4 December 2022
Advent 2, Year A
Psalm 11
OT Lesson : 1 Kings 18.17-39
NT Lesson : John 1.19-28
Text: Ahab said to [Elijah]: “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?” (1 Kings 18.17)
No wonder the people who went out to be baptised by John asked whether he could be the prophet hinted at in the Old Testament, perhaps Elijah, that archetypal troubler of Israel, or even the Messiah. There are three passages in the Old Testament which together gave rise to the popular belief that Elijah would return. After all, it was generally understood that he had never really died. Leaving his cloak behind as a token of his authority for his successor Elisha, the account of his departure in the book of Kings (2 Kings 2.11) speaks of him being separated from Elisha by a chariot of fire and ascending by a whirlwind into heaven. There is no mention of his death. Moreover, in the book Deuteronomy (18.15) Moses had promised the people that God would one day raise up another prophet like himself, whose words they would heed; and finally, in the closing verses of the Old Testamen, the prophet Malachi had promised Elijah’s return before the great and terrible day of the Lord (Malachi 4.5). John dressed like a prophet, and spoke like a prophet. Was he then the fulfilment of these prophecies? Perhaps he was, but he preferred to be identified with Isaiah’s voice of preparation. Get ready. Make straight the way of the Lord.
Is it you, you troubler of Israel? The long and honourable tradition of the prophet speaking truth to power dates back at least to Elijah confronting Ahab, if not indeed to Moses confronting the Pharaoh. In our own time it has been upheld by such characters as Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Desmond Tutu. Like Elijah, they could have responded that it was not they who were trouble Israel, but their accusers, who had forsaken the commandments of the Lord and followed the false prophets of Baal. In more recent times our latter-day prophets have been moved to protest against the self-serving policies of the nationalist, racist or class-based regimes which sought to silence all dissent.
The leaders of such regimes have always found it convenient to take the line that religious leaders should concentrate on spiritual matters and refrain from interfering in matters of politics and economics. They may not be quite so direct in challenging the prophet as King Ahab. Is it you, you troubler of Israel? But their meaning is the same. Don’t interfere. Keep off the grass. In responding to such challenges, the Church has to be steadfast and courageous in insisting that we do have the right, indeed we have the duty to speak out on the way society is organised, and for whose benefit. Those of us who venture to do so from this pulpit may be humble enough to ask your forbearance when you disagree, as well as being open to challenge at the church door, but above all we have to remember that we have no business saying anything at all which is not deeply and firmly rooted in our understanding of the gospel.
This year is the 80th anniversary of the publication in 1942 of an important little book by Archbishop William Temple, entitled Christianity and Social Order, which seems to have been something of a model for the modern voice of prophecy. Not only did Temple send his book in draft to some of the leading economists of his day, including Maynard Keynes, William Beveridge and Richard Tawney, but he also took care to expose his thinking to open debate in an extensive programme of public conferences, consultations and meetings both before and after publication. It was Temple who coined the expression Welfare-State more than a decade earlier, in 1928, in a series of lectures published under the title of Christianity and the State, in which he argued (London: Macmillan, 1928, p 169), and here I quote: that the First World War ‘was a struggle between the idea of the State as essentially Power – Power over its own community and against other communities – and [an alternative vision] of the State as the organ of community, maintaining its solidarity by law designed to safeguard the interests of the community’. He thought that ‘the Power-State might have yielded to sheer pressure of circumstances in the course of time’; but it [was] ‘contrary to the psychology of the Power-State to suffer conversion; it was likely to fight before it let a Welfare-State take its place.’
The First World War had many causes, and it was a considerable stretch to present it as a battle between the Power-State and the Welfare-State, especially if by Welfare State we now mean a specific set of policies developed by governments during and after the Second World War. But Temple’s original concept, which may perhaps be regarded as godfather to those policies, was an expression of social values rooted in the gospel concern for my neighbour and for the concept of community. However you choose to label them, Temple asserted that those values had been worth fighting for in the First World War against the ruthless authority of the Power-State, which demands the community’s unquestioning allegiance as an expression of subservience to my country and its leaders right or wrong.
The religious underpinning of Temple’s concept of the Welfare-State was made clear in a letter he wrote to The Times in 1934: ‘The gravest evil and bitterest injury … is the spiritual grievance of being allowed no opportunity of contributing to the general life and welfare of the community.’ We see here that his overarching concept was not just about the individual being able to rely on the support of the community when necessary, but equally about every individual citizen having the opportunity to contribute to the welfare of society in the sense of its well-being or the common good.
Returning to John the Baptist, Matthew and Luke cite John him as promising that his successor will baptize not with water but with fire, and John’s gospel goes on to say he will baptize with the Holy Spirit (John 1.33) which at Pentecost would take the form of tongues of fire as it inspired the waiting apostles. Water and fire. John’s baptism was a work of cleansing and preparation. He is after all the forerunner, not the Lord himself. We do not come to John, for he points us on to Jesus. He points us forward to one who will say: Come unto me. We come to one who is himself the way and the truth and the life, but when we come, we are baptised not just with the water of cleansing but with the fire which fills our hearts, or as Temple describes it in his great commentary on John’s Gospel ‘a positive energy of righteousness, a consuming flame of purity’.
The Power-State still challenges the prophet. Is it you, you troubler of Israel? It is the fire of the Spirit, burning in our hearts, which has the capacity to create in us and around us that Welfare-State of Temple’s dreams, greater, deeper and stronger than any Power-State, that Welfare-State which our Lord Himself calls us to build and to pray for, on earth as it is in heaven.