On the Way to Easter

Lent talks 2009

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 First Sunday of Lent

Genesis 9.8-17 God said to Noah and to his sons with him, I am establishing
my covenant with you and your descendants after you

1 Peter 3.18-22 For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous
for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. God waited patiently in the days
of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, were saved through water.
And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you

Mark 1.9-15 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was
baptised by John in the Jordan

Summary

1. God has brought with man into covenant with himself

2. The Covenant is open to us in Jesus Christ, through the Church and

mediated by the Scripture that tells us about God's covenant people of
Israel.

3. The Church that is confident in the covenant of God and the promise of
redemption can identify crises without fear and warn of disaster.

4. As it celebrates the resurrection, the Church is able to receive

judgment.
The good news of the covenant is the basis on which we may receive the
correction required for our redemption.

5. Love aspires to permanence, and so seeks the correction and

discipleship that will make it permanent.

6. The Church teaches self-control and the ability to wait. Christian

discipleship sustains our self-giving permanently. We have no need to give
ourselves away to one another instantly or to withdraw ourselves again.

7. It is only because it is a finite world that we have to learn how to act

within it. It is only when we exercise self-restraint that we can act
generously and for other people.

8. We may give ourselves to one another permanently, man to woman, in

the covenant of marriage. Self-giving depends on difference and it
matures complementarity. Marriage raises morale and result from good
morale.

9. The Church celebrates the resurrection and the passion simultaneously.

It travels to Easter through the passion of Lent.

10. The Church withdraws in Lent in order to prepare for the trials that this
witness requires.

11. Christ withstands the rage of man-without-God, overcomes this rage

and so will redeem us from it.

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12. The Church is witness of this covenant to the nation. The Church
witnesses to the nation, and the nation that receives this witness will
receive its judgment and receive the confidence that comes through this
covenant.

1. On the way to Easter

2. The covenant with man
3. The goodness of creation
4. The flood of unintended consequences
5. Christ is baptised for us
6. The ark of the Church

1. On the way to Easter

We are on the way to Easter. In these five talks I am going to lay out the
path the Church takes on its way there. The path is marked out by the
readings set for the five Sundays of Lent. These readings will tell us about
the relationship of God with man, and about the relationships between
men that are made possible by it. we will find that the Church points out to
the world that much more is possible when we are ready to hear about the
relationship of God with man, than when the world is determined not to
hear about any such relationship. Nevertheless, because the Church points
to God, it is able to ask what sort of people we want to be. Through this
Scripture we gain insight into our society that is available nowhere else.

So I propose the of set out some of the questions these Scriptures are
asking. A bishop does not presume to tell you something or other, but only
what the Church hears in Scripture and sings in its worship, and so what
you yourself may hear and sing in Church this Sunday. You are the Church,
and I am a servant of the Church. What the Church says it not only says in
Lent and Easter, but in every Church service. Easter simply spells out in
large format what is going on every Sunday morning, when on behalf of
the whole world the Christian community confesses its sins and receive
forgiveness, and so remains a confident people. For twelve years I have
been bishop of this city. There is no greater city, and no more wonderful
task than to be the servant of the Christians of this city. Each year I have
talked about the social and moral pain that our society puts itself through,
and the social and ecological costs involved. I have said the same things
consistently all this time. This our year I will spend a little longer on the
social and economic pain and cost, and show how the Church that is
confident of the resurrection is uniquely able to talk about pain and cost,
because it is formed by the promise of forgiveness and the hope of
redemption.

Easter is when new Christians are baptised into the Church. Lent is the
way of preparation for those who are going to be baptised, and also the

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preparation of the Church to receive them. If you are not yet a member of
the Church, hear what the Church says, step forward and receive this life
and this baptism. But there is another baptism on the way. For our society
is going to go through an unsettled period and the Church is preparing
itself for this now. It is possible that by preparing for it and being able to
countenance it, some of the trouble may be averted to some degree, but I
would not bank on it.

We are undergoing a severe economic crisis. What is causing this crisis?

Greed is of course some part of the answer but the problem is not only
that we have demanded too much, but that we have not demanded
enough. We do not value ourselves enough, and all our materialistic
impatience and over-reaching is nothing but compensation for this crisis of
morale, a failure to value ourselves. Our chief denigrator is ourselves. We
belittle and devalue ourselves in the fear that if we don’t others will
denigrate us more. But we denigrate ourselves in defiance of God. God is
the true judge of man, and God finds man good and loves him. That is the
news of the gospel. Unbelief is what self-denigration is, a failure to receive
the good judgment of God and thus our own failure to judge well. Long-
term failure to hear this true judgment given in the gospel results in a
society with wildly see-sawing estimations of its worth, and these are
reflected in wildly fluctuating markets. Societies that believe that they are
loved by God have a steady, a realist and ultimately an optimistic view of
themselves, and they prosper. So the question is whether we will receive
our true valuation from God.

2. The covenant with man

God loves man. Man is the creature informed by love, and brought into
existence by love. Love is the key to man. The technical term for love –
‘covenant’ – appears in our first reading, from Genesis. God loves man and
situates him in creation that God preserves for man’s sake. God gives us
creation. Covenant means that something is given, and this givenness is
the basis on which human beings meet and live together. This material
world makes us available to one another, obliged to take cognisance of
one another.

And covenant means relationship. We are given this relationship and we

may take it, in freedom, and in gratitude. We may take our existence and
all features of life as blessing. Of course we may also NOT take it. We can
decide that life is not a blessing, but a burden or curse. Man may turn
away from this love and hide and waste himself in all sorts of other loves.
But the love of God for man remains and God waits until we are ready to
receive it.

The community of the Church understands itself as loved, for its own sake,
and because it is God's witness to the world that does not yet know about
any covenant. The Church tells us that man is a covenantal being, that
God is with man, and enabled by God, man may be with his fellow man.
Man flourishes as he knows he is loved, and by love is enabled to love and
give himself in service in turn. All communities and societies are entities of
love. Loves aspires to permanence: we desire its growth, not its break
down; love may seek self-control, so that it becomes truer and more
permanent. If man is a creature of covenant he is not merely an individual
but also a creature in relationship, and we may deduce, since he is not yet

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in relationship with all his fellows, that he is creature with more future than
past. But without the Christian understanding of covenant, the default
position of Western society seems to be that man is man is on his own and
so fundamentally an isolated being.

3. The goodness of creation

Our Old Testament reading gives us the story of Noah. The narrative that
starts the Book of Genesis tells us that in the beginning God created the
heavens and the earth. The story of the Flood and Noah gives us the same
narrative, in more picturesque form. The ark is all creation: creation rides
on the forces of the storm, is it shaken by it, but the promise of God is
irrevocable, and so creation survives. God holds back all threats to human
life: his covenant covers us like a rainbow. God creates in freedom and
creation exists just for the joy of it.

The lesson is that creation is good. It is the garden that God sets before us
for our sake, to wonder at. It is not a hostile place made by some distant
or unfeeling God, the God of Gnostics or Manicheans. We address the
‘Maker of heaven and earth…’, as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and
as ‘our Father’. It is a central teaching of the Church, premised on the
covenant of God with man, that creation is gift and it is good. Our
materiality and our bodies are not a mistake but good as made.

We are embodied persons, persons with bodies. Our bodies are not our
masters, but we may be masters of ourselves as we achieve some control
over our own bodies. Many of our contemporaries do not see creation as
good, but have a pessimistic and merely functional orientation to the
world. They are not happy with its materiality, and some are in revolt even
against the human body. This is not a new crisis, for pagan man has
always feared the sheer exuberance and materiality of creation, and the
manyness and uncontrollableness of the people around us. It is an old
belief that the material world is a dark power, and that the dark always
threatens to overcome the light. We call this Manicheanism.

But Christians have an entirely different view. We regard creation as good

and we receive the limits it represents as good, and we receive the human
body along with all its limits and challenges as good. We neither idolise
the body or material world, nor do we denigrate them. They will be
redeemed. This is the Christian doctrine of creation emphatically
communicated by the story of Noah and the ark.

4. The flood of unintended consequences

A flood is on its way. ‘The waters swelled and increased greatly on the
earth so that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were
covered’ (Genesis 7.18) A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into
the boat (Mark 4.37) and a flood arose, the river burst against that house
(Luke 6.48). What flood is this? This flood is the sum of the consequences
of our actions and inactions. We mostly acknowledge that there is a
growing ecological crisis. Now we see other waves coming our way. There
is a banking crisis and an economic crisis, the result of our profligacy and
negligence come back to us. Behind these are other waves, political and
social. The flood represents the breakdown of trust, of self-giving, collapse
of confidence, which can turn our society into a raging sea. In these talks I
will talk about a number of crises which are aspects of this flood. In a

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moment I will start at the beginning, which is to say with the crisis in
judgment or crisis in morale. But first, since our reading is Noah’s flood
and the destruction of the world, let us look at the ecological.

Ecological crisis
I have spoken to you about the coming ecological crisis many times
before. I have said that it shows us that we do not seem to be in control of
ourselves. I have told you that we have been introducing technology into
the places where we should be exercising virtue and learning self-control.
We have been using technology and consuming resources in order to save
us from having to learn self-control. We seem to have believed that,
though the material resources of creation are not infinite, our technology
can make them so, and we have consumed and exhausted material
resources in decades that might have lasted us centuries. We have torn
the minerals out of the earth at a rate that has rendered tracts of the
world so barren that no future generation can gain so much as subsistence
from them. We have treated creation as it were disposable, even as
though it were a latrine.

I have spoken to you many times about the moral poverty that comes
from treating creation as though it were bottomless. If creation were
infinite we would never have to exercise any self-control. It is good that
creation has limits. It is good that we explore and discover these limits. To
burn our way through creation is absolutely impoverishing for us. It gives
us no opportunity for moral growth. It does not teach us to husband these
resources or to wonder at this creation and care for it. It is as bankrupt as
wanting a world in which the food cooks itself or the beds make
themselves: if they did we would never have to interact with the world or
learn about it in any way. It is only because it is a finite world that we have
to learn how to act within it. It is only when we exercise self-restraint that
we can act generously and for other people. And it is only the opportunity
of acting well and generously, that there is the joy which is the whole point
and purpose of creation. If we treat creation as though it had no end we
will never experience the joy of acting with responsibility, and so with
freedom and spontaneity. We would never learn to distribute well, that is
to give things as they are good for the specific people we give them to, or
give them to the degree and extent that they are good for those people,
and not more.

The ecological crisis may therefore teach us how to stop cramming

everything into our mouths and despoiling the whole earth as fast as we
can go in order to prevent anyone else beating us to it. It may be the
opportunity that is given to us so that we can learn and grow and to
discover how to be human. The longer we leave this lesson the more
abrupt its eventual beginning is going to be.

5. Christ is baptised for us

Our reading from the Gospel of Mark tells us that ‘Jesus came from
Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan.’ John the
Baptist came to prepare the way for the Lord, that is, to prepare us to
receive the Lord. John brought us the news that we can repent, we can
turn around, that our present path is not inevitable, we may yet swerve
out of it into a less self-destructive one. And Jesus undergoes this baptism,
and performs this repentance, for us.

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Secondly we are told that ‘a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son,
the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ Then it tells us that Jesus
proclaimed ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near;
repent, and believe in the good news.’ The news has been amply trailed,
and now in Christ the good news himself is here. This is the unshakeable,
non-negotiable basis on which we can say any of the things that follow.
God is with man, God is with us. But we are also told that as result of this
baptism Jesus goes out to wilderness to confront the angry and destructive
powers, to face them down and subdue them. What takes place in this
confrontation in the wilderness gives us the whole narrative of the gospel,
for Christ is going to withstand all the rage of human beings without God,
and overcome this rage that possesses us and so to redeem us from it.

Our reading from Genesis tells about a flood that threatens to engulf
mankind. We in the West have come so far away from a sustainable
relationship with the natural world and with the givens of our own created
nature. We are those forces which have become out of control. We have
made a vast and painful correction inevitable, so perhaps we should even
be relieved that this flood has started. These crises of ecology and
economy may indeed be the way to our redemption, if we receive them as
the judgment and correction delivered to us through the covenant of God.

I have said that covenant is fundamental, and that relationship, promise

and its redemption, that relationship begun not be ended but increase.
Creation has become disordered, but Christ is here to bring it back to
order, and to give it a better order and greater beauty than it had in the
first place. In the readings of the next four weeks we will see that Christ
takes us on, just as he takes his baptism from John. He makes it possible
for us to leave our madness and to enter into his communion. Jesus Christ
is the ark which will save us.

6. The ark of the Church

In the story of Noah, the sending of the flood is just the scene-setting for
the story which is the ark. God will provide us with salvation so that
neither we nor creation will be destroyed, and Christ is this salvation. We
may embark on a long voyage over difficult waters. We are now being
summoned to grow up, to end the long period of our flight from
responsibility, to see all the truths that we have been avoiding. Though
our crises may seem too big to take, they a summons to repent and leave
the make-believe world in which we have been living.

In Lent the Church withdraws from the world. The Church periodically
steps back from the world in order that it be refreshed and receive again
the gospel that it has been entrusted with. The Church withdraws in order
to be able to go back to the world with a transforming gospel from another
kingdom. The Church travels between the desert where it can hear the
Word of God and be made holy by it, and the city to which it repeats that
Word. This back and forward movement of the Church is essential to its
witness. In Lent the Church leaves the city so that on Palm Sunday it can
go back into the city with its Lord, to suffer and to die.

In these talks I am going to examine the social, political and economic

crises and relate them all to a crisis of morale. I am going to conclude that
Britain is loss of confidence that amounts to a nervous breakdown.

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Because it has not heard the news of the love and the judgment of God, its
self-belief has crashed. The Christian life takes us through judgment and
crisis, indeed only the Christian faith is premised on going through
judgment, which is what the cross is. The Church hears and receives its
judgment through Lent and on Good Friday, and it receives the judgment
that is due to the nation. If we do not acknowledge the Christian gospel, all
we do amounts to running from judgment, but in running away from one
judgment we run into another. But when we hear this judgment and
receive it as the truth, we are forgiven and redeemed. If this society
wishes, it can emerge back out of its crisis. It can repent, ask for
forgiveness and cancellation of its debts, and having received that
forgiveness, it can embark, or re-embark, on the voyage of Christian
discipleship. In ark that God has prepared for us, we can ride out all the
floods that threaten us.

The whole Church is the witness to the covenant of God with man given to
us in Christ. Every Christian in London is witness to this. They are all on
the way with me, through the passion of Lent to reach the resurrection.
Our task is to tell you that you are loved, and loved with an unending love
and with truth. This Great Lent is our way to Easter. Come with us.

Readings for first Sunday of Lent (Year B)

Genesis 9.8-17
8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, 9 "As for me, I am
establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, 10
and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic
animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of
the ark. 11 I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all
flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a
flood to destroy the earth." 12 God said, "This is the sign of the covenant
that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with
you, for all future generations: 13 I have set my bow in the clouds, and it
shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 When I bring
clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, 15 I will
remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living
creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to
destroy all flesh. 16 When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and
remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living
creature of all flesh that is on the earth." 17 God said to Noah, "This is the
sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that
is on the earth."

1 Peter 3.18-22
18 For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the
unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh,
but made alive in the spirit, 19 in which also he went and made a
proclamation to the spirits in prison, 20 who in former times did not obey,
when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the

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ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. 21
And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you--not as a removal of
dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through
the resurrection of Jesus Christ, 22 who has gone into heaven and is at the
right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to
him.

Mark 1.9-15
9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by
John in the Jordan. 10 And just as he was coming up out of the water, he
saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.
11 And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you
I am well pleased." 12 And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the
wilderness. 13 He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and
he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. 14 Now after
John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of
God, 15 and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has
come near; repent, and believe in the good news."

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 Second Sunday of Lent

Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16 No longer shall your name be Abram, but

your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a
multitude of nations

Romans 4.13-25 For the promise that he would inherit the world did
not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through
the righteousness of faith.

Mark 8.31-38 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must
undergo great suffering..

Summary

1. The covenant given in Christ, expressed through Noah, Abraham, Moses

and the whole people of Israel and recorded in the Scriptures, is revealed
in the Church.

2. The covenant of God given to man in the Church is the basis upon which
man may give himself to his fellow man, and create the many covenants
of which society is made up. We may build our society and prosper on this
covenant.

3. Marriages consist in economic as well as emotional provision. When

their economic function and the mutual dependency of partners is not
removed, marriages create lasting social capital.

4. Marriages motivate the production of children, and enable the formation

of children into mature adults who are ready to enter their own marriage
covenants.

5. The permanence of marriages communicates a long-term perspective to

civil society.

6. We may act generously and take the initiative. We may start families
and businesses and be an enterprising culture.

7. An economy without local access to capital loses manual and

manufacturing skills, finds little dignity in work, and experiences a loss of
industriousness and purposefulness.

8. The excessive growth of the market and financially-mediated

relationships results from our failure to make ourselves open, vulnerable
and dependant on one another formally in marriage.

9. Consumption substitutes for love. It allows us to distance ourselves from

our families, friends and results in loss of social capital.

10. Without foundation in the covenant, a society is vulnerable to the

forces that loosen its ties, divide it into antagonistic groups and tend
towards its dissolution.

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11. The Church that is renewed by God will stand forever.

12. The society that is content to listen to the Church receives new
confidence.

1. Covenant and Abraham

2. Gift and faith
3. Giving yourself
4. Covenant with the future
5. Marriage and the economy
6. The suffering of the Son of Man

God knows man and loves him. The Church is witness to the covenant of
God with man, and its mission is to communicate this covenant to man. It
is the job of the Church in London to assure this country that is known and
loved by God. The Church is faithful to this mission for just as long as it
points to the Israel, the apostles and the Church as witnesses to this
covenant.

1. Covenant and Abraham

Our first reading, from Genesis, tells us about a covenant. ‘I will establish
my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you
throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to
you and to your offspring after you.’ This is a second covenant, for the
Lord God who made the covenant by which creation will continue for
man’s sake, now makes a covenant with one specific man. Abraham is to
be the ancestor of an entire people. One specific people are given this
covenant and the promises that come with it. They will prosper and grow,
and have children and become numerous. God will be with them, they will
be his witnesses, always able to point to the promise that they have
received. Since God is faithful they may be a confident people.

We are witnesses too, albeit in the second row. We have heard about this
covenant with the people of Israel, set out for us in the Old Testament.
This covenant of God with man has come to us in Jesus Christ. He is the
Word of God who came to Abraham and now makes himself known to all
men as their God, as the New Testament tells us. It is this specific form of
belonging, of the communion of God with Israel, that is the basis of all
human belonging and relationship. There is a necessary asymmetry: not
all relationships and communities are the same or of equal value. This
one, with Abraham, Moses, David is the one basis on which there may be
any other covenants and societies. We shall examine the consequences of
this next week. So it is on the basis of the existence of the Church, within
which we are witnesses of this covenant, that we are able to make our
distinctive contribution to our own society.

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God has given us himself in love that brings about a permanent
relationship, for which we have the concept of covenant. We may accept
or reject this covenant as we wish. As we acknowledge this covenant we
can receive creation and other people as the gift of God to us and so as a
great good. The society that does not receive, but holds out against, this
covenant does not receive the world or other people as good, and so it
oscillates between a too high and too low account of itself, and in
Manichean fashion regards the world as a dark and friendless place.

God made a covenant with Abraham, and this the Apostle Paul tells us in
this letter to the Romans is an entirely unilateral gift. It is a gift that
enables a whole world of things to happen. Because this gift is given to
him Abraham will be the father of a whole nation of people and so an
entire economy. It is given to him in order that, much further down the
line, it may also be given to us in the simple one-sided generosity which
we call ‘grace’. We may work and exchange and earn, but this is because
the entire world within which we work and exchange and earn is given to
us. We did not build the people we meet and attempt to sell things to;
they are simply the gift and grace of God to us.

2. Gift and faith

Last week I promised you that I would talk about the series of crises that
are coming our way. These crises have arisen because we are poor judges
of ourselves, who estimate ourselves both too highly, as though we did not
really believe in anyone or anything beyond our immediate purview, and
estimate ourselves too modestly, because we fear that there may not be a
future for us.

To explain why we are facing this flood and these crises we have to think
through covenant, love and gift. We will examine them not because these
are religious ideas, but because they are fundamental economic ideas. If
we attempt to understand economics without them, we achieve
incoherence. Economics has indeed tried to understand human interaction
and exchange without the concepts of covenant, love and gift, and the
result has been the bankruptcy of economics and a crisis that is both
social and economic. These three concepts indicate our freedom: the
concept of gift indicates that we are free to give, and give ourselves. They
indicate that we are both individuals, as thus mature and self-possessed
agents, and that we are persons in relationship with one another. We are
both independent, and we live together with others and in
interdependence with them. In this covenant other people are gifts, given
to us. We are free to decide for ourselves that they are indeed good gifts,
or we can decide that they are not so, and that we do not wish to receive
them.

The fundamental freedom of man to give himself to his fellow man is the
beginning of all human interaction and the basis of every economy. You
may meet this person and exchange with him words, ideas, services and a
whole world of commodities in what we call economic transactions. The
two of you are in the market. When we call the market ‘free’ we mean only
that one man may speak, persuade and sell to or buy from any other. Each
of us free to address any other and offer to establish a relationship with
him. Along with every exchange there is a relationship, regardless of how

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fleeting. For this reason we must be clear that ‘the market’ is good, for it is
simply the freedom of man to be with man.

Man is in covenant with God. Man is in covenant with man. We can give
ourselves to other people definitively and truly. You give yourself, and so
you come into relationship with someone who is not yourself: that
someone gives themselves to you and so comes into relationship with you.
We may do this because we are different from one another, and are able
to bring something that the other did not have. Only another person can
complement a person. In giving yourself and in receiving the person
who give themselves to you, you can do something that no other set of
persons may revoke. Now I am going to examine take these concepts of
covenant love and gift by taking them in one particular direction. For
about a minute this seem like a red herring but you will see the point soon
enough.

3. Giving yourself
In order to talk about economics, we have to talk about sex and marriage.
in order to talk about economics. The concept of covenant and gift also
relates to the way that man is himself. For man is in himself either man or
woman. Humanity is not unisex, but sexed and so dual.

For any economic encounter to work, the two agents have to offer things
that are not identical. There would be no point in exchanging identical
spades (The difference between the two things may only a function of
time: I sell you these vegetables today, because I have excess today, but
another day when I don’t have enough you will sell me identical
vegetables). The two agents must be different. Difference is essential to
human interaction and transaction. The difference between men and
women is built in biologically. It is the first difference and the basis of all
other differences. Without the difference of the sexes we would be a
homogenous unisex being, that would not desire or reach out to encounter
anything, for nothing would be different from himself. Mutual desire of
men for women and women for men is both the beginning of all society
and it is the first economy.

Men and women may desire and love each other enough to give
themselves to each other, without reservation or time-limit. Marriage is
what we call refer to such permanent self-gifts of mutual service. But our
society is not entirely confident about the desirability or possibility of
permanent self-giving, or about whether the difference between the two
sexes should be emphasised in this way. We fear that difference means
that one is subordinate to the other. We have been attempting to play
down the sexual difference. The Church says that the world is the creation
of God, and has its own good order (‘natural law’) which we may discover,
and that to reduce the difference between man and woman betrays a
great unhappiness. It comes from a an insecurity about the goodness of
creation, and a fear and even hatred of our own bodies that relates to that
old Manichean thing again.

What is the difference between marriage and other sorts of relationship?

Any fleeting ‘relationship’ between a man and woman may result in a
pregnancy and the birth of a child. The child himself might be glad if this
relationship was a deliberate, long-term, even permanent, arrangement.

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Marriage is that relationship intends to serve that child all the way up into
adulthood. It is thus the formal recognition, not only that a child may
come, but that child is also a person who from beginning to adulthood
deserves a respect, love and service without end.

The Church, the community of one covenant, witnesses to the goodness of

this other covenant of marriage. The Church says that any man and
woman may give themselves to one another, irrevocably and so enter the
covenant that creates a new little society, a family. Marriage is uniquely
suited to turn babies into mature members of society. Hindus, Jews and
Muslims say so, and the Church says so. Though the Church did not invent
marriage it does point out that Christian discipleship is the best means to
learn to love and serve one another so that marriage grows. Then
marriage can provide the long-term security in which their own eventual
readiness to receive and enter covenants, and their own generous
individuality, may develop. How do marriages work? I know of only one
way – Christian discipleship. Marriages work when both partners come to
the altar together week after week together to hear the promise of God's
faithfulness and hear the question of their own faithfulness, and to
apologise and receive forgiveness, from God, and from one another.

4. Covenant with the future

Marriage gives the recognition that its offspring is not only a child but a
person, who may expect to be brought up by that man and woman from
whose bodies they come, and hope for a respect, love and service without
time-limit. In marriage a husband and wife are dedicated to the children
that they may then have. Though they are married to each other, their
children are members of this marriage covenant too. We could even say
that this couple is ‘married’ to their children, and even that they are
‘married’ to the next generation. Society is sustained as it succeeds in
persuading people to marry themselves to their society’s future,
dedicating themselves to its continuation.

All human encounter and interaction is based on the permanent public

encounter of man and woman in marriage and on the family that it
creates. Children must be the first purpose of any society and the first
product of any economy. The education and formation of those children to
maturity must be the second purpose and product of that society and
economy. In order that they do not remain children, they must be formed
in the same industriousness and virtues that brought them into existence
in the first place. A new generation must be formed in the virtues of
mutual desire and service, for such love and mutual subordination is the
glue of society and the source of the confidence in self-giving that is the
motor of the economy.

A confident people starts new covenants. Young couples marry and take
on the debt by buy a house and bring up a family, and will provide for that
family together, and through doing so will themselves acquire an
emotional maturity. They will not only go to work but imagine and work for
the society that they would like to see their children inhabit. Marriage and
bringing up a family is the one overwhelmingly positive thing that you can
do for your society. Marriages bring up children who will be formed in that
civilisation and as adults will themselves be able to desire, love and serve
and enter marriage and other covenants. Children are the most basic form

14
of saving. Your children will be there to look after you when you are old,
unless of course they have been convinced by their education that you are
not worth their service.
Capital may grow as a result of technological development, but it grows
principally as social capital, that is, a population that knows how to work
and has reasons to go to work, and enough stake in that work to be
creative, to take new initiatives, and even have the confidence to let those
enterprises that do not work go bust.

5. Marriage and the economy

Marriage is the result of high morale and it generates high morale, which
encourages the creation of social capital. Marriage and parenthood
matures us and orients us towards the public world in which our children
are going to live. A husband and wife who depend on one other, materially
as well as emotionally, have reason to make their marriage work. Where
there is enough incentive to stick with our partners and children, because
we realise the economic and emotional consequences of not doing so, we
grow as persons and come through our difficulties. Marriage must also be
sustained against resistance. For a couple of centuries the market has
been seeping into the domestic household so its functions have dwindled
to a fraction of what they were and a married household is now seldom an
explicitly economic unity. When we evacuate marriage of its economic
functions, husband and wife have nothing to bring each other, and it is no
longer thought to matter whether these covenants succeed or fail.

We are offered a more urgent love and more instant gratification than the
other members of our family or neighbourhood can provide. The members
of our family compete with the entertainment industries for our love. The
moment we believe that we are not loved or not satisfied by those who
love us, we become consumers and the things that we are prepared to
work for, the house and car, become substitute children, parents, partners
and friends. But the entertainment industries cannot sustain this
gratification over the long term for they cannot love.

For a half century we have increasingly deferred marriage into our thirties.
Those who marry late have fewer children. Those with fewer children
discover that sticking with the decision to give themselves to this one man
or woman, year after year, is difficult. Our society does not give them
strong enough reasons why they should persist. The family gives you
motives to leave the household every morning and to meet other persons
in the marketplace in order to gather the material and social resources
that your family needs. Those who never start a family and those who
after marriage break up become single again have no occasion to leave
behind what has become an extended adolescence and to take
responsibility. As the proportion of marriages drops, a whole society
becomes a set of de-motivated individuals. When marriages break up
there is an immediate economic effect that reaches beyond the family
itself. The arrangement of two parents in one household is a massively
economic efficient way to bring up a child. When this arrangement is
ended, we are left with a significantly less efficient way to bring up that
child. More of the care of that child will be financially mediated, as
additional care has to be paid for. If the market enters the household far
enough to break up the family, the state steps in.

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The society that does not hear the Christian proposal that we are
simultaneously covenanted and singular beings will not concede that
marriage is distinct any other form of relationship. The society that does
not like the idea of specific permanent interpersonal relationships
minimises the distinction between those who are dedicated to the creation
of the next generation, and those who are not. Let us indulge the
consequent upside-down logic for a moment: we need children in order to
have economic prosperity. But for the last half-century our ‘economic’
rationality and corresponding social policy have been undermining the
production of children and the population that will be our future economic
agents. We cannot promote economic growth by encouraging women
away from their household and ‘back to work’. We cannot reduce the
family economy in an attempt to grow the outer formal economy. What
more serious work is there than producing the next generation? But this
work has increasingly be left undone, with economic results that we see.

6. The Son of Man must undergo great suffering…

The Gospel of Mark tells us that ‘He began to teach them that the Son of
Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected,’ and that he ‘said to
them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and
take up their cross and follow me.’ We said that in Jesus Christ God has
given us himself, and so enabled us to give ourselves to one another and
to receive one another. We have also said that self-giving demands self-
control, which comes with lifelong process of formation and discipleship,
which has its own joy. There is a cost to this, for letting go of our ill-
discipline and our unreadiness takes place against not only our own
resistance, but against the resistance of others too.

God is good for his word. God is indeed with man, and thus that all men
loved, even through all their ambivalence about this love. Man is invited
into the communion in which he can forever be a unique individual. He will
never be absorbed into the collective or his identity be lost. Our
togetherness and our unique individuality, our sociality and our
particularity, are established simultaneously in the communion of God,
that is given to us in the Church. But that society that holds out against
this communion and this identity with Christ suffers.

We are experiencing two movements simultaneously. One is of

disintegration: social and economic pressures are trying to tug us apart so
we revert into our constituent parts and cease to be whole persons, or
members of a united society. As the reading from Mark has it, ‘those who
want to save their life will lose it.’ By the vast effort of securing ourselves
against every threat we have ensured that we are absolutely vulnerable
and exposed. The other movement is towards absorption, so we are
amalgamated into the total lump of humankind, become functions of the
economy and state and again cease to be independent and responsible
persons.

The concept of love is essential for economics. Love means generosity,

respect, and self-giving in service, and only subsequently sentimentality.
And the concept of freedom, that is the ability of any human being to act
well, generously, to take initiatives, to enter relationships, to form
covenants, to give him or herself, and to receive and hold on to the person

16
who gives themselves to him, all this is fundamental to our individual
dignity, to our communal life, and fundamental to economics.

As long as our society is reluctant to acknowledge that it is loved by God,

it will suffer a crisis. Mankind is in pain, because like Legion, he is divided
against himself. The Church, the body of Christ, that has to undergo this
suffering, publicly. It has to suffer before the world, and tell the world as it
does so, that this is the world’s suffering, redeemed by Christ. By avoiding
that cross, and that discipleship with its inevitable costs, we put ourselves
through a greater agony, because it is the pain of long disintegration as
man breaks up, and pain without hope.

As long as we chase the short-term to the exclusion of the long-term, and

remain in a crisis of confidence about the long-term, we put ourselves and
our children through terrible suffering, and with no certain outcome. As
long as we let the short-term push the long-term aside, we will put our
own future in trouble. Economic success is all about looking ahead deep
into the future, which comes from a confidence in the inherited practices
and virtues that a society gathers over a long time and continues to
practise. Only the man who knows he is loved, and who is therefore able
to love and to serve, will survive. But the person who acts with their eye
on the long term, who can give themselves and even sacrifice themselves
for their children and the future of their community, will be redeemed.
Whoever who takes up their cross and follows Christ, enduring however a
long passion, will be raised and vindicated. He will have invested wisely
and built well.

Readings for the second Sunday of Lent

Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the
Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, "I am God Almighty; walk before
me, and be blameless. 2 And I will make my covenant between me and
you, and will make you exceedingly numerous." 3 Then Abram fell on his
face; and God said to him, 4 "As for me, this is my covenant with you: You
shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. 5 No longer shall your
name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you
the ancestor of a multitude of nations. 6 I will make you exceedingly
fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. 7 I

17
will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after
you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God
to you and to your offspring after you. ..15 God said to Abraham, "As for
Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name.
16 I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless
her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from
her."

Romans 4.13-25 1 For the promise that he would inherit the world did
not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through
the righteousness of faith. 14 If it is the adherents of the law who are to be
the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. 15 For the law brings wrath;
but where there is no law, neither is there violation. 16 For this reason it
depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be
guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but
also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of
us, 17 as it is written, "I have made you the father of many nations")--in
the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead
and calls into existence the things that do not exist. 18 Hoping against
hope, he believed that he would become "the father of many nations,"
according to what was said, "So numerous shall your descendants be." 19
He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was
already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when
he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. 20 No distrust made him
waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he
gave glory to God, 21 being fully convinced that God was able to do what
he had promised. 22 Therefore his faith "was reckoned to him as
righteousness." 23 Now the words, "it as reckoned to him," were written
not for his sake alone, 24 but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who
believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, 25 who was
handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our
justification.

Mark 8.31-38 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must
undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests,
and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32 He said
all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get
behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but
on human things." 34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to
them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and
take up their cross and follow me. 35 For those who want to save their life
will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of
the gospel, will save it. 36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole
world and forfeit their life? 37 Indeed, what can they give in return for
their life? 38 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this
adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be
ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."

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 Third Sunday of Lent

Exodus 20.1-17 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the
land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods
before me.

1 Corinthians 1.18-25 The message about the cross is foolishness to

those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of
God.

John 2.13-22 Zeal for your house will consume me. Destroy this temple
and in three days I will raise it up

Summary

1. Man is the image of God. Man is the fundamental good of the economy.
No other goods can substitute for him.

2. The Church insists on the unity and integrity of man. With the concept
of covenant it provides the account of social cohesion lacked by the
Humanities and social sciences.

3. People are the end and goal of all our activity. We work so that we have
the means to be generous.

4. The society that does not hear the witness of the Church is liable to
subordinate man to other ends.

5. Those who have no faith in eternity will be unable to take the risk of
making themselves vulnerable. They will not want to make themselves
(financially) dependent on a marriage partner.

6. Through expanding welfare we reduce expectations and personal

autonomy, making it more difficult for people to act either for themselves
or for others.

7. The state spreads in order to compensate for what we have not done for
each other. It can spread but not withdraw.

8. The dissolution of each marriage makes the involuntary relationship of

each of us to the state stronger.

9. The nation has not asked itself whether foreign investors will continue
to finance our retreat from individual responsibility into centralised
welfare.

10. The society that does not promote the production of children above
any other economic good will suffer declining morale and declining
population.

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11. A declining population is reflected in economic crises.

12. The Church names the forces of disintegration at work in the nation.
By pointing to the covenant of God with man it encourages the nation, and
directs it away from its poor morale and self-inflicted misery.

1. Ten freedoms
2. The temple
3. Britain as temple
4. Confident nation
5. Saving and the future
6. Disappearing nation
7. Restoring the temple

We are on our way to Easter. We are following the readings for the five
Sundays of Lent that take us to Palm Sunday. We have heard that God has
brought man into covenant with himself, that God regards man and
creation as good, and that his covenant with them will not come to an end.
Last week we heard that the promise of God has brought a new society
into being, and will sustain the society that lives from this promise. The
covenant given to Abraham sustains his people to this day. In Christ all
other societies have received this same promise that God will sustain us,
and within this covenant we will be able to receive all men as good
company, and to give ourselves to others and so create new covenants
with them.

1. The commandment of God

This week we hear the words spoken to the people of Israel at Sinai,
recorded in the Book of Exodus, ‘I am the Lord your God’. For the third
week running we are confronted with this absolute assurance that God has
given himself to man, that God loves and esteems man and knows him
and sustains this relationship with him in which man may if he desires,
freely acknowledge God. The ten commandments constitute a single
statement – I am your God. We hear it also as an invitation and question –
Shall I be your God? We can put it the other way around – Do not have any
other gods. Why give yourself away to any other ‘gods’? Altogether these
commandments tell us not to idolatrise, not to accept any substitutes. You
will find these commandments written above the altar of almost every
church in the City of London, because the builders of these churches
recognises that this covenant and commandment is the basis of all society
and human transacting.

Man is the image of God, literally the eidolon of God. Every human being
is, and all humans together are, the image of himself that God has chosen.
Let us accept no substitutes for him. We can spend our lives attempting
to give this image away, and substituting other images for it, but we
cannot finally succeed in doing so. We can mar this image, let it become

20
distorted by rage and unrecognisable, but we cannot shake it off. We
cannot so abuse our bodies and destroy our souls that God no longer
recognises us as his own. Nothing substitutes for God, and nothing
substitutes for man who is the image of God. We may attempt to
substitute for man in many ways, but all are destructive, none are
sustainable. By indicating what it excludes, these commandments set out
the freedom that belongs to God and man his creature. The sabbath
indicates the limits God sets on our power to compel other people to our
purposes. We fail to know the limits of freedom if we misuse the name of
the Lord, if we despise our parents or forebears, if we kill, commit
adultery, steal, are untruthful or avaricious. In this covenant with God we
may discover freedom from the compulsion to substitute means for ends,
by subordinating people, who bear the image of God, to any other
‘economic’ logic.

2. The temple of God for man

Our gospel reading from the Gospel of John tells us that Jesus entered the
temple. The temple is the place in which man may go to pray and speak
with his Lord there. The temple is the house of prayer for all nations:
anyone may come to it, receive a hearing from the God of gods, and
receive the justice that he has not received anywhere else. The temple is
the house in which God make himself present to man. It re-distributes
from the poorer to the richer, releases the poor from their debts when they
ask for forgiveness, demonstrates to the rich how to exercise generosity,
and so maintains the unity and functioning of that society.

Was the temple cleaning and empowering the people of Israel in their
relationship with God? Did this House of God enable and support a
confident population? This is the question that Jesus puts to the priesthood
and the temple regime. The answer is given when Jesus enters the temple
and drives out those he finds selling animals and changing money there.
The people of Israel were being exhausted by the financial burden of the
sacrifices that constituted access to the temple. The way to the mercy and
justice of God was blocked by a caste of intermediaries that were milking
those who came to them, de-motivating and separating them from God.
The temple mechanism had gone into reverse, so that it is now
distributing in the wrong direction, not trickling-down but siphoning up
from poorer to richer.

Jesus sees that the people of Israel, to whom the covenant has been given,
are being excluded from access to the promises of God by a cabal. Zeal for
his Father’s house consumes him: love for God’s chosen people, the
people of God’s household, drives him. Jesus enters the temple to cleanse
and restore it as the place in which Israel may pray and worship God, and
this is what this is what his passion, cross and resurrection effect. Christ
tears down a faulty dispensation that separated man from God and from
his fellow man, and in its place rebuilds the relationship of man with God
so that man can truly live with God in permanence. Christ is our access to
God and so our temple.

All other temples function only as they point to Christ. Last week we saw
that houses are only worth anything if they serve to produce children and
so reproduce society. Let us first consider British society as though it were

21
single temple and household, that serves to keep all the relationships of
which the nation is made up in good health.

3. Britain as temple of God

The British economy is a reflection of British society. We could even say
that the economy is what our society is, and it is an expression of what
other countries and other economies believe our society is. We could claim
to have invented Capitalism in the City of London. The practices of trade
and commerce, and the free flow of information and goods and services
came into existence here. Foreigners brought their savings here not only
because they were confident that it would grow, but that they would be
able to get those savings out again. They believe that there is such a solid
tradition of legal transparency and public accountability here that their
money could never simply disappear. They believe that our society has
been so formed by the virtues of honesty and self-control, that they are
confident of our public ability to hold one another to account. We have the
law and legal system that produces good and impartial unbiased
decisions, so there are not different prices for different people. What has
created this belief about the City of London? It is our slow formation that
has resulted from our long exposure to the Christian tradition that has
made us honesty, even when it is not to our short-term advantage, and
honesty is what market transparency and market efficiency are. Without
this tradition of virtues that built a trusted market here, London would still
be just a village on a muddy river.

Recent decades have seen massive economic growth around the world, a
growth that since the mid-nineties seemed to have buoyed up the whole
United Kingdom. But the economic crisis that we are now experiencing is
serious enough to make us ask how much of this has been true growth?
Has this increase in prosperity been the result of any growth in our
industriousness or productivity? Along with this ostensible increase in
prosperity we have also suffered a massive loss in the first and
fundamental economy of the family, the economy that reproduces
persons. This primary economy is secured by marriage, the institution that
gives us the confidence to reproduce children and to support them
through the long years in which they become public members of society
and confident economic agents. Could it be that in the last fifty years we
have experienced a significant loss of social capital because we have
frittered away the institution that generates it? In order to make sense of
our economic situation we have to examine the confidence and social
capital of our nation as though they were economic assets.

Old people lend to young people. We have lots of old people who want to
lend to young people, but we do not have lots of young people. We have a
growing shortfall of young people, and this is the reason why we are
experiencing a banking crisis and why, if the crisis goes away this time, it
will assuredly come back again. Now since this conclusion may seem
completely implausible at first hearing, I will take a little time to set it out.
Let us start by looking at the housing market. As house prices relentlessly
surged up we felt prosperous and confident to borrow, so we have been on
a long shopping binge, that has seemed to grow not only our economy,
but the global economy. We did not ask whether house prices could
continue to rise. They could not do so, for there are more people in their
seventies trying to sell houses than there are people in their thirties trying

22
to buy them. The result is that the price of houses will fall, the security
against which we have all felt confident to borrow is gone and our
shopping spree is over. House prices have been fuelling the whole
economy, but houses are only worth anything as long as there are young
people to buy them. When today’s thirty year olds are seventy, there will
be still fewer people to sell those houses to, for today’s thirty-year olds are
not having enough children to replace today’s seventy year olds.

Our economic crisis is an expression of a much more long-term crisis of

demography. No other issue can be seen for what it is until we have
grasped this one. In the UK we talk about demography only in terms of a
coming pensions crisis, but almost no one seems to realise that the
imbalance between old and young people will effect the economy as a
whole. Are we are in denial about this demographic issue because it has
been drummed into us that there are too many people, by those who are
not convinced that man is an unreservedly good thing, or are we in denial
about it because the problem is so huge that we fear that there is no
solution?

4. Confidence and the nation

I have a question for you. Do you want to be part of a young and vigorous
society, or an old and exhausted one? Do you want to be part of a you and
vigorous economy, or an old and exhausted one?

Our population is not growing. The population of old people is growing, but
seen over the long term our population is shrinking. An ageing population
is experiencing a temporary population rise, and masking a dramatic
future reduction. If on average women have two children, they replace
themselves and their children’s father and the population stays the same.
But in Britain, far from producing 2.4 children, we are producing less than
two. Since the 1960’s the population of Britain has applied the emergency
brake, so we are facing a 4-2-1 problem: one child will have to support two
parents and four grandparents. This is issue is less obvious in London than
it is in any other part of the country. We have to thank God for all our
African and Asian women who are glad to have children, for without our
new arrivals and their families, things would be grimmer. We must even be
glad for those benefits-supported women who have children, since welfare
seems to give them more confidence than those with incomes. But the
nation has become dependent on people coming in to stave off the
consequences of its own growing childlessness. Last week I suggested that
loss of the morale that empowers to give ourselves to one another, and to
work and serve one another in covenants, might have something to do
with this.

We used to understand marriage as a public affair. In getting married we

did something that society regarded as unequivocally good, and in going
to work to support our families we were giving our lives to something
unique and worthwhile, which all society could recognise and appreciate.
But successive Acts of Parliament and a generation of so-called ‘family
law’ have changed our understanding of marriage from a public to a
private affair, and taken away our confidence in marriage with the result
that the social capital that marriage produces has been leaching away.

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A new legal regime allows spouses to dismiss one another from their
responsibilities. When a marriage breaks up the personal is replaced by
the impersonal and institutional, for another partner steps in to provide
the missing long-term relationship.
When marriage is not regarded as permanent and indissoluble, the state
provide the long-term partnership. No single parent is really alone for they
are married to the state, which has become the universal husband and
dad. Now that law and public policy has made it easy, finances dissolve
the familial and social bonds of which civil society is made. We have by
default created a generation of parents who have been outbid and made
redundant, so that their love, presence and hands-on contribution is not
required. Married couples seem no longer confident enough in their own
love to let their covenant hold them together, take them to work for each
other or to receive with contentment whatever the other brings. Our
taxation policy assumes that living alone is the norm, and living with your
spouse and children the exception. So we have promoted singleness over
life together in the covenant which we can enter freely, and so we have
become dependents and employees of that other covenant that we have
not entered freely, the state.

The British economy is constituted by two covenants. There is UK GDP,

which is the covenant of the domestic economy. And there is position of
the UK in the global economy, which is the covenant of our economy with
all other economies. It is for all other economies to decide, whether our
view of ourselves is too high, and the valuations of British companies and
UK stock-market are too high. This seems to be what the international
stock-markets and money markets are now telling us. Our overseas
investors suspect that our economy is not young and vigorous but old and
sclerotic, that we have not been investing the funds they have lent us into
new vigorous industrious enterprises, but simply stoking our housing
market and raising our pension and welfare entitlements. If they think that
we have over-valued the forms of trust that constitute the financial and
other services we offer, and so over-valued ourselves, they will sell our
stock and cease to trade in our markets. They will be our judges.

If we do not believe in ourselves and in all the virtues and practices which
have built our common (economic) life, why, our overseas investors may
ask, should they? By running down the social capital generated by the
covenant of marriage, have become so disassociated from one another
that we don’t know how to pay for, or support financially, someone we
love? Have we become so disassociated even from our own bodies that we
despise manual work and don't know how to wield a broom, let alone a
spanner? Our overseas investors will let us know. If we think it clever to
short-cut on the truth, which is what these instruments of financial
leverage and securitisation amount to, those who once thought Britain and
London a reliable and virtuous place may simply go elsewhere, and our
vaulted financial creativity, without financial self-control, will have ended
the whole game. Overseas investors may decide that in these last decades
we have simply been prettifying our national temple so that the UK
economy has simply become a dolls house. It is time to receive our
correction from the global economy.

Is it time for this temple that we have built to ourselves to be torn down?
Should we be glad to see it torn down in order that another more modest

24
but longer-lasting temple may be built? Behind this economic crisis is
another crisis, one of morale. Have we become the society that each of us
individually ceased to believe in? We have have assumed that the
economy is an independent mechanism with no connection to any other
factors, in particular those social factors that I have linked to covenant, to
confidence and to the readiness of this society to create another
generation and so to continue. We have not made the connection between
economy and morale, and so we been taken by surprise by this financial
crisis.

Money is ultimately a matter of our confidence in ourselves and in other

people’s confidence in us. If this society of ours hears about the covenant
of God with man it will be a confident society, and its members will be
confident to initiate their own covenants with one another. Then they will
have reason to serve and to work, and so to invest in our society and its
economy. When we do this, other people will do so too, and then our
economy and our society have a future.

5. Saving and the future

We have an economic crisis. We can’t fix this crisis with more money,
because just what money is, is the problem. We have to fix money with
something that is not money. The only way to fix it is with attitude, or
more traditionally, with virtue. Let us run through the stages that brought
us to this point.

We have said that financial markets are about old people lending money
to young people, and that declining numbers of young people means that
there are fewer productive places for that lending to go, so that our
savings have been placed unproductively and recklessly, and in place of
real economic growth we have created only a massive overhang of debt.
This financial crisis will not go away because the crisis of missing young
people is going to worsen. If we confess no knowledge of any covenant,
surrender to cultural pessimism and are disinclined to raise a next
generation we cannot expect to enjoy a healthy economy. An economy is
not an autonomous mechanism but an expression of its society. Our
economic crisis is simply our own self-evaluation coming back to us.

Credibility and crisis

We have a crisis with money, and we need something that is not money to
fix it. Let us look at the connection between present action and future
outcome, and so between saving and economic prosperity. Saving simply
means that you decide not to spend now but to keep some part of your
income to spend later. You lend this money to someone. That someone
wants to borrow it in order to take an initiative and start an enterprise. You
both know that their enterprise may not work, and that if it does not, you
will lose your money. Interest is your reward for your preparedness to lose
your savings. If you decline to bear this risk there is no reason why you
should receive any interest. The Church has always referred to the
demand for interest without risk as usury: it is wrong to demand payment
when you are not offering something for it, such as taking responsibility
for this risk.

A year ago it suited all of us to believe that the credit boom could go on
forever. We wanted others to believe that a national economy can

25
continue to ride on borrowing, and enjoy increasing amounts of the fruit of
that growth now before we have created it. as our mutual indebtedness
grew, and consideration of risk was suppressed, this became increasingly
implausible to each of us individually, but we did not care to say in public,
nor did we decide not to take advantage of the unsustainably high return
on offer. Market information was widely distorted or withheld; those
responsible for overseeing the market, regulators, boards and
shareholders, failed to do so. A prolonged lack of transparency or failure
to tell the truth and insist that others be truth with us, meant that there
has been no meaningful market here. Now we are experiencing a
collective collapse of belief; no one knows what valuations to believe. The
resulting breakdown in trust that has destroyed our fundamental asset,
our reputation. We have been foisting delusion on people, and since we
are still over-value, I do not believe that we have stopped doing so. We
have all been complicit here. Restoration of the market requires more than
apologies. It requires criminal and civil charges and trial in a court of law
for some, confession and penitence for others, and no less than a
conversion for all.

We over-valued ourselves and are doing so still. But this is the result of a
deep uncertainty about what our value really is. The same lack of
confidence that has undermined our valuation of ourselves also
encourages us to make wildly exaggerated valuations. Next week I shall
examine how economics itself gives us only a greatly impoverished
account of our public transactions, that allows us to assume that economy
and society are entirely unrelated realms, so we cannot see that it is us
that the market weighs and measures. We have to hear what we are worth
from other people, not only from all around the world but even from future
generations. This is only difficult for the society that has such little
awareness of past or future, and which does not care to hear its valuation
from the one who truly loves it, from God who called us into existence and
bid us live. We must allow our estimation of ourselves to be questioned
and shaped by the gospel.

God presides over the assembly of the worshipping Church, and the
Church hears his judgment. God asks us to judge ourselves and to offer
judgment and mercy to one another, and he judges how well we do so. He
offers us tuition in good judgment, so that we become good judges of one
another. Through the discipling we may learn how to value ourselves truly
and to estimate one another better. God asks us again and again to
judge, leading us gently towards a more truthful estimation of ourselves.

6. Disappearing nation
We said that one fundamental factor for any economy is demography. For
decades it has been a given that the populations of Britain and the world
are growing. It is now clear that this is not the case. In Europe growth is
over, and in Russia and Eastern Europe, population is already falling back.
No declining population ever had a growing economy. A population does
not fall back smoothly and gently, for markets magnify these falls so that
its economy suffers a series of crashes. As our population contracts we are
compensating by importing people from other economies. Our society has
convinced its men and women into pouring so much of their effort into
clambering up the mortgage ladder that they have been too busy to have

26
children. , We bought the house in which to put the children, but our little
temples are empty.

Why is this? It was because we have put private good, without any
definition or control on that good, before public good. We give no account
of the claims of other people on us, because we believe that we are
primarily on our own, not covenantal but solely single beings. The
Christian tradition understands that generosity and justice should be
considered together, and that no account of my good is complete when it
does not offer an account of my community and its prospects.

The Gospel that tells us that Jesus overthrew one temple in order to
establish a better. ‘Zeal for your house will consume me. Destroy this
temple and in three days I will raise it up.’ Jesus overthrew the temple that
was impoverishing the nation in order to make way for the temple that
would serve and restore that nation. He is that temple, the meeting place
of God and man, and the guarantor that man may meet and enter
covenants with man. In every service of worship the Church publicly
celebrates this gift of God, which makes all human society possible. It
celebrates the dignity of the man who receives the gift of this covenant,
and takes it as his invitation to act well, in public, with justice and
generosity. We have said that freedom of one human being to give himself
to another human being, and the freedom of that human being to receive
him, is the foundation on which there is first society and second an
economy. This original self-gift of one person to another reflects the
absolute freedom in which God has given himself to man and brought man
into covenant with himself. It is the basis on which there is the first
economy of the family, and the second formal monetised economy in
which we are customers and employees. Those who are convinced of the
promise of eternal life, will be confident enough of the long-term to start
families and take the initiatives that create social capital and sustain civil
society. The Christian hope gives a society a sense of worth and
permanence.

7. … and building the Temple again

We heard from the Gospel of John that when he entered the temple in
Jerusalem Jesus said to those assembled there, ‘Destroy this temple, and
in three days I will raise it up. But, John tells us, ‘He was speaking of the
temple of his body.’

In Jesus Christ mankind lifted up by God, built on the rock and established
forever. Jesus Christ is the place where God camps with man and stays
with him, the permanent temple of God for us. Christ refuses to let us
substitute, idolatrise or be satisfied with any other temple. The Church
asks whether we are selling ourselves here, in this ‘temple’ that we have
built. Are we being sacrificed here? Are we being sold here, amongst the
money-changers? The cross of Christ tests all these temples of our own
construction. If they have become the places in which we are not built up
but sold and sacrificed, they will not survive this testing. The construction
that we have been working on has enfeebled us, and now its own
contradictions is beginning to bring it down. Can Christ restore what we
have and build us a more permanent temple?

27
The society that does not understand itself to be in covenant with God will
experience wide swings between optimism and pessimism. Sometimes the
mechanism of the economy will serve to tamp down these fluctuations,
but when they become too great, the market will only serve to make them
even wilder. But the society for which the concept of covenant is
fundamental and holds on to the hope of redemption is able to accept how
bad its situation is and how much it is in need of forgiveness. It cannot
have a merely high or merely low view, but sees the cross and death
through the promise of resurrection, and sees that the resurrection lies
through the cross and death.

We have come to reading from the epistle, Paul’s first letter to the
Corinthians. In its opening chapter he tells us that The message of the
cross is foolishness, that is, it seems like foolishness to those who are
comfortable and convinced by a different, ‘economic’, logic. This message
is received by faith. It is faith that secures your human freedom to
acknowledge God, if you wish or to decide against God and thus not to
know him if you do not wish. Nothing is foisted upon you. You do not have
to hear the word that the Church passes on from Christ. But you may hear
it, if you pray. It is only the Christian faith that insists that this faith is
fundamental, and more basic than any form of ethnic belonging. The
Church insists that man may judge for himself, in faith that God is his
judge, and so may act for others, generously. He can be an economic
agent if he has a high enough view of himself, and when he knows that he
is loved he will have a high enough view.

In these talks I have not described the economic or social teaching of the
Church, nor prescribed any policies, political or economic. I have merely
brought up some of the questions that the Church puts to the country. I
have said that the Church is a little community that lives within the great
community of Britain. It feels the power of the forces of disintegration
tugging at Britain and it names them. The Church is held together by the
love of God and so is unshakeable. It can only celebrate the resurrection
which demonstrates this unbreakable covenant of God with man. It can
ask these questions because it is confident that God is with man and that,
however dire the testing that he puts himself through, man is loved and
will be sustained and redeemed by God. The Church is on the way to
Easter, experiencing the passion while celebrating the resurrection. Come
with us.

Readings for Third Sunday of Lent (Year B)

Exodus 20.1-17 Then God spoke all these words: 2 I am the Lord your
God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;
3 you shall have no other gods before me. 4 You shall not make for
yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above,
or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5
You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God
am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the
third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, 6 but showing

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steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and
keep my commandments. 7 You shall not make wrongful use of the name
of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his
name. 8Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall
labour and do all your work. 10 But the seventh day is a sabbath to the
Lord your God; you shall not do any work--you, your son or your daughter,
your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your
towns. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all
that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the
sabbath day and consecrated it. 12 Honour your father and your mother,
so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving
you. 13 You shall not murder. 14 You shall not commit adultery. 15 You
shall not steal. 16 You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.
17 You shall not covet your neighbour's house; you shall not covet your
neighbour's wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything
that belongs to your neighbour.

1 Corinthians 1.18-25 For the message about the cross is foolishness to

those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of
God. 19 For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the
discernment of the discerning I will thwart." 20 Where is the one who is
wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God
made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God,
the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the
foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. 22 For Jews
demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23 but we proclaim Christ
crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to
those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God
and the wisdom of God. 25 For God's foolishness is wiser than human
wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.

John 2.13-22 The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to
Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and
doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. 15 Making a whip
of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the
cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and
overturned their tables. 16 He told those who were selling the doves, "Take
these things out of here! Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!"
17 His disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for your house will
consume me." 18 The Jews then said to him, "What sign can you show us
for doing this?" 19 Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and in
three days I will raise it up." 20 The Jews then said, "This temple has been
under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three
days?" 21 But he was speaking of the temple of his body. 22 After he was
raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and
they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

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 Fourth Sunday of Lent

Numbers 21.4-9 Whoever looks at the serpent shall live

Ephesians 2.1-10 Christ raised us up with him and seated us with him in
the heavenly places

John 3.14-21 Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness

Summary

1. God has come to us without regard for considerations of power in Jesus

Christ. The humbleness of God shows us the unbreakable love and
covenant of God for man.

2. For us God has made himself weak and given himself into our hands. In
the difficult and repellent way of the cross, there is redemption.

3. In Christ man comes into community with God. In communion with God
man comes to man and is reconciled with him and may grow to his full
stature.

4. In the grace of God there is good work for us to do through establishing

and sustaining our covenants. The Church tell us that man may an
individual who judges for himself, and acts for others, generously.

5. The Christian tradition insists on the unity of man in its dialogue with
the humanities and social sciences that seek to dismantle mankind into
conflicting phenomena.

6. Neoclassical economics is that idiom of politics that filters out the issue
of the good and of who may be its judge. Though it is a vocabulary that
reflects only private preferences, economics has become the discourse of
the public square.

7. Economics cannot account for long-term consequences. It has made the

short-term and private sphere the idiom of the long-term and public
sphere.

8. Economics cannot account for our motivations. Not everything can be

made explicit. Explicit and instantaneous rewards are long-term
disincentives. Money has value only when it is not the sole expression of
value. Money can only be fixed by what is not money.

9. The Church is the community that is part-withdrawn from the monetised

economy.

10. The society that recovers the virtues that can sustain its unity has a
long term. The society that hears the Church may recover the virtues.

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11. We can sustain relationships with particular persons because we are
creatures of the covenant of God with man. When they give them explicit
acknowledgement, market and state can support our covenants. When our
covenants are denied public recognition, economy and state tend to
dissolve all specific relationships over the long-term.

12. The Church tells the society in which it lives that it has no need to
torment and divide itself, but may receive its restoration from the
covenant made public in the resurrection of Christ.

1. The scandal and dignity of man

2. Christ the truth of humanity
3. Economics and private man
4. Economics and public man
5. Economy and state against the family
6. Two societies
7. The humility of God

We are on the way to Easter, at which the Church celebrates the covenant
of God with man established by the resurrection. The Church, the
community brought into being by the resurrection, can suffer the passion,
and can do so in behalf of the nation. Lent is the way of the cross by which
the Church witnesses to this covenant for the nation. Our life together is a
gift which God gives, sustains and redeems for us in this covenant We can
give to one another, and give ourselves, in hope of our restoration and
redemption. The whole economy of human commerce is based on our
giving ourselves to one another: we may enter covenants, contract with
one another and start business initiatives which promote and support a
unified society. Redemption comes to each of us, and renewed life comes
to our society as a whole, from the God who has approached us and given
his name to us in Jesus Christ, not from the gods we construct for
ourselves.

1. The scandal and dignity of man in Christ

Whoever looks at the serpent shall live
The readings for the fourth Sunday of Lent tells us that Christ is lifted up
for us, and in Christ mankind is raised and redeemed. Our reading from
the Book of Numbers tells us about the years in which the people of Israel
are being led through the wilderness. They have found this discipleship
hard; their back-biting has grown into a plague of mutual recrimination.
The whole people has been bitten, so the plague is here visualised as
snake bite. The strange antidote for this case of snake-bite is to grasp the
snake itself. Moses erects the figure of a serpent, and anyone in trouble
has only to look up to the serpent to be restored. Restoration appears here
in the form of the snake from which we recoil. On the cross, Christ is a
repellent and deathly sight: as Isaiah puts it, ‘There was nothing in his

31
appearance that you would desire him.’ The death of Christ is an utterly
offensive and unpleasant event which all of us would wish to avoid. This
why the saviour appears here as this repellent ‘serpent’. How desperate
would we have to be to look for solutions in the cross and the death of
Christ? How desperate will our society have to be to see its redemption in
the Church? It would represent the defeat of so much twentieth century
aspiration to recognise Christ and his Church as our way out of our crises.

2. Christ is the truth of humanity

Christ is raised up for us to wonder at. He is God with man and man who is
with God. This vast image of humanity redeemed and in communion with
God is held up before us. When we look to him and pray we are saved.
Christ is the truth of our identity, and the question raised over all other
accounts of who we are. Will we stick with our own smaller and more
short-term identity? Or will we look up to Christ and receive what he
offers?

The Christian faith tells us that we are loved and known, and that we
needy and full of sin. It brings us the news that we are also forgiven. There
is no forgiveness, there is no cancellation debts, no fresh starts to be
found anywhere except through this cross and in this faith. In communion
with God which Christ has opened for us, we may be reconciled to our
fellow man, enter covenants that last and grow to the full stature of man
with God for, according to our reading from the Letter to the Ephesians,
God ‘raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places
in Christ Jesus.’

Christ has laboured on our behalf: he is the provider of mankind’s only free
lunch. We may provide for one another as we receive and distribute what
he has provided for us. God has acted generously to us, and invites and
enables us to be generous and active on one another’s behalf. From him
we may receive the abilities by which we can act and trade on our own
account, for we are ‘created in Christ Jesus for good works’, as Ephesians
puts it. We may discover that labour can be its own reward, for we may
take pride in those whom we have served and lift and present them to God
in thankfulness, and then we will no longer be alienated from the product
of our labour. God is the one who is able to tell the true worth of our labour
and our lives.

The Letter to the Ephesians tells us that man is intended for life with God,
and that this life is not yet entirely knowable to us. For man, the creature
of God is a mystery, whom we may know, but not know entirely. He is a
work in progress, and this means that he has a future that is not yet
known to us. And man is male and female. Ephesians tells us that, in
Christ, that the old pagan wall between man and woman is broken, so that
they do not live in separate and antagonistic spheres. Man and woman are
now in covenant, and may now love serve one another in freedom; the
difference between them is the source of their complementarity and the
basis of all our distinctions, and so of the individual identity of each of us.
The tells us that, as man is married to God in Christ, so humans are
intrinsically covenantal and ‘married’ creatures, and that we may
acknowledge and celebrate this by entering freely our own covenant with
one particular woman or man in marriage. Established by the love of God,
we may love our own wife or husband first, and then love our children, and

32
then love our friends and neighbours, and thus through these covenants
we are free to act in generosity without limit.

3. Economics and private man

The Christian faith is not offered in a vacuum, but in a world of competing
religions and worldviews. The long experience of the Church in offering the
gospel to many societies enables us to describe the worldview of our
contemporaries and the challenges faced by our society. This faith holds
out to us the largest and most developed account of man. In it man is able
to demand reasons for the way things are, and in the bible is positively
exhorted to demand reasons from God. The Christian faith offers us
reasons, and so enables us to reason together about these reasons. To ask
whether religion has any business in politics is to ask whether the long-
term should inform our discussions about the short-term. It is to ask
whether ideas, gathered over generations can help us wrestle with our
own problems. I have suggested that our own problems have come about
because we have not heard and wrestled with the ideas of our
predecessors about society and the economy. The only way we may
emerge out of the crisis that our short-termism has brought about is by
turning to the long term, and hearing again what previous generations of
British people, and amongst them Christians, have learned. We need their
virtues in order to restore the society which can sustain an ordered
economy.

We need a little history of economics. It is essential to the claim of

neoclassical economics that economics is timelessly true, as though it had
dropped down from the heavens. It does not wish to acknowledge that it
has a history. Nonetheless, what we presently know as ‘economics’ is part
of a greater economic tradition, not the whole. Economics has devolved
out of the disciplines of politics and of ethics, which themselves belong to
the Humanities, in which all accounts of human being as a social, political
and reasoning creature are gathered. Over many centuries Europe has
accrued a vast tradition of thought about how to act well and so live well
together as a society. A society is healthy to the extent that its members
are generous and just towards each other. Individual responsibility,
generosity and justice, and so an orientation towards the common good, is
the goal that the classical tradition of political philosophy points us to.

In their discussions of what happens when men meet in the marketplace,

for many centuries Christians preferred the description offered by Plato
and particularly Aristotle, developed by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
But from the seventeenth century a series of reduced accounts of man
and politics, that owed more to Stoicism and Epicureanism began to take
over. These identify other people not as persons but as sub-personal
forces which we have to master or fly from. What had been the dominant
account, owed to Plato and Aristotle, of how to be a responsible individual
in pursuit of public acclaim through acting and reasoning well, began to be
replaced by a much more limited account. When it cut lose from the great
tradition of political philosophy from which it had come, economics
became an autonomous discipline, which was gradually considered more
fundamental than politics. It became the science of man in which man was
a creature without a past.

33
Modern or neoclassical economics is most often identified with Adam
Smith. Smith did not intend that we should be care-nothing autonomous
agents without responsibility. We are not ‘selfish’ atoms. Smith wanted to
see men behave well as citizens and public actors, who were able to act
for the common good. He was determined that men should not conspire
together to create monopolies that corner the market and act against the
wider common interest. The concept of ‘sympathy’ that he introduces in
his ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’ is the key to ‘The Wealth of Nations’:
Smith expects us to act from our own best instincts, which he knew are a
mixture of self-respect and fellow-feeling. Self-respect is inextricably
related to our concern for what other people think of us, and so to our
reputation. The market should be free because we should each of us be
free to form relationships and enter covenants with whomever we wish.
When the market is skewed by big corporations and by government
revenue-raising or -spending it is not free. Smith simply wanted to remove
the blockages to individual initiative caused when the market is dominated
by any group of self-interested big players. Smith nonetheless dropped
two of the fundamental economic concepts employed by Augustine and
Aquinas, and limited himself to the two concepts of labour and exchange.

But others came after Smith who were convinced that the entire existing
tradition of deliberation about what is good, of Plato and Aristotle, and
Augustine and Aquinas and their heirs, had become hopelessly tangled.
They decided to give up on it, and cut moral language loose from all
previous discussion of what is good or true. This new generation of
political philosophers were the Utilitarians, best known of whom is Jeremy
Bentham. The utilitarians wanted us to give up talking about right or
wrong, or good or bad, even in the sense of ‘good for some purpose’, as
when we say ‘this will not look good to other people’. Any good is good to
the extent that it is wanted enough to raise its price to the point at which
its present owner is prepared to sell it. They have encouraged us to think
only in terms of good as this is established by the satisfaction of the
person who employs enough money to outbid all others and so claim it.
The value of a thing, its utility, is determined by the price that reflects the
preferences of all agents in the market. Within this Utilitarian account, all
our acts are seen as ‘preferences’, that is, as private.

After the eighteenth century the whole tradition of thought about being
human in public was turned inside out. As neoclassical or utilitarian
economics became the dominant idiom of public life, our various actions in
the public square were described in terms of individual market
transactions in which each of us imagines that we act privately, as though
no act of ours could be seen by others or would be emulated by others.
Every transaction is considered in isolation from all previous and
subsequent transactions. Economics understands each transaction as
though it took place in the secrecy of a private room, and no act of ours
could create envy in others or induce them to copy us. The inside world is
the whole idiom in which we understand the public world.

We said that economics was a sub-discipline of politics. But even here

there is a problem. For economics is not a discipline, that is, it does not
offer us any of the discipline by which we can learn to take responsibility
and to act in the market as mature political agents. In this modern or
neoclassical economics everyone is taken to be unaware of those around

34
them and unable to attribute motives to them. It is as if we cannot take
one another seriously as deliberative, reasoning and public creatures. But
economics need not remain constrained by the utilitarian heresy. There
are always alternative traditions, and when these have been forgotten the
Church is able to bring them back. Bentham’s cadaver still squats
amongst us: perhaps it is time to give him a Christian burial.

5. The economics of public man

We have said that love is primary, and yearning for love and reputation is
the motor of human interaction. St Augustine tells us that we love our
family and so we are able to put their needs in order and decide how to
distribute between them the various goods that we know they need. It is a
given that we love and care for ourselves, and that we distribute goods in
proportion as we love others, so we feed and care for our own children
before anyone else’s. Because we both love and know them, we are able
decide between their needs and so to achieve the best distribution of the
resources we have. We give, or distribute, goods between the persons we
love. Love is a fundamental economic concept, also referred to as
distribution.

Augustine tells that though love can of course turn to narcissism, this is
just a perversion of a self-love that is proper to every creature. It is a given
that we look after ourselves first: when some part of your body itches, you
scratch; when you fall over you pick yourself up, when you are cold you
put a coat on. You do all these things for yourself. Then when your wife is
cold you fetch her coat, when your child cries you comfort them. In the
letter to the Ephesians husbands are told that they ‘should love their
wives as they do their own bodies… for no one ever hates his own body,
but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it’. (Ephesians 6.28-9). The point is
that you show a basic self-preservation and self-respect, and you love and
look after those who are closest to you in similar fashion. Love and self-
respect are primary, and the basis on which you can be appealed to do
something similar for others who are not quite so close. What the family
does first for its own members, it may then begin to do for others; it may
be generous and neighbourly. When its outward service becomes big
enough we refer to it as charity and the voluntary sector. If this service
continues to grow because people offer to pay for it, it has become a
business. Many firms started as family businesses, because a husband and
wife, or some other combination of family members, found that the
family’s own provision for itself stretched first to include the
neighbourhood and went on to attract paying customers.

Another fundamental economic concept is use (utility): to complete the

identification of anything includes finding the end and purpose to which it
is oriented. Economists after Smith attempted to do economics in terms of
the two concepts of labour and exchange, without the concept of
distribution which I have linked to self-giving, love and covenant. With only
a truncated account of utility, related to the prices determined by the
market, they did so without consideration of the purposes, uses or goals to
which any thing or any person is oriented. With only the three concepts of
labour, exchange and utility, neoclassical economics knows nothing
about covenant, self-respect, Adam Smith’s ‘sympathy’, community
feeling or love of reputation. It is unable to account for the motivations of
people who are free self-givers, or deliberate, reasoning and political

35
creatures. Neoclassical economics cannot say why we should go work, or
why work is good even when it is not explicitly and financially rewarded, or
why it is good to be a public agent. It cannot tell us why we should not
skim our customers or corner a market. Neoclassical economics does not
allow us to ask about the public or long-term effect of our myriad private
actions.

Psychology and political science can confirm that we watch one another,
seek one another’s love admiration and that our desire to be loved and
admired drives all our acts. We do things because we hope that they will
get us noticed and admired by the right people, make it easier for us to be
loved by those whose love we want most. Business is of course all about
public reputation: we know that, better than business is repeat business,
and that we are in trouble if our customers do not come back. Each
financial transaction is a joint act of mutual acknowledgment and promise
of ongoing relationship. But in the language of economics we cannot talk
about why men act responsibly in public, or commend one another for
acting well, that is, generously and justly. Next week we shall discuss what
happens to the society that is has no concern for its reputation or cannot
find reasons for self-respect.

Economics does not able to give us any of the discipline by which we can
be formed into generous and responsible public agents, and it has
divorced itself from the other discourses which can. Economics reflects
man’s assumption that he is fundamentally alone. Economics is the
‘theology’ of the hyper-short term, the term so short that nothing is
thought to have any public consequences. One reason why we are in this
crisis is that economics is not an adequate account of what takes place
when persons meet in the marketplace. But we are able to say this only
because the Christian tradition gives us the resources for a more adequate
account.

5. Economy and state against the family

We have said that the household is the first economy, and the source of all
public service and of all the enterprises that make up the market. The
Church says that there are limits to the responsibilities we can devolve
without losing our integrity as independent agents. It says that
governments cannot provide for us what we are called to provide for one
another, for what we have to provide is relationship, or love. This primary
economic act of giving yourself is the foundation of all subsequent
‘economic’ activity.

All human life and civilisation is about learning to defer, that is, to balance
the taking of pleasure with the deferral of pleasure, between having some
now and knowing that there is more to come, so that pleasure is not
merely fleeting and ‘physical’ but also social and lasting. So in order to be
public actors we have to be able to wait and not to resent those who have
what we do not. We cannot be completely compensated for what we have
undertaken or foregone. We may serve one another, acting generously
adult to child, husband to wife, or adult to elderly parent.

I suggested that every society has to defer to families because only

families produce new generations. The state cannot reproduce society. The
state is that set of public servants who intend to serve society by

36
safeguarding whatever is necessary to its future. The state exists to
protect the economy of the household, and protect and honour the original
event of self-giving that brings the household into being. We said that the
entertainment industries are the first universal mediator that open a
wedge in the family. The corporations create the ‘needs’ and the monetary
economy takes over the functions of the family. When the unity of the
family is dissolved by those desires, the state moves in to meet those
‘needs’.

Marriage keeps people out of dependency more than any other institution.
Nothing can substitute for it, but everything the state does is a
compensation for it. Where there is not a prejudgment, literally a
prejudice, in favour of marriage, the working of the mechanism goes into
reverse. Far from safeguarding the family and the social capital it
generates, the effect of the state’s interventions is to promote singleness
over the covenant of two persons. Any government wants to encourage all
those initiatives that make up civil society, but it does not know how to
stop itself from hearing everything as a plea for its closer involvement. If
we are not dependent on one another through a myriad particular
covenants of family and its extensions in the community and voluntary
and private sectors, we are all dependents directly of the central power.
When it acts to provide for our need, we no longer need one another.

If they cannot resist the torrent of desires that pour in from the
entertainment industries, family members cease to sacrifice individual
desires for family cohesion and are unable to work for one another or
welcome one another’s service. As the family breaks up, the state is there
to provide for each of the individual pieces that have been created. We no
longer need of one another because the state follows the private sector in
to provide each ‘need’ so that it never becomes articulated as the need of
one person for another. The result is that each individual is married to the
state. The state has become the universal mediator, driven to smooth out
all inequalities and with them all the complementarities, by which we need
one another. The state cannot love. But it may exhaust our national
economic resources in compensating for the love that we no longer give.

Our public servants and their ideologists come to assume that there are
certain things that we cannot do for ourselves but which they have to do
for us. The state then offers to lighten our burdens, by saving us from
responsibility and risk, offering a form of salvation, which since it is from
salvation from relationship can only be a false salvation. The result is that
rather than a nation, we have become a collectivity of individual victims,
of people who outbid each other with claims of our neediness. We all
victims now. All this represents a very low view of man. The language of
sin has not disappeared with the secularisation, but rather in the language
of guilt and blame it has begun to get out of control. The public budget is
employed to leach away at marriage, the one institution that is more basic
than the state, in order to promote singleness over all the covenants of
which society and the economy is made up. The state has paradoxically
begun to work towards the dissolution of civil society.

Neither the economy nor the state is able to produce children, or motivate
people to have children and bring them up. This covenanted entity, the
family, alone contains reasons why a man and woman should subordinate

37
themselves to this new generation, and so it alone produces new
generations and safeguards that society’s future. If business and state do
not deliberately set out to support the family, conscious of that the family
is a fundamental good, they begin to militate against the family and so
against the production of children. We said that utilitarian economics is in
denial about history: it proves to be in denial about the source of the
future as a result. Considered alone, apart from their responsibility to this
covenanted entity, economy and state can only throttle the future and so
bring themselves into crisis.

6. Two societies
God loves man. We can say that man loves himself, shows some self-
respect and love for his own. Yet man does not love himself nearly enough,
or not truthfully enough. Since he does not know himself, he is unable to
do so truly or fully. The Church proposes that the true good of the
economy is man, and that man is truly himself when in the company of
God. The Church says that each person is a unique particular, and that
there is nothing more fundamental and irreplaceable than a human being.
The society that refuses to hear this proposal turns the state into the one
fundamental person, and so into the idol, that replaces man as the image
of God. This failure of true love, and our failure to allow ourselves the
language by which to judge this love, has social consequences, which
themselves have direct economic consequences. These are what we are
now beginning to see around us.

We have to identify two societies, mingled together. One is the society of

man trying to be without God. The upshot of his efforts to be without
God is that each defines himself without anyone else: that no one
concedes that anyone has any fundamental claim on him. This man who
wants to be without God and who retreats backwards into greater
isolation, is driven to construct all sorts of controls so the world may make
no excessive demands on him. This man by seeking love and refusing it
and then substituting for it, inflicts a process of disintegration on himself
and his society and a passion without end. The other is the society of
man who is with God whose witness to us is the communion of the
Church. The Church travels through the society of those who reject the
love and suffer this wretchedness¸ assuring God them that they are loved
with an undying unchanging love, that God at once knows, judges and
loves them with a love that they will never be able to prevent.

7. The humility of God

God has come to us and humbled himself in order to meet us. That the
God who humbled himself for our sake is the true God is evidenced by the
resurrection of Jesus Christ. The resurrection tells us that the love and
covenant of God with man is unbreakable. Christ is our servant and the
one fundamental worker. We may not want to take what he gives, but we
cannot stop him giving it. It is always there; the offer is not withdrawn.
Man cannot crush the resolution of God to be with us and to be our God in
this to us incomprehensible way in which he labours for us and is our
servant. The true God, who in the shame of the cross of Christ appears to
have no regard for his reputation, and is unencumbered by all
considerations of his own power, is free to take an interest in mankind,
wait for him and stick with him. This God only is worth our worship.

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The man who cannot believe that he is conceived and borne in the love of
God believes that it is more sophisticated, more ‘scientific’, to remain
between fear and despair than it is to concede that he could indeed be
loved and valued. To secure himself from the possibility that God might
finally recoil in horror from him, man refuses to admit God. In fear of the
possibility of the enormity of this love, and the risk of this love, he is
fearful, and because he is fearful he is angry at the God that is a
projection of himself. The God who has come to him in the way of humility,
remains as unrecognisable to him as the redemption in the serpent in the
wilderness.

That Church that proceeds through our city puts questions to it. It queries
the utilitarian and reductive thought represent by the economics that has
become our dominant description of man. It asks whether we are sure that
there is no relationship between the existence of the Church and the
liberty and liberalism that this society has enjoyed. It asks whether we can
be sure that there can be liberty by a sheer balance of forces without any
of the self-mastery and self-transformation that Christian discipleship
offers? Are we sure that if we remove the Church’s self-discipline from it,
that the liberal public square will continue? Are we sure that if we cut
ourselves off from these roots the plant will grow rather than die? Are we
sure that the Christian tradition is only an old dead beast from which we
should severe ourselves in order to become freer? Could it be that this
history is the source of this liberty, and that if we severe ourselves from it,
it is we who will be the dead beast? These are the questions that the
Church asks as it carries its cross through the streets, on its way to Easter,
praying and interceding for the city.

Readings for Fourth Sunday of Lent (Year B)

Numbers 21.4-9 Serpent of Bronze - whoever looks at the serpent shall live
From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of
Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. 5 The people spoke against
God and against Moses, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the
wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food."
6 Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the
people, so that many Israelites died. 7 The people came to Moses and said, "We
have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to
take away the serpents from us." So Moses prayed for the people. 8 And the Lord
said to Moses, "Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who
is bitten shall look at it and live." 9 So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it
upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the
serpent of bronze and live.

Ephesians 2.1-10 Christ raised us up with him and seated us with him in the
heavenly places
You were dead through the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once lived,
following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the
spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. 3 All of us once lived
among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses,
and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. 4 But God, who is
rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us 5 even when we were
dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ--by grace you
have been saved-- 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the

39
heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the ages to come he might show the
immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by
grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the
gift of God-- 9 not the result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are
what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared
beforehand to be our way of life.

John 3.14-21 Nicodemus – just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness
14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of
Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 16 "For
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes
in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 17 "Indeed, God did not send the
Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be
saved through him. 18 Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those
who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in
the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment, that the light has
come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their
deeds were evil. 20 For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light,
so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21 But those who do what is true come
to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in
God."

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 The fifth Sunday of Lent

Jeremiah 31.27-34 I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel
Hebrews 5.5-10 Although he was a son he learned obedience through
what he suffered
John 12.20-30 The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself

Summary

1. The Church is a holy community that distinguishes itself from society.

This is its distinctive contribution to national life.

2. The community that is made strong by the resurrection can suffer

weakness, remain open and vulnerable. It can repent, and lead the
repentance of the nation.

3. As the state takes on excessive responsibility, it loses its mandate and

legitimacy as the realm of the public service of citizens.

4. The state wants to demonstrate its legitimacy in order to justify the

ranks of mediators it supports. Increasingly unable to acknowledge any
power outside itself, it will be determined not to acknowledge the Church.

5. The state that determines not to receive the Christian contribution to

civil life becomes desperate to demonstrate its legitimacy through its
omni-competence. It will become an alternative Church.

6. The atheism of secular liberalism cannot restrain the unmediated power

of state and market.

7. The society without confidence in eternal life will sacrifice the future for
now. The society of secular liberalism attempts to pull the future forward
and consume an increasing proportion of it. It does so because it only
knows about ‘now’; it knows of no ‘later’.

8. As the state loses its legitimacy, it will attempt to efface the

differentiations and asymmetries of the covenants that make up civil
society. Ideological polarisation will ensue.

9. Such tensions will ensure that the state is not able to motivate the
existing generation to produce a new generation. The state will so over-
determine the present that it will render the possibility of the future more
doubtful.

10. The Church announces the limits of the market and state, and is
prepared to undergo the suffering that results for this witness. The Church
is able to undergo the suffering transferred to it by a society that is in
denial about its own limits.

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11. In the long-term those societies in which men and women, in the
covenant and discipleship of the Church, are content to allow ourselves to
be explicitly (financially) dependent on their marriage partner, together
with the families and households that derive from such marriages, will
flourish.

12. The Church worships God on behalf of all men and all societies.
Whatever happens to the Church is for the glory of God and the glory that
God gives to man.

1. The crisis of faith

2. Covenant renewed
3. Persons in covenant
4. Honour and self-respect
5. The crisis of liberalism
6. The Son of Man takes the way of the cross
7. Repentance and redemption

This is the fifth Sunday of Lent, and next Sunday will be Palm Sunday. The
Church has been travelling through Lent on the way to Easter. The
community created by the resurrection can take this way of suffering. It
goes through the crisis of judgment to its redemption. Our country is
suffering its own passion, as its parts divide and distance themselves,
threatening its unity and the well-being of our society’s weakest members.
This is a crisis for the secular liberalism proclaimed by our country’s
leaders, and that it is a crisis is most obvious where that secular liberalism
opposes itself to the Church. But when this country is ready to hear from
the Church and look to its Lord, it can hope to come through this suffering
to its redemption.

1. The crisis of faith

When he comes will the Son of Man find faith on earth?
Our society is undergoing a crisis of self-belief. It has not listened to its
own previous generations, so it does not have their confidence in the
covenant of God with man, and so does not know how to exercise truthful
self-judgment. As a result it swings between unsustainably high and low
estimations of its own worth. The present financial crisis demonstrates
that this is a crisis for our economy. The financial insanity of recent years
is warning us of a long-term failure. We are no longer be taken at our
word, for we ourselves have devalued our word. Money is a series of
promises, a proportion of which have to be kept: when that proportion is
too low, and neither we nor anyone else believes our promises, our money
has no value, and neither does the economy denominated in that money.
In these talks I have demonstrated that an economy is a reflection of a
society. The nation that does not want to hear of the covenant of God with
man suffers a crisis of morale that makes it unable to act for the long

42
term. The unwillingness of this country to hear about any covenant of man
with God results in the crisis that we have described variously as
ecological, moral, social and economic.

2. Covenant renewed
The covenant theme that we met with Abraham in the second week
returns now in our reading from Jeremiah. The days are surely coming,
says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel
and the house of Judah (Jeremiah 31.31). The new covenant that the Lord
makes is the covenant of God with man restored and made new. When this
fundamental covenant is in good order, all our covenants may be renewed
and redeemed, and we find the confidence to receive their true valuation
from the judgment of God and of man.

In these talks I have suggested that the concept of relationship is

absolutely basic. We are loved by God, we have been brought into
covenant with him, and through this covenant we are in many other sorts
of covenant with all other human beings. Each married couple represent a
covenant, with each other, with their children, and with their society. Each
household comes into relationship with all other households as they meet
in the marketplace, trade and so form an economy. Each household is
judged and assessed by every other, and so by the market as a whole, and
our national household is judged and valued by global markets. We live in
the view of all our peers: we love them and we act in the hope that they
will love and esteem us more.

But in compensating for marriage’s failures, the state has determined that
there is no difference between married and non-married, that is, between
relationships that intend permanence and those that do not. It is
attempting to obliterate the differentiations and asymmetries between the
covenants that ensure our future and those that do not. To suggest that
relationships which do not produce children are equivalent to relationships
that do is not only an untruth, but it has costly economic consequences.
When the state does not give fiscal protection to marriage, the confidence
that enables us to start families, and other more explicitly economic
initiatives, disappears. If the state taxes small businesses as though they
were big business, confidence to start businesses and employ people also
disappears. The need to comply with government demands means that
larger (and older) businesses do better than smaller (and younger) ones,
with the result that the economy is dominated by large corporations, and
capital has less and less relationship to social capital and the practices of
civil society.

All our preoccupation with what we do in our bedrooms is as nothing

compared to the new agenda of bringing it out of the bedroom and
promoting it as a new orthodoxy. The society that promotes such
equivalence at the behest of any group is inflicting contradiction on itself.
The logic of such an ideology is that all particularity is rubbed out, so that
we may not love our own family more than others, nor prefer our own
initiatives and enterprises over others. To eradicate ‘inequality’ is to
attempt to obliterate all differences: without check this will become
coercive and totalitarian. Whether the state intends turn persons in
covenants into uncovenanted individuals who can only relate to one
another through the state’s own mediation, is perhaps a political issue for

43
one country. But whether the state can pursue this project by consuming
the national product is an economic issue, and therefore an issue which
other economies and the international markets will decide on.

Here the Church makes its response. It says that because there is a
covenant between God and man, there is a covenant between man and
man, and a covenant between this generation and future generations.
Only the community that understands itself in terms of covenant, can say
this. Man may take his own initiatives, enter covenants, start enterprises
of commerce or public generosity, just as he may marry and start a family.
And it points out that he must do this, if a society is to continue. Such
initiative and enterprise requiring self-control, saving, risk and even self-
sacrifice, must be recognised if a society is to produce a new generation.
The initiatives that create new covenants do not require any permission
from society as a whole, but simply its acknowledgement: law and
government exist in order to safeguard this sphere of individual,
household and corporate initiative, not prevent it.

We are in a single covenant because we are members of a single nation,

and our national economy is in covenant with all others, since we subsist
from our relationship with these other nations and other economies. They
decide what value they give to their relationship with us, so it is for them
to tell us what they think we are worth. They may tell us that we have
over-valued ourselves and are now only worth a fraction of what we were.
If we receive their judgment as constructive correction, and take steps to
renew ourselves, perhaps they will continue to do business with us here in
London.

3. Persons in covenant
In each of these talks I have said that we have a contrast between two
accounts of man. In the Christian account man is both a covenantal being
and an individual. In the non-Christian account, man is merely an
individual, fundamentally on his own. On this account males are on their
own and females are on their own, and masculinity and femininity are
opposites. Man is threatened by feminity or weakness and woman is
threatened by masculinity and power. The realm of man has therefore to
be harnessed and controlled.

Christianity, by contrast, says that man and woman are in covenant. We

can understand them as covenantal beings, and understand that man is
given to woman and woman to man, and that they both contain each
other and seek each other. We saw from the letter of the Apostle to the
Ephesians last week, that though the dividing wall between man and
woman is broken, this does not mean that all difference is gone or that are
dissolved into a unisex. It means that in Christ man and woman are still
two distinct estates, but that they serve one another in freedom. They are
not antagonists, so they don't need any third party to mediate between
them. It is not women, but wives, relational beings, who may freely
represent the inner world of the household and not, men but husbands,
relational beings who may freely represent the outer world of public
square and marketplace. They have come into their covenant in freedom
and in love: they have reasons for coming together and for being distinct
and non-identical.

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When man and woman regard themselves solely as individuals, there is no
reason why they should come together in lasting mutual relationship. Male
and females may desire and meet each other briefly for private purposes,
but these can never generate public purposes: sex will result in no
commitment to the upbringing of a new generation. If men and women are
individuals, they are in conflict. Of these two rival powers, the stronger
power of machismo and patriarchy has to be controlled by the creation of
another power to police them – the state. But such a response to
‘patriarchal’ domination can only another form of domination, only
nominally gentler because identifiable with a set of ‘non-male’
characteristics; the pursuit of a less masculine and hierarchical culture
remains a game of power. Concerned to avoid confrontation and upset, we
identify new categories of person who may be offended, we widen
consensus by seeking permission from ever-greater numbers of people,
demonstrating that we have done so by keeping records, and employing
great numbers of people to do so. The machinery of compliance that
enforces the equivalence agenda is limitlessly expensive. Do we imagine
that the rest of the world will continue to give us their savings so that with
this standing army we can turn our self-preoccupation with avoiding
masculinity into a public agenda and the goal of the whole economy?

If we do not understand persons as covenantal, we lose the distinction and

complementarity of the household and the public economy. Then there is
no reason why the household and public economy should come together
in that lasting way that is secured by a marriage. If society does not
recognise the household as the source of the next generation, there is no
incentive to start one. If society does not recognise and commend new
households and all other forms of public initiative- and risk-taking, there
will be fewer of them. If no one can take a loss, no one will take a risk, and
the result is the stagnation of our inflated social economy. Only our own
freely-entered covenants can give us the motivation to take initiatives.
Since we are not free in relationship to it, the state cannot motivate us to
anything.

Without the covenanted understanding of the human being, our society

sees men and other initiative-talkers as those who have to be controlled
and is investing its energy in doing so. It has created a hierarchy of
controllers and mediators, and a sclerotic society in which no one may act
without them. The Church has faced this situation many times before.
Christians in this country in the sixteenth century had to throw off an
inflated clerical caste that had made itself a universal mediator. Christians
wrenched back into the centre the truth that every human being is directly
before God and before man, and that no ranks of mediators may take that
dignity away. This insistence on the dignity of the individual Christian
reformed the Church to make it the Protestant Church of England. Its
understanding of the individual has been the bulwark against the
absolutism and totalitarianism that periodically captures other cultures.
When we despise the Christian faith that bulwark disappears. God calls us
into freedom and enables us to judge for ourselves, enter relationships
with one another freely and take the initiatives that bring benefit our
society as a whole. The society that does not wish to hear this will descend
into self-inflicted social conflict, and its economy will suffer a painful
collapse.

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4. Honour and self-respect
Our society is undergoing a crisis of self-respect. We do not seem to be
concerned for our own reputation or what previous generations called
‘honour’ or ‘glory’. We have been given this social capital, this bundle of
attitudes and this system of laws, shaped by the Christian tradition. This
moral, social and constitutional capital is the silver spoon we were born
with. We have inherited the good will that came with the UK brand, which
was created by all the Victorian, imperial and post-imperial twentieth
century generations that shaped the City which we now see. What will we
do with all the social capital that they have left us? Are the British really
going to disavow all that they have been? Do we regard this country’s past
as though it were all mistake? Here again is the Manichean fear, by which
we oscillate between excessively high and low estimations of ourselves.
Where we are uncertain about our value we see wild swings in the
valuation the markets give to our currency and our economy. When it has
been long divorced from a confident society, the market becomes a thing
of pure emotion, a herd plunging between greed and fear, hubris and
despair, that cannot be headed off by any political force no matter how
concerted. When the virtues and the social capital of the UK are not
understood as good, they cease to motivate us and supply us with good
reasons for our undertakings. When the risk-avoidance mechanisms in the
market turn into responsibility-aversion, instead of damping down on
volatility the markets can magnify such fears, until the unreason that we
see as economic crisis becomes wild and destructive. There are storms in
the market because we have let go of so much of our social capital that
we are no longer sure what we are worth.

The self-respect that extends into fellow-feeling and sense of belonging is

the glue that holds people together and makes them a nation. Each of us
considers our interests in the light of those of our various communities
and the nation as a whole. Yet we do not seem to care what others think of
us. Our government has not considered whether other economies are
really likely to carry for us the burden of the national welfare that we have
awarded ourselves. If we do not believe in our society it is not likely that
anyone else will believe in our economy. This, incidentally, is the basis of
Islam’s question to the West. The West seems to have no self-respect, it
despises manliness and no longer sees its own reputation as reason
enough for its public actions. We revel in moral ambiguity. Islam is very
properly puzzled and disgusted by this. It looks as though we have
undergone a collective loss of self-respect, so that we could never admit
that we could do something simply in order to defend ourselves and
establish that we are here for the long term. We are undergoing a
collective auto-immune response. We must either recover from it, which
involves diagnosing it for what it is, or our society will break up. So, oddly,
the Church now has to defend the concept of self-respect and tell us that
pride and loyalty to our community are basic.

5. The crisis of liberalism

Christianity understands that, because he is the image of God, man is free.
We are free to use our own judgment, and able to decide to act well for
one another. We may fail of course, but when we do so, we may admit our
fault, ask for forgiveness and start again. There is a dignity in admitting
that we have failed, and terrible failure and loss of dignity when we cannot
bring ourselves to admit failure. The Christian faith gives us the dignity of

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public confession and repentance. Christianity is not a political programme
or an economic programme: there is no set of instructions in which our
every little act is laid down for us. God invites us to act publicly, using our
judgment. Our conscience may be formed from a tradition of judgment,
such as Christian discipleship, but we decide for ourselves. Only the
Christian faith insists that we have the freedom of individuals who may
judge ourselves. It gives us the dignity of confession and repentance.
There is a terrible loss of dignity when we cannot bring ourselves to admit
that we have acted partisanly and badly, and so failed, and this is what we
are now witnessing.

The Christian doctrine of God gives us the break-through concept of the

person that gives us these concepts of freedom and responsibility. Though
it declines to acknowledge this, the liberal tradition lives from its memory
of the Christian tradition. It takes different elements of the unitary
Christian teaching about man but sets these elements out without
relationship to the doctrine of God which alone can hold them together.
The result is one part of the Christian concept of man is set against
another. The independent and autonomy of man is set against the
covenant of each man with others of his community and mankind as a
whole. So we oscillate between seeing ourselves as deracinated
individuals and collectivism that strips us of our individual dignity.

In Christianity, God hold himself responsible to us and gives an account of

himself: this is what the Church’s Scriptures are. But where no such
covenant and personal relationship between God and man is understood,
God can only be understood as fate, and so as a threat to our freedom. So
for secular liberalism God could only be a large will, and so it mistakenly
understand Christianity as though it were some form of submission to such
a will. Such raw will is not interested in being answerable to our questions
or protests.

When the British decline to hear the Christian account of God and of man
his creature they take on a ferociously fatalistic conception of God, in
which power dominates and weakness is punished. It is the metaphysics of
paganism and tribalism. When power is the fundamental category, and
God has all power, why should God be interested in whether we live or
die? And if he is not interested in us, he is also an irrelevance, for it makes
no difference to us whether he exists or not. Or if he has submitted us to
contradictions that cannot be resolved in an arbitrary cruel and
meaningless universe, such a God is a monster. Either way, such a
conception of God knows no redemption and no hope. Atheism is an
appropriate rebuttal expression of this sort of power claim, but atheism is
also a result of this deist or pagan conception of God, for in acknowledging
no other authority, it allows no challenge to the ‘gods’ of power that we
experience in the market and state. The Christian doctrine of God does not
offer us naked, unmediated will or power: the God of Jesus Christ is
entirely unthreatened by loss of power. We may know the God of Jesus
Christ only in this newborn child at Christmas, and in the single isolated
figure of Christ on the cross at Easter in whom all human self-assertion
and power is exposed and shamed. The Church insists that God is only
accessible in this dark way as someone who has given himself into our
hands, utterly without fear of what we may do with him. As the result the

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Church gives itself into hands of the world unafraid of whatever grief lies
ahead. We are on our way to Good Friday.

Without the practices of the Church, of confession and forgiveness,

liberalism does not remain liberal. Without such a discipleship liberalism
turns Christian humility into another game of power. This has created the
inversion by which we all now claim to be victims, with the resulting
culture of resentment. But the practices of Christian discipleship teach us
that we may work so that we may be generous and have something to
give to one another. Such labour is its own reward, for we may take pride
before God in those whom we have loved and served. For the Christian,
work is valuable regardless of whether it receives explicit financial reward.
It is labour that gives the economy and currency their value, not the other
way around. The value of money can only be established by what is not
money: labour is a fundamental economic concept only as long as it is
defined by a Christian account of the work, and the pain, of self-giving.

Church as guardian of secularity

It is the Church that provides the true secularity. It insists that we are free
to meet and encounter one another, without the mediation of business or
government. It says that we may do so, and thus we may live together,
and thus we may live well. The Church insists that the individual may
undertake whatever he wishes in the open field of individual and
corporate enterprise and responsibility in which we demonstrate
leadership and generosity. We have seen that over many decades
commerce has outbid the mutual service of husbands and wives, and so
monetised the provision that belonged to family life. Then whenever
husbands or wives can no longer pay the market price for such services,
the state steps in to provide for the need that the market has created. We
have outsourced so many of the functions of the family, but the economy
that tries to take over these functions takes on an impossible burden. No
economy can sustain itself by paying some people to dig holes and others
to fill them in again, for the worth of our total economic output must also
depend on what we can sell to other economies. Since these holes are
being dug in the social capital gathered over centuries, no amount of
welfare spending in one generation can repair or compensate for this
moral-ecological disaster. Social capital is money in the bank, but as soon
as it is cashed into explicit money to compensate for love not given or
received, it is gone. Our needs are non-finite, insatiable, until they are
satisfied by love: love is personal and regards each of us as irreplaceable.
When everything is denominated in terms of money, we cannot know
whether to enter services on the debit or credit side, with the result that
money itself suffers a crisis.

We have looked at some of the challenges that our society faces. We have
been able to do so only because the Church is able to find the resources
from its long memory by which it can ask these questions. But Scripture
does not leave us alone with such an appalling vista. The community that
lives from the promise celebrates publicly in its every act of worship, the
reconciliation and restoration of all things, and the confidence of this joyful
community spreads to the wider society amongst which it lives. But the
society that turns away from this promise and the community that
celebrates it condemns itself to increasing short-termism, and will be
unable to comprehend what is happening to it. It will hate the only

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community that is able to predict what is on its way, the Church. We
already find it difficult to discuss some of the issues that these talks have
raised. If people told you that you are wrong, or even that you are being
offensive, that would just be part of the debate that makes for a healthy
public square. But concern not to be shushed up means that we shush
ourselves up. Self-censorship and self-inflicted totalitarianism creeps up on
us. Its own unhappiness and urge to self-destruction drives this society to
refuse to hear the questions of the Church so that it is not confronted by
the issue of its own long-term survival.

6. Repentance
Individuals are responsible. We are a mature and independent individuals
if we can take responsibility for what we have done, name it in public, and
not merely apologise for it but bear the cost of it. We are individuals if we
can repent. If we cannot go back and take responsibility, even for the
things that we have not been directly responsible for, we blemish the
image of God in ourselves. You can go back to your wife and family and
apologise. You can go back to your clients and tell them that you are
responsible for their loss, and to the extent that that is possible that you
will repay them. We can mark our balance sheets down, take our losses
without demanding that they be nationalised, we can go bankrupt. We can
admit our failure and our weakness, because the covenants of which we
are members make us strong enough to do so. After fifteen centuries in
which the British have been soaked in Christian culture, we have the
intellectual and ethical resources to repent. We understand what asking
for forgiveness means. Because the Church receives its life and strength
from Christ, it is strong enough to lead the repentance, and the nation and
its leaders are free to follow, to endure the ignominy, If we do this, we will
survive.

The society that loses Christian habits can reclaim them. But the society
that does not wish to reclaim them will not continue as it was. It will
become a society that increasingly experiences the retribution and
stagnation of the pagan economy, in which no one may get ahead without
arousing envy and creating enemies who will vow to pull him back and be
revenged on him. It will have public square and economy in which one
man can win only because another loses, and one man can win only for a
while until the forces of envy and rage catch up with him.

Christian discipleship forms us for freedom. The Church speaks into the
spreading chill and silence, and it speaks even in the face of the outrage
that the Church is still here. It tells us that we have been giving up our
freedom as we have been giving up responsibility, allowing the market to
provide household service for us and the state to carry risks and
responsibilities for us, we give up our freedom and enter a period of
listlessness and fecklessness. Our society is not even searching for
reasons for its problems, and is no longer able to raise its eyes to the issue
of the future. The Church will continue to say this, for the sake of the
country, even when all other individuals and institutions have ceased to
say so. As the Apostle Paul says, such things will sound like foolishness to
some. Only the Church that is absolutely sure of the covenant of God with
man, secure in the love of God and of the promise of this resurrection can
look into abyss, see the extent of this disaster and name it. Only the
Church dare say that things are indeed bad, that other people did not

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impose this crisis on us, but we inflicted it on ourselves. It is our sin. The
Church can say what a generation of political leaders, a whole political
class is unable to say, that we are responsible and that we may repent.

7. The Son takes the way of the cross

The reading from the Gospel of John tells us this: The hour has come for
the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat
falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it
bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate
their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must
follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also

The job of the Church is simply to be holy, and so to be a distinct

community with a distinct form of life and discipleship. The Church is here
to stand out from the rest of society, and to take the ignominy and the
suffering that this brings. In Christian discipleship we are undergoing an
apprenticeship which we cannot put off.

This apprenticeship in holiness is good for our entire society. We are in the
world full of other people, and our lives consist in the meeting and
deepening relationships with them. As long as we remain in flight from
other people, this apprenticeship will be agony without end or purpose.
Coming into relationship with others is what all our communal, national
and economic life is about. In business we hope to create relationships
that we can sustain, and which will sustain us. This requires a process of
growth on our part, and this requires a form of apprenticeship too.

One reason for our present crisis is that that the Church has not clearly
told this country that man is loved by God and that this country is also
founded in that love and covenant. Whether this country is on its way to
Easter and to its resurrection, or simply on its way to an extended and
never-ending crucifixion and misery will be decided by whether the
country is ready to tolerate the Church and even to be informed by it, or
determined to impose silence on it. We have lived on the social capital
accumulated under the many centuries in which we received the shaping
of Christian discipleship, the discipline that turned us into more or less
self-respecting, self-controlled, generous and initiative-taking people. We
have spent that capital and not renewed it. The Church has not passed on
to the comfort of God, and so the Church has been unfaithful to the nation,
and the nation is suffering as a result. The Church carries the cross. It is
Britain’s cross, and the Church carries it on Britain’s behalf. The Church
must repent, and in Lent it does repent. In coming years the Church will
suffer. The Church will go through its Passover here in London, and take
whatever is thrown at it. It must do so for the sake of the world and so for
this country which, because it is discovering that many of its hopes have
been delusory, is going to undergo great anguish. The Church, which is the
Body of Christ, will suffer the rage of this panicked and angry nation. The
Church knows how to suffer and how to live under alien government, for it
lives under a hostile culture and government in many parts of the world. It
is ready to do so in this country too.

Lent is the preparation and unburdening that accompanies the teaching of

the Church’s candidates for baptism. For the Church knows how to hear
judgment, and it knows the joy of repentance, honest speech and

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unburdening. The Church can repent and beg for forgiveness. The Church
can repent of having failed to be the intercessor and prophetic and priestly
intermediary for the country. The Church that hears the promises of God
and sees the nation in agony cannot not speak to it, and offer it the
correction, and comfort and hope. The Church comes with judgment. The
Church has the confidence to be able to repent and accurately to name
our sins, to look down into the widening pit of our trespasses and debts,
and to cry to our creditors and to God for our forgiveness and release. So
the Church represents a question to the nation. The Church that has
confidence in the covenant of God with man can ask the nation to hear
this promise and this judgment, to receive them and with them new
confidence and new life.

This brings us back to the first gospel reading. Jesus answered them, "The
hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. And what should I say -
'Father, save me from this hour'? No, it is for this reason that I have come
to this hour. Father, glorify your name." Then a voice came from heaven, "I
have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." Amen, Lord, Glorify it again.

Readings for Fifth Sunday of Lent (Year B)

Jeremiah 31.27-34 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I
will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of
humans and the seed of animals. 28 And just as I have watched over them
to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will
watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord. 29 In those days
they shall no longer say: "The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the
children's teeth are set on edge." 30 But all shall die for their own sins; the
teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge. 31 The days
are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with
the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the
covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand
to bring them out of the land of Egypt--a covenant that they broke, though
I was their husband, says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will
make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my
law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people. 34 No longer shall they teach one another, or
say to each other, "Know the Lord," for they shall all know me, from the
least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity,
and remember their sin no more.

Hebrews 5.5-10 5 So also Christ did not glorify himself in becoming a

high priest, but was appointed by the one who said to him, "You are my
Son, today I have begotten you"; 6 as he says also in another place, "You
are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek." 7 In the days
of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and
tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard
because of his reverent submission. 8 Although he was a Son, he learned
obedience through what he suffered; 9 and having been made perfect, he
became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, 10 having
been designated by God a high priest according to the order of
Melchizedek.

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John 12.20-30 20 Now among those who went up to worship at the
festival were some Greeks. 21 They came to Philip, who was from
Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, "Sir, we wish to see Jesus." 22 Philip
went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. 23
Jesus answered them, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be
glorified. 24 Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the
earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much
fruit. 25 Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in
this world will keep it for eternal life. 26 Whoever serves me must follow
me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me,
the Father will honour. 27 "Now my soul is troubled. And what should I
say--' Father, save me from this hour'? No, it is for this reason that I have
come to this hour. 28 Father, glorify your name." Then a voice came from
heaven, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." 29 The crowd
standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, "An angel
has spoken to him." 30 Jesus answered, "This voice has come for your
sake, not for mine. 31 Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of
this world will be driven out. 32 And I, when I am lifted up from the earth,
will draw all people to myself."

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