Sermon Archive
Laugh and be merciful
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Matins on 14 December 2003
'To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.' The words are those of a character in Greenmantle by John Buchan, an author I've recently been re-reading. One view of Buchan nowadays is that he was an old-fashioned romantic reactionary, with little to say to the realities of the 21st century. But when you actually read his novels, a much more complex picture begins to emerge, not only of an enthralling story-teller, but also of an acute and often disturbingly prescient political intelligence. Only a couple of days ago, a historian pointed out to me that Buchan's political thrillers are intimately related to events on the world scene at the precise date when they were being written; and some of these events have had consequences which are still with us nearly a century later. Osama bin Laden, for example, is a character straight out of a Buchan novel; and it pulled me up sharply to read one of Buchan's British heroes saying, back in the 1920s, that he was 'furious about the muddle in the Near East - we were doing our best to hammer a much-divided Orient into a hostile unanimity'. Whether today's dramatic capture of Saddam Hussein will diminish that hostility, remains to be seen. But certainly its scenario could have been scripted by John Buchan.
Buchan's heroes, of course, have some aristocratic and imperial attitudes with which it is now difficult to sympathise. But, and I owe this insight to the same historian, they are also able to rise above their own racial and class-based views. Even when engaged in deadly conflict with 'evil' individuals or organisations - the bin Ladens and al Qaedas of their day - Buchan's heroes come to respect their opponents. They learn that the 'evil' they are fighting, and what produced it, are morally complex phenomena which challenge them to reconsider their own cultural presuppositions. As one of them puts it, the passion of those Arabs who 'want to prune life of its foolish fringes and get back to the noble bareness of the desert isn't inhuman. It's the humanity of one part of the human race.'
Politically then, we may have more yet to learn from Buchan than the conventional view of him allows. But politics aside, let me come back to the quotation with which I began. 'To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts'. This again, I suspect, is a currently unfashionable opinion, at least among those whose education has been informed by evolutionary biology and Darwinian views. The educational emphasis today is not on how great, but how little is the difference between humans and other animals. Some evolutionary biologists indeed seem to delight in reminding us of how few genes separate us from non-human living creatures, and of how our supposed human superiority in fact is no more than the product of blind natural selection, which in time may yet deselect us in favour of 'fitter' competitor species. On this view, man is not 'better than the beasts', but just another species which, for the time being, has been successful in adapting to its environment. Humanity, in other words, is pretty insignificant in the natural world, and it is unjustifiably arrogant of humans to imagine that we have some special destiny in the great scheme of things.
Now this evolutionary view, whose scientific basis is sound, is clearly a necessary corrective to the idea that humans are superior creatures who have an unfettered right to exploit animals and the natural world. Environmentalists and animal lovers everywhere will applaud this reminder that humans have no entitlement to regard themselves as the undisputed lords of creation. But there is also a paradox about this Darwinian view. It denies any ultimate significance to humanity. But it does so, on the evidence solely of the human outward senses and their extension in science. It tells us that we are arrogant to imagine that humans have any ultimate significance. But it no less arrogantly assumes that ultimate significance can be judged only by what makes plain and palpable sense to humans. What this view overlooks, in other words, is that there may be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in a sense- and science-based philosophy, and that beyond what humans can understand, there may be that which passes human understanding.
Precisely what it is that passes human understanding, of course, is by definition impossible for humans to say. That has not prevented humans from trying however; and the arrogant modern claim that only what can be explained by the senses or science has any real significance, is probably a reaction against the arrogance with which some of our religious ancestors confidently explained the ways of God to man. Perhaps, as one philosopher has remarked recently, we need to be a little more modest. Our knowledge is limited to the humanly knowable; humans are not the centre of creation. But as humans we also feel responsible for those parts of creation our actions can and do affect, including aspects of the natural environment, and above all our relationships with one another. And as humans, the most natural thing ('the default position of healthy common sense' as this philosopher puts it) has always been to feel responsible not just to one another, but also to the 'mystery beyond everything'.
Morality and religion, in other words, are native aspects of what it means to be human. Individuals and significant sections of society, of course, can and do talk themselves out of particular moralities and particular religions, or forget them amidst their other preoccupations; and in large tracts of Europe today, organised religion is in decline. But even in Europe, this decline is far from terminal, and in the rest of the world religion is flourishing. Nor is this surprising. For it is difficult to imagine how a society entirely without religion and morality, or no longer living off their inherited social capital, could continue to be recognisably human. It might, indeed, be inhuman.
Now John Buchan, I think, had some sense of this when he summed things up in his own way: 'To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.' We may well now prefer not to say 'better'. But 'to laugh and to be merciful' surely are at the heart of human religion and morality. Laughter, when it is whole-hearted and generous, including kindly laughter at oneself, is an instinctive human affirmation that, despite everything, 'all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well' in the ultimate mystery. 'To be merciful' to others and to oneself, is the fruit of that affirmation and the motive of morality.
No one religious or moral system of course, encapsulates, in a way that is accessible to everyone, the full implications of laughter's affirmation and mercy's impulse. Each human tribe has its own historical tradition, through whose language and ritual individuals come to feel themselves addressed personally by the 'mystery beyond everything'. Our tradition is that of 'the people who walked in darkness [and] have seen a great light', of the Christ cradled in humility and crossed out by the world, but who will come again in glory. To understand what that means however, tradition alone is not enough. We need also to live the affirmation of Advent's expectation in the laughter of our common days, and in our hearts and actions to be merciful, as God is merciful. To be able to laugh is the sign, and to be merciful is the seal, of our human destiny in Christ - who 'comes, the broken hearts to bind, The bleeding souls to cure'
Even so come, Lord Jesus. Amen.
Worship >> Sermons >> Sermons