A New Age?
Sunday 19 July 2026
The Very Reverend Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury
Romans 8: 12–25
Matthew 13: 24–30, 36–43
‘An enemy has done this’.
According to the church historian Alec Ryrie you and I live in the age of Hitler. It’s a bold claim to make. Hitler died in the first half of the twentieth century; we are now in the second quarter of the twenty-first. Surely his malign grip on the threads of history has loosened? No, argues Ryrie. The horror of his regime and of the war in which it engulfed the world was such that, ever since, the European-American West has set its moral compass by the years in which it defeated him and destroyed the scourge of Nazism.
But if those years are our defining moment then how are we to live now? This is Ryrie’s point. What are the virtues for which the West stands as opposed to the vices which it condemns? Once, these virtues would have been discerned and drawn from the life and example of Jesus Christ and the broad spectrum of our Christian inheritance. But the tide of professed faith, Biblical literacy and religious practice has receded, leaving a yawning void. With what do we fill it? We’re against all sorts of things. Think of the debates of recent years. Think of the fury we’ve directed at imagined inheritors of Hitler’s mantle, imagined inheritors as various as Vladimir Putin, the leaders of the European Union, the architects of global migration, and the gunmen of Hamas: all these and more have been spoken of with reference to the Second World War. Locked into perpetual opposition, we’re much less clear about what we’re for.
‘An enemy has done this’. They are the words of the householder of Jesus’s parable, but they could have been spoken by most of the world leaders of the post-war years at one time or another. I’m reminded of George Orwell’s satirical account of political tyranny, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Emmanuel Goldstein is the sworn opponent of Big Brother’s rule. ‘An enemy has done this’. His image is routinely projected into every workplace for The Two Minutes Hate, in which he is castigated, abused, and vilified. A satire which has morphed into our reality. Two minutes hate? We have twenty-four hours hate, seven days a week, too often with violent and tragic consequences, as we have seen very recently.
‘An enemy has done this’: today those words sound like the beginning of yet another tirade. An enemy has done this – let’s legislate against the enemy – let’s shame the enemy – let’s cancel the enemy. But in the parable told by Jesus they are not.
Why are they not? Because the householder knows that the harvest is coming. He sows good seed in his field. At night an enemy sows weeds. Up sprouts wheat. Up sprout weeds. There is evil in the field, but it is sown among the good. The weeds are visible; they are no doubt a nuisance; but they do not absorb the householder’s time and attention. He knows that the harvest is coming. He trusts that the weeds will be dealt with, at the right time and in the right way. Meanwhile, he has a crop to nurture.
The former Foreign Secretary and Leader of the Opposition, William Hague, spoke here the week before last about two other Williams – Pitt the Younger, and Wilberforce – whose biographer he is. Hague reminded his audience of Wilberforce’s extraordinary habit of diary-keeping. The evangelical Christian and abolitionist MP kept a very close eye on how he spent almost every hour of every day and chastised himself for every second wasted. On Sunday 11 January 1795 he writes this: ‘This last 10 days have been sadly frittered away: nothing done, no thought, nothing but talk and civilities, concerning the real Effectiveness of which I greatly doubt. My mind, my understanding are in a sad state…O may I now be enabled to reform and to lead a Life of more self-denial and humble diligence both in the discharge of my daily work and above all in Spirituality’.
Wilberforce regrets his poor use of time because he understands that there is such a thing as a proper use of time. Time wasted is a vice when time used well is a virtue. He has a crop to nurture: he makes a self-critical note when his prayers are curtailed or when his study of Scripture is foreshortened. Wilberforce understands that to be ensnared by the weeds of easy company and idle chat is to neglect the good seed for which the field was planted, and to abandon the work that he has been given to do within it.
In our first reading, from the Letter to Romans, Saint Paul writes not of weeds strangling a wheat field but of an entire creation subject to futility. Perhaps it’s an image that is in Wilberforce’s mind as he assesses the hours he has given to the futility of doubtless agreeable debate. Yet while the householder of the parable trusts that the harvest is coming Paul believes that it has already begun. ‘…We ourselves …have the first fruits of the Spirit’, he writes. God’s gifts already live in God’s people. God’s Spirit springs up among God’s people. God’s people have a crop to nurture.
If our attention is solely on the weeds – on tracking them down and rooting them out – then we run the risk of which the householder speaks, the risk of having a field stripped of weeds but containing nothing but bare earth. To leave behind the age of perpetual opposition is to turn our attention to the wheat. We need urgently to plant something in the weeds’ place.
And perhaps, just perhaps, we might turn back to the life and example of Jesus Christ and the broad spectrum of our Christian inheritance. Christians are not immune to the seduction of perpetual opposition, of course: we’re against contemporary worship songs, or substitutionary atonement, or exclusionary ethics. But what might Christians model for the angry culture in which we’re immersed? What virtues might we nurture as wheat in the world’s field?
First: humility. The householder knows that the harvest is coming. St Paul knows that glory is to be revealed. You and I have, in the words of the Prayer Book, no power of ourselves to help ourselves. We are penultimate; we will be judged by the God from whom we have come and to whom we will return.
Second: repentance, a consequence of humility. The householder knows that the roots of the wheat are hopelessly tangled with the roots of the weeds. St Paul admits his need of redemption. We need to change. Daily; hourly – a lifetime’s work. It’s Wilberforce’s gift to us – perhaps we need to keep a diary.
And third: hope. This week, the nation’s turns upon the skill and luck of one man taking up office in Westminster. It may prove fragile. The hope to which we hold is not cheerful effervescence; neither is it minutely judged calculation. Hope that is seen is not hope, writes St Paul. But we hope for what we do not see – for God who in love raises Christ from death, the first fruits of a new creation in which sorrow and crying and pain will be no more.
England’s sixty years of hurt have not ended. But humility, repentance, and hope may yet reawaken us, and reawaken us to a new age. Amen.