A Sermon preached at Jesus College, Cambridge on Sunday 26th April 2009
Macavity’s a Mystery Cat: he’s called the Hidden Paw –
For he’s the master criminal who can defy the Law.
He’s the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad’s despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime – Macavity’s not there!
Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,
He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.
His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare,
And when you reach the scene of crime – Macavity’s not there!
You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air –
But I tell you once and once again, Macavity’s not there!
T S Eliot, of course, from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. And the problem with Moses too [when he was up the mountain and Israel started to make the Golden Calf] was that he wasn’t there. But more than that. The problem, or at least a consistent characteristic, of Jesus in his post-resurrection appearances is that he is and isn’t there. “Early in the morning, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples did not realise that it was Jesus.” Mary thinks he is a gardener. The Emmaus Road disciples only recognize him in the breaking of the bread. Thomas needs to touch – and Mary isn’t allowed to. Churchman as he was, Eliot was probably thinking of just this there- and not-thereness of Jesus at the Ascension too, when the disciples look up in the air, but must look elsewhere to find him.
So what’s going on? The story about Moses and Golden Calf reminds us how wedded we humans are to knowing what’s going on, having it in our hands; and how difficult we find it to have faith in and trust what we cannot see. Since credo and credit share the same root, think of it as the ancient Israelites’ credit crunch. Trust breaks down. Perhaps this Yahweh business was all a bubble. The people cast around for something, anything to believe in. Aaron plays the part of the pragmatic politician and look for a quick fix. By a legerdemain that no-one quite understands but which involves considerable amounts of gold, a new order is pulled out of the fire and it’s party time again. Except it’s not. The scam is exposed, the lamest of excuses are offered. “Honest, guv, it just appeared in my hands.” The forces of tradition rally, but come over far too strong. There is a lurch to the right, religious fanaticism, and a priestly pogrom. It will be several chapters before the covenant relationship of faith and trust is restored, and the generation concerned won’t make it themselves into the promised land after all.
Jesus forces a different reaction. He calls Peter and all of us to follow him, and we sense his real presence and utter integrity; faith is a natural response. But like a parent training a child to walk by always moving their hand just that bit further away, as we approach him, he backs away. We have to keep following, keep growing our faith. We have to be weaned off the need to have unsatisfactory, substitute securities. We have to be helped to hope in what we cannot fully yet see, and not settle for half a hope in our hand. We have to discover that as we break through the frontiers of our fear we start to discover the seeds of a new sort of community, where credit is not crunched.
I’ve come to see, as have many others, that working on our credit limit takes us in three directions, none of which involve banks – which is something of a relief.
First, as per the Bible stories so far, we need to work on our credit with God. Not how much credit we have earned with him, but how much credit we give him. The self-sacrificing God has spent his whole self on us, and takes the high-risk policy of letting us decide, completely freely, whether we will come in on his partnership, or not. The level of risk was borne in on me personally when my father, who is also a priest, preached at my first celebration of the eucharist. “God is a Gambler,” he memorably began. “Anyone who has risked putting their business in this boy’s hands has to be.” Up to quite recently it has been common practice to decry the whole business of crediting God, of faith – as either out of date, or out of its mind, or both. But there is barely a page of our newspapers now that does not have a story predicated in some way on the practice of faith, and God it seems is not going to go away. So the personal point of predicament remains for each of us: are we going to turn to God, like Peter, accept his trust in us and place our trust in him – or not. You choose.
Second, we need to consider how far we are going to credit others. I was an academic briefly before turning my collar round and I can well remember that while on a good day we were a universitas together, a company dedicated to learning together; on a bad day the knives would be out, and reputations left in tatters. It’s not so different in the church. But what is different there is that not only is there a noble human ideal at stake, which in the end if it is simply human is subject to the law of the survival of the fittest, even if that is the fittest with the knife. No, for someone who has put their trust in God, the law of the fittest still applies, but the fittest is that which most follows the example of Christ, in giving up its security, its resources, even its life, for others. Now even in pure evolutionary theory this is not completely off the wall. Read Martin Nowak or follow the lectures of Sarah Coakley here in Cambridge. Co-operation and altruism can be effective evolutionary motors as well competition and conflict. You don’t have to be an atheist to take evolution seriously. So in the church there should be, and pray God there will more often be, a serious commitment by its members to a practical acting-out of the theological truths that in this community everyone matters, all are able and gifted, the diverse members of the body are essential to the health of the whole. And actually, given the ease with which I have bee able to co-opt the vocabulary of secular society, I don’t think this call to credit one another rather more is only for Christians.
Finally, in crediting others we need to break through the boundary of not just believing in and trusting those who are like us and part of us, but those who are not. The blessing at the end of a service has often been extended to include all whom we love. I have rather taken to adding “and those whom we do not love” as well – and I think I have the teaching and example of Christ on my side. God is profoundly Other, not there – but we take the risk of crediting him, of believing in him, of trusting him. Within the church we discover, slightly to our chagrin, that others enjoy the same relationship with him, and have to learn to share. And we discover too that there are others both within and outwith the fold who are also profoundly other, but that God credits them too – and so must we; even the ones who mock us, hate us and would like to kill us. Bale out at this point, demonise the different, and the instead of the blessing spreading out, the poison will spread in. And I want to dare to say that the best way of spreading the blessing is not by banning blessing, but my mobilizing it. At its best, Christianity for instance is not a blood-curdling crusade, killing all who can’t believe in it; but precisely because of what it believes, or rather who it believes, it would rather its own blood were shed than theirs.
As G K Chesterton remarked, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”
