Archives for posts with tag: holy week

The Pleasant Plant, the Stinker and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

By hughdbryant
April 13, 2025 //
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Sermon for Evensong on Palm Sunday 2025

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=611300034

Two vineyards. Two stories about vineyards at the start of Holy Week. You might think that we are being exposed to, talking about, another temptation involving wine, but that’s not it. The two vineyard stories in Isaiah and St Luke’s gospel.

Isaiah the prophet singing for his beloved concerning his vineyard – I’m not quite sure how the genders work – the beloved having done all that is necessary to create a fruitful vineyard on a very fertile hill; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded, according to our translation here, ‘wild grapes’: although apparently, according to one of the commentaries which I read, the word in Hebrew literally means ‘stinkers’. Heaven knows what a grape has to be like to be described as a stinker; anyway it was not a successful planting of a vineyard. Somehow the vineyard didn’t turn out as it was intended to be.

‘What I will do to my vineyard’ – it’s quite difficult to follow who’s who in this story – it’s somebody and his beloved who builds the vineyard and then it’s me, it’s my vineyard. And because the vineyard produces stinkers I’ll dismantle it and make it a wasteland so that it’s overgrown with briars and thorns. There isn’t really some boyfriend’s Château Musar somewhere which has suddenly stopped producing decent grapes.

Similarly Jesus talks about a man turning his vineyard over to tenants – literally, farmers – in the King James Bible, husbandmen. Where have all these good words gone? I like a world with husbandmen in it. And where are the handmaidens? I ask myself. The word here is γεωργος (Georgos, which is Greek for ‘farmer’). Like a lot of names, George is derived from the Greek, so if you are called George, in Greek you are a farmer. In Jesus’ story, they were tenant farmers of some kind. And he sent members of his staff – literally, his slaves – one at a time to try to collect the rent, or a share of the produce instead, which certainly seems still to be the way that it works in the south of France even today. A friend of mine had a house there including a vineyard. He let the local cooperative manage the vineyard, in return for which they harvested the grapes and gave my friend a share in the wine produced. He took his rent in bottles.

Here, however, the parable is about wicked tenants who didn’t pay their rent and instead, eventually, when the owner sent his own son, the tenants, having kicked out his servants one by one when they called on the farmers to hand over the rent, actually killed the son. So what did the owner of the vineyard do? Obviously he evicted the wicked tenants and passed the vineyard over to other managers to manage.

Again, this is not an actual story about something that actually happened. It’s a parable and it’s very relevant to Easter. Jesus is forecasting what is going to happen, and the scribes and the chief priests, hearing him, get angry because they realise that what he is saying is directed against them, Jesus suggests that if they do behave like the wicked tenants then ‘the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’, and that stone will trip people up fatally, and it may fall on other people, with similar devastating consequences.

If they, the Pharisees and scribes, are builders, and if they reject a stone while they are building something, if they reject Jesus, then He will become a stumbling block for them, or even fall on them and obliterate them.

Ploughing up a vineyard. Fatal trips and falls. Being crushed by a massive boulder. I’m not sure whether, when we read these lessons in the Bible, even in the context of Lent and even as we look forward to the commemoration of the amazing events of the first Easter, even so, I’m not sure that these lessons really grab us in the way that some of the language used indicates that they are meant to.

Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces and it will crush anyone on whom it falls. And Isaiah’s friend’s vineyard producing ‘stinkers’ instead of the sweet juicy grapes that he might reasonably have expected and so getting dug up and bulldozed. These are two parables, two stories that are not meant to be taken literally, but which colourfully illustrate, dramatise, an idea or principle; and they have been chosen to be readings for Evensong today because they put you in mind of what we are going to commemorate at Easter.

Jesus is the son who is sent to the vineyard, the vineyard being the human race, the only son, who gets rejected and killed by the people who are looking after his father’s property, the vineyard, the world that his father has created. The Israelites, the Jews, were the bad tenants who threw out the only son and killed him; or rather, they would be, because Jesus is telling the story before he gets crucified.

But so what? Look, there are only 43 of us here – although that’s a really good turn-out: there are only a few thousand, perhaps, in Evensong services all over the UK. Most people couldn’t care less. Most people are snoozing after Sunday lunch or maybe having a nice walk in the park.

Even if they are vaguely aware of Easter having more to it than just a lot of Easter eggs, nevertheless there is nothing vital or urgent about it so far as they are concerned. Even if they’re going to turn up on Easter Sunday, if they are in the habit of coming at Christmas and Easter, say, (which, incidentally, if they were in the Roman Catholic Church would count as regular attendance), but even if they are really rather sparing attenders at church, or if they never come, they presumably don’t feel any compulsion, any need or anything really vital for their life today about this teaching of Jesus or this prophecy of Isaiah.

Nobody much today really thinks that because they might be descendants of the people who cast out the son and killed him, (in these terms), they should worry that a stone might be a stumbling block or that it might fall on them and crush them. It’s probably a metaphor too far, even if they do know a bit about Jesus, because the idea that Jesus would take some dreadful vengeance on people, crush them and grind them into dust, is not consistent with our picture of ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’, the suffering servant, who washed the disciples’ feet – as we will wash at least one of your feet, on Thursday at Holy Nativity.

What is our Lent reflection about this? I want to read you something which was written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian who was executed by the Nazis in the dying days of the Second World War because he was a member of the Stauffenberg Plot to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944. The church remembered the 80th anniversary of his death last Wednesday. He wrote, from prison, what he called an ‘outline for a book’, in which he tackled the idea of a world in which people do not feel they need God any more. He speaks of a God in “religion” as a deus ex machina. Literally it means ‘god from the machinery’. That’s defined in the Oxford Illustrated Dictionary as a ‘power [or] event that comes in the nick of time to solve difficulty.’ The ‘machinery’ was what they had in ancient Greek theatres, to make the actors playing the part of gods fly through the air.

Bonhoeffer felt that religious people had been seeing God in a way as a magic fixer, that “[God] must be ‘there’ to provide answers and explanations beyond the point at which our understanding or our capabilities fail.” But as scientific knowledge has increased, so people have needed God less and less. They may well feel they can get along without needing God at all.

Bonhoeffer felt we ought to accept this, that this was a sign of the world ‘coming of age’. He wrote, ‘The only way to be honest is to recognise that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur – even if God is not ‘there’. Like children outgrowing the secure religious, moral and intellectual framework of the home, in which ‘Daddy’ is always there in the background, God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him’.

He went on to set out a paradox at the heart of this, which I think leads very well into our reflections for Lent. Bonhoeffer wrote, ‘God allows himself to be edged out of the world, and that is the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us. … This is the decisive difference between Christianity and all [other] religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world; he uses God as a deus ex machina. The Bible however [has] directed him to the powerlessness and suffering of God; only a suffering God can help.’

“[Bonhoeffer wrote that he would explain in his book] the experience that a transformation of all human life is given in the fact that Jesus is ‘there only for others.’ His ‘being there for others’ is the experience of transcendence. It is only this ‘being there for others’, maintained till death, that is the ground of his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.” Those are the essential characteristics of the divine, of God, of what he calls ‘transcendence’. He goes on: “Faith is participation in this being of Jesus (incarnation, cross, and resurrection).” Those are the key things about Jesus: incarnation becoming human, the cross, and resurrection. According to Bonhoeffer,“Our relation to God is not a ‘religious’ relationship to the highest, most powerful, and best Being imaginable – that is not authentic transcendence – but our relation to God is a new life in existence for others, through participation in the being of Jesus. The transcendental is not infinite and unattainable tasks, but the neighbour who is within reach in any given situation.”

We need to think very carefully about this really big mystery. On the one hand we believe in God as a kind of omnipotent father figure, but on the other we read that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. God, Jesus, is in the needy people, the ill people, the homeless people, the naked people who have no clothes.

The sky has turned darker since the joyful procession this morning on a donkey. Donkeys are great, and Jesus was on that donkey. But what else was going on? That’s for us to ponder in this week to come.

Quotations are from ‘Outline for a Book’ in Bonhoeffer, D, (enlarged edition) 1971, ‘Letters and Papers from Prison’, London, SCM Press p.380f., and from Bonhoeffer as quoted in Robinson, J. A. T., 1963, ‘Honest to God’, p36f, ‘Must Christianity be Religious?’

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Emily Maitlis’ Wise Words

By hughdbryant
April 10, 2020 //
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A Reflection at Easter, April 2020

By Hugh Bryant

‘The language around COVID-19 has sometimes felt trite and misleading. You do not survive the illness through fortitude and strength of character, whatever the Prime Minister’s colleagues’ll tell us. And the disease is not a great leveller, the consequences of which everyone, rich or poor, suffers the same. This is a myth which needs debunking. Those serving on the front line right now, bus drivers and shelf stackers; nurses, care home workers, hospital staff and shopkeepers, are disproportionately the lower-paid members of our workforce. They are more likely to catch the disease because they are more exposed. Those who live in tower blocks and small flats will find the lock-down tougher; those in manual jobs will be unable to work from home. This is a health issue with huge ramifications for social welfare, and it’s a welfare issue with huge ramifications for public health. Tonight, as France goes into recession, and the World Trade Organisation warns the pandemic could provoke the deepest economic downturn of our lifetimes, we ask what kind of social settlement might need to be put in place to stop the inequality becoming even more stark.’ (Emily Maitlis, introducing ‘Newsnight’, BBC Two, 8th April 2020.)

That was such a grown-up and eloquent comment on the COVID-19 plague, that my first reaction was to scratch around to see whether Emily Maitlis had been quoting some eminent philosopher or grand old man or a woman of world affairs when she introduced ‘Newsnight’ on BBC2 on Wednesday night. But my instinct was unworthy. She is a very talented journalist in her own right and those are her words.

Her words are among the most apt and most challenging words in the torrent of verbiage which the first week of lockdown has produced. I can’t really get excited by this procession of metropolitan sophisticates discovering the joys of birdsong and blue-skies-without-aeroplanes, empty roads and silence.

I’m sure there is a place for all those good things, but somehow I don’t think that, when this is all over, historians will look back and celebrate stumbling prose about the unaccustomed joys of birdsong. Instead our generation will be judged on how we dealt with this ‘health issue with huge ramifications for social welfare, [or] …welfare issue with huge ramifications for public health’, as Emily Maitlis so eloquently put it.

It seems extraordinarily apt that Emily Maitlis said what she did on the eve of Maundy Thursday. For Christians, Maundy Thursday is the day when they remember Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. The son of God, arguably the most important man who has ever lived, doing the same sort of thing that a care home worker does, washing the dirty bits, becoming a servant. As we have seen in this COVID-19 plague, the sort of thing that Jesus was doing can become very dangerous. So dangerous that only people who don’t matter are put in the line of risk. Only the expendable ones, although nobody spells this out. As Emily Maitlis said, the bus drivers, the shelf stackers, nurses, care home workers, hospital staff and shopkeepers. The government has advertised jobs in the new Nightingale Hospital at the Excel Centre including receptionists at £37,500 per annum, when at the same time nurses and doctors, after years of training, start at less than £25,000.

Somebody will say that the market justifies this, that there are fewer people willing to be receptionists in the Nightingale hospital than there are willing to be doctors and nurses in that dangerous place. Therefore by the inexorable laws of supply and demand the willing, the brave, are worth less than those in short supply. Put that way, the proposition looks quite indefensible. How could the market, even if it is correct in identifying shortages in that way, be the only guide to the value of these vital people’s work?

But wait a minute. How does the market account for the fact that there is a shortage of doctors and nurses, tens of thousands of doctors and nurses? Either the market is not functioning properly, as their value is not rising to reflect their scarcity, in which case all these political statements based on “realism” and “the market” are not true, or the market as an index of value is not actually accurate. Either way there is a glaring injustice. As Emily Maitlis put it, ‘… what kind of social settlement might need to be put in place to stop the inequality becoming even more stark?’ How are people to be valued in future?

Christians have a number of pointers in front of them, particularly at this time in Holy Week and Easter. So much of what Jesus did and said was counterintuitive and back-to-front. Before he was born, when an angel announced to Mary that she would be the mother of the Messiah, what she said, “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my saviour…’: this speech, this aria, this canticle, is one of the most subversive, even one of the most revolutionary, passages in the whole of literature. ‘For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden’. God chose an ordinary young girl; he selected her knowing that she was one of the little people. ‘He that is mighty hath magnified me’. The omnipotent, the divine, the greatest power, has chosen me, small and insignificant, and made me great.

‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.’

This is what God is doing. This is the implication of his having chosen someone not special, just an ordinary girl; but having chosen that person to be the mother of the divine incarnation, God with us. God in human form. She wasn’t in any way rare or perfect or uniquely suited to this job. She was just an ordinary girl from a humble background. God’s choice implies a direct challenge to the value system that we have had and we have in our world today. The Magnificat shows up and challenges head-on the great divide in our society between the rich and the poor, between the great and the little people.

That was before Jesus was born. The Magnificat points to how he is going to operate. It points forward to the Sermon on the Mount, the longest sustained piece of counterintuitive argument that you are ever going to come across. The Beatitudes: ‘blessed are the – poor: blessed are the meek. Not ‘blessed are the people in large houses riding about in Lamborghinis’. (See Matt. 5,6 and 7 http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=453535527)

In one sense I disagree with Emily Maitlis. She says, ‘And the disease is not a great leveller, the consequences of which everyone, rich or poor, suffers the same.’ I know – indeed I passionately agree with – what she means. But in one important sense, there is equality. We are all – wherever in the world we come from – we are all creatures of God, made in His image. The virus is not a leveller, as Emily Maitlis rightly says. It affects all humans – and, unfortunately, tigers too.

Where it does not level us is shown by what happens when the virus has struck someone. Then it depends where you are and how wealthy you are, either as an individual or because you belong to a rich society, whether you will get full treatment. Even so, so far we have not yet discovered a cure, so even with the best treatment in an intensive care unit in a European or American or Far Eastern teaching hospital, you may still die – but you will be made as comfortable as possible, and you will have the very best chance of survival.

If on the other hand Coronavirus strikes and you are in a refugee camp on the border of Syria, in Jordan perhaps, or if you live in the slums of Calcutta or Bombay, or in many parts of Africa, there are far fewer doctors, far fewer hospitals, and no money or National Health Service to pay for your treatment. In the USA, except in one or two enlightened states such as Massachusetts, unless you can afford to buy expensive health insurance, no-one will treat you.

But perhaps the reason why this is so wrong, and why this is a ‘health issue with huge ramifications for social welfare’, is that there is no good reason why some people should be so much better off than others – or rather, that so many people should be so much worse off than the fortunate few. Why should there be any entitlement in an accident of birth? Rich and poor, G7 or Third World, we are all susceptible to COVID-19. But if we are all liable to suffer, should we not all share the means of salvation?

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke recently about the objective of the Good Life (with a capital G and L) being, not, as theologians and philosophers from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas have argued, ‘human flourishing’ (ευδαιμονία) but rather, the objective, the objective of the Good Life, is to be safe. Safe. Safe from harm. Safe from disease. Safe from hunger.

Again, Christians can turn to the teaching of Jesus. Think of the Great Judgment in St Matthew chapter 25 (from verse 31), the division of the sheep and the goats, the saved – the ones who are safe – and those condemned to eternal damnation. Hunger. Thirst. Disease. They are at the heart of it. What did you do for them? No suggestion that some hungry people, or thirsty people, or poorly people, might deserve to be safe, to be saved, more than others. Absolutely not. Jesus says that He is in all of us, however lowly.

Again, just as God chose the humble Mary, so ‘the righteous will [say]…, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and fed you, or thirsty and gave you drink, a stranger and took you home, or naked and clothed you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and come to visit you?” And the king will answer, “I tell you this: anything you did for one of my brothers here, however humble, you did for me”. (Matt. 25:37-40, NEB). (Jesus would surely have wanted to be explicitly gender-neutral if he had been saying this today, and would surely have said, ‘anything you did for one of my brothers and sisters here, however humble, you did for me.’)

So at this Easter time, when we remember Jesus’ amazing self-abasement, his humbling himself to wash the disciples’ feet, and then his enduring the most terrible torture and death – being the most important man on earth, but beaten and strung up to die with common criminals, as a common criminal, because that was actually his rank, his lowly position in society – and then rising in triumph, leaving the empty tomb: when we reflect on that extraordinary sequence of events, the Triduum, the Three Days, we can realise that there is an alternative. There is an alternative to the dominion of the market. There is an alternative to people who know the price of things but not their value. The fact that Jesus beat death – and that must be about the most counterintuitive thing he ever did – has given us hope: the ‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’. And that is for everyone, for everyone who could possibly catch COVID, wherever they are and whatever flag they fly.

Emily Maitlis concluded, asking ‘what kind of social settlement might need to be put in place to stop the inequality becoming even more stark’. That is the most important thing we have to do when the medical campaign against COVID-19 has been won. It is a huge challenge: but Jesus has given us hope, hope that we can do it. The Easter message is one of hope, and of salvation, that we can make that Good Life, where all people, everywhere, are safe.

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Lord Green’s Concert

By hughdbryant
February 16, 2015 //
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Sermon for the Sunday before Lent, Quinquagesima Sunday, at St Mary the Virgin, Stoke D’Abernon, 15th February 2015

Holy Communion and Mattins – Mark 9:2-9: Evensong – 2 Peter 1:16-21

One of the nicer ways to get people, who don’t normally come to church, to darken our doors, is for there to be a concert in church. We are blessed here in Stoke and Cobham with an awful lot of good music. We have all sorts of recitals, here in St Mary’s, and down the road, St Andrew’s hosts regular concerts under the ‘Maiastra’ name.

This is where musicians who have participated in a residential master-class at Aidan Woodcock’s house, at Little Slyfield, just opposite the Yehudi Menuhin School, give a concert, led by their teacher. These are people at the beginning of their performing career, who have already graduated – sometimes more than once – from leading music schools, and have usually won some prizes as well. The Maiastra concerts – the name, incidentally, comes from a mythical Persian bird – are a real opportunity to hear the classical music stars of tomorrow, and they’re very exciting, very good.

These concerts do bring a lot of people into the church who wouldn’t ordinarily come – either because they are not local, or because they just don’t go to church. I hope that some of them, having found a warm welcome and a beautiful space, do decide to come back to worship with us later on.

So far, so good. But I had a rather disappointing exchange the other day with one of the admin staff for the master classes, who was trying to book the church for a Maiastra concert at the beginning of April. ‘How would Friday 3rd or Saturday 4th be? Would the church be free?’ Well, I was rather surprised, because of course that is Good Friday and Easter Saturday. I had to delicately remind the lady that this was Easter, the height of the Christian year, and that, I was afraid, the church was not going to be free.

‘So sorry’, she said, ‘Of course.’ She would talk to the course tutor to see whether the course could be slightly rescheduled, so as to allow the concert to take place without conflicting with Easter. Back came another email. ‘How about the Monday or Tuesday?’ Oh dear.

So I had to go back and explain that that was the Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week – all part of the most important part of the Christian year, so that you couldn’t think of having a concert in the church, unless it was a devotional performance, at all during that week.

Well, of course the concert will eventually take place at some other time. But I reflected on that a bit, in the context of our worship today, on the Sunday before Lent, when we remember Jesus’ Transfiguration. The cloud descended, and a voice said the same words as they heard when Jesus was baptised in the Jordan: ‘He is my Son, the beloved. Listen to him.’ It was a literally dazzling experience for Peter and James and John, as they accompanied Jesus up the high mountain. You couldn’t ignore that. It would be a life-changing experience.

But here’s the thing. Today, very often it would appear that people are ignoring this: that these extraordinary events no longer affect people’s lives. The nice people organising the Maiastra concert had forgotten what the main purpose of a church is. It’s not just a pretty concert venue. At the Church’s General Synod this week, one of the speakers reminded the delegates that studies had shown that, if the Church of England carries on declining in numbers at the current rate, 1% per year, overall in England (although fortunately, not in the Guildford Diocese), there will come a time, sooner rather than later, when churches in many rural parishes will be unsustainable and it will no longer be the case that the Church of England will have a parish church in every city, town and village in England.

So the Church has been embarking on all sorts for programmes of evangelisation: Messy Church, Fresh Expressions, Alpha courses, and so on. And quite a lot of it seems to be working. New people are coming to the the Church. Its interesting that it’s not always the most modern ideas which are successful in involving new people. Apparently the fastest-growing service in terms of numbers attending in the Church of England is – what do you think? It’s Evensong.

Obviously to some extent that’s influenced by the fact that cathedrals are attracting more and more people, and Evensong is seen as a quintessentially cathedral service; although of course we have lovely Evensongs here at St Mary’s every Sunday, sung just as they are in a cathedral; in fact, we sing a little bit more of the service than they do in Guildford Cathedral.

But the fact is that we are 2,000 years away from the spectacular events of Jesus’ time here on earth. It was relatively easy, when compared with our position, for the disciples to go out and spread the Gospel. As St Peter said in his second letter [2 Peter 1:16], they’d ‘been eyewitnesses of his majesty’ – they had seen Him, they’d witnessed the miraculous things that happened; and the inner circle, Peter and James and John, had even seen a foretaste of the Resurrection. The transfigured Jesus was like the resurrected Jesus. It was a glimpse into the future.

As a matter of intellect, as a matter of rational reflection, that’s still tremendously important, even 2,000 years later, even today. For us as Christians, as practising Christians, it’s something we couldn’t even think of ignoring. We have to react. We have to come and worship, and say prayers, and give our sacrifice of praise.

But what about the people who don’t get it? The people for whom church really doesn’t figure in their lives? St Paul has something to say about that in his second Letter to the Corinthians. ‘If our gospel be hid’ – if our Gospel is veiled, if our Gospel is obscure – St Paul says that it is ‘hid to them that are lost’, who are ‘on their way to perdition’, as one translation puts it. ‘Their unbelieving minds are so blinded by the god of this passing age, that the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the very image of God, cannot dawn upon them and bring them light.’ [2 Corinthians 4:3f]

It’s an easy thing to understand. If you are doing well, having a nice life, enjoying good things, you probably don’t feel there’s anything much missing in your life: that’s one kind of distraction. If you are somebody who comes from a home where nobody ever went to church, and you go to school and study at university among people who see a scientific explanation for everything; who don’t need, or feel they don’t need, any kind of reference to God, the Gospel will be veiled from you.

Later on in his second Letter to the Corinthians, St Paul says this. ‘No wonder we do not lose heart, though our outward humanity is in decay, yet day by day we are inwardly renewed. Our troubles are slight and short-lived; and their outcome an eternal glory which outweighs them far. Meanwhile our eyes are fixed, not on the things that are seen, but on the things that are unseen: for what is seen passes away; what is unseen is eternal.’ [2 Corinthians 4:16f]

I think that’s a very good message for us. We can’t see, in the same way that the disciples saw. That unseen reality, that inner spiritual reality, the working of God, is what is permanent and unchanging. It’s just as good now, as it is was 2,000 years ago, as it was in the time of St Paul.

Jesus’ injunction to us Christians was to ‘go and teach all nations, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.’ So what is it that we should do? I’m not really qualified to tell you a whole lot about Fresh Expressions of Church or Messy Church – although I can tell you that our Messy Church, run by Churches Together, attracts big numbers of children and their parents each time – but what I think is important and perhaps may open the idea of the Kingdom to more and more people – is the idea that we get over and over again, from Archbishop Justin and Archbishop John Sentamu, that we should be as the Lord intended us to be, and that we should live our lives in such a way as to promote human flourishing: flourishing, ευδαιμονία, something more than just passing your time without hurting anybody, something more than just keeping your nose clean: but instead actively looking out for ways to go the extra mile, to do the better thing.

It’s perhaps a bit unfair to single out anyone, particularly in the last week, for examination against that kind of background, but I can’t help thinking we will all have been a bit challenged by the sad story of the Revd Lord Green, the retired boss of HSBC, who has preached sermons and written books, preaching the virtue of observing the very highest moral standards.

But unfortunately at the same time, his bank was offering to clients a very aggressive form of tax avoidance. When I worked in the City, we were brought up to distinguish, reading the fine print, between tax avoidance, which is legal, and tax evasion, which isn’t. But this now seems to be a place where simply following the letter of the law isn’t enough. The Christian way, the Gospel way, is in fact not only not to evade tax, but also not to avoid it either. It’s rather bad luck, I think, on poor old Lord Green that in his part of the City – as indeed in my part of the City when I was there – nobody told him that the rules had changed, and he perhaps never appreciated that simply observing the law wasn’t necessarily sufficient in order to demonstrate the light of God.

Because, you see, when you do get to be able to see the light, then you will be like the Good Samaritan. You will be actively looking out for people you can help, rather than just sticking to the letter of the law. Let us pray that we will see that light: that the light will shine on us: and if we’re not transfigured, let us pray that we are at least transformed.

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