Lent 5

The fifth Sunday of Lent Jeremiah 31.27-34 Hebrews 5.5-10 what he suffered

I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel Although he was a son he learned obedience through

John 12.20-30 The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself

1. The crisis of faith 2. Covenant renewed 3. Persons in covenant 4. Honour and self-respect 5. The crisis of liberalism 6. The Son of Man takes the way of the cross 7. Repentance and redemption

This is the fifth Sunday of Lent, and next Sunday will be Palm Sunday. The Church has been travelling through Lent on the way to Easter. The community created by the resurrection can take this way of suffering. It goes through the crisis of judgment to its redemption. Our country is suffering its own passion, as its parts divide and distance themselves, threatening its unity and the well-being of our society’s weakest members. This is a crisis for the secular liberalism proclaimed by our country’s leaders, and that it is a crisis is most obvious where that secular liberalism opposes itself to the Church. But when this country is ready to hear from the Church and look to its Lord, it can hope to come through this suffering to its redemption. 1. The crisis of faith When he comes will the Son of Man find faith on earth? Our society is undergoing a crisis of self-belief. It has not listened to its own previous generations, so it does not have their confidence in the covenant of God with man, and so does not know how to exercise truthful self-judgment. As a result it swings between unsustainably high and low estimations of its own worth. The present financial crisis demonstrates that this is a crisis for our economy. The financial insanity of recent years is warning us of a long-term failure. We are no longer be taken at our word, for we ourselves have devalued our word. Money is a series of promises, a proportion of which have to be kept: when that proportion is too low, and neither we nor anyone else believes our promises, our money has no value, and neither does the economy denominated in that money. In these talks I have demonstrated that an economy is a reflection of a society. The nation that does not want to hear of the covenant of God with man suffers a crisis of morale that makes it unable to act for the long

term. The unwillingness of this country to hear about any covenant of man with God results in the crisis that we have described variously as ecological, moral, social and economic. 2. Covenant renewed The covenant theme that we met with Abraham in the second week returns now in our reading from Jeremiah. The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah (Jeremiah 31.31). The new covenant that the Lord makes is the covenant of God with man restored and made new. When this fundamental covenant is in good order, all our covenants may be renewed and redeemed, and we find the confidence to receive their true valuation from the judgment of God and of man. In these talks I have suggested that the concept of relationship is absolutely basic. We are loved by God, we have been brought into covenant with him, and through this covenant we are in many other sorts of covenant with all other human beings. Each married couple represent a covenant, with each other, with their children, and with their society. Each household comes into relationship with all other households as they meet in the marketplace, trade and so form an economy. Each household is judged and assessed by every other, and so by the market as a whole, and our national household is judged and valued by global markets. We live in the view of all our peers: we love them and we act in the hope that they will love and esteem us more. But in compensating for marriage’s failures, the state has determined that there is no difference between married and non-married, that is, between relationships that intend permanence and those that do not. It is attempting to obliterate the differentiations and asymmetries between the covenants that ensure our future and those that do not. To suggest that relationships which do not produce children are equivalent to relationships that do is not only an untruth, but it has costly economic consequences. When the state does not give fiscal protection to marriage, the confidence that enables us to start families, and other more explicitly economic initiatives, disappears. If the state taxes small businesses as though they were big business, confidence to start businesses and employ people also disappears. The need to comply with government demands means that larger (and older) businesses do better than smaller (and younger) ones, with the result that the economy is dominated by large corporations, and capital has less and less relationship to social capital and the practices of civil society. All our preoccupation with what we do in our bedrooms is as nothing compared to the new agenda of bringing it out of the bedroom and promoting it as a new orthodoxy. The society that promotes such equivalence at the behest of any group is inflicting contradiction on itself. The logic of such an ideology is that all particularity is rubbed out, so that we may not love our own family more than others, nor prefer our own initiatives and enterprises over others. To eradicate ‘inequality’ is to attempt to obliterate all differences: without check this will become coercive and totalitarian. Whether the state intends turn persons in covenants into uncovenanted individuals who can only relate to one another through the state’s own mediation, is perhaps a political issue for

one country. But whether the state can pursue this project by consuming the national product is an economic issue, and therefore an issue which other economies and the international markets will decide on. Here the Church makes its response. It says that because there is a covenant between God and man, there is a covenant between man and man, and a covenant between this generation and future generations. Only the community that understands itself in terms of covenant, can say this. Man may take his own initiatives, enter covenants, start enterprises of commerce or public generosity, just as he may marry and start a family. And it points out that he must do this, if a society is to continue. Such initiative and enterprise requiring self-control, saving, risk and even selfsacrifice, must be recognised if a society is to produce a new generation. The initiatives that create new covenants do not require any permission from society as a whole, but simply its acknowledgement: law and government exist in order to safeguard this sphere of individual, household and corporate initiative, not prevent it. We are in a single covenant because we are members of a single nation, and our national economy is in covenant with all others, since we subsist from our relationship with these other nations and other economies. They decide what value they give to their relationship with us, so it is for them to tell us what they think we are worth. They may tell us that we have over-valued ourselves and are now only worth a fraction of what we were. If we receive their judgment as constructive correction, and take steps to renew ourselves, perhaps they will continue to do business with us here in London. 3. Persons in covenant

In each of these talks I have said that we have a contrast between two accounts of man. In the Christian account man is both a covenantal being and an individual. In the non-Christian account, man is merely an individual, fundamentally on his own. On this account males are on their own and females are on their own, and masculinity and femininity are opposites. Man is threatened by feminity or weakness and woman is threatened by masculinity and power. The realm of man has therefore to be harnessed and controlled. Christianity, by contrast, says that man and woman are in covenant. We can understand them as covenantal beings, and understand that man is given to woman and woman to man, and that they both contain each other and seek each other. We saw from the letter of the Apostle to the Ephesians last week, that though the dividing wall between man and woman is broken, this does not mean that all difference is gone or that are dissolved into a unisex. It means that in Christ man and woman are still two distinct estates, but that they serve one another in freedom. They are not antagonists, so they don't need any third party to mediate between them. It is not women, but wives, relational beings, who may freely represent the inner world of the household and not, men but husbands, relational beings who may freely represent the outer world of public square and marketplace. They have come into their covenant in freedom and in love: they have reasons for coming together and for being distinct and non-identical.

When man and woman regard themselves solely as individuals, there is no reason why they should come together in lasting mutual relationship. Male and females may desire and meet each other briefly for private purposes, but these can never generate public purposes: sex will result in no commitment to the upbringing of a new generation. If men and women are individuals, they are in conflict. Of these two rival powers, the stronger power of machismo and patriarchy has to be controlled by the creation of another power to police them – the state. But such a response to ‘patriarchal’ domination can only another form of domination, only nominally gentler because identifiable with a set of ‘non-male’ characteristics; the pursuit of a less masculine and hierarchical culture remains a game of power. Concerned to avoid confrontation and upset, we identify new categories of person who may be offended, we widen consensus by seeking permission from ever-greater numbers of people, demonstrating that we have done so by keeping records, and employing great numbers of people to do so. The machinery of compliance that enforces the equivalence agenda is limitlessly expensive. Do we imagine that the rest of the world will continue to give us their savings so that with this standing army we can turn our self-preoccupation with avoiding masculinity into a public agenda and the goal of the whole economy? If we do not understand persons as covenantal, we lose the distinction and complementarity of the household and the public economy. Then there is no reason why the household and public economy should come together in that lasting way that is secured by a marriage. If society does not recognise the household as the source of the next generation, there is no incentive to start one. If society does not recognise and commend new households and all other forms of public initiative- and risk-taking, there will be fewer of them. If no one can take a loss, no one will take a risk, and the result is the stagnation of our inflated social economy. Only our own freely-entered covenants can give us the motivation to take initiatives. Since we are not free in relationship to it, the state cannot motivate us to anything. Without the covenanted understanding of the human being, our society sees men and other initiative-talkers as those who have to be controlled and is investing its energy in doing so. It has created a hierarchy of controllers and mediators, and a sclerotic society in which no one may act without them. The Church has faced this situation many times before. Christians in this country in the sixteenth century had to throw off an inflated clerical caste that had made itself a universal mediator. Christians wrenched back into the centre the truth that every human being is directly before God and before man, and that no ranks of mediators may take that dignity away. This insistence on the dignity of the individual Christian reformed the Church to make it the Protestant Church of England. Its understanding of the individual has been the bulwark against the absolutism and totalitarianism that periodically captures other cultures. When we despise the Christian faith that bulwark disappears. God calls us into freedom and enables us to judge for ourselves, enter relationships with one another freely and take the initiatives that bring benefit our society as a whole. The society that does not wish to hear this will descend into self-inflicted social conflict, and its economy will suffer a painful collapse.

4. Honour and self-respect Our society is undergoing a crisis of self-respect. We do not seem to be concerned for our own reputation or what previous generations called ‘honour’ or ‘glory’. We have been given this social capital, this bundle of attitudes and this system of laws, shaped by the Christian tradition. This moral, social and constitutional capital is the silver spoon we were born with. We have inherited the good will that came with the UK brand, which was created by all the Victorian, imperial and post-imperial twentieth century generations that shaped the City which we now see. What will we do with all the social capital that they have left us? Are the British really going to disavow all that they have been? Do we regard this country’s past as though it were all mistake? Here again is the Manichean fear, by which we oscillate between excessively high and low estimations of ourselves. Where we are uncertain about our value we see wild swings in the valuation the markets give to our currency and our economy. When it has been long divorced from a confident society, the market becomes a thing of pure emotion, a herd plunging between greed and fear, hubris and despair, that cannot be headed off by any political force no matter how concerted. When the virtues and the social capital of the UK are not understood as good, they cease to motivate us and supply us with good reasons for our undertakings. When the risk-avoidance mechanisms in the market turn into responsibility-aversion, instead of damping down on volatility the markets can magnify such fears, until the unreason that we see as economic crisis becomes wild and destructive. There are storms in the market because we have let go of so much of our social capital that we are no longer sure what we are worth. The self-respect that extends into fellow-feeling and sense of belonging is the glue that holds people together and makes them a nation. Each of us considers our interests in the light of those of our various communities and the nation as a whole. Yet we do not seem to care what others think of us. Our government has not considered whether other economies are really likely to carry for us the burden of the national welfare that we have awarded ourselves. If we do not believe in our society it is not likely that anyone else will believe in our economy. This, incidentally, is the basis of Islam’s question to the West. The West seems to have no self-respect, it despises manliness and no longer sees its own reputation as reason enough for its public actions. We revel in moral ambiguity. Islam is very properly puzzled and disgusted by this. It looks as though we have undergone a collective loss of self-respect, so that we could never admit that we could do something simply in order to defend ourselves and establish that we are here for the long term. We are undergoing a collective auto-immune response. We must either recover from it, which involves diagnosing it for what it is, or our society will break up. So, oddly, the Church now has to defend the concept of self-respect and tell us that pride and loyalty to our community are basic. 5. The crisis of liberalism Christianity understands that, because he is the image of God, man is free. We are free to use our own judgment, and able to decide to act well for one another. We may fail of course, but when we do so, we may admit our fault, ask for forgiveness and start again. There is a dignity in admitting that we have failed, and terrible failure and loss of dignity when we cannot bring ourselves to admit failure. The Christian faith gives us the dignity of

public confession and repentance. Christianity is not a political programme or an economic programme: there is no set of instructions in which our every little act is laid down for us. God invites us to act publicly, using our judgment. Our conscience may be formed from a tradition of judgment, such as Christian discipleship, but we decide for ourselves. Only the Christian faith insists that we have the freedom of individuals who may judge ourselves. It gives us the dignity of confession and repentance. There is a terrible loss of dignity when we cannot bring ourselves to admit that we have acted partisanly and badly, and so failed, and this is what we are now witnessing. The Christian doctrine of God gives us the break-through concept of the person that gives us these concepts of freedom and responsibility. Though it declines to acknowledge this, the liberal tradition lives from its memory of the Christian tradition. It takes different elements of the unitary Christian teaching about man but sets these elements out without relationship to the doctrine of God which alone can hold them together. The result is one part of the Christian concept of man is set against another. The independent and autonomy of man is set against the covenant of each man with others of his community and mankind as a whole. So we oscillate between seeing ourselves as deracinated individuals and collectivism that strips us of our individual dignity. In Christianity, God hold himself responsible to us and gives an account of himself: this is what the Church’s Scriptures are. But where no such covenant and personal relationship between God and man is understood, God can only be understood as fate, and so as a threat to our freedom. So for secular liberalism God could only be a large will, and so it mistakenly understand Christianity as though it were some form of submission to such a will. Such raw will is not interested in being answerable to our questions or protests. When the British decline to hear the Christian account of God and of man his creature they take on a ferociously fatalistic conception of God, in which power dominates and weakness is punished. It is the metaphysics of paganism and tribalism. When power is the fundamental category, and God has all power, why should God be interested in whether we live or die? And if he is not interested in us, he is also an irrelevance, for it makes no difference to us whether he exists or not. Or if he has submitted us to contradictions that cannot be resolved in an arbitrary cruel and meaningless universe, such a God is a monster. Either way, such a conception of God knows no redemption and no hope. Atheism is an appropriate rebuttal expression of this sort of power claim, but atheism is also a result of this deist or pagan conception of God, for in acknowledging no other authority, it allows no challenge to the ‘gods’ of power that we experience in the market and state. The Christian doctrine of God does not offer us naked, unmediated will or power: the God of Jesus Christ is entirely unthreatened by loss of power. We may know the God of Jesus Christ only in this newborn child at Christmas, and in the single isolated figure of Christ on the cross at Easter in whom all human self-assertion and power is exposed and shamed. The Church insists that God is only accessible in this dark way as someone who has given himself into our hands, utterly without fear of what we may do with him. As the result the

Church gives itself into hands of the world unafraid of whatever grief lies ahead. We are on our way to Good Friday. Without the practices of the Church, of confession and forgiveness, liberalism does not remain liberal. Without such a discipleship liberalism turns Christian humility into another game of power. This has created the inversion by which we all now claim to be victims, with the resulting culture of resentment. But the practices of Christian discipleship teach us that we may work so that we may be generous and have something to give to one another. Such labour is its own reward, for we may take pride before God in those whom we have loved and served. For the Christian, work is valuable regardless of whether it receives explicit financial reward. It is labour that gives the economy and currency their value, not the other way around. The value of money can only be established by what is not money: labour is a fundamental economic concept only as long as it is defined by a Christian account of the work, and the pain, of self-giving. Church as guardian of secularity It is the Church that provides the true secularity. It insists that we are free to meet and encounter one another, without the mediation of business or government. It says that we may do so, and thus we may live together, and thus we may live well. The Church insists that the individual may undertake whatever he wishes in the open field of individual and corporate enterprise and responsibility in which we demonstrate leadership and generosity. We have seen that over many decades commerce has outbid the mutual service of husbands and wives, and so monetised the provision that belonged to family life. Then whenever husbands or wives can no longer pay the market price for such services, the state steps in to provide for the need that the market has created. We have outsourced so many of the functions of the family, but the economy that tries to take over these functions takes on an impossible burden. No economy can sustain itself by paying some people to dig holes and others to fill them in again, for the worth of our total economic output must also depend on what we can sell to other economies. Since these holes are being dug in the social capital gathered over centuries, no amount of welfare spending in one generation can repair or compensate for this moral-ecological disaster. Social capital is money in the bank, but as soon as it is cashed into explicit money to compensate for love not given or received, it is gone. Our needs are non-finite, insatiable, until they are satisfied by love: love is personal and regards each of us as irreplaceable. When everything is denominated in terms of money, we cannot know whether to enter services on the debit or credit side, with the result that money itself suffers a crisis. We have looked at some of the challenges that our society faces. We have been able to do so only because the Church is able to find the resources from its long memory by which it can ask these questions. But Scripture does not leave us alone with such an appalling vista. The community that lives from the promise celebrates publicly in its every act of worship, the reconciliation and restoration of all things, and the confidence of this joyful community spreads to the wider society amongst which it lives. But the society that turns away from this promise and the community that celebrates it condemns itself to increasing short-termism, and will be unable to comprehend what is happening to it. It will hate the only

community that is able to predict what is on its way, the Church. We already find it difficult to discuss some of the issues that these talks have raised. If people told you that you are wrong, or even that you are being offensive, that would just be part of the debate that makes for a healthy public square. But concern not to be shushed up means that we shush ourselves up. Self-censorship and self-inflicted totalitarianism creeps up on us. Its own unhappiness and urge to self-destruction drives this society to refuse to hear the questions of the Church so that it is not confronted by the issue of its own long-term survival. 6. Repentance Individuals are responsible. We are a mature and independent individuals if we can take responsibility for what we have done, name it in public, and not merely apologise for it but bear the cost of it. We are individuals if we can repent. If we cannot go back and take responsibility, even for the things that we have not been directly responsible for, we blemish the image of God in ourselves. You can go back to your wife and family and apologise. You can go back to your clients and tell them that you are responsible for their loss, and to the extent that that is possible that you will repay them. We can mark our balance sheets down, take our losses without demanding that they be nationalised, we can go bankrupt. We can admit our failure and our weakness, because the covenants of which we are members make us strong enough to do so. After fifteen centuries in which the British have been soaked in Christian culture, we have the intellectual and ethical resources to repent. We understand what asking for forgiveness means. Because the Church receives its life and strength from Christ, it is strong enough to lead the repentance, and the nation and its leaders are free to follow, to endure the ignominy, If we do this, we will survive. The society that loses Christian habits can reclaim them. But the society that does not wish to reclaim them will not continue as it was. It will become a society that increasingly experiences the retribution and stagnation of the pagan economy, in which no one may get ahead without arousing envy and creating enemies who will vow to pull him back and be revenged on him. It will have public square and economy in which one man can win only because another loses, and one man can win only for a while until the forces of envy and rage catch up with him. Christian discipleship forms us for freedom. The Church speaks into the spreading chill and silence, and it speaks even in the face of the outrage that the Church is still here. It tells us that we have been giving up our freedom as we have been giving up responsibility, allowing the market to provide household service for us and the state to carry risks and responsibilities for us, we give up our freedom and enter a period of listlessness and fecklessness. Our society is not even searching for reasons for its problems, and is no longer able to raise its eyes to the issue of the future. The Church will continue to say this, for the sake of the country, even when all other individuals and institutions have ceased to say so. As the Apostle Paul says, such things will sound like foolishness to some. Only the Church that is absolutely sure of the covenant of God with man, secure in the love of God and of the promise of this resurrection can look into abyss, see the extent of this disaster and name it. Only the Church dare say that things are indeed bad, that other people did not

impose this crisis on us, but we inflicted it on ourselves. It is our sin. The Church can say what a generation of political leaders, a whole political class is unable to say, that we are responsible and that we may repent. 7. The Son takes the way of the cross The reading from the Gospel of John tells us this: The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also The job of the Church is simply to be holy, and so to be a distinct community with a distinct form of life and discipleship. The Church is here to stand out from the rest of society, and to take the ignominy and the suffering that this brings. In Christian discipleship we are undergoing an apprenticeship which we cannot put off. This apprenticeship in holiness is good for our entire society. We are in the world full of other people, and our lives consist in the meeting and deepening relationships with them. As long as we remain in flight from other people, this apprenticeship will be agony without end or purpose. Coming into relationship with others is what all our communal, national and economic life is about. In business we hope to create relationships that we can sustain, and which will sustain us. This requires a process of growth on our part, and this requires a form of apprenticeship too. One reason for our present crisis is that that the Church has not clearly told this country that man is loved by God and that this country is also founded in that love and covenant. Whether this country is on its way to Easter and to its resurrection, or simply on its way to an extended and never-ending crucifixion and misery will be decided by whether the country is ready to tolerate the Church and even to be informed by it, or determined to impose silence on it. We have lived on the social capital accumulated under the many centuries in which we received the shaping of Christian discipleship, the discipline that turned us into more or less self-respecting, self-controlled, generous and initiative-taking people. We have spent that capital and not renewed it. The Church has not passed on to the comfort of God, and so the Church has been unfaithful to the nation, and the nation is suffering as a result. The Church carries the cross. It is Britain’s cross, and the Church carries it on Britain’s behalf. The Church must repent, and in Lent it does repent. In coming years the Church will suffer. The Church will go through its Passover here in London, and take whatever is thrown at it. It must do so for the sake of the world and so for this country which, because it is discovering that many of its hopes have been delusory, is going to undergo great anguish. The Church, which is the Body of Christ, will suffer the rage of this panicked and angry nation. The Church knows how to suffer and how to live under alien government, for it lives under a hostile culture and government in many parts of the world. It is ready to do so in this country too. Lent is the preparation and unburdening that accompanies the teaching of the Church’s candidates for baptism. For the Church knows how to hear judgment, and it knows the joy of repentance, honest speech and

unburdening. The Church can repent and beg for forgiveness. The Church can repent of having failed to be the intercessor and prophetic and priestly intermediary for the country. The Church that hears the promises of God and sees the nation in agony cannot not speak to it, and offer it the correction, and comfort and hope. The Church comes with judgment. The Church has the confidence to be able to repent and accurately to name our sins, to look down into the widening pit of our trespasses and debts, and to cry to our creditors and to God for our forgiveness and release. So the Church represents a question to the nation. The Church that has confidence in the covenant of God with man can ask the nation to hear this promise and this judgment, to receive them and with them new confidence and new life. This brings us back to the first gospel reading. Jesus answered them, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. And what should I say 'Father, save me from this hour'? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name." Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." Amen, Lord, Glorify it again. Summary 1. The Church is a holy community that distinguishes itself from society. This is its distinctive contribution to national life. 2. The community that is made strong by the resurrection can suffer weakness, remain open and vulnerable. It can repent, and lead the repentance of the nation. 3. As the state takes on excessive responsibility, it loses its mandate and legitimacy as the realm of the public service of citizens. 4. The state wants to demonstrate its legitimacy in order to justify the ranks of mediators it supports. Increasingly unable to acknowledge any power outside itself, it will be determined not to acknowledge the Church. 5. The state that determines not to receive the Christian contribution to civil life becomes desperate to demonstrate its legitimacy through its omni-competence. It will become an alternative Church. 6. The atheism of secular liberalism cannot restrain the unmediated power of state and market. 7. The society without confidence in eternal life will sacrifice the future for now. The society of secular liberalism attempts to pull the future forward and consume an increasing proportion of it. It does so because it only knows about ‘now’; it knows of no ‘later’. 8. As the state loses its legitimacy, it will attempt to efface the differentiations and asymmetries of the covenants that make up civil society. Ideological polarisation will ensue. 9. Such tensions will ensure that the state is not able to motivate the existing generation to produce a new generation. The state will so over-

determine the present that it will render the possibility of the future more doubtful. 10. The Church announces the limits of the market and state, and is prepared to undergo the suffering that results for this witness. The Church is able to undergo the suffering transferred to it by a society that is in denial about its own limits. 11. In the long-term those societies in which men and women, in the covenant and discipleship of the Church, are content to allow ourselves to be explicitly (financially) dependent on their marriage partner, together with the families and households that derive from such marriages, will flourish. 12. The Church worships God on behalf of all men and all societies. Whatever happens to the Church is for the glory of God and the glory that God gives to man.