The Bishops of the Church of England recently produced a pastoral letter to the people and parishes of the Church of England, entitled ‘Who is my neighbour”.
As far as I know, at the moment you can only find it at https://www.churchofengland.org/media/2170230/whoismyneighbour-pages.pdf
The press sought to make it as controversial a document as they could by finding conservative MPs who would attack it for being too left wing. In doing so they seemed not to have read very much of the document. It seeks quite successfully not to be party political. In fact it states as one of its aims a desire to move beyond current adversarial party politics to find a new vision for the nation which has roots in the ideals of both left and right. It is sensitive, thoughtful, balanced and wise in what it says, but somehow it fails to take wings and fly. It fails to inspire, but why that is so is not easy to say – perhaps the problem lies just with the language which is earnest and worthy and not much more. Its aim, nevertheless, is to generate a national debate and to provide questions which we should put to our candidates seeking our vote. So far the former seems not to have taken off though there is still time.
It is vital to find better ways of talking about many fundamental questions facing us today. To name only a few of the major questions which contemporary politics seems determined to avoid, we need a richer justification for the state, a better account of the purposes of government, and a more serious way of talking about taxation. Most of all, we need an honest account of how we must live in the future if generations yet to come are not to inherit a denuded and exhausted planet.
It is not a matter of ticking off these issues one by one in election manifestos and speeches. Decent answers to the questions facing the nation will only emerge when politicians start to promote a dialogue with the people about a worthwhile society, how individuals, communities and the nation relate to each other, and the potentials and limitations of politics in achieving such ends. The different parties have failed to offer attractive visions of the kind of society and culture they wish to see, or distinctive goals they might pursue. Instead, we are subjected to sterile arguments about who might manage the existing system best. There is no idealism in this prospectus.
The time has surely come to move beyond mere “retail politics”, where parties tailor their policies to the groups whose votes they need, regardless of the good of the majority, whilst lobbyists, pressure groups and sectional interests come armed with their policy shopping lists and judge politicians by how many items they promise to deliver. Instead of treating politics as an extension of consumerism, we should focus on the common good, the participation of more people in developing a political vision and constructive ways to talk about communities and how they relate to one another.
Candidates who free themselves from clichés and party formulae may be showing the first signs of that human sympathy which would enable them to be real representatives of their constituents rather than simply needing our votes to gain power.
So much for the problems. The letter talks a lot about the recovery of community and the nation as a community of communities. It talks about relative poverty and the needs of those in work but with inadequate incomes. It calls for a greater bearing of our financial burdens by those with the broadest shoulders. It acknowledges the suspicion of those from other ethnic and national origins, in communities whose strengths have been lost through de-industrialisation. It considers our responsibilities for succeeding generations when many of our present policies are very short term in scope. It calls for a wider distribution of wealth and power rather than its increasing accumulation in the hands of the few, whether individuals or corporations. It seeks a new debate about national defence and the need for Trident and a reconsideration of our place in Europe and the ideals which led to the formation of the European community.
At the start of Lent we think about Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness. In one way or another they were about Jesus’ identity and his response to the problems of the world he had to live in. That response consisted of three refusals.
The first refusal involves taking short cuts to answer human need. Turning stones into bread is miraculous but it is also a short cut. Jesus refuses on the grounds that human beings have first to live by the words of God – their spiritual need come first. That of course doesn’t mean that you take the gospel to someone who is starving and try to teach them before feeding them. It means that any kind of response to human physical need has to be set in the context of our spiritual understanding of the meaning of that life which is to be physically nurtured. As the Bishops imply we need to understand ‘the better angels of our nature’ – the characteristics of our humanity of which we can be most proud and which we most desire to share.
Making people better off can never be a goal in itself – we have always to ask, ‘Better off for what?’
The second refusal involves not putting God’s love to the test. Satan quotes one of the psalms to the effect that God will always send his angels to protect you. So Jesus should test those words by jumping off the tallest tower of the Temple – and perhaps in the process wow the watching crowd. We live in a society where people often seek out the adrenalin surge of taking huge risks; whole hours of television can be based on watching people taking risks. People get a buzz out of driving too fast, playing the markets with vast sums of money, pushing themselves physically to the limit assuming that something always takes care of us, trying to prove we are invulnerable. But in the end we all have to die in a way we cannot predict – God does not step into prevent that, just as he did not enable Jesus to come down from the cross when the crowds shouted for him to do so. Jesus chooses instead to accept the truth of our vulnerability and our mortality.
The third refusal is the refusal of omnipotence in the form of political power. In one way or another we put people into positions of great power over our lives and we expect them to solve all the problems of our society in health and education and housing and world affairs. And when they fail we vote in another lot and when they fail we stop voting and just complain. What is wrong with Satan’s third temptation is not that the offer comes from him but that the offer is fraudulent. Jesus wisely refuses to believe in the possibility of that kind of power.
He rejects the offer with the words that we must worship and then serve God alone. And that could mean that when we find ourselves in any kind of position that gives us power, we should first pray, and then use that power in ways that in one way or another might be said to be serving God – his justice, his mercy, his loving-kindness, his patience, his concern for the poor and outcast. And we should not be deluded by our power – the achieving of anything in our kind of world will need to be tackled slowly, patiently and in small steps.
Perhaps then this story encourages to look for politicians with spiritual vision, with a real understanding of the difficulties we face, and with the patience and humility to be given the power of office.
The Vicar writes
Stephen Tucker