Thanks to UnHerd for carrying my piece on the Archbishop of Canterbury and the assisted dying debate…
Earlier this week, Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally wrote an opinion piece in the Telegraph urging MPs to vote against the reintroduced Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill when it comes before the Commons on Friday. The article restates her opposition to assisted dying, expressed in a speech in the House of Lords last year and again when the previous bill ran out of time in the upper house in April.
Mullally’s predecessor, Justin Welby, also objected to assisted dying legalisation during the passage of the previous bill, but by the time the key Second Reading vote took place in November 2024, he had announced his resignation over safeguarding failures. The argument the bishops most wanted to make — that the state cannot be trusted to protect the vulnerable from coercion — was being made by an institution that had just demonstrated it could not protect the vulnerable in its own care.
That is the deficit Mullally is placed to repair. The Archbishop objects to assisted dying because the pressure to opt for the measure against one’s own wishes will fall most heavily on those who are most vulnerable: the poor, disabled people, and ethnic minorities. Although these arguments dovetail with Church of England perspectives on assisted dying, they are clinical rather than religious objections that echo those made by, among others, secular disability campaigners.
“if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”
Stanley Spencer, Separating Fighting Swans (ca. 1932-3) in the keeping of Leeds Museums and Galleries.
“…the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” So writes St Paul in this morning’s epistle. Isn’t that lovely? Christianity is all about love and nothing more. I could stop preaching now, you could all go home deciding to be even more loving than you already are, because that’s what Christianity is about, and we could all live happily ever after.
But, wait, maybe it isn’t that simple. Jesus says, “if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” Cut them off! Treat them like one of those thugs who abuse their position with the government to extort money from law-abiding people! That’s what Jesus says.
So, clearly, it isn’t just as simple as saying love one another and that’s it. How do we resolve St Paul’s commitment to love as the absolute standard of the law with Christ seeming to put hard limits on forgiveness when reasoned persuasion has failed?
One thing to bear in mind is that our Gospel reading is set towards the end of Jesus’ time of preaching and teaching in Galilee. He is about to make His final journey towards Jerusalem. He is starting to teach His followers things that will matter when He is no longer with them. Their lives have already been transformed by His work of preaching and healing, and they will later be transformed further by His Resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit.
But they’re still people, with the normal run of human failings. People don’t always see eye to eye. They don’t always agree on what the most loving way to behave is. And then they all get tempted by greed, and laziness, and need for status, and taking others for granted; and they still have the frustrating moments of failing to live up to their principles that we’re all familiar with.
Our two Bible readings today are an interesting pairing – one asks who Jesus is; one explores what His Church should be.
In the Gospel reading, Jesus and His closest followers are on a bit of a road trip, away from the lakeside villages where He began His public work of healing and teaching. Apparently, the district is abuzz with gossip about Jesus. Everyone is talking about Him, because He is doing things well beyond what people have come to expect from local faith healers – powerful works, so much so that sometimes they even leave people frightened. Many people are wondering if Jesus is a prophet – perhaps one of the great prophets.
Jesus asks His closest followers, “Who do you say that I am?” This is one of the great hinges of the Bible. Peter gets it right first time – Jesus is far more than a prophet, but the Messiah Himself – the saviour of the human race, sent by God, the Son of God.
This is the perfect reading for a Sunday with baptisms and renewals of vows, because one of the promises we make in baptism is to turn to Jesus Christ as Peter identified Him, as our Saviour and the Saviour of the world. We join the biggest family in the history of the world, uniting people across time and space. This is a family that crosses divisions of nationality and race and class and political opinion. In baptism, we are united in the same family as baptised Christians in Albania and Zimbabwe, and all the other countries from A to Z. We are united across time with St Peter, and the people who built this church all those centuries ago. And we are united not only with Christians on Earth, but with those who have gone before us into heaven.
And here’s the thing, we aren’t united because we agree on everything, and certainly not because we’re perfect people – we are united by Jesus Christ, whom Peter correctly identified on that road trip all those centuries ago. We are united because we trust that Jesus Christ will save us even though we often mess up, because God loves us as we are.
“The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has told the New Humanistthat Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is misusing Britain’s Christian heritage “to channel anti-Muslim feeling”. He added that he has “some awkward questions” for Tommy Robinson about how his claimed conversion to Christianity in prison squared with “public rhetoric designed to produce hostility and violence”.
“Concerns about cynical manipulation of Christianity for political advantage are warranted, even from those who don’t share Dr Williams’s perspective as an out-and-proud “hairy Lefty”. Yet rather than simply damning this new enthusiasm for Christianity on the hard Right to the largely atheist readers of the New Humanist, might he be better advised to put his concerns to Farage and Robinson directly?
“For example, if Mr Robinson’s jailhouse conversion is sincere, then he will have to engage with the hardest sayings of Jesus Christ about loving one’s enemies, turning the other cheek, and forgiving others if one wishes God to forgive them. And, like other Christians, he will have to grapple with the challenging personal and theological implications of how often he fails to live up to those ideals…”
“It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib, Jesus and the Canaanite Woman (ca. 1684). Part of an illuminated set of the Gospels in Arabic, produced in Egypt. Now belongs to the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA.
“That pack of dogs!” It isn’t a very nice way of talking about a group of people.
The exchange between Jesus and the Canaanite woman makes us uncomfortable because it shows Jesus cutting across one of the sacred principles of our own time and culture: not being nasty to people because of their nationality or race – or at least not being caught out doing so in public. The Canaanite woman is at her wits’ end, needing help for her possessed daughter; Jesus tries to ignore her, then implies that her people are dogs. It doesn’t strike us as very Christlike.
Jesus was truly human as well as being truly God. All human beings have a culture and a background – and that always involves complicated relationships with people not like us.
The Jews and the Canaanites had been living intermingled with one another for over a thousand years by this point, and there was plenty of bad blood between them. When the Jews came into the Promised Land after Moses led them out of captivity in Egypt, the Canaanites were one of the groups of people already living there. The Jews claimed they were just returning to their ancestral homeland; the Canaanites thought that was poppycock. The Jews said the Canaanites had a nasty history of sacrificing their own children. By the time Jesus came along, “Canaanite” was no longer the term in daily use anyway – the politically correct nomenclature was “Syrophoenician”, which was used by Mark when telling the same story. So Matthew’s use of the archaic term hints that he’s reaching back into history for something.
There’s something else to keep in mind: what happened just before. Notice how this morning’s reading starts: “Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon.” That leaves me curious as to where “that place” was.
It turns out that place was Gennesaret, by the Sea of Galilee, not much over twenty miles from where Jesus grew up, the area where He had started His public ministry of preaching and teaching, and a heartland of conservative Jews. What happened there was that as He was being mobbed by a crowd desperately seeking help, some Pharisees came up from Jerusalem – which was a hundred miles away – and started giving Jesus a hard time, telling Him He was breaking the Jewish religious traditions. Jesus in turn says the Pharisees are the ones promoting false teaching: in fact, they are blind guides, leading the people into a pit.
So Jesus has just had a spicy exchange with the self-appointed defenders of Jewish orthodoxy. For some reason, after that happens, He leaves the Sea of Galilee and goes to Tyre and Sidon, to what is now the coast of South Lebanon, away from the main Jewish centres of population and into the very heartland of the Canaanites.
A couple of summers ago, I was on the way to Jersey, on a very hot summer day, on a big slow ferry across the English Channel, when I decided to get off and go for a walk. The water was lovely and cool after the stuffy cabin, and it was enjoyably strenuous to climb up and down the waves, but my shoes were starting to get soaked and stained with salt water, and I worried about how they’d stink the cabin out.
Of course, this never happened. I made this up. People don’t walk on water. If God had wanted us to walk on water, we would be born with skis instead of feet.
Jesus can walk on water because Jesus isn’t just another small-town preacher and holy man, but the Messiah, sent by God as Saviour of the human race. This is one of the miracle stories in the middle part of Matthew’s Gospel where the disciples, and Peter in particular, are confronted with more and more evidence of Jesus’ divine origin. These form the backbone of our readings from Matthew’s Gospel through this late summer and autumn and Peter will, before too long, be the first to work it all out.
Peter was the first person to confess that Jesus is the Messiah. A great man. But Peter wasn’t God. So, Peter couldn’t walk on water. It isn’t that Peter couldn’t walk on water because he didn’t have enough faith – or that he was able to walk on water while he had his eyes on Jesus, but lost it when he got distracted by the wind. Jesus isn’t telling off Peter as “You of little faith” because he can’t walk on water. People can’t walk on water.
The life of St Oswald, on whose feast day we gather in this church dedicated to him, might easily be accounted a failure. He ruled Northumbria for nine years, before dying in battle aged just thirty-eight in the incessant wars between Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and Picts, themselves multiply factionalised, that disfigured these islands in the 7th Century. Providence decreed him a more important role than might be supposed from those bare facts – after his father’s death in war, he had spent his childhood in exile in the Kingdom of Dál Riata, home to the great monastery of Iona. In exile, he converted to Christianity, and full of fervour on his return to Northumbria, he granted the island of Lindisfarne to Bishop Aidan as the site of another monastery. That Holy Island had such a significant impact on Church history that Oswald’s cult spread deep into continental Europe. As far away as Slovenia, the town of Ožbalt is named for him.
The great Bard was wrong. The good that men do is often not interred with their bones – indeed, seeds sown in our earthly lives are often only ready to be harvested long after our deaths. We all admire the person who plants trees that will only reach maturity in the time of their great-grandchildren.
It is in that light that we should look at Caroline’s political career. She joined the Secretariat of the Conservative Group in the European Parliament in 1974, before being elected herself a decade later, serving in the European Parliament until 2009. For more than a third of a century, she served the British people and those of the whole continent, during a period of extraordinary change which saw the collapse of Communism and the fall of the Iron Curtain, the European Economic Community’s transformation into the European Union, and its expansion firstly to the newly democratic states of southern Europe, and then to the formerly Communist East – to Ožbalt in Slovenia, and well beyond.
Caroline developed significant expertise in environmental and public health matters, and was one of those British MEPs who made a serious contribution not only to the detailed legislative work of the European Parliament but to the construction of Europe – work of which she was immensely proud.
Last April, a French nun was attacked near the Old City in Jerusalem, attacked from behind and shoved to the ground by a man whom she had done nothing to provoke and couldn’t even see. It’s increasingly common for Christians in Jerusalem, whether foreigners or local Palestinians, to be verbally abused, spat at, or even beaten up by Jewish extremists. But this incident was caught on camera. The next day the Israeli authorities charged the man with religiously aggravated assault. The case has not yet come to trial.
This incident came to mind when I read this morning’s Epistle reading from St Paul’s letter to the Romans. You see, St Paul hadn’t started as one of Christ’s followers, but as someone who constantly persecuted them. His worst moment was when he stirred up a lynch mob that stoned poor St Stephen, the first Christian martyr. By the time he wrote today’s first reading, about fifteen years later, he had been on quite a journey. Whenever I see one of those extremist leaders of the West Bank settlers being interviewed on TV, I can’t help thinking of Paul, back in the days when he was still Saul. Indeed, the place where St Stephen was probably stoned is no more than a mile from where the nun was attacked last April.
None of us emerges into the world as an island. We all have a backstory – family, ancestors, nation, perhaps even more than one nation. These backstories are all complicated. Our family stories all have their dark moments – the relation nobody wants to talk about, the cousins who studiously avoid one another at weddings. Of course, every country has episodes of shame in its history as well as episodes of glory. The story of the Church is one containing much wickedness as well as good – when we encounter members of other faiths, we need to remember that.
Christianity emerged into the world from Judaism. Except for Luke and Acts, the entire New Testament was written by people who, like Christ Himself, lived and died as Jews – Jews who happened to come to faith that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. But none of them ever thought of themselves as being anything other than Jewish, and indeed there was quite a battle in the first two decades or so of the Church about whether Gentiles – in other words, people who weren’t Jews – could become Christians at all unless they became Jews first. St Paul argued that they needn’t do so, and Paul won the argument in the end, but we can hear echoes of it throughout his writing.
Some notes after reading Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant by Robert C. Austin and Artan R. Hoxha (London: Reaktion Books, 2026).
“After Nixon’s visit to China, a group of disappointed radical Marxists from Washington state hung a banner in downtown Seattle reading: ‘Defend Albania, Marxism’s last hope’.”[1]
Despite its diminutive scale and its poverty, Albania in the latter decades of the Cold War retained a wider importance to cognoscenti on the Far Left worldwide because of its unflinching and unembarrassed Stalinism. This was the product of the unflinching and unembarrassed tyrant who ruled the Balkan country for forty of its forty-seven years of Communist rule, Enver Hoxha, most of it as a minotaur defending his maze. With perfect timing, Hoxha died exactly one month after Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in the USSR in early 1985 – granting the world just the tiniest sliver of overlap between the last holdout of Communism’s murderous but potent heyday in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the man who would inadvertently dismantle the structures that allowed the system to remain rigid despite its increasingly obvious contradictions.
Hoxha thought he and his régime were of global importance every bit as much as his more enthusiastic overseas admirers. In my latter primary school years, those immediately after Hoxha’s death, Radio Tirana, at some financial cost to this small and impoverished country, dominated the shortwaves with its portentous, somewhat sinister, interval signal introducing programmes in twenty languages, aiming to export Albania’s vision of revolution. I doubt programming in other languages was any less tedious than that in English, which was soporifically dry and always delivered in a halting, heavily accented monotone, bemoaning the machinations of “American imperialists” and “Soviet socialist imperialists”.
My thanks to Unherd for running my short piece on the comments of Sir Chris Bryant MP, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, on the attack on the Christopher Street Day LGBT+ parade in Berlin last weekend. Sir Chris refused to acknowledge that the attacker was an Islamist even after the German Interior Minister publicly stated that to be the case.
Sir Chris was “ordained as a priest in the Church of England before he first left active ministry and later Anglicanism entirely because he couldn’t reconcile his homosexuality with his Church’s treatment of gay relationships. Naming Christian homophobia is considered laudable in his own support base.
“But naming Muslim homophobia? This, in contrast, threatens the unofficial British state settlement around crimes which undercut the narrative that multiculturalism only has benefits and never brings new problems. The most obvious case is of nationwide grooming gangs. But there has been a constant drumbeat of lesser yet still serious incidents, from the reaction to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988 to the Wakefield woman forced to go to the local mosque to plead for her son’s life in 2023 after he damaged a Quran.”
