Epiphany: Freedom and Friendship

‘Follow me and I will make you fish for people.’ INFSHSA

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Patrick Stewart playing Macbeth in a film adaptation. Every time I see the play I feel badly for the poor man, but especially when beneath that gruff exterior is the very model of heroism and leadership we know and love in Captain Jean-Luc Picard. From the start Macbeth is trapped and tricked by fate – the witches hail him immediately as king, which sets him down a track to getting his hands dirty with murder – and all to rule Scotland. Then they promise him, with convoluted assurances, that he’s invulnerable, which leads him to a gruesome death. Fate costs him first his soul and then his body.

At the end he realises that he’s just been an actor in his own life: ‘Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more: it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing...’

Not unlike Kate Winslett in The Holiday, who is chastised for only being a Best Supporting Actress, when she should be a leading lady. (2 films not often compared.)

But fate is a common theme in tragic drama. Before Oedipus is even born a soothsayer warns of coming family drama (not the PG kind), and the prologue of Romeo and Juliet notes that it’s not going to end well in this ‘fearful passage of their death-marked love’. Weirdly, science has taken the new place of fate. Between the natural sciences with causality, laws and genes, and social sciences with all their predictable outcomes, you can take someone’s pedigree and school and predict their job and life expectancy, like the oracle of Delphi.

But for all this blaming it on the heavens, we shouldn’t forget Cassius’ comment: “the fault dear Brutus is not in the stars but in ourselves.” (He obviously didn’t go to Eton); Cassius and Brutus are defeated and slain, and in Dante’s depiction of Hell they are on either side of Judas eternally chomped in the mouths of the three-headed devil: ‘The one who hangs from the black jowl is Brutus;/ See how he writhes himself, and speaks no word’. Not an obvious figure to name your child after, but at least Brutus takes responsibility for his decisions.

Today we have a perhaps fated conjunction of events: The Gospel is Jesus’ calling of the disciples, the Bishops opening up old wounds in the Church of England and the week of prayer for Christian unity. Today is a good day to reflect on what it means to be called as a Christian. Is it perhaps a trick of cruel fate – a savage public school chapel upbringing – or pressure from a rather domineering partner – that forces us against our will to a place we don’t want to go, as Macbeth growls:

They have tied me to the stake; I cannot fly / but bearlike I must fight the course”?
(As a tired father once muttered walking in to Sunday School.)

Or is it a star-crossed love affair that brings you here with a passion for the unknown woman in the 3rd row, that has taken control of your Sunday morning despite the fact that you avidly follow Richard’s Dawkin’s twitter-feed all through the service? We operate a don’t ask don’t tell policy here on this issue.

In the calling of the disciples in today’s Gospel what we find is a conjunction of the disciples’ desire to find the Messiah, and Jesus’ open call to follow him. The disciples themselves are not marked out by any obvious intelligence, wisdom or qualities of perception. Their training as fishermen will be presumably of little help in Jesus’ mission beyond a slightly awkward metaphor. (fishers of men) And throughout the Gospels they’re shown up as the lumbering, slow-witted Dr Watsons, compared to the mental-acrobatics of the Holmes-like Jesus. But the desire for change is there. And somehow this is enough for Jesus to transform these ordinary people into a world-changing movement. Their hearts, their desires, are in the right place.

Macbeth, however much he feels cheated, is a conniving murderer at heart, and that’s what he chooses to become; however passionate Romeo is, he knew it was trouble getting into bed with a Capulet. The disciples for all their slowness are open-minded and open-hearted enough to follow the truth that they see in Jesus.

Our desires inform our decisions and our decisions accurately reflect the people we are. When we look at the decisions we’ve made honestly, we really see who we have become, though we may regret them. So we must want to change - and decide to change for the better.

When Jesus finally achieves his tragic end, it’s not that he’s been tricked and thwarted, compromised or overcome; he has predicted his death and finally, through the struggle of Gethsemane, he chooses his own fate, and it reflects who he is: ‘to thine own self be true’. What binds the disciples to Jesus through the pain and hardship, what determines their call as Christians, is friendship and a shared purpose. For all their misdemeanors, the Gospel writers know that these holy fools died for their faith.

So the question that addresses Christians today is: what are our desires, and how do these meet Jesus’ call? It couldn’t be more obvious today that Christian visions of the kingdom of God, Christian ideas, about lifestyle, who can be a priest and what the church is, are in conflict. But as the epistle makes clear, factionalism and conflict are not new in the life of the church.  

Where there is passion there is usually conflict. But, as I said earlier, the call of discipleship occurs in the meeting of our desires with Jesus’ open call to follow him. And Jesus, time and again, sets the basis of this inclusive call to follow him in terms of friendship. And all that stuff about love is essentially that – that in all Christian relationships – in all human relationships – the basis upon which we should relate to other people is as friends. It’s asking for a high level of generosity of spirit.  There has to be room for people to say honestly what they think in appropriate situations. But to allow this there also has to be an acceptance of difference. That, whatever we say or think or feel, we can accept that other person without prejudice on the basis of friendship. It is the exclusionary outcome of the current debate on sexuality, and the threat of schism, that is most hurtful to Christ. We, the Church, are just not very good at being friends.

Now if we return to our tragic heroes, scuppered by fate: Macbeth, Oedipus, Othello, Lear, one of the striking things about them is that they don’t generally have any friends. Sometimes they do - but then they’re Iagos or Lady Macbeths, and that sort of friend (I use this phrase advisedly) doesn’t have your back. But if ‘the fault dear Brutus is not in the stars but in ourselves’, the one thing we need is friendship. Without friendship – between our vaulting ambition, faltering hesitation and terrible jealousies, we’re heading for a tragic end. And not the sort of friendship that nods and retweets everything we say – but one that is able to see the truths we hide from.

Here is something to remember then about the nature of discipleship. It’s not a journey made alone – in a church or as churches. If we take the time to reflect, a little time in prayer, we may see how God is at work in our own life, we may see how our desires and the kingdom of God we are trying to build here in Putney coincide. But if we look at others – people perhaps not just like us – we may see God in them, and this may enrich and widen the scope of our efforts and our understanding of God and the world. Because that is what friendship does.

Jesus said, “I no longer call you servants... but I have called you friends.” Prayer is a form of friendship, as a means of open and honest communication with God, but friendship is also a form of prayer as we give our attention to seeing the handwork and presence of God in another person. So as the call of the disciples reminds us of the call on each of our lives, let us think today about how we can achieve the kingdom of God, in establishing a loving and just community and church in the bonds of friendship; and how we can maintain our freedom against the threats of fear, prejudice and fatalism, and avoid a tragic end.  Amen.