Seventh Sunday after Trinity (Mary Rose) - Dean Anthony
Seventh Sunday after Trinity (Mary Rose) 11.00am Eucharist 19 July 2026
As regular cathedral worshippers will know, I went on my very first choir tour at the beginning of last month. It was quite an experience travelling around Normandy with a coach load of choristers. There was much to enjoy, alongside powerful and poignant services to mark the 82nd anniversary of D-Day. At the new British Normandy Memorial, for example, above Gold Beach where so many lost their lives, a veteran stood before us, upright and dignified at one hundred years old. And it was this centenarian who spoke the famous words we have just used at the Mary Rose grave, illustrating their literal truth: ‘they shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.’
The poignancy born of personal experience with which those words were spoken, might give us an insight into the impact of the loss of all those lives on the Mary Rose.
Above the veteran’s head, carved into the stone of the memorial, were words of ‘everlasting gratitude’, and a quote from General Montgomery about ‘striking a blow for freedom’ and the ‘better days ahead.’ All of us have grown up in those ‘better days’, with much to be thankful for. That immediate postwar period created the National Health Service, the United Nations, NATO, the International Monetary Fund, and so much more.
Now, however, many see key aspects of this postwar international order as under threat, and there is war once again in Europe. And there is much talk of being a divided society, even a broken society; indeed we cannot even agree whether or not such language is accurate, or overly pessimistic.
At first sight it may not be obvious that our Gospel reading today offers good advice for polarised times. After all, it is about a rural community where a farmer has sown a field of wheat. But as it is a parable of Jesus, there is a deeper meaning. In this wheatfield, weeds have grown up. What counts as a weed, of course, is subjective; they are perfectly good plants with their own proper names, that in some contexts get called ‘weeds’ because gardeners or farmers decide are unwelcome. In this case, those working on the farm suggest they pull up the weeds, but the farmer offers wise counsel; it will be less destructive to let everything grow together until harvest time.
This becomes a metaphor for wider society; don’t try and separate people into the wheat and the weeds, the sound and the unsound, the enlightened and the bigoted. This is destructive of the social fabric, and in any case, who is to judge which is which?
Our translation of Jesus’s parable was from the Great Bible, first published in hugely divisive times. The year was 1539, six years before the sinking of the Mary Rose, and Henry VIII authorised it; the first Bible in English to receive royal permission to be read aloud in the public worship. It was too large and expensive to be owned privately; the idea was to have one in each parish church.
The Church of England, as opposed to the Church in England, was only five years old. Thomas Cromwell commissioned a frontispiece for the Great Bible, with an image of a king-emperor – someone like Henry and definitely not the Pope – receiving the Word of God directly from heaven. He then passes this Word on to his two trusty lieutenants: Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury and lord of the spiritual realm, and Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister, lord of the temporal realm.
It is these two who deliver the Word of God in English to grateful throngs of clergy and laity. The whole thing looks far more orderly than it really was. Opponents to Henry’s Act of Supremacy over the church were executed. Cromwell worked to ensure that anyone loyal to the so-called ‘Bishop of Rome’ – a new term to describe the Pope – was an enemy and a foreigner. Cromwell stirred up a crude kind of patriotism – arguably not dissimilar to the efforts of some in our country today. And there was no holding back in terms of pulling up the ‘weeds’.
When the second edition of the Great Bible came out, Archbishop Cranmer offered a more positive message: he wrote a preface saying that the Bible was for ‘all manner of persons of whatever estate – men, women, young, old, rich, poor’. King Henry did not see things this way; in 1546 he expressly forbade women and the lower classes (that is, the majority of his subjects) from reading the Bible in English lest they be led astray. Unstoppable social change was underway, however, and in due course a Bible in every household, of whatever estate, would come – but the change was disputed and difficult and costly.
By 1546, of course, the Mary Rose had been at the bottom of the Solent for a year. Over the thirty four years of her working life, England had changed in all kinds of ways, and so had her King. Famously, or notoriously depending on your point of view, the ‘dissolution of the monasteries’ uprooted nearly fifteen thousand monks and nuns from their ancient patterns of prayer and service. And then there was the matter of bones!
When the Mary Rose was launched, nearly every English Cathedral had a major relic, usually the body of a saint with local associations. The bodies and bones of these saints offered the possibility of an immediate connection with the divine, and just occasionally miracles of healing. The shrines of some saints became enormously popular, and were visited by huge numbers of pilgrims. By the time the Mary Rose sank, however, these shrines had been destroyed, and the bones scattered.
Shortly before the Great Bible was published, for example, Cromwell’s men destroyed a shrine just twenty miles from here: that of St Richard of Chichester. And I mean destroyed; it was razed to the ground. Fifty-five images were taken away in a ships coffer. Another fifty-seven were placed in a long coffin that had contained Richard’s bones, and who knows what happened to them.
The word ‘shrine’, by the way, is derived from the Latin word scrinium, meaning ‘chest’, as in a chest for putting things in. So when, in 1984, the bones of an unknown sailor from the Mary Rose were placed in a simple English oak coffin, with a gabled top as commonly used in the sixteenth century, and laid to rest beneath a slab of black slate in this cathedral church, this created a modern shrine, a new place of pilgrimage. A shrine that honours not only that single member of the crew, but all who lost their lives that day – many of whom, analysis of the bones shows, were not all English, but also from southern Europe and North Africa. Even more than that, it honours all who have lost their lives at sea from whatever period. As a member of the Trust staff put it at the time, ‘many felt this was the service that their son or their brother [or daughter or sister] never had.’
Cranmer wanted the Great Bible to be for everyone, of whatever estate. Well, here in this cathedral church we have a shrine and a grave for everyone, not of some famous saint, but of an extraordinary ordinary person, whose body and soul are here given the dignity appropriate to every human being, as made and loved by God: ‘sonnes [and daughters] of God’ as our second reading had it – children of God as we all are.
That person is not named, making it one of the very few graves to the unknown sailor anywhere in the world. At the British Normandy Memorial, where that veteran poignantly recalled his fallen comrades, more than twenty two thousand are individually remembered. In their own way that Memorial and our grave are equally inclusive, remembering not some, but all. There are no wheat and weeds here; they are places of unity, places for everyone.
In that 1984 service, these were some of the words as the coffin was lowered: We have entrusted our brother to God’s merciful keeping, and we now commit his body to the ground… To God be glory for ever.’ And then final words that speak to us of how the honour that grave gives to people of every estate remains a powerful symbol to this day: ‘God will show us the path of life, in his presence is the fullness of joy: and at his right hand there is pleasure for evermore.’ AMEN