You must be wondering why I don’t just do a re-direct from this blog to the Vatican. The reason I want to hear from Benedict again and again is that he tirelessly sets out this gospel for us. I have to have the words of the gospel dinned into me, and the power of the gospel got into me, direct via eucharistic transfusion. These two go together: preaching – the laying out of this gospel – is essential to the eucharist, for the eucharist is not an act without words.
Benedict never speaks over the head of the church, addressing just city and world (urbe et orbi). First and last he speaks to the church, teaching it about its Lord, and therefore about its own identity, and about its calling and its luck.
Now I want to receive this eucharist-and-gospel with my own people here in my own church, and in an English accent please. I want this combined dose for head and body, dispensed to me and the people I pray with here in London. I know I stand no chance as a merely individual Christian, receiving my nourishment via the library or internet, intellectually – words, unaccompanied, are not enough. I want to be a member of a church happy to be under the authority of Christ, led by clergy who dispense that full words-and-power eucharist with the generosity and authority of Christ, and who are therefore able to exercise discipline and tell us not to go snacking from any other worldly sources. My salvation depends on this church and clergy.
So this gospel laid out by Pope Benedict (and Archbishop Rowan, and Patriarch Bartholomew) is what I want to receive also from bishops Richard (of London) and Stephen (of Stepney, my part of London) and from my priest. I want my church, and these clergy, to feast on this gospel-and-eucharist and then to pass it on to us, all of it. If it is Benedict laying out the feast, that’s fine, isn’t it? We are Anglicans, so surely not too proud to snatch food from Christ’s table even if it is chiefly Benedict who is bringing it out of the kitchen at the moment, right? I want the full gospel, some of which always has to be imported, and I want it served up here for us in England.
So for the clergy and people of Stepney and London I am pointing to Benedict. When they and I have learned everything there is to be learned from Benedict, we will look elsewhere. Of course the clergy of London are the last to read and receive any of this. Which leaves the rest of you with a little intercessory job to do.
