BE VERY CAREFUL

 

Fortunate are the merciful, for they shall experience mercy in return.

Makarioi hoi eleèmones, hoti autoi eleèthèsontai.

 

The Greek text translates with eleos the Hebrew chesèd (ch as in ‘loch’), one of the three words that could become English ‘mercy’. In one sense it can mean ‘kindness’, but not, like praios, as a character trait but rather as a form of action. Chesed is taking care of someone else’s need: Jonathan protects David from Saul in an act of chesed. It is always seen as reciprocal: someone who receives chesed from another is expected to return it. 

 

So this Beatitude does not really introduce something new or unexpected, but rather reminds the audience of the way conventional relationships ought to be. It is really a form of ‘do as you would be done by’. And yet it goes beyond that also. God shows chesed to his people, both collectively, as the people of Israel whom he feeds in the wilderness, and individually in persons such as Abraham, Jacob, David and Job. For human beings it is of course impossible to return this to the Father himself; but He expects them in return to show it to others. So there may well also in this Beatitude be a sense that those who are merciful to others may receive the mercy of the Father, just as in the Lord’s Prayer those who forgive others’ debts to them may receive the forgiveness of their own debts to the Father.

 

In Psalm 85/86:11, ‘Mercy and truth are met together’, it is chesed that is joined to emet; and the ‘truth’ that is also characteristic of the Father is not so much ‘truth’ in the sense of conformity to a factual norm as ‘truth’ in the sense of faithfulness, of being ‘true’ to a loved one, one’s lord, or one’s country. So if that is joined to chesed, it means that Fidelity is joined to Care. 

 

It is both interesting and useful to pursue these words a little, because the English word ‘mercy’ has a connotation of opposition to ‘justice’ which in this case is not present. Our ‘mercy’ is usually closer to ‘compassion’, which translates the Hebrew racham/rachamim. The latter is word that does not imply as much reciprocity as does chesed: its root is linked to the Hebrew word for ‘womb’, hence the otherwise curious English term ‘the bowels of compassion’. So in the case of the fifth Beatitude, one might almost translate the text as ‘Fortunate are those who care, for they shall experience care in return’. And one should always remember that this does not refer merely, or even especially, to human interactions only, but to the very real Care and aid we children receive from our Father in heaven, and which we must pass on.  

ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?

I have been looking up the ungodly. Not, initially, in the physical or social sense: they are all around us and we will get to them presently. No: in the linguistic sense. Since I have been reading the Psalms a good deal lately, I realise that there too they are everywhere. So I wanted to find out what the Hebrew term was, and then what was its Greek equivalent in the New Testament.

The Hebrew term, I find, is rasha, with the a’s pronounced as “ah”. And it’s a strong term, meaning ‘guilty’ or ‘wicked’. So ancient Israel did not beat about the bush, so to speak: the opposite of the chasid or godly person is not just somebody who doesn’t believe in the Deity but a guilty or wicked man.

If we read the Psalms, it is not hard – especially from Psalm 119 – to find out what a chasid is. He is someone who loves the Law and obeys it: the Law in all its glorious intricacies, the Law that provides the parched traveller, lost in the spiritual Negev or Nefud desert, with a path that if followed will inevitably lead him to a well and even to an oasis. The path was made and given by God: man’s job is to find it, follow it and learn it by heart. That is the way to God. The holy man is also the righteous man, who abstains from evil deeds and succours the defenceless; if he is so, then God’s favour will uphold and follow him. His granaries will be full, his wife and children will be as green olive trees, and he will not eat a morsel or drink a drop without giving thanks – Baruch atta Adonai Elohenu . . . .

His opposite is not the decent man who just doesn’t believe in God: his opposite is the evil man, the one who robs widows and children of their savings, who says “Tush, God will not see it” and cheerfully enriches himself without a smidgen of charity, and who, as the Psalm wonderfully says “grins like a dog and runs about the city”.

In the New Testament, where Greek takes the place of Hebrew, there is a significant change. The “ungodly” now is the asebès, the man who will not venerate, will not be respectful, will not “hallow” the holy. Not actively wicked, he is the one who shrugs. He reminds me of the Athenians who listened politely to Paul on the Unknown God and said, “Hmmm. Interesting. Come back some other time.” To the asebès, all gods are sort of equal, equally interesting, equally boring in the long run, equally irrational and thus quaint but unimportant.

Today’s ungodly are more like the Greeks. They tend to say, when asked, that yes they believe in some sort of higher power as long as they can think of feeling it on a mountaintop at sunrise; but above all never, never in a church; not in a church, not in any sort of group, not in the context of any kind of intellectual definition or spiritual rigour, not in a tradition of thinkers, not in any context that would bind or constrain them in any way at all.  Moreover, a number of them, reacting to militant Islam in a carefully non-discriminating way, proclaim the idea that all religion is not just slightly irritating but positively harmful.

While our very modern and rhetorically evangelising churches keep telling us that we must be active witnesses, encountering today’s ubiquitous ungodly is a challenge neither St Paul nor Luther ever had to face. Paul did better with Jews than with Athenians; Luther convinced many members of a degenerate Catholic Church. And we? We are often told (by our own churches) that as long as we live a life of clear and evident faith, that will interest and intrigue people enough to start a conversation. In my own experience this is mostly untrue: people note that Dwight is religious, in the same way that Beatrice does crosswords and Charles collects old absinthe bottles, and move on.

The not-very-satisfactory provisional solution is to keep a keen ear open for  the opportunities that do sometimes arise in conversation, and to keep one’s private feelings about today’s asebèsis firmly to oneself.  One point I have sometimes made is a modern version of Pascal’s Wager. “Look around you at the people you know,” I suggest: “Do you on the whole think those who do not believe in God are happier than those who do?” That sometimes makes people stop and think. But the problem is huge, and remains. How does one make inroads on a culture, not of anger or persecution but of complete indifference?