Meek and mild?

Part of this morning's New Testament lesson, from the First Letter of St Peter: ‘For it is to your credit if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly... if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God's approval. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps.... When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.' [1 Peter 2:19-23]

I try very hard, I really do, to be a model of tact and diplomacy. But I also try to be honest and open in my dealings with other people, and to speak the truth even if that is not always the most politic thing to do. I happen to believe very strongly that it is part of the calling of every Christian both to speak and to do the truth, and that the ordained priest or minister has a particular responsibility to do so in his or her public ministry, for how else are the people to ‘know the voice' (to echo this morning's Gospel) of faithful and true shepherds? [cf John 10:4].

But there are dangers here of which I am all too well aware. How much of my ‘plain speaking' is in fact pride talking? How often does my ‘honest bluntness' hurt rather than heal? And how often when I speak out on this issue or that do I confuse prophetic truth with personal offence?

This last danger seems to me particularly acute in our world today. Increasingly we in the west live in mortal dread of causing offence to anyone, especially if they come from any kind of minority which likes to portray itself as victim. Amongst the books I read during my post-Easter break was Monica Ali's Brick Road [2004], a Bangladeshi woman's novel about a Bangladeshi woman's arranged marriage to a man twenty years her elder, her forced exchange of her native village for a block of flats in the East End of London and her struggle to find her own voice and take control of her own life. Not surprisingly, the book trod on a number of male Bangladeshi corns. The film of the book sparked an organised protest. At the last minute the Royal Film Performance at which it was to have been shown was cancelled. It prompted Ali to write an article in October of last year which said many important things, and perhaps most especially this:

All sorts of people take offence at all sorts of things. When Irvine Welsh's junkie novel Trainspotting was published, some people in Edinburgh objected to the way it portrayed their city. No-one took much notice. The feelings of an offended ethnic minority, though (or rather a tiny minority within a minority) rank more highly. Undoubtedly offering to burn books helps. But there is something more fundamental going on here. The white, middle-class good burghers of Edinburgh can look after themselves, but when offence is taken by the underdog those feelings are valued more highly.

I can understand this liberal sentiment. But I fear it is taking us to a dangerous place, a marketplace of outrage at which more and more buyers and sellers are arriving, shouting their wares and inflating the prices. And now it is open for business it will not be possible to keep people out. The essence of this new economy is emotion. If the feelings run (or are seen to run) high and deep enough, a good price will be fetched.

If the best thing we can say is how we feel about something, we turn from reason to a type of emotivism in which the frameworks for moral and political judgements collapse. It is a post-Enlightenment phenomenon that has an invidious effect not only at this relatively local level, but also on the world stage. Neo-conservative rhetoric on good and evil leads the way. In Bush and Blair's war against Iraq, the presence or otherwise of WMD [weapons of mass destruction] was simply a sideshow. ‘I only know what I believe,' said Blair. Never let the facts get in the way of how you feel. Fiction is now, apparently, the place for fact; in real life it shouldn't intrude.

Ali concludes:

If this seems like a minority issue ... let me now make the case that it is anything but. Christian groups are already trading in the outrage economy, as witnessed by the Jerry Springer, the Opera campaign. Read the tabloids and even some of the more supposedly respectable newspapers, and it is clear that outrage is being manufactured to counter outrage. My deepest fear is not that the outrage economy remains alien but that we enter it wholeheartedly. Whose voices will be loudest then?

I have quoted Monica Ali at length because I think it is important to hear someone from an ethnic minority background challenge what she calls the ‘outrage economy', especially as she is quite right to suggest that Christians are beginning to enter it as enthusiastically as any. You have only to listen to the current ‘liberal versus conservative' arguments in the Anglican Communion to realise that the hard work of rational enquiry and reasoned discussion is being replaced by the language of offended feelings and outraged emotions. And this should not be.

What we need to do instead is to re-examine very carefully all the incidents in the Gospels which record Jesus' anger and indignation. Here are three. First, St Mark at the end of his first chapter tells how a leper came to Jesus asking to be cured. Most translations of the Bible tell us that Jesus was ‘moved with compassion' (or ‘pity') and healed the man. But the New English Bible is nearer to the meaning of the original Greek when it renders the phrase ‘in warm indignation Jesus stretched out his hand' and touched and healed the man [Mark 1:41].

It is St Mark again who tells us that when Jesus met a man with a withered arm on the Sabbath day, the Pharisees watched to see if he would heal him so that they can bring a charge of Sabbath-breaking against Jesus. Heal him he does, having ‘looked round at them with anger and sorrow at their obstinate stupidity.' [Mark 3:5]. And all the Gospels record how Jesus went into the Temple and drove out those who were buying and selling in the Temple precincts, upsetting the tables of the money-changers and the seats of the dealers in pigeons, and roaring ‘Scripture says “My house shall be called a house of prayer” but you are making it a robbers' cave.”

What do we learn from this? Surely it is that the ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild' of the Sunday School chorus is at best a half-truth, at worst a travesty. Jesus shows us that humility, real humility, is not incompatible with passion, and especially with passion for God and for justice. God does not look for some feeble dropping-down-deadness-of-manner in those who follow him, but a hunger and a thirst after righteousness; a zeal to know and to do the truth. But this passion must never be self-centred or self-seeking. Jesus' own anger was aroused whenever he found people being hurt or damaged by others, and especially when that hurt or damage was being inflicted by the religious establishment of his day. The Church, like any other institution, can be an agent of oppression, manipulation and even cruelty. Christians, like any other individuals, can indulge in character assassination, malicious gossip, and every kind of pernicious prejudice. ‘We are only human' we plead in self-defence. And so we are. But Jesus shows us that part of becoming human beings made in God's image is to transcend these things, to rise above our self-centredness and self-concern, and instead to share heaven's anger whenever and wherever we find God's children being hurt or maimed, damaged or exploited. But what about when we ourselves are at the receiving end? St Peter has already given us the answer: ‘When he [Jesus] was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.' We must play no part in the outrage economy which Monica Ali so pertinently describes. We must reserve our anger for the injustice and the oppression suffered by others, and then it has to be an anger which will move us not to vengeance or reprisal, but to active engagement on the side of truth, justice and freedom.

‘The leper knelt before Jesus, begging his help. “If only you will”, he said, “you can cleanse me.” In warm indignation Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him, and said, “Indeed I will, be clean again.” And the leprosy left him immediately, and he was healed.' So may the passion of the passionate God course through us, to bring healing to his world .