Sermon preached by Most Rev Dr Rowan Williams, during BBC Radio 4 Sunday service Broadcast, transmitted 08:05 10/12/00.
It's become quite common in the last twenty years or so to talk not just about 'good news for the poor' but about God's 'bias to the poor'; and this always provokes questions. Surely God loves the rich as well? Surely God doesn't have favourites? Yes of course God is specially concerned about the poor - as our readings in this service suggest; but we mustn't let this distort how we see things. There can be no bias in God, and all people must be equally the objects of his love.
There's no quarrelling with that. But it misses the point of what people mean when they speak of 'bias to the poor'. It would indeed be silly to say that God just happens to love the poor more than the rich. There's a wonderful moment in Evelyn Waugh's novel, Brideshead Revisited, when the narrator expresses to the aristocratic Lady Marchmain his puzzlement about the wealth of her Catholic family: doesn't she have any problems about being rich in a world of poverty? She replies, memorably, that it is a sin for the rich to envy the spiritual privileges of the poor, who are specially dear to God. This sort of language has the unhappy effect of making God's love rather like a consolation prize: you don't have any of the good things of this life - but at least you are special to God.
That's by no means nonsense; in situations of great suffering and apparently immovable oppression, people have been strengthened precisely by believing that they are special to God and close to God, even when they have humanly no hope of improvement in their condition. Out of experiences like this come the great spirituals of the African-American slaves and other testimonies to the stubbornness of faith in the middle of suffering and injustice. But there must be something wrong when people living in comfort and prosperity tell others to console themselves by thinking about how spiritually privileged they are. In the New Testament, the letter of St James has some hard things to say to anyone who tries to make things easy for themselves in this way.
So it can't be right just to say that God is more fond of the poor. What is missing if we try to think about the question in this sort of way is the absolutely basic truth that God's love is meant to make a difference in the world, a difference that shows itself in the way we live with one another. If we appear before the judgement seat - as in our second reading today - with no evidence that our faith has made a difference to how we behave towards the rejected and needy, we have a lot of explaining to do. To say that God has a bias to the poor is simply a way of saying that one sort of difference God expects to see in the world as a result of his love entering into it is a difference in our attitudes to what makes us safe and comfortable, to our wealth. And that difference is bound to be worked out in favour of those who don't have comfort, security, the assurance of a voice that will be heard in the world. So yes, the effects of God's love will be 'lopsided', in favour of those who have been losing and failing. The proclaiming of the good news of God's love is good news for them because it announces that freedom and control over their lives is possible after all.
Needless to say, we can get this wrong in all kinds of ways. We can think of it just in terms of turning the existing order upside down; our reading from Samuel today might suggest this if we take it in isolation. But the point of the difference God's love makes is that every idea of wealth and poverty, every assumption about natural inequalities that can never be removed, only shifted around, is challenged. It's not enough just to change who happens to be on op of the heap. That's the mistake of many revolutions which end simply by victimising a new set of people. The gospel asks us to imagine what things would be like if we just stopped thinking in terms of 'heaps' at all, if we stopped thinking that the world is always a competition to rise to the top.
But the other mistake, at least as serious, is to think that justice for the poor is simply a command from God: we now have to be nicer to the unfortunate because God will punish us if we aren't. And the truth is something far more remarkable and exciting. We learn to let go of our anxious struggle for material security as we learn that we are the receivers of an immeasurable gift and that our privilege and joy is to transmit that gift on every way possible to others. One of the best expressions ever of this can be found in the writings of the great Bible translator, William Tyndale, born just over the border from us in Gloucestershire; he had a passion for real social transformation as much as for the reformation of the Church, and in one of his meditations on the New Testament he wrote: 'As a man felted God in himself, so is he to his neighbour'. In other words, what we experience at the hands of God is what we will long to pass on to others. And, as Tyndale points out, if we meet a God who cancels the debts we owe him, who never gives up on us, who wants us to live in his own joy and freedom, we shall want for others that freedom, that sense of the possibility of new beginnings; we shall want to see debts cancelled - the metaphorical debts we think people owe us when we are hurt or offended by them, and the perfectly literal debts that keep people in hopeless dependence. Tyndale would have been an unreserved supporter of the Jubilee 2000 campaign for the cancelling of the debt in the poorest countries. Indeed, he has a lot to say about how the real debt is the one that the rich owe to the poor, the obligation to meet their pressing needs out of what they themselves do not need.
This is why the Christian passion for justice in society can never be just a matter of trying to keep rules set by God. It isn't even a matter of respecting human rights. The modern idea of human rights is a useful shorthand for what people may expect from each other in society - but it's a notion that never appears in the Bible, for the simple reason that the Bible is interested not in abstract rights but in how the love and gift of God shatters those instincts in us that keep the needy at arms' length, and gives real hope and dignity to the powerless. God's love creates community not first and foremost by giving orders but by changing how we see ourselves and each other. The good news for the poor is in substantial part the fact that the inner sickness and fear that make us cling to material security are healed by the gift we receive from God, so that the impulses of competitive greed are cut at the root.
In Advent we often sing about our hope for the Kingdom of God to draw nearer- with the implication that Christmas must have something to do with the arrival of God's Kingdom and God's righteousness. In Luke's gospel, when Mary sings her song of joy at the promise giver her, she echoes the words of our first reading about the God who humbles the comfortable and greedy and lifts up the poor - as if the birth of her son will be the beginning not just of one human life but of a whole new way of living for the world. And so it is. Christmas shows us a God who holds nothing back from us, who doesn't 'hoard' the wealth of his joy and love but pours it out so completely that it fills a human life. That human life, the life of Jesus, pours it out in its turn, transforming who and what we are in the profoundest ways. In the death and rising again of Jesus, we see that our deepest sins and deepest hurts are addressed and overcome. We needn't be afraid. We have encountered a God of total generosity. And as we feel this God in ourselves , so shall we be to our neighbours.
Amen.
Notes: The readings for this service were 1 Samuel 2, 2-5a & 7-9 and Matthew 25 31-40 & 6d