Article
- Date:
- Sunday 11th April 2021
Year B, The Second Sunday of Easter - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Parish Eucharist
- Readings:
- Acts 4. 32-35
When Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand in his first recorded sentence in the first Gospel to be written (Mark 1.14) he meant it. What he was saying was that the sequence which began with human creation and its fall from grace would be ended with the Resurrection which would break the link between human failing and death. Human beings after the Resurrection would therefore be living in a new era, a time of jubilee, as innocent as the mythical perfection of Eden. This spirit of jubilee shows itself in the early Chapters of Acts, no more so than in our Reading for today which talks about an absolute unity of spirit and action in pursuit of the common good.
Inevitably, because humanity cannot be perfect in the exercise of free will, the early Church soon fell from its blissful state, degenerating into hierarchy, inequality, poverty and misogyny so that by the end of the First Century as Christian theology developed its moral integrity was corrupted, a trend accelerated when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire. Since then, Western Christianity has always valued theology much more highly than justice which is why we can count ourselves as good Christians while millions live in poverty in our own country and throughout the world.
In that context, then, what do we mean when we say that as Easter children, we are building the Kingdom on earth in preparation for its union with the Kingdom of Heaven? What is the Good News we are proclaiming? Well, most people think the good news has something to do with salvation but that is not what Jesus concentrated on. His simple, dual message was justice and forgiveness; and in the context of today's Reading, I want to talk about justice.
So, let us check what I say against the Gospels. I can't detail all the statistics, but I can give you a summary:
- In Matthew there are three times as many references to social justice (26) as there are to sexual issues (8).
- In mark the ratio is 4 - 1.
- In Luke it is 10 to 1; and
- In John, the two categories are almost equal, excluding references to "love" which are not specifically enough concerned with social justice to count.
- In the gospels as a whole there are 21 references to sexual conduct which are relevant to us today, 87 on social justice and, for good measure, 30 on procedural justice*.
As I have said, I accept that since the Jubilee days of Acts when the Holy Spirit was almost tangible, we have fallen from grace but that does not mean that we should count ourselves helpless or pretend that we can be followers of Jesus while ignoring his most often-repeated teaching. This was a relatively simple issue until the end of the 19th Century when the fate of the poor largely depended on charity, so Christians could measure their commitment to Jesus in terms of their commitment to charity; but when the state began, in the first decade of the 20th Century, to use taxation as a method of re-distribution from the top to the bottom, the aphorism that we should never mix Christianity with politics became even more of a nonsense than it had previously been.
To take an example, we can still measure our commitment by what we donate to food banks, but we can better demonstrate our commitment by making food banks unnecessary. There is no point whatsoever in praying for justice and talking about justice and even making charitable donations to the poor and then voting to make them poorer by cutting benefits or cutting our Third World aid budget.
During the 20th Century the argument of those opposed to state redistribution was that it did not work, and it would be much better to let market forces gradually ameliorate the condition of the poor; and for three decades after the Second World War this worked but then the figures began to go badly wrong. Then opponents of redistribution brought a new set of arguments, that poverty was the fault of the poor, that they were feckless scroungers who spent all their benefits on alcohol and tobacco and, even, that people with disabilities were in some way responsible for their own plight.
And now matters are even worse: not only is poverty rising while wealth is ever more concentrated, with a bias against the young towards the old, we have a new language with which to denigrate the poor and disadvantaged: first, "political correctness" which called for all people to be treated with equal concern and respect has become a term of insult; then those who stand up for the weak are accused of being "woke", another insult; and those who call for action are "virtue signalling"; and last week in an official report the term "well-meaning idealists" was used as a term of insult.
The public discussion about poverty has degenerated from economics to the branding by the rich and powerful of advocates for the poor as stupid or, to borrow Donald Trump's elegant phrase, we're "losers". In such circumstances we all need to be careful what we are actually voting for; and we all need to be careful of the language of public discourse. We are not likely to reach the post Resurrection heights of the followers of Jesus but that does not free us from our obligation to strive for justice both in our private and public life.
* Carey, Kevin: The Judas Church: An Obsession with Sex, Sacristy Press