You have only one more week to go and see Anthony Gormley’s exhibition Blind Light at the Hayward Gallery. It closes next Sunday, and if you haven’t already bought a ticket then I urge you to do so.
The feature that’s caught the public imagination is a rectangular glass box filled with cloud-like mist. Into this the visitor walks. It’s a remarkable experience. The fog immediately swirls around; visibility drops to a matter of inches; and sound becomes disoriented and dislocated. Twenty-five are allowed in at any one time, but once you are in you wouldn’t know if two Premier League football teams were in there with you. Engulfed in the mist, sense is rendered useless and the visitor wanders alone.
Outside the Hayward is a rather different box, comprising water jets springing up from the floor to a height of eight feet. These are arranged so as to make up walls of water around the four sides of the box, with internal walls to make up four rooms. The walls spring up and then subside at random, so the visitor can enter when an external wall is down, and suddenly find himself a prisoner within. Then an internal wall subsides and he can move quickly to the next room. There’s a skill in choosing the right move, and in moving sufficiently quickly to avoid a soaking (a skill which may visitors plainly did not possess).
Abram’s exchange with God, heard as our Old Testament reading this morning, marks a paradigm shift in the history of ancient Israel. At such moments things change: the collective narrative or self-consciousness of a community turns a page. I suppose that the Berlin Wall provides us with two such moments in our own times, in its creation and in its demolition. In this exchange Abram hears God’s promise that he will be the father of many, and he believes it. His readiness to believe becomes the cornerstone of the covenant between Israel and Yahweh and also the crux of the European Reformations. Abram’s faith is credited to him as righteousness. So our faith is credited to us as righteousness. We are justified by faith, and by faith alone.
Which, of course, leaves us with the ticklish question of what faith really is. To some, it’s a word that represents a visit to Anthony Gormley’s box. Faith means flailing around in a world of misty uncertainty. For others it represents the ducking and diving of the water installation. Faith means the calculated (and rather cynical) judgement of how best to avoid a drenching. And for others it does not represent anything that can be illustrated by a sculpture. Faith means acknowledging, perhaps from the comfort of one’s own armchair, the irrefutable truth that Anthony Gormley does have an exhibition in London at present. Faith is the assent of the human intellect to a proposition put before it.
Yet for the author of the letter to the Hebrews faith represents none of these. The letter looks back to that paradigm shift in the nation’s life, the moment of Abram’s exchange with Yahweh. Faith for the letter’s author means Abram leaving his father’s land and venturing into the unknown. It means Abram sojourning under canvas in the land he has been promised. It means Abram eventually receiving the gift of a child despite his old age. In other words, faith is what happens when God’s promise invites and invokes a response. Faith involves movement from God, and movement from us.
So the third caricature, of faith as intellectual assent, must bite the dust immediately. We can believe in all sorts of things, in the sense of admitting their existence or allowing their efficacy: flying saucers, perhaps, or the superiority of a 1984 vintage, or world peace. But our lives are changed by none of these; they cost us nothing if they remain at the level of dispassionate mental activity. In no sense are they are they a matter of faith. Had Abram simply believed in God in the sense that you or I believe that the chemical formula for water is H2O then I don’t suppose he would ever have left Ur of the Chaldeans.
Nor will the second caricature - faith as a game of risk, of dodging from room to room and evading the water jets - detain us for long. The second sentence of today’s Gospel dispels any notion of faith as insurance, as a self-serving exercise in threat management. The words of Jesus are stark: in response to God’s promise, he urges, ‘sell your possessions and give alms’. That is faith. There is little room for the tactically faithful.
And as for the first caricature: well, there’s not much fog about what Jesus teaches. He’s quite clear. Those who follow him are to live lives of expectant watchfulness, lives lived in the knowledge not simply that God is, but that he is likely to tap us on the shoulder as he did our ancestor Abram. Coming as suddenly as a thief in the night, he will ask of us that we too make hard choices and real sacrifices.
But perhaps I have misread the symbolism of those two works of art. Perhaps they have something to teach us about the life of faith after all. Perhaps through the water box we could learn the attentiveness of which Jesus speaks. We watch for the moment when we can move. A wall of water subsides, and we cross quickly to the next room. Thus are we called to keep a constant look-out and to follow where God leads, his children moving perpetually forwards, just as did Abraham and Moses. Perhaps through the mist box we could learn the faithfulness of the one in whom we have faith. As we plunge into the fog of Blind Light we see not as a stumbling journey into the unknown, but a reception into the mystery of the divine. The cloud is not hostile; it is a welcoming companion. It is, in fact, the presence of God, surrounding us on every side and accompanying us as we discern our path, set our feet upon it, and walk the path of faith. Amen.
Sunday 12 August 2007
Genesis 15: 1-6;
Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16;
Luke 12: 32-40
Wednesday, 15 August 2007
Tuesday, 14 August 2007
Ninth Sunday after Trinity
It’s an unlikely contingency, but if I’m ever asked to complete one of those questionnaires that appears in the Sunday supplements then I shall enjoy being scandalous. My answers about when and where I was most happy, and about with whom I would most like to have dinner will pass unnoticed. But when I am asked ‘do you believe in life after death?’ I shall fix the interviewer with a steely glaze and say ‘I believe in life’.
I shall do that because I believe that there’s a pernicious myth abroad about the faith of Christians that I should like to nail. It is that ours is a life-denying religion that exalts death; a religion that is so intent on what lies beyond the grave that it all too easily neglects what precedes it.
In his best-seller The God Delusion Richard Dawkins tells the story of the moment that Cardinal Hume told the Abbot of Ampleforth of his approaching death. The Abbot apparently replied ‘Congratulations! That’s brilliant news! I wish I was coming with you’. Dawkins concludes that the Abbot was a sincere man of faith, and concludes also that, as professed Christians do not on the whole react in such a fashion to such tidings, their profession can offer them little consolation, and that it therefore cannot really be sincere.
What Dawkins has touched upon is the conviction that Christians must infinitely prefer death to life; that the promised rewards of heaven must far outshine the inconveniences of the present and dazzle us with their lustre; and that our eyes are so firmly fixed on the far horizon that there is no chance of their slipping earthwards and lighting upon the miseries (or the beauties) of our time.
And the parable that comprises our Gospel reading this morning seems to give comfort to that critical view of the faith. God speaks to the rich man, telling him that he is to die, and almost mocking the labours of his life. ‘The things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ The rich man has given no thought to his own mortality and he will pay for it. The message seems clear. What really counts is what lies beyond death, when all else is forgotten.
A conclusion not dissimilar emerges from the Old Testament reading. When I complete my Sunday supplement questionnaire it is very unlikely that I will say that I want to have dinner with the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, who has a special line in doom-laden self-righteousness. If the rich man of Christ’s parable has though insufficiently about his own death it appears that the Preacher has thought of little else. So constantly has he dwelt on it that he has reached the famous and oft-repeated conclusion ‘vanity of vanities; all is vanity’. What is the cause of his grumbling? That when he dies he will no longer be able to benefit from the fruits of his life’s exertions; that, to coin a phrase, he can’t take it with him when he goes. The result is that the Preacher despises life; just as it might appear that the rich man of the parable is being urged to despise life; and just as Richard Dawkins and co. would like to think that we do today.
Were that to be the case, were we despisers of life, then there would be a number of immediate implications. One would be that Christians would cease to care about the thousands who will perish this week because they have no access to clean drinking water. Why would that matter if heaven beckons so urgently? Another would be that Christians would set about consuming the earth’s resources with feckless impunity. Why would the climate or our delicate ecosystems matter if global meltdown is in fact the gateway to Paradise? A third would be that Christians would begin to think again about the ethics of their response to abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment and war. Why would a response to any of those seem so difficult if we thought as Dawkins and many others seem to think we think?
In the face of an apparent pincer movement from Gospel and Old Testament St Paul does not appear to be of much help. After all, today’s passage from Colossians opens with the words ‘Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth’. Perhaps Dawkins has a point, and perhaps, if we are serious about any of this at all, we ought to go and sit on a mountain top imploring the Lord to finish the job quickly. But we do Paul an injustice if we stop reading at that point. Continue, and we get into an exhaustive moral instruction of his readers. We are advised against anger and foul talk; against lies and impurity, slander and covetousness. Why, we must ask, why does any of this matter? If our minds are properly fixed on things above then why should they be troubled by these questions of behaviour? Surely they slip into irrelevance once our hearts are engaged on loftier business?
Well, no, they do not slip into irrelevance. They do not, and this explains my heretical answer to the Sunday supplement question. They do not because, as Paul says ‘you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God’. We have died the death of baptism, and in so dying we have received the new life that is God’s gracious gift to his people. The new life has begun; the new life is now. It has no end. It will be changed by death, of course, but it will not be ended by it.
Hence I feel discomfort at declaring my belief in life after death, and hence also I have a passion for declaring my belief in life and in the sanctity of life: in the potential for holiness of every life. Of course the starving of Africa matter; of course the threats to our planet’s survival matter; of course the debates over morality matter. They matter to Christians because it is in life today that God makes himself known; in life tomorrow that we will grow into our full stature as his children; and in life everlasting that we will stand before his throne. Amen.
Sunday 5 August 2007
Ecclesiastes 1: 2, 12-14, 18-23;
Colossians 3: 1-11;
Luke 12: 13-21.
I shall do that because I believe that there’s a pernicious myth abroad about the faith of Christians that I should like to nail. It is that ours is a life-denying religion that exalts death; a religion that is so intent on what lies beyond the grave that it all too easily neglects what precedes it.
In his best-seller The God Delusion Richard Dawkins tells the story of the moment that Cardinal Hume told the Abbot of Ampleforth of his approaching death. The Abbot apparently replied ‘Congratulations! That’s brilliant news! I wish I was coming with you’. Dawkins concludes that the Abbot was a sincere man of faith, and concludes also that, as professed Christians do not on the whole react in such a fashion to such tidings, their profession can offer them little consolation, and that it therefore cannot really be sincere.
What Dawkins has touched upon is the conviction that Christians must infinitely prefer death to life; that the promised rewards of heaven must far outshine the inconveniences of the present and dazzle us with their lustre; and that our eyes are so firmly fixed on the far horizon that there is no chance of their slipping earthwards and lighting upon the miseries (or the beauties) of our time.
And the parable that comprises our Gospel reading this morning seems to give comfort to that critical view of the faith. God speaks to the rich man, telling him that he is to die, and almost mocking the labours of his life. ‘The things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ The rich man has given no thought to his own mortality and he will pay for it. The message seems clear. What really counts is what lies beyond death, when all else is forgotten.
A conclusion not dissimilar emerges from the Old Testament reading. When I complete my Sunday supplement questionnaire it is very unlikely that I will say that I want to have dinner with the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, who has a special line in doom-laden self-righteousness. If the rich man of Christ’s parable has though insufficiently about his own death it appears that the Preacher has thought of little else. So constantly has he dwelt on it that he has reached the famous and oft-repeated conclusion ‘vanity of vanities; all is vanity’. What is the cause of his grumbling? That when he dies he will no longer be able to benefit from the fruits of his life’s exertions; that, to coin a phrase, he can’t take it with him when he goes. The result is that the Preacher despises life; just as it might appear that the rich man of the parable is being urged to despise life; and just as Richard Dawkins and co. would like to think that we do today.
Were that to be the case, were we despisers of life, then there would be a number of immediate implications. One would be that Christians would cease to care about the thousands who will perish this week because they have no access to clean drinking water. Why would that matter if heaven beckons so urgently? Another would be that Christians would set about consuming the earth’s resources with feckless impunity. Why would the climate or our delicate ecosystems matter if global meltdown is in fact the gateway to Paradise? A third would be that Christians would begin to think again about the ethics of their response to abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment and war. Why would a response to any of those seem so difficult if we thought as Dawkins and many others seem to think we think?
In the face of an apparent pincer movement from Gospel and Old Testament St Paul does not appear to be of much help. After all, today’s passage from Colossians opens with the words ‘Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth’. Perhaps Dawkins has a point, and perhaps, if we are serious about any of this at all, we ought to go and sit on a mountain top imploring the Lord to finish the job quickly. But we do Paul an injustice if we stop reading at that point. Continue, and we get into an exhaustive moral instruction of his readers. We are advised against anger and foul talk; against lies and impurity, slander and covetousness. Why, we must ask, why does any of this matter? If our minds are properly fixed on things above then why should they be troubled by these questions of behaviour? Surely they slip into irrelevance once our hearts are engaged on loftier business?
Well, no, they do not slip into irrelevance. They do not, and this explains my heretical answer to the Sunday supplement question. They do not because, as Paul says ‘you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God’. We have died the death of baptism, and in so dying we have received the new life that is God’s gracious gift to his people. The new life has begun; the new life is now. It has no end. It will be changed by death, of course, but it will not be ended by it.
Hence I feel discomfort at declaring my belief in life after death, and hence also I have a passion for declaring my belief in life and in the sanctity of life: in the potential for holiness of every life. Of course the starving of Africa matter; of course the threats to our planet’s survival matter; of course the debates over morality matter. They matter to Christians because it is in life today that God makes himself known; in life tomorrow that we will grow into our full stature as his children; and in life everlasting that we will stand before his throne. Amen.
Sunday 5 August 2007
Ecclesiastes 1: 2, 12-14, 18-23;
Colossians 3: 1-11;
Luke 12: 13-21.
Eighth Sunday after Trinity 2007
An aspiring comic scriptwriter could do worse than study the book of Genesis. He could do far worse. For the dialogue that comprises our first reading this morning is a brilliant example of the comic writer’s art. The subject is the sin of Sodom and God’s planned destruction of the city. Abraham is perturbed at the possible loss of innocent life amidst the conflagration, and petitions the Almighty on behalf of hapless humanity.
In the conversation that ensues two features are remarkable. The first is the boldness of Abraham, who has no hesitation in addressing God directly. He argues with him and urges him to change tack. The second is the responsiveness of God, who listens and is won over. He is susceptible to the pleas of a mortal, and changes his mind.
In the hands of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, say, it could be a very funny sketch. Yet let’s leave aside for a moment the arresting image of Abraham, sitting on a park bench, tweaking the sleeve of the Omnipotent’s raincoat. What we are left with is a pattern of behaviour that is familiar. Humanity pleads; God listens. The plea is repeated; God acts. That pattern of plea and response is how we commonly understand our prayer.
It is, after all, a pattern that Jesus appears to commend. He it is who tells the parable of the friend who bangs on the door at midnight asking for three loaves of bread (some friend, we might think). The door is locked, the householder is in bed, and his children are with him. It’s not a promising scenario for the socially embarrassed and bread deprived friend. Yet, says Jesus, his persistence in asking eventually compels the householder to get up, disturb the children, unlock the door and hand over what he has been asked for. His perseverance is rewarded.
‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened’. According to the Gospel of Luke Jesus endorses that Genesis pattern of prayer. Humanity pleads; God listens. The plea is repeated; God acts.
I suspect that I’m not alone in feeling dissatisfied with the pattern. All too often it just doesn’t seem to work. Our prayers do not secure what we pray for: witness the agony of the McCann family, for whom the smug advice we were offered as children about God sometimes saying ‘no’ or ‘not yet’ must seem insulting. The pattern also betrays a rather odd image of God as a sort of auctioneer, selling his divine influence to the highest bidder, as it were, to the one who’s prayed longest and hardest.
So let me suggest a return to the comparison with which I began, between the Genesis dialogue and a comic script. One of the conceits of comedy is that the audience knows the truth which is concealed from the characters. The same is true of Abraham’s conversation. He is concerned that God may destroy the innocent along with the guilty. He embarks upon a negotiation, bartering God down, and securing his agreement that if as few as ten righteous are found then Sodom will not be destroyed. Abraham is no doubt mightily pleased with his efforts. Yet we the audience already know the outcome – don’t we? We know that God is just: more than that, that he is perfectly just. We know that he would be incapable of destroying innocent life.
What is actually revealed to us in the dialogue is Abraham, not God. What is revealed is Abraham’s credulity, his willingness to believe or suspect evil of God. What is revealed is the falseness of his humility. What is revealed is his presumption, his arrogant belief that he is more moral than God. Abraham’s questions - Abraham’s prayer - are about Abraham.
And the same comedic conceit runs through the Gospel. Jesus has taught his disciples to call God Father, and puts to them those famous rhetorical questions about fish and eggs, snakes and scorpions. The questions are what Dick Cheney would call ‘no-brainers’. We know the answers – don’t we? We know that our loving Father will never hurt us or trap us; we know that he eternally wants what is best for us. The teaching of Jesus sheds light only upon those who will not or cannot accept that, upon those who lay their own meanness or trickery, or that of others, at God’s door. Again, prayer reveals to us more about the one who prays than about the one to whom prayer is offered.
God is unchanging. He is not susceptible to our chaotic desires, treasured longings and fevered requests. As Paul writes to the Colossians, the earthly authorities, with their ethics and their strictures, have been disarmed. They have been set aside by Christ and nailed to the cross, symbol both of God’s love for the world and of the truth that in the world love is destined to suffer before it prevails.
Once we have grasped that prayer is about we who offer it than the one to who we offer it; once we have grasped that in Christ God has defeated the power of despair and death; then we understand our prayer anew. What will our prayer reveal about us? We must bang on the door throughout the night, not because by so doing we will eventually grind God down and persuade him to stir himself, but rather because in our patient, persistent waiting we will discover something of our own helplessness before God. We must ask for fish and for eggs. We will not change his mind about his giving them to us. God does not need to be persuaded that peace in Iraq is desirable or that an end to the English floods would be welcome. But when we pray for these things we unite ourselves to the suffering of our neighbours and find within ourselves the power to be God’s agents of transformation in the world he loves so dearly.
Michael Mayne, formerly Dean of Westminster, a priest remarkable for his holiness and his humanity writes about prayer in this way: ‘ … I have come to understand the heart of it as a disciplined taking of time to remind ourselves of who we are and whose we are, in which the one necessary element is stillness’. Amen.
Sunday 29 July 2007,
Genesis 18: 20-32;
Colossians 2: 6-15;
Luke 11: 1-13.
In the conversation that ensues two features are remarkable. The first is the boldness of Abraham, who has no hesitation in addressing God directly. He argues with him and urges him to change tack. The second is the responsiveness of God, who listens and is won over. He is susceptible to the pleas of a mortal, and changes his mind.
In the hands of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, say, it could be a very funny sketch. Yet let’s leave aside for a moment the arresting image of Abraham, sitting on a park bench, tweaking the sleeve of the Omnipotent’s raincoat. What we are left with is a pattern of behaviour that is familiar. Humanity pleads; God listens. The plea is repeated; God acts. That pattern of plea and response is how we commonly understand our prayer.
It is, after all, a pattern that Jesus appears to commend. He it is who tells the parable of the friend who bangs on the door at midnight asking for three loaves of bread (some friend, we might think). The door is locked, the householder is in bed, and his children are with him. It’s not a promising scenario for the socially embarrassed and bread deprived friend. Yet, says Jesus, his persistence in asking eventually compels the householder to get up, disturb the children, unlock the door and hand over what he has been asked for. His perseverance is rewarded.
‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened’. According to the Gospel of Luke Jesus endorses that Genesis pattern of prayer. Humanity pleads; God listens. The plea is repeated; God acts.
I suspect that I’m not alone in feeling dissatisfied with the pattern. All too often it just doesn’t seem to work. Our prayers do not secure what we pray for: witness the agony of the McCann family, for whom the smug advice we were offered as children about God sometimes saying ‘no’ or ‘not yet’ must seem insulting. The pattern also betrays a rather odd image of God as a sort of auctioneer, selling his divine influence to the highest bidder, as it were, to the one who’s prayed longest and hardest.
So let me suggest a return to the comparison with which I began, between the Genesis dialogue and a comic script. One of the conceits of comedy is that the audience knows the truth which is concealed from the characters. The same is true of Abraham’s conversation. He is concerned that God may destroy the innocent along with the guilty. He embarks upon a negotiation, bartering God down, and securing his agreement that if as few as ten righteous are found then Sodom will not be destroyed. Abraham is no doubt mightily pleased with his efforts. Yet we the audience already know the outcome – don’t we? We know that God is just: more than that, that he is perfectly just. We know that he would be incapable of destroying innocent life.
What is actually revealed to us in the dialogue is Abraham, not God. What is revealed is Abraham’s credulity, his willingness to believe or suspect evil of God. What is revealed is the falseness of his humility. What is revealed is his presumption, his arrogant belief that he is more moral than God. Abraham’s questions - Abraham’s prayer - are about Abraham.
And the same comedic conceit runs through the Gospel. Jesus has taught his disciples to call God Father, and puts to them those famous rhetorical questions about fish and eggs, snakes and scorpions. The questions are what Dick Cheney would call ‘no-brainers’. We know the answers – don’t we? We know that our loving Father will never hurt us or trap us; we know that he eternally wants what is best for us. The teaching of Jesus sheds light only upon those who will not or cannot accept that, upon those who lay their own meanness or trickery, or that of others, at God’s door. Again, prayer reveals to us more about the one who prays than about the one to whom prayer is offered.
God is unchanging. He is not susceptible to our chaotic desires, treasured longings and fevered requests. As Paul writes to the Colossians, the earthly authorities, with their ethics and their strictures, have been disarmed. They have been set aside by Christ and nailed to the cross, symbol both of God’s love for the world and of the truth that in the world love is destined to suffer before it prevails.
Once we have grasped that prayer is about we who offer it than the one to who we offer it; once we have grasped that in Christ God has defeated the power of despair and death; then we understand our prayer anew. What will our prayer reveal about us? We must bang on the door throughout the night, not because by so doing we will eventually grind God down and persuade him to stir himself, but rather because in our patient, persistent waiting we will discover something of our own helplessness before God. We must ask for fish and for eggs. We will not change his mind about his giving them to us. God does not need to be persuaded that peace in Iraq is desirable or that an end to the English floods would be welcome. But when we pray for these things we unite ourselves to the suffering of our neighbours and find within ourselves the power to be God’s agents of transformation in the world he loves so dearly.
Michael Mayne, formerly Dean of Westminster, a priest remarkable for his holiness and his humanity writes about prayer in this way: ‘ … I have come to understand the heart of it as a disciplined taking of time to remind ourselves of who we are and whose we are, in which the one necessary element is stillness’. Amen.
Sunday 29 July 2007,
Genesis 18: 20-32;
Colossians 2: 6-15;
Luke 11: 1-13.
Sixth Sunday after Trinity 2007
When I was training to be a barrister one of the lessons I learned was that in court one should never ask a question to which one does not know the answer. It’s a pretty reliable guide to not getting caught out in front of the jury, but, I have to say, it’s a pretty dire prospectus for life.
I am an ex-lawyer who is married to a lawyer and so I suppose I feel qualified to cast a critical eye over members of my former profession (not that the absence of such a qualification inhibits others from doing the same). The lawyer who questions Jesus is instantly recognizable character and, I fear, an instantly dislikeable one. Legal training has plainly changed very little over the centuries. He knows the answers to both his questions. Neither is designed to elicit truth or broaden understanding. The first is a test: ‘what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ The supplementary - ‘and who is my neighbour?’ - is asked out of a desire to justify himself. He brings to his questions a lethal mix of intellectual vanity and emotional insecurity. His desire to trap the teacher combines with his need of reassurance. Which of us is not familiar with at least one of those deep stirrings of the heart?
‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’. The assumption of first-century Jews mirrored that of their ancestors in the days of the book of Leviticus, which is the source of the quote. Their assumption was that people do love themselves, that such love is a basic instinct of survival. Yet we, I suspect, are uncomfortable with that. Self-love is unattractive. Justifiable pride easily tips into overweening arrogance and modest self-assertion into extravagant self-aggrandisement. Yet I wonder whether this discomfort at the excesses of self-love masks a profound reality about our condition and about that of our interior selves.
Luke the Evangelist is referred to in Scripture as a physician, and although he is honoured as the patron saint of doctors we have no reason to believe that he was a psychologist. He was certainly not a writer blessed with the insights of modern psychology. These insights, which have influenced all sorts of therapies and theories, reveal that often, perhaps all too often, we do not love ourselves very much. We are not, by and large, consumed with self-loathing, it is true, a complex that some parts of the Christian tradition have done a shameful amount to encourage. But many of us, very many of us take easy refuge in the sorts of intellectual strategies and character traits that the lawyer who questions Jesus displays. These are our way of papering over the chasm that yawns at the very heart of our being, the chasm of nagging suspicion and persistent belief that, really and truly, we are not worthy of love.
This is an unspoken conviction with staggering implications. One in particular casts its long shadow over the Christian church and propels us into ceaseless, dizzying action. We ourselves are not worthy of love, of course, but so many others are. We tire ourselves in running after them and meeting their imagined and imaginary needs. But what we are actually doing is running away from our selves, and filling our diaries, minds and hearts with empty activism. I can think of at least one priest of whom it was said that he cared greatly, and for many: you could tell those for whom he cared because they had a hunted look. This is the inexorable path to exhaustion, defeat and despair.
It is not the path of the Good Samaritan, the fictional character created by Jesus in response to the lawyer’s hollow questioning. What is it that enables the Samaritan to cross the road when the priest and the Levite have passed by on the other side? He ignores the purity laws that have kept them at a safe distance. He disregards the racial codes that put enmity between his kind and the Jews. He does not consider his personal safety in what is so evidently bandit country. He dismounts, crosses to the helpless victim, and lavishes attention on him which far exceeds what is immediately necessary. Why?
It is not that he is well-intentioned, which is what makes Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 comment on the parable so extraordinarily crass. It is not automatic response of a do-gooder. The Samaritan crosses the road when the others do not because he loves the helpless victim as he loves himself. Cultic laws and racial segregations mean nothing to him. Personal safety and freedom from ridicule mean nothing to him. They mean nothing to him because he loves himself in the best and noblest sense of that divine command. He is not at war with himself or running away from himself: he has nothing to prove and nothing to suppress. He is at peace; and so he is set free to minister to another.
In our first reading Moses speaks to the children of Israel and explains to them that God’s word is not something that they need to chase after. It does not lie beyond the sea; it is not concealed within heaven’s vault. ‘It is very near you’ he says ‘it is in your mouth and in your heart’. The lawyer correctly identifies the greatest of God’s commandments. Their observance begins with our looking at ourselves, just as our ancestors in the faith Paul, Timothy and Epaphras must have looked at themselves. Their observance begins with our seeing there what God sees there: a person worthy of his love and therefore worthy of our love. And their observance begins with our using our confidence in that love to re-shape the world around us. Amen.
Sunday 15 July 2007
Deuteronomy 30: 9-14;
Colossians: 1: 1-14;
Luke 10: 25-37
I am an ex-lawyer who is married to a lawyer and so I suppose I feel qualified to cast a critical eye over members of my former profession (not that the absence of such a qualification inhibits others from doing the same). The lawyer who questions Jesus is instantly recognizable character and, I fear, an instantly dislikeable one. Legal training has plainly changed very little over the centuries. He knows the answers to both his questions. Neither is designed to elicit truth or broaden understanding. The first is a test: ‘what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ The supplementary - ‘and who is my neighbour?’ - is asked out of a desire to justify himself. He brings to his questions a lethal mix of intellectual vanity and emotional insecurity. His desire to trap the teacher combines with his need of reassurance. Which of us is not familiar with at least one of those deep stirrings of the heart?
‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’. The assumption of first-century Jews mirrored that of their ancestors in the days of the book of Leviticus, which is the source of the quote. Their assumption was that people do love themselves, that such love is a basic instinct of survival. Yet we, I suspect, are uncomfortable with that. Self-love is unattractive. Justifiable pride easily tips into overweening arrogance and modest self-assertion into extravagant self-aggrandisement. Yet I wonder whether this discomfort at the excesses of self-love masks a profound reality about our condition and about that of our interior selves.
Luke the Evangelist is referred to in Scripture as a physician, and although he is honoured as the patron saint of doctors we have no reason to believe that he was a psychologist. He was certainly not a writer blessed with the insights of modern psychology. These insights, which have influenced all sorts of therapies and theories, reveal that often, perhaps all too often, we do not love ourselves very much. We are not, by and large, consumed with self-loathing, it is true, a complex that some parts of the Christian tradition have done a shameful amount to encourage. But many of us, very many of us take easy refuge in the sorts of intellectual strategies and character traits that the lawyer who questions Jesus displays. These are our way of papering over the chasm that yawns at the very heart of our being, the chasm of nagging suspicion and persistent belief that, really and truly, we are not worthy of love.
This is an unspoken conviction with staggering implications. One in particular casts its long shadow over the Christian church and propels us into ceaseless, dizzying action. We ourselves are not worthy of love, of course, but so many others are. We tire ourselves in running after them and meeting their imagined and imaginary needs. But what we are actually doing is running away from our selves, and filling our diaries, minds and hearts with empty activism. I can think of at least one priest of whom it was said that he cared greatly, and for many: you could tell those for whom he cared because they had a hunted look. This is the inexorable path to exhaustion, defeat and despair.
It is not the path of the Good Samaritan, the fictional character created by Jesus in response to the lawyer’s hollow questioning. What is it that enables the Samaritan to cross the road when the priest and the Levite have passed by on the other side? He ignores the purity laws that have kept them at a safe distance. He disregards the racial codes that put enmity between his kind and the Jews. He does not consider his personal safety in what is so evidently bandit country. He dismounts, crosses to the helpless victim, and lavishes attention on him which far exceeds what is immediately necessary. Why?
It is not that he is well-intentioned, which is what makes Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 comment on the parable so extraordinarily crass. It is not automatic response of a do-gooder. The Samaritan crosses the road when the others do not because he loves the helpless victim as he loves himself. Cultic laws and racial segregations mean nothing to him. Personal safety and freedom from ridicule mean nothing to him. They mean nothing to him because he loves himself in the best and noblest sense of that divine command. He is not at war with himself or running away from himself: he has nothing to prove and nothing to suppress. He is at peace; and so he is set free to minister to another.
In our first reading Moses speaks to the children of Israel and explains to them that God’s word is not something that they need to chase after. It does not lie beyond the sea; it is not concealed within heaven’s vault. ‘It is very near you’ he says ‘it is in your mouth and in your heart’. The lawyer correctly identifies the greatest of God’s commandments. Their observance begins with our looking at ourselves, just as our ancestors in the faith Paul, Timothy and Epaphras must have looked at themselves. Their observance begins with our seeing there what God sees there: a person worthy of his love and therefore worthy of our love. And their observance begins with our using our confidence in that love to re-shape the world around us. Amen.
Sunday 15 July 2007
Deuteronomy 30: 9-14;
Colossians: 1: 1-14;
Luke 10: 25-37
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