Winchester Cathedral 
Diocesan Eucharist for Maundy Thursday 24 March 2005

“...To provide for those who mourn in Zion – to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, a mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. They will be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.” (Isaiah 61.3)

I want to tell you why those words have made such a deep impression on me as I have prepared for this service in which we renew our ordination vows and bless the oils. 

For Palestinians who have inherited olive trees and the care of them, their trees which are productive over so many human generations are rich in symbolic and family, as well as in economic, importance. But in the last five years of the present intifada in the Occupied Territories, the occupying Israeli Defence Force and Israeli settlers have uprooted and destroyed more than four hundred thousand olive trees – and the Separation Barrier cuts off local small-scale farmers from many thousands more. 

In November Lou and I visited the YMCA Rehabilitation Centre in Beit Sahour, in the Shepherds' Fields, down the road from Bethlehem. They told us about their work, which Christian Aid helps to support, with young people all over the Occupied Territories who have been maimed or traumatised by the fighting of these last years. 

They told us, too, about a project begun by East Jerusalem YMCA, and the YWCA of Palestine, called Keep Hope Alive. They aim to raise the funds to plant 50,000 olive trees right up close to the Separation Barrier, or in fields where olive trees have been uprooted or which are threatened with confiscation. 

And then they took us outside for a closer view of what we had seen from their upper windows – the swathe of cleared land, with the Separation Fences glinting in the middle of it, snaking a couple of hundred metres away through the valley where once traditionally “there were shepherds abiding in the field”. And there in the garden, beyond where groups of young people come and camp, there were ten or fifteen gnarled, maimed stumps of olive trees, uprooted by the IDF from where they had grown for centuries but rescued, replanted and tended here and, wonderfully, putting out shoots of fresh, bright-green life - “trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, to display his glory”, signs of the “good news to the oppressed, liberty to the captives” of the prophecy that Jesus read in the synagogue at Nazareth and used to describe his own and his followers’ calling.

When we come in a few minutes to the finely-worded prayer for the blessing of the oil of chrism, and then whenever you use the oils that we bless today, please remember as I do that whole oppressive, tragic situation in the Holy Land, and those Christians and their faith in the middle of it – and those “trees of righteousness” that Lou and I saw, that “planting of the Lord, to display his glory.” In Confirmation services when our ministries are particularly interwoven, that of the Bishop with those of lay-people and clergy who have together worked with the candidates in their preparation, I and my bishop colleagues so often learn what you have been shown over the previous months: that here are adults and young people whose lives had been uprooted and hacked and bull-dozed about by tragedy or disappointment or mistake, for whom now their fresh life in Christ is indeed “a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning”.

Remember too that as we celebrate and symbolise God’s gift to them of the Spirit of His Son, and of that fresh life in Him, with oil from olive trees and with laying on of hands, we use in their Confirmation words from earlier in Isaiah that speak of God’s seven-fold gifting of the King in Jerusalem; and the first Holy Week began with Our Lord riding to his coronation as the kings of Judah rode on a donkey to theirs. Like their coronations were in symbol, we believe that Jesus’ coronation, on the cross and in His resurrection, was in reality God’s re-establishing for creation and for humankind his kingdom of order and justice, life and peace. So he amazed those with whom he had been brought up by telling them that Isaiah’s words, which we have read just now, “had been fulfilled in their hearing” (Luke 4:21).

Today, and in these next days, as we celebrate these foundational events we celebrate the truth that they are still fulfilled, through him, among us and through the ministries of the Church – hacked about and bull-dozed though we know ourselves, too, to be. Let those to whom we minister with these oils, those who are sick and dying, those whom we baptise, those whom we confirm – and those once-uprooted, now bravely sprouting trees in the Shepherds’ Fields and the courageous faith and hope that they symbolise – let these together encourage us freshly to trust Our Lord – to trust that he continues to call us with all his church into the ministry that he expressed in today’s verses from Isaiah, continues to equip us and strengthen us for it; 

and so to trust that it is of us also that it is written

“They will be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.”

Amen.