Imagine that you are the cook for a large group of people. They live in the middle of a desert and are very hungry. You are sorry for them and do your best to feed them. It involves spending most of the day gathering the small plants and roots that grow in the rocks, and the nights digging for water in which to soak them so they are soft enough to eat. There are just enough stringy weeds, but only just. You do your best, but it is still not what they need, let alone what they want. So relations are strained. You have come to resent their demands as much as they resent your failure to satisfy them. One night a mysterious stranger appears and puts in your hand a cardboard box full of cheese and pickle sandwiches. You are so famished you eat them all, and then the box. He comes the next night, and you wolf the lot. Now you can have sandwiches, you don’t want roots and plants, and you eat the box only to hide the evidence. And so you no longer find food for other people with the same zest; you are not hungry like they are. Some time later, now you are better fed, you spare a glance for the nocturnal stranger. He has changed recently: more haggard about the eyes, thin about the wrists. This will not do! You cannot have him starving to death, worn out with fetching food; no more sandwiches if he dies. You offer him a sandwich: ‘Why don’t you have one?’ He looks at you and answers, ‘Because they are for you.’ And then you understand. It is the same with our lack of love. We cannot love as we should, as others need. We do not love ourselves even. But this is exactly where we are made in the image and likeness of God, in our ability to relate to other persons; or, more precisely, in our inability not to interact. The blessing has become a curse, as our inner loss spreads. We do not have enough for ourselves, still less for others. But then, in the middle of the fallen world a man speaks words the like of which men and women were created to speak:
I am the bread of life. Anyone who comes to me will never be hungry; anyone who believes in me will never thirst … Your fathers ate the manna in the desert and they are dead; but this is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that you can eat it and not die. I am the living bread that has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world.
John 6:35, 50–51
Jesus offers you love, for you, and for you to pass on. He gives what was lacking, the real food we long for from God and from each other. He stands in the middle of the human race and hands out his bread to all who will take it. Thus we can talk of the raising of our nature; there is a relating ‘I’ among us who loves as we should love. We can take his food, gorge on it, and then learn to imitate his sacrifice.
It is not simply a matter of example. Let us think a little about that sacrifice. The bread is not quite how we would like it; not in nice soft white slices. It is a rough and broken bread, ‘my flesh for the life of the world’. The agony of the Cross is not an obvious sign of the love of God. But Christ’s love is so full, and so different from ours, because it was taken even to the last resort: ‘Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing.’ We have to appreciate the depth of choice involved in the Passion of Jesus. At any point he could have answered his taunters and saved himself. At any point he could have summoned the power that stilled storms and gave sight to the blind. At any point, God could have intervened in tiny, invisible ways to prevent the situation becoming humanly inevitable.
He did not, for the same reason that he will not just punish us, or scrap the whole world and start again. Christ resisting his Cross would have been an act of self-defence, of aggression such as we do every day. He could have defended himself, with swords or thunderbolts, but at the expense of those around him. This is what makes the difference. His love consists of a total giving of himself, unmixed with anything else, any other interest, any other motive. It is the love which the Father and Son share in the Holy Spirit, the same love which overflowed in the creation of you and me and the whole world, and the same love we were meant to show to each other in him and to him in each other. But we say ‘no’ to God and to ourselves and to others in a thousand little ways each day. Christ fulfilled the will of God, gave to the Father a total ‘yes’ because at each stage he responded with the gift of love. At last, there was a part of creation which no longer held up God’s grace with resistance.
All we have to do is get in touch with Christ, and keep in touch. The Church exists simply as a way of doing this, so that Christ walks with each person the path of life. In some senses, it is the way of doing this. Catholics believe that in the Church, God gives us the love of Christ, and a community in which to share it. The theological term for this is ‘sacrament’. Before we think about sacraments, however, it is time to make concrete some of the doctrines we have looked at. We now have sufficient resources to make some sense of everyday life.
But they give solidity to the created world.
Ecclesiasticus 38:34
The aim of this chapter is to show how the doctrines we have been exploring can impact on the way we see everyday life. The Gospel is about Jesus Christ, the God who lives with us. Let us begin with the part of life which is perhaps the least likely candidate for finding God: the daily drudge of working (or, worse, not working) for our living.
The modern period has witnessed a large degree of confusion about the purpose and value of work. In the ancient world, things were much simpler. Greek culture, for example, thrived on the institution of slavery, which left a large leisured class able to enjoy the delights of politics, the theatre and warfare. Such a way of organizing society was not simply convenient, it actually reflected what were perceived as fundamental facts about human beings. It was not just the case that slaves were people who had fallen on hard times, or were the captives of vanquished enemies. People became slaves because they were that type of people, understood as almost a separate species. As Aristotle put it, ‘The natural slave is one qualified to be, and therefore is, the property of another or who is only so far a human being as to understand reason without himself possessing it’ (Politics, 1.5).
It is hardly necessary to trace the path of such thinking through history. Perhaps the clearest expression is in the eighteenth-century description of those who did no work at all as ‘people of quality’. Nor is it fair to blame the Greeks. Aristotle was cited only because he gives such a bald statement of what is so easily assumed. The same perceptions would have been found in ancient – Old Testament – Israel. Even in this economically very simple, agricultural society, wealth, and the consequent ability to have servants and be freed from daily drudge, was seen as a sign of righteousness and of blessing. Though the wicked may prosper for a short while, the psalmist assures us that this is done on credit, and that we shall soon see his widow and children begging in the streets. When Job is suddenly cast into utter destitution, the only explanation his comforters can find is that he must somehow have sinned without knowing it. It is but a step from saying that riches are a sign of God’s favour to saying that rich people are the people that God likes. Such thinking underlies the Pharisees’ statement about Jesus in St John’s Gospel that ‘as for this man, we do not even know where he comes from’. Which is simply a way of saying that he obviously does not come from the right place, the right people.
The market place
We have