ANOTHER VOICE
Why have the Gentiles raged, and the people devised vain things?
CHARLES MOORE
n preparation for my first Christmas as a Roman Catholic, I duly attended Mass two Sundays ago and heard the priest explain in his homily that John the Baptist taught that we should give a larger proportion of our Gross Domestic Product to the Third World and was opposed to the huge salary increase for the Chief Executive of British Gas. As most people who pay the top rate of income tax will understand, I felt so cross that I was unable to concentrate for the rest of the service.
The following day, I drove to Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk. Oxburgh belongs to the National Trust, and I went there at the Trust's request to gather material for a short contribution to a publication which will appear to celebrate the Trust's cente- nary in 1995. The subject was the altarpiece in the chapel of the Bedingfeld family who built, owned and still occupy Oxburgh. The Bedingfe]ds were recusants and are still Catholic. They bought the altarpiece in the 1860s. It is a triptych (whose two wings are away in Cambridge being restored) made in Antwerp in the early 16th century, and it is remarkable for its vigorous detail. The scene of the accusations against Christ is particularly striking. Pharisees hold up scrolls of denunciation. All of them are dressed in the manner of 1520 and one of - them is wearing thick spectacles. This touch does more than anything else to bring the moment alive.
Why rage against anachronism at one moment, then, and be enchanted by it the next? Is it more ridiculous to suppose that John the Baptist doesn't want Mr Cedric Brown to get £475,000 a year than to depict a Pharisee as wearing spectacles?
I fear not. It is perhaps reasonable to sympathise with Mr Brown for being sin-
gled out in the pulpit as a bad example to us all; it may tend to diminish the awe in which we hold John the Baptist to imagine him as one of those whingey shareholders who complain about bosses' greed at the annual general meeting; one is wary of
priests who make such political points When preaching, since it leads one to sus- pect that it is the politics and not the reli- gion of the thing which animates them. But for all that, I think the priest had a point.
We know how, in the late 20th century, liberal churchmen have struggled to show
that Jesus is in favour of sexual pleasure. Because he is the God of love it is some- how sloppily assumed that he welcomes
homosexual unions, remarriage after divorce, 'responsible' pre-marital sex, doing it outside the bedroom (according to the Bishop of Chester), condoms (used caring- ly) and so on. This flies in the face of more than 90 per cent of Scripture and tradition whose message, broadly, is that Jesus is very little interested in any sexual relations but that, unless they are strictly necessary, he is against them.
But this twisting to suit the preoccupa- tions of the age in relation to sex is far less all-pervasive and skilful than that which is used to justify wealth. There is far more in Christianity about giving away all that you have, laying not up for yourself treasure on earth and love of money being the root of all evil than there is about the dos and don'ts of the bedroom, yet almost all of us do not scruple to earn as much as we can and own as much as we can. In fact, we think it is not merely a thing indifferent, but positively morally right to do so. Any- thing else, we say, would be irresponsible, particularly if we have dependents. Thatcherites scour the Gospels (I have done it myself) to show how Our Lord favoured wealth creation. The parable of the talents comes in useful here, and I have even known the parable of the sower pressed into service. It is pointed out that the Good Samaritan would not have been able to help the man who fell among thieves if he hadn't had a few bob. These are not bad arguments exactly, but they cannot be made to bear much weight. To labour to prove that John the Baptist was in favour of Mr Cedric Brown's pay rise is even harder than to show that he was against it. The Baptist says, 'He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none.' He does not say, `. . . let him award himself two more coats to bring him into line with comparable executives'.
The priest I heard obviously thought that some form of socialism was divinely pre- scribed. For others, the story of John the Baptist may prompt more complicated thoughts. John says that bit about the two coats, but in the context of saying much more extraordinary things — that he is the voice of one crying in the wilderness, that every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill brought low, that the axe will be laid unto the root of the tree, that one is coming the latchet of whose shoes he is not worthy to unloose, and that all flesh shall see the salvation of God. He is talking in a language whose tone is profoundly stir- ring, but whose content, to the unpreju- diced general reader, is pretty well incom- prehensible. The first thing, rather than trying to derive some 'message', is surely to try to understand something of that lan- guage.
Reading the Bible, I sometimes feel that I am half-hearing and much less than half understanding an epic debate among bril- liant Jews. Although none of them has run my religion for 1900 years, they formed it, providing God himself from their number. This is such a strange, moving thought, and it would make one feel excluded were it not for that Jewish God's assurance that the salvation offered is offered for all. Our extreme distance from that time and place and people may help to answer the ques- tion which appears at the beginning of the first Mass of Christmas in the old Roman Missal: 'Why have the Gentiles raged, and the people devised vain things?' Because we can only have the dimmest sense of what is meant by the Incarnation, and so we fall to quarrelling about Mr Cedric Brown.
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