Category Archives: Religious good works

Behold, I make all things new

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Behold I make all things newA Happy and Prosperous New Year to you all!

 

A favourite homiletic trope is the idea that Jesus makes all things new. It is the theme running through Rowan Williams’ last Christmas homily before he leaves Lambeth for Cambridge at the end of this year — which, of course, is close at hand! (Courtesy of the Telegraph you can read his sermon in full here.) The biggest problem for someone who today who wants to claim that Jesus makes all things new is that it is now nearly 2000 years later, and Jesus is pretty old news. Try as they might, the leaders of the church can’t transform the “news” about Jesus into news. In fact, perhaps we need to coin a new word and speak of “olds” in this case, which is reasonably thought to be what news becomes when it ceases to be new.

Nevertheless, the good archbishop does his level best to present Jesus as being fresh and new, worthy not only of our attention, but new enough to be transformative. It’s really hard, though, to be convinced, especially given the deadliness of the olds that Jesus has become. In the same newspaper (in which the ABC’s homily is printed in full) there is a report about Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, and leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, and his campaign to put a stop to the government’s plan to legalise gay marriage. He used his sermon at midnight mass, according to the report, “to accuse ministers of acting to legalise same-sex marriage in defiance of public opinion.” Not to be upstaged by the pope, Nichols’ Christmas message was like the pope’s a denunciation of gay marriage, and a reaffirmation of his church’s stand that gay marriage is unnatural and defective. (Did the pope encourage his minions to address this issue in their Christmas homilies as he was planning to do in his own? I wonder.) In another report, we hear that Nichols is urging parishioners to write to their MPs, encouraging them to defeat the bill.

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“Cruelty, especially theological cruelty, has to be opposed, if necessary to the death.”

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I’ve taken a couple days off to read a book, not because I can’t read books and blog too, but because this book captivated me, entranced me, even appalled me. It was like a drug, and I had to read it straight through to the end. The book? Richard Holloway’s Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt. I read myself on almost every page — not the part about his childhood in the Vale of Leven, or his adolescence with the Society of the Sacred Mission, but the part about his sense of personal failure, the sense of having been a disappointment to God. That rang true. What also rang true was his years of questioning, doubting, wondering, slowly moving away from faith, seeing the church as at once a living icon of Jesus, in its bias towards justice, and yet an insistent failure, locking itself in nostalgia, pomp and ceremony, hanging onto its certainties, and even retreating into them from real engagement with the world, and with the nature of being human. But this is not a review of the book, but a number of reflections to which the book prompted me as I read.

Towards the end of the book he traces the final steps that led him, after much struggling and disappointment, away from the church, away from repeated attempts to overcome what seemed to him a failure to commit himself fully, as he had undertaken to do so many years ago as a boy, to a “given away” life, a life lived for others, a life lived solely for others, and, perhaps, most chiefly, for God. Of course, I must say at once that I never thought that I could have lived such a life, though I often faulted myself for failing, not so much to live up to promises and ideals already taken on with hopefulness and zeal, but even to want such a life. I can remember now how, on Sunday, during the holidays, when I was taken to church where the services were in a language that I only partly understood, I would have to read some “improving” book — usually the life of a missionary, like David Livingstone, or E Stanley Jones, an American Methodist missionary, author of Christ of the Indian Road, or anything that was not secular — and how, then, I used to think that one day I might have heroic faith like theirs. And how, too, over the years, those youthful aspirations were disappointed by an inability to believe with the same rock-like certainty.

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Why do Christians seek to do good?

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The question in my title was prompted by this article by Ross Douthat at the New York Times. Now, I’m not an American, and do not understand the ins and outs of American politics and religion as they impinge on health care (or on anything else, for that matter), which seem to me particularly byzantine (a 2005 study, prepared by the Missouri Foundation for Health, Hospital Charity Care in the United States, gives some insight into the complexities involved), so the following is not a comment on American health delivery systems. What I am mainly interested in here is some of the strange dynamics of Douthat’s approach to the issues involved, and how these are tied up with the question I ask in my title. Putting my point directly, it seems to me that it would not be unfair to see the intention behind the new medical insurance legislation (often called ”Obamacare”)  which provides medical coverage for a lot of people who simply weren’t covered before, as an attempt to make the American health care system more just. (In fact, as we will see in a moment, Douthat himself recognises this social justice dimension of ”Obamacare”.) It might therefore have been seen, by a reasonable person, as a way to help one’s neighbour — you know: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Douthat sees things through different lenses, because he thinks that government directives could turn Catholic compassion to ashes in their mouths, and this leads me to my question: Why do Christians, and, in particular, Catholics, seek to do good?

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