YORK AND CANTERBURY

A Telegraph Article Regular readers will be aware that I knew the archbishop of York many years ago, and so feel able to comment occasionally on things he says. I have given up the hope that he might try to look less prelatical in photographs, because that seems to be the style that he has chosen. Presumably he encourages the photographers to picture him staring meaningfully into the distance in full visionary mode. I continue to be anxious about archbishop Stephen’s Gospel interpretation, though. Last Saturday he had a piece in the Daily Telegraph which was a nice defence of singing, and especially singing in church (though there was no hint that he and the other bishops might have been over zealous in ordering us out of our churches in the first lockdown). He’s absolutely right about the Hallelujah Chorus (I made the same point a few weeks ago in a sermon). That was fair enough, and I was enjoying the article, but then I came upon this sentence: “It is the particular song that we sing at Christmas, the song of the angels: peace on Earth, goodwill to everyone.” Now, that’s an unexceptionable sentiment in a way, and rather the sort of thing that one might expect an archbishop to say, but the trouble is, that isn’t what the angels sang. Yes, if you rely on the Authorized Version (for which Stephen at college had contempt) the text says, “on earth peace, goodwill towards men” and I am happy to agree that those phrases are part of our English cultural heritage, and perhaps lurk in many (older) people’s memories, but that’s not the point. Of course archbishop Stephen amends “men” to “everyone”, which is perfectly fair, but it really won’t do to present that as what the angels sang, because the universal scholarly consensus nowadays is that the Authorized Version was translated from defective manuscripts. The angels didn’t sing the rather incoherent “peace on earth, goodwill towards men/everyone” but “on earth peace among those whom he favours”. All modern translations prefer “en anthropois eudokias”, which is found in the best and earliest manuscripts, to “en anthropois eudokia” which is a widespread reading but seems to be a mistake, or possibly an amendment by a scribe who didn’t understand the Hebraism of the original. “Eudokias” is a surprising usage, but it makes it into a coherent sentence, instead of two oddly juxtaposed phrases, and it is unbelievable that anyone would have changed “eudokia” to “eudokias” precisely because it is such an unusual form, whereas you can imagine a scribe outside the Hebrew Christian environment in which St Luke wrote assuming that it was a mistake and preferring the simpler “eudokia”. Apologies for the excursion into Greek, but the point is that it really does change the meaning. The peace that the angels proclaim is among those people who are pleasing to God, those whom God favours, the recipients of God’s goodwill. The phrase in St Luke’s Gospel is related to what is heard by those at Jesus’s baptism, when the voice from heaven declares, “You are my Son … with you I am well-pleased.” Jesus inherently pleases God, but that’s not necessarily the case with the whole of humankind, this blessing of peace is for those who do please him, and that is where we part company with the archbishop’s reading. Now you could construct a universalist case to say that actually the whole of humankind does please God (there is after all a strand in Old Testament “Wisdom” literature that takes that view) but that’s not obviously what St Luke means. He clearly intends “eudokias” as a qualifier, precisely because a significant portion of humankind clearly doesn’t please God, but causes him profound sorrow and regret (if not anger). The Christian gospel for 2000 years has been that the birth and death of Jesus was necessary precisely because so much of humankind was completely displeasing to God. His birth as one of us is an affirmation of our nature, but certainly not a celebration of our behaviour. Archbishop Stephen knows all this. Perhaps he is ignoring the fruits of modern scholarship in order to sound warm and affirming to all of humanity, perhaps he was just being careless, but he knows that there is plenty of human behaviour that is profoundly displeasing to God. Christianity requires that we change the way we live, “repent” in the biblical language, which aligns us with Christ and makes us people pleasing to God. In the end, the song of the angels is celebrating God’s people, those who accept the gift of his Son, which is not quite what the archbishop seems to say. And in the Holy Land Meanwhile I find myself having to take issue with the archbishop of Canterbury as well. Him I’ve never met, so I claim no insight, but his article in the Sunday Times caught my attention. It’s a piece co-authored with the Anglican archbishop in Jerusalem, following on from a statement issued by a number of Palestinian Church leaders last week, and the headline was “Pray for Christians driven from the Holy Land”. Now it’s absolutely right to draw attention to the plight of Christians in the Middle East and the frightening decline in their numbers as they go into exile, but this piece seems to suggest that this is all the fault of the state of Israel, which is simply not true. Israel is not driving Christians out of the Holy Land. The article admits that overall the number of Christians in Israel is rising, but concentrates on the exodus of Christians from the Old City of Jerusalem (the Church leaders’ statement makes a good point about trying to preserve the Christian Quarter which is missing from the Sunday Times article) and talks about attacks and intimidation from “fringe radical groups”. Clearly there is cause for concern, and there is obviously obnoxious behaviour from some Zionist groups in Israel, but frankly Hamas in the Palestinian territories is far more anti-Christian, and Christians in Israel enjoy much more safety and security than anywhere else in the Middle East. The major exodus of Christians is from countries like Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, which used to be safe, but are no longer, but the article rightly draws attention to the departure of Christians from the Occupied Territories, but this is not merely the fault of the Israeli occupation, but the catastrophic misgovernment of the Territories by the Palestinian Administration. As the article rightly points out, Palestinian Christians are disproportionately well-educated, and it is hardly surprising that they should leave the corrupt, lawless statelet, especially given the intimidation offered by Islamists. In the region, Egyptian Christians have been subject to barbaric Islamist terror attacks, whereas nothing remotely similar has ever happened to Christians in Israel, while Christians cannot even worship freely in Saudi Arabia. The archbishop has allowed himself to take a strangely one-eyed view of a real problem, presumably out of solidarity with his Palestinian fellow archbishop, which is very sad, because the plight of Palestinian Christians is a real one, as anyone who has been to the Holy Land is aware, but just blaming Israel is no answer. h

VICTIM SUPPORT

CRIME VICTIM It was a stressful Sunday morning anyway,with my elderly assistant priest not having turned up for Mass, which makes me (and others) anxious, and means that things are not necessarily prepared properly before my arrival, hotfoot from St Mary Mags. On this occasion, though, I was distracted as I brought my bike inside and didn't check that the door was securely closed behind me. Apparently it wasn't properly closed, because when I came back up to the vestry after Mass was over, the bike was gone, and with it my phone, which was in the pannier. The feeling of frustration and disbelief was enormous. I couldn't see how this could have happened. I am never careless. I am not the sort of person who becomes a victim of crime, I thought. But this just demonstrated that it can affect anyone. I dutifully informed the police and got a crime number, which satisfied the phone company. The phone was insured, and a new one was miraculously provided a few days later, though of course I had to take it to the shop to get it all sorted out, as it was way beyond me. The bike, however, was more problematic. It should have been covered by my household insurance, but I invalidated that because I left it unlocked. The fact that it was indoors, in enclosed premises (securely enclosed, as I mistakenly thought)changed nothing; it was away from home and not locked securely to a fixed object. So I wasn't covered. Huge frustration. I was, however, covered by the church insurance, which covers us for loss of possessions taken from the church up to one thousand pounds (though with a two hundred and fifty pound excess). The bicycle rules don't apply there. So, God willing, I should at least get part of its value back. What can't be replaced, of course, are the associations and memories. That was the bike on which I rode to Paris, bought specially for the purpose. It had recently become my second bike, as I bought a new, faster, one this summer after a lot of looking at websites, but the loss of the Paris bike has made me very sad. FLOOD VICTIM On Monday 12th July the weather changed bizarrely in the course of the afternoon, and I was sitting in the office at St Peter's when the sky turned black and a deluge began. We soon had water coming under the main door and falling in sheets off the porch as people used donated clothes to try to staunch the flow into the church and hall. Then I got a phone call from the Grand Junction staff who told me that water was coming into the undercroft at St Mary Mags, apparently from the sewer. I couldn't cycle home in the deluge, so Fiona came (very gingerly) in the car and collected me. I found the Grand Junction staff, shell-shocked, having retreated from the undercroft which was now under nearly a foot of water, two steps were covered. I fussed around rather ineffectually and tried to call the fire brigade, but couldn't get through, as the water rose over another step. Lucy phoned Thames Water, and didn't get through until the next day, but that was necessary to be sure that they logged the existence of the flood, since we are not in a row of buildings, unlike the houses in Kilburn Park Road and Shirland Road, where multiple basements were flooded. Poor Fr Amos at St Augustine's had rather more water than us, flooding his nice new boilers. We watched it until it stopped rising, and then went home. Astonishingly, the next morning the water was gone, and the manhole through which it had entered (and seemingly departed again)was in the middle of a very clean patch of floor, ringed by a circular rampart of ballast. The water had come in through a drain that we blocked with concrete nine years ago, and that gravel was the remains of the concrete plug. The dark grey residue on the floors contained a lot of cement dust, evidently, but blessedly no sewage. The water had come in through the Comper Chapel, and had fortunately burst the plasterboard screens (which had screend off the chapel from when we were doing the building works in the main part of the undercroft) before it got much deeper than a foot. The conservator later reported that the flood had merely washed the painted surfaces in the chapel, not having been there for very long. In my nice new sacristy a bit of water had got into the bottom of the frontal chest, but that had then been lifted off the ground, so the water was just at one end; the force of water necessary to lift a nine-foot by four-foot by one-foot solid oak chest must have been quite something. So, several frontals were damaged, but not too badly. The vestment press is completely unusable, but only the bottom two drawers were actually under water, which mostly contained rather unimportant vestments. Just one precious one was inundated, and we hope to be able to get it restored, though the colour has run terribly in the embroidery. So the past few months have been spent drying out textiles, and moving them from place to place. They occupied chairs in the nave for a while, but when school broke up they were able to go onto the dining tables in the school hall, and dried out nicely there during the holidays. After school came back I have been moving them from place to place, which is a chore, as the sacristy is much too damp to bring anything back into. I just have everyday, synthetic fibre vestments in there for now, as we wait for the place to dry out. Noisy fans have been installed, but it will take a while.