The Deadly Sin of Envy

A Lecture given to the Carlisle Theological Society in October 2009

Posted on Black Friday 2019

When I agreed to speak to you tonight, we were probably at the lowest point of the recession.  At that time of despondency, it did not look likely that the economy would show signs even of the beginnings of recovery before the middle of next year.  Now, the financial environment appears to be a little less gloomy, and analysts are daring to talk about ‘green shoots’.  I am no expert, so I can’t judge whether such hopes are well-founded.  In north-east England, there has been considerable attrition as a result of this tsunami and I expect it is the same here.  It will be years before we see manufacturing industry in the north-east revitalised, if it ever is, employment levels back to where they were earlier this decade, and inward investment in our region once more flourishing.  

A disaffected public continues to ask why so little regulation has existed to check reckless speculation and the cynical exploitation of the markets.  We all hope, though we do not necessarily expect, that out of this debacle will emerge a more disciplined, more accountable culture that will begin to restore trust.  But a better managed economy will not necessarily address the underlying causes of this crisis.  These are, I am sure we agree, human, moral and spiritual in character.  Religious leaders are right to ask for some serious reflection on what the recession is teaching us about ourselves and our society.  

One book to do this is remarkable for having been written by the chairman, formerly the chief executive, of one of the major world banks.  So it is an insider’s view on the crisis and a refreshingly honest analysis of its roots.  But its author, Stephen Green, is also a non-stipendiary priest of the Church of England.   He is not ashamed to identify what he sees as the underlying malaise in western society that he describes as its Faustian deal with Mephistopheles.  To simplify, this amounts to the selling of our collective soul for the sake of short term material gain.  There is nothing new in this, as the power of the Faust legend down the centuries illustrates.  What is new is the global scale on which this age-old drama is acted out in the world’s financial markets.  The near-failure of the world banking system last year was as near a miss from global disaster as the Cuba Missile Crisis.  

Archbishop Rowan Williams has focused on the erosion of public values and regretted that there have been few signs that the powerful financial institutions and their leadership have begun to reflect on the moral and spiritual causes of this financial debacle.   He has called for repentance.  Repentance, as we know, means a change of mind.  It is close to what the third Benedictine vow calls conversio morum, the conversion of life.  It looks for a new way of living, a new set of attitudes and ambitions, a life that is focused not on our own selves but on God and what he looks for in humanity.  In a renewed, God-fearing society, there would still be accidents and they might be damaging, even catastrophic, but perhaps there would not be economic crises so patently traceable to basic faults due to the relentless pursuit of self-interest.  Such a society would be marked by caritas, generosity, mutuality, collaboration, self-giving and service.  The church is called to model precisely this vision of human beings living together in genuine koinonia.  

But what are the sins which we should repent of, and from which we should want to be delivered?  The usual candidates among the seven deadly sins are gluttony (which is over-indulgence) and avarice or greed (which is the inordinate hunger to acquire and possess).  These are both, like lust, sins of excess.  There is a long Christian tradition that understands these in relation to acquiring wealth.  What makes greed sinful, says Thomas Aquinas, is that it is the abandonment or collapse of spiritual desire for what is material and temporal.  Dante illustrates this in the Divine Comedy by depicting the greedy as tied up and laid face down on the ground because they concentrated too much on earthly things. (It is a good example of what is called contrapasso, literally ‘counter-suffering’: you are punished by the very thing you practise.) Stephen Green’s book suggests that the Faustian bargain so many wage their futures on is a symptom of precisely this.  

However, I want to suggest that Green doesn’t go deep enough into the human spirit.  All the sins of excess are disorders of desire, as Augustine so profoundly understood: it is not that we don’t love, but that our love is wrongly directed.  And if we ask where the origins of disordered desire are to be found, the answer is in the two fundamental sins of all.  The first of these is, of course, pride.  Pride is usually regarded as the worst of all sins because it is the most far-reaching in suppressing or perverting the love that should be directed outwards to God and to our neighbour.  It is, as Augustine says, ‘turned in on itself’.  And this obsession with ourselves is, says the tradition, nothing short of idolatry because there is no place in it for God.  (There is another graphic example of contrapasso in Dante where he shows the proud condemned to wander round for eternity bent double under the weight of their gorgeous copes which are made of lead.)  

But there is another perversion of love which is turned outwards, or at least looks as if it is, and that is envy. I want to focus on envy this evening because I believe it is the besetting sin of our age, and because apart from texts on moral theology, it is not given nearly enough attention in Christian reflection on our human state.  I don’t know, for instance, when you last heard a sermon on envy or when I last preached one.   But the Bible focuses on it a great deal as I shall illustrate, possibly more than it does on pride.  

What is envy?  It is an inward state of mind and heart.  I am careful not to say it is merely a feeling or emotion, though of course we experience it that way.  We could say that the seedbed of envy is our awareness that we lack something that someone else possesses.  This could be their material possessions, their human qualities, their successes or status in life, their religious faith, their personal relationships, their happiness.  All these can be the focus of envy.  But envy is not by itself knowing that someone else has something we do not possess.  Our chairman has the name Richard.  I do not have that name myself.  I recognise this lack.  But it does not make me envious of him.  Envy is born when I want what the other person has for myself, or simply wish that the other person could be deprived of it (which they would be if I took for myself what belonged to them).  

We need to be clear about the difference between envy and jealousy and resolve that we shall use these words accurately.  Jealousy is the fear of losing someone we love or who is important to us to another person.  Envy is the frustration caused by another person having something that I do not have myself. So envy involves simply two people, myself and another, and is focused on a thing, while jealousy involves three (or more) people and focuses on a threat posed to a significant relationship.  We use that word accurately when we say, ‘I love her jealously’, meaning ‘I will not let her go to another person’.  It is exactly in this sense that Yhwh is a ‘jealous God’ according to the Second Commandment, because he will not ‘lose’ his chosen people to the worship of idols and graven images but shows ‘steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments’ (Exod 20. 4-6).  Try substituting ‘envious’ for ‘jealous’ in that command, and it ceases to make sense.  

Aquinas says that envy as sorrow on account of another person’s benefit or good, drawing on Aristotle’s definition of it as the pain caused by other peoples’ good fortune.  In this tradition, Dante says that envy is the love of my own good and resolve to pursue it perverted to a desire to deprive other people of theirs. In his Purgatorio, the punishment for the envious is to have their eyes sewn shut with wire because they have gained sinful pleasure from seeing others brought low. This tells us straight away that the other side of envy is Schadenfreude, the pleasure we get at other peoples’ misfortune.  They belong together because the usual way of dealing with envy is to damage or destroy the object of my envy, or to deprive the other person of it (possibly, though by no means necessarily, by taking it for myself).  In the last of the Ten Commandments, the prohibition against coveting what belongs to my neighbour is not forbidding me from admiring his house or his wife, his slave, his ox or his ass, nor acknowledging that I am not as well-endowed as he is.  It prohibits any action of mine that could spoil his enjoyment of them, what the French call jouissance, a legal term meaning the ‘proper enjoyment of possession’, either by stealing them, damaging them, violating or abusing them, disparaging them, or (and this is the inward attitude the torah wants absolutely to guard against) becoming so fixated on my neighbour’s fortunes that I lose sight of him as a person and destroy myself in the process.  The moral and theological point is that envy dehumanises.  It degrades the image of God in us.  It robs us of our dignity and worth because it deflects us from a person-centered relationship with God and with other people, which alone is the way towards human flourishing, into an idolatrous concern with what is material and impersonal. 

This dynamic of envy as emptiness or need allied to the instinct to ‘spoil’ the good that others have is studied extensively in the Bible,.  I should like to explore this theme in three Old Testament texts, the third of which begins to suggest how envy can be addressed as a spiritual problem.  I shall then comment on some New Testament texts that develop these themes before returning to our own day and asking what these biblical insights might suggest to us as we try to read the signs of the times and understand the human hungers and longings that permeate our society.  

My first text is a locus classicus of envy, the story of Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings 21.).  It is a simple enough narrative.  Naboth has a vineyard up against the royal palace.  King Ahab wants it: when it comes to real estate, location is everything.  Naboth will not sell his patrimony, whereupon Ahab goes to bed and sulks.  Jezebel devises a scheme whereby Naboth is accused of sacrilege for resisting the royal, and therefore divine, will.  Naboth is stoned to death and Ahab takes possession of the vineyard, only to find Elijah already there to pronounce judgment for his contempt of his subjects and of his God.  

This looks like a story of avarice, inordinate desire, and so it is.  Ahab wants something so desperately that it occupies all his waking thoughts.  In his emptiness of spirit, the ennui that so many rich and powerful people know, he obsesses about something he does not need.  But there is an important clue about his deeper mental state.  ‘Ahab said to Naboth, “Give me your vineyard, so that I may have it as a vegetable garden”.’  In other words, the wanting is accompanied by a destructive impulse.  The vine, like the olive and the fig tree, symbolises the best and most productive that the land is capable of.  To degrade a vineyard into a vegetable patch is to spoil what has been handed down in an ancient family for centuries. What is spoiled is not simply a vineyard.  It is part of a family’s sacred geography.  It is terrain that holds long-cherished memories that are not transferrable to another place.  It is the patrimony not only of a man’s ancestry but of a people to whom the land was a divine gift and the charter of their freedom from tyranny.  Tyranny, always deeply implicated in envy, is precisely what Naboth resists.  A tyrant’s envy costs him his life, though as the story goes on to relate, the envier meets an altogether more ignoble end.    

My next text is more complex.  It is the story of Saul and David in the First Book of Samuel, one of the finest tales of the ancient world.  Its greatness as tragedy comes from recognising the need to ‘speak what we feel; not what we ought to say’, as Edgar puts it in the final speech of King Lear.  Like Lear, Saul is ‘every inch a king’: not ague-proof, but for all that, a man whose flawed dignity elicits our compassion and even our regard.  He starts out so well, the young, charismatic hero whose prowess with the sword wins him acclaim from the tribes of Israel longing, in their fragile bond, for some unifying symbol of their kinship that will offer stability in the chaotic, uncertain world of the 11^th century BC.  But Saul’s problem is that he is never given the space to develop as king and as human being in his own right.  The scenery is always populated with others who surround him, in particular Samuel the prophet, Jonathan his son and heir, and David the bright-eyed youth whose magnetic looks and personality pulls all three of them into his orbit and whose sunny presence casts Saul into ever deepening shadows.  We have only to recall how Saul takes a rash oath to kill anyone who breaks a needlessly imposed fast, only to find that it is his own son Jonathan who is implicated, and how the people turn against Saul so that Jonathan may live; or how Saul is bowed down with melancholia and is soothed by David’s music; or how he frets about David’s absence from the feast, inventing every kind of reason why he has not come, then hurling a spear at his son because of his friendship with David; or the exquisitely crafted scene in the cave where David calls to Saul and delivers a long self-righteous speech, to which Saul listens and simply replies, ‘Is this your voice, my son David?’ and weeps; and at the emotional climax of the tragedy, the worn out king going in disguise by night to the woman at En-dor and learning from Samuel’s ghost that the coming day will be his last.  

Tragedy, in the strict sense, is a story told about greatness that is brought down by some failure in character, some ‘basic fault’.  What is Saul’s?  I propose that it is envy.  His obsession is not his own grandiosity (this was Solomon’s fault).  It is his preoccupation with what others have that he himself does not (or, if he has had it, he becomes deprived of it).  Again, we sense the void in his life, the emptiness that gives birth to envy.  He is envious of Samuel (even after he is dead) because of his direct access to the word of the Lord, something Saul has once enjoyed but now lost: ‘Is not Saul also among the prophets?  He is envious of first of his own son Jonathan and then of David for their military success and popular acclaim, qualities that fitted them so well for leadership, an art in which Saul for all his good beginnings, progressively fell short of Israel’s aspirations for what was required in a king.  There is a telling moment in the story when David returns from killing Goliath.  The women turn out (‘to meet Saul’, the text says carefully, not to adulate David directly) dancing and singing: ‘Saul has killed his thousands, and David his tens of thousands’.  It is meant, I think, as a celebration of them both, with the thousands-ten thousands comparison meant simply as a dramatic figure of speech to intensify their adulation: common enough, in Hebrew poetry.  But Saul takes it literally and is ‘very angry… “They have ascribed to David tens of thousands, and to me they have ascribed thousands; what more can he have but the kingdom?”  So Saul eyed David from that day on’  (1 Samuel 18.6-9).  This malevolent ‘eyeing’ (or, we could say, the ‘evil eye’) is envy in its purest form, with all its destructive intention laid bare.  

Most powerfully of all, in the way the story is told, he envies the love between David and Jonathan.  It is true that here we are dealing with a story about jealousy as well as envy, for both David and Jonathan pose a threat to Saul’s own attachment to each of them: each of them, he thinks, is taking the other away from him.  There are shades of Othello in this sad and beautiful tale.  But I think we can safely say that overshadowing his jealousy of his double attachment is his hard-edged envy of what existed between Jonathan the heir, and David, Saul’s friend turned (as he supposes) supplanter.  Such a friendship is what he does not have, and imagines he can never have.  And this, reinforced by his envy of David’s military success, is what he is determined to spoil by killing David and thereby destroy the very thing that animates and gives life to both his son and to himself, the love David is prepared to offer to them both.  There is only one way the mental distress of despair can end.  Saul falls on his own sword on Mount Gilboa, defeated by his own demons.  Who is to say whether, in the complex mysteries of the human mind, envy is the symptom or the cause?  But the symbolism is clear.  Envy always has the tendency to destroy.  In the end, say both the stories we have looked at, it visits destruction at home, in the very seat of the human soul.  

I spoke about the symbolism of Saul’s mental collapse and suicide.  This is a layer of the story we should pay attention to.  I said that envy always has the propensity to spoil.  In the psychoanalytic literature, this insight is associated with Melanie Klein whose work Envy and Gratitude (1957) proved ground-breaking in post-Freudian theory.  She says of envy that it entails an attack on the ‘good’ object because of its goodness, because the awareness of being separated from the ‘good’ which arouses envy becomes intolerable.  So acting out envious impulses is to relieve the tension between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects.  Klein develops this theory in the light of her observation of infant behaviour at the mother’s breast, and the tendency of the infant to ‘split’ the ‘good breast’ from the ‘bad’.  What I want to stress is her insight that envy attacks the good object because it is good.  And this perfectly explains Saul’s erratic behaviour towards David.  The good that is ultimately spoiled by his own envy is not external but internal, his love for David and the wholesomeness that comes from it.  More than that, the clarity of his moral vision, the integrity of his own motives and attitudes becomes increasingly clouded and compromised through his envy.  In this sense, Saul has already ‘died’ as a human person long before he throws himself on to his own sword.  The seven sins, of which envy is perhaps the most potent, are rightly known as ‘deadly’. 

My final text from the Hebrew Bible is one of the psalms.  Envy is a frequent theme in the Psalter, particularly among the wisdom Psalms.  Psalm 37 warns the feverish complainant against the destabilising effects of envy: ‘Fret not thyself because of the ungodly, neither be thou envious against the evil doers’.  The antidote here is a calm and equable spirit, for the evil doers will soon be cut down like the grass.  Psalm 49 is more probing.  ‘Be not thou afraid, though one be made rich: or if the glory of his house be increased; for he shall carry nothing away with him when he dieth; neither shall his pomp follow him.’  There, the argument turns on human mortality: there is no point in being consumed by envy when death is the great leveller of high and low, rich and poor.  It is a bleak way of dealing with envy, though undeniably potent.  

However, the Psalter’s most searching anatomy of envy is to be found in Psalm 73.  It is unique in the Old Testament for its acute psychological and spiritual perception of human envy, not least as a meditation that autobiographically charts the landscape of the psalmist’s own life.  

The Psalm begins with what looks like an orthodox statement of belief: ‘truly God is good to the upright’ (or to ‘Israel’ depending on how we read the Hebrew) (1).  Statements like this (perhaps meant to be read in implied quotation marks?) are very easy to make, but the theme of the Psalm is to test whether the credal assertion matches experience.  So, without further ado the psalmist launches out on his story.  ‘As for me, my feet had almost stumbled… for I was envious of the arrogant’ (2-3).  Psalm 37 may warn against futile worry, but here the psalmist could not help himself.  The prosperity of the arrogant is described with striking imagery as if the psalmist has personally had his nose rubbed in their graceless affluence.  He sees them gliding around ‘sound and sleek’ (4), wearing their pride like a necklace and violence like clothing (6), a kind of second skin.  Porcine eyes  bulbous with fat (7), mouths gaping open to the sky and tongues greedily scouring the earth for fodder (9) build up the unpleasant image of a grotesque self-inflated beast – for such people, to the psalmist, have forfeited their right to be called human.  And this is the symptom of their deadly underlying disease, the functional atheism we have already met in Psalm 14.  Like the fool who says, ‘there is no God’, the arrogant proudly defy their Maker with the question that most characterises the arrogant: ‘How can God know?  Is there knowledge in the Most High?’  What does a remote, transcendent deity know or care about anything (11)?  

After this graphic and colourful portrait of hubris the psalmist returns to his testimony.  If the arrogant are so favoured, what is the point of being wise or good or religious – this is the heart of the psalmist’s dilemma.  ‘All in vain have I kept my heart clean, and washed my hands in innocence.  For all day long I have been plagued and am punished every morning’ (13-14).  The inward struggle between the faith of verse 1 and the experience of the following verses is an unbearable burden, for there is simply no answer to this conflict (15-16).  The circle of theodicy cannot be squared.  Until, that is, the great turning point of this Psalm.  ‘I went into the sanctuary of God’ (17).  In this life-changing moment, illumination happens; there is a sudden disclosure of how things truly are.  ‘Then I perceived their end’ (17).  It’s as if the psalmist has been given spectacles so that where previously there had only been hints and nudges of reality, now at last everything comes into focus. 

Something very striking happens to the psalmist’s discourse here.  Up to now, the story has been told in the 1^st and 3^rd person: this is how it is with them; these are the consequences for me.  But no sooner has he experienced this sudden reorientation of perspective than he turns to address God himself.  ‘Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin’ (18).  Narrative turns into prayer, and remains in that mode for the rest of the Psalm.  In other words, it is as the psalmist turns towards God that everything else begins to make sense and his envy begins to subside.  He understands now the truth already sketched out in Psalms 37 and 49.  Above all, he recognises that good fortune is a chimera, an insubstantial dream (20); once seen for what it is, those favoured by it are to be pitied, for it blinds them to the infinitely better, more lasting rewards the psalmist has now discovered. 

What are these rewards?  The psalmist likens his earlier, pre-enlightened state to that of a ‘brute beast’ (22).  So while the arrogant had become bestial through their pride and avarice, there had been a comparable risk to the psalmist: that he too would be brutalised through the sin of envy (3).  But what he now describes is how the corrupting effects of envy are transfigured by humanising desire.  This is no longer the destructive envy of others’ wealth and success but the life giving hunger for God.  Where envy had poisoned his vision, desire for God transforms and renews it.  And so the Psalm rises to a magnificent climax of faith: ‘Nevertheless I am continually with you; you hold my right hand.  You guide me with your counsel and afterward you will receive me with honour.  Whom have I in heaven but you?  And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.  My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever’ (23-26).  So the journey ends with an elaboration of the opening credal statement, but this time without quotation marks, for the conventional rewards-and-punishment formula he had trotted out has become his personal confession of a lived faith.  ‘But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge to tell of all your works’ (28).  He has made the pilgrimage from the words of religion to the inward experience of it, the most important journey a human being can ever make.  

Melanie Klein’s work was entitled Envy and Gratitude.  Her thesis was that gratitude is the polar opposite to envy and the antidote to it.  She defines gratitude as our response to what we experience as the true ‘good’.  She means by this that when we experience something as gift, our response is not the envious instinct to attack and destroy but the loving instinct to care, appreciate and give in return.  It awakens a life-instinct that is generous and transformative and that is the antithesis of the death-instinct that gives birth to envy.  This is because contentment is the hard-won realisation that we are not empty after all: the good permeates our lives, if we can only see it.  And the recognition that our cup is, so to speak, full of what is good, and the gratitude that flows from it, drains the poison out of our propensity to envy.  I think we can see this transformation happening in Psalm 73, which provides us with a happier ending than the stories of either Naboth’s vineyard or King Saul.  The psalm’s turning point marks the threshold at which the psalmist crosses over from envy to gratitude, from destructive impulse to the opening up of the self to all that will be integrative and healing.  

For a Christian theologian, this Kleinian language has strongly eucharistic overtones.  Eucharistia, thanksgiving, is of course a liturgical act commanded in the gospel in memory of Jesus on the threshold of his passion.  However, the eucharist is what it is in the larger sense that it expresses the offering of all of life to the Creator and Redeemer of the world.  To be a disciple is to live eucharistically.  To be the church is to be the community of disciples who are shaped by gratitude as the fundamental Christian virtue, and who are thereby being humanised by the transformative gift of grace.  So I want to say that in a fundamental sense, the antidote to envy is the eucharist, because it is in the eucharist that the human race does what it was created to do, to offer God its praise and thanksgiving, to ‘glorify God and enjoy him for ever’ as the Westminster Shorter Catechism has it.  And the consequence of this is as the broken, disordered fragments of our lives are gathered up, like the broken fragments of the eucharistic bread, and put back together again and healed.  Eucharistia is the answer to envy because it takes us out of our narcissistic self-absorption with our own envious desires, and instead invites us to gaze on larger things until, as the hymn says, we are ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’.  This integrative, individuating journey into divine lostness is envy’s ultimate anthithesis.  

There is one passage among many in the New Testament that encapsulates this perfectly.  Writing to the Philippians, Paul constantly underlines the life-giving, transformative effect of gratitude and joy on the believer and the church.  Towards the end of this most beautiful of his letters, Paul captures his major themes.  His final chapter reiterates the command to rejoice in the Lord always, and promises that because of God’s goodness, believers do not need to worry about their needs (‘fret’, in the language of Psalm 37).  It is the peace of God, passing all understanding, that will guard against anxiety.  Therefore, believers are to focus on the ‘good’: ‘whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.’  Paul elaborates on his own circumstances.  ‘Not that I am referring to being in need; for I have learned to be content with whatever I have.  I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty,  In any and all circumstances, I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and being in need.  I can do all things through him who strengthens me… My God will satisfy every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.’ (Philippians 4) 

The key word here is contentment.  Autarkeia literally means ‘self-sufficiency’, being able to support oneself without being dependent on others.  By extension, it came to mean in Stoic philosophy being free of my own inner desires, a state of equilibrium in which I am no longer driven by my needs and drives and envious desires, in other words, ‘contentment’.  We could say this equates in a theological sense, to not being empty. This is, I think, what Paul means here.  He is saying that only when we have begun to transcend our envy with all its destructive tendencies can we experience true liberation.  In Stoic philosophy such a state is achieved by the discipline of living contemplatively.  It would be tempting to say that for Paul contentment is God-given, arising spontaneously in the heart of the believer because of his or her free justification by faith in Jesus Christ.  It is, of course, but not in a simpliste way that excludes the contemplative way we have explored in the Hebrew wisdom literature.  It is I think a subtle marriage of gift-and-response: gift, because salvation cannot be earned by anything that we do, even contemplation; response because the gift is nothing until we do the lifelong ‘work’ of making it our own and inhabiting it. ‘I have learned to be content’ he says.  It is spiritual askesis, part of the artistry of being formed in the image of Christ that is both God’s and ours.  It begins with gratitude, for contentment means, theologically, that state of spiritual balance (to use a Benedictine idea) that comes from knowing that we are loved by God and are on the way to salvation.  Only then, as Paul says in the Letter to the Romans, can we offer our lives as as ‘living sacrifice’ (Romans 12.2).  With gratitude, it is an act of grace.  Without it, it is merely Pelagian effort.   

Envy infiltrates every aspect of modern life.  The reckless competitiveness and bonuses on a scale that beggars belief that have driven our financial institutions to the brink of ruin are a clear symptom of it.  On a smaller scale (but not always so small in the context of modest domestic finances) the advertising industry cleverly plays straight into our envious propensities, and largely encourages them in the young, whether it is electronic games, fast cars, must-have gadgetry or the cult of youth and the body beautiful.  It is perhaps futile to expect society to change very much, for its values have been formed now over many generations.  I do not think we should be too quick to blame post-Enlightenment economics for this: Christians flourished in the 19^th century market place by developing the virtues of thrift, prudence and an ethic of hard work.  Is it too much to ponder whether this was because our forebears had a deeper awareness of the importance of gratitude and contentment than we?  If so, then the cultivation of these virtues would seem to be a high priority if our society is, like the prodigal son, ever going to come to its senses and understand the life of a human being in a larger context than simply the gratifying of needs and desires.  I have argued that if envy is the besetting sin of our day, its greatest need for moral and spiritual health is to recapture the life-enhancing generosity of eucharistia and autarkeia, of gratitude and contentment.  With these given house-room as fundamental values in our society, we might perhaps lose interest in even considering, let alone embracing, the Faustian bargains that put our souls in such danger.  

October 2009

Holy Week in Chester 3: “I am the Light of the World”

Reading: John 9.1-12

In our Holy Week journey through the I AM sayings of St John’s Gospel, we have looked at the Door, and at the Resurrection and the Life. Tonight, we come to “I am the Light of the World”. 

Light is a universal word we find in all the world’s religions. And like last night’s life, light is one of the great words of St John. The two are linked together in the very first paragraph of the gospel that we read at Christmas time, “In him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it”. That passage in turn looks back to the creation story in the Book of Genesis where the first words God speaks are “Let there be light!”  “And there was light” the text says, “and God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. The light he called Day, and the darkness Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

In Genesis, light and darkness, day and night aren’t yet distinguished by moral or spiritual values. Light is to see by, and the daily rhythm of light and darkness is given in order to structure time. But in St John it is very different. Night time and darkness are dangerous and risky. When Judas left the upper room to hand Jesus over to the authorities, he “went out”, says John, “and it was night” – an observation left hanging in the air as its own commentary on the darkness that had overtaken the betrayer’s soul. “And this is the judgment” says Jesus earlier, “That the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” Or as he says on the very threshold of Holy Week, “the light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light so that you may become children of light.”

All of which heightens the significance of Jesus’ saying, “I am the light of the world.” He has already spoken these words in the previous chapter and added: “whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life”. But now, Jesus embeds those same words in the important story of the healing of the man who was born blind. Like the raising of Lazarus last night, this sign is another disclosure of God’s activity in the world, his “works” as John calls them. “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 

But light has its different aspects. In St John, the Light of the World enables us to see in things in new ways. C. S. Lewis famously said that he believed that the sun had risen, not because he gazed directly at it but because by its light he could see the world, other people and himself. Illumination is a key stage in the classic spiritual path. Not for nothing did our eighteenth-century forebears speak about enlightenment as an event (God-given, some said) in the journey of scientific method and intellectual self-awareness. But if you were the poet William Blake, you would describe looking into the sun as gazing at angels. So you did that with great care, knowing how risky it is to expose yourself to such a fierce, unforgiving light. Indeed, one of the Psalms talks about God wrapping himself in light as in a garment, an idea taken up in the hymn Immortal, invisible, God only wise, In light inaccessible hid from our eyes. ’Tis only the splendour of light hideth thee it goes, verses rich in theological wisdom. The paradox is that light conceals as much as it reveals. Moses prayed, “Lord, show me your glory”, but is warned to protect himself in the cleft of the rock because if he so much as glimpses Divinity as he really is, it will kill him. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality” says T.S. Eliot, least of all when that reality is God. 

St John plays with some of these themes in the course of his gospel. In particular, he takes us back to Moses in the prologue we keep returning to. Where Moses had asked to behold God’s glory but had needed to be shielded from experiencing its fulness, John tells us that in the Word made flesh who lived among us, “we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth”. His claim is as high as it could possibly be. And to underline it, as he embarks on telling the story of Jesus’ works among humankind, the great “signs” he performs, John says that he “revealed his glory and his disciples believed in him”. 

And it is not long before Jesus begins to speak of the destiny that awaits him, his own suffering and death. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” he says; and later, in his prayer on the very threshold of his passion, “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do”. We know where it is that Jesus finishes his work, for he tells us so in his last word from the cross: “It is accomplished”. If you had asked St John, where do we see God’s glory most clearly, where do we see his light shining most steadily, he would answer, at Golgotha, at the cross where love’s work is completed, where the crucified Lord lays down his life for his friends, where the Son of Man is enthroned as the king who is lifted up so that he may draw all people to himself. In the Fourth Gospel, the cross, the last and greatest sign of glory, represents not defeat but God’s work achieved, completed, victorious.

It’s worth lingering on this point about the Johannine cross. It seems perverse to use words like light and glory of that darkest and cruellest of places, Golgotha, the “skull”. But that paradox, seeing glory in a place of ignominy and shame, light in the midst of darkness and desolation, is precisely John’s point. “There is in God a deep and dazzling darkness” says one mystical poet. It’s not far from St Paul’s language about seeing God’s wisdom in the folly of the cross, his power in its weakness. “It is accomplished” proclaims Jesus in the last word from the cross in St John. Throughout the gospel, he emphasises how Jesus has come into the world to do the work of God and complete it, or as he says of Jesus in the upper room, to love to the very end. So tetelestai, “it is finished”, is the most important word in the Passion narrative. 

On Good Friday, Bach’s St John Passion will be performed in the Cathedral. I wonder how Bach’s setting of that last word will be sung by the bass who takes the part of Christus. It’s a falling line in Bach’s music, Es ist vollbracht.  I hope it will be with firmness and confidence, not resignation and defeat. I have a theory that just as the last words from the cross in the other gospels are quotations from the Psalms, John’s “it is finished” refers to the conclusion of the Passion Psalm 22. Matthew and Mark tell how the dying Jesus quotes the first line, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Could it be that St John alludes to the triumphant last line of that Psalm that moves from utter despair to gratitude and praise: “future generations will proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it”. He has performed it. All is done. Tetelestai. That’s glory.

And because it is done, the cross inevitably points beyond itself to the new day that begins at Easter. As we saw last night in the story of the raising of Lazarus, throughout John’s gospel, resurrection seems to be enfolded into the passion and crucifixion in a single movement that the author describes as Jesus’ “going to the Father”. When the Easter story begins and Mary goes to the tomb, it is still dark. I think it’s meant to point up the contrast between what she and the disciples don’t yet know, can’t yet grasp about the empty tomb, and what the emerging light of day will reveal to be the dawn of a new glory, that Jesus is risen and is present to his people until he returns to his Father. 

So the Light of the World gives sight not only to the man born blind, but to the whole of creation, for “the true light which enlightens everyone was coming into the world”. For St John, the incarnation, the signs, the crucifixion, the resurrection are like the seamless robe for which the soldiers cast lots in his passion story. They all disclose the glory that is revealed as the Light of the world that he loves, says John, “to the end”. This Holy Week we celebrate the great light that shines into the shadowy places of life, brings warmth and vitality to a cold dark world, and shows us the way back to him so that we can learn to be God’s people once again.

Here is how Malcolm Guite puts it in his sonnet on the Light of the World.

I see your world in light that shines behind me,
Lit by a sun whose rays I cannot see,
The smallest gleam of light still seems to find me
Or find the child who’s hiding deep inside me.
I see your light reflected in the water,
Or kindled suddenly in someone’s eyes,
It shimmers through the living leaves of summer,
Or spills from silver veins in leaden skies,
It gathers in the candles at our vespers
It concentrates in tiny drops of dew
At times it sings for joy, at times it whispers,
But all the time it calls me back to you.
I follow you upstream through this dark night
My saviour, source, and spring, my life and light.

(c) Malcolm Guite. With permission 

Retreat Address on the Psalms 6 - Prayer and Happiness (Psalm 32)

Our last psalm is a song of gladness. It begins with a repeated ashre’, the happy Hebrew word we met at the start of the week in Psalm 65, Happy are those whom you choose and bring near to live in your courts. It introduces the beatitude “happy” or “blessed” are those who... Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Happy are those to whom Yahweh imputes no iniquity and in whose spirit there is no deceit (1, 2). So our retreat has begun and ended on a note of happiness, which is good. 

It is not too much to suggest that happiness is one of the defining themes of the Psalter.  The opening utterance of the entire book is the first of 23 such ‘beatitudes’ that are found throughout the Psalms: ‘Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord’ (Psalm 1.1,2).  Psalm 1 is one of the latest in the Psalter.  We can safely assume that those who brought the Psalms together as a collection consciously placed Psalm 1 as a kind of introduction to the book by way of inviting readers to find in the Psalter a guide to happiness and contentment.  The message is: consider the Psalms, and discover in them the way of lived faith in Yahweh that is the safe path to blessing.  

Today’s psalm is in the same vein as that first psalm in the book, reflective in character, the fruits of the long experience of contemplating life and drawing lessons from its darker side.  Here it is sin and forgiveness that is the focus.  These are common themes in the wisdom literature where happiness is often spoken of as having a right assessment of human life, and in particular, recognizing where God is to be found in it. The New Testament takes up the idea of happiness sayings, like the makarioi, the Beatitudes with which Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”. If we were to translate these sayings as “happy those who…” as the Jerusalem Bible does, we would see their Old Testament roots more clearly.

The happiness of the believer in Psalm 32 is that of the forgiven sinner.  It is the thanksgiving of an individual who not only knows he or she has done wrong, but whose wrongdoing has led to the consequence of some unidentified suffering. My body wasted away through my groaning all day long; for day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer (3,4). It sounds as though it is some kind of sickness or injury. Then again, it could be hostility or persecution, or even, highly metaphorically, exile from home, family and temple. Or it could be a vivid picture of the misery we feel when our consciences are burdened by our sins and wrongdoings, the kind of inward distress the psalmist pours out in Psalm 51 which we recited yesterday. We don’t know, only that it was painful and deeply troubling. 

What’s clear is that the experience has been chastening, brought the psalmist to his or her senses. Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity. I said ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’. That is a very thorough confession indeed. The psalmist uses three of the most important Hebrew words for doing what is wrong. Sin literally means missing the mark as in Romans, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”. Transgression means crossing a boundary, not staying the right side of a line that defines right from wrong. It is a stronger, more conscious kind of word that represents deliberate rebellion against authority. Iniquity means that which is misshapen, twisted, deviates from what it should be. It’s the most inward of the three words. When you fall short or transgress, you are guilty. When you are distorted inwardly out of shape, you are more likely to feel shame. It’s worth noticing that these three words have already occurred in the psalm right at the beginning where the psalmist celebrated forgiveness and restoration with that double affirmation of happiness. 

The ‘naming’ of our wrongdoing is as characteristic of Hebrew faith as it is of Christianity.  I reminded us yesterday that Psalm 51 calls it “truth in the inward being”, that is, allowing our inner selves to be places of honesty and transparency rather than pretence.  We saw this when we looked at Psalm 106, that long psalm that rehearses Israel’s failure in history to live up to its covenant ideals. Integrity in the Bible is to accept our condition for what it is and allow God’s judgment and truth to do their purifying, healing work. And it’s this that led to God’s response. And you forgave the guilt of my sin. After the psalmist’s elaboration of sin in its many dimensions, the simplicity of that statement is striking. It’s like Nathan pronouncing to the penitent David, “the Lord has put away your sin”. It doesn’t take many words to describe a life-changing experience which this clearly was to the psalmist. But it takes a large and loving heart to be open to forgiveness, and to the transformation brought about by absolution. It’s a great reversal of the psalmist’s despair. Here is someone who thought they could never know release from the burden they were carrying. But now, all of a sudden, it’s lifted. The clouds have cleared. There is a deep and lasting gladness. For him or her, you sense that the words “go and sin no more” would have carried a lasting resonance.

The rest of the psalm reflects on this journey from sin to forgiveness. I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go. The poet is in wisdom mode now, determined never again to be found in that desperate and lonely place. What’s needed is to have understanding, not like a horse or mule that must constantly be restrained from blundering off the road. The only antidote to sin is to trust in the Lord. That way, not only will we avoid the torments of the wicked but we shall know the steadfast love of the Lord. The word is of course hesed, God’s tender mercy and loving kindness, the great covenant word that binds YHWH to his people and the to him. As another joyful psalm written out of the experience of forgiveness says, “the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments” (103). Our psalmist would have said amen to that. Which is why the psalm ends: be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart! When you are forgiven, you know a happiness like no other. For “whoever is forgiven much, loves much”. 

*******

Which brings us to Mary Magdalen, whose festival it is today. Or rather, it doesn’t quite, because the sinful woman whom Jesus forgave and of whom he spoke those words is not named in the gospel. But there’s no doubt at all that Mary Magdalen could have told the same story as the psalmist. We know she was healed of “evil spirits and infirmities”, and we know she was one “from whom seven demons had gone out”. Hence Psalm 32 is one of those proper to today, and it makes a fine commentary on the colourful career of this woman who is so central in all four gospel accounts.

It’s moving to find this most passionate of our biblical saints honoured here at Mirfield in the beautiful glass screens that mark the Chapel of the Ascension. I too feel a personal involvement with Mary Magdalen owing to our frequent visits to the hilltop town of Vézelay in Burgundy. The marvellous Romanesque Basilica stands at the summit of the medieval town. It has for centuries been the focus of pilgrimages to honour her relics in their shrine in the crypt; and of course Vézelay is still one of the four traditional starting points of the Camino to Santiago da Compostela. Her relics were contested in the late Middle Ages, but her spirit still pervades the town, especially today when there will  festivities all over the hill and a great procession through the narrow streets. My second grandchild is called Madeleine, perhaps to commemorate family holidays in this beautiful part of France. 

Why am I telling you this? Because it has helped me to get to know the saint a little better and place myself under her patronage. I think understand something of how she was drawn to Jesus from a chaotic, wayward past in which her longings and loves had yet to find clear direction or focus. As I said earlier this week, St Augustine tells us that sin is not a failure of love but applying it to the wrong things. If ever this was true of anyone, it is Mary Magdalen. When I came to faith as a teenager, it was with a sense of relief I began to discover how to straighten out those idolatrous distortions, find purpose and meaning, aspire to purity of heart. I don’t want to dramatize it, but I can empathise with Mary when she came to the tomb in the half-light of an early morning and found it empty and something stirred within her and she knew that life had changed forever. 

So what can I offer you in my reflections as this week of retreat draws to an end and I say farewell? First, we need like Mary Magdalen to see ourselves as witnesses of the resurrection with an apostolic story to tell. This is one of those personal thanksgiving Psalms that chart a journey from desolation to consolation, from predicament to rescue, from the cry of distress to the shout of salvation. So it is full of the spirit of Easter. You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with glad cries of deliverance. Here are psalmists who have seen the great work of a God who brings hope out of despair, life out of death and light out of darkness. When God arises, earth’s morning breaks and shadows flee away. That was Mary’s experience in the garden on Easter Day. It’s the heart of Christianity because it is all founded upon the paschal mystery. We are an Easter people and alleluia is our song. Above all here in this Community of the Resurrection. Today is one of those festivals where the name of this community comes into its own, I think.

So secondly, like Mary, like the believer in Psalms 116 and 32, we need to tell and retell the story of personal transformation through divine power and love. This follows from being a witness to the resurrection and telling an apostolic story, for if we have glimpsed the risen Christ, encountered him in our own experience, then Easter is more than a story of the past, a lot more. It’s a story about the present, about how Christ has, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ word, “eastered” in us. It’s a story about the future and how it is filled with the glorious hope for the creation and for ourselves that comes out of that encounter in a garden on the dawn of the first day of the week when the woman Mary, on behalf of all humanity, said to the man she had supposed to be the gardener, “Rabbouni”. 

The consequences of that dawn are nothing less than momentous for each of us as they were for Mary. For one thing, this transforming encounter, this life-changing experience gives birth to a profound sense of thankfulness, the gratitude that was the theme of our first address this week, Psalm 65, that celebrated the harvest and all God’s goodness to humanity and to the created world. Easter is at the heart of doxology and of the eucharistic life. For another, it brings home to us that we are witnesses of God’s continuing activity in human life, our own lives in particular. To bear witness and tell a story are the essence of evangelism. “Come and hear, all you who fear God” says another psalm, “and I will tell what he has done for me.” 

There is no substitute for faith-sharing in this personal way. It may seem naïve to reduce it to the revivalist chorus “this is my story, this is my song / praising my Saviour all the day long” but if we do not have a story to tell and a song to sing, we must ask ourselves how deeply our faith has imprinted itself on our character. If I learned anything in my distant evangelical past, it was that personal experience is what makes faith a living thing. Having your heart “strangely warmed” and telling a story about it to those who want to hear - the whole of mission is summed up in that. I have been young and now am old, but I hope to die professing the living, breathing faith that is to know and trust in God my light and life and love, that is to enter into the divine movement of incarnation, passion and resurrection, that is to have been forgiven much and therefore to love much.

Finally, we should cultivate truth in our inward being and renew our seriousness of purpose in our life together before God. Mary and the psalmist are mercilessly exposed in the texts. The flaws and ambiguities, the sins and offences are not hidden from us; and even if they were, they would not be hidden from God. That’s the fallacy of religious pretence because we know all along that God sees, and God knows, and it is only a matter of time before we shall be found out. We began with the ashre’, the makarios, the happiness of those who are forgiven, the blessings on those who are poor in spirit, pure in heart, who are merciful and who hunger for righteousness. These are the ones who will be filled, who will receive mercy, who will see God, who belong in the kingdom of heaven. And all because there is something transparent about these unrecognized, unsung nobodies, something that marks them as people of truth. Mary Magdalen is one of those happy ones.

I’m sure you agree that no other kind of Christianity is worth practising. In particular, you who have taken vows to live in this wonderful community did so because you were serious about following Jesus. Poverty, chastity and obedience, or as you now say, I think, stability, obedience and the conversion of life - those Sermon-on-the-Mount like virtues are signs that you are intentional about being Christians. For you, “truth in the inward parts” means there are no half-measures: all is given up for the sake of Christ. His yoke will no doubt not always feel easy, nor his burden light. But you believe in your hearts that this is to live according to the truth that is Christ himself, the truth to which you align yourselves in an ever deeper way hour by hour, day by day and year by year. This is what I call seriousness. Your witness is a treasure for all of us because it tells us that there is a more profound way of living than the superficial fantasies and illusions that crowd in upon us and seduce us, often against our better instincts, into dancing to their siren tunes.

And this retreat with its liturgy and lectio, its silence and its reflection is also a sign of wanting to embrace truth and always live in its light. The psalmist would tell us that while the light of scrutiny is not always comfortable because it searches us out and knows us, nevertheless it is at heart a kindly light that leads us on into truth and guides us in the paths of justice and mercy. So as people whom the psalm calls happy because we know we are reconciled and loved, we entrust ourselves to the Spirit of Truth to keep us faithful in the ways of God and to guide us in the imitation of Christ so that we find ourselves drawn ever closer into his wounded side where we find our rest and peace.

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I am leaving you today, so I want to thank you for your welcome, your kindness, and your hospitality this week, and especially for the privilege of daily prayer with you in your marvellous church. You have been wonderful companions to live amongst these few days.  

As for your meditations as your retreat draws to a close, I think we should link where we have ended up with where we began, Psalms 65 and 32 and on this festival day focus on happiness, gratitude and joy. I mentioned the General Thanksgiving at the start of the week. If you can unearth the text in the Book of Common Prayer, why not find an opportunity to pray it today, in thankfulness “for our creation, preservation and all the blessings of this life, but above all for the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace and for the hope of glory”. And why not ask that we may always have “that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we shew forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up ourselves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be all honour and glory, world without end”. To which we all say, Amen!

Retreat Address on the Psalms 5 - Prayer and Rage (Psalm 79)

In my second address, I began by mentioning the psalmists oppressed by wickedness and the utter wrongness of things who cry, “How long, O Lord?”. Here is one of those psalms that has turned up in our morning cycle. So let’s not tiptoe round the maelstrom but plunge into its centre in the hope of finding some still small voice amid the roar of wind and waves.

Primo Levi’s powerful memoir of Auschwitz, If This is a Man, offers an unflinching testimony to the minute particulars of cruelty and suffering. In one place, he writes about the wooden bowls each prisoner had. They were precious because without your bowl, you would not be able to eat, and once lost, it could be extremely hard to procure another. So prisoners would etch their name or camp number on the bottom of their bowl. But Levi came across a Frenchman who did not do this but etched instead the words Ne pas chercher à comprendre. For Auschwitz is a place beyond all understanding, a place that makes no-sense, where there is no answer to the question “why?” This is the world our psalm inhabits.

You’ll remember that in the week of The Queen’s Speech, a “day of rage” was organised in London in support of the Grenfell Tower victims and the social conditions that were exposed by that terrible fire. There was a lot of criticism about the demonstration, and a number of Christians posted messages on social media arguing that it was a day of prayer that was needed, not a day of rage. I can see both sides of this debate. But when I read psalms like 79, so full of anger in the aftermath of a fearful catastrophe, I find I have more sympathy with the protesters. Whatever else this psalm and others like it have to say, they seem to me to give us permission to rage. Not to protest at the injustice of it all seems to me to be a failure to feel with and for its victims who are our own flesh and blood.

But this is not a licence to rage blindly, or to rage hatefully at other people. The thing is, to rage in the presence of God. And that is the startling insight of these angry psalms, as it is of the Book of Job which we have been reading at the Church of England morning office in recent weeks. This is not sightless rage, but a far-seeing rage that sees that there is a God to be wrestled with and reckoned with, to whom all the great questions of life and death, suffering and distress need to be addressed. Why this? Why us? Why now? Why did you allow it? Where were you? How long, O Lord before you come to help us?

Like Psalm 106 which we looked at yesterday, disaster has struck Judah. They, the destroying nations, have defiled your holy temple; they have laid Jerusalem in ruins. This points again to the Babylonian invasion of the sixth century. By this time, the people are possibly in exile, or maybe still picking over the ruins of their holy and beautiful house in a post-traumatic state of shock, bewilderment and paralysis that is common after some awful catastrophe has befallen. And the opening verses leave us in no doubt about the terror they have endured. Human bodies lie unburied because there is no-one left to care for them; they are now carrion for wild animals and birds of prey. Blood has flowed in rivers around Jerusalem. The nations looking on, the pitiless goyyim as the psalm calls them, have no words of comfort, only derision and mockery. It is one of those unforgettable human landscapes depicted in the scriptures, and one of the most desolate and forlorn. Who would not weep in the face of such anguish?

The heart of this lament is the passionate prayer introduced by the words we began with, How long, O Lord? Will you be angry forever?  It’s hardly a comfortable psalm to recite when so much of it is dominated by the sense of divine judgment. But there is a logic here, and the way the argument works is important. It begins by recognising that the Lord’s anger with his people is justified. There is a reason for all the suffering they have endured: do not remember against us the iniquities of our ancestors…deliver us and forgive our sins. So we are back in the same experience of yesterday with Psalm 106 and how we tell the story of our own failure and sin. Here, it is the people who are doing this collectively. In the other psalm we recited this morning, Psalm 51, it is the individual penitent. Both these are different from the many laments where the sufferer does not understand why he or she is undergoing this punishment. Here, the people do not question God’s justice. They accept the premise that turning away from the will of a righteous God, violating his torah and transgressing his commandments is wilfully to break his covenant. And that in turn is to bring down on Israel the sanctions of a broken contract, the curses that are the other side of the blessings set before the people when the covenant was enacted in cloud and fire at the mountain of Horeb that you find in the Book Deuteronomy

The psalmist sees the nations as God’s unwitting agents in punishing Israel. Yet the prayer is that God will deliver Israel from the goyyim who have been the instruments of his justice. There seems to be the assumption that in the wholesale havoc they have wreaked, they have overreached themselves. So the prayer asks that God will turn his anger away from Israel and towards the goyyim. Pour out your anger on the nations that do not know you, and on the kingdoms that do not call upon your name. For they have devoured Jacob and laid waste his habitation. And all this because poor Jacob is left friendless without ally or champion – whether among the surrounding nations or in almighty God himself. 

It’s important not to misunderstand outbursts of anger like these which are very common in the psalms. It is not (or not primarily) that Israel wants vengeance for its own sake. Rather, it is the concern that God should be God, should vindicate himself before the world, publicly demonstrate that he cares about protecting his reputation, is moral as well as mighty. You could say that what exercises the psalmist is putting right and stabilising the moral order of the universe. It is unjust that the nations have punished Israel beyond what they deserved. And it is unjust that they continue to mock the people and blaspheme their God. Why should the nations say, “Where is their (that is, Israel’s) God?” Let the avenging of the outpoured blood of your servants be known among the nations before our eyes. 

The final section encapsulates these themes and adds an afterword. The psalmist returns to the plight of Judah’s victims and prays let the groans of the prisoners come before you; according to your great power preserve those doomed to die. But his fury is so close to the surface that it bursts out one last time. Return sevenfold into the bosom of our neighbours the taunts with which they taunted you, O Lord! A sevenfold punishment is exceptionally severe. But the psalm doesn’t end on that vengeful note. Instead, it looks forward to deliverance. There is a “certainty of hearing” as there is in so many laments, the confidence that God will act for his beleaguered nation and in due time they will have cause to be thankful. Then we your people, the flock of your pasture, will give thanks to you forever; from generation to generation we will recount your praise. So the first forever question is answered by a forever affirmation. Will you be angry forever? … We will give you thanks forever. It is in the Lord’s hands. Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.

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I said this was not a comfortable psalm. I think it calls for spiritual self-awareness if we are going to pray it with integrity. I don't so much mean that we are all affected the church’s culture of niceness where negative feelings are not allowed. I am more thinking of the risk we face that we could be eaten up by this rage, so full of righteous (or unrighteousness) anger that we forget that we are taught to love not only our neighbour but our enemy as well. I want to come back later to how we read this psalm on Friday, the day of the Cross.

Here is what I find myself doing with psalms like these. First, I want to affirm the importance of truth-telling when it comes to calamity and devastation. What is refreshing in the psalm laments is the total absence of pretence. They are written out of the searing experience of disaster and agony, and this is what the psalmist intends to lay before God. This puts a question mark by our propensity always to find a formal, courteous register that we regard as fit to be used in the presence of God. I am all for getting the words of public worship right! But there are times when carefully honed rhythms and cadences do not quite do justice to the hardness and roughness of human experience. The laments tell us: we do not need to be afraid to come as we are into the divine presence. God asks us and wants us to be truthful about our condition, and if that means crying out in unadorned protest at the ordeals that others or we are suffering, then that is how we must pray. Indeed, it would be wrong to bend the ear of the divine on any other terms. And if we doubt the legitimacy of praying out of godforsakenness and despair, we have only to think of the agonised last words of Jesus on the cross in St Matthew and St Mark. “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabhachthani? “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

Next, I want to ask us to take seriously the kind of God to whom this lament is addressed. When the text talks about his being angry forever, we tend to think of the affect, an outburst of emotion as likely as not wild and uncontrolled. I believe this is to misunderstand the psalm. In the Hebrew Bible, anger at its best, like love, is an act of the will. It's a decision. In the concrete imagery of the Old Testament, love is to turn your face towards someone else, while anger is to turn your face away. Which is to say that when we get behind our emotions, anger and love are two sides of the same coin, which is about honouring the integrity of a personal relationship. It’s in the nature of a holy God to love truth, integrity and justice, and to abhor what is false, wicked and wrong. So the psalm appeals to God’s character as a way of reckoning with the disaster that has happened. If God is responsible for events (as he must ultimately be), then it is only by laying over them the template of God’s character as we have learned to know him that we can hope to respond adequately, theologically and spiritually. So at its best, our human rage at the injustices that we see all around us is a way of aligning ourselves with the God who is angry about them too. I would not want to pray to a God who was not angry about the injustice and cruelty in the world, angry at how the poor and the voiceless and the meek and those in pain suffer, so often at the hands of both the tyrannical and the neglectful. 

And this brings me to a third reflection, that all our prayer and all our theology must be rooted in the experience of human beings. What has prompted this psalm is the destruction of a land and the suffering of its people. So it starts out with the victims and their plight. This is a feature of all the laments. Psalm 79 is specific about the pain being endured by a people who are crying out to be delivered. The first four verses are a vivid description of an ordeal that speaks for itself. Only after the psalmist has entered into that dreadful experience can he develop a way of praying in the light of it. I think there is an insight here of profound importance for our prayer, our proclamation and our mission. For if, as I said yesterday, religion has nothing to say about suffering, then it has nothing to say. We must be for the suffering people, as Albert Schweitzer said. And whatever we believe we are called to say in the aftermath of some terrible tragedy (and we shall of course choose our words with the greatest of care), the first message to convey is that we are trying to understand, to think ourselves into other people’s ordeals, to give ourselves in compassion, empathy and love. And if this is the way in which Christianity teaches us to serve, it is also the way it teaches us how to think, theologise and pray. 

My fourth thought is about the importance of keeping hope alive. That might not strike you as the message of the psalm. But I think it lies at its very core. For one thing, why pray to God at all if the psalmist didn’t believe that he or she would be heard? Or that God was capable of making a difference? Or that he cared? Prayer is the evidence that hope exists even when it looks as though all hope is lost. And the psalm’s conclusion leaves us in no doubt that this lament springs not only out of bitterness and anger, but also out of hope. There is this “certainty of hearing” that I have mentioned before. We your people, the flock of your pasture, will give you thanks forever. That phrase your people holds the clue. It’s an allusion to the covenant promise, “I will be your God and you shall be my people”. So the psalm ends by reminding God of his undertakings to the people he loves. It's a vital clue about the relationship between God and his people that makes this passionate prayer possible at all. We could easily miss the promise and hope enfolded in it. For us Christians, it makes us look beyond the immediate historical context of the psalm to the relationship of mercy and love God wants to have with all humanity. It was for this that he sent his Son as the everlasting sign of his face turned towards us, and which is symbolised in the gospel when Jesus is named Immanuel, God is with us. 

My final reflection is perhaps the most important of all. On this Friday as on every Friday, we commemorate the cross. So we must always read texts of suffering in the light of the Passion. For it is at Golgotha that human pain meets God’s pain, and the suffering of humanity is interpreted and given meaning by a crucified God himself. 

As we gaze on the cross with our hearts full because we love Jesus, we can perhaps share the anguish of this psalm. I mean that as we look on him as the innocent victim of human cruelty, it would be natural to rage against those who hate him so, who mock him and spit on him, who crown him with thorns and pierce his precious side. Some of the art and music of the crucifixion captures this sense of outrage, for instance the choruses in the Bach Passions that protest against what is being done to the divine Victim. But of course that sits side by side with another insight of Holy Week, that it is we ourselves who are doing this to Jesus. It is we who need to be reconciled, we for whom Jesus prays from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. 

So before I take this psalm on my lips to express my anger, or God’s anger, towards others, I need to recite it against myself, so to speak, imagining myself as the oppressor of God’s people and therefore the oppressor of God. For I know, if I'm honest, that I have it in me to be the one who clamours “crucify him!” I wish I didn't. So I need to face the violence within myself that is capable of cruelty and harm, even if I don't act it out. And when I view the psalm from that turned-round perspective, it leads me straight to the cross and to the Reproaches of Good Friday, “O my people, what have I done to you? How have I offended you? Answer me!”  

I'm saying that while it may seem a long journey from the rage of our psalm to the forgiveness and healing of the Cross, it isn't really. When the psalmist draws on the image of the shepherd tending his flock, we know we are not far from Golgotha, the place where that same shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. In that act of redeeming love, all hatred, all wrath, all bitterness, all despair is gathered up and transformed. The cross makes all the difference because it is where, as I said earlier in the week, we see what glory means: self-emptying, love poured out. It turns lament into thanksgiving, defeat into victory, sorrow into joy, desperation into hope. The psalmist can glimpse a dawn because he knows that even as he passes through the valley of the shadow of death, he needs fear no evil “for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff comfort me”. The possibility of living confidently out of hope while surrounded by terror and devastation is all that the psalmist needs to travel on. It is all we need as well. We can once again light candles in dark places and make the desert blossom. It may sound heroic in bleak circumstances. But experience tells us not to lose heart. It may feel like hoping against hope. But because of the cross, we know that our hope is not in vain. 

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For meditation today, we might want to think about those on whose behalf we are angry, people treated unjustly, the victims of cruelty, those who are helpless in circumstances that overwhelm them. We could ask ourselves how we express our anger, how we turn it into prayer and good action that could make a difference to others. And on this Friday, we shall want to come back to the cross and give thanks for the redemption of the world and for our own forgiveness, and where we pray for the reconciliation of all people and all things in the Christ who loves us to the end.