Hope and Glory

Easter is the most important feast of the Christian year, but the Churches have yet to agree where it belongs on the calendar. Perhaps this somewhat ludicrous difference is a kind of prophetic blessing. The ‘postponement’ of Easter on certain Church calendars reminds us that Christians can live with at least some differences. Our household postponed its own Easter celebrations – those which involve hunting for chocolate across several acres of soggy terrain, eating quantities of Easter cake with homemade marzipan (so much better than the shop stuff), and lamb not done the traditional way, for once, but spiced and slow cooked Ottolenghi style. We postponed all this because we had church commitments, as did our friends who came to stay with us.

Having taken the Good Friday service, and with Easter Sunday yet to come, I was particularly glad of the emotional space provided by Holy Saturday. Holy Saturday provides a chance to find our equilibrium in the context of the emotional swing which hurls us from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Holy Saturday provides time to prepare for Easter Sunday without having to shop and cook at the same time. The preparation on Holy Saturday corresponds to the Jewish Sabbath, so we can also think of the women who had earlier prepared spices with which to anoint the body of the Lord once the Sabbath had passed. We need a Sabbath rest between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, not just to shop, cook and prepare the egg hunt, but to make sense of where the Church and our society stands in this ‘in between time’, in relation to the Easter event itself.

The Saturday space, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, allows us to think of the world in the light of how all things will be when Christ comes again. I have long felt that Holy Saturday is better suited for ‘end time’ reflection than the Sundays preceding Advent. There is a sense of Christ’s absence about it which invites thought about how he will return ‘in glory to judge the living and the dead’, as the Christian creed puts it. This sense of absence is important. It gives us time to bring the suffering and dying of Christ into the light of his rising again and, in so doing, try to make sense of the world through the prism of these events.

Tradition holds that on Holy Saturday Christ descended into hell. While his descent might also be construed in his words of desolation and abandonment spoken from the Cross, he also descended into hell later, as the creeds declare, in order to grasp poor, despairing Judas by the hand and to offer him the kiss of peace in return for his kiss of betrayal. The hope offered to us by God in Jesus would not be hope if it did not travel beyond the reaches of despair.

While we were having supper on one of the evenings when are friends were with us, conversation turned to politics. We were generally agreed about one thing, and that is that the world is a pretty grim place and that it is hard to see where it will all end. Various end time scenarios were postulated, but that was about as far as the conversation was going to take us, until our youngest guest (aged 11) took us to task. What, she asked, did we think we were about? Had we nothing better to offer her generation than a generalised imminent doom scenario? What was she supposed to make of such talk?

Our young guest was far too intelligent to be fobbed off with an abrupt change of subject, or with being told not to worry her pretty head about such things, as if all would be well in the end. So we had to pick up where we had left off and posit something like believable hope. The conversation did not last much longer, but it did invite us to consider in our own minds how such hope, or the lack of it, relates to the kind of despair which Jesus experienced on the Cross and from which he later rescued Adam (the symbol of our humanity) and Judas.

The hope offered to the world in the risen Christ is not like any other kind of hope. It does not depend on vague belief in God, or on vague belief in anything. It is not a straw to be clutched at. Hope lives in the worst imaginable scenarios, past, present and future, and in any degree of despair in the life of any one human being. It is the hope of glory.

Glory pertains only to God. All other forms of glory, and the seductive and temporal power which they bring, are a poor imitation of the glory which pertains to God alone. The delusional desire for this counterfeit glory, and the seductive nature of power itself, accounts for the scarcity of true leadership in the world and in the Church of today. But hope sustains the human spirit because it proceeds from the glory of the ongoing life of the risen Christ. This is the Christ who speaks into the empty politics of the world and of the Church, as he spoke to the grieving woman who had brought spices with which to anoint the body of the one she loved, and found an empty tomb. 

Passiontide 2016 - Seeing you

Betrayal is anachronistic. It is all about lies, and yet at the heart of the moment lies a kind of truth. Whatever form betrayal takes, the person being betrayed experiences something like shame – naked exposure, perhaps. In the moment of betrayal that person is defenceless, without ‘cover’ of any kind. They look and feel foolish because they have trusted. It is their own trust which makes them feel defenceless and ashamed as much as the act of betrayal itself.

The one betraying, whatever their reason for doing so, must justify the lies involved and the pain caused by more lies. They must justify it to themselves, so that the betrayal seems in some way ‘necessary’ and therefore not of their choosing. ‘I had to do it’ they will say. ‘I had no choice’. Apart from justifying the moment, or the act, they must maintain their integrity, at least to themselves by distancing themselves from any direct responsibility for the damage they have done, and thereby exonerating themselves from being held in any way accountable for it.

All of this is the stuff of politics, of international relations, of the life of the Church and of our own experiences of betrayal, as victim or perpetrator. One could say that it is a universal principle, but it is also complex. Take, for example, corruption or betrayal in institutions whose integrity we need to take for granted, we need to trust; the fiddling of party election expenses (and in some countries the election process itself), police pay-offs for saying nothing in the context of organised crime relating to the grooming of young people for sex, the treatment of people held in police custody (especially if they are black), the power games and personal betrayals (both public and private) of government, sexual exploitation and cover up by the institutional Church along with the countless glossed over betrayals of loyal and faithful clergy who have served it in good faith, often for years.

Betrayal leaves us dealing with truths we would perhaps rather not face because in the moment of betrayal we see ourselves and others differently. Two such moments occur within a very short space of time in the final hours of the life of Jesus. Neither came as a surprise, but that did not make the betrayal easier to bear. The first took place in a garden at night where one of his own friends shopped him to the religious police. His friend identified him with a kiss.

Betrayal so often comes masquerading as love. ‘I did this or said that because I love you.’ Or ‘I behaved in that way, but you know I really love you.’ Both are lies, of course. We do not harm others because we love them, no matter how justifiable the action may seem to be at the time. We do not abuse trust by exposing another to pain.

Judas was trying to force Jesus’s hand politically. He was prepared to take the risk of his suffering (which Judas may have imagined would somehow be averted at the last minute) to turn Jesus into what he ‘should’ have been. It was about control and manipulation. The control or manipulation of others, especially those who trust us, is always betrayal. In the moment of the kiss Judas knows that Jesus also knows the truth of the situation, and the truth about Judas. He has known it for a long time in allowing Judas to be what he was, a pilferer of the common purse who had his priorities all wrong. 

Then there was the incident in the courtyard later that night, or possibly early the next morning. Peter, nicknamed ‘the rock’, the one who could be trusted, denies ever having known his closest friend. This moment, held in the meeting of their eyes as the cockerel crowed for the third time, also held every lie that has ever been told for the sake of saving one’s own life or reputation at the expense of the life or reputation of another.

The two moments I have just described are seminal. They are the soil in which the reversal of all betrayals germinates and takes root. Both reveal divine love at its source. They also reveal what that love looks and feels like. It looks like vulnerability and trust. In these two moments Jesus invites us not to look away, not to hide from our betrayals, or from the lies we have lived with for years, but to look quietly and bravely into his eyes, not asking for anything, but simply allowing ourselves to be seen. The rest will follow.

Politicians - What are they (in it) for?

Something is wrong when an elected representative of a civilised country is so confident in her superior standing with regard to the citizens she is elected to serve that she is able to make graphic and disparaging comments on Twitter about someone whose vote she presumably would like to keep. Something is wrong when another highly placed politician makes arrogant aggressive remarks to a police officer. Something is also wrong with a police force which seems to operate on a points basis whereby ‘performance’ matters more than people, whichever side of the law a person appears to be on at the point of arrest or detention. Something is wrong with the way we do politics.

We have a political system which relies on trust and accountability, if it is to function for the greater good and so enable us to remain a free society. The greater good is the basis of good governance and ought to be the underlying motivating factor for anyone who seeks election. But the good is easily compromised by the all too human tendency to literally ‘err’, to use a rather old fashioned sounding word for what otherwise might be called sin. To err is not simply to make a mistake. It is to go wrong. In the case of politics and public service, to err is to stray from the path of a commitment to serve the electorate or those to whom public servants, such as the police, teachers or doctors, have pledged themselves.

But to return specifically to politics, all of this begs the question of motive when it comes to seeking public office. The cynic would say that a person only seeks to be elected because they desire power. The cynic has a point. To begin with, and as a person of integrity, the aspiring MP may only desire a little power, enough to ‘make a difference’, enough to ‘influence’.  But power is addictive, which is why it never satisfies and invariably corrupts.

Standards and norms for civilised behaviour, including at times the law of the land, impede power satisfaction. They get in the way and this, as we saw in the cases of both Emily Thornbury and Andrew Mitchell, leads to frustration, anxiety and aggression of one kind or another. Addiction to power requires determination and aggression for the power need to be satisfied but, like other addictive habits and substances, the need is never fully met, with the resulting frustration playing itself out in the kind of macho aggression to which we witness almost daily on the floor of the House of Commons.

Irrespective of gender, those who are addicted to power are also testosterone driven, even if the ‘drive’ is purely subliminal. The Emily Thornbury tweet may have been made in haste in a surge of subliminal power driven energy – or frustration, but it revealed the fact that power matters to those who hold it, irrespective of gender. Power is more necessary to them than the people who gave them power in the first place. We can draw similar conclusions from the final outcome of the Andrew Mitchell ‘Plebgate’ affair. Being testosterone driven, whether your are male or female, gives you permission, it would seem, to be as rude, arrogant and indifferent to the humanity of the persons you are there to serve, and in some cases to the rule of law, as you like.

This aggressive power drive lodges itself in a person, overtaking that initial calling to work for the common good and threatening the innate goodness, the inner light, which made it possible for them to discern and obey that calling in the first place. The more aggressive the power drive, the further it drives politicians and others away from that inner light, and the further they err from the truth of their calling.

What seems to be happening, therefore, is that a kind of powerful negative energy is at work driving leaders and politicians of all persuasions away from their true calling which must have originally been a desire to serve the whole nation with the best of themselves. Power addiction causes us to lose sight of our higher nature, the best of ourselves, to the point that it is hard to believe that we were ever capable of speaking or acting wisely or in a spirit of sacrificial service.

In all of this, it is easy to forget that the best of ourselves is not, strictly speaking, ours to own. It is a given. The best of ourselves is pure gift. It comes by God’s grace, as it did in the case of my neighbour whose passport was delayed in this summer’s notorious bureaucratic mayhem. She appealed to our MP who took the time and the trouble to ensure, with constant re-checks, that her passport was processed so that she and her partner were able to go on holiday. Was this political vote-catching on the part of the MP? I would say it was grace surprisingly at work in one powerful person.

Something similar happened when David Cameron took an interest in a skate park which has just been built near our local town. The skate park has hit a sudden and very belated planning objection which threatens it with destruction. The Prime Minister asked to be kept informed of developments when he originally met the person responsible for the project. We hope that when he is informed of this setback the grace will be there. We believe that it will.

True authority and the conflicts of today

Jesus provokes the religious leaders of his time in a number of contexts. He disturbs the status quo by threatening individual power bases, including religious ones. He outrages the authorities by openly challenging them in his teaching and through subversive behaviour, such as driving out the money lenders from the temple. But most significantly, he threatens their authority by winning people’s trust. He connects with people. In other words, he connects with the truth which they inherently sense but seldom hear spoken, or witness in the lives of the powerful. In Jesus they experience truth as something understood at a primary level of human consciousness. They experience truth, rather than just hear it discussed. This is what makes the authority of Jesus recognisably authentic.

Authority comes with trust. True authority is always given, or entrusted, but it does not always come with power. In fact, Jesus refused to be seduced by power. As a result, his authority challenged and disturbed the powerful. The authority of Jesus was not the same as political power. Through the authority given him by the Father, he inspired and changed lives and convinced people of the love of God, but he did not get rid of the Roman occupying forces. Instead, with the authority given him, he radically changed the destiny of the world. He set it on a different course.

It is authority and not power that is needed today with regard to the conflicts raging in the Middle East. We need an authority which is vested in God’s love for all of humanity, and so capable of changing the world, but which at the same time has been entrusted to our leaders by us, through the democratic process. Trust has to have been earned if authority is to be freely given. It is probably fair to say that political authority is rarely earned in the way God would have it earned, with the exception of one or two rare individuals – Myanmar’s President Aung San Suu Kyi being one which springs to mind.

Entrusting authority to world leaders does not exempt the rest of us from taking responsibility for what they do with it. So they should know that we expect and demand that the wisest, most truthful and most judicious course of action be taken in our name. For us at present, this involves taking responsibility for our country’s active engagement in  a conflict which has been brought about by violent extremism borrowed from religion, and from the lust for power. There are issues of genocide, our own security and that of other countries at stake, all of which return us to the question of authority rightfully earned and exercised in the interest of the freedom and safety of all. ISIS has no such authority. This is also true for those who facilitate or support its actions.

People of faith, as well as those who do not think of themselves as religious, should give religious and secular leaders who are engaged in the urgent business of defeating this particular evil their full and heartfelt attention. Giving such attention is a business which concerns us all. Attentiveness means being alongside the world’s leaders in heart and mind,– in other words, in that part of the heart which also thinks. This does not mean agreeing with them. In fact attentiveness will inevitably face us with some uncomfortable truths regarding other conflicts that we have caused, been involved with, or simply stood by and allowed to happen, Gaza and Israel being one of the most recent examples.

Nevertheless, where there is a heart and head attentiveness, there is also hope. We have had brief and surprising glimpses of what this kind of attentiveness could lead to. Who, for example, could have imagined that a group of leaders whose countries have long distrusted one another and, in some cases, declared themselves to be in a state of mutual enmity, would sit around a table in order to plan how they might best work together to overcome the evil being manifested through the murderous activities of ISIS? The scenario is of course far more complicated, but something of wisdom and common sense is at work here. Something of true authority is being exercised. It shows that an evil which is everyone’s problem requires a concerted and judicious response. If, either as individual nations or collectively, we do nothing, we shall all be responsible for a growing violent anarchy which is capable of doing immense harm to those its perpetrators hate most. This is true both in its own sphere of influence and in the wider global context.

But we are also implicated when we act. This is why trust is so badly needed in politics today. Exercising authority in a judicious way means doing the right thing for the right reason. But this can only be done with the support and trust of a majority who want the same just and peaceful outcome, including those of us who may not be 100% sure that a particular course of action is the right one tactically or as part of a broader strategy, but do know that we need to act. 

Exercising authority in the way God would like us to exercise it begins with humility. It means that the authority given comes with an awareness that our human and often short term thinking does not always turn out for the best for the greatest number of people. Such authority involves us all, so let’s try to be more deeply attentive to those who are accountable to us for the decisions they make in our name.