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SALISBURY CATHEDRAL LENT LECTURES 2004 - LECTURE 3

Bishop John Baker (Wednesday 7th April 2004)


'WRITTEN FOR OUR LEARNING': THE USE AND UNDERSTANDING OF THE BIBLE

Lecture Three: 'The Bible and the Pursuit of Goodness'

The question of goodness is central to understanding the Bible for one basic reason: throughout, it is assumed that God himself is morally good and is concerned for goodness in his people and in the world as a whole. If this were not so, the issue of evil and suffering would not have taken the peculiarly poignant form which it did in Israel. In other nations the gods were thought to act well or badly as caprice took them. The problem in human relations with the gods was how to appease them, to get them on your side. In Israel, when things went wrong, the problem was to know in what way you, yourself, or the people as a whole, had sinned for God would not afflict you unless you had. Disaster is read as punishment precisely because God is assumed to be good and requires men and women to be so too.

There are passages where this does not seem to apply. In Exodus, when Moses is on the way to Egypt to bring out the Israelites as God has commanded him, once at the lodging place, God is said to have tried to kill him. No reason is given. On another occasion God sends fire to destroy 300 Levites for offering incense when that was not part of their permitted duties. But such stories are rare. It is true that God's own moral standards in the earliest period do not strike us as particularly high. His justice seems more like cruelty and revenge and his commands, such as the order to exterminate the people of Jericho (and, indeed, the Canaanites generally) the kind of thing which civilised nations have in recent times at last learned to condemn. (Churchpeople forget, although atheists don't, that for most of Christian history eternal torments for the wicked were standard Christian teaching.) But as time goes by the irrational elements in the picture of God disappear, and genuinely ethical goodness is seen as his central demand. Isaiah 5.16 is a crucial verse:
'God shows himself holy by justice.'

The Bible is relevant to our own pursuit of goodness in two ways. First, in its teaching as to what constitutes goodness. Secondly, in what it shows us of how people arrived at that teaching and the influences that helped them change and deepen their ideas of what is good. But as we follow all through this we find ourselves confronted with the same tensions and problems that, as Christians, we have to live with today.

I am going to leave aside for the moment the story of the Garden of Eden and what Christian theology has called 'the Fall', although it will prove significant later, and start with Noah. The Old Testament recognises three covenants, of which the first is God's covenant with the whole human race after the Flood. A covenant always contains a promise by God and a corresponding obligation on the human side. Here God promises not to destroy humankind again and humanity accepts that human life is sacred and that anyone who takes it must lose their own life. This is a universal covenant, not just with Israel. Morality is here acknowledged as the foundation of all fully human existence.

The next covenant was with Abraham, covering Israel and her immediate kindred peoples such as (ironically) the Arabs. The human obligation was the rite of circumcision. For our present purposes the interest of the story of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob lies in the clues it gives us about the legalities and customs of that society: the laws of inheritance; the practice of raising up children through a mother who was a slave; the laws of hospitality. These are in large part taken from the Hurrian civilisation, which flourished in the Middle East around 1500 BC.

After the time of slavery in Egypt the Exodus brings the people to Mount Sinai, the scene of the third covenant, where the greater part of Israelite law was said to be given by God through Moses. Much of this is concerned with religious ritual, purity and health laws and the like and is not directly relevant to ethics, although one point is worth mentioning. In the rules about atoning sacrifices, made to propitiate God for some inadvertent offence, it specifically provides for a very small offering for those who could not afford the normal sacrifice. Access to God's mercy must be available for all members of the community, however poor.

There are also, however, numerous laws of general social concern, such as: humane treatment for slaves; respect for parents; compensation for accidents; public liability; kindness to foreigners; care for widows and orphans; truthful witness in a law court; and the criminality of attempting to pervert the course of justice, eg by bribery. Many of these regulations come from Babylonian laws, such as the great Code of Hammurabi.

The laws come in two forms. The first, standard in the Ancient Near East is that of case law. 'When this or that happens, this is what must be done'. The other is direct injunction, 'You shall…' or 'You shall not…'. The latter, familiar to us from the Ten Commandments, is used to give an injunction the force of a direct address to the hearer by God, and this, in a way distinctive of Israel, sometimes commends or forbids not a specific action but an attitude. The tenth commandment, against coveting, is an instance of this. Others forbid nursing hatred or cherishing a grudge. The most famous example of all is in Leviticus: 'You must love your neighbour as yourself', although the great Jewish scholar C G Montefiore did say that another verse later in the same chapter 'knocked it into a cocked hat'. I quote 'When an alien resides with you in your land, you must not oppress him. He is to be treated as a native born among you. Love him as yourself, because you were aliens in Egypt. I am the Lord your God'. Almost 3000 years later this is still a moral duty humankind (including our own country) most needs to take to heart. Morality says the Old Testament, is essentially a community matter.

Once well settled in Canaan, Israel lost no time in taking up the ways of pagan religion, in particular its sexual practices, which were linked with shrines and cults. Male and female and same-sex prostitution and bestiality are all condemned in the law. But being part of a civilised international system also brought advances. The dreadful practice of the 'ban', that is, putting whole populations to the sword as a sacrifice to God, came to an end as politically unwise. Indeed, in time, Israel earned a reputation for mercy in its treatment of defeated enemies.

Internally, however, new problems arose, notably a huge gap between rich and poor, leading to exploitation and corruption. The prophets, looking back to the days of small farmers and communities where every family had its hereditary property, denounce these developments in ways that still resonate as we struggle with the unjust aspects of global capitalism. Eventually, after the Babylonian exile which we looked at last week, Judah became a small province, first of the Persian then of the Greek empire and for 350 years was left in relative peace, during which time there emerged a society free to work out its life in terms of the law of God and love of neighbour. We get few glimpses of this happy time but if you want some idea of it read the Song of Songs, love poetry celebrating the joy of a betrothed couple; the book of Ruth, which is set in the time of the Judges around 1100 BC but in fact reflects this much later period; and the book of Jonah, which takes as its central character a prophet who lived in the 8th century BC when the nations were terrorised by the Assyrian Empire with its capital at Nineveh, and makes him the reluctant hero of a story designed to show God's universal love. The closing words are, I think, among the most moving attributed to God in the whole Bible: 'Should not I have pity on Ninevah, that great city, in which there are 120,000 people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?' While we are in the business of favourite quotes, I hope you will bear with me if I include here one brought to mind by the mention of Nineveh. It comes as the climax of a series of prophecies in Isaiah, chapter 19, about what will happen when history culminates in the Day of the Lord. For various reasons we can be reasonably sure that these prophecies are pretty late in date, well after the Exile, so probably in the period I have been talking about. Very few people have ever heard of it; but when you think what Israel had suffered at the hands of Egypt and Assyria in the course of its history and what symbols of evil power they had become, I think you will agree that this verse represents a moral and spiritual high point before which one can only keep silence. 'When that day comes, Israel will rank as a third with Egypt and Assyria and be a blessing in the world. This is the blessing the Lord of Hosts will give: 'Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my possession".

The Ninevites, you will have noticed, were seen in Jonah as in darkest moral ignorance and this leads us to one more factor which helped to create the moral society of Judaism and that is the teaching of wisdom. This goes back a long way. The kings of Judah had their own sages to give them advice and the royal civil service was trained by them. The basis of wisdom teaching was realism: keep your eyes open for the way people actually behave and learn what will keep you out of trouble and earn you respect. It was also an international movement. The book of Proverbs has a remarkable section borrowed lock, stock and barrel from Egyptian wisdom. Remarkably, it was wisdom which in one way was enlightened self-interest, which produced some of the highest ethical teaching in the Bible. When St Paul cites the text 'If your enemy is hungry, feed him: if he is thirsty, give him a drink', it is the Book of Proverbs he is quoting. If you want to know the wisdom ideal for human life read Job chapter 31. Here is the picture of a man who can say of his slave 'Did not the same God create us in the womb?' A man who adopts orphans and brings them up as his own. One who clothes the poor and opens his door to the stranger with nowhere to lodge. Who can say 'Have I ever rejoiced at the ruin of anyone who hated me?' It is a passage too little known.

Which brings us to the New Testament and, in particular, to the teachings of Jesus. Not so much because of the high moral level but because all through the first three Gospels you will find traces of Jesus' indebtedness to the Jewish wisdom tradition. Does this ring a bell? 'Do not push yourself forward at court or take your stand where the great assemble; for it is better to be told 'Come up here' than to be moved down to make room for a nobleman.' Yes, of course, it is Jesus' parable about the wedding feast. 'Don't sit down in the place of honour [or] the host may come and say to you 'Give this man your seat'. Then you will look foolish. No…. sit down in the lowest place so that when your host comes he will say, 'Come up higher, my friend'.' But the links between Jesus and wisdom teaching are more fundamental than the odd quotation. The word for a parable in Hebrew or Aramaic is also that for a proverb and many of Jesus' simpler parables we can turn easily into proverbs. 'As a merchant seeks fine pearls and sells all to buy when he finds one, so the wise man gives all he has to enter the kingdom of heaven.' Or 'Like a man building his house on sand is one who will not heed wise counsel.' 'Only if you knock will the door be opened and only the one who seeks will find.' 'One who wastes his wisdom on fools is like a man spreading pearls before swine.' And in at least one famous verse Jesus makes a typical wisdom observation of Nature the basis for a revolutionary moral demand. 'As God sends his rain and sun on good and evil alike, so you must be perfect in heart as your Father in heaven is perfect'. It was, I think, this down to earth, everyday, think-for-yourself wisdom to which ordinary folk responded and which they found so different from the careful debates about every syllable of the Law characteristic of the Scribes and Pharisees. Jesus, with his stories and his jokes (yes jokes!) and his analogies from things everyone recognised, minted his teaching afresh in a way that made them say 'He teaches with authority'.

Of course, Old Testament wisdom was not the only influence on his ethical teaching. He drew on the rest of the Old Testament as well but not necessarily just to endorse it. Matthew presents Jesus very much as the new Moses and understands his teaching as a new Law, not superceding but completing the old, bringing it to perfection. He records Jesus as saying that not the smallest letter or part of a letter of the Law will be lost until history comes to an end. 'I tell you' Jesus says 'unless your righteousness goes far beyond that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you will not go into the Kingdom of Heaven.' It would be comforting to think this meant that the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees was not up to much but it would not be true. They were exceptionally moral and upright people. What Jesus did mean, we can perhaps work out from examples he, himself, gave.

It is not enough, he says, to abstain from murder. You must not harbour anger or use angry abuse. It is not enough to abstain from adultery, you must not let lust colour the way you look at a woman. It is not enough to tell the truth when on oath, people must be able to rely on the truth of every word you say. The Law laid down the rule 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth' to ensure that a spirit of revenge (or, we might think deterrence as well) did not inflict on those who had done bodily harm to another injuries greater than the harm they, themselves, had done. But, says Jesus, the very idea of repaying harm with harm is wrong. Evil can be overcome only with good.

It is in this context, you will remember, that Jesus uses the formula 'It was said by those of olden days… but I say to you…'. People often comment on the confident authority this displays but we need to think through the implications. Earlier generations saw this as a sign that he was indeed God incarnate but, if I may short-circuit a very complex theological argument, if Jesus was truly God incarnate (as I myself firmly believe) then he cannot have been aware that he was. Had he been aware, he would not have been living an authentic human life. But if he was not conscious of being God then the words 'but I say to you' are pretty staggering. For the Law was believed to have come from God himself through Moses, who received it either direct or, as some like St Paul believed, through the mediation of angels. Either way, to declare on your own authority that it was not incorrect but incomplete and that you were going to complete it, was breathtaking.

Surely equally breathtaking, however, are the implications for ourselves although we don't realise what they are because we read everything through lenses of piety. It is like the controversy over forgiveness. Jesus tells the paralytic, 'Your sins are forgiven'. The scribes murmur 'Who can forgive sins but God alone?' That is ok, we say, Jesus was God, although they didn't know it. But if Jesus didn't know it either, what then? And it looks as though he didn't because he goes on to say to the scribes 'So that you can know that the son of man has power on earth to forgive sins…' 'Son of man' here has its ordinary use of 'this human being talking to you'. There are traditions in the Gospels which say that Jesus passed on to his disciples the power to forgive sins not just in the sense of the Lord's Prayer, that we must forgive those who offend against us, but in the wider sense that where we forgive, God will ratify that forgiveness and where we proclaim God's forgiveness God stands by that. These are unnervingly vertiginous perspectives. In the sphere of morality, do they not also mean that where we see existing teaching about God's moral will needing to be carried a stage farther to make it coherent and complete then, even though we are just human beings, we have authority to take that step.

For the moment let us put that thought on hold and move on to the world of the apostolic church in the rest of the New Testament. Here we have to take account of the fact that Acts and the Epistles and Revelation are written within a drastically different environment, namely that of the Gentiles. The one exception seems to be the Epistle of James which is addressed to Jewish Christians, 'the twelve tribes dispersed throughout the world'. It gently warns against a tendency to misuse St Paul's teaching by supposing that faith without works can save you. The moral problems addressed are those of snobbery, sins of speech and anger. The environment is one of modest towns set in an agricultural landscape and there are probably allusions to Jesus' own teaching. All in all, it seems to come from James, the Lord's brother, head of the Jerusalem Church, to congregations in Palestine. By contrast all the other apostolic documents, leaving aside Hebrews which is an almost entirely theological text, come from urban society; no more sheep and goats, sowing, fruit trees and mustard bushes. The only time St Paul mentions animals is when he quotes the text 'You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading corn' and asks 'Does God care at all about oxen?' No, he says. This is about clergy salaries!

We are also concerned with a church whose leaders have been through life-shattering experiences. First and foremost, there had been the earthquake event of Good Friday and Easter; we looked briefly last week at the striking ways in which Jesus' followers tried to get their minds round that. Then there had been the spiritual upheaval of the gift of the Holy Spirit, spreading from congregation to congregation round the eastern Mediterranean. It is hardly surprising if all this also left its mark on the way the infant Church envisaged goodness and handled moral problems.

One obvious change is this. Although Jesus' moral teaching was aimed at the individual and his or her responsibilities, the sense of society, of the community and nation, is always there as the setting. Questions like divorce, duties to parents, food laws, duty to the poor, how to be a good employer, how to deal with the occupying power, attitudes to the marginalised and ostracised are the agenda of a community, not of the individual's private inner world. But in the apostolic age the place of human (or, as we might say, secular) community in the moral structure of life is now taken by the Church. The Greek cities or the Roman Empire are just background. A Christian's duty toward them is to pay taxes and to stay out of trouble, so that the Roman authorities would accept Christians as reliable citizens who did not belong to some subversive organisation. Only in the second-generation world of the letters to Timothy and Titus is there even mention of prayer for rulers, and then only that we may be godly and quietly governed.

So the pursuit of goodness becomes, to an extent, introverted. The ethical problems become ones of squabbles on the PCC, class distinctions within the congregation, churchwardens who let power go to their heads and sexual misbehaviour. Of course these are also general human problems but the objective now is to raise the moral standard of the Church, the little community of the saved, so that they can find their way into eternal life, hopefully, by their goodness, attracting a few more members along the way. (This is already there, implicitly, in St John's Gospel: 'By this shall everyone know that you are my disciples, that you love one another.' ) God may have been in Christ reconciling the world to himself, but apparently the only way for the world to be reconciled was to join the community of faith.

This brought with it another problem which plainly exercised St Paul a good deal. If Christians had received the Spirit of God, how come that their lives, from the moral angle, so often seemed hardly to have improved at all? In writing to the Roman congregation he uses language reminiscent of the mystery religions when he says that in the initiation rite of baptism Christians were united with Christ and thus with Christ's death. 'We were buried with him' he goes on 'in order that, as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, so also we might set out on a new life. For if we have become identified with him in the likeness of his death' that is, in the immersion of baptism 'we shall also be identified with him in the likeness of his resurrection', that is, the sinless life. 'We know that our old humanity has been crucified with Christ, for the destruction of the sinful self, so that we may no longer be slaves to sin'. But the 'fruits of the Spirit' as he called them in Galatians, could be an awful long time coming.

This calls to mind another significant change in the way of talking about sin and virtue, namely by means of lists of good and bad forms of conduct or general qualities and attitudes. We find this feature only once in the Gospels, in Mark, when Jesus is expounding his saying that it is what comes out of us which defiles us, not what goes in. 'For out of people's hearts come evil reasonings, acts of sexual immorality, thefts murders, adulteries… treachery, blasphemies' and so on. In the apostolic writings there are no fewer than eleven of these lists and Paul's list of 'fruits of the Spirit' was almost certainly inspired by a wish to supply a counterpart on the good, positive side. The lists of sinful actions and attitudes were in fact a borrowing from Gentile moral philosophy, for the Stoics invented them as means of instruction for use in the home. It is interesting that the lists of vices are much more concrete than those of good qualities, the fruits of the Spirit being given as 'love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness and self-control.' This, of course, is not a defect but simply reflects a fact of life, that there are endless ways of being good, whereas the repertoire of sin remains drearily the same.

The Bible's own pursuit of goodness, which we have been trying to trace, culminates in one simple, but inexhaustible, idea: that of Love. We met it in the Old Testament in those key verses from Leviticus. 'You shall love your neighbour as yourself' and 'You shall love the foreigner who lives among you.' The command to love one's neighbour was ratified by Jesus in the Gospels. It was enlarged by him to include love of enemies. It runs like a thread of gold through so many of his parables and stories, notably the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. It was one clue which the apostolic Church seized upon. Both Paul and James quote the actual command, Paul, in Romans, expounding it in simple terms. 'Love does no ill to a neighbour, therefore love fulfils the whole law.' In his ecstatic hymn in praise of love in 1 Corinthians 13 Paul celebrates just a few of the concrete ways in which love finds expression and ends by declaring that though faith and hope are essential for our life here, love is the only one of the three which will still be the heart of our being in the life to come. Finally, St John's First Letter presses all this to its theological conclusion in the simple affirmation 'God is Love, and those who dwell in love dwell in God, and God in them.' Full stop.

But is it full stop? This is perhaps the one moral idea in the Bible, the supremacy of love, which has made its way into secular thinking today and, indeed, is used as a rod with which to beat Christians who seem to cherish a sacred book which often portrays a God who is anything but love and who, in their own lives, are censorious and exclusive. But 'what is this thing called Love?' It appears at times to be used, especially in our western world, to sanction moral chaos. Is it love to opt out of guiding other people's lives, or voicing any kind of criticism, on the grounds that people must be free to make their own decisions? Misgivings are all around, emerging in the call for more 'tough love'. In the 'war against terror' what is the duty of love toward those who could in the end make civilised life impossible?

The Bible also leaves us with another profound problem. When the National Secular Society writes to The Times nowadays, one of its commonest lines of attack is to say that religion is incurably prescriptive and authoritarian. 'Well, what's wrong with that?' one is sometimes tempted to ask, surveying some of the wasteland which folly and self indulgence are making not just of society but of the planet. In any case, how would life go on without authority? Education has to have an authoritarian element of some kind because it is no use letting children carry on believing that two and two make three. There is a paradox here which needs to be faced.

At the heart of the religions of the People of the Book lie three things: faith, love and worship, and all three are impossible unless they are free. In certain circumstances you may be able to compel people to go through the outward motions of religion but you cannot force anyone to believe. They have to take that gamble for themselves because, as we were thinking earlier in these lectures, our faith cannot be proved. So too, as we all know from experience, you cannot force anyone to love. How many human tragedies have resulted from that kind of futile attempt! Worship; that too, has to be free. Naaman had to bow down with his master in the house of Rimmon, as he explained to Elisha, but his heart would always be with the God of Israel.

So far as morality and its crowning glory, love, are concerned, all that commands can ever do is to offer suggestions, wise we hope but people must make their own minds up as to what course to take. This means that the debate about all the many and various pieces of moral teaching in the Bible will never come to an end because life is always throwing up new situations through which we have to find our way. It happened with nuclear weapons. It is happening today with genetic engineering. New challenges never cease. What does the guidance in Scripture suggest to us now? All I would say at this point is that the Bible gives us a story in which people were not afraid to change their minds and learn new values. That is an uncomfortable legacy. We would much rather have a Word of God which settled all these questions for us. If we really care about true goodness - that is something we can never have.


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