The Unforgivable Sin

²² And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.” ²³ And he called them to him, and spoke to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? ²⁴ If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. ²⁵ And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. ²⁶ And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. ²⁷ But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.

²⁸ “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; ²⁹ but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”— ³⁰ for they had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”

Most of us do things of which we aren’t proud. Some of us do things from which there seems no way back: things that prey on our mind and haunt our conscience, so that we’re never quite at peace again.

How powerful, then, and even terrifying, are Jesus’s words about something that can never be forgiven. Particularly, I suspect, to people like us in a caring and inclusive church. There are plenty of churches attached to the notion that very little can be forgiven, but we talk of love and acceptance; too much so, perhaps. Are there really things that can’t ever be forgiven?

If so: what can’t be forgiven? And what can?

Today’s scripture passage tells of professional, seminary-trained Bible teachers, who are angry with Jesus. He acts as someone who has religious authority, but he hadn’t been licensed or ordained. He treats the Bible with respect but also with a sort of sovereign freedom. He takes on hallowed passages of scripture and downgrades them, as if he knows better. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…” He heals on the Sabbath, the day of rest from all deeds, even some good ones, and, when challenged, observes that the Sabbath was made for humans, not the other way round.

It’s hard for this seminary-trained university professor not to sympathize with the angry Bible teachers. Universities and seminaries emphasize expertise and knowledge, and stand opposed to those who think that their lightest thought merits attention and obedience. Such as those self-taught enthusiasts who start their own churches, many of whom are about as competent and as dangerous as surgeons who haven’t been to medical school.

No wonder, then, that Jesus, a carpenter from backwoods Nazareth, scandalized religious experts, by acting as if he knew better than they did.

The problem was that he did. What the huffing and puffing holy men missed about Jesus was that he was a force for good. He healed people. He changed lives. They were so appalled by his lack of qualifications, and probably so jealous of his popularity, that they couldn’t see that he was one of those few, those very few people, for whom ordinary rules don’t count.

The best-selling English-speaking historian of the twentieth century was Winston Churchill, though he’s better known for other things. He didn’t go to university and was entirely self-taught. His books sold in millions. He over-romanticized the history of the English-speaking people, but, boy, could he tell a tale and bring the past vividly to life. The composer Edward Elgar never went to music college. Instead, as a boy, he took himself down to the banks of the River Severn, with scores of Brahms 3^rd Symphony and Dvorak’s 7^th tucked under his arms, and there he pondered them. Whatever one thinks of Elgar’s music, and it touches my soul deeply, he was an orchestrator of genius. To prodigies like Churchill and Elgar, the rules don’t apply. The rest of us need a bit more help.

By their fruit, you know that they are a class apart. Churchill’s words and Elgar’s music speak to their genius.

Bible scholars of his day looked at what Jesus was doing, and spluttered: “But, but, he didn’t take that class, no one has authorized him to do these things’. Meanwhile, Jesus went about, doing good, being a genius. By his fruit, you can see that he’s a class apart. But the experts of his day couldn’t, blinded, as they were, by their anger and jealousy.

These scholars couldn’t deny that Jesus healed, so they took the path of saying that he was Satan’s servant, not God’s. By the power of the Prince of Demons, they accused, Jesus accomplished his deeds. Jesus mocked them. Evil, he said, can’t endure if it starts doing good, just as a kingdom, divided against itself, cannot stand. God does what he does: goodness. Satan does what he does: wicked things.

The Bible scholars couldn’t or wouldn’t see goodness for what it is. They were so caught up on the fact that Jesus isn’t one of us, seminary-trained and thereby fit for purpose.

The unforgivable thing is to look at good, and call it evil. Or to look at evil, and call it good. In the present climate of fake news, we do well to hear these words. If you can’t tell the difference, God help you, and, even more, all of us who have to deal with you.

It’s not that hard to value expertise, yet to know that sometimes, not often but very occasionally, it comes in unusual and unauthorized ways. You just look at the evidence. In the case of Jesus, transformed lives tell their own story of goodness: the blind could see; notorious sinners were doing decent things. The fact that Bible experts couldn’t and wouldn’t accept that shows us that guarding their privileges was more important to them than the truth; their self-esteem took priority over hope and healing.

So the unforgivable sin is to confuse good and evil, often because you make it all about you.

We liberal Christians sometimes play down the justice of God. Yet all humans are called to account for what we do and, if we foolishly take God for granted, and assume she’ll forgive us all manner of wickedness and vice, we’re liable to pay a price for our folly.

Even so, the problem lies more with human pride and folly than with God’s unwillingness to show mercy. Trouble is, many people can’t tell, don’t know, can’t admit to, the evil within them.

If we don’t know that we need to be forgiven, we can’t be. Forgiveness, after all, is something that has to asked for. In Agatha Christie’s classic story of ten people trapped on an island, all responsible for another’s death, and all dead by story’s end, one of the characters is an elderly woman who had indignantly fired her unmarried, pregnant servant, who then committed suicide. The old woman couldn’t see that she’d done wrong. She was okay with, even proud of, what she’d done. Her narrow and legalistic view of religion blinded her to mercy, compassion, and generosity. She’s the most terrifying character in the story.

If we don’t know that we need to be forgiven, we can never change, and our self-righteousness will stand secure forever. We shall never be troubled by truth, never haunted by a desire to do and be better, never be aware that we too need mercy. We shall never grow into the people we could be, if we knew our need of grace.

If we do know our need of grace, then it’s a different matter. What, then, can be forgiven? Anything, if you know your need of healing.

Years ago, a university chaplain had to deal with the aftermath of a young man who had killed himself, by jumping from a third-floor room in a university residency hall. He was trapped into a medical degree that he didn’t want to do; his parents, who were physicians, had insisted that he follow in their footsteps. His bereaved mother said to that chaplain: ‘What a pity. We had such high hopes for him”. She can never be forgiven. Never.

A young man came to see the same chaplain, burdened with guilt. In the days when it was difficult to be anything other than straight, he was, sexually, a mess. He’d been in love and often in bed with his male best friend, while engaged to a young woman. He ended up hurting them both, mightily, and he didn’t know how to fix things. “What have I done?”, he said. “I can’t undo the pain I’ve caused others, dear to me”. Well, no, he couldn’t undo the damage he’d done. Can he be forgiven? Of course.

There is always the possibility, even the certainty, of God’s forgiveness. But you have to know your need of it. And you have to ask for it.

On being an old fogey

In a few days’ time, I shall turn 67 years old. For some reason or another, I often think these days of my milestone 60^th birthday. I remember, among many other things, breakfast at Panera’s with Udho, Naomi and Joe; a phone call with a much loved aunt and uncle, who also sent me a check for £60!; a subscription to The Oldie, an excellent British journal, gifted by one of my oldest and dearest friends. I had a wonderful day, one to treasure and remember.

Naomi, Joe and I are still here, but all the others are lost to me in this world. I am not complaining. I have reached the stage in life when such loss is to be expected. As the Qur’an almost says: ‘All things pass away, save for the face of God’. I’m thankful for them and for many others, who have shaped my life for good, but whom I can no longer see, or touch. I grieve but I endure, as one must.

I had thought that religion would be a consolation for me in my old age, and, to some extent, it is. My head is filled with scripture passages, hymns, and other ecclesial bric-a-brac, from which I draw to impose meaning on my life. I go to a church that is adult, inclusive and thoughtful, and my soul is enriched thereby. But much contemporary institutional religion is violent, foolishly judgmental, manipulative, in the hands of charlatans and blackguards, and, almost worst of all, trivial, deeply trivial.

When I came to Aurora University, almost twenty years ago, most of its students were respectful of religion. Now, increasing numbers are almost contemptuous of it. Why wouldn’t they be, when many of its proponents have no obvious commitment to gospel values of justice, love, hope and truth? They prefer to be hateful and divisive, which no authentic follower of Jesus can be.

To that gospel I am still committed. It seems to me to be good news, the best news, that the arc of the universe bends towards justice, love, hope and truth. For me, the stories of Jesus illustrate this. Others, whether religious or secular or like me, straddling both of these in a conflicted way, have different stories. But, if we do not hunger after those values, there can be no hope for a world that, to use a metaphor from the fourth gospel, is at present in the power of the evil one.

To return, in my later years, to the teaching of History rather than Religion, has been a blessing for me. I have made friends with people from the past, and learned from others even when they appall me. Bad historians, and they are plentiful even among the renowned, either make the past a carbon-copy of the present, filled with people like us but dressed differently, or aren’t brave enough to see the links that can be made and things that can be learned, even from people and events that require patient attention to be seen, first of all, on their own terms, and not ours.

Another of my consolations for living is poetry, which also requires patient attention to yield up its treasures. This one, by James Elroy Flecker (1884-1919), who didn’t live long enough to surrender to autumnal reflections like this blog entry, speaks to my present state. The historian and teacher in me is compelled to tell you that Maeonides is better known as Homer.

I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along.

I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.

But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?

How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Maeonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.

Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.

Winston Churchill

Of the making of books about Winston Churchill, there is no end, with over one thousand so far, and counting. The recent biography by Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking With Destiny (Viking, 2018), has had excellent reviews, and rightly so. Among other things, it has the benefit of King George VI’s wartime diaries about his weekly meetings with his prime minister; the king emerges as a much more interesting figure than I had thought.

It’s a long time since I wrote a book review, and this is not meant to be such, but rather some reflections upon reading Roberts’ book.

My father was the last of eight children, born in 1916 to working-class parents in Greenwich, London. He had no time for Churchill. He remembered the General Strike of 1926, and Churchill’s role in it. He grew up with stories of Churchill’s foolish military adventures in Antwerp (1914), and the Dardanelles (1915), and was in the RAF when the disaster of Narvik happened in 1940. Roberts’ book underestimates working class anger and even contempt for Churchill. But that’s not the whole of the story.

My father’s brother, the eldest of the brood, worked for Churchill in a minor capacity, and revered him. Certainly, many of the people who worked him came, not just to admire him, but also to have great affection for him. Even so, Churchill could be a pain to work with, and there’s a remarkable and touching letter to him from his wife, Clementine, at the height of World War 2, urging him to follow his better instincts, which he was wise enough to act upon.

This ambivalent attitude towards Churchill wasn’t just a matter of class divisions. For example, the King was a critic and would have preferred Lord Halifax as wartime Prime Minster, but came to change his mind. Churchill was the only one of King George’s prime ministers whom he called by his first name.

Whatever Churchill’s failings, in May 1940, the hour met the man. After the German invasion of the Low Countries and France, it was Churchill who kept his colleagues, especially Halifax and the outgoing prime minister Chamberlain, from suing for peace, using Italy as a mediator. This is riveting stuff as Roberts describes it, even more so than the recent movie, Darkest Hour. Roberts makes a major misjudgment here, however, arguing that Hitler, obsessed with central and eastern Europe, would have offered reasonable peace terms to Britain and its Empire. It was to Churchill’s great credit that, early on, he realized that Hitler was entirely untrustworthy and not to be believed, as Roberts well knows. Perhaps he wants to protect the reputation of the subject of his earliest biography, Halifax. But Halifax isn’t worth protecting from his treachery and stupidity. Had he actually become prime minister, the world would now be in even more of a mess than it is.

There are a number of other contentious judgments in the book. The author’s defense of British and American meddling in Iranian affairs in 1953, bringing down its elected government in order to protect access to cheap oil, is puerile and unworthy. His attempts to exonerate Churchill from involvement in creating and prolonging the Bengal famine of 1943 are more interesting and have a measure of truth in them, but, to say the least, Churchill was not at his best when talking and making decisions about India.

Still, Roberts mounts solid defenses of Churchill in relation to many of the criticisms about him by his contemporaries and more recent biographers. His assessments of Antwerp and the Dardanelles are judicious. In particular, his several accounts of Churchill’s stormy relationship with General Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff during World War 2, make for fascinating reading.

Some of Roberts‘ character assessments are splendidly tart and deliciously witty: his references to Pamela Churchill, later Harriman, are hilarious; and his barbs about Lloyd George, Lord Beaverbrook and Sir Stafford Cripps, among others, are well-deserved. He describes Churchill’s relations with his son, with Clement Attlee, Charles de Gaulle, Anthony Eden, and Dwight Eisenhower just about perfectly.

Roberts is a leading Brexiteer, nostalgic for a lost and unattainable past, seen, to some extent, through rose-tinted glasses. No wonder, therefore that he’s drawn to a romantic imperialist like Churchill. But, in reality, Churchill’s a figure who looks backwards rather than forwards to a new future. He was an anachronism in his own day, and he knew it. When 77 and prime minister for the second time, it fell to him to pay tribute to King George, upon his death in February 1952. He ended by saying: ‘I, whose youth was passed in the august, unchallenged, and tranquil glories of the Victorian era, may well feel a thrill in invoking once more the prayer and the anthem: “God Save the Queen!”’

There we see much of the quintessential Churchill, with its glorious use of language, and a strong but idealized sense of history.

After reading this book, I am more than ever convinced that Churchill was Britain’s greatest prime minister. Without him, there would have been no Great Britain after 1940. Yet the Britain of the present day was created not by Churchill but by his successor, Clement Attlee by far the greatest of Britain’s peacetime twentieth-century prime ministers.

When I get to heaven, assuming there are still judgments to be made, I must tell my dear old dad that his brother, in this matter, had the right of it.

Job 42: 1-6, 10-17: a sermon

A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble,
      comes up like a flower and withers,
flees like a shadow and does not last.

Aint that the truth! Here we are, most of us touched by tragedy, haunted by grief, knowing that our days on earth are limited; and we muddle through.

There’s more to life than this, of course. There’s love, and times of joy, and other good things, but the Old Testament Book of Job, from which these words come, touches a nerve. Biblical scholars tell us that that book, above all other biblical works, explores the issue of theodicy. To put it simply, is God good, or is God a monster or just indifferent to human suffering? Or are we fools to think that there is a God?

In my last two years of high school, I concentrated on three areas of study, as was the way for English schoolchildren. My choice: History, English Literature, and the Bible. In my work on the Bible, I had specifically to study the Book of Job. I was fascinated and repelled, in equal measure. Such wonderful poetry, and such high and serious issues discussed, yet with a breathtaking matter-of-factness and lack of sentiment.

I mean: the whole book issues from a wager that God has with Satan. God praises Job’s faith to Satan the cynic who says: Put him in my power, and that will go away. Stung, God agrees. Everything Job has and all he loves, including his children and his health, is taken from him, violently. Even his wife tells him to curse God and die. What kind of God does that?!

As I’ve got older, I realize that I posed the wrong question. I should instead have asked: what kind of story is this? Once I did, then a whole new world opened to me.  The story forces us to accept the serendipity of life, it forbids us being sentimental about God, and enables us to explore really important questions about human suffering.

In the pages of this book, you’ll find discussed, artfully, not just why God allows suffering, but also many of the questions that ordinary people ask about the human condition. For example, is suffering a just punishment for my wrongdoing; is it something I can’t yet understand, but maybe one day will; if I obsess about suffering, am I likely to miss the enduring beauty and love in the world around me, blinded as I am by present pain; is anguish just part of life’s rich pattern? I could go on… And will! Why is life so often, and for so many people, short and brutal? Why is suffering usually an anguish of heart, mind and spirit, as much as a physical pain? These and many such questions are explored in the book of Job.

It offers no clear-cut A+ answer to these questions. It seems occasionally to come close to offering a variety of answers, but then never endorses any of them. And it ends as matter-of-factly, cruelly, and shockingly as it begins. Job, who has clung on to faith, despite everything, is rewarded for this endeavor. We are told that “The Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning; and he had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys. He also had seven sons and three daughters.” As if it’s acceptable for God simply to replace the things we love, and that makes everything okay.

And yet… Again, as I’ve got older, my views of the book have changed. I used to see it, as it were, from one remove, as an academic historian of religion, asking whether and how it’s a serious contribution to ideas about God’s involvement in human suffering. Now, I bring to it my life and, reading it, I ask myself whether therein is balm for my wounded soul.

And, recognizing my need of healing, I see things I never saw before. I used to tut-tut at the end of the story. Now, I know that, receiving grace after heartbreak, we don’t get restored to us what we want, but other gifts that might at least offer us a measure of hope and comfort. Some of the answers on offer to the problem of suffering that I used to dismiss, I now find… complicated. For one thing: when Job’s friends tell him he can’t have been the Goody Two-shoes that he seems, because suffering is the consequence of sin, it’s easy to point out what nonsense that often is and how someone can be blamed quite unfairly thereby. Yet, I can’t, hand on heart, tell you that some of the suffering I’ve caused myself and, worse, others, hasn’t been the result of my folly and wickedness.

I used to think that the Book of Job’s failure lay in its unwillingness to answer any or all of the questions it raises about human suffering. I know now that therein lies its brilliance. It offers us: possibilities, not certainties; realism, not sentimentality; wisdom, and not knowledge.

So, is God, indeed, just in all she does? The Book of Job admits that God doesn’t always seem to be just, and that sometimes he isn’t so, but contends that this doesn’t destroy the possibility that he exists and that he cares. At the end of the book, God appears to Job and, in the most wonderful poetry, puts Job firmly in his place.

‘Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.

 Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”’

A purple passage, indeed. Yet one that makes God into little better than a cosmic bully who tells Job he knows nothing of any importance about how and why the universe is; or so I thought. Now, in the autumn of my life, I realize how little I know of importance about anything, how many mistakes I’ve made. And I see other possibilities in the passage: God’s willingness to engage with bewildered and vulnerable people; her ironic, sardonic humor that forces us to man up as well as tear up in impossible circumstances; her compassion for us, who demand justice when instead we could look beyond present trials to a mysterious kingdom of love, where God will wipe every tear from our eyes.

For Christians, the Book of Job isn’t the last word about human suffering. We believe in the paradox of a crucified God. In Jesus, God enters into human suffering, and makes it redemptive. That’s the subject of another sermon, one for Gary or Joe to explain. My heart can accept it but my mind and tongue cannot quite make sense of it.

For sure, any serious and meaningful attempt to explain God’s involvement in human suffering has to engage with the difficult mystery that sometimes he permits what he doesn’t necessarily want to happen. It’s not just Christians, of course, who read Job in order to protest why bad things happen to good people. After all, the Book of Job was written by Jews. Last century’s Holocaust, in which one out of every three Jews in the world perished, has in the years since, shaped Jewish and Christian thinking about the sheer scale of human suffering, and whether that gives the lie to any credible belief in a God who cares.

When Jesus talked about his own suffering, and that of others who followed him, many enthusiastic supporters fell away. So, Jesus asked his twelve closest disciples, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life”. I’ve often thought of that passage, when contemplating or observing great, almost unbearable, suffering. We may be angry with God, but to whom else can we go?

Elie Wiesel, who survived Auschwitz, observed an incident there, which he later turned into a play, set in a village in Ukraine, in the aftermath of a pogrom, a state organized massacre of Jews. In explaining how the play came to be, Wiesel wrote: “Inside [Auschwitz] the kingdom of night, I witnessed a strange trial. Three rabbis—all erudite and pious men—decided one winter evening to indict God for allowing his children to be massacred. I remember: I was there, and I felt like crying. But nobody cried”.

In Wiesel’s play, the trial lasts several nights. Witnesses testify, the evidence is sifted, and finally there’s a unanimous verdict: God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, is found guilty of crimes against humanity. And then, after what Wiesel calls an “infinity of silence”, one among them, a religious scholar, says, “It’s time for evening prayers”, and the members of the tribunal, who had reached the guilty verdict, bow their heads in reverence and recite the evening service.

 

A good teacher

It will soon be time to greet college students again. I am now in the twilight years of my teaching career, so I suppose it’s natural that I should ponder, even more than usual, the art of teaching and, in particular, what makes a good teacher. Much could be written. I’ll settle for three things.

First, good teachers aren’t best proven to be so by assessment criteria. When I think of my many teachers, what stands out about the good and great ones is some indefinable quality. Of course, I could, to some extent, explain how what they did helped transform my ideas about the world. But their brilliance arose more out of their capacity to be lit up from within by what they talked of. They made me want to access that light, too.

Second: they were captivated by that slippery but essential word: truth. They helped me understand what was really fake from what wasn’t. They encouraged me to believe that the search for truth is a lifelong quest, engaging the heart and soul as well as the mind, with many setbacks and no certain ending, but with many rewards on the way. They had no truck with the foolish notion that anyone is entitled to his or her opinion: they made me see that the only opinion worth having is an informed one, and the only arguments worth exploring are with those who accept that fact. There is no point in debating with someone who can only shout the same prejudices over and over again, and who is quite unable to offer evidence for their point of view.

Third: although some of them didn’t suffer fools gladly, they genuinely wanted to help students who took their college career seriously, to grow and develop into thoughtful, reflective and reasonable people. Many years ago, in my Cambridge days, I impishly asked a colleague who had just published a book, how its sales were going. “Oh,” he said, “I don’t want ordinary people to read my books”. He was deeply in love with his own cleverness, the sort of man who gives scholarship and teaching a bad name. A good teacher and scholar is someone who thinks, “How extraordinary and powerful that idea is, worth sharing and exploring”, not “How clever I am to have grasped it better than others”.

This means that a teacher isn’t just there to repeat or explain facts and ideas. She hopes to transform her students. My course on Nazi Germany this coming semester concludes with a class conversation about whether such a phenomenon could ever happen again. If I’ve managed to motivate the students, I hope for some serious reflections, because truth matters and the foolish and wicked argument that there are good people on both sides is contemptible, and to act as if it were so can lead to unimaginable horrors.

Doubting Thomas – a sermon

John 20.24-31

Thomas was a reasonable man. He had heard stories that Jesus was back again from the dead. But he knew otherwise: the dead don’t return to haunt the earth. So, even when his friends told him that Jesus was truly risen, he didn’t believe them. They were fooling themselves, so he thought.

Thomas has become the bogeyman of many a sermon. “Not enough faith, Thomas”, the preacher says. “You should have had more trust in Jesus”. Even though he eventually responds to Jesus’s appearance to him with the most exalted of all declarations, “My Lord and my God”, that won’t do for those Christians who think he got there too late and with too much help.

In recent years, however, another spin has been put on the Thomas story. There’s no better patron saint for our skeptical age than Doubting Thomas. So, in liberal churches, Thomas becomes almost a hero or, at least, the disciple we can most relate to. He’s a man for our times, who speaks to our uncertainties; an antihero, perhaps? Like us, he knew that failure and disappointment are woven into the fabric of life, that no good deed goes unpunished.

As it happens, I’m not sure that either assessment of Thomas, the faithless follower or the pessimistic pragmatist, does him much justice. I picture him somewhat differently.

Thomas seems to have been a reasonable man. But was he? Are we really dealing with a man who follows evidence wherever it leads him, whatever the cost to his hopes and dreams, a man would like to believe but can’t? Maybe. But I’m not convinced.  I don’t think it’s Thomas’s fierce and fearless intellect that best explains his cynical reaction to the news that Jesus was raised from the dead.

He’d had a terrible shock. When Jesus died, so did Thomas’s hopes and dreams, all his plans for the future. When his friends told that him that God had raised Jesus from death, if Thomas been another sort of person he might have been thrilled and super-hyped. But that wasn’t his way. He’d been hurt and didn’t want to be hurt again. Allowing himself once again to hope and dream would be unbearable, if these accounts were simply fantastic tales fueled by liquor, wishful thinking, and hysteria. Thomas wasn’t super-rational so much as frozen in grief, using reason as a barrier to stop him being hurt again. He wasn’t a skeptic; he was in pain, that pain of the spirit and of the imagination which is just as real as physical agony, and often longer lasting.

If Thomas was as I have said, then the words of the risen Jesus to him could seem very harsh indeed: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Except: when you’re locked up in yourself, almost unable to function because of the hand life has dealt you, sometimes it takes a harsh word to set you free, a word that is cruel in order to be kind. Something, maybe, that provokes you to a flash of temper, an outburst that jolts you back to life. When Thomas finally sees Jesus again and responds to his mocking words, I can imagine him saying: “Not fair, Jesus. How dare you do this to me?” And then, with the adrenaline rush of rage, its attendant reactions of tears, relief, joy and hope; once suppressed, now set free.

This is the last story of John’s gospel, who sums up his account of Jesus by declaring that he’s written “these things … so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” John places all of his stories in a masterly way: Thomas rounds things off, because John is telling us that anyone like Thomas, who wants to believe but whose main problem is within themselves, so that they can’t quite get to where they want to be, may still be shaken and stirred by God’s love, until they do.

Like Thomas, I am a reasonable man, who sometime uses reason as an excuse not to take risks, to stay in my comfort zone where I can analyze, reflect and comment at one remove from where, perhaps, I ought to be. I laugh at the follies of others, and also at my own. I don’t like joining things. I’m wary of getting hurt. This works, for much of the time. But maybe it’s a coward’s, or an antihero’s attitude to life, in need of change.

The thing is: because life sucks, we get hurt anyway. So maybe we should take the risk of accepting the limits of reason. It isn’t the only tool with which to uncover the secrets of life, or to know how things really are. And it’s a particularly bad master if you use it as an excuse for not taking life by the scruff of the neck and becoming all you’re capable of being.

To put it another way: we’re more than our brains. Life should be experienced and interpreted though emotions, imagination, intuition, and many other things that lie beyond reason’s compass.

But, just in case you think I’m encouraging you to be unreasonable, let me put in a word for the life of the mind. I only have to read a student essay to realize the importance of reason. I am always amazed how many confident eighteen-year olds think that their trivial prejudice, based on nothing at all substantial, trumps facts, wisdom and commonsense. In class conversations, as well, some students reveal their self-absorbed fantasies; for example, a belief that the truth or falsehood of human-made climate change is decided by their uninformed opinion, what they want it to be, rather than by verifiable scientific evidence.

And, let’s face it, it’s not just a young and entitled generation that insists on the truth of its own ignorance. Religious people excel at believing impossible and hurtful things that are easily disprovable. A Muslim friend of mine who runs a mosque in Cape Town, South Africa, tells me that many of his congregation, when they take off their shoes before entering the worship area, leave their brains in them.

Would that it were just a few Muslims! Turn on the television most days, and you’re likely to hear an unctuous Christian pastor peddle his mindless and venomous drivel, passing it off as the will of God, and encouraging his followers to abandon the constraints of decency and of reason.

So hats off to everyone who thinks, and who thinks things through. No wonder Jesus was sort of okay with Thomas’s skepticism. Better that than pious, self-serving claptrap.

Yet reason is not, of itself, a sufficient compass by which to navigate life, any more than is phony religion. As I see it, the religious life, at its best, does not bypass reason. Rather, it surpasses reason. There is more to life than meets the eye. Beyond what we observe and process lie holiness, wisdom, the meaning and end of all things

It is to the mystics that I turn, to sustain my faith. The mystics covet an experience that takes you through reason but lies beyond it. The word mystic comes from a Greek word, muein, meaning to shut your eyes. You close your eyes and then you really see, scanning the universe with the inner eye of the soul; with what some Hindus call, the third eye. Truth lies beyond our capacity fully to grasp it, by reason or any other tool, so we must allow truth to grasp us. How it does, is hard to explain. So let me tell a story. When, like Thomas, I was once frozen in grief, I read the words of the great Muslim mystic, Jamal al-Din Rumi. He wrote this dialogue:

I said: what about my eyes?
God said: Keep them on the road.

I said: What about my passion?
He said: Keep it burning.

I said: What about my heart?
He said: Tell me what you hold inside it?
I said: Pain and sorrow.
He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.

At that moment, I knew that I had found in Rumi a friend across the centuries, who understood. Just as I think that Thomas found in the risen Christ a bracing friend, who got him.

I admire Thomas, in part because he took the gospel to India, a country very dear to my heart, where I learned to be me. Thomas gave his life to tell others of Jesus, in a far land where he knew nothing and no one. To do that, he needed more than his doubts; he also and certainly needed more than reason; he needed to close his eyes, and let the light enter him, warm him, transform him. If, like him, we are to embrace life in all its fullness, then we too need to let the light enter us, warm us, transform us. From what I learned in India and, fitfully, since, I know that it can and does.

Christmas

The last few years, and this past year in particular, many, too many, close family members and friends have died. I write that, not in complaint but as a matter of fact. I am, after all, almost 66 years old, and death and mortality are the ordinary state of things.

I love Christmas, but the last couple have been busy ones for me, responding to mortal illness. So, I’ve indulged myself this year, listening to Rutter carols, Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ, and other seasonal favorites. I intend to take myself off to see The Man Who Invented Christmas, and to watch at least one movie form of A Christmas Carol.

I love this season of the year. The story of the babe in Bethlehem has a magical touch of stardust about it. Yet it’s not entirely or even chiefly sentimental. The gospel stories are as much about suffering and death as they are about life and new beginnings. As T’S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi puts it: “were we led all that way for birth or death?”

A few people have, understandably, asked me how I’ve maintained Christian faith in the midst of human agony, disintegration and death. Mostly, I’ve deflected the question. In the face of so great a mystery, the best answer is silence. There are, however, many other partial answers to that question, and Christmas offers a combination of them: birth and new life, suffering and death, human meaning, are focused in a vulnerable baby. God comes, not in power, but trusting himself to a young girl:

Emptied of His majesty,
Of His dazzling glories shorn,
Being’s Source begins to be,
And God Himself is born

Vulnerability, brokenness and pain can be the vehicles of salvation.

Many Christians tell of a God who uses and abuses power, and encourages them to do likewise. 2017 has offered us many examples of this. I prefer the Christmas story: God, who heals and recreates through empathy and example, humility and hope.

And so, I abide in hope that the beloved dead make the distant heavens a home for us. Meanwhile, there is work to be done.

Merry Christmas to you all, and a Happy New Year.

“My Hope is in the Lord”: a sermon for the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation

Martin Luther’s language was often coarse; his sense of humor was unsubtle (he’d never use a rapier wit if a bludgeon was to hand); his writings are full of crude invective – sometimes comically so, when pointing out the shortcomings of popes, sometimes appallingly so, in his vicious condemnation of Jews. He overstates everything.

Luther, probably more than anyone else, was responsible, five hundred years ago, for destroying the medieval church that, in central and western Europe, had given people, from prince through priest to peasant, a sense of common beliefs and values. He was a monk who, intending to reform the church, broke it apart into sects and denominations. You’re thinking that I’m not a fan? And yet…

I’d like to explore with you three of Luther’s great achievements.

The first is his conviction that the church must always be ready and willing to reform its beliefs and actions. He didn’t just talk, as religious leaders are inclined to do, but got things done. He translated the Bible into German, so that ordinary people might read it; he brought an end to the celibacy of the clergy, believing it to be an unnecessary practice, and himself married an ex-nun; he wrote some wonderful hymns (and penned the odd dud as well), so that worshipers could sing the faith. Above all, he attacked the foolish belief that wicked, wealthy people could buy their way into heaven. The popes of his day had raised huge sums of money from that scam. Without it, the Sistine chapel and other renaissance glories of the Vatican wouldn’t have been built. Still, Luther was right. It’s the church’s responsibility to be self-critical, always seeking to reform itself, rather than be wealthy and powerful.

American Christians would do well to heed Luther’s conviction. The greatest fault of Christians in this country is to criticize others, sure of their own righteousness. Listen to many preachers here and you’d think that, if only the church controlled the state, everything would be hunky-dory. Meanwhile, there’s barely a shade of self-criticism, so the church is riddled with what Luther would have deemed heresies: that wealth is an absolute good; that poor people deserve their poverty and should be helped minimally, if at all; that pastors and politicians should be given the benefit of the doubt, even when common sense and empirical evidence show them to be self-serving and vindictive. On this last point, Luther didn’t always practice what he preached. But, at its best, Luther’s insight would tell many American Christians to stop blaming the Supreme Court, liberals, and others for what’s wrong in society, and to look within. Only by reforming themselves, can Christians do away with such nonsense as the prosperity gospel, which makes rich, overpaid, sometimes rapacious evangelists better role models than Jesus of Nazareth, who said: “Blessed are you poor…” A reformed American church might then try to persuade others of the values of the kingdom of God, rather than impose those of mammon and the market.

Luther’s second great achievement was to give the Bible a fitting importance for faithful people. The medieval church left the Bible in Latin, a language that had ceased to be widely spoken for centuries. Even many priests were clueless about it, let alone the laity. Luther built on the work of other translators to make the Bible open to everyone. He himself translated it into German. Yet he saw it for its real worth. For Luther, Jesus was God’s word, how the deity chose to communicate with his creation, as one of us. The Bible is a witness to that. And bits of it are better witnesses than others. Luther called the New Testament letter of James a right-strawy epistle, because he thought, quite rightly, that it’s a work of far less importance to the formation of Christian character than, say, Paul’s letters to the Galatians and the Romans. Here again, many American Christians could learn from his view of the Bible. Luther had no truck with foolish fantasies that the Bible is a book of science, or that it means what it says without a responsible person or tradition to interpret it, or that it’s all of equal value, or that quoting it closes off any discussion. The modern evangelical tendency to fetishize the Bible, to make it into more than it is, would have appalled Luther.

Luther had little time for the letter of James because, in his opinion, it misunderstands the relation between faith and works. James tells us that “faith without works is dead”.  Luther knew that James’s explanation of the link between faith and works is trivial.

The question of how faith and works are related is an old and vexing one for Christians. Some load the dice in favor of faith, so that when their pastor is caught with his pants down and his hand in the till, it’s okay when he gushes forth tears and claims to repent, because he’s a man of faith. Luther would have thought that cheap faith, and those who buy into that nonsense shallow Christians, if Christian at all. Most liberal Christian and secular people nowadays are convinced that what we do is more important than what we believe. Luther would have questioned that, too.

So his third and greatest achievement was to change the nature of the debate about faith and works. For him: How does your trust in God shape the person you are in the world as it really is?

For Luther, the world isn’t full of people who’d be nice, if only social and economic circumstances worked for their betterment. No Marxist, he. Nor would it be a better place if rich people had sweeping tax cuts so that the crumbs could fall off their table at the feet of the undeserving poor. No Reagan capitalist, he. The world isn’t steadily improving under the benign guidance of old white men. No believer in Teddy Roosevelt’s and Rudyard Kipling’s vision of the white man’s burden, he. Nor would he fall for the liberal fallacy that transferring power and influence to or sharing power with women, gay people, and other marginalized groups would, of itself, cut the Gordian knot of human selfishness and usher in the good times.

For Luther, the world is a dark place, where human souls are in thrall to Satan’s desires. I look at today’s world, its veneer of civilization easily planed away by populist politicians, and think he had a point. Our works are not the making of us, but our self-deceiving. People do terrible things, and justify them according to their prejudices, thinking themselves to be good Christians. Kids are thrown out of Christian homes, because of their sexuality. Women are forbidden abortions, and left, literally to carry the baby. Our so-called good deeds can be a justification for self-interest.

Our hope lies in trusting that God is like Jesus, not that people are basically decent. When Luther talks of such trust, having faith in God, he doesn’t mean disengaging your brain and believing self-serving imbecilities. Rather, it’s putting your hope in the lived proposition that God is good. Often, God doesn’t seem so, but trusting that she is, is a better basis for hope than trusting that we instinctively know and do the right thing.

Luther expressed in his hymns this belief that, in our wicked world, God, not presidents, politicians and pastors, or our own good deeds, is the only sure ground of our faith and hope. As always, he overstates to make his point. Even so, at moments in my life when I’ve been overwhelmed by despair, it’s to one of his hymns that I often go for comfort, challenge and renewal. So, let the remarkable, transformative Dr. Luther have the last word about what really matters. He wrote:

OUT of the depths I cry to thee,
Lord God! O hear my prayer!
Incline a gracious ear to me,
And bid me not despair:
If thou rememberest each misdeed,
If each should have its rightful meed,
Lord, who shall stand before thee?

‘Tis through thy love alone we gain
The pardon of our sin;
The strictest life is but in vain,
Our works can nothing win;
That none should boast himself of aught,
But own in fear thy grace hath wrought
What in him seemeth righteous.

Wherefore my hope is in the Lord,
My works I count but dust,
I build not there, but on his word,
And in his goodness trust.
Up to his care myself I yield,
He is my tower, my rock, my shield,
And for his help I tarry…

Though great our sins and sore our wounds,
And deep and dark our fall,
His helping mercy hath no bounds,
His love surpasseth all.
Our trusty loving Shepherd, he
Who shall at last set Israel free
From all their sin and sorrow.

 

India

Seventy years ago today, August 15^th 1947, India won independence from British rule. Forty years ago today, I’d just returned from two years in India, and was preparing to take up an appointment as assistant minister at Hinde Street Methodist Church, London, and Methodist chaplain to London University. I was twenty-five, and had just lived the two most formative years of my life.

I went to India, I think, with an openness of heart and a generosity of spirit, but was certainly a child of my time. I thought that the raj had brought to the South Asian subcontinent: administrative competence; governmental flair; the benefits of western education and medicine. Little did I know. The British were in India for their own ends and, in many ways, impoverished and divided the country they ruled. But it isn’t my purpose, in these short musings, to develop the theme of this paragraph.

Instead, I want to record my debt to India. The British Methodist Church sent me to the Church of South India. I was ordained deacon, served in St John’s Church, Secunderabad, an English-speaking congregation, and saw the church at its best. To be sure, there was corruption and infighting, but that happened in the wider church where, for the most part, I didn’t see it. I experienced instead that a white English student and pastor, the follower of a long-ago Jewish rabbi, could be welcomed and made at home by Indians, whether Telegus, Bengalis, Punjabis or others. I gained the conviction that God has many favorites, and delighted in the friendship, not just of Christians but also of: a Parsi poet; a Jewish educator; a Sikh holy woman; a Muslim imam; a Hindu skeptic. I never wanted to demonize them. I quickly realized that God loved them and had much to teach me through them.

I’d also like to put in a word for missionary colleagues. Many of them gave their lives to the conviction that God loves all whom she has made, and that there’s joy and fulfillment in giving up attachments to a homeland in order to witness to that love elsewhere. To be sure, some missionaries I met were determined to ignore what I quite clearly saw: that God could be and obviously was experienced by people outside the church. But many more were remarkable people and when they returned to England, Australia and the USA, proved able to offer profound insights into the increasing religious and racial pluralism of those countries.

I lived, successively, with two Indian Christian families, and they treated me as one of their own. I don’t have words to express my gratitude to them, or the depths of my love for them. After my wife died recently, their love and support has been one of the things that has kept me going.

These days, visiting India is a bit harder than it used to be. Mosquitoes, noise, traffic, negotiating airports and taxis: these things irritate me far more than they used to. Still, I hope I have one more trip to India in me before the grim reaper comes to pay me his visit. The country is beautiful, and so are my friends. I dream of it, and of them, often.

 

We live in an age of: divisive and mendacious politicians; white people willing to be persuaded that the clock can be put back to a romanticized time, disastrous for others, when they were top dog; religion, divorced from the teachings of Jesus and many other profound teachers, used as a tool to oppress others.

The only world we’ve got is a diverse one, including: men and women; Christians, Muslims and many more; theists, polytheists, pantheists and atheists; white, brown, yellow, mixed, and more. Our only hope lies in accepting the world’s diversity, and rejoicing in it. I learned that in India, and am forever grateful.

Getting to Easter

Holy Saturday is the day of death, poised between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. For me, it feels like the place I’ve mostly been these last few months, waiting for my wife to die and hoping that there’s resurrection. And her’s hasn’t been the only death recently. I’m learning that that the death of loved ones is inevitable if you get to my age (I’ve just been sent my Medicare Part A card until Speaker Ryan snatches it away from me, and have also picked up my British State Pension). There have been many, too many, intimations of mortality.

And so I wait for Easter. Will I recognize signs of resurrection when I see them? The gospel accounts suggest that Jesus’s followers didn’t, for they were seeking, not resurrection but restoration, the recovery of what was lost. Mary mistakes the risen Jesus for a gardener; and two disciples walk with Jesus to the village of Emmaus, unaware that it’s him until his characteristic act of breaking bread.  But the past has gone forever, and all the tears in the world can’t undo the present and restore what’s lost. Faith is the triumph of hope, not of nostalgia.

I talk to Udho every day, and am not too troubled by her lack of response. Faith tells me that she has a life beyond my life, so I must let her go and accept that she has new things to do and be. Just occasionally, I seem to catch a glimpse of her smile, an echo of her laughter. That must be enough for now, though I wish there were more.

As for the future? Well, tomorrow, I shall play a record of Maria Callas singing the Easter Hymn from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, and echo her words: “Inneggiamo il signor non è morto”: – “Let us rejoice, for the Lord is not dead”. Some of my friends will tell me: “Christ is Risen”. And I shall respond: “He is Risen indeed”. This year, I’m keenly aware that there is real suffering, actual death, before there can be resurrection. And I shall hope to recognize it when it comes to me.