Fourth Sunday of Lent

Numbers 21.4-9 Whoever looks at the serpent shall live

Ephesians 2.1-10 Christ raised us up with him and seated us with him in
the heavenly places

John 3.14-21 Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness

1. The scandal and dignity of man

2. Christ the truth of humanity
3. Economics and private man
4. Economics and public man
5. Economy and state against the family
6. Two societies
7. The humility of God

We are on the way to Easter, at which the Church celebrates the covenant
of God with man established by the resurrection. The Church, the
community brought into being by the resurrection, can suffer the passion,
and can do so in behalf of the nation. Lent is the way of the cross by which
the Church witnesses to this covenant for the nation. Our life together is a
gift which God gives, sustains and redeems for us in this covenant We can
give to one another, and give ourselves, in hope of our restoration and
redemption. The whole economy of human commerce is based on our
giving ourselves to one another: we may enter covenants, contract with
one another and start business initiatives which promote and support a
unified society. Redemption comes to each of us, and renewed life comes
to our society as a whole, from the God who has approached us and given
his name to us in Jesus Christ, not from the gods we construct for
ourselves.

1. The scandal and dignity of man in Christ

Whoever looks at the serpent shall live
The readings for the fourth Sunday of Lent tells us that Christ is lifted up
for us, and in Christ mankind is raised and redeemed. Our reading from
the Book of Numbers tells us about the years in which the people of Israel
are being led through the wilderness. They have found this discipleship
hard; their back-biting has grown into a plague of mutual recrimination.
The whole people has been bitten, so the plague is here visualised as
snake bite. The strange antidote for this case of snake-bite is to grasp the
snake itself. Moses erects the figure of a serpent, and anyone in trouble
has only to look up to the serpent to be restored. Restoration appears here
in the form of the snake from which we recoil. On the cross, Christ is a
repellent and deathly sight: as Isaiah puts it, ‘There was nothing in his
appearance that you would desire him.’ The death of Christ is an utterly
offensive and unpleasant event which all of us would wish to avoid. This
why the saviour appears here as this repellent ‘serpent’. How desperate
would we have to be to look for solutions in the cross and the death of
Christ? How desperate will our society have to be to see its redemption in
the Church? It would represent the defeat of so much twentieth century
aspiration to recognise Christ and his Church as our way out of our crises.

2. Christ is the truth of humanity

Christ is raised up for us to wonder at. He is God with man and man who is
with God. This vast image of humanity redeemed and in communion with
God is held up before us. When we look to him and pray we are saved.
Christ is the truth of our identity, and the question raised over all other
accounts of who we are. Will we stick with our own smaller and more
short-term identity? Or will we look up to Christ and receive what he
offers?

The Christian faith tells us that we are loved and known, and that we
needy and full of sin. It brings us the news that we are also forgiven. There
is no forgiveness, there is no cancellation debts, no fresh starts to be
found anywhere except through this cross and in this faith. In communion
with God which Christ has opened for us, we may be reconciled to our
fellow man, enter covenants that last and grow to the full stature of man
with God for, according to our reading from the Letter to the Ephesians,
God ‘raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places
in Christ Jesus.’

Christ has laboured on our behalf: he is the provider of mankind’s only free
lunch. We may provide for one another as we receive and distribute what
he has provided for us. God has acted generously to us, and invites and
enables us to be generous and active on one another’s behalf. From him
we may receive the abilities by which we can act and trade on our own
account, for we are ‘created in Christ Jesus for good works’, as Ephesians
puts it. We may discover that labour can be its own reward, for we may
take pride in those whom we have served and lift and present them to God
in thankfulness, and then we will no longer be alienated from the product
of our labour. God is the one who is able to tell the true worth of our labour
and our lives.

The Letter to the Ephesians tells us that man is intended for life with God,
and that this life is not yet entirely knowable to us. For man, the creature
of God is a mystery, whom we may know, but not know entirely. He is a
work in progress, and this means that he has a future that is not yet
known to us. And man is male and female. Ephesians tells us that, in
Christ, that the old pagan wall between man and woman is broken, so that
they do not live in separate and antagonistic spheres. Man and woman are
now in covenant, and may now love serve one another in freedom; the
difference between them is the source of their complementarity and the
basis of all our distinctions, and so of the individual identity of each of us.
The tells us that, as man is married to God in Christ, so humans are
intrinsically covenantal and ‘married’ creatures, and that we may
acknowledge and celebrate this by entering freely our own covenant with
one particular woman or man in marriage. Established by the love of God,
we may love our own wife or husband first, and then love our children, and
then love our friends and neighbours, and thus through these covenants
we are free to act in generosity without limit.
3. Economics and private man
The Christian faith is not offered in a vacuum, but in a world of competing
religions and worldviews. The long experience of the Church in offering the
gospel to many societies enables us to describe the worldview of our
contemporaries and the challenges faced by our society. This faith holds
out to us the largest and most developed account of man. In it man is able
to demand reasons for the way things are, and in the bible is positively
exhorted to demand reasons from God. The Christian faith offers us
reasons, and so enables us to reason together about these reasons. To ask
whether religion has any business in politics is to ask whether the long-
term should inform our discussions about the short-term. It is to ask
whether ideas, gathered over generations can help us wrestle with our
own problems. I have suggested that our own problems have come about
because we have not heard and wrestled with the ideas of our
predecessors about society and the economy. The only way we may
emerge out of the crisis that our short-termism has brought about is by
turning to the long term, and hearing again what previous generations of
British people, and amongst them Christians, have learned. We need their
virtues in order to restore the society which can sustain an ordered
economy.

We need a little history of economics. It is essential to the claim of

neoclassical economics that economics is timelessly true, as though it had
dropped down from the heavens. It does not wish to acknowledge that it
has a history. Nonetheless, what we presently know as ‘economics’ is part
of a greater economic tradition, not the whole. Economics has devolved
out of the disciplines of politics and of ethics, which themselves belong to
the Humanities, in which all accounts of human being as a social, political
and reasoning creature are gathered. Over many centuries Europe has
accrued a vast tradition of thought about how to act well and so live well
together as a society. A society is healthy to the extent that its members
are generous and just towards each other. Individual responsibility,
generosity and justice, and so an orientation towards the common good, is
the goal that the classical tradition of political philosophy points us to.

In their discussions of what happens when men meet in the marketplace,

for many centuries Christians preferred the description offered by Plato
and particularly Aristotle, developed by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
But from the seventeenth century a series of reduced accounts of man
and politics, that owed more to Stoicism and Epicureanism began to take
over. These identify other people not as persons but as sub-personal
forces which we have to master or fly from. What had been the dominant
account, owed to Plato and Aristotle, of how to be a responsible individual
in pursuit of public acclaim through acting and reasoning well, began to be
replaced by a much more limited account. When it cut lose from the great
tradition of political philosophy from which it had come, economics
became an autonomous discipline, which was gradually considered more
fundamental than politics. It became the science of man in which man was
a creature without a past.

Modern or neoclassical economics is most often identified with Adam

Smith. Smith did not intend that we should be care-nothing autonomous
agents without responsibility. We are not ‘selfish’ atoms. Smith wanted to
see men behave well as citizens and public actors, who were able to act
for the common good. He was determined that men should not conspire
together to create monopolies that corner the market and act against the
wider common interest. The concept of ‘sympathy’ that he introduces in
his ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’ is the key to ‘The Wealth of Nations’:
Smith expects us to act from our own best instincts, which he knew are a
mixture of self-respect and fellow-feeling. Self-respect is inextricably
related to our concern for what other people think of us, and so to our
reputation. The market should be free because we should each of us be
free to form relationships and enter covenants with whomever we wish.
When the market is skewed by big corporations and by government
revenue-raising or -spending it is not free. Smith simply wanted to remove
the blockages to individual initiative caused when the market is dominated
by any group of self-interested big players. Smith nonetheless dropped
two of the fundamental economic concepts employed by Augustine and
Aquinas, and limited himself to the two concepts of labour and exchange.

But others came after Smith who were convinced that the entire existing
tradition of deliberation about what is good, of Plato and Aristotle, and
Augustine and Aquinas and their heirs, had become hopelessly tangled.
They decided to give up on it, and cut moral language loose from all
previous discussion of what is good or true. This new generation of
political philosophers were the Utilitarians, best known of whom is Jeremy
Bentham. The utilitarians wanted us to give up talking about right or
wrong, or good or bad, even in the sense of ‘good for some purpose’, as
when we say ‘this will not look good to other people’. Any good is good to
the extent that it is wanted enough to raise its price to the point at which
its present owner is prepared to sell it. They have encouraged us to think
only in terms of good as this is established by the satisfaction of the
person who employs enough money to outbid all others and so claim it.
The value of a thing, its utility, is determined by the price that reflects the
preferences of all agents in the market. Within this Utilitarian account, all
our acts are seen as ‘preferences’, that is, as private.

After the eighteenth century the whole tradition of thought about being
human in public was turned inside out. As neoclassical or utilitarian
economics became the dominant idiom of public life, our various actions in
the public square were described in terms of individual market
transactions in which each of us imagines that we act privately, as though
no act of ours could be seen by others or would be emulated by others.
Every transaction is considered in isolation from all previous and
subsequent transactions. Economics understands each transaction as
though it took place in the secrecy of a private room, and no act of ours
could create envy in others or induce them to copy us. The inside world is
the whole idiom in which we understand the public world.

We said that economics was a sub-discipline of politics. But even here

there is a problem. For economics is not a discipline, that is, it does not
offer us any of the discipline by which we can learn to take responsibility
and to act in the market as mature political agents. In this modern or
neoclassical economics everyone is taken to be unaware of those around
them and unable to attribute motives to them. It is as if we cannot take
one another seriously as deliberative, reasoning and public creatures. But
economics need not remain constrained by the utilitarian heresy. There
are always alternative traditions, and when these have been forgotten the
Church is able to bring them back. Bentham’s cadaver still squats
amongst us: perhaps it is time to give him a Christian burial.

5. The economics of public man

We have said that love is primary, and yearning for love and reputation is
the motor of human interaction. St Augustine tells us that we love our
family and so we are able to put their needs in order and decide how to
distribute between them the various goods that we know they need. It is a
given that we love and care for ourselves, and that we distribute goods in
proportion as we love others, so we feed and care for our own children
before anyone else’s. Because we both love and know them, we are able
decide between their needs and so to achieve the best distribution of the
resources we have. We give, or distribute, goods between the persons we
love. Love is a fundamental economic concept, also referred to as
distribution.

Augustine tells that though love can of course turn to narcissism, this is
just a perversion of a self-love that is proper to every creature. It is a given
that we look after ourselves first: when some part of your body itches, you
scratch; when you fall over you pick yourself up, when you are cold you
put a coat on. You do all these things for yourself. Then when your wife is
cold you fetch her coat, when your child cries you comfort them. In the
letter to the Ephesians husbands are told that they ‘should love their
wives as they do their own bodies… for no one ever hates his own body,
but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it’. (Ephesians 6.28-9). The point is
that you show a basic self-preservation and self-respect, and you love and
look after those who are closest to you in similar fashion. Love and self-
respect are primary, and the basis on which you can be appealed to do
something similar for others who are not quite so close. What the family
does first for its own members, it may then begin to do for others; it may
be generous and neighbourly. When its outward service becomes big
enough we refer to it as charity and the voluntary sector. If this service
continues to grow because people offer to pay for it, it has become a
business. Many firms started as family businesses, because a husband and
wife, or some other combination of family members, found that the
family’s own provision for itself stretched first to include the
neighbourhood and went on to attract paying customers.

Another fundamental economic concept is use (utility): to complete the

identification of anything includes finding the end and purpose to which it
is oriented. Economists after Smith attempted to do economics in terms of
the two concepts of labour and exchange, without the concept of
distribution which I have linked to self-giving, love and covenant. With only
a truncated account of utility, related to the prices determined by the
market, they did so without consideration of the purposes, uses or goals to
which any thing or any person is oriented. With only the three concepts of
labour, exchange and utility, neoclassical economics knows nothing
about covenant, self-respect, Adam Smith’s ‘sympathy’, community
feeling or love of reputation. It is unable to account for the motivations of
people who are free self-givers, or deliberate, reasoning and political
creatures. Neoclassical economics cannot say why we should go work, or
why work is good even when it is not explicitly and financially rewarded, or
why it is good to be a public agent. It cannot tell us why we should not
skim our customers or corner a market. Neoclassical economics does not
allow us to ask about the public or long-term effect of our myriad private
actions.

Psychology and political science can confirm that we watch one another,
seek one another’s love admiration and that our desire to be loved and
admired drives all our acts. We do things because we hope that they will
get us noticed and admired by the right people, make it easier for us to be
loved by those whose love we want most. Business is of course all about
public reputation: we know that, better than business is repeat business,
and that we are in trouble if our customers do not come back. Each
financial transaction is a joint act of mutual acknowledgment and promise
of ongoing relationship. But in the language of economics we cannot talk
about why men act responsibly in public, or commend one another for
acting well, that is, generously and justly. Next week we shall discuss what
happens to the society that is has no concern for its reputation or cannot
find reasons for self-respect.

Economics does not able to give us any of the discipline by which we can
be formed into generous and responsible public agents, and it has
divorced itself from the other discourses which can. Economics reflects
man’s assumption that he is fundamentally alone. Economics is the
‘theology’ of the hyper-short term, the term so short that nothing is
thought to have any public consequences. One reason why we are in this
crisis is that economics is not an adequate account of what takes place
when persons meet in the marketplace. But we are able to say this only
because the Christian tradition gives us the resources for a more adequate
account.

5. Economy and state against the family

We have said that the household is the first economy, and the source of all
public service and of all the enterprises that make up the market. The
Church says that there are limits to the responsibilities we can devolve
without losing our integrity as independent agents. It says that
governments cannot provide for us what we are called to provide for one
another, for what we have to provide is relationship, or love. This primary
economic act of giving yourself is the foundation of all subsequent
‘economic’ activity.

All human life and civilisation is about learning to defer, that is, to balance
the taking of pleasure with the deferral of pleasure, between having some
now and knowing that there is more to come, so that pleasure is not
merely fleeting and ‘physical’ but also social and lasting. So in order to be
public actors we have to be able to wait and not to resent those who have
what we do not. We cannot be completely compensated for what we have
undertaken or foregone. We may serve one another, acting generously
adult to child, husband to wife, or adult to elderly parent.

I suggested that every society has to defer to families because only

families produce new generations. The state cannot reproduce society. The
state is that set of public servants who intend to serve society by
safeguarding whatever is necessary to its future. The state exists to
protect the economy of the household, and protect and honour the original
event of self-giving that brings the household into being. We said that the
entertainment industries are the first universal mediator that open a
wedge in the family. The corporations create the ‘needs’ and the monetary
economy takes over the functions of the family. When the unity of the
family is dissolved by those desires, the state moves in to meet those
‘needs’.

Marriage keeps people out of dependency more than any other institution.
Nothing can substitute for it, but everything the state does is a
compensation for it. Where there is not a prejudgment, literally a
prejudice, in favour of marriage, the working of the mechanism goes into
reverse. Far from safeguarding the family and the social capital it
generates, the effect of the state’s interventions is to promote singleness
over the covenant of two persons. Any government wants to encourage all
those initiatives that make up civil society, but it does not know how to
stop itself from hearing everything as a plea for its closer involvement. If
we are not dependent on one another through a myriad particular
covenants of family and its extensions in the community and voluntary
and private sectors, we are all dependents directly of the central power.
When it acts to provide for our need, we no longer need one another.

If they cannot resist the torrent of desires that pour in from the
entertainment industries, family members cease to sacrifice individual
desires for family cohesion and are unable to work for one another or
welcome one another’s service. As the family breaks up, the state is there
to provide for each of the individual pieces that have been created. We no
longer need of one another because the state follows the private sector in
to provide each ‘need’ so that it never becomes articulated as the need of
one person for another. The result is that each individual is married to the
state. The state has become the universal mediator, driven to smooth out
all inequalities and with them all the complementarities, by which we need
one another. The state cannot love. But it may exhaust our national
economic resources in compensating for the love that we no longer give.

Our public servants and their ideologists come to assume that there are
certain things that we cannot do for ourselves but which they have to do
for us. The state then offers to lighten our burdens, by saving us from
responsibility and risk, offering a form of salvation, which since it is from
salvation from relationship can only be a false salvation. The result is that
rather than a nation, we have become a collectivity of individual victims,
of people who outbid each other with claims of our neediness. We all
victims now. All this represents a very low view of man. The language of
sin has not disappeared with the secularisation, but rather in the language
of guilt and blame it has begun to get out of control. The public budget is
employed to leach away at marriage, the one institution that is more basic
than the state, in order to promote singleness over all the covenants of
which society and the economy is made up. The state has paradoxically
begun to work towards the dissolution of civil society.

Neither the economy nor the state is able to produce children, or motivate
people to have children and bring them up. This covenanted entity, the
family, alone contains reasons why a man and woman should subordinate
themselves to this new generation, and so it alone produces new
generations and safeguards that society’s future. If business and state do
not deliberately set out to support the family, conscious of that the family
is a fundamental good, they begin to militate against the family and so
against the production of children. We said that utilitarian economics is in
denial about history: it proves to be in denial about the source of the
future as a result. Considered alone, apart from their responsibility to this
covenanted entity, economy and state can only throttle the future and so
bring themselves into crisis.

6. Two societies
God loves man. We can say that man loves himself, shows some self-
respect and love for his own. Yet man does not love himself nearly enough,
or not truthfully enough. Since he does not know himself, he is unable to
do so truly or fully. The Church proposes that the true good of the
economy is man, and that man is truly himself when in the company of
God. The Church says that each person is a unique particular, and that
there is nothing more fundamental and irreplaceable than a human being.
The society that refuses to hear this proposal turns the state into the one
fundamental person, and so into the idol, that replaces man as the image
of God. This failure of true love, and our failure to allow ourselves the
language by which to judge this love, has social consequences, which
themselves have direct economic consequences. These are what we are
now beginning to see around us.

We have to identify two societies, mingled together. One is the society of

man trying to be without God. The upshot of his efforts to be without
God is that each defines himself without anyone else: that no one
concedes that anyone has any fundamental claim on him. This man who
wants to be without God and who retreats backwards into greater
isolation, is driven to construct all sorts of controls so the world may make
no excessive demands on him. This man by seeking love and refusing it
and then substituting for it, inflicts a process of disintegration on himself
and his society and a passion without end. The other is the society of
man who is with God whose witness to us is the communion of the
Church. The Church travels through the society of those who reject the
love and suffer this wretchedness¸ assuring God them that they are loved
with an undying unchanging love, that God at once knows, judges and
loves them with a love that they will never be able to prevent.

7. The humility of God

God has come to us and humbled himself in order to meet us. That the
God who humbled himself for our sake is the true God is evidenced by the
resurrection of Jesus Christ. The resurrection tells us that the love and
covenant of God with man is unbreakable. Christ is our servant and the
one fundamental worker. We may not want to take what he gives, but we
cannot stop him giving it. It is always there; the offer is not withdrawn.
Man cannot crush the resolution of God to be with us and to be our God in
this to us incomprehensible way in which he labours for us and is our
servant. The true God, who in the shame of the cross of Christ appears to
have no regard for his reputation, and is unencumbered by all
considerations of his own power, is free to take an interest in mankind,
wait for him and stick with him. This God only is worth our worship.

The man who cannot believe that he is conceived and borne in the love of
God believes that it is more sophisticated, more ‘scientific’, to remain
between fear and despair than it is to concede that he could indeed be
loved and valued. To secure himself from the possibility that God might
finally recoil in horror from him, man refuses to admit God. In fear of the
possibility of the enormity of this love, and the risk of this love, he is
fearful, and because he is fearful he is angry at the God that is a
projection of himself. The God who has come to him in the way of humility,
remains as unrecognisable to him as the redemption in the serpent in the
wilderness.

That Church that proceeds through our city puts questions to it. It queries
the utilitarian and reductive thought represent by the economics that has
become our dominant description of man. It asks whether we are sure that
there is no relationship between the existence of the Church and the
liberty and liberalism that this society has enjoyed. It asks whether we can
be sure that there can be liberty by a sheer balance of forces without any
of the self-mastery and self-transformation that Christian discipleship
offers? Are we sure that if we remove the Church’s self-discipline from it,
that the liberal public square will continue? Are we sure that if we cut
ourselves off from these roots the plant will grow rather than die? Are we
sure that the Christian tradition is only an old dead beast from which we
should severe ourselves in order to become freer? Could it be that this
history is the source of this liberty, and that if we severe ourselves from it,
it is we who will be the dead beast? These are the questions that the
Church asks as it carries its cross through the streets, on its way to Easter,
praying and interceding for the city.

Summary

1. God has come to us without regard for considerations of power in Jesus

Christ. The humbleness of God shows us the unbreakable love and
covenant of God for man.

2. For us God has made himself weak and given himself into our hands. In
the difficult and repellent way of the cross, there is redemption.

3. In Christ man comes into community with God. In communion with God
man comes to man and is reconciled with him and may grow to his full
stature.

4. In the grace of God there is good work for us to do through establishing

and sustaining our covenants. The Church tell us that man may an
individual who judges for himself, and acts for others, generously.

5. The Christian tradition insists on the unity of man in its dialogue with
the humanities and social sciences that seek to dismantle mankind into
conflicting phenomena.

6. Neoclassical economics is that idiom of politics that filters out the issue
of the good and of who may be its judge. Though it is a vocabulary that
reflects only private preferences, economics has become the discourse of
the public square.
7. Economics cannot account for long-term consequences. It has made the
short-term and private sphere the idiom of the long-term and public
sphere.

8. Economics cannot account for our motivations. Not everything can be

made explicit. Explicit and instantaneous rewards are long-term
disincentives. Money has value only when it is not the sole expression of
value. Money can only be fixed by what is not money.

9. The Church is the community that is part-withdrawn from the monetised

economy.

10. The society that recovers the virtues that can sustain its unity has a
long term. The society that hears the Church may recover the virtues.

11. We can sustain relationships with particular persons because we are

creatures of the covenant of God with man. When they give them explicit
acknowledgement, market and state can support our covenants. When our
covenants are denied public recognition, economy and state tend to
dissolve all specific relationships over the long-term.

12. The Church tells the society in which it lives that it has no need to
torment and divide itself, but may receive its restoration from the
covenant made public in the resurrection of Christ.