Signs of the times

Matthew 16: 1-4

Address given by Sir John Houghton, JRI Chairman, at the JRI Commissioning Service on 15th May 2001.

The Pharisees and Sadducees came to Jesus and tested him by asking him to show them a sign from heaven.

In this story, a group of religious leaders, the Pharisees, and a group of political leaders, the Sadducees, both came to Jesus and asked for a sign. They both had problems with Jesus. They didn’t understand him, and they saw him as a threat. Now it wasn’t’ Jesus’s style to produce miracles on demand - so he talked about the weather instead. Even Jesus found weather a good conversation piece. And I make no apology about talking about it, of course, because it’s almost like work.

‘Your meteorology’s quite good’, he tells them. You may not have computers, and you may not have satellites, nevertheless you’re very observant, and you know, as every good Englishman knows, that a red sky at night is the shepherd’s delight, and a red sky in the morning is a shepherd’s warning. What you’re not good at, Jesus said, was reading the signs of the times. What did he mean by that?

Well the Pharisees and the Sadducees were worried. Jesus was causing a stir. Just before this story he had fed four thousand people from a few loaves and small fishes, and that wasn’t the first time he’d done that. He was getting a big following - challenging their position and power. The Pharisees had power because of their very detailed rules of religious observance. And they wanted to maintain the religious status quo. The Sadducees had a good political fix. They had done a deal with Rome, and they wanted to keep the status quo, too.

And Jesus comes into their scene with radical messages. Uncomfortable ones. Messages of personal morality - loving your neighbour - and loving your enemies. That’s far too radical. Of corporate morality too. He talked against greed, against selfishness, and exploitation, against the rich robbing the poor, -messages also emphasisising genuine religion, love for God, humility forgiveness, salvation, the arrival of the kingdom of God. Messages that were being lapped up by the common people. Those were the signs of the times that the Pharisees and the Sadducees could not read, or didn’t want to read, or their minds were closed to them.

Now it’s not so different today. You may think the world is very different, and in many ways it is of course. But our attitudes are very similar. I’ll leave it to your imagination to try to identify the modern Pharisees and the modern Sadducees.

But those of us who are religious often succumb to the temptation of the religious fix. We hide away from the world’s problems in a cloak of spirituality. We like the comfort of the religious status quo. Or sometimes, of religious activity, just for its own sake. We like turning the handle of religious observance. And then many of us, in the middle class, like our comforts. Those in the political establishment, or connected to it, want the political fix. And there are political fixes all over the place at the moment. You can’t look at the television without being told of some political fix or other - something that will enable them to hang onto power at all costs. Oh they recognise the existence of big world problems - but they don’t want to be too disturbed by them. And so they put on blinkers.

And then there are the ordinary people. People at large who are looking for something more. Not quite sure what they are looking for entirely - but they are looking for meaning, for purpose, for something that really satisfies. And they don’t find it in the statements of today’s leaders.

And again, Jesus, the same Jesus as two thousand years ago, the living Jesus, comes into our world with radical messages. Oh yes he tells us we’re quite good at weather forecasting. In fact we’re much better than we were two thousand years ago. There are many more possibilities. We can actually forecast global weather. But again Jesus tells us: we are not good at the signs of the times. Oh there’s a bigger picture now. It’s not just Palestine times, but global times, that we’re to look at.

In January I was in Shanghai, for a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and I visited - in an afternoon I managed to find a couple of hours - I visited a couple of Chinese churches. Chairman Mao thought he had destroyed the church in China with his cultural revolution. In fact, from the disaster of that revolution, from the disillusionment it brought, a tremendous wave of the growth of the kingdom of God is occurring in China. It’s a genuine Chinese growth - it’s not brought by foreigners, or missionaries - but it is estimated that thirty thousand people a day are becoming Christians. It’s estimated that there are probably fifty million Christians in China, maybe more than in the United States. Five or ten percent, perhaps, of the population. Over the last fifteen years I’ve seen the Chinese meteorological service improve its weather forecasting enormously - it’s become one of the best services in the world - but there are also millions of Chinese who are reading and looking at the signs of the times.

Well if Jesus were in Cheltenham today, where would he be pointing the finger? In some ways, very much as two thousand years ago. He’d be talking of personal and corporate morality, of loving your neighbour, of loving your enemies; he’d be pointing to global issues, to rich countries getting richer, at the expense of the poor, to exploitation of the weak by the strong, to ethnic and racial hatred, to the need for forgiveness and reconciliation, to the need to recognise the coming of the kingdom of God - all those things are there, in our own world too.

But in the context of this service I would just like to apply this message, if I may, to our care for the earth and the environment, and what we are trying to do in the John Ray Initiative. We have environmental degradation all around us; an urgent need to move to sustainability in our use of resources and the disposal of waste. There’s the problem of climate change, an enormous problem of the loss of soil around the world. Foot and Mouth has caused questions to be raised about agricultural practices and methods. And then there’s the whole problem of GM and the environment. These are not just scientific or technical issues; but they’re moral and spiritual ones too. The care for creation is a central Christian theme.

And politicians are looking for political solutions. But the political fix can never be the complete solution to a moral or spiritual problem. It’s only part of the story. We need changes in fundamental attitudes. Industry and technology are still looking for technical fixes, and we thank God for technology, and science. But technical fixes can be dangerous when applied in isolation. There’s the danger of introducing other problems too. And then religious people have, to a large extent, ignored these issues, or let them pass them by. And yet, caring for the earth, on behalf of, and in co-operation with, the Creator, is a central Christian theme.

The mission of the John Ray Initiative, is defined as to address environmental sustainability, on the basis of Christian principles, and the wise use of science and technology. And in that we’re looking to follow Jesus’s injunction to open our eyes, to see the signs of the times, and bringing Jesus’s gospel to bear on the problems of the day, with appropriate sensitivity and humility. And especially do we want to bring God into the environmental equation. And we want to do that particularly for two reasons.

First of all, acknowledging God as Creator and caring for his creation, on his behalf, enables us to take the big view. These are big problems, and the more you look at them, the more you realise you need to take the big view. Not a selfish view, not one for humans alone, but one for all of creation. It needs to be a truly balanced view. The word in the Old Testament for it was Wisdom, practical morality and common sense, but with God in the centre, and with God’s help. Proverbs tells us that the beginning of wisdom is the fear, or the reverence, of the Lord.

And the second reason is that we are also concerned with the fact that we are dealing with big problems. I am often asked if the problems of the environment are not too big for humans to tackle. Can we possibly solve problems of that size? But the message is we don’t have to do it on our own. God is there to help, and we must take that help. I mentioned Wisdom. In Scripture it works out a much bigger thing, than just in parts of the Old Testament, because Wisdom is personalised. It’s identified in the New Testament with the person of Jesus himself. And Jesus said, ‘Without me ye can do nothing’. So Jesus is there to help us. And we musn’t imagine as we try to apply wisdom, and look for wisdom, that we can do it without Jesus, who personalised wisdom itself.

It’s not always easy, of course, to apply it this way, it’s not always easy to bring God into it, because we don’t want to make it exclusive of people in the world outside, who are also very keen to help, and they are very often doing far more than we are as Christians. So there is an enormous challenge here, for the John Ray Initiative, as we try to marry the material and the spiritual - an enormous challenge to tell the secular world, which has some yearning for the spiritual, but little knowledge of it, what Jesus meant, when he talked about the signs of the times.

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