Sermon from the 2025 Forward in Faith Festival

This is the text from the sermon from the 2025 Forward in Faith Festival, 10th May 2025.  The sermon was preached by the Rt Revd Jonathan Baker, Bishop of Fulham.

Words from this morning’s Gospel reading from the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to St John,

Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.

You will all know by now – at least I hope you will, because you will have studied it in Lent using the excellent material put out by your Society clergy and bishops – that this year is the 1,700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the First Ecumenical Council held in the year 325AD. 318 Fathers of the Church, mostly bishops but with a few others among them, gathered under the guidance of, and led by, the Holy Spirit, to put down the heresy of Arius, who said of the Son of God ‘there was when he was not,’ and to profess the catholic faith, that Jesus Christ is fully divine, consubstantial – of one and the same substance – with the Father. And a little over a week ago, on a damp day but one which did not dampen our spirts, I stood, along with some 70 pilgrims, Anglican, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, on the shores of a lake just outside the centre of present-day Nicaea in western Turkey, close to the ruins – now emerging from the slowly receding waters of the lake -  of what many archaeologists now agree is the very site of the palace and church of Constantine where the Council was held. You can imagine the tingle which ran up and down my spine. And, yes, this is why you indulged me with that little bit of Greek at the beginning of this sermon because, in very Orthodox fashion, daily, in prayer and when simply meeting for the first time, again and again those words rang out in our company – Christos anesti! He is risen indeed!

And this is also why my heart skipped when I heard that our new Holy Father had taken the regnal name of Leo. Bear with me a moment. The pilgrimage (and what a blessing it was) in which I shared last week and the week before did not just take us to Nicaea, but to many more locations of deep significance in the life of the early Church, among them the sites of the other great ecumenical Councils – Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon – 381, 431 and 451AD.

What was the golden thread running through these early Councils? How can we tell their story in a way such that a theme emerges? Well the answer which I suggested to the pilgrims was this. The Fathers of the Councils were trying to answer a question, a question which Jesus himself puts to the disciples, a question which Jesus puts to us, and which is surely the most important question we can ponder every day of our lives. St Matthew and St Mark record Our Lord asking the disciples, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ Peter gets it, of course, and says to Jesus, You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God; and through the teaching of the Councils Peter’s answer – not revealed by flesh and blood, you’ll remember, but by the Father in heaven – is as it were unpacked, the truth of which it speaks is ever more fully and beautifully revealed, the inexpressible mystery expressed. Jesus is one with us and one with God, fully human, fully divine; He is one divine person, such that His Blessed Mother can truly be called the theotokos, the God-bearer or Mother of God; He is one person in two natures, those two natures existing without confusion, change, division or separation.

Why does all this matter, matter so much? The Council Fathers were not playing metaphysical games or setting puzzles to frustrate theological students or weary congregations. In seeking to answer the Lord’s own question, they were responding too to those other words of St Peter’s which we have heard this morning – ‘You have the words of eternal life.’ This is not a comment simply about words spoken. No, Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh, is eternal life, and in knowing Him and being united with Him by baptism and in the Eucharist, he shares eternal life with us: he brings us the gift of salvation; He saves. And as the great Father of the Council of Nicaea St Athanasius – whose feast we kept on pilgrimage – taught so memorably, Jesus can save us, Jesus can give us eternal life because, only because, He is fully divine, consubstantial with the Father and fully human, consubstantial with us; for the unassumed is unhealed.

So back, briefly, to Leo. The first Pope Leo is one only three – four if we include St John Paul II – who is called ‘the Great.’ He was Pope at the time of the fourth great Council we have been thinking about, that Chalcedon – and on pilgrimage we visited the church which now stands on the site of that Council, and the cathedral church of the present-day Metropolitan of Chalcedon. Pope Leo did not attend the Council – he sent legates from Rome to represent him – but he did compose a text, known as his Tome, which was crucial to the orthodox teaching on the incarnation which the Council espoused. And in his preaching, and not least on a whole sequence of sermons preached on Christmas Day he returned again and again to the truth of the incarnation: ‘He who is true God is also true man,’ he said, ‘and there is no lie in either nature.’ And he never failed to draw out the consequences of this teaching for us. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said, ‘makes in Himself the beginning of a new creation’ – and that new creation is ours, our humanity is made new, even as Christ’s humanity, perfectly united with the Godhead yet not subsumed, overwhelmed or annihilated by it, is now made glorious in his resurrection and ascension into heaven.

So my heart indeed leapt a little at the new Pope’s choice of name, his choice to follow after the example of later Popes Leo, no doubt, not least the last to bear that name, but surely not forgetting Pope St Leo the Great; and may Pope Leo XIV be given the grace to teach and expound the faith of the undivided Church, as well as to be a true shepherd of God’s people.

Well there is so much more to be said but as St John the Evangelist has it, ‘you cannot bear it now.’ Two points in conclusion.

The first is this very obvious one. As we gather as Forward in Faith, in this Nicaea anniversary year, and in the springtime of the ministry of a freshly chosen successor of St Peter, we do so mindful that we come to renew our commitment to catholic like and catholic faith in our own church, in the corner of His vineyard where God has planted us, in his always good but mysterious purposes, and where we are invited to respond to the one who has Follow me, who speaks to us the words of eternal life. We must go on repeating – because it some quarters it seems it is still not heard – that our convictions about the character of the ordained ministry of the Church flow from our rootedness in what the Church has received and handed on – Scriptures, creeds, ministry, each referenced in that great contemporary Church of England text, the Declaration of Assent.

But second: to end this sermon, as I must, with the Gospel. ‘Therefore, many of his disciples, when they heard this, said, ‘This is hard saying: who can listen to it?’ What was this hard saying, what were these words of eternal life, spoken by the Lord just before our passage began, and which the disciples, or some of them, could not receive? They were of course His teaching about the Bread of Life. ‘He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.’ The Fathers of the Councils knew that the mystery of the incarnation touches intimately on the mystery of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Body and Blood, which once more we come to kneel and receive this afternoon. For this sacrament is no mere token; no. In receiving it we receive the living Word of God, we receive the life of heaven itself, and that heavenly live infuses and suffuses us and radiates through us and beyond us that we too may be a blessing to the world. As St Cyril, Patriarch not of Rome but of Alexandria, who presided at the Council of Ephesus and ardently defended Our Lady’s title of theotokos, wrote –

When we approach the sacramental gifts…we receive not mere flesh – God forbid! – but the personal, truly vitalising flesh of God the Word Himself.

So let us hasten to receive so inestimable a gift, and may all the holy pastors, confessors and doctors of the Church pray for us, for Pope Leo, and for the unity and mission of Christ’s people everywhere.

Lord to whom shall we go; You have the words of eternal life.

Amen.