The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Readings 1 Kings 18. 17-39, John 1. 19-28
    The first great personality in tonight’s readings is Elijah. He confronts the people with a stark choice; ‘How long will you go limping between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, follow him.’ The people have not yet realised that there can in reality be only one God. Jezebel, the wife of King Ahab, has introduced into Israel the worship of her Phoenician cult of Baal. For the Jewish people this is somewhat confusing; Baal simply means Lord or Master – it is a word they can use to describe their own God, though the proper name given to their God was Jahweh. The trouble was that there were more than one Baal in the Middle East and they all had their prophets and their cults. Was it therefore appropriate and perhaps politic to worship them alongside the God of Israel – especially if someone as powerful as Jezebel encouraged you do so and flooded the court with her prophets?
    For Elijah, there was no choice; after all his names means, ‘My God is Yahweh’. The people must choose and he initiates the contest with the prophets of Baal to help them choose. The result is a triumphant success. And yet if we fast forward to Elijah’s encounter with the still small voice on Mount Horeb we find a somewhat ironic comment on Elijah’s greatest moment. The Lord does not appear in wind or earthquake or fire nor are Elijah’s claims quite true. He has protested on more than one occasion that the Israelites have rejected God’s covenant, and that he is the only prophet left. God points out that Elisha is ready to take over from him and that in fact there are seven thousand loyal Israelites who have not bowed the knee to Baal. Elijah is not so dramatically alone as he likes to think.
    The second great personality in tonight’s readings is John the Baptist. The authorities from Jerusalem are curious about his identity – who exactly is he, how does he identify himself? And unlike Elijah he is curiously reticent. He is not Elijah, reborn, nor is he the Prophet, nor is he the Messiah. He is in fact more like a vanishing act, comparable (as Leslie Houlden has said)  to the Cheshire cat who was reduced to a grin. John is reduced to a voice, ‘a voice calling in the desert, “Make straight the way of the Lord.” ‘   John’s role in the gospels is somewhat perplexing; it is as though the gospel writers were afraid that he was somehow a rival to Jesus. They were almost embarrassed by the fact that Jesus was baptised by John – and from other evidence we know that John had a lot more followers than we might have guessed. The gospel portrait of John is content to point the way; and in death he is also a forerunner, dying because he like Jesus, speaks truth to power.
    The third great personality on our minds tonight is Nelson Mandela. Great claims have been made for him on a Biblical scale, but he was content to say of himself that, ‘I was not a Messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.’ Of course we know more about the life of Mandela than we do about any Biblical figure. We know about his complicated personal life; we know of his changing views about how the campaign against apartheid should be conducted; we know about his preparedness to become involved in guerilla warfare and terrorism if sabotage without loss of life failed to move the national government; we know about the dubious figures he related to on the world stage without drawing enough attention to their dubious human rights records; we know of his failure in office to recognize the seriousness of the Aids crisis as he himself later acknowledged; we know that he failed  to deal decisively with the members of his administration involved in corruption and scandal. We know all these things and yet we also know that he was undoubtedly a magnanimous and inspiring and courageous and hugely forgiving man. He so lived his life that he was able to give people hope. He knew like John the Baptist that he was only part of a movement towards a goal, and his personal success was not that goal. He knew, like Elijah, that you cannot limp along not making up your mind about crucial issues of justice and freedom. You cannot just live with what is not right, assuming you can do nothing about it and putting off a decision because the situation is just too complicated. There can be no more than two opinions about things like Apartheid and you have to choose. But he also knew that having chosen there will be many complicated decisions on the way to achieving your goal which you will get wrong and where self subordination will often achieve  more than confrontation. ‘If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.’
    These three great characters  set before us tonight might set us thinking about what intelligible ethical action is really about. No moral act is without a background – a status quo against which it is reacting.  In so acting we are inevitably constrained by people and situations about which we cannot know everything. And because that is so, our moral actions are always necessarily open to failure. Our significant moral actions cannot be well formed or orderly. There is a sense in which actions intended to change the status quo will always be in some sense violent because we are staking a claim over against the other who will require to be understood and recognized. Nevertheless this is surprisingly not an act of self assertion; it is an act of self gift – a giving of the self (as Mandela found at the cost of 26 years of imprisonment) – into a situation where you may fail. Our truly moral actions are launched into a situation where  we inevitably  introduce disorder and imbalance  by  misrecognising the interests of others in some way, And yet if we do not take that risk we become powerless. If we take the risk we submit ourselves to negotiating as truthfully as we can with all that  could not be known in advance. We have to take the risk in faith. We have to take it as individuals and as a church which constantly challenges sectional interests and proprietorial expressions of power. And we do that knowing that we act out of the universal saving generosity of God, even though we know our actions are always flawed and risky. And yet we take that risk because we know that in some small way what we do is an imitation of the self giving of God in Jesus Christ.
    Of course if you are an oppressed people the idea is unbearably hard that even you cannot simply take the moral high ground, that you have to take risks and see your oppressor as still human. It is incredibly hard that as a leader of an oppressed people you  have to accept that for the sake of eventual reconciliation you may have to make concessions on the way.  But that was what Nelson Mandela accepted in forging a rainbow nation – and that is why his example gives us hope that at least sometimes political action can also be ethical action of the highest order. His life, as our Archbishop said this morning was a life marked by amazing grace.
The reflection on ethical action is drawn from Rowan Williams’ essay, ‘Between politics and metaphysics; reflections in the wake of Gillian Rose’ published in  Wrestling with Angels (2007)