Article
- Date:
- Sunday 2nd October 2022
Year C, The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Holy Communion
- Readings:
- Psalm 37.1-9
One of the salient qualities of the late Queen, urged upon our new King, is that of restraint in speech. Our constitutional monarchy is burdened with an almost impossible obligation to stay silent, to watch the wicked, the venal and the merely silly, and to say nothing. We only have to think of how often we pass judgment to know how difficult that is. On the other hand, even their praise of what they see as the opposite virtues of the good, the worthy and the serious, has to be couched in the most moderate of terms; not only can they not take sides against the undesirable they must not take sides in favour of the desirable lest what they think of as such is contested.
Now we are not constitutional monarchs: it is for some to stay silent and for others to speak but we sit midway between the orator and the recluse. Yet, when we consider a lifetime of speaking, what does it amount to? How much good will we have done and how much harm. My prayer is that the harm will turn out not to be so bad and that the good will be more than we thought.
Setting aside the necessary paradox that the Psalmist speaks against speaking, the import of his words at the opening of Psalm 37 is that our primary, primarily silent, relationship should be with God and that we should not worry ourselves over the behaviour of the wicked. The Psalms are deeply ambivalent about the wicked because, deep down, people want to see the wicked suffer while the good prosper but, on the whole, they opt for leaving the wicked for the Lord to deal with.
The Chosen People to whom the Psalms were addressed in many ways lived much simpler lives than us; outside the family their opinions counted for nothing and inside the family only the opinion of the Pater Familias counted for anything and, even there, life was so prescribed by the Law that the only room for debate was the meaning of the Law which was the province of religious specialists. We, on the other hand, live in a society where, subject to certain limitations, we are free, if not encouraged, to decide on every Biblical point according to our own understanding; we live in a democracy where everybody's opinion is supposed to count; and we live in a culture which operates, at least in theory, on freedom of thought and speech.
Which reminds me of the old joke: "in our house dad makes all the big decisions such as whether we should go to war and mum makes the small decisions like how we should spend our limited income". The distinction between the two kinds of decision is valid: because we live in a democracy we all have our opinions on political issues and are entitled to express them; but this leaves the decisions over which we have direct control.
Again, setting aside the aphorism that we all fall short, the fundamental reason for being cautious about condemning the wicked is that we can most often only do this on the basis of outcome when any judgment should be based primarily on motive. Further, for all our scientific progress, we know very little about the balance in individual lives between nature, what we inherit, and nurture, what we acquire; and we know very little about how to draw a line between the sick and the sinful. With all these limitations, then, it is neither profitable nor even realistic to make judgments about other people. Further, we must always bear in mind, given the current passionate debate about free speech, that the purpose of speech, as Saint Paul says, is for mutual edification, for building each other up inside the community of Christ's Church.
All this being granted - and it's a great deal to grant - it is very difficult for us to suppress our hope that the wicked should come to a sticky end while we - the good, of course - prosper in this world and attain bliss in the next.
Which returns us to the Psalmist's main theme: our fundamental obligation is to trust in the Lord, to do what we can to improve the world by constructive speech and action but to recognise that this is trivial in the light of our obligation of trust. We are, with few exceptions, sayers and doers, not very good at listening, being done to, and resigning ourselves, not fatalistically, but self-consciously, to the mercy of God which we require just as fully as do the wicked.
On this day when we look back on the Festival, we more immediately recognise that, to parody the Book of Ecclesiastes, there is a time for participation and a much longer time for sitting still; so in our Christian lives, we will fall into error in our talking and doing if we do not leave enough time in prayer for listening to God. Even in prayer there is a time for speaking and an even longer time for silence.
For me, it comes down in the end to the nature of love, love for God and for each other. Our disposition and our culture tend to think of love as something we do to others but I believe that the essence of love is our openness to the other, true love, as in the love of Jesus, is expressed in our vulnerability, in our willingness to trust others. Of course that trust is often misplaced as it was in the case of Jesus who was killed in his vulnerability; but that is the point. Love of this sort will frequently cause us disappointment and even pain but in the end if it is not unconditional it is not love at all, it is only a contract when, in the Christian context, it is a Covenant of two parties who could not be more different. It is for God to speak and it is for us to listen.