Explainer

Belief

Creed

16 March 2023

4 min read

Hold or cut the golden thread?

There's a ‘mysteriously beautiful’ vision threaded through our world, writes Stephen Cottrell. In an extract from his Dear England book, the Archbishop of York considers the Beatitudes.

Stephen Cottrell

Stephen Cottrell is Primate of England and Archbishop of York. He has authored 20 books.

A CGI render of a grid of golden lines receding into the perspective

The golden thread.

Joshua Sortino on Unsplash.

The heart of Jesus’ teaching is found in the longest teaching passage in the Gospels, it is known as the Sermon on the Mount.

It begins with a mysteriously beautiful passage known as the Beatitudes.

Here Jesus sets out a series of maxims that at first sight seem to be his equivalent of the Ten Commandments. Like Moses, the Old Testament prophet who received the latter, when Jesus receives the Beatitudes he has gone up a mountain.

And like Moses he has a series of short, pithy things to say that will then need a lifetime to work out.

However, the Beatitudes are not a moral code. They are not things you can either do or not do. They are attitudes to which we can aspire. Rather than describing the moral life, a code by which we can justly live alongside each other in society, they describe what it looks like to 'go the second mile’. They describe what perfect love in action looks like.

Here they are:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

I don't propose to spend ages unpacking these. But alongside the Ten Commandments themselves, the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, the Beatitudes have become one of the central documents of the Church.

Living by them is the work of a lifetime.

They are the centre of Jesus' teaching. Their meaning, however, isn't always self-evident. Like his stories, they need inhabiting.

They are very challenging. It isn't easy to be merciful. It isn't easy to make peace. Especially if the likely outcome is the persecution we usually make efforts to avoid. Not that there is anything good about persecution. As we know, mockery and ridicule hurt. How much more hurtful is it to be hunted down because of your witness to peace? Nevertheless, it is witnesses to peace that Jesus is recruiting here. His own life, and everything that he teaches, led this way: to the peace that is beyond the world's understanding and is about a wholeness and totality of giving and receiving love.

Jesus is inviting us to live with a different set of attitudes. And he does not baulk from acknowledging that these attitudes will bring us into conflict with the carefully protected interests of those who secure power and influence for themselves at the expense of peace. They exchange it for what is little more than a truce. At best, an absence of war, what we live in our jealously guarded siloes and forcibly protect our borders, repelling intruders and stamping on those who even dream differently.

In our own society, thankfully, we enjoy freedoms of speech and action. This means that we rarely meet with much opposition beyond people's unreflective apathy or polished disdain. But these freedoms we enjoy should not be taken for granted. They have been hard won. They could easily be lost. Especially if we fail to see where they have come from; precisely this realisation of the dignity and worth of every person and our responsibilities to each other that arose through Christ.

Unfortunately, these things that underpin what is best in our society are not self-evidently the best. We've got so used to them that we easily imagine they are. But actually, we don't observe them in the world around us. Nature, for instance, is not democratic. Nor particularly caring. The weakest usually die first. The fittest survive. Nor is it much different in human communities. Our history - always written by those who win - is one bloody story of conquest after another.

Empires rise and fall, and there is very little to suggest that there might be another kingdom where a different set of values prevails, and where the king turns out to be the servant of all. But that is precisely the Christian narrative. It is a golden thread running through human history. In every age it can either be held on to, or cut away; left to our own devices, especially when our backs are to the wall, we find that the human compass is usually set towards self-preservation. Our empires and systems are usually designed to keep others out. Or at least in their place, so that they can serve us. In this so-called ‘real world’, shepherds do not go in search of one lost sheep, as Jesus suggested God does, in one of his parables. That would be uneconomic. Like the rest of us, they play a percentages game, and for the sake of the ninety-nine, we accept the loss of the one. The strongest and the wiliest prevail. That's just how it is, we say. If we can help the weak, we will. But if we can't, or if it affects us badly, we won't and we don't.

This is why the world needs a set of values - and a story - that will save us from ourselves, and our worst instincts. This is why we need a set of values that are rooted in a tradition whose stories and whose very heart are, gloriously, the life and teaching of a person who is himself the revelation of God's love and purposes for the world he made and loves - who even laid down his life to search out those who are lost: the very image of the invisible God. More than that: someone who loves us and knows what it is like to be us, who has experienced from the inside just what it is like to inhabit a divided and compromised world.

Therefore, the Beatitudes are a set of values and attitudes by which we can inhabit the world differently and through which we can begin to see what matters in the world and what must be done.

Dear England: Finding Hope, Taking Heart and Changing the World is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Column

Church and state

Creed

Feminism

Leading

9 October 2025

4 min read

Why Sarah Mullally’s appointment is about more than just breaking the stained-glass ceiling

Not just history-making, it’s a challenge to the Church to rediscover its soul

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Sarah Mullally.

Church of England.

Every new Archbishop of Canterbury has a honeymoon period, before this impossible job ends in tears. The priority should not really be who does it, as what it is they’re doing. As it is, they’ll have to spin too many plates, until one or more fall off their poles and it all ends in tears again.

Sorry to be such a Jeremiah, such a prophet of doom. This column isn’t going to be a gloomy one, promise. Rather, I’d just like to say that Sarah Mullally, in her translation from the bishopric of London to the archbishopric of Canterbury, represents something more than a triumph in a gender war.

Very little coverage of her appointment so far has got beyond the historicity of it. Wow, it’s a woman for the first time in the Church of England’s half-millennium. Yes, that’s the news hook, and yes it’s astonishing, both in good and less good ways. But we should scrutinise for a moment what a female distinctly brings to the Anglican party.

Without this becoming a rehearsal of the past 30 years of women’s ordained ministry in the Church of England, it may be sufficient to say that it must be a whole lot more than having a primate for the first time without a Y chromosome. So what is it when we ask a woman, specifically, to perform this role?

We have to look to history to scrutinise the question. First of all, if we accept scripture as history – either as metaphor or literal record – then women’s apostleship has been there from the very beginning. The first witness to the risen Christ on the first Easter morning, Mary of Magdala, was instructed to go and tell her brothers and sisters what she had seen. You don’t get a bigger apostolic mission than that, the apostle to the apostles.

Women facilitated and bankrolled the nascent Jesus movement in Asia Minor. Wealthy people such as Lydia, a purple-dye merchant. Others get name-checked for financial and material support such as Joanna and Susanna. There was no word “deaconess” in the early Church, only deacons, and Phoebe was one in Rome, to whom St Paul wrote. These were the very foundations, the cornerstones on which women’s priesthood was built. I couldn’t be a priest in a Church that didn’t ordain women.

But, again, that only gets us so far. It doesn’t tell us what is distinct about women’s witness, let alone women’s episcopacy. For that, one might need to look to the tradition of medieval mysticism, women such as the anchoress Julian of Norwich, or Margery Kempe whom she mentored. When the latter wasn’t annoying everyone by wailing in ecstasy (the “gift of tears”), they and others opened a via feminina as a route to encountering the godhead.

The self-sacrificial nature of Christ was consequently co-extended, along with the foundational figure of Mary and the divinity of her motherhood, with nurturing and the bringing forth of new life. The Church Fathers couldn’t hold on forever to gender specificity (though it took long enough) and the women brought us a more holistic experience of the divine.

It may be that a first woman Archbishop of Canterbury has to step up to this plate. No pressure then. What I think I mean is that there is a distinctive and authentic thread of women’s witness throughout history. So this isn’t just about a historic moment for women, it’s about womanhood. When Teresa of Avila founded a tradition of reformed Carmelite monasteries in the 16th century, she wasn’t just an indefatigable woman, she was standing up to and against the patriarchy of Rome.

It’s anachronistic to call these Mothers of the Church feminists, but they point to the feminity of God and that is something ontological for Mullally to consider, not just a chromosomal novelty. It makes her job very different from the political sphere. From Margaret Thatcher to Kemi Badenoch, Angela Rayner and Shabana Mahmood, top political women have not exactly had to pretend they’re men, but have had to emulate them. Wisecrackers used to say of Thatcher’s all-male cabinet that she was the best man amongst them.

That is not Mullally’s task. Women’s sacramental ministry is distinct from men’s and inauthentic if not lived as such. She needs to find a voice that is congruent with some of those mentioned above and it’s a prophetic voice, not simply priestly.

To do so, she’ll need to break with the bureaucracy and managerialism of the Church, which led to our churches being locked up during the covid pandemic and the parlous state of its safeguarding, which cost her predecessor his job. Mullally led on both those issues.

So this is a big moment for our Church, not just because she’s a woman, but for women’s prophecy. Can she do it? We hope so.

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