Thought for the Day

Good morning. This week will mark the centenary of the birth of Queen Elizabeth II and a new charity is being established in her honour. Its work will focus on restoring shared spaces in communities, based on her belief that ‘everyone is our neighbour’.

She articulated this view in her 2004 Christmas broadcast, drawing on Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan, which he told in response to a lawyer who asks with typical legal precision ‘Who is my neighbour’. The story is of a man who is attacked and left for dead at the side of a road. First a priest passes by on the other side. Then a Levite, another religious official, also passed by. At this point I think many in the crowd, listening to the story, had a knowing smile on their faces. They had heard this story many times before. Next would come the hero, a Jewish lay person who would help the man. This was an anti-clerical story and people like a story which makes a mockery of religious hypocrisy. But Jesus said a Samaritan came along, got his hands dirty by tending to the man’s wounds, put him on his donkey and booked him int the local hotel, breakfast included, for the next month. I think now smiles faded and mutterings began. ‘Did he say Samaritan? Doesn’t he know the historic hatred between Jews and those foreigner Samaritans. This preacher should keep out of politics!’

The late Queen commented that ‘the implication….. is clear. Everyone is our neighbour, no matter what race, creed or colour. The need to look after a fellow human being is far more important than any cultural or religious differences.’

I was working in the US last week, and in the midst of media and one to one discussions about Presidents and Popes, war and gas prices, and conduct in public office, I was struck by how an increasingly polarised culture uses religion and race to withdraw from shared spaces and to demonise the other. Yet, one evening I shared dinner with both a Jewish scholar and an African American scholar. Both spoke about their traumatic experiences of prejudice and oppression in racism and antisemitism. Both disagreed with each other vehemently on the current political situation and way forward. But both had faith in a God of justice and grace, and had discovered that in the shared space of mutual hospitality of meals together what it meant to be neighbours.

It gave me hope and demonstrated to me that a broken world can be healed not only by big political solutions but also by one meal at a time.

18 APRIL 26

I found myself not long ago in a courtroom as a witness for a person claiming asylum in the UK on the grounds that they had converted to Christianity, and would be persecuted in the country they had been born in if they returned. I’d got to know him well, prepared him to be baptised and he was a regular member of our congregation. We had even eaten mustard seeds together as we discussed the meaning of Jesus’s teaching in the gospels about the kingdom of God.
In court, he was asked to name the 12 apostles. He got to 5 before mistakenly mentioning Isaiah. The following Sunday I asked our own congregation, some of whom had been going to church for 50 years, to name the 12 apostles. No one could, and it was gently pointed out that the gospels themselves don’t quite agree on the precise 12 with a question over Thaddeus. Back in the courtroom, I was also asked whether I thought it was possible to be Christian without being able to read. Our congregation member was not literate. I refrained from commenting that for hundreds of years, nothing in Christian doctrine was written down until the formation of the Creeds in the 4th century, and simply answered yes, in my opinion I thought it was possible to be Christian without being able to read.
The system was working as it should, the lawyers were doing what the state required them to do. The court had to determine whether this conversion to Christianity was legitimate or not. But learning the apostles’ names or being able to read was not, and could never be, the place where true and deep lived faith would breathe and flourish.
The discovery that there is, in the words of the BBC reporters, a ‘sham industry’, providing assistance to people to enter the UK illegally on the grounds of sexuality or belief, is not very surprising. Enormous efforts are made by people trying to get around the housing or benefits systems for example, and huge sums are spent employing accountants to minimise the amount – legally or illegally - an individual has to pay in tax. For every bureaucratic system put in place to try to organise society for the good of the whole, there will be a shadow system, dedicated to get around it for personal gain.
In such shadow systems, the state’s attempt at fairness, however imperfectly or carelessly expressed sometimes, is replaced with active cruelty towards the most vulnerable in our society: by traffickers, or any who exploit the desperation of those whose life circumstances have placed them at the mercy of the system. State instruments will always be blunt, and political fashions come and go as to which issues attract the most attention. But the collective commitment to compassion, fair judgement, mercy and care towards those who are most in need of help, will never, can never, go out of fashion.

16 APRIL 26

Good morning.
They say that religion and politics don’t mix, but it’s impossible to separate the two when the Pope and the American President have gone head-to-head over the war in Iran. In a social media post, President Trump accused Pope Leo of being weak and advised that he should “focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician”. Pope Leo responded by insisting that he’s not a politician, but that the message of the Gospel, “‘Blessed are the peacemakers’, is a message that the world needs to hear today”.
This confrontation has catapulted the Pope onto the front pages of the world’s media, but he’s not the first modern pope to speak out against war. In 2003, when then Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, was asked to comment on the Iraq war, he said that “There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq.” He went on to ask “if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a ‘just war’.”
St Augustine gave a Christian interpretation to the idea of the just war in the early 5th century. He argued that, terrible though war always is, it is sometimes necessary to defend the innocent and preserve peace. However, it must seek the future well-being of the enemy, and be free from the lust for power or desire to dominate.
These ideas were developed by St Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, and they continued to shape western politics and international law long after Christianity ceased to be a major political influence. However ineffectual it might sometimes have become in the heat of battle, just war theory provided a restraining influence on the waging of war, especially with regard to the need to avoid the intentional targeting of non-combatants. Today, the nature of modern weapons and the bombing of densely populated areas means that civilian casualties, including children, usually far outnumber military deaths.
This is the context in which the Catholic Church’s opposition to war must be interpreted. Pope Leo is continuing a tradition set by all modern popes since the 1960s. In his Palm Sunday address, he quoted the prophet Isaiah when he said that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood’.” This is religious language, but it holds politicians accountable for shedding innocent blood. How could it do otherwise, when Christians worship a crucified God?