Sermon Archive
Conflicts and uncertainties
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at on 18 February 2008
Jeremiah 22.1-9 ; Matthew 8.1-13
Seventy years ago this summer, Sigmund Freud, the 82 year old founder of psychoanalysis, was an asylum seeker. Fortunately for Freud, Britain in 1938 heeded the words of Jeremiah in our first lesson: ‘do no wrong… to the alien’. Fleeing his home in Vienna, Freud found a new home in London. Had he remained in Austria, recently annexed by Hitler, he would probably have shared the fate, in Treblinka concentration camp, of three of his sisters. His own death a year later, just as the second world war was beginning, was not easy: his terminal cancer was dreadfully painful and debilitating, but his doctors were skilful and merciful: he kept working almost to the end, and died in his own bed.
In a recent book about Freud’s last years, the American writer Mark Edmundson contrasts the old man’s career with that of his much younger fellow Austrian, Adolf Hitler, the dictator who forced him to flee. They could not have been more different.
A dictator like Hitler, the forceful leader with no doubts and a clear message, has a perennial appeal, both political and psychological. Here at last is someone who will sweep away corrupt and dithering politicians, tell us what and who is to blame for all our troubles, and restore our self-respect. Or so it seems, until the dictator falters and fails us. And this, Edmundson reminds us, is not just something that happened seventy years ago in fascist Germany, or even that is found in fundamentalist religion today. In everyday life, there often are times when we wish that ‘they’ would ‘just get it sorted’, or again that someone with superior wisdom would tell us how to sort out our own lives.
But this ‘craving for authority’ and simple answers, Freud taught, is not the solution, but the problem. What we really need, is to recognise, accept, and learn to live with the inner conflicts and uncertainties that make us human. Freud’s method of psychoanalysis – enabling his patients to talk openly about their most deeply buried fears, hopes and memories, their dark dreams and secret fantasies – was designed to help them stop blaming, and start accepting themselves as only human. This was humbling, but not humiliating. At its best, psychoanalysis helped people to forgive themselves, enabling them, in the words of W H Auden’s great poem about Freud,
.…to approach the Future as a friend
Without a wardrobe of excuses, without
A set mask of rectitude or an
Embarrassing over-familiar gesture.
Among the things people learned from Freud, then, was that their longing for a dictator, or a doctor, to come along and sort out society, or their own lives, was an ultimately unsuccessful and unsatisfying way of trying to escape from coming to terms with themselves. And when people came to Freud, hoping that the great doctor would sort them out, part of his method of psychoanalysis was to help them see that he too was only human, thereby encouraging them to find their own way forward for themselves.
Because Freud himself was only human, he too had his faults, and in his own way did not always resist the temptation to be a bit of a dictator, at least as far as his disciples were concerned. Psychoanalysis was not just a method of treatment, but also rather like a religious sect, with its doctrines, orthodoxy and heresies. Freud was an atheist, deaf to the music of religion. But in some respects he was not unlike St Paul, who also did not always resist the temptation to be a bit of a dictator. Freud’s diagnosis of our inner conflicts, moreover, was not very far from Paul’s ‘For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.’ And like Freud, Paul did not believe that submitting to an external authority enabled one to escape, in this life, from these conflicts. For Paul, the external authority was that of the Jewish Law. For Freud, it was what much of European civilisation in the 19th century had made of St Paul’s Christianity: the religion and morality of conventional respectability, which judged by external standards, condemned those who failed to live up to those external standards, and ignored the fact that in their hearts, and in much of their lives, almost everyone is what Paul would have called a sinner. For both men, it was only by being honest about our inability to escape from own inner conflicts and uncertainties, that there was any hope for us.
For Freud, the best that hope could offer was to recognise these conflicts and uncertainties, and to learn how to live with them, constructively and creatively. There was nothing more, nothing beyond that to hope for. Part of the reason for Freud’s deafness to the music of religion, again was what, in the 19th and earlier centuries, much of Europe had made of Christianity: subscription to a set of doctrines, which made the truths of insight sound like the facts of science, and as such, which science itself was now supplanting. On the possibility that there could be more to us than we can know, Freud, unlike St Paul, had a closed mind. Yet curiously, in his last book, which was about Moses, Freud argued that what had enabled the Jews to make their distinctive contribution to civilization and to science ultimately derived from their belief in an invisible God. Worshipping without the aid of idols or images, prepared their minds for thinking in the abstract and theoretical ways that enabled knowledge to grow and science to develop. To Freud’s mind, closed to the possibility that we are more than we can know, worshipping an invisible God was worshipping what was not there. He flatly denied the elusive possibility that humans reach toward, in religious words, worship and community. But that perhaps is just another reminder of what Freud taught about the fallibility of all human authorities, himself included. Freud too was fallible. His views on the non-existence of an invisible God have ultimately no more authority, and perhaps much less than the authority of what our own experience of God teaches us.
While that may be true however, doesn’t today’s reading from St Matthew’s gospel, about Jesus healing the centurion’s servant, contradict what I have been saying about not submitting to an external authority? It is precisely because the centurion trusts Jesus’ authority as a healer that the servant is healed, at a distance, without Jesus even going to see him. Surely this is an example of exactly the kind of religion, or magic, we cannot believe in today. Let me just say two things briefly about that, firstly about the gospels and secondly about faith.
The gospels were written by people who lived in a pre-scientific age, to whom the idea of miracles as exceptions to the laws of nature, which exceptions to modern science are impossible, had no meaning. According to their way of thinking, ‘holy men… were expected to teach wisely and perform miracles’. These were seen as signs of God’s power; and the gospels were written by people who thought in that way. Today it is very difficult and perhaps impossible for us to share that way of thinking. Moreover we have no way of knowing what, in modern scientific terms, ‘actually happened’ in this encounter between Jesus and the centurion, or indeed of knowing, historically, whether it ‘actually happened’ at all. All we do know, is that the gospels were written by people whose experience of Jesus was so profound that it made them want to tell everyone else about him; and that while what they wrote was constrained by the way of thinking of their time and place, it has evoked equally profound meaning in the hearts, minds and lives of countless other people ever since, including very many of those who could not, and cannot, share the pre-scientific way of thinking of the gospel writers’ time and place.
Why were the stories recorded in the gospels, and not the many other ancient tales about holy men who taught wisely and performed miracles, to mean so much for the hearts, minds and lives of so many people? That might be explained historically by the authority of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire and the European Middle Ages. But while that made the gospel stories more widely available, it does not explain away the profound meaning they evoked in the hearts, minds and lives of those who heard and ‘inwardly digested’ those stories.
Perhaps there is a clue to this in today’s gospel story, in which the centurion talks about authority, but Jesus talks about faith. Reading this story as one episode in the larger story the gospels tell, of the life and ministry, the death and resurrection of Jesus, it is clear that no external authority, historical or scientific, can demonstrate that whatever happened at that time, has – or has not - the significance the gospel writers claimed for it. In that respect, we are in a similar position to that of the centurion when he first appealed to Jesus. His military experience recognised officially constituted authority. But the man he appealed to had no such authority. Jesus’ authority, if he had any, was of a kind that only faith could recognise, and Jesus confirmed that in his reply to the centurion: “in no one in Israel have I found such faith”. Similarly, how we respond to the gospel, whether we find it meaningful or meaningless, either way, is a matter of faith. Either the meaning it has evoked in human hearts, minds and lives, is illusory, or, however confused we are about that meaning, it is the beginning of true wisdom.
But let me end by returning to Freud and St Paul. Insofar as true wisdom can be gained, it is only first by being honest about our inability to escape from own inner conflicts and uncertainties. The best we can hope for from that, Freud believed, was to learn to live with those conflicts and uncertainties. St Paul believed there was more – the inner conflicts and uncertainties we must learn to live with, are our own small part in the birth pangs of what the whole creation waits for, with eager longing. Which was right? Only faith – either way – can decide.
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