Modern scholarship having made matters clearer, Martha, Mary and Lazarus have since 2021 been celebrated together on this day, which was formerly assigned to Martha alone.

  Lazarus repays reflection. His resuscitation forms such a key part of salvation history – which is why it has a Sunday in Lent dedicated to it – that it is easy to forget Lazarus himself. But as Monsignor Ronald Knox says somewhere, he deserves our sympathy and not only our envy, because this was not a resurrection. Lazarus was still mortal and he had his dying to do all over again at some point in the future. What Lazarus thought of being brought back to Earth is not recorded. The presence of the incarnate Lord must have made up for the postponement of Heaven, but – where less dramatic circumstances are concerned – we should think of Lazarus when we prepare to make spectacular acts of charity on behalf of people who may not necessarily appreciate our interventions.

  Well, it depends whom you ask. Curiously, it has come to seem seemly even in (non-Catholic) Christian circles, now, to put Olav’s Christian purpose in doubt. It is said — even, I gather, on guided tours here in this cathedral — that Olav was but a power-hungry despot who selfishly lorded it over people to such an extent that they had enough and struck him down at Stiklestad, and that would have been the last anyone heard of him, had not ‘the Church’ contrived to ‘make him’ posthumously ‘a saint’. This narrative just doesn’t make sense. I am led to think: we who, these days, take such care (for good reason) not to treat any societal group unfairly, should be thoroughly ashamed. For what is going on here is retrospective mockery of Norwegians a thousand years ago, on the assumption that they were so stupid they let an awful bully be foisted on them as a national symbol and hypocritically bent their knee before the corpse of a man they loathed. Anyone subscribing to this view is ignorant of people’s temperament back then; further, he or she has forgotten that ‘the Church’ is not reducible to a gang of supposedly ambitious prelates. The Church is made up of ordinary believing men and women. When Bishop Grimkettle on 3 August 1031, a stone’s throw from here, declared Olav a holy man (and Einar Tambarskjelve bade the curmudgeonly Alfiva, an apt patron for the Talk-Olav-Down movement, shut up), it was because the people willed it. They recognised in Olav, even after death, a faithful intercessor, protector, and friend.

  Olav was many-faceted, made up of tensions. Humanly speaking, he isn’t idealisable. It is no coincidence that art often shows him treading underfoot a dragon carrying his own features: he knew the Old Adam well; but was all the more fascinated by the New. His Christian maturing displays warfare on the battlefield of conscience. Archbishop Eystein wrote in the twelfth century that Olav arose from the baptistery in Rouen ‘changed into a new man’, but not as if by magic. Baptism sowed in him the seed of immortality. But the seed had to grow; and growth takes time in spiritual as in organic life. Much can be said about the signs of Olav’s growing Christian integrity. Beyond the indications we find in the sagas and songs, we have concrete evidence in the Christian law-code he introduced in 1024. It represented a political wager. To limit the self-governance of people who were used to ruling without accountability is a risky undertaking: we see that in our time. When Olav introduced, in juridically binding form, the notion of an eternal, objective Justice to which all, regardless of status, were held, he mobilised the people of Norway to combat their irrational passions. Revolt resulted, at various levels.

  Sigrid Undset paints an intimate picture of such revolt in the first volume of Olav Audunssønn, when Olav, staying as a guest of the Cistercian bishop of Hamar, struck down and killed, for honour’s sake, an enemy. ‘At first he seemed to freeze. Then, rage swelled in him, and defiant, jubilant enjoyment.’ Olav, like Cain, knew the ecstasy of revenge. Conscience did weigh him down. He was a Christian, after all. Considering the faith, he thought, ‘it is somehow beautiful’, but added: ‘Never, though, will all men turn into such saints that they will be content to have justice meted out to them, without imposing their own sense of right.’ It seemed utopian to fancy that all ‘should be minded to hear our Lord’s new speech about the fraternity of all God’s children’. That is how Olav Audunssønn reasoned then, drunk with vengeance. The ‘new speech’ had formed him, however; and would come to enable, as we discover when we read on, a slow bourgeoning of the life of Jesus in the heart of this implacable lover out there face to face with the fierce sea, in Hestviken.

  Olav Audunssønn, like Olav Haraldsson, his patron, had to learn from experience what it means to take up one’s own cross. All of us do. Christian life has a number of common denominators; yet must be articulated specifically for each of us. We revere and love St Olav not because he was born a saint, but because he became one through persevering battle against all that was untrue, unworthy, and ugly in himself and in the world; he fought to let Christ’s peace rule in his heart. In our troubled times his example gives us encouragement and blessed consolation. Olav shows us that the Christian calling can be followed even on the basis of the most unpromising conditioning.

  Augustine had a brilliant legal and academic career, but after his conversion he returned home to Africa and led an ascetic life. He was elected Bishop of Hippo and spent 34 years looking after his flock, teaching them, strengthening them in the faith and protecting them strenuously against the errors of the time. He wrote an enormous amount and left a permanent mark on both philosophy and theology. His Confessions, as dazzling in style as they are deep in content, are a landmark of world literature. The Second Readings in the Office of Readings contain extracts from many of his sermons and commentaries and also from the Confessions.

  In the earliest centuries all vestments were white – the white of baptismal purity and of the robes worn by the armies of the redeemed in the Apocalypse, washed white in the blood of the Lamb. As the Church grew secure enough to be able to plan her liturgy, she began to use colour so that our sense of sight could deepen our experience of the mysteries of salvation, just as incense recruits our sense of smell and music that of hearing. Over the centuries various schemes of colour for feasts and seasons were worked out, and it is only as late as the 19th century that they were harmonized into their present form.