The Coronation of King Charles the Third in Westminster Abbey on the 6th of May 2023 included a few innovations, but was fundamentally true to the pattern of coronation services in these islands (I speak to you from London, England) going back to at least the tenth century. The Recognition and the Oaths, the Anointing, the Investiture and Crowning, the Enthroning and Homage, all set within a celebration of the Holy Eucharist, can be found written down in documents like the 14th Century Liber Regalis (a beautifully illuminated handbook, displayed in the Abbey’s Triforium Galleries), and in the records of King Edgar’s coronation in Bath, way back in the year 973. These ceremonies have been handed from one generation to another, as a rich treasury of symbolic meaning.

Coronations have never been the most straightforward services to plan or deliver. As the then Precentor (the person responsible for delivering liturgy in the Abbey), I still find myself rehearsing aspects of that service in my dreams (some of them verging on nightmares!)

To be frank, there are parts of that service that I never quite understood. There were swords, lots of swords. Swords were swapped and offered and redeemed. It was all quite strange. For many people watching the ceremony, I’m guessing that the swords were the very least of it. Why on earth was the King surrounded by screens when he was anointed? Why was he anointed at all? Why did he change clothes, twice, and why did he seem to be, at one stage, wearing a large oven glove on his right hand?

The decision would not have been mine to make, clearly, but it might have been decided to strip the whole service back; to simplify the ceremony and remove the most mystifying bits. But we didn’t, and I for one am glad. I am glad we kept faith with the long tradition of coronation services; with the whole of it, even the complicated and confusing bits.

‘Guard the good deposit entrusted to you’, wrote St Paul to Timothy, his protege.

We heard, as our reading, the opening of Paul’s second letter to Timothy, and the tone is warm and intimate. Paul calls Timothy his ‘beloved child’, who is never far from his thoughts and prayers. Paul is in prison and says how much he longs to see Timothy, but this seems like a forlorn hope. Later in the letter, Paul will make it clear that he senses that his end is near. This lends an inevitable urgency to the letter; to rekindle the gift of God, which is the gift of faith.
‘Hold on to the sound teaching’, Paul urges, ‘guard the good deposit entrusted to you.’ Not only does Paul sense that his own ministry is coming to an end, but he can see the challenges that Timothy faces. Paul encourages him not to be ashamed of the gospel, or of the suffering that Paul is undergoing for its sake. It must have been at the very least confusing for Timothy to see his teacher condemned as a criminal, and hard for him not to think that this was some sign not just of Paul’s failure, but of the failure of the gospel itself.

It is a challenge that, I suspect, all Christians share. Which of us doesn’t, even at a subconscious level, evaluate our faith or the truth of the gospel we proclaim on the basis of our success, or approval, or wealth, or that of our teachers and leaders? Which of us doesn’t take pride in our own good fortune, or the numerical prowess of our churches? Are any of us really ready, like Paul, to consider suffering and failure as a potential part of the fulfilment of our calling; as part of our living-out the Good News?

Not that it has to be all suffering, not that we aren’t allowed to enjoy some measure of evident success in our lives and the lives of our churches, but neither should we be quick to conclude that those who suffer and fail are somehow proving themselves less faithful; subject, even, to God’s displeasure. The success or failure of the gospel simply cannot be measured; there is no metric for faith, hope or love. But, if we let go of our prejudice, our deep, Darwinian need to out-compete one another, we may discover these gifts of faith, hope and love most especially in places of worldly failure.

This feels rather subtle to explain, but I suspect I am speaking to those who have experienced or intuited just that reversal, that paradox, that life emerging out of death, which is the resurrection of Christ, the gospel of the risen-crucified-one, at work in the world.

This grace has been given to us in Jesus Christ before the ages began, Paul says, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Saviour Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.

This, surely, is the ‘good deposit’ that Paul is referring to, and that we are called, like Timothy, to guard in its totality; even the subtle, difficult, sometimes confusing bits.

There is tremendous pressure on us, on the church in nations where we are numerically in retreat, where there is decreasing religious literacy, to demystify. To take out the complexity and nuance. To declare a simplistic gospel, where prayers are answered and miracles performed for those who successfully follow the formula. Where suffering and failure have no place, no role, other than as opportunities, perhaps for the ‘Blessed’ to flex their superior spiritual muscles. It is a kind of spiritual neo-Darwinism, with all due respect to the father of evolutionary biology, lying, as he does, in the north nave aisle of the Abbey. It is not, I suspect, the gospel that Paul would have understood, and for which he could accept suffering and failure as part of the package and encouraged his beloved Timothy not to be in any way ashamed to do the same.

We have been entrusted with a deposit of faith that is rich and complex, sticky with the fingerprints of those who have handled it before us, who found in it symbolic meaning for their own lives and times, and who felt that same urgency to pass it on. That same desire that it be guarded by those who would outlive them. None of those generations would assume a perfect understanding of what they received, or that they had got to the bottom of how it worked, and those who imagined they could manipulate the gospel to their own ends leave a particular legacy of challenge for those of us who try to commend it today.

I need only point to the statues and memorials around the Abbey of upstanding Christians who established great wealth and power on the impoverishment and slavery of others. Lest we become too self-righteous, we have to wonder what complicity future generations may lay at our door; wondering how we could ever have squared our own social, economic or environmental practices with the gospel.

Because the point that Paul makes is that we are given, and we hand on, something that is beyond us all – beyond our understanding, beyond our manipulation. The deposit we are asked to guard is a revelation, not an argument, not a theory. The abolition of death, the bringing of life and immortality to light through the suffering and death of Jesus, the Son of God, is a gift, a given. It is at one level exquisitely simple, and yet its working is deeply mysterious, and often confusing in the hurly-burly, the difficulties of our actual lived experience.

Like Timothy, Paul urges us to guard this good deposit, not because it all makes sense to us, not because it will make us obviously successful, but because it promises that nothing will ultimately be meaningless or pointless – we will not end in shame and failure.

The Coronation service is a strange thing – complex and mysterious – but through it something is declared, revealed about human dignity, and human destiny. It is not just about one woman or man being anointed and crowned and clothed in splendour, but about the destiny of each one of us in Christ – sharing in his regal glory, in the defeat of death and the victory of light and life. If it had all been stripped-back and made obvious we might have been tempted to think that we were the ones who could make this happen.