Richard III & living DNA

a reflection (for our little Lunch Club communion service) on last night's TV documentary about the excavation of the remains of English King Richard 3rd.

The scene : a light table in a forensic laboratory. A reconstructed skeleton, recently excavated from an archæological dig in a car park, is laid out on the table. Various archæology and medical experts are grouped around the table, their faces lit from below by the light from the light table.

Also at the table is a TV presenter and a woman who's devoted a lot of her adult life to the cause of restoring the reputation of the English king, Richard 3rd. She really, really wants this to be the skeleton of the king — the last English king to die in battle, the last of the Plantagenets. In fact, in her heart she's already decided it is. Intuitively, she's known it is from the moment she first saw it in the dig, and insisted on the bones being moved from the site wrapped in King Richard's flag. To her, this is not just a collection of bones, but a person. But believing in her heart that this is Richard 3rd doesn't make it so.

One thing that disturbs her is that the skeleton very clearly has a severe spinal deformity. Richard 3rd was famously, according to historical legend, a hunchback — but she's spent years arguing that this was malicious propaganda put about by the Tudors . . . history is written by the victors of wars, and unless Henry Tudor could blacken Richard's reputation his own claim to the throne was dodgy. Shakespeare famously recycled the idea, yet what a coincidence that a skeleton with a spinal deformity should be found right in the place where Richard's body might be found.

Bit by bit, the story is pieced together with the evidence. The forensic pathologists are able to describe in great detail not only how the owner of this skeleton died in battle — but also how his body was dragged from the battlefield afterwards. And it all matches the historical accounts. There's a carbon dating match, then a DNA match with a known living descendant. Eventually, an expert reconstruction of the man's face is produced, and we're looking at him. The woman's intuition and rather desperate faith is vindicated, and she is overjoyed. But she has to come to terms with the fact that King Richard did in fact have a spinal deformity. So it wasn't all lies.

"Dead men tell no tales", says Long John Silver in Treasure Island. No longer true, quite.

Reflecting on the programme, I thought of us today, gathered around a table. Not a light table in a forensic laboratory with a TV crew, but an ordinary table here. And on the table, reminders of a man's death. Not his skeleton, of course. Our intuition tells us that there is something special here. Expectation is high. We very much want to believe that this is the body and blood of Jesus, and to feel that we are in his real presence. But the forensic evidence isn't promising. If we were to examine what we have here, what we would find is bread and non-alcoholic wine, not human DNA.

Except that there's something here that ties us to Jesus much more than the skeleton bones tie us to the real Richard 3rd. After all, the bones don't answer most of the questions that really matter. They don't tell us much more about the man.

By contrast, when we gather around this table we perform a ritual and say words that Jesus himself, on the night in which he was betrayed, asked us to do and say as a way of remembering how he was to die, and the meaning of his death, and as a way of describing everything that he was about. Not 548 years ago, but nearly 2,000 years ago. This breaking of bread and drinking of wine is an echo of the ancient Jewish ritual of the Passover and speaks volumes about how Jesus understood his mission. The more we understand the significance of this little ritual the closer we are to Jesus. We really are in his presence — it's as if he were speaking to us. "Do this". If anything, we're even more in his presence than if what we had here were his skeletal remains.

"Dead men tell no tales"? This one does. This dead man was raised from the dead and still speaks — through this ritual, and through the scriptures that teach us what this ritual means. If we want to know more about Jesus, we don't need carbon dating and DNA tests on his bones; we need to immerse ourselves in the Old Testament which was his Bible, in the New Testament passages that record his actions and teachings, and in the New Testament passages that reflect on those, and help us to understand what he is saying to us now.

Those people gathered around the light table in the forensic laboratory made good TV, and it was quite exciting wondering whether what they had on the table was the remains of a long-dead king. But actually, what we're doing here ought to feel more exciting still, as we find ourselves in the presence of a living king who still speaks a word to each of us : a word of challenge, a word of comfort, a word of hope. And as we take those to heart, and walk in his way, we share his living DNA. We become the Body of Christ.