You will probably not need reminding that it was a year ago this month that the first lockdown began. It has been interesting to reflect on all that has happened since then. Living as I do, here, in the very heart of the city of London, my abiding memory of that initial period of closure is that, virtually overnight, Fleet Street suddenly and dramatically fell silent.
London is a city that, in normal times, never sleeps. Prior to the pandemic, I was accustomed to seeing people around here – all day and all night. There was a busy night-time economy that was always active. There were those who travelled to and from jobs that took place during the most anti-social of hours: those who were employed to clean the offices and surrounding buildings very late at night, or long before dawn, often doing miserable work for minimal pay, in grim working conditions, because they had no other choice.
You will probably not need reminding that it was a year ago this month that the first lockdown began. It has been interesting to reflect on all that has happened since then. Living as I do, here, in the very heart of the city of London, my abiding memory of that initial period of closure is that, virtually overnight, Fleet Street suddenly and dramatically fell silent.
London is a city that, in normal times, never sleeps. Prior to the pandemic, I was accustomed to seeing people around here – all day and all night. There was a busy night-time economy that was always active. There were those who travelled to and from jobs that took place during the most anti-social of hours: those who were employed to clean the offices and surrounding buildings very late at night, or long before dawn, often doing miserable work for minimal pay, in grim working conditions, because they had no other choice.
And at the other end of the social and financial spectrum, there were those wealthy city workers, whose jobs were all consuming – consuming of their lives, their energy, and of their waking hours: those whom I could see chained to their desks far into the night, even throughout the weekends. Theirs was a different kind of slavery.
Our Old Testament lesson this morning recounts the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses. As some of you will have heard me observe before, our passage includes a line of crucial importance, that is often completely overlooked when the Commandments are mentioned: namely, the introductory words in which God says:
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
The Ten Commandments were delivered to a people who were newly released from slavery: they are a charter for a freed people, to help to keep them from falling into slavery again. Because as Almighty God knows far better than the rest of us, there are very many different kinds of slavery, and some of the most powerful and most insidious are precisely the ones that it is difficult for us to recognise. Read the Ten Commandments in that light, and you begin to discover their abiding significance, and their timeless relevance.
And bearing in mind my observations about pre-pandemic life in central London, the fourth of those commandments makes for particularly interesting reading: ‘Six days you shall labour and do all your work; but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God.’ Do not become a slave to work. We need an appropriately ‘boundaried’ time of rest and refreshment in order to be able to function properly as human beings – for the welfare of both our bodies and our souls.
Now, you might wonder why on earth I am talking about this particular subject at the end of a twelve month period during which many people have found themselves struggling to deal with more leisure time than they have known what to do with. My answer is twofold: firstly, note the accompanying Biblical wisdom that we cannot flourish in a life that is characterised by continuous leisure either – after all, even Adam in the Garden of Eden before the Fall was given work to do: to till the garden and keep it. Because without a purpose and focus of some kind, human beings rot. We are not designed for a life of indolence, attractive though the prospect might appear during those times when we really do feel stressed-out and overworked.
But more specifically, with our schools due to re-open tomorrow here in England, we are now (God willing) poised to embark upon the first step of the lifting of restrictions, and the journey back towards some kind of normality. Which makes it a very good time to pause to reflect on what kind of normality we wish to return to. Because we can very easily fall into the trap of becoming enslaved – or of colluding with systems that continue to enslave others.
The idea of Sabbath rest seems rather quaint and old fashioned in our restless, 24/7 world. But even back in those days when it was a reality, for many Christians it was anything but a source of joy and delight. My mother used to recount stories of dismal, dreary and boring Sundays spent at her grandmother’s house (a woman who was Victorian, in every sense of the world), which were characterised by sheer misery. Church attendance and enforced good behaviour during a time of complete inactivity were torture for any young energetic child.
Isn’t it sad that such an amazing gift – the gift of Sabbath rest – a gift that is actually explicitly ordained by God, to safeguard and preserve the enjoyment and fulfilment of human beings, could have become so confined by strictures of pious legalism, and corrupted into the very embodiment of joylessness.
Indeed, the sad thing is that Christians of all traditions have a lamentable history of taking something wise, and good, and of God, and turning it into something harsh and moralising. I would not presume to comment on the practices of any denomination other than my own, but the American theologian Stanley Hauerwas has lamented one particular aspect of his own Methodist tradition. The Methodism in which he grew up, recognised and engaged with the grave social consequences of alcohol abuse – quite rightly. And yet, in his view, its opposition to alcohol became ‘so strident and moralistic’ (his words) that it extended to the rejection of wine in the Eucharist in favour of grape juice. In his view, this turned ‘an important social issue into a personal code of conduct that lost its social significance.’ And even the holiest of us can fall into that trap.
I can remember hearing a Jewish rabbi say that one of the things for which we shall ultimately be answerable before God, is: which of God’s good gifts we are guilty of having failed to enjoy and appreciate to the full in this life – which strikes me as a far healthier (and actually holier) approach!
This morning’s Gospel is one of the most startling passages in the whole of the New Testament for its sheer violence – as we see Jesus exploding into the Temple, overturning the tables of the money changers and driving them out with a whip of cords. That is about as far away from the image of ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ as it is possible to get. It is utterly shocking. And for this to take place in the Temple, the dwelling place of God! Unthinkable! But sometimes it really does take an incident that dramatic and decisive to cut through our conventional ways of doing things; to challenge our assumptions; to reveal our enslavement; to shine a light on the ways in which we have allowed that which was originally good, and holy, and of God, to become corrupted and overshadowed by something much darker.
In the same way, the pandemic that exploded into our world a year ago has been heart-breaking, but also very exposing. It has exposed divisions within society, particularly between those who have and those who have not – divisions that were of course already there, but were so easily forgotten or remained hidden from view.
It has revealed to some of us how far the treadmill of work, and ceaseless activity, and busyness, was previously keeping us in chains. And I hope that it has also given those of us who are privileged enough to be able to exercise choices in the matter, to become aware of how our actions, and our decisions, and our collusion with some of the unjust structures of our society, can serve to keep others enslaved, albeit in ways we do not usually have to confront and face directly.
This Lent has been a very strange season to observe. After a year that for many people has been so devoid of enjoyment, it somehow hasn’t really felt right to speak of self-denying disciplines, let alone impose them (on ourselves or on others).
But I am not sure that that is what Lent is really for, in any case. Rather, we are called to spend some time in contemplation: which includes reflecting on what it is that keeps us and others enslaved, and to understand in the light of that, the true meaning of freedom – for us and for all God’s people. As Janet Morley once wrote:
We are called on not simply to give generously out of our abundance to those who happen to be less fortunate than ourselves, but to recognize that we too are diminished and wounded because the world is arranged as it is ; and that we also need actively to seek its transformation.
As we emerge into a new kind of future, let us hope and pray that it is a better kind of future – for all of God’s children, and for the whole human family, whoever and wherever they are.
Amen.
