Law Service at Newport Minster Church

Law Service
Monday 20^th October 2008
11.00am
Newport Minster Church
Readings: Job 40:1-14,
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
 “God on Trial” is the title of a play by Frank Cottrell Boyce that was screened on BBC 2 a few weeks ago.  The location is somewhere in the Auschwitz concentration camp. It is inspired by a story that has been circulating down the years about a group of inmates who put God on trial, and argue among themselves whether he should be pronounced guilty of all the horrors committed against the Jewish people in the name of ethnic cleansing.  It was an intense and harrowing ninety minutes – so intense and harrowing, in fact, that Sarah and the dog (our much loved and sensitive border terrier) left the room after about five minutes!  The scene is a dormitory, on the night before half the prisoners go to their deaths. The main characters consist of two rabbis, a criminal, a law professor, and a physicist.  All the arguments are rehearsed, the same ones that many of us have wrestled with in different ways and in other contexts: why does God allow suffering to happen, especially on such an awful scale?  For Jews, this means not only questioning the benevolence of God, but also that special relationship between God and the Jewish people – God’s covenant with them.  Of course, the trial is very different from anything we know under the disciplines and conventions of English law.   The defendant is, so to speak, not present – though that’s not unknown.  Or perhaps he was present, but replying only through the questions, the counter questions, the probings and the agonisings of those who are arguing various sides of the case.

There are some touching moments, such as when those being prepared for execution have their hair shaved.  That had a personal resonance for me.  Although I may be particular about how I look on public occasions, vanity about my everyday appearance is not exactly something that I could be accused of: but I did find the loss of my hair as the result of my recent illness a demeaning experience.  Then there is the very end, after those inmates have gone to the gas chamber, when a small group of visitors from our own time emerge from what remains of the camp, and one of them says to the others: “we’re still here”.  In other words, not only does this human race, the Jewish people included, carry on, but the questions remain.

The most refreshing feature of the play, what makes it so intense and harrowing, is that the arguments for and against are not given in the cool and forensic way that is right and proper for a normal court of law.  There is a great deal of passion and there is a great deal of emotion, to the extent that much of the play can be described as a prolonged rant at God.   And it’s this aspect of Jewish tradition, so strong in parts of the Old Testament, particularly in the book of Job, that shook Frank Cottrell Boyce’s faith.  As a devout Roman Catholic, he was brought face to face with a part of religious tradition that was unfamiliar to him. He had not “argued” with God in this way before, at least not on such a scale. But he began to see why this was one of the ways of coping with the situation. Here is a play where everything seems to be in the hands of barristers!  It’s a bit like a seminar that is dominated by preachers, but in the absence of a theologian, who will watch, listen, interpret, and where necessary bring a cooling system to the proceedings.  

In the end, God is declared guilty.  But it’s the journey there, rather than the verdict, that captures the imagination.  Perhaps the whole play explains why some Jews who came through the holocaust jettisoned their faith altogether (and, particularly in Poland, became communists); why others tried to bury the whole process, but remained superficially observant of their faith; and why others again persisted in this questing faith, determined that God is still God, however horrible, foolish, and wasteful human life can sometimes be.  I often think that those three responses – rejecting faith, paying lip service to religion, and wrestling with the real issues in spite of everything, are alive and kicking in Christianity today.  They certainly explain the recent rash of hostile writing and broadcasting against the Christian faith; the people who keep going, and don’t quite know why, even if it’s just at a Christmas carol service; and those who have the courage, or the circumstances, to argue with God, and come out at the other end with a deeper and more mature faith.

The question, “why suffering?”, and the related one, “why do things go wrong?”, are, of course, hardly new.  But by exploring them in the form of a trial, they have to confront the issue of justice, with which everyone here is concerned in one way or another.  It even concerns me, from watching the details of the Counter-Terrorism Bill, to administering discipline in the Church, which I occasionally have to do, within all the constraints of modern ecclesiastical legislation.  Those who suffer from severe illness are more likely to make a go of things with a positive attitude, but the person in trouble often starts with a disadvantage if they cast themselves in the role of victim.  Speaking for myself, I try never to be surprised when things go wrong: We’re part of a fallen creation, after all, where earthquakes suddenly erupt, viruses inexplicably develop, car-crashes happen, as well as the whole gamut of wilful human folly and wickedness, such as organised crime and mass murder.  None of this diminishes my commitment to medical research or restorative justice. But it still leaves me in the dilemma expressed in this morning’s readings.  Do we stick with Job ranting at God for losing his entire livelihood even though he’s done nothing wrong to deserve it?  Or can we use that struggle to make the leap into what St. Paul means when he says: “from now on, we regard no one from a human point of view?”  It is often hard to recognise how necessary both those attitudes are.  For those of us who deal in justice in any way, it’s sometimes not possible to avoid being immersed in the quagmire of human experience at its most tragic and pathetic, and at the same time, somehow cling on the hope that everything that surrounds us is redeemable.  I suppose that’s another way of saying that God can stand being put on trial, just as long as we’re prepared to go along the journey with him.