Video for February 6th, 2025
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.
I finished last week’s video referring to John Venn, Hereford’s preeminent philanthropist. I’m standing by his old vicarage, now the offices of Vennture. His ministry began from here addressing pressing need, but he quickly realised that action was needed on the systemic issues producing this need in the first place. He started the Society for Aiding the Industrious – a name which now sounds archaic. However, its work was anything but. It built and ran a steam corn mill, producing corn at a cheaper rate than was charged elsewhere. There was a baths complex, heated by waste energy from the mill, allotments, a model farm and gardens. They had a coal store, where coal was bought in bulk and the cheaper prices passed on to the poor in winter. He created a whole mixed welfare system for the poor of Hereford which helped promote health and cleanliness, provided jobs and gave sound financial advice. Mother Teresa said, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist”. John Venn, Mother Teresa and many others have recognised that its all very well pulling drowning people out of the river, but it would be much better to stop them falling into the river in the first place.
Jesus early working life was almost certainly as a tradesman in the city of Sepphoris, just up the coast from Nazareth. There he would have witnessed the exploitation of the poor, particularly day labourers. The land of Israel was full of systemic injustice in his day. An unjust tax burden was forcing people off their ancestral lands or taxing them to the extent that it was impossible to make ends meet. As Andrew Mayes remarks in his excellent book, Another Christ (one I highly recommend in our Year of Engagement) “Greco-Roman culture nourished the creation of an upper class, the social elites, who owned great homes and estates. The value system and belief system of the culture manifested itself in indulgent architecture....Wealth was power, and the gentry of Tiberias and Sefforis were at the top of the social pyramid of ‘haves’ and have ‘have nots’ “.
Our problem in seeking to emulate the missional practice of Jesus as prophet is we are both products of our culture and system that allows so many people to fall through the cracks, and beneficiaries of it. Our political system (both left and right) fails to ask the big questions and accepts a liberal capitalist dogma as the only way to run an economy. It is very hard to think and act outside the box. But there is something very wrong when people cannot earn enough to feed their families and rely on food banks, a need that seems to grow remorselessly. Jesus had no such qualms. He wasn’t a beneficiary of the system and was therefore better able to critique it. He called out the corrupt religious system that the Temple had become, turning over the tables of the money changers as an act of social resistance. He criticised religious practices like sabbath as they had come to be practiced. It was a practice that marked out Jewish ritual purity but was used as an excuse not to do good works for one’s neighbour. Brendan Manning in his book the Ragamuffin Gospel notes Jesus was not just breaking the law, “He was destroying the very structure of Jewish Society.” Jesus called out the immoral actions of both oppressed and oppressor. I wonder whether an equivalent today might be the actions of ‘Extinction Rebellion’ and ‘Just Stop Oil’? This direct action provokes very strong feelings. We miss the level of anger in the response to Jesus. They are monstrously inconvenient and irritating of course, but the crisis in climate is so serious that it perhaps requires such drastic action to force us to think about it. I’m going to talk about the imperative to treasure the planet next week.
We need to be discerning in these things, but citizenship of the Kingdom of Heaven challenges us to address the issues that prevent this Kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven. They are not purely spiritual they are practical as well. The church at its best has always been at the forefront of campaigns for social justice and at its worse when it works in cahoots with the powers that be. In the last few hundred years the Church of England has probably been both at various times in equal measure. In our Year of Engagement what injustice is the Lord calling us to address in a practical way?
+Richard