I was speaking last week with a woman I often see on the station platform as I wait for the train I take to work from Brondesbury Park to Hampstead Heath. I had spoken with her before because she knows one of my Chaplaincy colleagues at the Royal Free and his children go to school with hers. She was telling me what it felt like on the streets since the bombs of 7th July. She felt everyone was looking at her and she just kept her eyes to the ground. She felt judged because of her distinctive Islamic dress. She wasn’t seen or known for the person she was inside, or for what she stood for, her values. People made assumptions about her. She was type-cast, put in a box labelled ‘a supporter of terrorism’.
I struggled with the readings appointed for tonight’s service. The visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon’s court, a magnificent story of overwhelming adulation, was no doubt written to reinforce the regal claims of Solomon and his dynasty. The queen comes with ‘a great retinue, with camels bearing spices and very much gold and precious stones’, and on meeting the king she is bowled over by his accomplishments and his wisdom. In response to the climax of the story, the fact that God has delighted in the king and set him on the throne of Israel, she showers him with the gold, the spices and precious stones. It feels a little like a production from Hollywood. And I cannot help feeling that spin doctors have been at work either originally in how Solomon’s image was polished and presented to the queen or later when the story was written up.
And then there was the account in the Acts of the Apostles of Paul and Barnabas and their meeting with the magician Bar-Jesus. Instead of overwhelming admiration we find the opposite extreme with them accusing the man of being ‘the son of the devil, enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy’ and causing him, in the name of God, to become blind. Paul and Barnabas are on a mission and St Luke, in writing his account, is no doubt keen to show that nothing will stand in its way. Later in the same chapter Paul preaches to both Jews and Gentiles and describes God’s dealings with his people over the centuries, from the time in Egypt to the establishment of the land of Israel in Canaan. He tells of God giving the people judges until the time of the prophet Samuel, when the people asked for a king and Samuel anointed Saul and then David, from whose descendants God brought to Israel the Saviour Jesus.
It may be that the readings for tonight have been put together to remind us that for Paul and the first Christians the magnificence of the kingdom under David and Solomon are simply precursors of the Kingdom brought in through Jesus and that nothing will be allowed to halt its progress. And yet, as I read the passages thinking about the present and all that is going on here in London, I couldn’t help noticing the way both stories gain their power from being extreme.
In the first we are shown extreme adulation. May the Queen of Sheba have been a little overenthusiastic in her assessment of Solomon? Surely no one is quite that wonderful! And while it is important to confront evil, perhaps Paul and Barnabas were acting in an extreme way and were themselves blind in their exposure and punishment of the sorcerer Elymas. In showing the superiority of the new message, perhaps they were demonising the opposition in ways that were not entirely fair?
So on the one hand we find adulation and on the other demonisation. This makes for clear and powerful stories, but may not be true to real life which is rarely, if ever, that straight forward. It is much harder to live with and acknowledge complexity. Human life is muddled and rarely is the truth simple to grasp. And we are all full of mixed motives. When we reflect on our own lives I suspect we would all acknowledge that none of our motives are wholly pure. We are influenced by all sorts of things such as self-interest, inertia, tribalism of one kind or another .
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But it is surely when we recognise and live with complexity that we come to realise the danger of claiming all the moral high ground for ourselves and our own group. And we may then find the humility to live penitently, knowing that we often get things wrong, are blind to the truth and even when we think we are certainly in the right always allow for the possibility that we may be wrong.
On the Thursday following the bombs of 7th July, many held a 2 minute silence at 12 noon. A chaplaincy colleague at University College London Hospital found himself sharing a platform in Queen’s Square with a Muslim Imam. After each had said a prayer, they spontaneously hugged one another and the hundreds of people gathered there broke into applause.
It is natural to be afraid in the face of danger. But it is surely vital that that fear doesn’t drive us to extremes and to oversimplify a complex world. Yes, like St Paul, we must resist evil. But as Christians, as human beings, we must resist the temptation to demonise, to make assumptions about other people, their motives and values, sometimes simply because of the clothes they wear. We must surely find the courage and imagination to continue to reach out in love to one another and so face an often frightening and always complex future together rather than apart.
Robert Mitchell