afresh of the life of the God who is their life; whom they serve, whom they love. Let us pray.