Study Group - Week Two

Me And You

The first impression you will have had of this session is that its title is unfortunate. How many times were you corrected by adults and teachers when young for putting yourself first? We begin this way today because the discourteous reversed order of the title represents the truth about much human behaviour; we do very often put ourselves first.

Whilst society and schools were still suffused with Christian spiritual and moral teaching, even those not convinced by Christian standards were obliged to accept their general authority and would break this code certain that they would meet much opposition. Sunday School teachers instilled the principle of JOY: Jesus, Others, Yourself. Few dared argue.

In a society now quite distant from the mind of the New Testament, no such constraint operates. Asking secondary school students questions about the desirability of selfless behaviour, I have often had the reply, ‘Why should I. What’s in it for me?’. It would appear that for many, personal advantage reigns as the supreme good.

I drive into Shrewsbury along the A5. The single-carriageway section is limited to 60 mph. The last time I came in before this morning I was overtaken at a dangerous point by a car travelling at no less than 80 mph. Was the driver a doctor on the way to an accident? Almost certainly it was a selfish and thoughtless individual whose trivial desire to go fast was very likely to cause such an an accident. Taken in its true, full, social context, such behaviour is deeply dangerous to others and therefore unambiguously immoral. Not many speeding drivers see a problem in what they are doing, except in the matter of avoiding apprehension. They are, nevertheless, by any serious standard, immoral in their actions.

To move to a more sensitive and disputed issue, we might compare the number of elderly people consigned against their true wishes to residential care where two or three generations ago relatives would automatically have looked after them at home. Now many younger relatives insist on ‘having their own lives’. Being legitimately and respectably selfish is also quite a strong modern theme.

A well-known television advertisement from a firm operating here in this county showed a mother seated in a car outside a school eating her child’s lunch because she simply felt like doing so. 

In all these cases we are distant from the standards the Gospel and we can multiply examples of similar behaviour only too easily.

I imagine that we have all felt anger, frustration and despair in the face of this new fashionable immorality. Sometimes we persist in fury; sometimes we wonder if we should ‘move with the times’ and not be so observant, rigid or judgemental. Are we just hopelessly out of date and out of touch with where human life now is?

Yet the unease will not go away quite so simply. In our innermost selves we know that the life of Our Lord was directed towards the fulfilling the will of his Father and ours. He was always ‘The Man For Others’ He was the agent and spokesman for the Kingdom of God, whose standards are those of transcendent virtue, not practical compromise nor easy capitulation. He paid for all this with his blood, at the hands of people who, by comparison, had decidedly low standards.

Where, then, might we begin to find our way in this new world where many seem to think life consists simply of everyone looking after themselves?

One way of describing the world of self-care is to call it natural. Indeed, it is natural. When a baby cries because it is hungry it is making a bid for survival. When a tribe in a remote part of the world drives a neighbouring tribe away with weapons from its crops or pasture it is simply securing the survival of its own people. Human beings have within them a powerful and only partly-conscious drive towards survival; much of what they are naturally moved to do throughout their lives is connected with survival. To be sure of success, we naturally read survival not just as sufficiency, but as supremacy. There is a great urge to win, which shows in a controlled way in sport and in a barbaric way in spitefulness, exclusion, theft or brawling.

From the point of view of nature alone, such a pattern of behaviour is not remarkable, nor is it entirely reprehensible. Without an element of such drive all of us would be dead from starvation just hours after birth. What Christians would say, is that such an urge, especially in its uncreative excess, is not the summit of human life, but the power of destruction. It undermines and paralyses the best intentions of God in creation. 

There is something much better in store for us, which we call selflessness, service, care and love. This Divine Way goes beyond the natural and takes us quite simply into the realm of the supernatural - above nature and into the world of grace. Nature, or a modicum of it, is absolutely necessary, but it can never be an ideal or an end.

It is, however, rare just to stumble into the world of grace by accident. Given by God himself to human beings, women and men touched by his gracious standard not only live by it but hand it on to family, friends, neighbours and fellow workers - often unconsciously.

God is at work extending his Kingdom by all good means, but the power of nature’s independence is great and often temporarily overwhelms his gracious influence. 

This conflict has been described as a battle with the devil or a struggle between good and evil. Words are less significant than reality; whether we think in terms of this language or not, we nevertheless observe the existence of child abuse, ISIL murders, industries steadily destroying the very fabric of the world and good people passed over in employment as the result of carefully-implanted lies by those who wish to be promoted. Effective evil arises from nature without bounds and the only answer to evil is the continuous grace of God.

It seems to me that we are especially called in today’s world, a world in many ways similar to that which conservatives during the English Civil War called ‘These Troublous Times’, to live by the Gospel, not by the world. It will cost us dearly.

If anyone is inclined to doubt the analysis above, then it is worth reading verses 42 to 58 of the First Letter of St Paul to the Corinthians. Ordered by Cranmer to be read at every funeral service, it tells us just as much about life as it does about death and resurrection. 

Let us not grow weary and let us never fall into censoriousness and condemnation rather than be bearers of God’s grace!

Fr Alan