Sunday 14 June 2009, First Sunday after Trinity

'Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten…Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller’

It is sixty years since George Orwell published his novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, a prophetic depiction of a world still recognizable to the reader yet submerged in a totalitarian nightmare. Its three super-states are locked in unceasing war; its brutal governance is in the hands of the anonymous Party; and its people are kept under constant and total surveillance.

Chief among the instruments of oppression is the manipulation of language, as is explained to the novel’s hero Winston Smith in the passage with which I began. In 1984 Oldspeak, the language of Milton and Shakespeare, of Coleridge and Shelley, the language with which you and I are familiar, is being replaced by Newspeak, which is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year. Its purpose, Orwell writes, is to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of the governing Party’s ideology. It is also to make all other modes of thought impossible. The Newspeak dictionary introduces new words and eliminates undesirable words; those undesirable words that remain it strips of undesirable meanings. Political freedom and intellectual freedom have been abolished so the word ‘freedom’ can retain little of its original sense. The word ‘freedom’ still exists but only to describe the freedom of a dog from fleas.

The Party uses language to achieve certain ends; so too does Jesus. ‘With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples’. Saint Mark believes that Jesus gives an explanation to those closest to him, but that in public he chooses to speak differently. His subject is the kingdom of God: that kingdom, he says, ‘is as if someone would scatter seed upon the ground…it is like a mustard seed’. Jesus denies the crowd the interpretation he gives to the disciples, and offers instead sketches and stories. George Orwell warns us that language can be deployed to oppress. We are surely entitled to ask why Jesus deploys language as he does. And Orwell may help us find an answer.

In his 1946 essay ‘The Prevention of Literature he ponders what journalism and imaginative writing have in common. It is commonly acknowledged that the former is likely to suffer in societies that are not free. The authorities will clamp down on reporting that dissents from their ideological line. But Orwell argues that creative writing is just as likely to suffer. ‘The journalist is unfree’ he writes ‘when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him important news: the imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts’. Authentic history and enquiring journalism: these are the mark of the free; but so too is imaginative writing, poetry and story-telling.

Newspeak strips away all nuance, colour and interpretative possibility, denying the hearer space to imagine, question or speculate. Story is steeped in nuance, colour and interpretative possibility. It encourages the hearer to imagine, question and speculate. The language of totalitarianism is Newspeak. The language of freedom is story.

So Jesus Christ speaks to men and women in the language of freedom, a language that recognizes our need to think for ourselves, question for ourselves and speculate for ourselves. Jesus Christ speaks to men and women in the language of the kingdom, the kingdom that grows like a mustard seed as we think, question and speculate. Jesus Christ speaks to men and women in the language of freedom because freedom is what men and women have been created to enjoy, because in growing up and exercising our freedom we can become God-like.

Slavery and oppression still stalk our planet. Slavery and oppression are the antithesis of the kingdom that Jesus Christ proclaims. Twenty years ago this week thousands of protestors were swept from Tiananmen Square in an operation that China’s rulers can barely acknowledge took place. ‘If you want a picture of the future’ says O’Brien, Winston Smith’s torturer, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever’. In too many places there is no need to imagine. Wherever the liberty of God’s children is abused the seed of the kingdom is trampled underfoot; the face of Jesus Christ is bruised and bloodied.

‘From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view’ Saint Paul writes to the Corinthians. We cannot understand any human face simply as a human face, for in every human face we see the face of the One who gave up himself for the sake of us all. Their suffering and their struggle are ours. So let us speak the language of freedom; let us speak it boldly; let us tell the story. Amen.