Article
- Date:
- Sunday 23rd January 2022
Year C, The Third Sunday of Epiphany - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Cuckfield
- Service:
- Evensong
- Readings:
- Numbers 9.15-32
1 Corinthians 7.17-24
It's all very well, we may think, for the Chosen People to practise strict observance of God's instructions in the matter of the pillars of cloud and of fire for, after all, there was nothing else for them to do, they didn't know where they were going and they knew they had no alternative; the Lord was taking far too close an interest in their every movement which was thought of as an imposition as human nature's forgetfulness and ingratitude kicked in and memories of their liberation faded.
But the question of identity and obedience in Saint Paul is much more difficult for us to handle, not least because it is complicated by its use of slavery as an illustration. Did Saint Paul really mean that if you were a slave, you should be content to stay as a slave? Oh yes, decidedly he did! But the issue here isn't the moral legitimacy or otherwise of slavery but rather the primacy, above everything else, of our identity in Christ. Paul, being a sensible man, must have known how horrible the condition of slavery was for most of its victims and yet he ranked their ambition for freedom below their identity in Christ.
Now we need to be clear what we mean by the primacy of our identity in Christ; what it means is that of all our characteristics, such as our nationality, employment, family status, aesthetic preference, political affiliation, temperament, lifestyle and moral outlook, being a follower of Jesus comes first which means that if the exercise of any of these characteristics comes into conflict with our commitment to following Christ, then Christ wins, hands down, no argument. Full stop.
What makes our problem of obedience so difficult, much more difficult than it was for the wandering Chosen People, and for the slave in Roman times, is that we have far more agency; we will not obey God out of fear and we will not suffer servitude out of obedience and too many of us will make our situation even more problematic by forgetting where we came from and who we are: we came from God and we are God's children and no amount of clever argument can get us out of that reality.
But, as it is, with all our choices, we are not wandering round the wilderness in a state of imposed impotency and ignorance, neither are we slaves with no get out. As I said, we are free agents with a bewildering array of choices and more agency than any other generation, outside monarchies and dictators, in human history. So why is everything so difficult for us?
It seems to me that the root of our problem, as a society and often individually, is that we are beyond content. Our natural stance, our way of using language, is all about forward motion, not about staying still and certainly not about going backwards. And it's strange how this has manifested itself during the Pandemic. Let us grant ourselves the golden star for being more compliant with regulations than the Government ever expected; let us grant that part of this might have been self-preservation but the greater part was solidarity; let us also say that most of us have thought of vaccination not as an issue of individual freedom but of community solidarity. Let us grant all this, and more, but what strikes me is the degree to which our mental health has been affected by restraint. When I think of the social restraint imposed upon my childhood by living in a closed, guilt-ridden, pre Vatican II Roman Catholic poor working class community or when I think of the constraints under which most people live in the countries of the developing world where I have worked, we have had more options in lockdown than any of these cohorts of people respectively enjoyed or enjoy but we chafe and hurt ourselves.
I can understand why the mental health of people has been affected by lockdown, notably the isolated, the vulnerable, children and young people but in addition to quite properly calling for more public funds to deal with our mental health crisis it really is time that we conducted a full review into the fundamental causes of mental illness. Did our ancestors ignore the problem, not recognise it or simply accept it was part of human experience, or have we, through our collective and individual behaviour, generated a crisis?
Of course I can't answer these questions any more than you can, but here are three suggestions I would make to an enquiry:
- First, our forward reflex, our problem of chronic discontent, cannot be helpful; no sooner have we got something than we are thinking about the next thing; we are damaged by our key intellectual characteristic, our ability to think in the future tense, to transform our ability in the field of pattern recognition into extrapolation and future planning;
- Secondly, the contemporary trend towards ever more fierce competition and away from working together imposes huge pressures; you only have to look at the effect that constant testing has on school children; a great deal of the lockdown educational anxiety was not concerned with the loss of learning hours in themselves but how this would affect exam results; you would have thought that the purpose of education was to succeed in competitive exams where the number of people who fail is set in advance regardless of the merits of their work; and
- Thirdly, we have lost any sense of existentialism we ever had; we have stopped noticing the salient, often beautiful, details of the present, like people who race through a book so anxious to know how it will end that we don't read it properly.
Let me finish by being painfully truthful: the kind of obedience represented in our Readings is theologically pure but impossible; our competitive genes and our forward-tilted culture are against it; our commitment to Christ, as far as we can realise it, has to be lived through self-control and generosity, and through existentialism and openness to the Holy Spirit.