LONDON LECTURES - October 2001
MORAL LEADERSHIP
4. The Moral of the Story? Jesus
In classic English understatement Iris Murdoch, one of the great novelists of the human condition wrote: "if one appeals to the general notion of human nature, must one not agree that we are on the whole not framed to be particularly good." This led her to conclude: "Government should legislate with human frailty in mind." (Metaphysics pp 352,368)
This is a Christian insight that human beings while retaining the capacity for virtue are essentially flawed and fall short of the moral standards of God. None is perfect. This immediately presents a challenge for all who aspire to moral leadership. We all have clay feet. We all risk being out-ed as hypocrites. I have heard senior politicians say that whereas they believe in the fundamental importance of marriage and in the value of he family to social cohesion, they are reluctant to go on public record and introduce these principles into public policy for fear of being set upon by the press (and not just the Tabloids) and having their relationships examined as far back as their days as students. They fear not just for themselves but for their spouse and children and for former relationships. We can all think of examples where the media have been merciless in their treatment of political and religious leaders. I have been told by a senior journalist of others who are investigating my own past and no doubt the first questions to be put to the next Archbishop of Canterbury at the press conference to announce his appointment will be "Did you smoke pot as a student?"
Mind you, that might be considered progress! The first question I faced when I became Bishop of Hull was: "Do you believe in God?"!
I have gone on record as saying that you cannot divorce private life from public office; that an invitation to vote for someone is an invitation to trust them, and that trustworthiness of a candidate is a legitimate subject of public interest. If you have deceived others in business, in the community or the family, those who are closest to you, how does the electorate know you will not deceive them who are at a distance?
Although I still hold to this view I believe it needs amplifying and the amplification exposes something that is missing from our national life. I want to maintain the indivisibility of private life and public office not least because to divorce the two leads the people to become ever more cynical about those in public life whom they see as just feathering their own nest; the more you divide the private from the public, the more the notion of public service evaporates.
But how do we hold together the duty to uphold certain values and virtues with the reality that we are all sinners who fall short of the glory of God and like sheep have turned away and gone our own way? This is a major problem for it is having an effect on those who are prepared to offer themselves for public service. Many shrink from the exposure and inevitable scrutiny of every part of their life. It leads some public figures to mendacity over trivial misdemeanours for fear of the media fall-out, only then to find themselves later hounded out of office for the mendacity itself. The media are merciless and the public are as unforgiving as the crowds in the Coliseum turning their thumbs downwards on the fate of the gladiators.
Had King David lived with today's media he would have been exposed for his adultery with Bathsheba and his collusion in the murder of her husband Uriah and hounded from public office forever. Like John Profumo he would have done penance and reparation through tireless work in the East End of Jerusalem. But the rehabilitation and restoration of public figures whose fallen natures have been exposed are more problematic today for we do not have a culture of repentance and forgiveness. It has become almost fashionable for people to issue apologies although their lawyers ensure circumspection so as not to admit liability. And some of the apologies are illusory. "I'm sorry if I hurt you." if a very different sentiment from "I'm sorry that I've hurt you."
The latter is genuine remorse, the former simply adds blame to the aggrieved for being so offended. But whereas there are expressions of sorrow, what our society is deprived of through its diminished experience of Christianity is a mechanism of public forgiveness. An individual may well find forgiveness personally both from those he's offended and from God but restoration and rehabilitation to public life are more difficult because there is no commonly held mechanism whereby our society can express forgiveness and absolution. Thus, a public figure can go to prison and come out with his conviction spent and yet still find the media and the public merciless and unforgiving and determined to bar him forever from public office.
In my last lecture I made a call for a recovery of moral awe to accompany all our decision making; in this lecture I draw attention to the need for moral leaders to challenge the prevailing and censorious mood of the media and breathe into public life and public policy the twin principles of justice and mercy. In today's world there is much borrowing of religious language and imagery - mission statements, leadership with vision, evangelistic salesforces, born-again cars and the cool use of 'bless' in the youth culture. Whereas vision in management and politics is invariably about objectives, goals and strategies, vision in the Bible is exclusively of God. The vision that moral leaders, influenced by Scripture, are to have is of God whose love issues in justice and mercy. It is the character of God that is to be the model of the quality of our society. A world of justice alone is a very cruel place for sinners to find themselves. We are all left grasping for the oxygen of forgiveness. Moral leadership in the New Testament has the hallmarks of justice and mercy.
It is said of William Temple one of Anglicanism's greatest social theologians that he said of himself that he felt most at home in the Gospel of John so do I. In the opening chapter we read 'The law came through Moses; grace and truth through Jesus Christ'. As Grace and Truth incarnate he walked the face of the earth as pastor and prophet, demonstrating practically the compassion of God and urging on the world the justice of God. The loveliest (and I use the word consciously) example of this is to be found in the eighth chapter of John. The religious and moral leaders make stand before Jesus and a crowd of people in the Temple a woman caught in adultery (where, by the way, was the man?). When Jesus challenged them about their own private lives they began to drop the stones - or at least walk away. Notice John tells us that the older ones left first - the young, more idealistic, held on more ready to condemn; the older ones, more realistic, knew that there but for the grace of God went they. When eventually it was just the two of them, the voice of the pastor spoke, "Neither do I condemn you", then the voice of the prophet, "Do not sin again". Notice the order. The pastor precedes the prophet. Had the prophetic word pointing up the commandments come first she may not have been there to hear the pastor speak of God's compassion. It is both grace and truth that must characterise the moral leader. Justice and mercy, commandment and compassion, truth and grace. These are the virtues that flow from the love of God. It is vitally important to hold these virtues together. The truth is I could not continue as a Christian let alone as a leader within the church and society if I did not embrace and was not embraced by the mercy, compassion and forgiveness of God as well as his Commandments.
At the same time as acknowledging the reality of human nature and the inherent weakness of all moral leaders we need also to recognise that no leader can be omniscient especially in such a complex world. There is a continual pressure on those in leadership to pronounce on all sorts of subjects and there is little space for someone to say, "I don't know" or, worse still "I'm afraid I got it wrong". These are seen as body-blows to the leader's authority. But why? Perhaps we live in such a rapidly changing world with frightening prophecies of doom that we long to be guided by authoritative leaders into a secure future. We are glad to welcome new heroes to the stage but quickly boo them off when they cease to lead us where we want to go or when they reveal their true and faded colours or when they cease to entertain us.
The time has come to say that leaders are also learners. One of my favourite cartoons in a book called "Following Jesus" is of a candidate kneeling before a Bishop to be confirmed. On his back is pinned an "L" plate. Look closely and you will see that an "L" is also woven into the Bishop's mitre. Both learners, both disciples. I've been told that this cartoon was copied and used in a parish and that the "L" in the Bishop's mitre was air-brushed out! What view of leadership does that convey? What does it say about the relationship between leader and led, the leader and young people? A moral leader does not possess all the answers. They too are learning in this sophisticated world seeking to apply moral principles to an evolving culture whose specific moral dilemmas could never have been imagined by the authors of the Scriptures. The leader will be characterised by that recovery of moral awe and will lead by example and with humility urging upon us the four principles of knowing that:
1. all our actions spring out of and shape our character
2. all our actions have consequences, individually and socially
3. all our actions will be judged by future generations
4. and we are all responsible to whatever or whoever is the source of our
moral intuition
Of course, the Christian moral leader will be particularly conscious that the source of the moral intuition lies with "God who spoke in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days has spoken to us by a Son" who is "full of grace and truth (Hebrews 1 and John 1). The Christian moral leader will keep Jesus ever before them, mindful that having claimed "all authority in heaven and on earth" he sent his followers off into the world to make others learners of Christ and "to teach them to obey everything that I have commanded you". The teachings are uniquely collected and expanded in the pages of the New Testament, the fuller meaning of which can only understood by reference to the images and insights of the Old Testament.
These testaments together form Scriptures which from the earliest period of the Christian movement were deemed "inspired by God and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work" (2 Timothy 3: 16,17). There is no doubting here that the Bible is given for moral leadership. How we read and interpret the Bible is for a series of lecture on hermeneutics! But just as the recovery of moral awe has a humbling effect on decision-makers, so the placing of oneself beneath the authority of Jesus through engaging submissively with the Scriptures does its own unique work in our lives as we seek to apply the law of God in a manner that is both gracious and truthful.
Pannenberg argues that our personal spirit, that which is truly and essentially oneself, cannot bow before anything except a moral personality and quotes Wilhelm Hermann saying:
"Consequently the revelation of God to which we submit can be nothing else than the moral personality in which Jesus confronts us." (Ethics 1.58).
When it comes to expressing his mind fully and articulating his own moral character, God goes further than the prescriptions of the law of Moses. Ultimately, he gives us himself. When we ask to be shown the Truth, he answers by giving us not a set of abstract propositions but a true person, "full of grace and truth". "The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ (John 1:17). One of the most poignant ironies in the Gospel of John is Pilate the political leader faced with the moral dilemma of what he should do with Jesus asks him, "What is truth?" And the answer is staring him in the face! The question of Pilate was prompted by the assertion of Jesus that "Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." I believe that standing with our society on the common ground of moral awe we who follow Jesus must find new ways of enabling others who are open to searching for the truth to listen to the voice of Jesus. As a church in a pluralistic culture we are more comfortable in our public discourse talking about God. Yet we must find new ways of listening to the unique and authoritative voice of Jesus without rubbishing other faith-communities and pandering to the racism endemic in our society.
* Cleansing of Temple = Statement against Racism
Although we can engage in a public discourse on moral leadership and find common ground with people of other faiths and no faith by, for example, recovering that moral awe, the Christian takes a stand that says ultimately you cannot separate ethics from metaphysics, morality from spirituality if you want to make sense of the world. Again, I am with Iris Murdoch, "I certainly want to suggest that the spiritual pilgrimage (transformation- renewal - salvation) is the centre and essence of morality, upon whose success and well-being the health of other kinds of moral reaction and thinking is likely to depend". (p 368)
But how do we exercise that moral leadership in a fragmentary yet globalised world? Following the lead of Alisdair McIntyre, the Chief Rabbi, Professor Robin Gill and Paul Vallely and with a nod even in the direction of Bishops Richard Holloway and Jack Spong but without losing my evangelical credentials (!), I want to argue in conclusion for a rediscovery of a biblical model of community.
The term "moral leader" begs several questions. One of them may have you asking why I've taken nearly four lectures before addressing it! What do you mean by "leader"? I once asked a leading management consultant for her definition of leadership. Her immediate reaction was "followership". However much you may designate someone a leader if they do not have a following "they ain't no leader"! The very notion of leadership presupposes a group of followers. The idea of moral leadership presupposes a community that is bound together by certain values. Therefore, there can be no serious study of moral leadership without addressing the issue of community. Leadership and community are two sides of the one coin.
Interestingly, I have just interrupted the preparation of these lectures by responding to an invitation from the Editor of the Liverpool Echo. He wants 900 words by 9am tomorrow on the aftermath of the American Terrorist Attack to calm the fears of their readership.
I had a similar call four months ago when James Bulger's killers were released and 45,000 rang the Echo to say "don't let them out". Without being too self-important here's an example of moral leadership. As a leader not just within the church but in the community of Merseyside I have a responsibility to rehearse the common values that bind us together and help shape our future.
* No - asylum interviews - Victim and Perpetrator
For the Christian the model of community is primarily located in God's three persons in one community. The Gospel of John pulls back the curtain on this picture with a description of the three persons of the Trinity giving glory to one another. The Father gives glory to the Son, the Son to the Father, the Spirit to the Son. By the same token the Son receives glory from the Father, the Father from the Son, the Son from the Spirit. Here is a community of mutuality caught up in a reciprocity of giving and receiving. Significantly no one gives glory to the Spirit. The door of the community is left ajar to welcome in new people. It is open for the church to join as she comes into the circle bringing glory to the Spirit and to the Son and to the Father. Thus the community of God is not an exclusively mutual and excluding company but including and inclusive for ever widening the circle to embrace the church and the world.
This is the community that Jesus inaugurated with his first followers and which he both presided over and served as leader. The locus classicus is the episode of foot-washing in John 13 where Jesus reveals the nature of his own leadership. This is the only time he ever calls himself "Lord, you call me teacher and Lord and you are right for that is what I am". He reveals his lordship verbally while by his actions and on his hands and knees shows himself as a servant, doing the job that no self-respecting man could do, washing the dirt from the feet of his followers. Here is the deacon God, the servant Lord. Jesus, the same, yesterday, today and forever in the role of a servant. This is his character. The character of the Moral Leader. It is not a phase that he goes through but it belongs to his nature. This servant Lord will carry on serving his people when he returns (Luke 12:37) A servant at the second coming as well as the first.
The Servant Lord at the centre of Heaven is seen in the Book of Revelation as the Lamb upon the Throne - the Lamb the symbol of the Servant Lord, innocent having endured suffering; the throne the symbol of Lordship, presiding over the community of the redeemed. And who is it that takes to himself the ministry of wiping away the tears from our eyes? The Servant Lord. God himself.
This is the character of God revealed in Jesus kneeling before his followers, picturing a radically different model of leadership. Cool and calculating he poses the question "Do you know what I have done to you?" He then gives them the example that they should wash one another's feet. Note that he does not command them to wash the feet of others. He calls them to mutual service, to mutual ministry, to ministering to one another. That is very different. And the example he gives includes not only the episode of him washing their feet in John 13 but also the episode of him having his own feet washed by the woman in John 12. When they try to dismiss her he is firm and stern with them. "Let her alone!" The washer and the washed. The Servant Lord. Mutual ministry. Giving and Receiving. This is how true community is born. The mutuality expressed between the persons of the Trinity now mirrored in the community to which Jesus gives birth on earth. One of the last great questions of John's Gospel is set to connect Peter, the founder of the Church, with the Eternal Logos. Emphatically he is asked "Do you love me?" and emphatically he protests "You know that I love you". The lover loved. Mutuality between Heaven and Earth. Each loving and loved. Then assured of his love and connected to the world through Peter's love Jesus reaches out to the church and to the world beyond "Feed my sheep". What with? The sacrament of love, food of bread and wine. "Feed on him in your heart by faith and thanksgiving".
So the world is brought into communion with God who so loved the world that he gave his only Son. This giving inspires giving, grace upon grace. Mutual giving. Mutual receiving. Heaven and Earth in one community who is God "in whom we all live and move and have being". The will of God ever widening, embracing and including fulfilling "the plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth" (Ephesians 1:10).
This is the inclusive community, the Kingdom of God. All community is to be measured by this community. It is within this community that Jesus serves as leader, the Servant Lord.
Community is therefore the context the only context for the moral leader. As Yoder and Hauerwas remind us, the moral issue is not what are we to do but rather who are we to be? Clearly, you cannot rigidly divide action from being nor being from action. Nevertheless it is the moral quality of the community in which the leaders serve that authenticates their leadership. The Scriptures establish an inextricable link between being, doing and speaking. And yet the leaders, spiritual and moral, by virtue of their calling may need to speak uncomfortably, even prophetically, to their own community and risk ostracism, exclusion and even death. The moral authority of the leader depends on the moral quality of the community they serve (Church!).
In Luke 4 when Jesus expounds the Nazareth Manifesto of Isaiah and declares that God delights in those beyond the boundaries of their own community synagogue praise turns to synagogue rage and they try to throw him off the cliff. Exclusion versus inclusion. Time and again Jesus stands over and against his own community for being exclusive.
This is an example of Jesus both under authority and exercising authority. Commissioned and commissioning. Commanded and commanding. In the Gospels there are nine authorities explicitly ascribed to him - to judge, to forgive, to heal, to give life, to cast out demons, to lay down his life, to take up his life, to teach and to make disciples.
"All authority in Heaven and over the Earth has been given to me .." He is both under an authority that has been given to him and exercising that authority over others.
This language of authority and command which Barth (and Banner) trade in enthusiastically causes problems to others such as the Bishop of Oxford and especially to Bishop Richard Holloway and Jack Spong. "The model of commander-commanded can encourage immaturity, even infantilism". Although Richard Harris recognises the place of this metaphor in Christian theology and ethics he believes "it cannot be used today in such a stark, unqualified manner as do Barth and Banner without at the least arousing moral questioning and more probably, moral protest". (Crucible article op.cit.)
Surely the qualification is the cross. Here the commanded-commander is culled. This is the destiny of the moral leader. A disturbing thought for all those who aspire to such leadership.
The values of the community of the Kingdom of God are the two immediate commands - Love God and Love your neighbour as yourself. But as Jesus found in Nazareth and on Calvary these commands are not as universally popular as one might imagine especially when love of neighbour embraces that beyond the perceived boundaries of the group and loving your enemy! Everybody loves Jesus until he shows us he loves that we hate! Moral leadership involves courageously challenging such prejudice.
The question will be asked. Are there any limits to this inclusiveness? Is there no one in front of where we draw the line? The example of Jesus in the Gospels is that he did draw the line but uncomfortably for those of us who are professionally religious it was in front of the toes of the spiritual and moral leaders! "Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees".
He drew the line to embrace the prostitutes, the treacherous tax-collectors, the thieving shepherds, the lousy lepers, the poor, the blind, the lame, the least, the last and the lost.
Here was a new ethic to disturb the status quo. He was uncompromising about money, status, sex, love, forgiveness, judgement and extravagantly generous in his compassion to those who knew they had messed up their lives. To those who dissembled in hypocrisy he issued nothing but dire warnings. But for them and all the world did he die pleading forgiveness of the good Father which he continues to plead as our advocate in Heaven.
I am very conscious that in the course of these four lectures I have not touched on the range of contemporary issues. This has been deliberate. Firstly, I was conscious that the media might easily have pounced on these and distorted the series. Secondly; I - for my own sake as well as yours - wanted to set out again the principles of engagement between the Christian faith and the world. I am an evangelical Anglican which means that I am
self-consciously a member of a national church who takes as authorative in matters of faith and conduct the Scriptures of the Old and the New Testaments. I read these daily and especially the Gospels so as to hold before me both as inspiration and example the One from Nazareth "full of grace and truth". In his image I hope to be restored day by day so that I might be neither truthless in grace nor graceless in truth. The immersion in Scripture is not simply to read off verses as proof-texts but to be saturated by the Word of God that we have a new mind and different attitude "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus" (Phil 2:5). Moral leadership, modelled on Jesus, should exhibit the twin virtues of grace and truth.
I was very struck recently by an interview with Will Self in Third Way. On the strength of it I bought several of Will Self books for my summer holiday. I have to confess to not making it beyond several of his short stories in "Tough, tough toys for tough, tough boys" and being disturbed by the darkness of the tales. However, in conversation with Steve Turner he rejects moral relativism in characteristically colourful language. "It's a lot of balls to be taken in by this short-term-moral relativist perspective and to think that it solves anything. It does not solve ultimate questions of right and wrong. It evades the question of how to live the good life". Although Self finds the idea of "an incarnate God very difficult" he confesses to being very open to "the idea that there is some form of power external to the phenemological world". I'm tempted to plagiarise St. Paul at the Areopagus. "What you identify as 'power eternal' this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is the Lord of heaven and earth ... has made all nations to inhabit the whole earth .. so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him - though he is not far from each one of us - and has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged with justice by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead" (Acts 17).
Although many baulk at the idea of a God of judgement, it lies at the base of the question that is frequently put to Christians as they seek to engage the world with their faith. "Well, if there is a God why doesn't he do something about the state of the world?" What is being invoked is a discerning God who will draw a line between the good and the bad, preserve the good and ditch all those who have added to the sum of human misery. Laying aside the important corollary "who do you think would be left?" Which of itself points up our universal need of a just and merciful Saviour, the question is a profoundly moral one. It assumes some sort of absolute ethic by which we are justly judged. Which is exactly where St. Paul takes the Athenians in his dialogue at the Areopagus. "God has fixed a day on which all will be judged with justice by a man who he has appointed". This man is Jesus. He is the moral of the
story - full of grace and truth and the model of all moral leadership.
What is inescapable is that the Scriptures were to him formative both in his self-understanding and in his moral attitudes.
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfil" (Matthew 5). Anyone married to the servant leadership of Jesus has to embrace the Scriptures for without them Jesus Christ lacks both definition and moral meaning.
These Scriptures were written in a time that could not conceive of the possibilities of the contemporary world. Yet they have baked into them moral principles that feed all generations.
Here are three biblical texts with moral tones:
Psalm 139:13-15 "For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth" speaks not just of the sanctity of life but of the fearful and wonderful process of divine making. In the face of which when faced with such moral choices as abortion or cloning we must be both humble and exceedingly cautious.
Colossians I tells us that in Christ "all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible" and that "all things have been created through him and for him" thus emphasising John's testimony "without him not one thing came into being". Thus as we face fundamental questions about the future of the planet in personal choice and future policy we must be both humble and exceedingly cautious for to exploit recklessly the planet and to plunder Earth with the greedy self-indulgence of prize-winners in the TV Quiz Show "Supermarket Sweep", cramming our trolleys with all that we can topple from the shelves, it is not just a crime again humanity but a blasphemy for it is to undo the gracious acts of God in creation.
In his letter to Christians at Corinth Paul expounds the beauty of the human body as "a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body". This is the foundation of sexual ethics. I have no space here (but would make available the first part of a sermon I preached at Oxford University) to develop the link between the Resurrection of the body and sexual ethics but suffice it to say that the bodily Resurrection is an affirmation of the body, that matter matters to God and that the sensual and sexual expression of the body is a means of glorifying God as 1 Corinthians makes it clear. It doesn't mean anything goes. Rather, it supports that an awareness of your body as the Temple of God's spirit is to be the principle that guides all sexual behaviour. It renders us humble, cautious and joyful.
Although these three Scriptural texts are isolated they are consonant with other biblical passages. Together they orchestrate a symphony, as with the prophetic demands for justice.
From the prophecies of Amos to the Nazareth Manifesto God demands (no, that is not too strong a word) justice for the poor, asylum for the stranger, freedom for the oppressed. This will take courage to say "no" to those in power who might want to back-pedal on our duty to love our neighbour as ourselves.
Before these divine principles we are to order our lives with humility and caution. It will not always be easy to discern the right moral path. We live in a complex world, so much so that the notion of simplicity, I fear, verges on the heretical! The incarnation was in immersing of God himself into the complexity of the world.
In conclusion, it is salutary to observe that today's moral leaders are found in difficult places. The moral theologians of the twenty-first century are the script writers of soap operas where today's moral dilemmas are acted out then discussed throughout the land. The moral prophets are song writers and singers such as Sting campaigning against the deforestation of the planet and Bono elevating Jubilee from a church based organisation into a popular mass movement. If leadership is defined by followership then they are the leaders!
If Bishops and politicians thought that we were the moral leaders of today we lack the following that is the very definition of leadership. The recovery of followership is the moral leaders most urgent task.
Mission is therefore the concern of the moral leader. Which is why in the questions that have followed these lectures the answers have led often to consideration of the Church's mission "Go", says Jesus "Make others learners of Christ ... Teach all that I have commanded". Mission and ethics belong together.
And as a postscript that should wake us all up I quote from a song by Bono:
Jesus, Jesus help me
I'm alone in this world
and a fucked up world it is too
tell me, tell me the story
and one about eternity
and the way it's all gonna be
WAKE UP WAKE UP DEAD MAN
WAKE UP WAKE UP DEAD MAN
Jesus, I'm waiting here boss
I know you're looking out for us
but maybe your hands aren't free
your Father, He made the world in seven
He's in charge of heaven
will you put in a good word for me
WAKE UP WAKE UP DEAD MAN
WAKE UP WAKE UP DEAD MAN
It reminds me of that early Christian hymn sung as the baptised rose out of the waters "Awake O Sleeper and arise from the dead and Christ shall give you light". The extent to which that light continues to shine in the darkness will depend on the moral quality of the Christian community and its fertility to give birth to a new generation of moral leaders.