MODELLING DIVINITY

… The heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. … Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. Ezekiel 1

Debates between scientists and religious folk irritate me when one or other side seems to misunderstand its own professional way-of-thinking – or at any rate for the purposes of the debate sticks with a way of thinking that was long ago abandoned as inadequate by their predecessors in science or religion. What’s more, each side – a most unhelpful way of speaking, incidentally – likes to set up straw men to represent their opponents, just for the fun of blowing them away. But this fun is not harmless, and it certainly doesn’t lead to enlightenment.

                We live in a world which presents all living things with phenomena with which we have to deal. We humans deal with those phenomena at least partly consciously: we know what we want and we can work out ways of getting what we want, on the basis of some understanding of how the phenomena are caused and relate to each other. For hundreds of thousands of years, humanity and its recognisable precursors operated in the world pretty successfully without making any attempt to systematise its understanding of the causes and relationships of the phenomena being experienced. Of course, this limited what could be achieved, but that didn’t seem to be a problem at the time; life was good enough as it was. As consciousness evolved however, humanity gained the ability to understand more about how the world worked and to formulate more distant objectives than had hitherto satisfied it. Western religion calls this the ‘Fall’ and regrets the need for artificial ways of dealing with the loss of contentment that it brought; science sees in this same development the earliest stirrings of a more scientific approach and rejoices in the dawning of a richer understanding of life. They both have a point.

                The scientific approach was honed over the centuries into what we call scientific method – the process by which explanations for a particular phenomenon are formulated as hypotheses, which are then successively tested until we arrive at a theory that we haven’t found a way of disproving. These theories are practically certain explanations of the phenomena around us, and we rely on them both to predict future discoveries and events, and to guide our actions to get what we want. Among the hypotheses that have been formulated is the idea that a supernatural supreme being – ‘God’ – is directing the phenomena, but this is impossible to test, not least because, as Laplace famously told Napoleon, we can explain the phenomena around us without recourse to such a hypothesis; it may or may not be true, but we can’t know, and in any case for the purpose of explaining phenomena it doesn’t matter. Consequently, the idea that God exists is a hypothesis that cannot become a theory. It is not the kind of idea that classical scientific method can do much with.

                But classical scientific method struggles with something else. Many hypotheses cannot be rigorously tested, maybe because the variables cannot be properly isolated, or because it is impossible to carry out the necessary experiments; meteorology and economics present familiar examples of these difficulties, as does astronomy. Untestable hypotheses cannot grow into theories. Yet we still want to have sufficient understanding of the phenomena for us to be able to use them for our own ends or manage their impact on us. So we formulate, not theories, but models. Scientific models are quite distinct from theories built upon hypotheses: we know we can’t say they are exhaustively accurate; we understand that they are tools for our thinking rather than exhaustive explanations of reality; we accept that for different purposes incompatible models may be needed. Theologians will no doubt find these limitations on scientific models somewhat familiar. After all, they have long acknowledged that the divine is finally beyond our understanding, and that while the language we use to speak of God may assist our thinking it cannot fully express the reality of divinity; they have also had to find ways of expressing the awkward insight that the one God of monotheism has to be spoken of as relating to us in apparently ill-assorted ways, as, for example, loving saviour, righteous judge and first cause.  

                Religious people, as distinct from theologians perhaps, will be quick to point out that they experience their God as a personal god not as an abstract model. Abstract models in meteorology or economics do not alter the very personal experience of being soaked in a downpour or losing your job. You would not make much of a meteorologist or economist if you forgot why your subject mattered to people. Nor would you make much of a theologian if you forgot that the point of religion is not so much to plumb and explain the deep mysteries of the universe as to enable and encourage people to live richly in their personal lives, to be, in the term used in the Beatitudes, makarios – blessed, happy. That is the great purpose of formulating and developing religious models. That ‘… and developing’ is important. Religious people seem to have a greater tendency than do scientists to feel unable to develop and finally let go of models that experience has shown to be less helpful than newer ones. It is a tendency born of fear; it lacks the boldness of, say, an Abraham or Ezekiel or Jesus or Paul – or indeed a Gautama, a Muhammad or a Gandhi.

                This is not a call for religious people to be more sophisticated.  On the contrary: religion, particularly Christianity, has got far too sophisticated over the centuries. It is a call rather to be less sophisticated, to accept our models and rituals and music and sacraments as what they are, and nothing more: means of helping ourselves and others to make the most of our human life, overcoming its inevitable setbacks and enjoying its richest potentialities. The fact that the resources – the support, the guidance, the understanding – that we need to be able to do this are unseen, unconstrained and finally incomprehensible to us does not make them any less real or valuable. When scientists remind us of all this, they are not combating religion; they are recalling it to its central essential purpose, and for that we should be grateful to them; it will help us take our religion seriously, but not too seriously.

GOD IS LOVE

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 1 Jn 4 v7

To say ‘I love you’ seriously in any circumstance is among the most significant things we can ever do; it can have huge and long lasting implications for both the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, whatever happens next. It’s not the kind of thing anyone should want to say insincerely, or thoughtlessly, or out of obedience to convention, or against their better judgement. So it’s a good idea to be as clear as we can be about what it means. Unlike ancient Greek, English doesn’t distinguish different sorts of love: lovers ‘love’ each other, parents ‘love’ their children, friends ‘love’ each other; God is said to ‘love’ us. Always the same word: love. The fact that English has a bigger vocabulary than any other language suggests that this isn’t an accident; it suggests that maybe there is something similar at the core of all these loves that perhaps the Greeks overlooked in their desire for unambiguous definitions. At its most basic level, ‘I love you’ conveys a speculation: ‘I being I and you being you, I sense that we could do wonderful things together’; in the light of that speculation it offers an invitation: ‘I’d like you join me in enjoying doing those wonderful things.’ The first thing to notice is that love is personal; it’s about you as you and me as me. That means that to love someone you need to have a reasonably clear understanding of who you are yourself – your strengths and limitations, hopes and fears, expectations and blind spots, values and hang-ups, sexuality and status; that’s one reason why love is for grown-ups. You also need some idea about these aspects of the person you may be about to tell that you love them; at the very least you need to understand that he or she has all these aspects, just as you do. You can’t love humanity in the mass; you can only love individuals.

If you love someone, you will take time and make efforts both to build your relationship with that person and to work on your shared activities – those ‘wonderful things’ you could do together. But it’s important not to think of these contributions as fulfilling the demands of the other person; if you make that mistake, you will resent making them, and your resentment will communicate itself and rot the foundations of love. They must rather be freely given – and that ‘must’ is a logical not a moral ‘must’. Similarly, the contributions the other person makes must not be thought of by you as some kind of quid-pro-quo for your contributions. As the Jesus teaching points out, life in everyday society can be successfully managed only through a common sense of reciprocity, of give-and-take, forgiving as we ask to be forgiven. Love takes this a stage further, because it envisages doing wonderful things with a particular person, not just rubbing along with the people you happen to come across. For reciprocity to work, both sides have to know about it; one of the characteristics of love is that it sometimes makes us want to do things for the other person that they will never know about, and it may be that it’s when we find ourselves doing such never-to-be-known-about things that we discover that, yes, it really is love.

Love is about doing wonderful things together, but it’s not about achieving wonderful things. It is the ‘doing together’ that makes it love, not any ‘achieving’ that may or may not be the result. Take the most obvious use of ‘I love you’, said between a man and a woman: the wonderful things they will no doubt do together include sex; if that sex produces children that’s a wonderful added extra. And if they do have children, the possibility of a further wonderful thing to do together opens up, the wonderful shared activity of bringing up members of the next generation; if what those young people do with their lives is itself wonderful, that’s a wonderful added extra. Of course some people do marry in order to have children, and they do their best for those children in order to see them grow into successful adults. Love however never does anything in order to achieve something wonderful; love does what it does because doing that is itself wonderful. And when people get together in order to achieve something beyond their relationship, there is the rather unsettling question of what happens if they don’t achieve what they set out to achieve, or indeed after they have achieved it.

The reason that question is unsettling is that we humans are not principally satisfied by achievements; we are not made that way, because for tens of millennia, our fully modern human ancestors ‘achieved’ practically nothing: no ‘progress’, no ‘development’, no ‘improvement’ – or at any rate, none that any individual would have noticed. We like them are evolved to enjoy principally our relationships with each other.  We often, quite rightly, contrast love with law as a guide for life, but love also contrasts with being results-oriented. What both law and being results-oriented have in common is that they are consciously controlled activities: we consciously write laws and consciously obey them, or we consciously stipulate our goals and consciously work out how to attain them. They are activities we feel we can do without having much awareness of anything beyond our conscious selves. Love calls for a great deal more self knowledge, or at least self awareness, including awareness of the resources we have access to that are not under our conscious control. And one word that can be used for such resources is ‘God’.

Can anyone really promise to love someone else ‘till death us do part’, rather as they might promise to pay back a loan over the course of a lifetime? No, because loving someone is not a contract. But because we are made the way we are, long term relationships give us immense satisfaction, richer and deeper than either our achievements or any relatively short-term relationships. If sticking to the letter of a contract is not the way to make relationships last, we need some other more effective glue. There can be no more effective glue between people than the recollection of an ever-growing number of wonderful things done together. No surprise then that some of those wonderful things are called ‘making love’.

WASHED AWAY

The flood continued forty days upon the earth. … and all flesh died that moved upon the earth. … Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. Genesis 1 vv17-23

You might almost worry about the independence of science from the religious tradition of the Old Testament. Not only does the creation myth in the first chapter of Genesis foreshadow our modern understanding of the beginnings of the universe and of the development life on earth, but the story of Noah and the Flood seems to point towards our modern understanding of mass extinctions. We now know that in the long history of life on earth vast numbers, not only of individual creatures, but of whole species and genera have repeatedly been wiped out through natural events that have overwhelmed them. In each case the catastrophic effects of the natural disasters wore off and left the earth a different kind of place from what it had been before; many kinds of animals and plants disappeared but life survived, including of course our own ancestors. As a matter of scientific fact, counting the numbers of species that become extinct each year, we seem to be living through a rapid mass extinction at present, and uniquely in this case it’s one that a single particular species – us – has initiated through its conscious, intelligent actions. You and I cannot know whether homo sapiens will go the way of the land-based dinosaurs that were wiped out in the previous mass extinction, or will instead survive, albeit in smaller numbers – saved, you might say, though some miraculous-seeming intervention like Noah’s Ark.

                It is truly astonishing that the people of the ancient world produced what appear to be mythologised accounts of mass extinctions, such as the story of Noah. They could have had no conscious knowledge of the various mass extinctions that recent scientific discoveries have revealed to us; even the most recent large-scale reduction of the human population that occurred when the Toba volcano erupted about 70,000 years ago probably happened before language had developed sufficiently to pass on a memory of that event in the form of stories. The idea is not one that would be likely to arise through speculation. Pure chance? Maybe, but then there is also the ‘pure chance’ that put equally astonishingly suggestive ideas into Genesis chapter 1. It’s tempting to wonder whether somewhere in our minds, out of reach of consciousness, we retain some kind of ‘memory’ of these things, and perhaps have a similar kind of ‘knowledge’ about a great deal else that we’re not consciously aware of. When such ideas bubble up, perhaps in a dream or in a work of art, and strike a chord with our conscious selves, we might speak of ‘inspiration’; earlier generations might have been prepared to call the inspiration ‘divine’ and to attribute it to ‘God’.

                In one particular respect, the story of the Flood as told in Genesis is quite unlike the mass extinctions, except perhaps the present one. It is seen as a punishment for, or, we might say, a direct outcome of, human action – ‘sin’ is what Genesis calls it. Two primitive ideas coalesce here. First, there is the feeling like the one children have when they believe that they are personally responsible for what happens around them; for example, they often feel that if their parents divorce, it is because of something bad they have done. Second, there’s the difficulty early people had in accepting that anything significant could happen without someone intending it, and since the Hebrews did not believe in a malicious deity, they had to suppose that the Flood had been divinely intended for some good and rational purpose, punishment for example. It was a long time after the Genesis stories were written down that Jesus of Nazareth pointed out that natural calamities and genuine accidents, like towers falling down and crushing people, just do happen without any unseen power causing them in order to punish people.

                That said, the current mass extinction is not principally a natural calamity or a genuine accident. Our crazily burgeoning population and our extraordinary wastefulness are what underlie it, and you’d think that both of these are in our collective human power to control. But we actually do very little to control them and tend rather to hope the problem will not really arise, just as, in the Flood myth, the people mocked Noah’s caution and carried on ‘sinning’. Perhaps we’re meant to imagine that Noah’s fellow-citizens only realised their mistake when the rains came and didn’t stop; and perhaps our successors here will have the same dismal experience of realising that it’s too late to avert the catastrophe. You might think that’s no reason for us to be troubled by the current mass extinction; after all, it’s most unlikely that any of us will personally witness its climax. The dinosaurs didn’t understand what was going on in their mass extinction event, and in any case could have done nothing about it. By contrast, we are conscious of what’s going on, and it troubles the best of us to think of a world whose development is being decisively and catastrophically transformed by us behaving as if we lacked the consciousness and intelligence that distinguishes us from other animals. It may turn out that we have enough consciousness and intelligence to get ourselves into serious difficulties but, tragically for our species, not enough to get us out again. And notice that when the people have failed to deal with their ‘sinning’, the Flood myth suggests that it will be dealt with by a force of nature. You don’t really need to posit a punishing god-out-there to understand that a sustainable equilibrium must somehow be restored.

                The Flood story ends with the rescued remnant of life coming through the crisis thanks to the insight and effort of Noah, and being promised that no such thing would ever happen again. We need something of that optimism, provided it doesn’t turn into the insouciant optimism of human-imitating-dinosaur that says there’s nothing much to worry about, and even if there is there’s nothing we can do about it, so we should just carry on as we are. The kind of optimism we need is Noah’s kind, the grounded optimism of a man who recognises what’s going on, who can see what needs to be done to tackle if not avert the coming catastrophe, and who gets on and does it, in the face of criticism and mockery.

TAKING RESPONSIBILITY

And they put forward two, Joseph called Barsabbas, who was surnamed Justus, and Matthias. And they prayed and said, ‘Lord, … show us which one of these two thou hast chosen.’ … And they cost lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthias. Acts 1 vv21-26

I wonder how Justus felt when the lot fell on Matthias. Disappointed maybe, rejected perhaps – or just relieved? Maybe others felt he would have been more suitable than Matthias. At any rate, it didn’t take the church very long to abandon this method of election. Imagine if the Catholic Church simply drew lots to elect a new pope from among the cardinals; it might make for some interestingly unpredictable appointments. But of course they don’t make decisions in that way, and neither do the rest of us. I think the main reason for that is that we understand that as ‘Fallen’ humanity we cannot abdicate our responsibility to make choices as best we can, informed by our knowledge of good and evil – even if we don’t always make objectively wise choices. Ever since what Genesis mythologises as the ‘Fall’, we have been embarked on a course on which we cannot comfortably leave important matters to chance if they are within our control. There are of course many things which are either not important or not under our control, and we needn’t fret too much about them. But our problem is that our ‘Fallen’ consciousness and intelligence keeps bringing more and more important things under our control, and sometimes we struggle to feel able to deal as responsibly as we’d like with the consequences of having attained our new powers. And then we like the irresponsible luxury of leaving things to chance.

                Or, as religious folk might put it, to God, and more specifically to a god-out-there. In drawing lots to select a successor to Judas Iscariot, the early church was behaving a way that was very much of-a-piece with other first century religious practices designed to relieve people of the responsibly of deciding what to do. They believed that God would ensure that the right man was chosen for the job by, so to speak, manipulating the straws. I don’t think any church people would believe this now, because if they did, they’d surely continue with this apparently foolproof selection system, which they don’t. And they don’t, I think, because they do not believe that God operates like this. They may even believe that to attribute to God a power and a willingness to act in this way is to misunderstand what ‘God’ means, where ‘God’ is located and how ‘God’ acts. Perhaps, maybe without being fully aware of it, they have come to believe that ‘God’ is not an ‘out-there’ God but a God who animates our better selves and can be appealed to to assist with decision-making without relieving our conscious selves of the need to take our decisions seriously and to accept responsibility for them.

                Our problem with responsible decision making shows up acutely with some issues in particular. Birth control has long been one. From the beginnings of agriculture until about a hundred years ago, human society needed as many babies as could be produced because many, sometimes most, babies died before adulthood, and each older generation as it aged needed a larger younger generation to support it. The religious prohibition on birth control was understandable in such a setting. Thanks to our medical and technological ingenuity, conditions have now been transformed, but some religious teaching hasn’t adjusted itself; it still advises the faithful to leave conception to chance – or, as they would put it, to God. Our ‘Fallen’ powers of intelligence and consciousness have given us a problem, but some people of a religious cast of mind feel uncomfortable using that same consciousness and intelligence to deal with the problem thus created. This strikes me as dishonest: if you really want to abdicate responsibility, you’d surely want to be consistent and stop using your intelligence altogether. We can’t do that of course, and so most people now accept that ingenious birth control is an appropriate way of dealing with the problem of population that we have created through our ingenuity.

                Birth control appears now to be a relatively easy case; the argument has been had and is largely won. There is however a matter that is becoming an even more acutely difficult issue for our sense of responsibility: call it ‘death control’. I suspect quite a few of us  have witnessed the long, slow decline of someone we have grown to love and respect, from the active, engaged, self-aware person we knew, into the mere husk of that person, bereft of reason, of interest, of the ability to interact meaningfully. Those who are left have ‘lost’ the person they loved, but cannot mourn as they would a death. There is no disguising the horror of this increasingly common situation. And why is it increasingly common?  Because we have got better and better at defeating the diseases and infections that until recently used to carry most of us off not so very long after the prime of our lives was past. I’m pleased we have: too often those diseases and infections carried off happy, active, engaged people, whatever their age. But we have as yet no answer to the question, ‘If not from this or that defeated disease or infection, what are we supposed to die from, and at what point in our lives?’ I can’t answer that question either, but I’m sure it has to be asked, and sure too that we are going to have to find an answer that we can be responsible for, just as we are responsible for the medical progress that has made it such a pressing question. Just now, we are at the stage of being uncomfortable with leaving death control to chance, or God, even as we seize almost every opportunity to lengthen life. That we cannot finally be satisfied with that is one of the unavoidable consequences of the ‘Fall’.

                Dealing with the problems raised by steps we have taken as a result of our ‘Fallen’ consciousness and intelligence has been a characteristic of human development. The early Old Testament repeatedly records worries about the consequences of developments we now take for granted because we have ways of managing their downsides. But finding those ways was neither easy nor straightforward. Controversy was, and will surely always be, part of the process, because it is through controversy, and experiment too, that we come to understand where ‘God’ is leading us.

HEREDITY AND FAIRNESS

What man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? … If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him. Matthew 7 vv 9-11

This is one of those gospel sayings of Jesus that it is easy and comfortable to spiritualise so that it offers no challenge to us as we live our lives in the world. The process of spiritualisation is even visible in the New Testament: where Matthew has God giving ‘good gifts’, Luke’s version (ch.11 vv19-13) has him giving the Holy Spirit. We need to reverse this neutralising trend and try to go back even beyond Matthew to what Jesus might have been getting at as he tried to help people improve their lives.

Ever since the agricultural revolution about 12,000 years ago, the most important determinant of your position in an increasingly complex society has been your parents’ social standing. It’s really not very much different now: social mobility is still quite limited; it’s relatively widespread only in unusual social circumstances; and it’s seen as desirable, if at all, only in one direction. This isn’t surprising. People generally have two inclinations when it comes to social organisation: while they want it to be ‘fair’, they also want to do well not only for themselves but also crucially for their own children. There’s an obvious tension here. No parent intends that in the interests of fairness their own children should be poorer, or less powerful, or of lower social status than themselves; you don’t pay for your kid to go to Eton to give him the opportunity of becoming a bus driver. If you are a poor or powerless parent, your demands for ‘fairness’ may be as much driven by considerations of heredity as are the demands of rich and powerful parents that their children should inherit their wealth and social position. People who have no children, whatever their wealth or social position, may find it easier to espouse fairness at least in the long term because they have no heredity to worry about. This is the very stuff of politics, of course, and you can often characterise political parties in terms of their wish to conserve the social order pretty much as it is, or their demand for the better treatment of their down-trodden supporters and their children, or their impartial idealism about fairness.

Religion is equivocal about all this. On the one hand, it sanctifies existing social stratification; the Hindu caste system and the coronation of hereditary monarchs come to mind. It may preach that true contentment has nothing to do with your place in society, so you can be content with the lot that society has laid upon you. Sometimes it has discouraged social revolution partly because revolutions tend to be violent, and violence is discomforting to most religious outlooks. On the other hand, there has long been a positively equalitarian, levelling streak in religion; it’s there in Old Testament prophecy and in Islam, and here in England both the Civil War Parliamentarians and the later Labour Movement were the offspring of religious nonconformity. To some extent religion may have simply been enlisted by opposing political factions, but I don’t think that’s the whole story; there are sincere religious, and indeed Christian, convictions on all sides of the political debate. This is worrying. If religious and specifically Christian people have deeply held, religiously-informed convictions about politics, but those convictions will support almost any political position, that wouldn’t seem to say much for the quality of the religion that informs the politics.

It’s hard to expect a parent to do anything less than as much as they possibly can to advance their child’s interests, not least because to do so is to go against the evolutionary grain. Some political revolutionaries have attributed their political aims to religious inspiration, yet often when such religiously inspired political revolutionaries gain power, they find they want to hand it on to their children, just as their ousted predecessors did; the example of Oliver Cromwell comes to mind as once among many. In theory, religion may possibly put God on the side of the poor and dispossessed, but when it comes to practice, that doesn’t cut very much ice; it seems that heredity always trumps fairness when heredity is available. Perhaps that was one creditable reason why the powerful medieval western church insisted on clerical celibacy. In a world of widespread dynastic violence, clever and ambitious people born outside the ruling class – Thomas Becket, for example – could rise to wealth and power only provided they had no children to whom they could pass on their new-found social status.

One characteristic of heresy is that it gives too great a prominence to some particular religious idea and too little to others, and it may be that the problem here is of that kind. Maybe religion asks us to give full political weight to several different ideas, a balancing act that is only possible to the extent that all the relevant ideas are honoured. To ask socially well-placed parents to allow the clever, ambitious children of their social inferiors to overtake their own children is going to be a lot easier if socially inferior roles are properly respected and paid; to claim that money isn’t everything is going to be a lot easier if the disparity between rich and poor is narrower than it will be if left to itself; to resist violent revolution is going to be a lot easier if social structures offer other avenues for redressing grievances. And close to the heart of all this is the Jesus conviction that just as human parents want the best for all their children, so in the God-as-Father theology the concept of all human beings being radically equally the ‘children of God’ implies an urge towards more equal treatment in society. If as a religiously-informed parent you treat, or allow society to treat, a child that is not yours in a way you would not accept for your own child, the Jesus teaching challenges you to ask yourself how you would justify that in terms of your religious convictions. No-one should imagine that there are easy or comfortable responses to that challenge.

TRANSGRESSING

On the same day Jesus saw a man performing a work on the Sabbath. Then he said to him, ‘Man! If you know what you are doing, you are blessed. But if you do not know, you are cursed, and a transgressor of the law.’ Luke 6, 5 (a unique reading in Codex D)

Today’s text is curiously familiar, yet unfamiliar – familiar because we’re used to hearing stories of Jesus in which he casts doubt on the importance of keeping ritual rules like not labouring on the Sabbath, unfamiliar because we can’t quite place this one. In fact, it is one of the few stories of Jesus that are entirely plausible yet are not found in the canonical gospels. It comes from just one fifth century manuscript of Luke’s gospel, Codex D, now in Cambridge. No-one knows how it came to be there, and only there. Had it been handed down orally for over three hundred years? Was it the creation of a preacher who wanted to make an important point that wasn’t quite clear enough in the canonical gospels? But maybe what matters is not how this saying came to be in Codex D but what it prompts us to learn.

                Here is a man who is clearly doing something that the Jewish law forbade. Right-thinking, religious Jews would have condemned him for this, just as right-thinking Christians have often condemned those who disobey the church’s rules. Jesus does not do this, but neither does he say that what the man is doing is obviously OK. He says that whether or not it is OK depends on the man’s understanding of what he is doing. This cannot be judged from outside; only the man himself can be certain as to whether he believes that what he’s doing is right, for him, now. This development is of massive significance, because it undermines the ability of any external agency to judge the moral value of an act. An external agency might of course decide that the act, whatever the motive behind it, must be punished – what lawyers call ‘strict liability’, the kind of law enshrined in the very earliest law codes. Maybe the reason this saying is not found elsewhere is that the early church found this development deeply disturbing; if it were to be accepted, the church could not say with any finality, ‘Thou shalt not ...’ but could instead only ask, ‘What’s your motive for doing that?’ It is a mark of the maturity of our modern legal system, and also of its having been influenced by the thrust of the Jesus teaching, that our courts seek to discover not only whether the accused did what has been alleged but also, crucially, why.

                Jesus, we know, did do on the Sabbath day what was regarded as ‘work’. Neither that fact nor today’s text tell us whether he thought that Sabbath observance was generally a good idea, though we also know from his famous saying, ‘The Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath’ that he would have made that judgement on the basis of its human utility. But today’s text is not concerned with whether or not the rule about Sabbath observance is a good one; it is about the fact that it is a rule, and this man is breaking this rule when it might be assumed that it applied to him.

                Jesus expressed doubts about the wisdom of doing what the rules said you should simply because the rules said so. But the problem with rules is that they can make us unfree whether or not we obey them. You’re obviously not free if you simply obey the rules. But it should be equally obvious that you’re not free of the dominion of rules if you simply disobey them – if, that is, you decide to break the rules exactly because they are the rules. In that case, as in the first, what you do is being driven by the rules, one way or the other; in neither case are you behaving autonomously. It’s this understanding that our text makes crystal clear. If this man working on the Sabbath really understands what he is doing and is doing it because he knows it’s right for him to do it, he is ‘blessed’, and, we might want to add, free. If on the other hand he’s just being bolshie, breaking rules for the sake of breaking rules, that is not commendable; he’s just a ‘transgressor of the law’; he is not free.

                In Christian history there have been groups who have believed that all rules should be abolished, or at least that rules didn’t apply to them. The Jesus of our text doesn’t appear to have been such an antinomian. It’s not that the rules don’t have some utility – some of them at any rate; it’s that any utility they may have as wise guidance is lost when they become rigid rules that people feel they must keep at all costs. It’s one thing to accept traditional guidance when you have neither the time nor the inclination to think things through for yourself and want to behave in a way that has generally been found to be both safe and defensible. But it’s something quite else to think that traditional guidance is unchallengeable, or that it must always unfailingly take precedence over our own intuitions, however deeply felt or carefully thought through.

I think that something further may be implied in this story. Change is an unavoidable part of life at every level. Consequently, it’s unrealistic to think we can go on forever obeying the same old laws and conventions. And maybe the way laws and conventions are best developed is by serious people thinking seriously about whether and when to follow the traditional guidance, and whether and when to try something that the traditional guidance forbids. Of course, such explorations sometimes turn out badly. I don’t think that the Jesus teaching would call such disasters ‘the judgement of God’; that wasn’t how Jesus thought of God. But because there is this risk, it takes a certain kind of courage to act on a sincere belief that some traditional constraint does not apply to the situation you are in, either for reasons you understand or because you have a deep intuition about the matter. That courage is an aspect of what we call ‘faith’, and I hope it was possessed by the man Jesus encountered working on the Sabbath day.

PRAY FOR THE WEALTHY

Jesus … said to his disciples, ‘How hard it will be for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God!’ They were amazed that he should say this, but he insisted, ‘… It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.’ Mark 10 v25

Public prayers can be very revealing of the values really held by those who lead them. Among the groups regularly prayed for, along with the sick, are the poor. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s odd that another particular group never gets prayed for: the very rich people in our society. Yet you’d think that the very rich needed at least as much praying for as the poor; after all, Jesus himself observes the potential blessedness of poor people, but he’s scathing about the rich: it’s easier, he says, for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for rich people to attain the Kingdom of God, his term for the state of blessedness. This week-by-week failure has serious implications, not least because it conditions us to think that while we would want to avoid being poor, being very rich would be fine and might perhaps be aspired to. Of course, there’s nothing to be said in favour of real poverty, but perhaps it’s not much more undesirable than huge wealth. Let me be clear: I am not talking here about the damaging effect of great wealth on those who don’t have it. Real relative poverty is corrosive in itself and the envy it provokes only makes it worse; as a society we need to encourage the relief of poverty because we have compassion for the poor. No: I am talking about the damaging effect of great relative wealth on those who do have it; perhaps as a society we need to encourage the relief of wealth at least partly because we have compassion for the very wealthy.

                While religion has long exhorted society to be generous or at least fair towards its poorest members, it has often had rather less to say about the dangers of wealth to the wealthy. But this concern too is deeply embedded in the tradition, as the eye-of-a-needle saying demonstrates. We can now explain this concern better than once we could. For one thing, we understand that beyond a certain point more and more wealth does not make people commensurately more and more happy; we say that wealth has a declining marginal utility. As Jesus’s story of the widow and her mite suggests, we can see that the pound in the plutocrat’s bank account is much less valuable than the same pound would be in the pauper’s pocket. For another, we have had plenty of evidence that when great wealth is inherited as distinct from being earned, the heir has little sense of its value and cannot imagine what it is like to be – not even poor: just an ordinary middle-income person. That’s just one way great wealth can sap the ability to be compassionate; hence perhaps Jesus’s advice to the rich young ruler[1] to give away his wealth, and his inability to do so. We also know that for those who didn’t inherit it, amassing great wealth demands at the very least single-minded pursuit of it and at the worst utter ruthlessness towards other people; neither leaves much room for the cultivation of good relationships or any other lastingly satisfying human activities. Jesus’s story of the rich man who dies before he can enjoy his wealth[2] seems to make the point. It can be even worse: great wealth tends to make its possessor see other people as objects to be bought with cash, not as fellows to be won by love or persuaded by debate; and even when in fact love and debate are present, the very rich can’t be certain that what binds others to them is not simply their money. That’s how great wealth corrodes human relationships.

                All this we know, but we find it hard to take seriously. To say you are wary of the dangers of great wealth can easily sound like a case of sour grapes: since you couldn’t reach the grapes when you tried, you claim you never wanted them in the first place because you knew they were sour. It is naturally much more convincing when people who certainly could reach the grapes, and indeed enjoyed a good many of them, realise the limitations and dangers of great wealth, and begin to give it up. And some of them do. It takes great inner courage to do this, because the pursuit of wealth is deeply ingrained not only in us as individuals but also in our society’s value system: whatever it claims, there’s plenty of evidence that our society tends to value people by their wealth rather than by other, better, measures of human worth. But even in giving wealth away there is a moral risk: how can you or anyone else be sure that in doing so you are not buying worldly popularity and power, or, if you believe in an afterlife, the reward of eternal bliss?

                It’s not just individuals who are corrupted by great wealth; so are nations. The truth is that great wealth and great poverty are, for individuals and for whole societies, burdens that we would all be better off without. That does not mean that there should be no disparity of income at all, but it does mean that we need to take steps to ensure that those disparities do not grow exponentially, as they tend to if unchecked. The Old Testament provides mechanisms to prevent this happening: pawned tools and clothes had to be given back, slaves had to be freed and land returned after a set period, the charging of interest was forbidden, and so on. Our inheritance, income and capital gains taxes continue this ancient and wise tradition. But we need always to be vigilant: money has a way of beguiling its possessors into finding, and even justifying, ways round such safeguards, now no less than in ancient times.

                So let me suggest that we begin routinely to use in our intercessions some such prayer as this: ‘We pray for the very wealthy in our society. We pray that they may come to see that great and growing wealth brings relatively little happiness, compromises human relationships, and takes attention away from what is truly enriching in life. We pray that they will find courage to forsake the pursuit of great wealth. We pray also that they will be able to dispose of their excess wealth in ways of that will bring relief and joy both to them and to others.’ I would certainly say ‘Amen’ to that.

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[1] Lk 18:18-23

[2] Lk 12:20