Life: Scripture, Church Closure, and the Question of Life

This blog offers some biblical reflections on ethics and obligations around the preservation of life.  It is not meant to bash anyone who has chosen to either close or keep churches open - Twitter Christians have done that well enough already.  I have somehow ended up writing about New Testament, as opposed the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, which is slightly more outside of my comfort zone, so would welcome any clarifications or corrections.

Christianity has a curious relationship with life.  'I have come to give life and life in its fullest', 'I am the way the truth and the life'.  Yet if life is our ideal, we love a bit of death on the way.  The way the truth and the life, who gives eternal life, only did so through the means of a quite gruesome end.  Our tradition attributes martyrdom to almost every early Christian we can name.  The valorisation of martyrdom can be matched with the Christian asceticism of the likes of Elizabeth of Hungry whose piety took her to an early grave while also making her a saint.

Much like forgiveness, humility, and sacrifice, we can only make much sense of how we live out this ideal of life through the nitty-gritty of daily decision making - and this is showing in our current debates more than ever. 

The thinking that led me to this blog is not in fact an area of Christian ethics but of Jewish - Pikuach nefesh. Pikuach nefesh is the kind of thing you learn in Jewish Ethics 101, the principle of forgoing certain obligations because of the primacy of saving a life.  Without delving too much into the history of rabbinic interpretation, when left with the range of biblical commands and their working out in the post-biblical period, a question occurs of when and where it is appropriate to break commandments for a greater good.  The principle stands that most religious obligations can be left unfulfilled, or broken, in order to save a life.  Exceptions apply – murder, blasphemy and idolatry, bestiality, adultery and incest, worship of an idol.  And there are profound areas of debate today - such as how an organ donation is taken - and of course, how to live out the tradition in times of Covid.  

This got me thinking - what precedent do we have for scriptural thinking around the obligations to save life against fulfilling certain religious practices?  There is a great blog here that looks at some historical precedent in times of pandemic, but I would like to look at a couple of biblical texts.

The closest discussion to pikuach nefesh in the New Testament is between Jesus and his favourite debating partners, the Pharisees.  While used as an opportunity to beat up Pharisees in much contemporary Christian discourse, the New Testament compilers seem almost romantically fascinated by the debates.  It appears no less than six times with a confrontation (Mark 3:1–6, Luke 6:6–10; 13:10–17; 14:1–6; John 5:1–18), and once without (Luke 4:38–41).  It's a topic of fascination because it raises some of the most interesting discussions of how you live out the law (putting to side Paul's rejection of the keeping of the law, which is quite a separate discussion).  The keeping of the sabbath was not, in Jesus's context, about having a day off, but an active keeping of the seventh day, something which was both complex (hence the debate) and serious (the sabbath does make the top ten commands, after all).  If scholars agree that Jesus’s approach to the law, as a good rabbi, is a mix of relaxing (some questions around food and the sabbath for instance) and restricting (Jesus appears to tighten the laws around adultery, divorce and remarriage), then here we get a glimpse of how these tendencies rub up against each other (see Matthew 5:19 if we're still trying to insist Jesus wasn't that fussed about the law).  

The New Testament writers, I would argue, are fascinated by this question of the sabbath, not because it is Jesus giving a carte blanch to break the law, but because it offers some form of a principle of interpretation and praxis - how to fulfil, and break - the law.  

To run through the texts:

Mark 3:1-6: Jesus heals a withered hand in a synagogue, and asks the bystanders “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” - to which they are silent.

Luke 6:6-10: the above passage appears in a slightly different form.  Here the scribes and the pharisees are explicitly waiting.

Luke 13:10-17: here Jesus encounters a woman with a spirit which means she is bent over, whom he heals. However, the rulers of the synagogue are indignant, and say to the people 'there are six days to do work, come and be healed then, not the sabbath'.  Jesus, not pleased, responds 'You hypocrites! Do you not untie your ox or donkey and take it to water on the sabbath? And so shouldn't this woman, a daughter of Abraham, bound by the evil one for 18 years, be freed on the sabbath?

Luke 14:1-6: Here Jesus dines at the house of a Pharisee, and a man with dropsy is present.  Jesus is more deliberately confrontational now: the interaction begins by him asking the lawyers and Pharisees a question: 'is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?'.  He heals the man, before telling them 'Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on the sabbath, would not rescue him?'

John 5:1-18: At the Pool of Bethesda is a man paralysed for 38 years, and Jesus asks if he wants to be healed.  He tells the man 'get up, take your bed and walk', and the man is healed.  Here the man is questioned whether the healing is lawful.

Although not a healing story, Matthew 12:1-8, Mark 2:23-28, and Luke 6:1-5 are an interesting parallel, as Jesus and his disciples on the sabbath, possibly with less exuberance than Theresa May, walk through the wheat fields - and pick off some heads of grain to eat.  The Pharisees again aren't happy, and Jesus compares the incident to David and his companions eating the consecrated bread of the temple for sustenance (1 Sam. 1:5-6)/  Jesus summarises this interaction: 'The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.  So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.'

It would be easy to try and make apples into oranges here and find some direct parallels, however, these are worth resisting (the Christian understanding of the celebration of the Eucharist, despite occurring principally on our Sabbath, is not the same as the first century Jewish Shabbat).  But there are some interesting principles in how Jesus understands the relationship between the preservation and dignity of life, and religious obligation.  Firstly, the principle of doing good.  Secondly, the sabbath made for man not man for the sabbath. Thirdly, the question 'would you not do this for your son?'.  

These three issues raise ample material to reflect on how we might approach the temporary ceasing of public communal worship.  This is not a health and safety naysayer approach that we should stop anything that is dangerous – Christian life at its best is risky, not to mention it would be an affront to Christians whose fidelity to the Lord mean they risk life to worship together around the world.  But it does raise the question of what it means, in certain limited contexts, to do good, to understand the relationships between religious practice and human dignity, and to make the preservation of life a priority.  This is brought sharply into focus in the final point - 'would you not do this for your son?'.  Covid, unless we are being wilfully ignorant, is not an individual but a communal disease - our decisions are not for ourselves, but affect the community, and I do wonder how our decision making would be altered if we kept in mind the most vulnerable person we know who we love, rather than resorting to an individualistic 'I can take the risk as I can fight off the flu' mentality (I am aware of a number of friends, who are still continuing to have dinner parties though the current period).

This all brings to the fore what exactly we are stopping and starting, and has caused most of us to hone our eucharistic theology over the past year.  There are worthy points to be made on both sides.  The eucharist, properly understood, is not a communal meal but the recalling of the sacrifice of Calvary in the context of the resurrection; receiving the host alone is receiving the fullness of Christ's body and blood; weekly reception is not particularly familiar to any Christian tradition with a long memory.  Yet at the same time to meet together is life-giving in a genuinely theological way.  The coming together, especially in a time of pandemic, is for many - including myself - the only real social contact we have, even if it is at a distance.  And our sacred spaces, our rootedness in place and time, matter.  Our obligation to God is total.  Not to mention the dangers of prohibiting, even temporarily, something which is a fundamental human right.  

If Jesus’ activity on the sabbath gives us some room for thinking about the keeping and breaking of duty for the sake of life, it still leaves us with the same problem we began with, the Christian ambiguity of what is life and what is death.  Our obligation, our debt towards God is, after all, nothing less than our whole selves.  We can - and have - waxed lyrical about all the ways we can interpret these things: the sacrament is life itself; not capitulating to a secular understanding of death; the Christian hope in life eternal; and not least the Christian desire for martyrdom, to give witness to the faith at the risk to self-preservation and material well-being.

Jewish jurisprudence and ethics - a long time passion of mine - function with radically different categories than our own as Christians.  We are, for better or worse, heirs of Paul's Law of Freedom, which, put crudely means we are not to bound by hard and fast rules but by constantly working out what the rule of love means in any given context (which is a blessing and a curse).  This can lead to a beautiful freedom to live our Christian calling in the most bespoke of ways, but it can also lead us to a rather competing set of principles we have to navigate in unfamiliar territory, of which this definitely is.  However we know the principles on which we are to act - love of neighbour, dignity of life, the vitality of the sacraments, the Church itself – are in no way dispensable but are held in a kind of tension which is giving agony to many, and rightly so.  Because all this matters – life, liberty, worship.  If the difficulty of Christian ethics is also its vitality – the need to weigh conflicting values which have no easy resolution – then if not providing an answer, perhaps this is a renewed opportunity to ask ourselves the same questions in a new light – who is my neighbour? What does God demand from me? How do I give God that which is owed? And how do we find new and creative ways, where possible, to fulfil our obligations in worship?