Many, if not all of you will have heard of the Norfolk village of Little Walsingham. Even if you’ve never visited the village, you may have heard of it because it’s a famous place of Christian pilgrimage. And if you haven’t heard of it for that reason, you’ll at least have heard or read about Walsingham in the Sunday notices in church or online when I’ve advertised our own parish pilgrimage to Walsingham.

Walsingham is the site of the most famous Marian shrine in England. It’s roots go back to the year 1061 and so it’s been a place of pilgrimage, in one form or another, for almost 1,000 years. Over those years, Walsingham has changed a great deal and many times. The Shrine began as a simple wooden house which was later incorporated into a larger stone building that was built to protect the original wooden house from the elements. Over the years the stone building was enlarged and eventually became a great Abbey that flourished until the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII when it was closed and eventually, demolished. After that Walsingham fell into relative obscurity until pilgrimage there was revived by the vicar of Walsingham in 1922. The present Shrine Church was consecrated in 1938 but there have been many changes in Walsingham since then. I first went to Walsingham in 1993 and whilst the Shrine Church itself hasn’t changed since then, the grounds that surround it and the village of Little Walsingham itself certainly have, and those changes have affected pilgrimage to Walsingham. 

During the past week, I spent a few days in the East of England and, as I was in that part of the country, I visited Walsingham for a few hours. During my time there I chatted to a few of the villagers and one of the things we spoke about was the way things have changed in Walsingham over the years. We spoke about the fact that there’s no longer a Post Office in the village; about the number of shops and pubs that have closed; the number of tea shops and restaurants that have closed, and about the number of places offering accommodation that have closed. And there’s no doubt that some of these changes have had an adverse effect on pilgrimage to the Shrine.

One of the biggest events of the pilgrimage season in Walsingham is the National Pilgrimage that takes place in May each year. This year, because of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations, the National Pilgrimage took place on the first Monday in May rather than the last, as it traditionally does. Amongst the people I spoke to in Walsingham about this year’s National Pilgrimage, was the landlord of one of the only two remaining pubs in the village.

He told me how much he’d been looking forward to this year’s National Pilgrimage. He thought that, after two years of Covid restrictions, there would be a big turnout this year. But, in the event, he said it was very quiet and very disappointing. The information he was given by the Shrine, was that only about 500 people came to Walsingham for the National Pilgrimage this year. You might think that 500 people for a church service is good; but when I tell you that for the first National Pilgrimage I went to in 1994, the congregation was about 5,000, I think you’ll understand how things have changed, and not for the better. One of the main reasons for this seems to be that because of the loss of guest accommodation in the village. A lot of people have stopped going to the National Pilgrimage because, for a lot of people, Walsingham is too far to go for just a few hours, and for those who are willing to make the National Pilgrimage a day trip, staying around for a few drinks is out of the question, which for a pub landlord is very disappointing indeed.

One of the things that pilgrims to Walsingham have often said to me over the years is that going to Walsingham is like stepping back in time to a much quieter and slower way of life. In many ways that’s true, but that doesn’t mean that Walsingham has never changed. It has changed, many times over the years, and it continues to change as the years go by. It’s changed for the better over the years, and it’s changed for the worse over the years. But then, we can’t really expect anything else can we because life itself is like that isn’t it?

Change is part and parcel of human life. We all change as we go through life, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. As we grow up, we tend to improve in terms of our physical and mental abilities, we can do more and do things better than we once could and, hopefully at least, we become more mature in our attitudes and wiser in our words and actions. But as we grow older, some of the changes we go through are not so good. Our physical abilities decline, what we could do in our teens and twenties, even our thirties, we probably can’t do in or past our forties or fifties. And as we grow older we tend to lose some of our mental sharpness too. Even if we’re spared such a terrible disease as dementia, we probably find it harder to learn new things as we get older than we did in our younger days.

And we don’t just change physically, the circumstances of our lives change too. Most of us live with our families when we’re young. Then, as we get older, we move away from home; we go to university, we get our own home, we get married, have children of our own who, in their turn, also move on and go their own way in life. And we change from being in education to being in employment. Most of us change jobs during our working life too.

Then we change from working to being retired. And the world we live in changes and when it does, that affects and changes our lives too.

So we live in a constant state of change throughout our lives. And then there’s that final change that we all have to go through at the end of our earthly lives, that change from life to death. But I say that this is the final change of our earthly lives, and not simply the final change, quite deliberately, because as Christians we believe that this change from life to death isn’t the final change we have to go through. We believe that after our earthly lives have come to an end, we still haven’t come to the end of change. There’s still one more change that we have to go through before we can come to the end of change and that’s the change from death to eternal life.

Quite what that change will be like, we don’t know. The Scriptures do give us some clues but perhaps one of the reasons we find it so hard to imagine what eternal life will be like is because it will be a life without change. It will be a life that is unimaginably better than the life we have and know during our time on earth, even in the best of times we’ve ever known. As St Paul says in his First Letter to the Corinthians,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”

But we have a saying don’t we, that ‘All good things must come to an end’? But eternal life with God will be better than any good thing we’ve ever known or can even imagine, and it won’t come to an end, ever.

It will be a life in which we live in the love that Jesus commanded his disciples to have for one another. I hope we all know what it is to love and be loved; I hope we all know how good that is and how good it feels. One of the problems with earthly love though is that, sometimes, it isn’t returned; the one we love doesn’t love us. Sometimes too, earthly love comes to an end. And we know how these things feel; they hurt, very deeply. But the kind of love that Jesus spoke about is always mutual, it’s always given and returned, and it never comes to an end.

One of the most painful changes we can go through in life is to lose someone we love, whether that’s because our love and relationship with them has come to an end, or when we’re parted by death. Again, that’s a pain I’m sure we all know and it’s one of the worst pains and changes we can go through in life. But once we’ve changed from death to eternal life with God, this is a pain and a change that we’ll never have to go through again. As this morning’s reading from the Book of Revelation tells us:

“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.  He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”

The life that God promises to those who have faith in him is a life beyond our imagination. It’s a life better than the best times we’ve ever known on earth and a life in which those good times never come to an end because nothing ever changes, so there can never be any bad times, or even less good times. But of course, a promise is only as trustworthy as the one who makes it. So a very big part of our faith in God is that God himself is faithful, that God himself is unchanging and will keep his promise. I think this is something that’s summed up very well in the words of a hymn that we very often sing at funerals, during what is a time of great change during our earthly lives:

Change and decay in all around I see.
O Thou who changest not,
Abide with me. 

God promises to abide with us, always, but in return he asks us to abide with him. God promises to accept us if we can accept the way of life he showed us through his Son, Jesus Christ. One of the things that can make it so difficult for us to do that though is the changeability of human life; it can be difficult to abide with God, to be faithful to him and his Son, in the face of the bad things and through the bad times of human life. But we have God’s promise that he will abide with us through those bad times and if we can just bear with the bad things in life and abide with him through those times, he promises us a life in which there are no bad times, ever. A life good beyond our wildest dreams and a life in which nothing will ever change to take those good things away from us.

Amen. 

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The Propers for the 5th Sunday of Easter can be viewed here.

Entrance Antiphon

The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord;
by the word of the Lord the heavens were made, alleluia.

The Collect

Almighty God,
whose Son Jesus Christ is the resurrection and the life:
raise us, who trust in him,
from the death of sin to the life of righteousness,
that we may seek those things which are above,
where he reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Amen.

The Readings

Missal (St Mark’s)        Acts 13:14, 43-52
                                   Psalm 100:1-3, 5
                                   Revelation 7:9, 14-17
                                   John 10:27-30

RCL (St Gabriel’s)         Acts 9:36-43
                                   Psalm 23
                                   Revelation 7:9-17
                                   John 10:22-30

When we read commentaries on this morning’s Gospel story, we can often find that they concentrate on just one or two aspects of the story. Very often, commentaries tend to focus on the miraculous catch of fish, and on Jesus’ three-fold questioning of Simon Peter. There’s no doubt that these are important and interesting aspects of this Gospel story. The miraculous catch of fish can be seen as an allegory, a story which tells us that when we follow Christ and do as he tells us to do, we’ll make many new disciples whereas, alone and acting without Christ, we can do nothing. Jesus three-fold questioning of Simon Peter has multiple meanings. Jesus’ questions are seen as the correlative to Peter’s three-fold denial of Jesus on the night of Jesus’ arrest. Jesus’ command that Simon Peter should feed his lambs and sheep is seen as Jesus’ commission of Peter as the leader of the Church. And Simon Peter’s response to Jesus’ questions has been the subject of a great deal of debate. In the original Greek, Jesus asks Simon does he agape him, does he love him with true Christian love, the kind of love with which Jesus loves. But Simon Peter responds by saying to Jesus, ‘I phileo you.’ In other words, Simon Peter has brotherly affection for Jesus. Some commentators see the words agape and phileo as interchangeable and so they see no real difference in their meaning, but others see a great deal of difference in their meanings. That there is a difference is shown in the Second Letter of Peter where we find what’s been called a ‘ladder of Christian virtues’ which Peter urges his readers to adopt, and which culminates with brotherly affection and love: phileo and agape.

But as interesting and important as these things may be, I think what’s equally important, especially in terms of our discipleship as we need to live it out in the world, is what happens at the beginning of this Gospel story, the part of the story that’s often simply taken as setting the scene for what’s about to happen So let’s set the scene and see what it has to teach us. 

In the Gospels of both Matthew and Mark, Jesus’ disciples are told that they will see Jesus again in Galilee, and this morning’s Gospel begins with the disciples, some of them at least, back in Galilee, by the Sea of Tiberias. No doubt they were waiting for Jesus to appear but, as the story begins there’s no sign of him. And Simon Peter decides to go fishing. We know that Peter was impatient and impetuous, so I don’t think it’s too big a stretch of the imagination to think that he’d become fed up with hanging around waiting for Jesus to show himself and so he decided to go and do something else. Perhaps the others felt the same and it was simply that Simon Peter, as ever, was the first to speak up, or perhaps it was simply that he was their leader, but for whatever reason, the others decided to go fishing with him.

And how typical is that of us? How often do we get fed up with waiting for something or someone and eventually decide that we’re not waiting any longer and we go and do something else instead? It’s something that we’ve probably all done at one time or another and as it’s something we’re prone to do in our daily lives, it’s something we can so easily do in our discipleship too.

Over the years I’ve known many people who’ve left the Church. Those people have given different reasons for doing that, but quite a few have said they’ve left the Church because they ‘weren’t getting anything out of it anymore’. The usual response to that is to ask what it was they were putting into their churchgoing, but there’s another question that’s just as relevant, if not more relevant, to ask in that situation. It’s this; ‘What did you expect to get out of going to Church?’

Going to Church regularly and becoming a Christian is a life changing thing to do, there’s no doubt about that. But I think some people believe that if they go to Church and become a Christian then, ‘Hey Presto’, as if by magic, their lives will suddenly be changed for the better, that everything in life will suddenly become wonderful and that all their problems and worries will disappear. But it’s not like that at all. We’re disciples of Jesus Christ, who was betrayed, arrested and put to death by those he loved and came to save. Jesus’ story is a story of unrequited love that led to terrible hardship and suffering. Jesus never promised his disciples any easier a time than he himself had, quite the contrary in fact. But what he did promise them was that hard work, and even long-suffering if that’s what it takes, in faithful obedience to him is worth it because, in the end, it leads to eternal life.

Going to Church and being a Christian doesn’t take the problems of life away, it simply gives us a different perspective on the problems. For example, Simon Peter was a fisherman and perhaps one of the reasons he went fishing that day in Galilee is because he had to earn his living. So do we; and going to Church and being a Christian doesn’t take away that need. But what it does do, or should do, is stop us from succumbing to the greed, selfishness and materialism that we see so much of in the world. Going to Church and being a Christian changes our lives but it doesn’t make them any easier. Going to Church and being a Christian isn’t a magic spell that suddenly makes our lives trouble free and if that’s what people are waiting for, if that’s what they mean when they say they don’t get anything out of it, then they’ll be waiting a long time indeed. In that case, it’s no surprise if they get fed up with waiting and go and do something else instead.

In this morning’s Gospel Jesus does appear, eventually. But it seems from the Gospel that the disciples don’t recognise him at first, it’s only after the miraculous catch of fish that the beloved disciple tells Peter,

“It is the Lord!”

at which the ever-impetuous Peter throws on some clothes and leaps into the sea because he’s so eager to get to Jesus. And again, this often-overlooked part of the story can tell us so much about what it means to be a disciple of Christ.

This part of the story tells us that Jesus can come into our lives at any time, whatever we’re doing at that time. He can come into our lives when we’ve become so fed up with waiting that we’ve gone to do something else instead. It tells us that we have to be ready for Jesus to enter our lives at any time and in any place. But it also tells us that we have to be able to recognise Jesus when he enters our lives and to be ready to act at a moment’s notice when he enters our lives.

In the Gospel, despite the miraculous catch of fish they’d just made, only one disciple realises who is responsible, who it was who was calling to them from the shore, and it was the beloved disciple. This story tells us that we can recognise Jesus when he enters our lives by what happens. It tells us that when we act as Jesus says we should, good things can happen. Not necessarily good things from a worldly perspective, although that may happen too, but good things from a spiritual perspective or in terms of the growth of God’s kingdom. But this Gospel story tells us too that, if we’re going to recognise Jesus, we have to be close to him.

The beloved disciple was the one who sat closest to Jesus at the Last Supper, and he was the one who recognised Jesus in this Gospel story. So if we want to recognise Jesus when he comes into our lives, we have to be close to Jesus too. We have to know him; we have to know what he taught and know what he wants from us. We have to know what he would have us do in whatever situation we find ourselves in. And when we do recognise Jesus as he enters our lives we have to be ready to act at a moments notice, just as Peter did that day in Galilee.

And yet, how often does Jesus enter our lives and we miss those chances to meet him and to do what he calls us to do because we don’t recognise him? How often do we miss chances to meet Jesus and do what he calls us to do because we’re too busy with other things to recognise him and to hear him calling to us? To use an analogy from this morning’s Gospel, how often are we too busy hauling in the nets to stop what we’re doing for a moment and think how Jesus might be calling to us in a situation, and how often do we fail to recognise Jesus in a situation because of that? How often are we too preoccupied with what we’re doing to stop hauling in the nets and go to him by doing what he calls us to do? Are we ready to be like Simon Peter, to stop what we’re doing and go to Jesus, or are we more likely to finish what we’re doing before we can spare the time for Jesus? And if that’s what we do, how often do we miss Jesus when he enters our lives because an  opportunity to act as his disciples has come and gone? 

Coming to Church and being a Christian is life-changing, but it isn’t about having an easy life. It’s life that can bring great joy and happiness, but much of that joy and happiness comes from a changed outlook on life, rather than from an easy life free from problems and worries. The reward for being a disciple of Christ is, quite literally, out of this world, but having the reward  involves a lifetime of discipline and hard work. It means being prepared to wait on Jesus, how ever long we have to wait. It means staying close to Jesus always so that we can recognise him when he comes into our lives. And it means being ready to drop what we’re doing at a moment’s notice and to do what he calls us to do, whenever and wherever he enters our lives.

There is so much in this Gospel story, let’s make sure we don’t miss out on what it can teach us about living as a disciple of Christ and as a member of his body, the Church.

Amen. 

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The Propers for the 3rd Sunday of Easter can be viewed here.