REVOLUTION AND STAGNATION

You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. Matthew ch5 v13

It’s impossible to overestimate either the awfulness of the Black Death in the late fourteenth century or its impact on European life. At least a third of the European population died in a few short years, and died quickly, within days of contracting an illness that was entirely mysterious. The disaster transformed the economy of Europe and, in time, its art and its politics, but what troubled religious people was that the desperate prayers of faithful Mother Church to a loving Father God had failed to avert the disaster. This proved to many of them that the church’s effectiveness was crippled by its corruption and that society had developed in ways that deserved God’s punishment; they felt that both church and society had to be changed radically. It took more than a century for the implications to fully sink in, but when they did, religious revolution was all but inevitable: we call it ‘the Reformation’.

                The western church of the middle ages was not in fact as hopeless as the reformers thought. There was indeed corruption, idleness and greed, but priests, monks and nuns had sometimes selflessly ministered to the victims of the Black Death, and there was plenty of theological creativity. Reform was needed, but what came was revolution which tried to sweep away even the most positive aspects of the medieval church. There are always those who are suspicious of theological creativity, and indeed it often takes some questionable forms, but without it theology has less and less to say to a constantly changing society, and eventually it serves no purpose at all. Whatever one thinks of for example the ideas of Peter Abelard or Thomas Aquinas, or the development of the cult of the Virgin Mary, it has to be said that these witnessed to a confident, even daring, liveliness in medieval church thinking. But this creativity as much as the corruption, idleness and greed were aspects of the church that had failed to avert the Black Death. The reformers therefore sought to go back to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity as found in the New Testament in St Paul’s writings – writings, remember, that owed nothing directly to the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth and a quite a lot to Old Testament ideas that Jesus had overtaken. Moreover, they saw politics as the way to ensure that people could be saved from the errors that came with change, and indeed saved from change itself.  Seizing the political levers meant displacing the monarchs and aristocrats who had hitherto pulled them, and replacing them with ‘new men’. Consequently, the Reformation, like all fundamentalist revolutions, was simultaneously reactionary in theology but revolutionary in politics. The Province of Massachusetts Bay, Cromwell’s Protectorate in England and the Islamic Republic of Iran have much in common.

                The legacy of this fundamentalist revolution in western Christianity is still with us, which is one reason it’s important as well as interesting to understand it. The Reformation heritage of the USA continues to inform its domestic and foreign policies. The Catholic Church still struggles to get over the Counter-Reformation that was its inevitable reactionary response to the Reformation. Closer to home, the contribution of church people to British political debate about social issues frequently invokes religious doctrines that are two thousand or more years old and were developed in conditions that were unimaginably different from those of today. Perhaps what was most disastrous about the Reformation was not that it split the western church and in doing so started half a millennium of social and military strife, but rather that it stopped theological creativity and development and progress in their tracks. It’s an intriguing thought: if the Black Death had never happened, maybe we’d have long ago accepted that abortion, same-sex marriage and voluntary euthanasia could be accommodated within religious thinking as proper responses to changing understanding and circumstances – though of course the understanding and circumstances might have been very different from what they are.

                Over the last century or so great efforts have been made to promote the reunification of churches. I’m not sure that these efforts have not missed the point. Engineering institutional reunification, showing respect for each other’s differing histories and points-of-view and working together on social projects are neither the most necessary nor the most difficult things that need doing to correct the calamity of five hundred years ago. If the most valuable thing that the sixteenth century split put an end to was a theological creativity that placed theology in the vanguard of intellectual life and held open the possibility that the rise of science and the growth of European empires might inform and be informed by theological reflection, then clearly what we should be doing is to reintegrate theology into the wider cultural life, not now just of Europe, but of the planet. That means being as bold as some of the most theologically daring personalities of the medieval western church. And we have a great deal of lost time to make up for – almost five hundred years during which catholic and reformed branches of the western church have found themselves permanently dragging along the dead weight of Pauline or medieval theology through the mire of sixteenth century controversies. 

                It’s not that the church has nothing useful to say to the world; it is that so long as the church’s core thinking has not progressed beyond the sixteenth century anything useful is permanently compromised in the minds of the general public. Maybe the worry is that a church that abandoned positions taken up five hundred years ago in favour of ‘modernisation’ would then not be distinctive, would be just like everyone else of good will. It’s worth remembering that that’s very much like the thinking of the Jewish authorities who had Jesus executed. Followers of Jesus are not supposed to be in the business of being distinctive, any more than they are in the business of taking over the world; they are supposed to be in the business of being useful to the world. Like salt.

HAPPINESS THROUGH LOVE

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh,

in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. Paul’s Letter to the Roman Church ch 8 vv 1-4

Early civilisations in the Middle East invented strict law as a means of dealing with social difficulties and disputes. It was often quite crude – ‘an eye for an eye’ and all that –, rarely showed much respect for women, and sometimes conflated ritual law with secular law. It was about order, not justice; actions, not motives; rules, not human fulfilment. In due course, most of the societies that created these law codes, like Hammurabi’s Babylon, sank beneath the tide of history; the descendants of the people who had created and lived under these strict codes learnt new and better ways of dealing with issues, and the old codes were forgotten. One society in particular resisted this trend: the Jews did not sink beneath the tide of history, and in surviving retained and even enhanced their reverence for the old law, which came to play a major role preserving Jewish identity when political independence had been lost. In the first century of the Common Era, the Pharisees were a notable group among those Jews whose reverence for the law only increased. At the same time though, some Jews were becoming aware of the obsolescence of the old reliance on strict law. They saw that, in the first place, the old approach did not serve human happiness, and in the second, it was humanly impossible to fully obey all the detailed provisions of the old law.

                So it is not wholly surprising that, although neither knew anything about the other’s teaching, Jesus and Paul agree on the central issue: there has to be a better way of living than trying to obey the ancient Law. Paul had been brought up as a Pharisee and was only too aware of the difficulty of keeping the law in every detail. While he remained a Pharisee, he could never relax, was always worried that he might be breaking some rule or other, and always felt guilty for the infractions he could hardly help committing. Jesus seems not to have had such an over-strict upbringing, and a large part of his ministry involved challenging the Pharisees and their backward-looking legalism. He made a habit of associating with people whose lifestyles implied that they had simply given up on trying to observe the old law, and he was aware that in many cases this had, if anything, made their lives more straightforward and happier. No doubt this difference in experience between Jesus and Paul helps to account for the contrasting ways they deal with law in their teaching.

                Paul’s key idea is ‘justification by faith’. This is his answer to what was for him the burning question: ‘How are we sinners to regain our good standing before God?’ That of course is very much the question of an ex-Pharisee. It assumes that nothing is more important than to be in good standing with God-out-there, that God’s ancient law really applies to us, that we haven’t kept the law (because, being human, we couldn’t), that we are consequently not in good standing with God, and that there is nothing we can do about that by ourselves. What however we can do is to have faith in Jesus, whose resurrection has revealed him to be God’s anointed, the ‘Christ’; we simply have to accept that Jesus’s death can somehow expunge our bad record and restore us to the good standing before God that we crave. Now we might demythologise this as Paul saying that it does no good feeling bad about ourselves because of our constant failings; we have to put them behind us and get on with life. But that would not accurately represent Paul’s view: for him, this was not a myth but a literal description of the situation.

                Jesus does not have a tagline like ‘justification by faith’, but perhaps we can compose one for him: how about ‘happiness through love’? This seems to be a reasonable distillation of a good deal of his teaching, from the beatitudes to his summary of the law. ‘Happiness’ here has to be understood as something much richer, deeper and longer-lasting, than what is often meant by the word; ‘happy’ in this rich sense is sometimes used instead of ‘blessed’ for the Greek word makarios in the Beatitudes. Maybe ‘joyful’ would be better: ‘joyful through love’. For Jesus, the difficulty is not so much that we can’t keep the old law, but more that trying to do so, quite as much as allowing primitive instincts free rein in our lives, gets in the way of our finding happiness, or joy. What he suggests we focus on is how we manage and improve our relationships with each other. This teaching needs no demythologisation, and it does not address itself only to those who are slaves to the old law or who believe literally in stories about the unseen world. It is just a statement of fact: look around you and you will see that the people who are truly happy are those who prioritise their loving relationships with other people, and who find the strength and the faith to do this by nurturing their spiritual – not necessarily their religious – life. 

                Truly, this is gospel – good news. Maybe it shouldn’t be news, because it has been repeated often enough down the centuries. But we find it all-too-easy to prioritise other, less emotionally demanding if also ultimately less rewarding things in our lives, or alternatively to try to manage our lives by living by acting according to conventions and rules, the modern versions of ancient Law: That’s why we need the good news.

JESUS OF NAZARETH - 'SON OF GOD'?

"But what about you?" he asked. "Who do you say I am?" Peter answered, "God's Messiah." Luke ch 9 v20

In the New Testament, there are three quite distinct ideas about the relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and God. The earliest is St Paul’s, explained in his letter to the Roman church. The background to this is that Paul knew nothing – nothing at all – about what Jesus had taught. He was not interested in knowing about this, as he makes clear in Galatians; all he was interested in was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Their total belief in this astonishing event had overwhelmed Jesus’s disciples and driven them to become an embryonic heretical sect within Judaism – pretty much what the Jewish authorities had been trying to prevent by having Jesus killed. For the loyalist Saul who was to become Paul the authorities had been right to silence Jesus, and he felt called to continue their efforts by persecuting the followers of the disappeared Jesus. What little reliable evidence there is in Acts of the Apostles does not suggest that the disciples were repeating Jesus’s own teaching; they were just talking about his resurrection and how they thought it might be fitted into Jewish traditions. This, not the teaching of Jesus, was for Paul what their embryonic religion was about, and it was this religion that he joined and came to define. To this Paul added an account of Jesus’s last supper with his friends – but never anything of his actual teaching.

                For Paul, this Jesus whom he had never met and about whom he knew next to nothing, was either a dangerous misleader of the Jewish people or – what? If it had really happened, the resurrection would seem to have marked him out as something more than a mere prophet in the long Jewish tradition of prophecy, for there was no earlier account of a Jewish prophet being killed and rising from the dead. Clearly, if Jesus had been raised from the dead, there was something unique about him, and that uniqueness Paul spoke of in terms of God having made him his son, rather as Roman emperors sometimes made unrelated young men their official sons to give themselves heirs. Paul is quite clear in Romans that there had been nothing unusual about Jesus’s birth. It was the resurrection and only the resurrection that entitled him to be called the Son of God. If during his lifetime Jesus had gone around claiming to be the son of God, Paul would have disapproved of that as snatching at equality with God.

                Writing a quarter of a century or so later than Paul, Matthew and Luke push Jesus’s divine sonship back to his conception. Like the earlier Synoptic writer, Mark, one of their principal purposes was to give an account of Jesus’s actual teaching. Clearly they had accepted the idea that Jesus was God’s son, along with a lot of Paul’s theology, but they wanted that sonship to have begun earlier so that it could lend authority to Jesus’s teaching during his lifetime. They or their sources adapted the familiar Hellenistic idea of a hero being the child of a divine father, from whom the hero derived his characteristics, and a human mother. From the human point of view, this made it at least possible for Jesus’s mother to be a virgin, which would make his birth even more amazing. It’s not only Paul who shows no trace of this idea; neither does Mark.

And neither, later still, does John, though for very different reasons. For him, Jesus’s special relationship with God had not begun after the resurrection or even at his conception. John sees Jesus as the divine Word or Logos. In Hellenistic philosophy, the Logos had existed before, and had caused, the creation of the universe. So he had always been God, had appeared on earth as Jesus, and after his crucifixion and resurrection had returned to heaven. In this interpretation, it is not so much the resurrection as the crucifixion of Jesus that reveals his divine glory as the Logos. What interests John is not Jesus’s teaching but his status. What John presents as Jesus’s teaching is clearly a series of meditations about his status, as the Good Shepherd, as the vine and so on.

I’m not going to delve into the ancient and fruitless debates about the precise nature of Jesus’s divine sonship, or exactly what the Logos was or in what sense it was uniquely incarnated in Jesus. For two millennia, it has been the business of Christian theologians to try to weave these independent and to my mind irreconcilable accounts of Jesus’s unique relationship with God into a single coherent account. I don’t believe that that can be convincingly done, and I think the lamentable effect of all this effort has been to divert attention from what is most helpful and most significant about Jesus of Nazareth: his teaching. This is not a Pauline or a Johannine view; for Paul and John it is always and only who Jesus was or became – his status – and the death and resurrection that revealed, or confirmed, or promoted him to, that status. This is what the Christian religion is about, and to be frank, being centrally interested in Jesus’s teaching rather than his status prevents one from being in any strict, historic sense a Christian. 

Accepting the presence in the New Testament of three distinct strands of ‘Christological’ thinking and resisting the temptation to attempt the hopeless task of weaving them together is immensely freeing. For a start, it removes any sense that one ought to accept the New Testament view of Jesus, because there isn’t one single such view; at most one might feel bound to choose between the views of Paul, the Synoptics and John. But, more radically, one might be prompted by their differences of view to do what they did: make up one’s own mind about whether and why Jesus is worth taking seriously and to express any conclusions as best one can in contemporary language and imagery. The question we face is, ‘What is Jesus of Nazareth to you?’ Peter’s answer is not the one that matters to you: it’s yours.

GNOSIS AND FAITH

The Pharisees asked him, ‘When will the kingdom of God come?’ He said, ‘You cannot tell by observation when the kingdom of God comes … For in fact the kingdom of God is among [or within] you.’ Luke ch17 vv20,21

The first century Mediterranean world was infested with religious teachers who undertook to give their followers secret knowledge that was not obtainable elsewhere; it was of course unverifiable and had little to do with the world around them. It was about the princedoms and principalities of the unseen world, about what lay behind creation, about when the world would end and what would happen after that, about mysterious causes behind events in the world. These teachers are referred to as ‘Gnostics’ but of course knowledge, gnosis, was the last thing they offered. Sometimes their stories had the quality of myths, attempts to express in stories truths about human life that are hard to express or to grasp less concretely, but often they were personal obsessions played out to impress the credulous and attract a following of people needing to believe in something, anything. We are familiar with a similar phenomenon today, in the form of various sects. We’re familiar with the phenomenon in the New Testament too: some of Paul’s theology is not terribly far removed from the kinds of ideas the Gnostics peddled, though it is more anchored in ancient Jewish traditions.

                In one sense, believing such teaching is easy: unless you include belief in predictions of an early end of the world, you can be sure that you will never in your lifetime discover that your beliefs were misplaced. And if in your lifetime you find that believing such teaching gives you a confidence you would lack without it, one might say that it was pretty harmless and even positively helpful. But it is not grounded in life as we know it in our daily lives, and nor does it take its cues from what we can find out about life through careful observation and thought. So while belief in Gnostic-like teaching is easy, it is also fragile. Like a house built on sand, it may not withstand the more serious of life’s tempests – and then the once-believer has nothing to give himself the confidence he lacked. This is why credulity – the willingness to believe any old stories about the unseen world – is different from a faith that, while it is not explained or proved by our experience of life, is nevertheless grounded on the firm rock of what we know of life and can survive the challenges that life sets before us.

                The approach of the Gnostics and of Paul stands in marked contrast to what we know about the approach of Jesus of Nazareth. Occasionally we find attributed to him descriptions of the unseen world, much of a muchness with his contemporaries’ Gnostic teaching. But mostly, and more strikingly and therefore so much the more reliably, his teaching repeatedly draws his followers’ attention to what they can see for themselves in the world around them if only they will do so. His parables ask them to look and see how the world works and prompts them to draw conclusions from that. His beatitudes ask them to notice what kinds of people can be called makarios, happy, blessed, so that they can shape their dispositions appropriately. His famous prayer to Our Father is wonderfully earth-bound. He explicitly rejects the idea that anyone might know when the end of the world is coming.

In this important sense Jesus’s teaching is not a revelation at all. His teaching is focussed on drawing his hearers’ attention to what they could have seen – and many perhaps did see – in the world they knew. We have heard of Jesus of Nazareth only because St Paul seized on his disciples’ emotional accounts of his resurrection to be the basis of his new, Christian, religion. For all we know there might have been other teachers with a similar approach to Jesus’s, who made no more effort than did Jesus himself to commit their ideas to writing, and who have been lost to history. And if we had had our attention focussed by someone else on the same things that Jesus drew attention to, perhaps we would have taken just as much notice and given that person just as much honour. (Incidentally, it’s not only Jesus who would have been lost to history save for the happy chance that someone felt he wanted to write down his ideas; without the testimony of Plato, Socrates too would be forgotten. Both Jesus and Socrates saw it as their business, not to tell people what was what, but rather in their different ways to lead people to their own conclusions. It is the Pauls and Platos of the world who have a harder-nosed approach to working out, writing down and passing on a clear, coherent philosophy who usually get remembered, rather than those who are content to make and share their discoveries about life as they go along, like Jesus and Socrates.)

What might have been revelatory to Jesus’s hearers is the assurance that you can get along just fine without the kind of other-worldliness that religion always seems to generate, provided you pay proper attention to how this world is and how people can be truly happy in it. That’s an important proviso. The Jesus approach is not simply to try to undermine the beliefs of the credulous or mock the pretensions of the religious, though examples of both can be found in his teaching. To do that without offering, and indeed putting the emphasis on offering, an alternative and stronger basis for living well would be cruel for individuals and unhelpful for society. Perhaps that’s why Jesus sometimes carefully links what he has to say with the religious traditions of his hearers, showing how those traditions have provided the basis for the progress that his teaching represents. It must be said that this caring and careful approach is not always shared by teachers who are powerfully aware of the shortcomings of religion but either cannot or will not balance their attacks upon it with something better upon which their readers can base their approach to life. Yet in the end it is the alternative that matters; if that is clearly understood perhaps religious other-worldliness may be left to die naturally away.

EXISTENTIAL QUESTIONS

When we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter's day… In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside, the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing.  Bede: The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, II:13

Back in the eighth century, the Venerable Bede likened a human life to the flight of a sparrow across a banqueting hall, in through one door and out through another; the sparrow had an existence outside the hall even though we could see it only within. It’s a powerful metaphor because it neatly expresses the existential mystery of being human. Even though we understand the physiology both of reproduction and birth, and of death, the appearance and disappearance of a human life retains its existential mysteriousness. It feels too marvellous to be true that an act of copulation should really create a human life with its unique identity and vast potential; surely – we feel – it must have a less animal origin than that? And similarly it feels too monstrous to be true that such a life should absolutely cease to exist on death; where has all that love, all that understanding, all that potential gone? These are not questions of a kind that can be answered by ever-more-detailed descriptions of physiological or evolutionary processes; they are existential questions – indeed, perhaps they are not really questions at all, but ways of expressing a proper sense of awe at our own existence and nature. We would not be better off if we could simply accept ‘No’ and ‘Nowhere’ as adequate answers to these questions, true as they are, because that would suggest that our human existence had ceased to amaze and mystify us – and then perhaps we would be well on the way to regarding it as insignificant and wasteable. 

                That is partly why the Christian tradition makes so much of the birth and death of Jesus, and why the seasons of the church’s year that mark them have such appeal well beyond the circle of Christian believers. This has nothing to do with the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth or even with the Pauline account of the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, though of course the tradition has woven them all together. The story of Jesus’s mysteriously un-physiological conception and the theological accounts of his hidden pre-existence with God before birth offer us the opportunity to reflect on the mysteriousness of the coming into being of every human life. Hence not only the popularity of Christmas observance but also our habit of sacralising the arrival of a baby, in baptism. The story of Jesus’s messily human death and the theological account of how it was not really the end of his life offer us the opportunity to reflect on the mysteriousness of the meaning of every human life as it comes to its end. Hence not only the place of Good Friday and Easter in our culture, but also our habit of sacralising the disposal of a dead body, by holding a funeral service.

                Other cultures than ours also find ways of giving people the opportunity to meditate on these matters, even if they sometimes lay the emphasis in slightly different places. Always, though, these myths and rituals are associated with religion, as they are with us. There’s a risk here. Religion suffers these days from literalism and antiquarianism, which makes it vulnerable on the one hand to fananticism and on the other to indifference. The risk is that the significance and richness of human life will find nowhere where it can be celebrated, and what is not celebrated can be forgotten. I don’t know for how much longer than 100,000 years humanity has been fascinated and mystified by the existential questions, but the evidence suggests that it hasn’t been for long enough for it to become hard wired in our brains. Being richly human may be natural to us, but it’s second nature, an overlay on the nature we share with other animals. We could forget it. Indeed as a society we may well forget it if we don’t keep talking about it and celebrating it and encouraging succeeding generations to discover just how enriching it is. So long as inherited myths and rituals can be used in this way and have not been wholly superseded by new and better techniques they are worth nurturing and passing on. But it must always be the meaning and the richness that really matter, not the myth or the ritual.

                The power of Bede’s metaphor may help to explain part of the horror, as distinct from the disapproval, that religious people often feel about contraception and abortion on one hand and suicide on the other. If there are disembodied souls out there in the cold waiting to fly into the mead hall through a door, there is a particular awfulness about suddenly slamming that door shut, so to speak, so that a soul on its way in is left outside with a broken neck. Similarly, if souls will continue to live out there in the cold when they have left the banqueting hall, there seems little to be gained in deliberately hurrying out of the nearest door; better to stay as long as possible in the warm, because it has to be better than the alternative. This is an example of how religious images that were intended to express some important idea about the human condition can take on a life of their own. Neither abortion nor suicide is to be taken lightly, weighed down as they both are with implications. But to approach them with a horror that is powerfully informed by a myth that is taken literally, and consequently to come to think that they are never, ever, conscionable is to make a serious mistake. It’s a kind of mistake that is all too common in the world’s religions, the kind that  an lead believers to feel justified in subjecting to mean, offensive or vicious treatment other people whose existential wonderfulness somehow gets forgotten along the way.

LEAVING LEVITICUS BEHIND

[Jesus said,] Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them.  … You have heard that it was said to people long ago …  But I tell you … Matthew 5 (The Sermon on the Mount)

One of the oldest books in the Old Testament, Leviticus, lays down rules about many aspects of everyday life. For instance: ‘You shall not put on a garment woven with two kinds of yarn.’ (Lev 18:19). Or ‘You shall not shave the edge of your beards.’ (Lev 19:22). Or ‘You shall not eat … the pig, because it has a parted foot and a cloven hoof but does not chew the cud; you shall regard it as unclean.’ (Lev 11:7) These ancient laws, and many more equally unfamiliar, are still accepted as binding by truly orthodox Jews. Other Jews, and Christians of course, do not feel bound by them. So why do I quote these strange laws, laws which we find bizarre or even unacceptable? It’s certainly not to pour scorn on the people who wrote them. They and their contemporaries were struggling to find their place and manage their affairs in a changing world which they barely understood. Many of the laws are about how to make distinctions between things, and the ability to classify is basic to our understanding of the world. When Leviticus was written, people were just beginning to do this; it’s not surprising they got the classifications wrong and were over-keen to give classification and therefore separation a pre-eminence we would deny them. The roughly simultaneous change from nomadic, pastoral living to settled, agricultural society was enormous; the story of Cain and Abel illustrates how fraught it was. Settled, agricultural society brought with it surplus wealth and therefore the emergence of a ruling class and life in large villages and towns. In this new situation, accepted customs and the decisions of a headman were no longer enough; a new means of keeping order was needed: clear, easy-to-enforce Law.

                Perhaps it was because he instinctively sensed the reasons behind the old laws that Jesus could confidently say that many of them had been superseded. It wasn’t that they had been wrong; it was simply that their time had passed; humanity had moved, or at any rate could move, beyond them. Some people still struggle with this idea. They want to say either that the old rules were wrong all the time and should never have been made, or that if they were right once, they must be right now. What we cannot know is whether we could have reached our modern understandings without having passed through stages of over-zealous classification and over-reliance on strict liability law – or, to use the language of journeying, whether we could have arrived where we are today via a different route. Perhaps we could have, but we didn’t; the Leviticus route was the one our predecessors took, and we’re not really in a position to say whether they were right or wrong to do so. This thought might make us extra-careful about the rules and conventions by which we live or which we seek to develop, both because we will be judged by them and more importantly because they will bring our successors to where they will find themselves. You’ll have your own ideas as to which of our current rules and conventions are likely to go the way of Leviticus’s ban on weaving mixed-fibre cloth; my prime candidates would be those about drugs and assisted suicide.

                It’s important to remember that Jesus’s attack was not simply on the old rules themselves but on the approach they enshrined. He saw that trying to regulate and improve life principally by making and enforcing rules was an approach that had had its day, and that something different could be just as effective, less constricting and more enriching. It was necessary to get behind the behavioural rules to see whether underlying them were admirable dispositions that were to be encouraged. If there weren’t, the rule could be abandoned, at least as a moral rule as distinct from a civil law; if there were, it would be the disposition not the rule that needed to be nurtured. It’s clear from the earliest accounts of the post-Jesus church that its members quickly agreed to abandon circumcision and the kosher food rules, no doubt acting on the logic of Jesus’s teaching. By contrast, they would not have had any problem with a Leviticus rule such as ‘You shall not treat the deaf with contempt, nor put an obstruction in the way of the blind.’ (Lev 19:14), though they would probably have realised that it is the loving impulse behind such a rule that matters, not the rule itself.

                Jesus was boldly clear that some of the old laws and the approach they enshrined had to be abandoned, and with them, by implication, a particular conception of what it was to be a Jew. That the clearest statement of this view appears repeatedly in the Sermon on the Mount in the deeply Jewish gospel of Matthew is surprising and therefore reliable. Less reliable, because not so unexpected, is Matthew’s attribution to Jesus of the statement that no detail of the old law could be changed, and the claim the he had come to ‘fulfil’ the Law and the Prophets. No doubt this is Matthew trying to reassure himself and his fellow Jews, because it clearly does not reflect the thrust of the Jesus teaching – at least, not unless ‘fulfil’ is taken to mean ‘continue to develop and where appropriate abandon’. The Jewish authorities would have had no interest in executing a Jesus who had demonstrated a deep loyalty and reverence for the ancient texts that kept Jewish identity intact; they wanted him dead precisely because he did not show such unquestioning loyalty and reverence.

                One of the lessons we might draw from Jesus’s attack on the tyranny of the old rules of Leviticus is that it’s important to beware of the human tendency to imagine that the latest invention for helping us deal with life is a panacea. Maybe we can’t help this; it’s certainly a recurrent feature of human history. Perhaps we just have to live through these periods of over-enthusiasm, hoping that a Jesus figure will emerge to courageously suggest that the time has come to move on – and that enough of us will have the sense to listen.

DEMOCRATIC DESPOTISM

Then Nathan said to David, "… Thus says the Lord God of Israel: 'I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul. I gave you your master's house and your master's wives into your keeping, and gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if that had been too little, I also would have given you much more! Why have you despised the commandment of the Lord, to do evil in His sight? You have killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword; you have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the sword of the people of Ammon.' " 2 Samuel 12 vv7-9

The ancient kings and emperors who became the image for God as King were regarded as all-powerful; their will was to be obeyed, their desires were to be satisfied. They didn’t like being told that their desires didn’t define rightness, which is what Nathan boldly told King David when he used his power to have Bathsheba’s husband killed in battle so he could have her himself. What Nathan was telling David was that it was wrong for rulers to use their power to satisfy their private desires, which you might think is a fairly obvious requirement of good government. For well over 2500 years, most religion in Eurasia has insisted that government is divinely appointed in order to benefit ordinary people; in saying this religious teachers have had to challenge the majority of rulers, who have tended to take a very different approach. There have of course been episodes when religious leaders have confused their own interests with those of the people, when secular rulers have manipulated religion for their own ends, and when the interests of different peoples have conflicted. We have to be careful not to allow such episodes, however common, to blind us to the thrust of religious teaching down the centuries: government is meant to benefit ordinary people, to make it possible for their lives to flourish.

                Over the last century it has become increasingly common to rely on voting as the means of ensuring that government does benefit ordinary people. And by and large voting hasn’t done a bad job; it certainly hasn’t produced worse results than other systems we’ve tried. In fact, so successful has voting become that we tend to think of it not as a means to an end but an end in itself. We tend to think that having a majority voting in favour of some policy or other makes it right. In other words we have come perilously close to the position Nathan had to criticise: we have come to think that the ruler’s desires – now meaning by that a majority of the people – define what is right.

But while democracy may be the least-bad way of deciding what is going to be done, it is not a way of deciding that what is going to be done is right. Like the rulers of old, we seem to have come to think that we can properly use our power, meaning these days our votes, to satisfy our private desires; the largely value-free appeals of competing political parties at election time suggest that they at least assume that voters – we – take heed mostly of exactly those self-centred considerations that motivated the less savoury non-democratic rulers. The coming of democracy, valuable as it is, does not free us, the new rulers, from the ancient requirement that Nathan insisted on: power must not be used to satisfy private desires. So it is that in a democracy, the tradition lays on all of us responsibilities that most members of earlier generations escaped, for we too are now rulers, and the requirement for rulers not to use their power to satisfy their private desires is one we all need to consider whenever we take part in the political process, even just by voting. The tradition does not smile on those who decide how to vote principally on the basis of how they personally would benefit if this or that party took power.

            And like ancient rulers we electors won’t always find the admonition of Nathan’s successors easy to accept – which is why it’s so important that they keep insisting on the need to pay attention to the common good and high standards in public life. Their insistence will face resistance. They will be told that we need to debate what the common good really is; fair enough, but such discussions can be cleverly used as an effective way of avoiding the issue. They will be told that they should keep religion out of politics, that politics is no business of theirs because religion is really just about personal morality; but notice that Nathan was admonishing David as an unscrupulous ruler who abused his power, not as a private man of faulty morals. They will be told to be realistic and admit that what the powerful want, they will get, be they ancient kings or a democratic majority, and there’s not much point in going along with Nathan’s denunciation of them; but real progress – of any kind but especially moral and spiritual progress – is achieved by people who dare to challenge the powers that be, not by those who go along with what those powers want. They will be told that making a nuisance of yourself by demanding that those in power do what’s right will not succeed; but Jesus’s story of the widow who pestered the judge until he unwillingly did the right thing reminds us that making a fuss is often the only way to achieve justice.

                Challenging ourselves and other electors to support the common good with our votes involves asking us all to understand that democracy can only thrive if we do. If as electors we don’t prioritise the long term common good over our own short term private interests, the governments we elect will inevitably take systematically wrong decisions – wrong not only for the common good but wrong even for our own long term interests. In the end we might even welcome dictatorship in the hope that a dictator, not in hock to an electorate that votes only on short term self interest, might take a longer view of the common good. But the most desired of dictatorships eventually goes sour; the temptation for even the best of us to use absolute power to satisfy our own private desires is practically impossible to withstand in the long run: in the story, David was not a bad man, just an ordinarily good man who had been given despotic powers. Far better, therefore, for us to mature as electors and not demand that our politicians pander to our cupidity – in other words to hear the admonition of Nathan as being addressed to us.