7th sunday in 2007

Over the last two weekends, what I call my £10 note theory has been, if not blown out of the water, at least severely dented. The theory itself can be stated very simply: that if there were a pile of £10 notes in the porch and a notice in the bulletin inviting people to collect one on the way out, most folk would walk past it. But on this occasion that did not happen. Instead, over two weekends, a pile of sixty copies of a speech given by Des Browne at King’s College, London, on 25th January, followed by another pile of thirty copies the following week, disappeared from the porch like the proverbial ‘snow of a dyke.’ I have to say that I was both amazed and delighted. It even crossed my mind that someone might have lifted them all as some kind of protest, but I don’t think that happened. And so it’s worth remembering for a moment how it all came about.

It began with the petition nearly two hundred of you signed before Christmas, urging Des, as Defence Secretary, not to replace Trident but to use the £20bn involved for the alleviation of poverty. This, of course, is a slightly over-simplified position, but the basic point is clear. In response to this, Des sent us a letter outlining the governments position, and, again, a large numbers of you took away copies. As it happened, the same week-end Des’ letter was made available, the back of the bulletin invited us to respond to a consultation paper from Michael Mathieson MSP on his proposed Prevention of Crimes Committed by Weapons of Mass Destruction (Scotland) Act 2007, and commenting on these two items in the bulletin I pointed out that Des’ letter dealt with the matter at the level of politics and political judgement rather than morality. As it happened, Des was here at Mass that day, and a week later sent us copies of the King’s College speech. He said in a personal letter to me that he had thought about what I had said, had concluded that I was right, and so had addressed the moral question in the speech. And no doubt he will do the same next Sunday when he and I debate the matter here in the hall.

Now, I have no doubt personally that all of this is extremely important. There are those who would say that such things belong to the world of politics and so have no place in church. I disagree profoundly with this point of view. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not about pie in the sky when you die. It’s not about the kind of piousity which ignores the world and seeks refuge in churches and religion. As the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Church in the Modern World famously put it; The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men and women of our time are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well… Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in their hearts…That is why Christians cherish a deep feeling of solidarity with the human race and its history. And it goes on to describe how it is the task of men and women of faith to enter deeply into all the challenges and events of history so as to discern there the movement of God and his Holy Spirit. And as we begin a new century and a new millennium, what could be more important to the world and to people of faith than the whole question of how we resolve conflict between nations in an age when our capacity to destroy both ourselves and the planet we live on have reached heights, or should it be depths, previouly unimagined. Do we do what we have always done, or has the time come to try something new?

The ‘do what we have always done’ approach was summed up for me on the front page of last week’s Catholic Herald. It contained a report of a speech given at Farm Street, the Jesuit Church in central London in which Britain’s most senior Catholic soldier, Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, former chief of the defence staff, argued that, while he doesn’t think the present situation justifies it, Britian should be free to strike the first blow in any future conflict with Iran. He goes on to justify this position in a very logical and reasonable way, using all the classic arguments that have underpinned military thinking down through the centuries. He also justifies the replacement of Trident in the same way that Des Browne does, arguing that we need it as an insurance policy. We don’t know what the world will be like in 20 or 25 years, he says, and describes the English and Welsh bishops’ opposition to the replacement of Trident, identical to the position taken by our own bishops here in Scotland, as, and I quote, ‘utterly irresponsible.’

Now I’m sure Lord Guthrie is a good man. I have no doubt he believes what he says and I have no doubt either that some of you here will agree with him. As a Catholic and a Christian, however, he has a problem, and it is a pretty fundamental one… Jesus disagrees with him. What Jesus says could not be more clear. ‘Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. To the man who slaps you on one cheek, present the other cheek too. Treat others as you would like them to treat you. If you love those who love you, what thanks can you expect? Even sinners love those who love them.’

I just invite you to hear those words today. Jesus is not kidding. He’s deadly serious. His words are the most radical ever recorded and few are able to accept them. They make no sense in the world inhabited by Lord Guthrie. They function at a different level and have a different logic. They represent a revolutionary approach to human relations and challenge us to the very depth of our being. To begin to live by them is to enter into the unknown. It is as if God were to ask us to jump out of a plane without a parachute and trust him to catch us.

And so I invite you to look deep inside yourself today and answer one simple question. Is what Jesus says in today’s Gospel madness, a foolish ideal with no chance of working in the real world, or is it the way forward, the promise of a new beginning, a new way of living which opens up the possibility of finally bringing to an end the endless vicious circle of violence and war which is our history?

It has to be one or the other.
When the Old Testament spoke of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, it was attempting to put limits on the vicious circle of violence and counter-violence which plagued the world of those days. It was not, however, the Bible’s last word on the subject. In the New Testament Jesus calls us beyond this way of thinking to something new and revolutionary. He calls on us to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us and we pray for the grace to hear that call today………………..Lord hear us

In the first reading Saul is out to kill David. As we heard, however, David finds himself in a position where he could easily have got his retaliation in first, made a pre-emptive strike, and killed Saul. But David refuses.‘Who can lift his hand against the Lord’s anointed and be without guilt,’ he says. And so we pray for the grace to see every person as God’s anointed, so that killing any human being, even in war, ceases to be acceptable or a mere statistic……………...Lord hear us

The Prime Minister has made it clear that the government wants to replace Trident. Only this week, however, a campaign which has the support of the leaders of two of the Parties in Parliament was launched to challenge this decision. And so we pray that, faced with such an important choice, the people of Britain will stop watching rubbish on television long enough to think about what all this means……………….....Lord hear us

In the second reading, Paul speaks of how, in Jesus, we become new men and women. Left to ourselves, we could never love our enemies. Instead, we would continue to repeat the mistakes and blunders of history until the end of time. And so we pray that the world will be open to the grace God is offering and embrace the new way of dealing with conflict which Jesus speaks of today…………………Lord hear us
This new way of living based on the teaching of Jesus must begin with ourselves. And so we ask God to stir in us a desire to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us. We pray that he will lead us beyond our prejudices, our narrow nationalism, our aggressive instincts, our deep-rooted desire for power, our primitive violent tendencies and all the other things which emerge from the dark part of ourselves and have been the cause of so much human suffering throughout history……....Lord hear us

On Wednesday we begin again the journey towards Easter we call Lent. It is a time of conversion; a time of prayer, fasting and alms-giving; a time when and we ask God for the grace we need to enter deeply into the process of death and resurrection without which neither we nor the world we live in can ever escape from the vicious circle of history we are caught up in. And so we pray that this coming Lent will be the most radical we have known in our lives…………...…..Lord hear us

Now let us be silent for a moment…………