Article
- Date:
- Tuesday 28th December 2021
Year C, The First Sunday of Christmas - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Eucharist
- Readings:
- Luke 2.41-52
We are now a month into the Gospel of Luke, revelling once again in its artistry and beauty which has generated so much magnificent art; but I think it is also fair to say that no Gospel has generated quite so much chocolate box sentimentality; and, as we know, sentimentality is the enemy of beauty. So it is easy to conjure up a picture of a quasi-angelic Jesus, having lapsed into endearing naughtiness by evading his parents to go about his "Father's business", being found amid the grizzled elders in the Temple porch, giving, as they say, as good as he got; with interest.
The trouble with this picture is that his Father's business did not consist of a simple list of right and wrong answers; if it did, after all, there would hardly be any need for elders, let alone learned elders. But the nature of Jewish scriptural interpretation was and is based on a process called Midrash, which means that elders interpret Scriptural texts in minute detail and make pronouncements which are, literally, laid on top of previous interpretations so that the process was centralised and cumulative. After the destruction of the Temple this centralised process never quite recovered but, nonetheless, from then until now the outstanding teachers have deposited their detailed interpretations as part of the massive library of textual criticism such that the density of interpretation is often regarded as more important than the original text. From which two immediate conclusions flow: the first is that there were not and are not easy answers; and any answer was and is subject to revision. So that when Jesus' Disciples are eating plucked grain on the Sabbath, or when Jesus is discussing healing on the sabbath, this is not, as Christians too often understand it, a petulant Jewish attack on Jesus, it's an intrinsic part of what Scribes and elders did, not least when dealing with the Rabbi Jesus. You can therefore expect that while Jesus was sitting among the elders at the age of Twelve, no matter how clever he was, he had much to learn from the elders.
While I was writing the previous paragraph, it so happened that an interviewee on the radio said that compulsory vaccination for Covid was "Unethical". This is the kind of statement which bedevils contemporary public discussion but, sadly, Christianity is not immune from this kind of simplicity which tends to confuse the process, how I get to a conclusion, with how I stick to it once I've got there. Without going into the minutiae of the argument, in broad terms, if we believe that being vaccinated is an entirely individual decision which only affects us then we might well view compulsory vaccination as "unethical", as a serious breach of our individual rights. But if, on the other hand, we think that vaccination is a matter of social solidarity, accepted not only for oneself but also for the good of the community, and if we further think that the huge number of beds occupied by unvaccinated Covid sufferers is depriving other people of the urgent care they need, we might conclude that to refuse vaccination for no good reason is 'unethical". That is just one serendipitous example of ethical complexity.
But for Christians there are other complexities. If we take what we think of as fundamental ethical issues Biblical teaching evolves over time so that the Bible as a whole might be seriously contradictory; sometimes individual instances are at sharp odds with the overall tenor of the canon as a whole; sometimes the Bible flatly contradicts contemporary values, say in matters such as slavery and the place of women; and sometimes the Bible says, or at least appears to say, nothing at all about subjects like abortion, contraception, surrogacy, organ transplants, war and the use of earthly resources. So we try to extrapolate from the general to the particular, or vice versa. Some people resort to proof-texting, finding one or two verses which, they think, justify forming an ethical position.
Let me just quote you one example which I came across in my studies just before Christmas.
This is Psalm 139.13-14:
"For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well."
Now some people might think, reading this in the context of the Psalm, that the author is talking about God's intimate involvement with each of his people, but this is also one of the key proof-texts showing the immorality of abortion. Of course, the text might be both of these things, that's the nature, or maybe the hazard, of sacred writing, but I use the citation simply to show how difficult some of these issues might be. Again, if we think that abortion is an entirely individual moral issue, we might argue that its wickedness is obvious. If, on the other hand, we analyse abortion in the United States where this controversy rages, we will see that it is almost entirely confined to very poor black women, so there might be a misogynist and racist element; the pronouncement against might be part of the campaign to preserve white male supremacy.
Time and time again we come back to the central issue that in Christianity the thing that really matters is our motive, why we do things, rather than the outcome, what we do. It must also be clear from this rather sketchy presentation that our choice of ethical frameworks, between the personal and the social, has a huge influence on our conclusions, to say nothing of our different temperaments. I suppose what I'm saying, not least as a writer on theology and ethics, is that I have a deep respect for the Jewish way of doing these things and am deeply suspicious of easy answers. It's alarming, for instance that data is increasingly showing that people think that those who give simplistic answers are honest and that people who say that issues are complex are evading the truth and being dishonest.
Finally, I want to return to something i said earlier: no matter how complex it is to reach any conclusion we should stick to it as long as the evidence and/or our conscience dictates; the truth may be complex but being true to ourselves is simple; not easy, of course, but simple.