‘The prevailing attitude…was one of heavy disagreement with a number of things which the [speaker] had not said’. (Ronald Knox)

After forty eight hours in which people have been outraged by what the Archbishop said, what they thought the Archbishop said, what they thought the Archbishop didn’t say, what they thought the Archbishop ought to have said, and any other random prejudices that could be whipped up by a devious press (they know who they are), it is a relief to have the Archbishop’s own observations on what he said and its context.

Delivered as the presidential address at the opening of General Synod, a video link to the first, ‘sharia’ part of the address is here. The full text of the speech is here, including the ‘sharia section’, but also, perhaps more importantly, touching on the suffering of Christians in Zimbabwe.

Incidentally perhaps some of the more zealous critics of Dr Williams will be mollified by his conclusion to the ‘sharia section’:

If we can attempt to speak for the liberties and consciences of others in this country as well as our own, we shall I believe be doing something we as a Church are called to do in Christ’s name, witnessing to his Lordship and not compromising it.

God’s strength to him, I say.

Mike Higton, of Exeter University, has really done a magnificent job of producing a summary of the Archbishop’s now notorious speech: actually, three summaries; brief, longer and detailed. I mentioned it as an update to my own gloss below, but this really is a masterful analysis of what the Archbishop said (and occasionally, what he didn’t say).

It really does do what it says on the tin. Thank you, Mike.

Consider these two questions. You don’t have to write an essay, but just think through what your reactions might be.

• What makes you happy?

• How do you best learn?

Read the Beatitudes through (either alone or as a group). As you read, mark the text with:

• !! for that which makes you think;
• those things you agree with, or approve of;
• those things you find difficult to believe or understand;
• ?? those things which require you to go a little bit further.

Can you answer these questions?

• What tense are the Beatitudes written in? (that is, are they saying something about the past, present or future?). What significance might these tenses have?
• Can you see any pattern to the layout of the Beatitudes? (that is, what structure do the sayings have, is there a flow to the ideas they express?)
• Are any words or ideas left undefined? Is there ambiguity? (that is, can a sentence mean more than one thing?)
• Read again how St Matthew tops and tails the Sermon on the Mount (Mat 5:1-2; Mat 7:28-29). What does this add to your understanding of the Beatitudes?
• Sum up the Beatitudes in one sentence.

What do you think of these two statements?

• The Beatitudes are not laws— rather they are statements of grace. They overflow with affirmation, accepting love and reassurance.
• The Beatitudes draw for us a very strange picture of the man who is blessed: he is poor and unimpressive, hungry and in mourning, trodden on, yet able to make peace. [Simon Tugwell : Reflections on the Beatitudes (1980)]

Noirin Ni Riain and the Monks of Glenstal Abbey : The Beatitudes (1989); Kevin Healy OSB

Nóirín Ní Riain is an Irish singer, theologian and musicologist. Her doctorate in the theology of listening coined a new word ‘theosony’, a Greek/Latin neologism which means ‘God-sounding’. The composer, a Benedictine monk, has added a chorus: “Amen. Truly I say unto you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). What do Jesus’s words to the penitent thief add to the Beatitudes? Are they deepened? Changed? Spoilt? Improved?

Each Sunday in Lent the preachers at the main Sunday service of the Holy Eucharist at St Stephen’s Church, Canterbury will be leading our thoughts through the beginning of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, through the verses known as “the Beatitudes” (Matthew 5:1-10). After each sermon I will post a series of questions and reflections for anyone who wishes to take the ideas in the sermon series, and the original Sermon on the Mount (!), further. The posts will provide suggestions for further thought, study or prayer. Some people may wish to use them in privacy. Others may wish to gather together in groups, over bible study or coffee, with friends or neighbours, to share your ideas and questions.¹)

• Session 1 / 10 February (Lent 1) Teaching from the Mountain — Matthew 5:1-2
• Session 2 / 17 February (Lent 2) The Poor and the Mournful — Matthew 5:3-4
• Session 3 / 24 February (Lent 3) The Meek, the Hungry, and the Thirsty — Matthew 5:5-6
• Session 4 / 2 March (Mothering Sunday) Mercy and Purity — Matthew 5:7-8
• Session 5 / 9 March (Lent 5) Peace and Persecution — Matthew 5:9-10

This first post is a general introduction to the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes.The Beatitudes are the opening section of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Matthew’s Gospel. They are a collection of eight sayings, each beginning with “Happy (or blessed) are the…” —hence their name, for beatitudo is the Latin for ‘happiness’. However, we should all remember that the gospels were not originally written in Latin but in Greek, and the word that St Matthew used was makarios, which can mean happy, but also means much more. A rough approximation would be “possessing an inward contentedness and joy that is not affected by the physical circumstances”.

Furthermore, we should not think that the Sermon on the Mount is the transcript of a single sermon preached on a single occasion by Jesus: rather it is a compilation of some of his teaching (and certainly not all of it) collected and arranged by Matthew and placed by him at the beginning of his account of Jesus’s ministry in Galilee. The Sermon on the Mount frames Jesus’s ministry and gives us what the scholars call a “hermeneutic lens”; that is, it gives us a means of interpreting and understanding the whole of Jesus’s teaching and actions. If you want to understand Jesus’s ministry, Matthew says, then read the Sermon on the Mount; if you want to understand the Sermon on the Mount, then look at Jesus.

This is an important point. Look at the way Matthew begins and ends the Sermon.

Matthew 5:1-2: “When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them… ”.

Matthew 7:28-29: “Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.”

Matthew frames the whole Sermon by showing that Jesus is acting in the role of Rabbi, a scribe, a man learned in Scripture and the Law. Jesus assumes the traditional position of the teacher at the beginning of the Sermon: he teaches whilst sitting (in Jesus’s day, as in our own, the person who remains sitting in a social gathering, is the person with the greater authority— the Queen doesn’t stand up for anyone!). Some scholars have seen a connection between the structure of the Sermon on the Mount and the giving of the law by Moses. Just as the Law of the Old Testament, the Torah, was given to Israel in five books (Genesis, Exodus etc), the Sermon on the Mount can be divided into five sections, or discourses. In this way, the hill in Galilee becomes a new Sinai, and Jesus the new Moses, the Lawgiver. Certainly there is another Old Testament connection: Matthew has arranged the Beatitudes to reflect the promises made by God in Isaiah 61. Jesus is shown as the promised Messiah, the fulfilment of all God’s promises to his people.

If the posture Jesus used in teaching is familiar, the reaction to his teaching is anything but. The crowds (not just the disciples, the in-crowd, but all the curious of Galilee who came to see what the rabbi had to say) were astonished at the authority with which he taught. It is not that what he had to say was anything desperately novel or unusual: scholars can find similar ideas in the teaching of other rabbis of the period. It is the way in which he taught. The crowds recognised the absolute identity between who Jesus was and what he taught. There was no difference between what he said and what he did. There is an authenticity to Jesus, teaching and man, and this surprises the crowd.

In other words, if you want to understand the Beatitudes then look at Jesus. If you want to understand Jesus then look at the Beatitudes. The whole of Jesus’s life and teaching was lived and spoken according to the kingdom values of the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes are an expression of what it means to be a child of God the Father, and Jesus was the particular and complete example.

1. Some of this material, is taken from Robert Warren and Sue Mayfield, Life Attitudes: A 5 Session course on the Beatitudes for Lent, (Church House Publishing, 2004 [↩]

… then how about this for a description of the last 48 hours:

An archbishop once gave an oration
On religion and law in our nation;
When we heard what he said
We all stoned him down dead,
To protect our great civilisation.

From the completely spot-on Ben Myers. (Thank you, Ben, for writing something that is both funny and acute).

I’ve often thought that the difference between reading the text of one of Dr William’s speeches, and hearing him delivering it, is like the difference between reading a music score and hearing the Berlin Philharmonic playing the piece: only the very gifted can “hear” the music from the score, but even the most flannel-eared can understand the beauty of the performance.

So it is all to the good that BBC Parliament are streaming a video recording of the delivery of the notorious speech. You can watch it here.  (Thanks to Matt Wardman of the Wardman Wire for the link). One poignant moment in the lecture as delivered is the aside about the acoustics of the hall: if people aren’t able to hear the Archbishop’s speech, that’s not a problem, as so many people already know what he’s going to say, anyway.

It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the records department, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate….

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared.

The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even – so it was occasionally rumoured – in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.

George Orwell, 1984, (1949)

‘But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market-places and calling to one another,
“We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.”
For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He has a demon”; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!” Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.’

Dear comrades,

3MinuteTheology has been a pleasant sidewater, if not backwater, in the flow of the Anglican world. Until today:

If this is you, visiting from Thinking Anglicans, or Cartoon Church, welcome. And let me know what you’re thinking.

Justin

There has been a lot of snittiness about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech delivered on 7 February about the relationship between civil and religious law in England. I don’t mean the “beardy idiot surrendering our inalienable Anglo-Saxon freedoms to the mad mullahs” sort of snittiness (although there certainly was a lot of that about). No, I mean the “I can’t understand a word he’s saying” sort of sneering. Examples here, here and here.

Even Riazat Butt, the religious affairs correspondent of The Guardian leapt in:

I’ve read the speech and re-read it. I don’t understand a word of it and unfortunately for us hacks he doesn’t replicate his BBC words in the bloody text. If anyone can tell me what he’s saying I’ll buy them a beer.

This really is shameful. Continue Reading »