John 12:20-33, and an encouragement to confession

“Anyone who loves his life loses it; anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it for the eternal life.”

What can it mean to say that you, and I, must “hate [our lives] in this world”?

Well, the first thing to make clear, I think, is that we are not being asked to hate ourselves, but rather our lives in this world. But perhaps this merely kicks the can down the road, as it were. Because we are then forced to wonder in what way are we ourselves, and our lives in this world, able to be separated?

Surely, hating our lives is no different from hating ourselves. Our life in this world is all we’ve got, after all.

I want to suggest two ways in which we might be able to think and talk about ‘hating our lives in this world’ which do not mean that we must end up hating ourselves.

And this is important, because hating ourselves is not a good thing!

The second part of the great commandment, that commandment on which, Jesus told us, hang all the law and the prophets, is that we should love our neighbours as ourselves.

This is a truly profound insight into the nature of what human beings are like. If we hate ourselves, we will inevitably end up hating our neighbours as well. We cannot love our neighbours if we do not first love ourselves.

So, let me repeat the question.

How can we hate our lives, without hating ourselves?

The first of my two possible answers grows directly out of today’s gospel reading. But in order to see it, we have to understand something about the context in which Jesus was speaking.

Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover. This is the high point of the year for Jewish believers, and our gospel reading today opens with the request of “some Greeks” to see Jesus.

But these are Greeks who, although not Hebrews, are religious Jews in the sense that they follow the Jewish religion, and that is why they have also come to Jerusalem for the festival.

And so Jesus is talking to “the Jews” when he speaks about losing the life that we love.

And the life that the Jews in general, and the scribes and the Pharisees in particular, loved so much was their life as Jews, their laws as handed to them by Moses, their traditions, and their conviction that they were special.

The chosen people of God. Exclusive. Pure. Unique.

And suddenly, here is the man who claims to be the pinnacle of Jewish history, the one they have been anticipating all these years. The Messiah.

And to their horror and disbelief, the Messiah who they’ve been excitedly expecting to be the person who confirms all their sense of specialness, of superiority, of chosen-ness, is telling them that they have got it all wrong.

That as Jesus says, as the passage we heard closes, “when I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all [people] to myself.” Not, note, all Jewish people to myself. All people.

And this is the life that Jesus challenges his Jewish listeners to give up, to lose. The life of exclusive entitlement. The life of narrow adherence to legalities and prohibitions. A life that is exclusively focused on this world.

And if they are willing to hate this life, and instead embrace the life that Jesus offers them, then they will experience eternal life, life in all its fullness.

And this challenge to the Jews of Jesus’ time is also the challenge that Jesus lays before us, in our time.

Are we willing to hate our lives or, in other words, are we prepared to throw away all our assumptions, and prejudices, and received wisdoms, and sense of entitlement, in order to serve our Lord, to follow him, so that God our father will honour us?

It is, indeed, a very big ask. It is challenging us to question our very identities. Just as the Jews were asked to question their identity as special, and exclusively chosen, so we are called to question our identities.

Our identities as members of the world’s rich elite, which all of us in this church are, no matter how much we might think we are poor relative to others we might know.

Our identities as Christians tempted to look down on those who are not.

Our identities as passionate supporters of Brexit. Or, perhaps, equally passionate opponents of Brexit.

But whatever identity we might hold on to as a precious part of ourselves, we must be prepared to throw it away and follow Jesus.

And what’s the second way in which we might hate our lives without ending up hating ourselves in the process?

Well, our identity is something to do with the totality of how we see ourselves, our over-arching sense of who we think we are.

But even if we love ourselves in general, as it were, we all have aspects of ourselves that we don’t like. Aspects, perhaps, that we hate.

And this more limited self-hatred can also begin to spill over into the rest of our lives. It can begin to make us hate ourselves bit by bit.

And then we will find it impossible to love our neighbours.

What can we do to prevent the little self-hatreds, that we all suffer, from becoming an all-consuming self-hate that will cut us off from God and neighbour?

Well, we can take advantage of the sacrament of reconciliation that I’ll be offering after mass today, for any that want it.

It’s often, I think, rather misunderstood. It might perhaps feel more like a recipe for creating self-hatred rather than curing it!

But, in truth, it is a simple, and a beautiful, process. It’s an opportunity to name, to express, those things which we don’t like about ourselves. To lay them before Jesus, and to receive his assurance that he loves us despite our own self-contempt, or self-criticism.

It’s not supposed to be a memory test of every particular thing we’ve done wrong.

God is not especially interested in the fact that we may have eaten two cream cakes this week despite the fact that we gave them up for Lent.

But he is interested if our giving in to those cream cakes has made us feel useless, incapable of keeping our word to ourselves, and perhaps to others as well.

Jesus knows, as St Paul knew in his letter to the Romans, that for all of us it is true that “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do”.

And that knowledge of our inherent frailty, our inherent inability to carry out our own good intentions, can be corrosive, undermining our self-belief and making it harder for us to love ourselves, and thus to love our neighbours.

The sacrament of reconciliation is like a welcoming bench on a steep mountain climb.

An opportunity to gain perspective, and to put down our self-imposed burdens for a moment and listen to the voice of our Lord telling us that if he loves us, as he most certainly does, then we can surely love ourselves too.

So it’s nothing to be afraid of, nothing to be embarrassed about; but everything to look forward to, and to be grateful for. Grateful to be reminded once again that Jesus promises us that “my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”.

To put it simply – come to confession, and give yourself a break!

Chicken or egg?

I’ve been struck by two recent articles considering the role of social media in influencing what we think.

One is in today’s Guardian. It’s presented as an exposé of how illegal harvesting of Facebook user profiles was allegedly used to target voters in the last US presidential election. (Facebook profiles harvested in data breach)

The other was an article by Elizabeth Oldfield published by Theos (Beyond the Twitter clean-up) which reflected on Twitter’s efforts to de-toxify the kind of hot-housed debate that the platform is considered to encourage – “increasingly divisive echo chambers” in the words of Twitter’s CEO.

In both cases, the emphasis was on the power of social media, either when their data is misused, or simply by virtue of their operating models, to amplify and reinforce the existing opinions and prejudices of their users. In the US election, it is alleged, the harvesting of data enabled swing voters to be identified, and then plied with targeted messages encouraging them to swing towards Donald Trump.

In the Twitter case, and by as yet unspecified means, the desire is to lead users towards being exposed to more open, rather than increasingly closed, voices and opinions. As Elizabeth Oldfield notes, this is a worthy goal. Unfortunately, given that Twitter is based on the ‘free’ choice of who to follow, and therefore which opinions a user is likely to be exposed to, it’s hard to see how the objective could be achieved without an entirely different model.

Elizabeth Oldfield’s article is largely concerned with demolishing the optimistic notion that what we end up thinking is the result of our rational and even-handed consideration of the available evidence on the matter in hand. And she goes on to give some sound advice about how we might approach one another when we discover that we profoundly disagree. Advice that I’d very much like to see taken up more widely.

But neither of these articles sets out to consider how we end up thinking what we think in the first place. Preventing Twitter users from being exposed only to other Twitter users with whom they already agree will not address how those users came to their prejudices initially. And although if we all followed Elizabeth Oldfield’s humane and courteous advice we might disagree more respectfully, we probably still wouldn’t change our existing minds.

And the Guardian’s anxiety is about how existing prejudices are reinforced by unscrupulous misusers of data, but not about how those prejudices were cultivated originally.

In fact, if Elizabeth Oldfield is right in her view that human beings are not the ‘rational actors’ that we’d like to kid ourselves we are, then perhaps the Guardian’s anxiety is overstated. We’re going to think what we’re going to think in any case, and having our prejudices and distortions fed back to us is perhaps not all that significant. It seems balanced and objective considerations of the evidence cut no ice with us anyway.

So I’m less concerned by the ‘divisive echo chambers’ than I am by how we first come to be in the echo chambers we inhabit.

I have no wisdom to offer, I fear. Hence this post’s title. I am no nearer to disentangling the chicken and egg dilemma now than I’ve ever been.

I’m not even able to work it out in my own personal case, never mind develop a mechanism that might apply more widely. I was born and brought up in an all-embracing Anglo-Catholic environment. I morphed into a 1970s Maoist-Christian-freedom-fighter (not that I actually did any fighting, mind), and thence into a virulently anti-religious zealot. And eventually I’ve ended up as an ordained Anglo-Catholic priest after all.

Chicken? Egg? Rational sifting of evidence? Answers, please, on a postcard…

The seal of the confessional

The painful and appalling reality of child abuse committed by priests in the Church of England is coming under renewed and devastating scrutiny this week at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

This is entirely as it should be. The church may be squirming, but squirm it must. We must all face up to the past, face up to the terrible disfigurement that the Body of Christ has inflicted upon itself.

It is also right, proper and inevitable that the spotlight should be maintained unflinchingly upon the damage and suffering endured by so many victims, and on the inadequacies and self-deception of the church’s response to the dark truths that are seemingly emerging in a never-ending and foully festering stream.

But.

The damage is not confined to those victims. For those of us who believe passionately in the message of Jesus Christ that, at its best, the church proclaims anew in every generation, there is also the pain of coming to terms with how much harder that mission is now.

And how difficult it is becoming to defend the church’s deepest obligations and understandings from some of the remedies that are now being proposed as necessary and unavoidable consequences of the church’s failings and evils.

One of those is the seal of the confessional. It is widely believed now that this has in some way contributed to the child abuse scandal because priests have offered absolution, rather than a trip to the police station, when penitents have confessed to abusive behaviour during the sacrament of reconciliation.

Of course, in part it is that very exercise of sacred silence about all that a priest may hear in the confessional that prevents any truly objective or evidence-based assessment of how, or whether, such a contribution may have been made.

But it is a fundamental article of faith that it is God in Christ who absolves, not the priest. The priest ‘merely’ conveys to the penitent that assurance that the absolution has indeed been offered. And it follows from this that it is not in the gift of the priest to decide when the sacred seal of the confessional is to be broken.

The sacrament of reconciliation is not the possession of the church. It is the possession of God.

What is in the possession of the church is the management of its safeguarding processes, and its obligation to assist the secular authorities in bringing miscreants to justice.

But depriving penitent sinners of the opportunity of confession and absolution, and making the seal conditional on the nature of the sin, is not what that assistance requires, nor does it make abuse any less or more likely to occur.

Conflating sacrament and management process is wrong in principle, and unhelpful in practice.

A chrysalis cracks…

Almost 10 years ago, I found myself abruptly made redundant. And in the hiatus that followed, I set up a blog. I called it Billy No-Job’s blog.

And then, about a year later, I got another job. So I changed the blog’s moniker to Billy Gotta-Job’s blog. And over the next few years I wrote about things that interested me, annoyed me, mystified me. I built up quite a following.

But then time and, perhaps if I’m honest, inspiration, seemed in short supply, and I let it lie fallow.

One of the areas that I explored in various ways, and contended over, was faith. For reasons that were never entirely clear to me, many of my most loyal readers were committed atheists, and so there were some robust, but always respectful, exchanges in the comments.

I always kept the actual identity of first Billy No-Job, and then Billy Gotta-Job, out of the blog. I think initially, whilst I was looking for work, I probably felt that prospective employers might not relish some of my more piquant observations. But I left the anonymity in place, even when that was no longer a consideration.

Throughout my blogging years, I was first investigating, and then pursuing, my vocation to the priesthood. A vocation that has now come to fruition.

And that, I think, is the chrysalis to which I’m referring.

I have a real sense of having come out of something, or better expressed, somewhere, and into the light. And also of having, in some important way, been transformed in the process. And one consequence of that – and an entirely unexpected and probably inexplicable one at that – is that I no longer feel any need to hide, as it were.

So I’m going to start blogging again, in my new butterfly form.

I should make it clear that like all analogies, this one of insect metamorphosis has its untruths as much as its truths. I am not claiming now to be more beautiful than in my preceding caterpillar form – merely flying somewhat more freely, and perhaps with less care about, well, about anything.

So much so, that I’m leaving all my previous posts in place. I don’t think there’s really much in my oeuvre that embarrasses me, but what the heck if it does…