The Eternal Now

The Eternal Now

Sermon preached by The Very Reverend Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury

Sunday 20 July 2025

Readings: Colossians 1: 15–28, Luke 10: 38–end

‘Forty years on, growing older and older,
Shorter in wind as in memory long
Feeble of foot and rheumatic of shoulder
What will it help you that once you were strong?’

In Alan Bennett’s first stage play, a Headmaster is retiring from the crumbling public school which he joined as a pupil at the end of the First World War.  The end of year school play charts the forty years that have elapsed since, with a cavalcade of cameo appearances:  Lawrence of Arabia; Virginia Woolf; Neville Chamberlain (tried by the court of history and sentenced to Total Ignominy).

Bennett wrote the play fresh from the satirical success of Beyond the Fringe and in the year of revolution, 1968.  His theme was the historic transformation of Britain in four decades:  in closing, he sums up the nation thus:  ‘To let.  A valuable site at the crossroads of the world.  Outlying portions of the estate already disposed of to sitting tenants.  Of some historical and period interest.  Some alterations and improvements necessary’.

Hence Bennett’s use of the Harrow School Song:  ‘Forty years on, growing older and older… What will it help you that once you were strong?’  Bennett understands time as linear and its trajectory as downward.

Writing to the Colossians, St Paul must fear that such is his trajectory, too.  He writes from prison – probably in Ephesus – not knowing what his fate will be.  In the sixth decade of the first century justice was arbitrary and brutal.  Paul and his companions had been at liberty.  Now they are prisoners.  The future is uncertain.

Forty years on, we can assert with confidence that in 1985 only two musical appearances were consequential.  The first took place in London and Philadelphia, where Bob Geldof cajoled the royalty of rock ‘n’ roll to play the Live Aid extravaganza.  And the second took place in Salisbury, where, as the dying notes of Freddie Mercury’s unforgettable performance echoed around Wembley, two young men rode into town, their hair blowing in the wind.  For one of them, this was a return:  Stephen Abbott was admitted as a chorister in the year Bennett’s play received its première; now he was returning as a Lay Vicar.  He was joined by a new Assistant Director of Music, David Halls.  The rest, as they say, is history…

Forty years on we thank David for four decades of service, and we say farewell to Steve, who retires today.  Farewell not just to Steve:  Jacob Costard, our outstanding Organ Scholar, leaves us for Clare College, Cambridge; and Emmie, Phoebe, Fred, Gabriel, Joshua, and Freddie, our Senior Choristers, complete their time in the Choir.

Anniversaries and farewells reinforce our linear experience of what we call the passage of time.  Steve arrived here forty years ago; Jacob, one year ago; the Senior Choristers at least five years ago; all eight of them are here this morning; all eight of them will leave here tonight.  Past-present-future.  Bennett’s progressive schoolmaster, Mr Franklin, may assert ‘We want to be free to look to the future.  The future comes before the past’.  But when his Headmaster retorts ‘Nonsense.  The future comes after the past.  Otherwise it couldn’t be the future’ he speaks for the way in which most of us experience time.

Yet from prison St Paul and his companions learn to view things differently.  Tom Wright has written this:  ‘They are now invited to see the world with the eye of faith, the eye that has learned to look through the lens of scripture and see Jesus’.

Paul’s response to this invitation explodes onto the page in his letter to the Colossians.  ‘He is the image of the invisible God, for in him all things…were created… He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together’. I n Jesus, Paul writes, there is no past, and there is no future; there is only now, and now is eternal.  Everything that has ever been and everything that will ever be is held together by the one through whom everything is created:  Jesus.

It’s why he chides Martha.  He does it gently.  ‘Martha, Martha…’.  He repeats her name, something that happens in only one other place in Luke and in none of the other Gospels.  Martha is distracted by her many tasks, by the demands of the household and by the expectations of hospitality.  Jesus calls her back to herself, back to the eternal now.  Mary chooses to sit with Jesus, in whom ritual ablution and a hot dinner and polite small talk are unnecessary, because in him every ablution and every dinner and every conversation is brought to perfection.  He was and he will be, but he is.  The eternal now is a guest under the sisters’ roof.  This the better part.  There is need of only one thing – to dwell in the now.

On days like this we naturally look back, and look around, and look ahead.  The Senior Choristers may look back at the day when they were bumped into the Choir, or at the ubiquitous lasagne that they were fed before almost every Diocesan concert they sang.  Mr Halls may look around at this week’s exceptional Southern Cathedrals Festival, already rated by more than one of my correspondents as quite possibly the best ever.  Mr Costard may look ahead to undergraduate life at England’s finest university, and Mr Abbott… well, Mr Abbott may look forward to the Cathedral coffee rota which I understand he will join in retirement.  On days like this we acknowledge a moment in time by cutting cake, giving gifts, making speeches, and joining in rounds of applause.  We honour together all that has been, all that is, and all that shall be, and in the texture of the cake, in the unwrapping of the gifts, and in the noise of the applause what has been and what will be is brought into the now.  Cake and wrapping paper and handclapping have an almost sacramental quality.  They are earthly experiences graced with eternal meanings.

But the cake will be eaten, and the applause will die away, and the gifts will gather dust.  Jesus tells Martha that the part that Mary has chosen will not be taken away from her.  It will not be taken away from us, either.  For in the life of faith every moment is graced with eternal meaning.  In the life of faith we are in Christ and Christ is in us.  We look back at the past and ahead to the future, of course we do.  But we live in the eternal now; it is the reason – the only reason – why we have hope.  This is the character of our every departure.  We know that in Christ we will never be parted from one another; we know that in Christ our lives are held and our names are known and our futures are secure.  There is no time like the present, but in Christ there is no time but the present.  And the Good News is that we are all part of it – for ever.  Amen.