FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - The Devil’s Mousetrap

Rant Number 437 Good Friday 22 April 2011

The Cross, a monk called Rufinus once preached, was really a bait. Like a hook, designed to catch a fish. The tortured flesh of the Saviour on Golgotha, on the first Good Friday, drew man’s eternal enemy, the devil, as a

bait would lure a fish. Lo and behold! It was the devil who was hooked by the Cross, not the other way around. Satan’s stupidity could not grasp Christ’s divinity, hidden by his humanity, and so he swallowed the bait. Hence what looked like the triumph of evil turned out to be Eternal Goodness’ victory. Satan was caught.

St Augustine ably glossed Rufinus’ metaphor . For the Saint the Cross becomes a mousetrap. The devil becomes not a fish – after all a symbol of Christianity - but a mouse. He comes along, sees his coveted prey and, eager to seize it, enters the trap and...It snaps shut! The fiend is caught. It serves him right! An old altarpiece actually shows carpenter St Joseph presciently making a mousetrap in his Nazareth workshop, hinting at the drama to come.

Crude, fundamentalist and medieval to believe in the Devil as a personal, active force? If so, Christians are in a large company. Over a billion Muslims share the same belief. They pray regularly to God to be protected from Shaitan. Why is this never mentioned in interfaith gatherings, the priest wonders?

Satan, however, is not easily restrained, like a lowly mouse. Above all, he is cunning. Very cunning. Don’t ask me how but somehow, from inside his trap, he still works powerful mischief. They say the devil’s cleverness is to make us believe he does not exist. That is true. Deluded atheists and theological modernists are easily caught that way. But now Satan – it grieves me to say so but say it I must - has come up with one better. He has managed to make innumerable folks behave as if the Cross did not exist. Especially in what used to be a Christian land, Europe. The fiend has truly bamboozled the people. He has cast a veil over their listless minds. The devil has made them forget the very instrument of their salvation, Christ’s Cross.

Yes, today is Good Friday. The awesome day when Christ was betrayed and given into the hands of wicked men, to be manhandled, scourged and nailed to the Cross, where he died. A holy day of which generations of English people not only would have keenly aware, but also a day which they would have kept by saying prayers, attending the rites of the Church, fasting and so on. But yesterday, Maundy Thursday, I was in central London. After making my devotions, I met a pious friend and we meandered about. We heard many shop assistants wishing each other ‘have a good Bank Holiday’, ‘nice week-end’, ‘have a good break’, etcetera. Not a single ‘Happy Easter’. (Correction, a lone American tourist said that – thank God for American exceptionalism!)

My friend and I moved up and down the heart of the great metropolis. We felt like two characters in a Chesterton story. Hardly any sign, any voice, any symbolism reminding a visitor from outer space that it was it was the prelude of the Triduum, the most sacred three days of the Christian calendar. It looked as if the masses had simply forgotten. As if the Cross had never existed. Verily, Satan has done a good job.

OK. London ‘is no longer an English city’, says actor John Cleese. If he means ‘no longer white’, that is irrelevant here. (Besides, native English people to me look pink, not white. They are not the colour of chalk, surely?) There are Christians of all races. Indeed, I suspect it is often immigrants who now strengthen church membership. And of course there will be some people going into churches to pray and remember but...they will be proportionately a small, tiny minority. The bulk has forgotten. Perhaps they never knew a thing about Good Friday at all.

The Church of England too has fallen under Satan’s spell. She too has forgotten the Cross. I do not mean that Bishops and Vicars would not bleat away in their sermons today. It is what they are paid for – they are in effect civil servants of an established corporation. But she no longer witnesses in word and deed and sacrament to the English nation. Anyone who has the misfortune to study the pronouncements of churchmen, such as our ineffable Rowan Williams or the ludicrous, stunt-loving John Sentamu will find no challenge to the pestilent secular culture which is the main tool of Satan to stupefy good people into forgetting who they really are and where they come from. To paraphrase Kierkegaard: ‘The greatest sin the Church has committed is to have made it impossible for people to tell true from false Christianity.’

Remarkable how one person who has not forgotten about holy things is the Queen. Satan seems powerless on Her Majesty. Yesterday in Westminster Abbey Elizabeth II handed out the royal Maundy money. A ceremony which replaces the Pedilavium. The foot-washing Christ did when he washed the disciples’ feet, before his arrest and Passion. A sign of the mighty service to humanity to which Christians are called to imitate the Master.

No, the Queen has not forgotten. The devil cannot subdue the Old Lady. Her Majesty remains exemplary in her duties and behaviour. You don’t need to be a monarchist to render thanks for her. May God indeed save the Queen! The day she disappears will not be a happy day for the future of this country...

After the Cross comes the Resurrection. That is certain. No Cross, no Resurrection. (Here I must, alas part company from my valued Muslim friends.) Clergy will remind worshippers of that. But I fear. The devil, the fiend, the impostor and deceiver of mankind...what tricks will he be up to? God’s people must be on their guard, because the devilish mouse has many guises. He also prowls about, like a roaring lion, to devour those who are not steadfast in the faith.

A Happy Easter to you all.