Per ducatum Evangelii pergamus itinera Christi

2 August 2009
2 Samuel 11:26-12:13; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35
Kierkegaard said: “Far be it from us to endeavour to win human admiration by fathoming what is not to be fathomed; we do not believe that he came to this earth to propose for us themes for a learned investigation. But He came to this earth to prescribe the task, to leave behind Him a footprint, so that we might learn from Him.” Elsewhere he remarked that, rather than agonising over the parts of the Bible we do not understand, or even abandoning our faith because of them, we would do better to take in the parts we do understand, and live by them. If we really try to do that, he suggested, we probably wouldn’t have time to worry about the rest.

Christianity, living according to the will and law of God, is dead simple. Sometimes, in my more unconventional moments, I suspect it may even be dead easy, once you really get stuck in. Momentum doesn’t only work for the devil; it’s perfectly true that one sin leads to another (just look at David) and that once we get on to the slippery slope of vice it is difficult to turn and climb back up, and so forth. but, as someone said, the best way to pray is to pray. Praying is not easy, not for anyone, unless they are really experienced, and perhaps not even then, unless they have been given the grace of discovering “their” way of prayer. But once you actually start doing it, it does become easier. You are carried by the momentum. The same applies to virtuous actions; and the simpler both the prayer and the action is, the better.

We have an awful tendency to mock the Jewish Law, especially as it became in the Pharisaic and Rabbinic periods. Hedges round the Torah, hedges round the hedges. But we would do well to glance at our own faith. Now, I do not deny the necessity of law. Jesus gave us a law, and a very clear one: and if we do not keep that law we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. The simpler the law, the more binding – if not in theory, certainly in practice. Paul himself said that neither his generation nor their fathers had been able to keep the Jewish Law, and we have gone a long way towards making the Christian law equally impossible (and might I say undesirable) to keep. The church over the millennia, through, I believe, the same laudable desire to be certain about God’s will as the Jews had, has built up a vast structure of details, commandments big and small, sub-clauses of sub-clauses, full of ifs and buts and at the very same time extreme precision – I think that if everything seems to be collapsing around our ears, if our own part of the church appears to be tearing itself apart, it is because we have sowed the wind and we are now reaping the whirlwind.

Paradoxically, it is a minimalist attitude that leads to this mind-breaking (and soul-destroying) maximalism. It is the minimalist attitude that needs to know who my neighbour is (or rather, who he isn’t) and how little I need to do for him and still squeeze into heaven; and that same attitude, therefore, which leads to the details, the hedges, the ifs and buts. And still more paradoxically it is the minimalist attitude which leads to the need for domination and laying down of rigid rules. if I can’t get away with this, neither shall you; I want to do this but I am not allowed to, so neither shall you; if I have to do this, then you shall do it too. At which point I quote, yet again, Father Faber’s “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea”. Jesus, who is God, was as un-minimalist, un-hedged-about and as free from both ifs and buts and sweeping rigidity as we are the opposite. “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”

We are full of the wrong kind of fear: a fear of the consequences, a fear of inconvenience, a fear of discomfort; a fear that “God might be cross with us” as if he were an unreasonable and unpredictable parent; an insecurity; a human respect. Like Kierkegaard, I am preaching primarily to myself. We are too afraid to dare to be wrong, and too insecure to bear seeing another exercising the freedom which both attracts and frightens us. We have been held back by minimalism, by suspicion and by insecurity for too long; we are trying to break out of a painful situation, but we are going about it in the wrong way. It is as if we said “These rules as to who is my neighbour and what I must do for him are absurd and constraining. Therefore I will cast aside the very concept of “neighbour” and “charity” and be free from such shackles.” They are indeed absurd and constraining. indeed we should not be shackled; but we will only unshackle ourselves as God wishes it by going in precisely the opposite direction. Yes, this is the Edinburgh-Perth road. But to get to Perth, you don’t only have to be travelling on this road, you have to be travelling in the right direction. When theory becomes crushing and maze-like, when law turns into a great heap of tangled details and all sense of proportion and hierarchy of values is lost, the answer is not to chuck all theory and all law. The answer is to go back, to discover the foundations of the theory and the law, the point at which they are as clear and unmistakable as a signpost to Perth.

It is true that not everything is in the Gospel, or not explicitly so. When dealing with situations which are not explicitly there, one may respond in one of two ways. The first is the one which the church has adopted up to now and when I say the church I am starting with Moses, if not Abraham. It is to start to build up, or build up again, a huge structure of laws, each logically or not so logically deduced from previous ones. It does feel safer, I admit, and it is probably easier. But the other, which has not been tried except in very circumscribed areas – yes, even by the Anglican communion – could be simply to say “We don’t know” and leave it to private judgement. This is really scary to the average Christian (even to the congregation of St John’s) but it seems to me to be far more in tune with the Gospel itself. There are passages in the Gospel which are beyond us; but we have got to deal with that. It is not a disaster. There are situations for which the Gospel does not even give us guidelines. I think we have got to deal with that too. There is so much in the Gospel that we can understand, so much that we can carry out. The word is very near to us, in our mouth and in our heart that we may keep it. We do not need to cross the sea or climb mountains to find it. We do not even have to climb up to heaven to fetch it down: it has already come down to us. AN Whitehead complained that “the brief Galilean vision of humility flickered through the ages uncertainly…but the deep idolatry of fashioning God in the image of Egyptian, Persian and Roman rulers was retained. The church gave unto God attributes that belonged exclusively unto Caesar”. God is not a dominating God. God is a God whose truth gives freedom. When St Mechtild asked God what was most pleasing about St Gertrude, God replied “Her freedom of heart”. That sounds like a bad joke in the context of the church as institution, but it is true. It is only human beings who need to dominate and to hedge things about.

Could we perhaps try to walk in the direction of the sometimes wild-sounding indications Jesus has given us or, better still, follow in his footsteps? And maybe worry a little less when we can’t see them and the path is not quite clear? It may well be that in the area where we are walking just now there is no one correct path. If we are following his general direction we will come out automatically in the right place and find the footprints again.

Of course, this can be carried too far. The following suggestion by Dermot A Lane could be dangerous if taken maliciously. But perhaps some of us could try to use it benignly and see what happens:

“The need to move beyond a modern mechanical perception of the world towards some form of post-modern, inclusive, progressive paradigm is receiving growing acceptance among scientists and theologians alike. The issue facing humanity is to move from theory to praxis, from an instrumental rationality to a liberating wisdom, from an ethic of domination to a new ethic of social and ecological solidarity.”

Well, I mightn’t have put it quite like that. But when I unpack it it seems to say exactly what I mean. God, and so the things of God, is too big to be contained in one way of looking at things, and too simple to be codified. The essentials do not change, and changing world-views do not make them change. All truth speaks truly of God, since it comes from God. We could do with being a lot less afraid, and we would be a lot less vulnerable to the devil and his angels and a lot more supple in the hands of God. Per ducatum Evangelii pergamus itinera Christi!