Lent 4

Fourth Sunday of Lent Numbers 21.4-9 Whoever looks at the serpent shall live Ephesians 2.1-10 Christ raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places John 3.14-21 Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness

1. The scandal and dignity of man 2. Christ the truth of humanity 3. Economics and private man 4. Economics and public man 5. Economy and state against the family 6. Two societies 7. The humility of God We are on the way to Easter, at which the Church celebrates the covenant of God with man established by the resurrection. The Church, the community brought into being by the resurrection, can suffer the passion, and can do so in behalf of the nation. Lent is the way of the cross by which the Church witnesses to this covenant for the nation. Our life together is a gift which God gives, sustains and redeems for us in this covenant We can give to one another, and give ourselves, in hope of our restoration and redemption. The whole economy of human commerce is based on our giving ourselves to one another: we may enter covenants, contract with one another and start business initiatives which promote and support a unified society. Redemption comes to each of us, and renewed life comes to our society as a whole, from the God who has approached us and given his name to us in Jesus Christ, not from the gods we construct for ourselves. 1. The scandal and dignity of man in Christ Whoever looks at the serpent shall live The readings for the fourth Sunday of Lent tells us that Christ is lifted up for us, and in Christ mankind is raised and redeemed. Our reading from the Book of Numbers tells us about the years in which the people of Israel are being led through the wilderness. They have found this discipleship hard; their back-biting has grown into a plague of mutual recrimination. The whole people has been bitten, so the plague is here visualised as snake bite. The strange antidote for this case of snake-bite is to grasp the snake itself. Moses erects the figure of a serpent, and anyone in trouble has only to look up to the serpent to be restored. Restoration appears here in the form of the snake from which we recoil. On the cross, Christ is a repellent and deathly sight: as Isaiah puts it, ‘There was nothing in his appearance that you would desire him.’ The death of Christ is an utterly offensive and unpleasant event which all of us would wish to avoid. This

why the saviour appears here as this repellent ‘serpent’. How desperate would we have to be to look for solutions in the cross and the death of Christ? How desperate will our society have to be to see its redemption in the Church? It would represent the defeat of so much twentieth century aspiration to recognise Christ and his Church as our way out of our crises. 2. Christ is the truth of humanity Christ is raised up for us to wonder at. He is God with man and man who is with God. This vast image of humanity redeemed and in communion with God is held up before us. When we look to him and pray we are saved. Christ is the truth of our identity, and the question raised over all other accounts of who we are. Will we stick with our own smaller and more short-term identity? Or will we look up to Christ and receive what he offers? The Christian faith tells us that we are loved and known, and that we needy and full of sin. It brings us the news that we are also forgiven. There is no forgiveness, there is no cancellation debts, no fresh starts to be found anywhere except through this cross and in this faith. In communion with God which Christ has opened for us, we may be reconciled to our fellow man, enter covenants that last and grow to the full stature of man with God for, according to our reading from the Letter to the Ephesians, God ‘raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.’ Christ has laboured on our behalf: he is the provider of mankind’s only free lunch. We may provide for one another as we receive and distribute what he has provided for us. God has acted generously to us, and invites and enables us to be generous and active on one another’s behalf. From him we may receive the abilities by which we can act and trade on our own account, for we are ‘created in Christ Jesus for good works’, as Ephesians puts it. We may discover that labour can be its own reward, for we may take pride in those whom we have served and lift and present them to God in thankfulness, and then we will no longer be alienated from the product of our labour. God is the one who is able to tell the true worth of our labour and our lives. The Letter to the Ephesians tells us that man is intended for life with God, and that this life is not yet entirely knowable to us. For man, the creature of God is a mystery, whom we may know, but not know entirely. He is a work in progress, and this means that he has a future that is not yet known to us. And man is male and female. Ephesians tells us that, in Christ, that the old pagan wall between man and woman is broken, so that they do not live in separate and antagonistic spheres. Man and woman are now in covenant, and may now love serve one another in freedom; the difference between them is the source of their complementarity and the basis of all our distinctions, and so of the individual identity of each of us. The tells us that, as man is married to God in Christ, so humans are intrinsically covenantal and ‘married’ creatures, and that we may acknowledge and celebrate this by entering freely our own covenant with one particular woman or man in marriage. Established by the love of God, we may love our own wife or husband first, and then love our children, and then love our friends and neighbours, and thus through these covenants we are free to act in generosity without limit.

3. Economics and private man The Christian faith is not offered in a vacuum, but in a world of competing religions and worldviews. The long experience of the Church in offering the gospel to many societies enables us to describe the worldview of our contemporaries and the challenges faced by our society. This faith holds out to us the largest and most developed account of man. In it man is able to demand reasons for the way things are, and in the bible is positively exhorted to demand reasons from God. The Christian faith offers us reasons, and so enables us to reason together about these reasons. To ask whether religion has any business in politics is to ask whether the longterm should inform our discussions about the short-term. It is to ask whether ideas, gathered over generations can help us wrestle with our own problems. I have suggested that our own problems have come about because we have not heard and wrestled with the ideas of our predecessors about society and the economy. The only way we may emerge out of the crisis that our short-termism has brought about is by turning to the long term, and hearing again what previous generations of British people, and amongst them Christians, have learned. We need their virtues in order to restore the society which can sustain an ordered economy. We need a little history of economics. It is essential to the claim of neoclassical economics that economics is timelessly true, as though it had dropped down from the heavens. It does not wish to acknowledge that it has a history. Nonetheless, what we presently know as ‘economics’ is part of a greater economic tradition, not the whole. Economics has devolved out of the disciplines of politics and of ethics, which themselves belong to the Humanities, in which all accounts of human being as a social, political and reasoning creature are gathered. Over many centuries Europe has accrued a vast tradition of thought about how to act well and so live well together as a society. A society is healthy to the extent that its members are generous and just towards each other. Individual responsibility, generosity and justice, and so an orientation towards the common good, is the goal that the classical tradition of political philosophy points us to. In their discussions of what happens when men meet in the marketplace, for many centuries Christians preferred the description offered by Plato and particularly Aristotle, developed by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. But from the seventeenth century a series of reduced accounts of man and politics, that owed more to Stoicism and Epicureanism began to take over. These identify other people not as persons but as sub-personal forces which we have to master or fly from. What had been the dominant account, owed to Plato and Aristotle, of how to be a responsible individual in pursuit of public acclaim through acting and reasoning well, began to be replaced by a much more limited account. When it cut lose from the great tradition of political philosophy from which it had come, economics became an autonomous discipline, which was gradually considered more fundamental than politics. It became the science of man in which man was a creature without a past. Modern or neoclassical economics is most often identified with Adam Smith. Smith did not intend that we should be care-nothing autonomous agents without responsibility. We are not ‘selfish’ atoms. Smith wanted to

see men behave well as citizens and public actors, who were able to act for the common good. He was determined that men should not conspire together to create monopolies that corner the market and act against the wider common interest. The concept of ‘sympathy’ that he introduces in his ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’ is the key to ‘The Wealth of Nations’: Smith expects us to act from our own best instincts, which he knew are a mixture of self-respect and fellow-feeling. Self-respect is inextricably related to our concern for what other people think of us, and so to our reputation. The market should be free because we should each of us be free to form relationships and enter covenants with whomever we wish. When the market is skewed by big corporations and by government revenue-raising or -spending it is not free. Smith simply wanted to remove the blockages to individual initiative caused when the market is dominated by any group of self-interested big players. Smith nonetheless dropped two of the fundamental economic concepts employed by Augustine and Aquinas, and limited himself to the two concepts of labour and exchange. But others came after Smith who were convinced that the entire existing tradition of deliberation about what is good, of Plato and Aristotle, and Augustine and Aquinas and their heirs, had become hopelessly tangled. They decided to give up on it, and cut moral language loose from all previous discussion of what is good or true. This new generation of political philosophers were the Utilitarians, best known of whom is Jeremy Bentham. The utilitarians wanted us to give up talking about right or wrong, or good or bad, even in the sense of ‘good for some purpose’, as when we say ‘this will not look good to other people’. Any good is good to the extent that it is wanted enough to raise its price to the point at which its present owner is prepared to sell it. They have encouraged us to think only in terms of good as this is established by the satisfaction of the person who employs enough money to outbid all others and so claim it. The value of a thing, its utility, is determined by the price that reflects the preferences of all agents in the market. Within this Utilitarian account, all our acts are seen as ‘preferences’, that is, as private. After the eighteenth century the whole tradition of thought about being human in public was turned inside out. As neoclassical or utilitarian economics became the dominant idiom of public life, our various actions in the public square were described in terms of individual market transactions in which each of us imagines that we act privately, as though no act of ours could be seen by others or would be emulated by others. Every transaction is considered in isolation from all previous and subsequent transactions. Economics understands each transaction as though it took place in the secrecy of a private room, and no act of ours could create envy in others or induce them to copy us. The inside world is the whole idiom in which we understand the public world. We said that economics was a sub-discipline of politics. But even here there is a problem. For economics is not a discipline, that is, it does not offer us any of the discipline by which we can learn to take responsibility and to act in the market as mature political agents. In this modern or neoclassical economics everyone is taken to be unaware of those around them and unable to attribute motives to them. It is as if we cannot take one another seriously as deliberative, reasoning and public creatures. But economics need not remain constrained by the utilitarian heresy. There

are always alternative traditions, and when these have been forgotten the Church is able to bring them back. Bentham’s cadaver still squats amongst us: perhaps it is time to give him a Christian burial. 5. The economics of public man We have said that love is primary, and yearning for love and reputation is the motor of human interaction. St Augustine tells us that we love our family and so we are able to put their needs in order and decide how to distribute between them the various goods that we know they need. It is a given that we love and care for ourselves, and that we distribute goods in proportion as we love others, so we feed and care for our own children before anyone else’s. Because we both love and know them, we are able decide between their needs and so to achieve the best distribution of the resources we have. We give, or distribute, goods between the persons we love. Love is a fundamental economic concept, also referred to as distribution. Augustine tells that though love can of course turn to narcissism, this is just a perversion of a self-love that is proper to every creature. It is a given that we look after ourselves first: when some part of your body itches, you scratch; when you fall over you pick yourself up, when you are cold you put a coat on. You do all these things for yourself. Then when your wife is cold you fetch her coat, when your child cries you comfort them. In the letter to the Ephesians husbands are told that they ‘should love their wives as they do their own bodies… for no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it’. (Ephesians 6.28-9). The point is that you show a basic self-preservation and self-respect, and you love and look after those who are closest to you in similar fashion. Love and selfrespect are primary, and the basis on which you can be appealed to do something similar for others who are not quite so close. What the family does first for its own members, it may then begin to do for others; it may be generous and neighbourly. When its outward service becomes big enough we refer to it as charity and the voluntary sector. If this service continues to grow because people offer to pay for it, it has become a business. Many firms started as family businesses, because a husband and wife, or some other combination of family members, found that the family’s own provision for itself stretched first to include the neighbourhood and went on to attract paying customers. Another fundamental economic concept is use (utility): to complete the identification of anything includes finding the end and purpose to which it is oriented. Economists after Smith attempted to do economics in terms of the two concepts of labour and exchange, without the concept of distribution which I have linked to self-giving, love and covenant. With only a truncated account of utility, related to the prices determined by the market, they did so without consideration of the purposes, uses or goals to which any thing or any person is oriented. With only the three concepts of labour, exchange and utility, neoclassical economics knows nothing about covenant, self-respect, Adam Smith’s ‘sympathy’, community feeling or love of reputation. It is unable to account for the motivations of people who are free self-givers, or deliberate, reasoning and political creatures. Neoclassical economics cannot say why we should go work, or why work is good even when it is not explicitly and financially rewarded, or why it is good to be a public agent. It cannot tell us why we should not

skim our customers or corner a market. Neoclassical economics does not allow us to ask about the public or long-term effect of our myriad private actions. Psychology and political science can confirm that we watch one another, seek one another’s love admiration and that our desire to be loved and admired drives all our acts. We do things because we hope that they will get us noticed and admired by the right people, make it easier for us to be loved by those whose love we want most. Business is of course all about public reputation: we know that, better than business is repeat business, and that we are in trouble if our customers do not come back. Each financial transaction is a joint act of mutual acknowledgment and promise of ongoing relationship. But in the language of economics we cannot talk about why men act responsibly in public, or commend one another for acting well, that is, generously and justly. Next week we shall discuss what happens to the society that is has no concern for its reputation or cannot find reasons for self-respect. Economics does not able to give us any of the discipline by which we can be formed into generous and responsible public agents, and it has divorced itself from the other discourses which can. Economics reflects man’s assumption that he is fundamentally alone. Economics is the ‘theology’ of the hyper-short term, the term so short that nothing is thought to have any public consequences. One reason why we are in this crisis is that economics is not an adequate account of what takes place when persons meet in the marketplace. But we are able to say this only because the Christian tradition gives us the resources for a more adequate account. 5. Economy and state against the family We have said that the household is the first economy, and the source of all public service and of all the enterprises that make up the market. The Church says that there are limits to the responsibilities we can devolve without losing our integrity as independent agents. It says that governments cannot provide for us what we are called to provide for one another, for what we have to provide is relationship, or love. This primary economic act of giving yourself is the foundation of all subsequent ‘economic’ activity. All human life and civilisation is about learning to defer, that is, to balance the taking of pleasure with the deferral of pleasure, between having some now and knowing that there is more to come, so that pleasure is not merely fleeting and ‘physical’ but also social and lasting. So in order to be public actors we have to be able to wait and not to resent those who have what we do not. We cannot be completely compensated for what we have undertaken or foregone. We may serve one another, acting generously adult to child, husband to wife, or adult to elderly parent. I suggested that every society has to defer to families because only families produce new generations. The state cannot reproduce society. The state is that set of public servants who intend to serve society by safeguarding whatever is necessary to its future. The state exists to protect the economy of the household, and protect and honour the original event of self-giving that brings the household into being. We said that the

entertainment industries are the first universal mediator that open a wedge in the family. The corporations create the ‘needs’ and the monetary economy takes over the functions of the family. When the unity of the family is dissolved by those desires, the state moves in to meet those ‘needs’. Marriage keeps people out of dependency more than any other institution. Nothing can substitute for it, but everything the state does is a compensation for it. Where there is not a prejudgment, literally a prejudice, in favour of marriage, the working of the mechanism goes into reverse. Far from safeguarding the family and the social capital it generates, the effect of the state’s interventions is to promote singleness over the covenant of two persons. Any government wants to encourage all those initiatives that make up civil society, but it does not know how to stop itself from hearing everything as a plea for its closer involvement. If we are not dependent on one another through a myriad particular covenants of family and its extensions in the community and voluntary and private sectors, we are all dependents directly of the central power. When it acts to provide for our need, we no longer need one another. If they cannot resist the torrent of desires that pour in from the entertainment industries, family members cease to sacrifice individual desires for family cohesion and are unable to work for one another or welcome one another’s service. As the family breaks up, the state is there to provide for each of the individual pieces that have been created. We no longer need of one another because the state follows the private sector in to provide each ‘need’ so that it never becomes articulated as the need of one person for another. The result is that each individual is married to the state. The state has become the universal mediator, driven to smooth out all inequalities and with them all the complementarities, by which we need one another. The state cannot love. But it may exhaust our national economic resources in compensating for the love that we no longer give. Our public servants and their ideologists come to assume that there are certain things that we cannot do for ourselves but which they have to do for us. The state then offers to lighten our burdens, by saving us from responsibility and risk, offering a form of salvation, which since it is from salvation from relationship can only be a false salvation. The result is that rather than a nation, we have become a collectivity of individual victims, of people who outbid each other with claims of our neediness. We all victims now. All this represents a very low view of man. The language of sin has not disappeared with the secularisation, but rather in the language of guilt and blame it has begun to get out of control. The public budget is employed to leach away at marriage, the one institution that is more basic than the state, in order to promote singleness over all the covenants of which society and the economy is made up. The state has paradoxically begun to work towards the dissolution of civil society. Neither the economy nor the state is able to produce children, or motivate people to have children and bring them up. This covenanted entity, the family, alone contains reasons why a man and woman should subordinate themselves to this new generation, and so it alone produces new generations and safeguards that society’s future. If business and state do not deliberately set out to support the family, conscious of that the family

is a fundamental good, they begin to militate against the family and so against the production of children. We said that utilitarian economics is in denial about history: it proves to be in denial about the source of the future as a result. Considered alone, apart from their responsibility to this covenanted entity, economy and state can only throttle the future and so bring themselves into crisis. 6. Two societies God loves man. We can say that man loves himself, shows some selfrespect and love for his own. Yet man does not love himself nearly enough, or not truthfully enough. Since he does not know himself, he is unable to do so truly or fully. The Church proposes that the true good of the economy is man, and that man is truly himself when in the company of God. The Church says that each person is a unique particular, and that there is nothing more fundamental and irreplaceable than a human being. The society that refuses to hear this proposal turns the state into the one fundamental person, and so into the idol, that replaces man as the image of God. This failure of true love, and our failure to allow ourselves the language by which to judge this love, has social consequences, which themselves have direct economic consequences. These are what we are now beginning to see around us. We have to identify two societies, mingled together. One is the society of man trying to be without God. The upshot of his efforts to be without God is that each defines himself without anyone else: that no one concedes that anyone has any fundamental claim on him. This man who wants to be without God and who retreats backwards into greater isolation, is driven to construct all sorts of controls so the world may make no excessive demands on him. This man by seeking love and refusing it and then substituting for it, inflicts a process of disintegration on himself and his society and a passion without end. The other is the society of man who is with God whose witness to us is the communion of the Church. The Church travels through the society of those who reject the love and suffer this wretchedness¸ assuring God them that they are loved with an undying unchanging love, that God at once knows, judges and loves them with a love that they will never be able to prevent. 7. The humility of God God has come to us and humbled himself in order to meet us. That the God who humbled himself for our sake is the true God is evidenced by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The resurrection tells us that the love and covenant of God with man is unbreakable. Christ is our servant and the one fundamental worker. We may not want to take what he gives, but we cannot stop him giving it. It is always there; the offer is not withdrawn. Man cannot crush the resolution of God to be with us and to be our God in this to us incomprehensible way in which he labours for us and is our servant. The true God, who in the shame of the cross of Christ appears to have no regard for his reputation, and is unencumbered by all considerations of his own power, is free to take an interest in mankind, wait for him and stick with him. This God only is worth our worship. The man who cannot believe that he is conceived and borne in the love of God believes that it is more sophisticated, more ‘scientific’, to remain between fear and despair than it is to concede that he could indeed be

loved and valued. To secure himself from the possibility that God might finally recoil in horror from him, man refuses to admit God. In fear of the possibility of the enormity of this love, and the risk of this love, he is fearful, and because he is fearful he is angry at the God that is a projection of himself. The God who has come to him in the way of humility, remains as unrecognisable to him as the redemption in the serpent in the wilderness. That Church that proceeds through our city puts questions to it. It queries the utilitarian and reductive thought represent by the economics that has become our dominant description of man. It asks whether we are sure that there is no relationship between the existence of the Church and the liberty and liberalism that this society has enjoyed. It asks whether we can be sure that there can be liberty by a sheer balance of forces without any of the self-mastery and self-transformation that Christian discipleship offers? Are we sure that if we remove the Church’s self-discipline from it, that the liberal public square will continue? Are we sure that if we cut ourselves off from these roots the plant will grow rather than die? Are we sure that the Christian tradition is only an old dead beast from which we should severe ourselves in order to become freer? Could it be that this history is the source of this liberty, and that if we severe ourselves from it, it is we who will be the dead beast? These are the questions that the Church asks as it carries its cross through the streets, on its way to Easter, praying and interceding for the city. Summary 1. God has come to us without regard for considerations of power in Jesus Christ. The humbleness of God shows us the unbreakable love and covenant of God for man. 2. For us God has made himself weak and given himself into our hands. In the difficult and repellent way of the cross, there is redemption. 3. In Christ man comes into community with God. In communion with God man comes to man and is reconciled with him and may grow to his full stature. 4. In the grace of God there is good work for us to do through establishing and sustaining our covenants. The Church tell us that man may an individual who judges for himself, and acts for others, generously. 5. The Christian tradition insists on the unity of man in its dialogue with the humanities and social sciences that seek to dismantle mankind into conflicting phenomena. 6. Neoclassical economics is that idiom of politics that filters out the issue of the good and of who may be its judge. Though it is a vocabulary that reflects only private preferences, economics has become the discourse of the public square.

7. Economics cannot account for long-term consequences. It has made the short-term and private sphere the idiom of the long-term and public sphere. 8. Economics cannot account for our motivations. Not everything can be made explicit. Explicit and instantaneous rewards are long-term disincentives. Money has value only when it is not the sole expression of value. Money can only be fixed by what is not money. 9. The Church is the community that is part-withdrawn from the monetised economy. 10. The society that recovers the virtues that can sustain its unity has a long term. The society that hears the Church may recover the virtues. 11. We can sustain relationships with particular persons because we are creatures of the covenant of God with man. When they give them explicit acknowledgement, market and state can support our covenants. When our covenants are denied public recognition, economy and state tend to dissolve all specific relationships over the long-term. 12. The Church tells the society in which it lives that it has no need to torment and divide itself, but may receive its restoration from the covenant made public in the resurrection of Christ.