One of the stranger features of the Old Testament world view, and especially that of the Psalms and the Prophets, is an ambiguity about geological and meteorological phenomena and the way in which they are investment with a moral force. Amos envisages God’s anger as an earthquake shattering the Temple. Had the choir continued with Psalm 18 we would have heard of God covering himself in a canopy of dark rain clouds, advancing out the brightness with hailstones and lightening. The terrifying imagery is as appropriate to the avenging God as the rescuing one and it is often not quite clear which side of that single coin we stand. I suspect the ambiguity is intentional.
On the other hand, Amos’ vision of the restoration of Israel uses ordered human activity. There is, admittedly an element of fantasy as the seasons seem to move into frenetic syncopation, as the ploughman laps the reaper or as the mountains drip Sauternes or Tokay. But the essential image is of the restoration of order; the same order that God imposed at the beginning, as he separated dark from light and solid ground from dangerous and volatile water. This ordering culminates in man’s co-operation, naming the animals and domesticating them and cultivating the fruits of the earth (although the need to work at cultivation was, of course, a result of the Fall) In Amos’ vision happiness and plenty follow from rebuilding and replanting.
Paul’s moral universe is different; the powers of darkness are supernatural; Paul specifically says that the moral contest is not with flesh and blood “but the powers of this dark world and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” The world outside is thoroughly bad and we need the armour of God to defend ourselves.
This follows the familiar injunctions reinforcing family order (slaves would be considered part of the family) Paul conceives the Christian community as a household. He is conservative; we were spared the now simply embarrassing exhortations for wives to obey their husbands; his endorsement of slavery is, perhaps, only a little less uncomfortable. In his different way, however, Paul is as concerned with order as Amos and the prophets are, but it is not the order of man’s relations with the physical world but the order of a community. The Christian community is the body of Christ and it needs to function according to ordered principles motivated by mutual love and respect.
Paul’s morality here is introspective compared to that of Amos and the Psalms; the outside world is bad and threatening; the Christian body must look to itself and make secure its vital bonds, of husband and wife, parent and child, master and slave. This is a difficult model for us.
First, it assumes a very short lifespan. Paul is not interested in any sort of social reform because it is irrelevant if, as he believes, the second coming is imminent.
Perhaps more importantly, he is deeply unreconstructed and, given the Hellenistic culture around him, unimaginative. He was not, we assume, a conventional family man himself. So why does he assume that society cannot be composed of anything but conventional households, apparently incapable of accommodating people who might prefer, for example, not to be married or, God forbid, the company of their own sex? Is it that he sees disorder in any deviance from conventional family life? Having modelled the Christian community on paternalistic lines, other social groupings, or the absence of conventional bonds, is dangerous and potentially, if not actually, sinful. We are I think much readier to see virtue in the outlandish, and not so ready to assume that plain vanilla family life is right for all. And we do not believe that our won Christian community is the only place that we will find virtue and grace.
It’s plain that the moral worlds of Amos and Paul are a long way from our own, although natural phenomena still frighten us and still cause devastation but we do not attribute any moral dimension to earthquakes and floods. We may suspect that our abuse of our world has contributed or exacerbated the disaster that we witness but we don’t see them as a punishment, any more than we see a bumper harvest as a reward. But although we understand the mechanics of the world much more clearly and know how disasters occur, we are no wiser as to why they do. And we are just as conscious of evil around us; we see deprivation, greed and despair in our own society and further afield have witnessed human evil on a possibly unprecedented scale in the last century.
So is Paul’s defensive reaction right for us? Should Christians just defend themselves from this evil? For some, and Paul’s communities may well have been the same, self defence and survival remain the paramount consideration. We shouldn’t forget that many Christian communities are persecuted in a way we find hard to conceive. Happily we are not in that position; we can survive the flaming arrows of Professor Dawkins and the paper darts Mr Hitchens without divine armour.
But we are still faced with evil around us, not perhaps attacking our religion, but attacking ideas that we hold sacred, because as Christians we believe we are made in God’s image and with all creatures we share a heavenly father. The torture and exploitation that kill human dignity and starvation and disease that needlessly extinguish life itself are aberrations; they are not how God wants the world to be.
Should we just defend ourselves against this disorder? Surely Christian love demands that we go on the offensive. The central evil in so much of this disorder is the absence, or the perversion, of love. We cannot prevent tsunamis or earthquakes but we can try to remove the causes of man’s inhumanity. If we remove poverty, injustice and persecution, we shall go a long way to sterilising the ground in which evil grows. I believe that we should turn from the introspective defence of the Christian body to bring the gospel to the world outside.
There is a hint of this in the last item in Paul’s divine panoply and his only offensive weapon; that is “the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God”. Paul knew about the word of God; there have been few more prolific missionaries. It is odd that this man whose life was spent and eventually sacrificed to spreading the Gospel to outsiders, most especially gentiles, in the face of opposition from the infant “established” church, should in this passage of Ephesians be so inward looking and so insular.
An explanation is perhaps that Paul sees mutual respect and love as the glue of the ideal society, which is the body of Christ. It is by living a life of love that we shall show others the good news. St Francis urged his followers to preach by their actions, using words only as the last resort. But St Francis did not stay at home; he took the Gospel to those who needed it on the outskirts of society, as did Jesus. Like St Paul, it may be observed that neither, were exactly good family men. We should demonstrate love in our dealings with each other, but we need to get out into the world too, primarily the wider human community but equally, following Amos’ vision, in harmony and co-operation with the rest of creation.
Amen.