Let us eat….
It has been overshadowed in the last few days by the passing of a great man. The Duke is rightly to be remembered and his life celebrated for all the good he has done and in the idiosyncrasies that he displayed. His death reminds us that life does not remain the same; time moves on; until now in recent days, and I suppose that it shall return, there had been much talk in these parts about what the new normal will look like. I don’t know what you hear elsewhere, but what we hear doesn’t sound to me very much unlike the old.
Holidays in the sun is good for vitamin D deficient sun lovers unless they also have a melanin deficiency in which case extra strong skin cream is required. Racing to return to the gym, which provides bodily exercise for those who do not have to labour hard in the acre of land that the government allows them on which to grow maize and other crops. Eating out and visits to the cinema, theatre, opera, shows, concerts, dance halls, gigs (is that orthographically correct, or should it be gigues?) and the like are, well, without the need for justification of any sort, a necessary part of the new normal. Let us eat drink and be merry¹, seems to be the message.
Are we any different? There has been much celebrated over the past year of dedication, selfless giving, service, but little (but not nothing) has been said about the cleaner who was no longer needed because her employer now WFH had recovered two hours a day not being required to travel, or the employer who simply told his staff not to bother to return the next day, they would not be paid. The poor still had mouths to feed and bills to pay.
Do not think I am about to suggest that wealth is bad, Abraham² did not berate the rich man for enjoying the things that he enjoyed in this life but for failing to believe in the Son of Man. He was not asked to give half his wealth to Lazarus who sat at his gate, but rather to remember justice, righteousness and compassion. It was this that he forgot.
In the new normal, will we simply revert to type, and behave as we always have done? Noah³ left a world that was filled with violence to sail into a new world. What sort of violence? Physical, economic, emotional, therapeutic? Did Noah hope for better in the new world into which through the flood he had sailed? But his own behaviour and that of his sons soon showed that the world that they had left behind had come with them. The new world was no better. We today seek to deal with violence, but the very need to do so simply exposes our shame that it continues to exist.
The last year is no cure for our condition; it has shown many good things about the image of God in which we are made, but it has also exposed that our condition is unchanged.
There is but one cure, the man, who himself suffered violence at the hands of his own people, is our cure. Jesus now sits at the right hand of God⁴ and will come again to take his people to a world which really shall be new and different than this one, where there shall be no violence, no hurt, no harm. That will be the new normal; it will be an extraordinary, previously unimagined normal⁵, but it is the only new normal for which it is worth waiting.
Mene, mene, tekel upharsin⁶.
¹ Ecclesiastes 8:15, Isaiah 22:13, Luke12:19, 1 Corinthians 15:32
³ Luke 16:19-31
³ Genesis 9
⁴ Mark 16:19, Luke 22:69, Acts 2:33, 5:31, Colossians 3:1, Hebrews 10:12, 12:2, 1 Peter 3:22
⁵ 1 Corinthians 2:9,
⁶ Daniel 5:25