Bill Darlison's weblog

Rendering to Caesar

Mark 11: 27-33

They came to Jerusalem again and as he walked around in the Temple precincts some of the chief priests, lawyers and elders came up to him.  And they were asking him, ‘Where do you get your authority to do what you do? Who gave it to you?’ Jesus replied, ‘I’ll ask you a question. Answer me and I’ll tell you in what kind of authority I do all these things. Was John’s baptism from heaven or from men? Answer me!’ They discussed the matter with one another. ‘If we say that it was from heaven, he’ll ask us why we didn’t believe him. But we can’t really say that it was from men either……’ (They were frightened of the crowd because everybody considered John to be a prophet.) So they said in reply, ‘We don’t know.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Nor am I going to tell you by what authority I do what I do.’

Mark 12:13-17

But they sent some Pharisees and supporters of Herod to him, so that they could entrap him in his speech. They came and said to him, ‘Teacher, we know that you are sincere and that you don’t bother what other people think of you. You don’t judge on appearances, but you teach the way of God truthfully. Is it lawful to pay the poll tax to Caesar? Should we pay it or not?’ Fully aware of their hypocrisy, he said to them, ‘Why are you trying to test me? Bring me a denarius. Let’s look at it.’ They brought one and he said to them, ‘Whose is this image and inscription?’ They said, ‘Caesar’s.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God.’ They were amazed at him.

Story: The Big Headed King

There was once a king in India who was so vain and so mentally unstable that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he believed himself to be the best at everything. He couldn’t so much as boil an egg, but when he gathered his cooks around him to discuss the week’s menus, he would ask them, ‘Who is the best cook in the world?’ and they would prudently reply, in unison, ‘Why you are, your majesty!’ He was fat and lazy and no good at sports, but occasionally he would organise a race in which he would compete against the country’s top athletes, but they knew it was wise to under-perform and let the king win. ‘Who is the best athlete in the world?’ he would ask, as he celebrated yet another victory, and all the super-fit runners would reply, ‘Why you are, your majesty!’

One day, he gathered all the country’s religious leaders together and asked them a question: ‘Who is greater, God or I? You have until tomorrow to come up with a satisfactory answer.’ The priests and ministers were very frightened. They knew that if they answered as their conscience told them to answer they were running the risk of banishment from the kingdom, and perhaps even of execution, and yet they did not want to betray their calling by simply giving in to the king’s vanity. Here was a dilemma indeed!

‘What can we say?’ they were asking each other, as they left the palace. Some were shaking with fear; others were weeping, thinking of banishment to some far off land, life-long separation from their homes and families.

‘I know what to say,’ said one venerable priest. ‘Leave it to me!’

The next day the religious leaders gathered in the palace to give the king the answer to his question. The king stood before them, flanked by heavily armed soldiers who looked menacingly at the assembly. ‘Well, have you decided? Who is greater, God or I?’ asked the king. There was silence for a few moments. The king looked around, smiling a wicked little smile as he watched the ministers and priests squirming with fear. Then the old priest came forward and said, ‘I will answer your question, your majesty. You are the greater.’ The king looked very pleased with himself; this was exactly what he wanted to hear. But then the priest continued, ‘You are greater than God, because you can banish people from your kingdom, but God cannot banish people from his; for God’s kingdom is everywhere and there is nowhere to go outside of it.’

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here’s no doubt that this is the most miserable time of the year. Christmas lifted our spirits a little – the lights, the evergreens, the carols, the jingles, the shopping, and the presents all contributed to an easing of the burden of winter. And that, of course, is their function. Christmas comes when it does in order to counteract the general feeling of gloom that the long nights and the cold weather inevitably bring. To our ancestors, who lived without central heating, electric lights or television, it would have been an almost unbearably dreary and even dangerous time. In the darkness entertainment is limited, and you can’t see the predators; in the cold people die. This is the time of year when people suffer from the aptly named SAD – seasonal affective disorder – when lack of sunlight can bring on depression and feelings of hopelessness, and even in those of us whose moods don’t change quite so dramatically there is a general feeling of contraction, in sharp contrast to the expansive optimism of the springtime.

This is not all negative, of course. Winter has its own beauty and its own range of pleasures. Hot drinks; blazing fires, snow, frost, can all delight us, as they give us permission to slow down a little, to lie fallow like the earth, to recover our energies for the next burst of activity which is only a few months away.

In addition, winter makes us conscious of our vulnerability, and of our reliance on each other for the smooth continuance of our lives. In the summer we feel invincible, but things can go very badly wrong now, so we need people around us to share the burden of the darkness.

On our journey round the zodiac circle we have had occasion to mention that one of the symbolic bases for our understanding of the individual signs is their relationship to the light or the darkness. The light represents individual consciousness, the darkness symbolises the collective, so when the light is strongest – from the spring equinox to the summer solstice, from March to June, – the signs of the zodiac symbolise emerging individuality, separateness. When darkness prevails, as it does now, and we need to huddle together for warmth and safety, the signs symbolise group consciousness, the community, the state even.

These are the very themes which the ancient astrologers associated with Capricorn, which the sun entered on 22^nd of last month. Capricorn symbolises the relationship of the individual to social and political organisations, and the most ancient symbol of Capricorn was not the mountain goat, but the goat-fish, a mythical creature which lives in two environments, just as human beings live both a private and a public life.

People who are strongly Capricornian – and that doesn’t just mean people born at this time of the year – ‘take life and its responsibilities very seriously, and sometimes seem weighed down with care….. When in charge of any concern, they see that rules are punctiliously observed, sometimes displaying an inflexibility which becomes absurd… …They not only cherish a deep respect for law, order and convention, but also reverence all that is ancient. …..All this ….may cause a pharisaical attitude of mind which obeys the letter of the law rather than the spirit.’

So writes Joan Hodgson in her engaging little book Wisdom in the Stars, and we can supplement her insights with a few observations of our own. The Capricorns I know are generally serious people, often ‘old beyond their years’, even in youth. They tend to be responsible, cautious, prudent, quietly ambitious, industrious, sometimes with a sense of constantly fighting a tough battle against life, as if, somehow, they have chosen to follow a hard and stony path, but like the mountain goat, which is their symbolic animal, they continue to climb relentlessly to the top, undeterred by obstacles. They are conscious of status and so can be deferential to authority while expecting deference from those who stand beneath them on the social ladder. England is said to be heavily under the influence of Capricorn, as is India, and both of these countries have age-old systems of social stratification which seem quite ridiculous to outsiders. The English reserve and concern for propriety are parodied throughout the world, and there’s an old joke about two Englishmen who were washed up on a desert island. Ten years later a ship picks them up; they are living on opposite sides of the island and have never spoken to one another. ‘Why didn’t you get together?’ asks the incredulous ship’s captain. ‘We haven’t been introduced,’ was the reply.

A typical Capricornian figure was the 19^th Century English politician William Ewart Gladstone. Born on 29^th December 1809, he was one of the hardest working and most productive politicians of all time. In addition to running the British Empire, he translated and wrote commentaries on the classical authors, and even found time to ‘save’ fallen women. He would roam the streets of London at night, meeting with prostitutes, attempting to rescue them from their life of vice. He was called, in true Capricorn style, ‘The Grand Old Man’, and his manner was so formal that Queen Victoria said, ‘He always addresses me as if I were a public meeting’. When he was 85, he bequeathed £40,000 and many of his books to found a library and, despite his advanced age, he himself hauled most of his 32,000 books a quarter mile to their new home, using his wheelbarrow.

Another political Capricornian, Richard Nixon, (born January 9^th 1913), was known for his incredible political ambition and his complete lack of humour. David Frost said that he had absolutely no small talk whatsoever. Sadly, as Nixon’s career shows, in another of life’s little ironies, those who talk loudest in public about duty and responsibility are often the ones who flout them both in private, and hypocrisy, which, in one sense, is the failure to live up to a sometimes impossible ideal, is often the besetting fault of the heavily Capricornian person

The ‘ruler’ of Capricorn, the planet most closely associated with it, is Saturn, which, to the ancients, marked the boundary of the solar system. From Saturn we get our word ‘saturnine’ which, according to the dictionary, means ‘gloomy; taciturn, showing a sullen, brooding ill humour’. Saturn was associated with the metal lead, and when we describe people or skies as ‘leaden’ we are not expecting much jollity from either. The colour of the sun is gold; the colour of the moon is silver; Mars is red, Venus is green – all lively, vibrant colours. But Saturn, like lead, is dull grey. And what’s more, Saturn has rings around it, further emphasising the idea of boundaries and restrictions. Saturn symbolised the Father, not as a tender protector, but as a figure of authority and power, who lays down the law and sees that it is enforced. Saturn was also said to be associated with the bones, which give structure and form to the body

The Roman Saturnalia was celebrated as the sun passed into Capricorn and was a riotous celebration marked by acting in defiance of everything that Saturn stood for: traditions and customs were overturned; authority figures were ridiculed; conventions and laws were suspended. It was the Roman way of cocking a snook at Saturn, of squeezing out a few drops of pleasure from life before the dourness of winter set in.

According to the English astrological writer, Charles Carter, the Jews are a Capricornian people, and he goes on to say that ‘the New Testament does contain condemnations of the leaders of Jewry that certainly sound like attacks upon the traditional Capricorn – the love of high places, hypocritical formalism in religion, the desecration of holy places in pursuit of gain.’

Carter is right. And what’s more, this attack by Jesus on those aspects of Jewish formalism and hypocrisy, occur in what I have called the Capricorn section of the Gospel of Mark. If you read from chapter 11:27 to chapter 12:44, you will see that Jesus encounters and argues with representatives of each of the leading groups within Judaism, Pharisees, Sadducees, elders, lawyers, and in the Parable of the Tenants he savagely attacks the historic leaders of the nation, who, he says, have murdered God’s representatives while pursuing their own corrupt political ambitions

The section begins, appropriately for Capricorn, with a question about the source of Jesus’ authority, a question which he very cleverly avoids. Then some Pharisees and Herodians ask him whether it is right to pay taxes to Caesar, to the Roman state. What is often overlooked by commentators is the implausibility of this combination of inquisitors. The Pharisees were patriots, committed to reclaiming Palestine from Roman rule. The Herodians were collaborators, supporters of King Herod who was a puppet ruler, put and kept in place by the Roman overlords. It would have been as unlikely for Pharisees to mix freely with Herodians as for the U.D.F. to associate with the I.R.A. However, they appear together in Mark’s narrative in order to put Jesus in an apparently impossible position, because whatever answer he gave would alienate him from one group or the other.

Jesus asks to be shown a denarius, a silver coin. ‘Whose image is this?’ he asks. ‘Caesar’s,’ is the reply. ‘Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.’ This little saying of Jesus’ has been used by Christian people down the centuries to express the demarcation between one’s civic obligations and one’s spiritual duties, a demarcation which needs to be kept in mind by those who would argue for an established church. America recognised this demarcation in the Constitution – engineered largely by the Unitarian sympathiser, Thomas Jefferson – which kept church and state separate, but the creation of the Church of England – and numerous other state churches – was an attempt to combine the two jurisdictions, often with catastrophic results, as religious dissent became tantamount to treason. We Nonconformists have, like Jefferson, always been on the side of disestablishment, since, no matter how seriously we take our civic responsibilities – our duties to Caesar – we recognise that the law of conscience – our duty to God – must always take precedence in any conflict between the two. Two very different approaches to this dilemma can be illustrated by the respective careers of Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas More, successive Chancellors to Henry VIII. More, obeying his Catholic conscience, disagreed with Henry’s divorce and was beheaded for treason. Wolsey never disagreed so radically with the King, but, at the end of his life was heard to lament:

Had I but served my God with half the zeal
I served my king, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.

The King has power; the state has power, and ostensibly, as our children’s story today showed, such power is often experienced more acutely and more directly than is the power of God. But, the ultimate crime against conscience is the deifying of state power, the confusion of jurisdictions which occurs in all kinds of totalitarian regimes, from the right and the left, and two of the twentieth century’s most notorious attempts to do this were made by men born under Capricorn – Mao Tse Tung (born December 26^th, 1893), and Joseph Stalin (born January 2^nd, 1880).

We can readily see how the things of Capricorn feature in this little altercation between Jesus and his enemies, but there is another Capricornian signature here. Jesus specifically asked to see a denarius, and a denarius minted during the reign of Augustus Caesar actually carried a representation of Capricorn on its reverse. The Irish poet Louis McNeice, in his last book, which was about astrology, writes:

The young Augustus, though a hard-headed and calculating person, was so impressed by the glorious future foretold for him… …that he struck a silver coin stamped with Capricorn, the sign under which he was born.

We can assume that Augustus was long dead when Mark was writing, but it is quite possible that this Augustan denarius was still seen as a symbol of imperial power, since Augustus was the first of the Roman emperors, and the one under whom Roman rule in Palestine was consolidated. However, we might also note that the emperor Titus, who was born on 30^th December, also issued a denarius with Capricorn on the reverse in 79 C.E., and, as far as I am aware, these are the only Roman coins with zodiac signs on them.

We seem to have been a little hard on Capricorn this morning, associating it with authority, gloom, coldness, seriousness, industriousness, inflexibility, ambition, and the like – even its virtues seem like vices! – but we have to remember that somebody has to provide structure for society in order to prevent it falling into anarchy, and so we can be thankful that the world contains people who are prepared to shoulder this onerous burden. We just have to make sure that the worst excesses are avoided, and that personal freedom does not become sacrificed to social control.

We have to remember, too, that Capricorn, like its polar opposite Cancer, is a sign of reversal. When the sun enters Capricorn on or around 21^st December, we have the darkest time of the year. But then it starts to get light again, and Jesus, like all representations of solar deities, is said to be born at this time. In fact, according to the ancients, the enlightened human soul ascends to heaven through the gate of Capricorn. The symbolism is clear: at the darkest time of the year, the light is born anew. Kahlil Gibran, St. Theresa of Lisieux, St. Bernadette Soubirous, Paramahansa Yogananda, Albert Schweitzer, Alan Watts, were all born under this sign and these, along with countless other Capricorn natives, have reflected the light of the spirit just as effectively as natives of less sombre signs.

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Call No Man Father

Story: The Blind People and the Elephant

The Buddha and his disciples were staying near the town of Savatthi. One day some of the disciples went into the town dressed in their saffron robes in order to beg alms from the citizens, when they became aware that the place was full of people from numerous conflicting religious traditions, who seemed to be engaged in a constant debate about religious matters. Some were saying, ‘The world is eternal; this is the truth and everything else is delusion.’ Others were arguing exactly the opposite point of view. Some were saying, ‘Body and soul are really just one thing,’ while members of an equally vociferous group were declaring that body and soul were distinct entities. ‘The soul lives on after the death of the body,’ said the representatives of one group. ‘There is no life after death,’ said the representatives of another. The town seemed to be in an interminable state of disputation, men and women abusing each other with words that pierced like swords.

Amazed by the ferocity and intensity of the arguments, the disciples returned to the Buddha and told him of their experiences. After listening to their story, the Buddha said, ‘These people are blind. They don’t know what is real or what is not real. They can’t distinguish truth from falsehood, and it is purely because of this state of ignorance that they spend their time in argument. What’s more, they’ve been at it for a very long time. Then he proceeded to tell his disciples this story.

Many years ago there was a king in this very town of Savatthi who was himself so sickened by the religious disputes that he decided to teach the people a lesson. He ordered a servant to gather together all the town’s blind people and have them touch an elephant, but he was to make sure that each one touched a different part of the elephant’s body.

The servant assembled the blind people in the town square. ‘Here is an elephant,’ he said to them, ‘and I want each of you to touch it.’ To one he presented the head of the elephant, to another the ear, to another the tusk; to others the trunk, the leg, side, tail, tuft of the tail, saying to each one that what he could feel was the elephant. Then he went to the king and said, ‘Your majesty, the elephant has been presented to the blind people.’

‘Now bring the blind people to me,’ ordered the king.

When the blind people were brought before the king, he said to them in turn, ‘Have you studied the elephant?’

‘Yes, I have, your majesty,’ each one replied.

‘Then tell me your conclusions about it.’

The one who had touched the elephant’s head answered, ‘Your majesty, the elephant is just like a pot.’

The one who had felt the ear said, ‘The elephant is just like a basket.’

‘It’s like a sword,’ said the one who had touched the tusk.

The elephant’s side was said to be like a wall;

its leg like a pillar;

its trunk like a pipe;

its tail like a rope;

the tuft of its tail like a brush.

After each one had given his opinion, the others would disagree, shouting, ‘It’s not like that!’

‘Yes, it is!’

‘No, it isn’t!

At the end, the arguments became so bad that the blind people even began to hit each other!

The king was delighted with the scene.

After he had told this story, the Buddha said, ‘The people in the town of Savatthi today are just like the blind men in the story: some of them may have part of the truth, but each of them is arguing as if he has the whole of it. Then the Buddha uttered these memorable words:

O how they fight and wrangle, some who claim

Of monk and priest the honoured name!

For quarrelling, each to his own view they cling.

Such folk see only one side of a thing!

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bout ten days ago I received two consecutive but very contrasting emails. The first was from Michelle Read, thanking the church’s managing committee for donating €500 to the Dublin Buddhist Centre. Michelle is a member of our church, but she has attended yoga and meditation classes at the centre, and she had asked the committee to consider a donation to the centre’s refurbishment fund. Michelle’s email contained the response of Simon, the centre’s representative:

What a lovely surprise!… … How generous of you to suggest to your management committee that they support our work; and how generous of your management committee to agree to give us €500. We really are delighted, more especially as we’re such a small community, not practising within the mainstream religious traditions of Ireland, so to know that what we do is appreciated by someone like yourselves is very gratifying.

The second email contained very different news. It was an extract from an article printed in a Lancashire newspaper about the decision of three churches to boycott an event which is to take place in a Unitarian church.

A war of words has broken out after three leading Christian churches snubbed an event to bring women together in prayer. The Church of England, Baptist, and Methodist churches in Padiham rejected the invitation of the town’s Unitarians for the Women’s Day of Prayer service. Clergy said that they had taken the decision because Unitarians did not believe in the Holy Trinity, that is the father, the son, and the holy spirit.

The Women’s Day of Prayer is a world-wide event, held on the first Friday in March each year, and, in the Lancashire town of Padiham, the churches have taken it in turns to host it. This was all well and good when the conventional churches were hosts, but not this year. ‘The idea of the day is Trinitarian,’ says Rev. Mark Jones of St. Leonard’s Church, ‘and we do not think that it is right for them to hold the service if they do not believe in Trinitarianism.’ He went on to explain that he wouldn’t be attending because ‘Unitarians deny virtually every one of the crucial Christian doctrines.’ Representatives from the Baptist and Methodist churches agreed with him.

The responses on the newspaper’s website are entertaining. One, from ‘Dave’, says, ‘A few hundred years ago, the other Churches would have burned the Unitarians alive for what they believe. I guess just snubbing them is a form of progress.’ Another, from ‘padihamresident’, says, ‘Typical that it is men who are arguing over a day of prayer that is meant to be for women.’ Although one or two letters support the snub, calling it ‘a stand for real Christianity’, the vast majority express incredulity and dismay at the narrow mindedness of the decision.

Ironically, the theme of this year’s service is ‘God’s Wisdom Provides New Understanding.’

But we here in Ireland can’t be too smug about our tolerance levels. Last Tuesday afternoon on RTE Radio 1, there was a phone-in in progress, a debate on whether St. Patrick’s Cathedral – Church of Ireland – should be selling rosary beads in its shop. ‘It’s a betrayal of the principles of the Reformation,’ said the Northern Ireland Protestant man, who seemed to have raised the issue. He was a pleasant enough chap, but he told us that he wouldn’t attend his daughter’s wedding, or the funeral of a relative, if either event were to take place in a Catholic church. He agreed with Ian Paisley that the pope was the antichrist, that Catholicism wasn’t a Christian religion, and that the sole guide to faith and morals was the Bible. ‘Unless we believe on the Lord Jesus Christ we cannot be saved,’ was his message.

The major issue raised, both by the emails and the radio broadcast, is that of authority in religious matters, the very question which Mark deals with in the Capricorn section of his Gospel, where he challenges us to reconsider our attitude to religious authority in whatever guise it is presented to us.

The planet associated by the ancients with Capricorn was Saturn, the planet of boundaries, rules and regulations, duty, and structure. Saturn represents the Father, not as a tender, loving parent, but as a stern, authoritarian potentate who brooks no dissent, who insists on conformity, and who upholds tradition. The paterfamilias in the Roman world had absolute power of life and death over his children, his wife, and his slaves, for the whole of their lives. At the time of the Roman Republic, the paterfamilias had the right to order an unwanted child to be put to death by exposure, and he even had the power to sell his children into slavery. His word was law, and punishment for disobeying it could be swift and merciless.

Capricorn was also associated with the goddess Vesta, the goddess of the hearth. Remember Swan Vestas matches? These are no doubt named after this goddess, but she was not the goddess of light in the sense of ‘enlightenment’ or ‘truth’. Her ‘sacred flame’, kept alight by the Vestal Virgins, was the light of the fireside, the light of tradition. Whenever the Romans established a new colony, fire was brought to it from the central fire in Rome, emphasising continuity, and the extension of authority from the centre outwards. So important was this central fire that the Vestal Virgins were under threat of death should they let it go out.

Tradition was a dominant theme within the Roman Empire, and tradition has been a dominant theme within religion throughout the ages. In this section of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is shown debating with the upholders of the various traditions within Judaism – Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, the Elders, the Lawyers, all those who, in one way or another, mediated the religion of Moses to the people. It should come as no surprise to us to learn that these groups – and others – were constantly in dispute with one another; plus ca change! For example, the Sadducees believed that only the first five books of the Bible – what the Jews call Torah, the Pentateuch, the Law – were authoritative; the Pharisees, on the other hand, while accepting the authority of these books, believed that certain oral and written traditions should also be granted authority. The two positions are not very different from the Protestant and Catholic attitudes to authority today; Scripture alone (like the Protestants) for the Sadducees; Scripture and Tradition (like the Catholics) for the Pharisees.

Jesus’ dispute with the Sadducees concerns life after death. Because there is no unequivocal mention of an afterlife in the first five books of the Bible, the Sadducees did not accept it as part of their belief system. The question they bring to Jesus is this: ‘Suppose a woman marries seven brothers successively, whose wife will she be in the afterlife?’ It seems a silly question to us, but in its context it was not so silly. If a Jewish man died childless, it was incumbent upon his brother to marry his ex sister-in-law and raise up children in the dead man’s name. It was called ‘levirate marriage’, and so, theoretically, it was possible for a woman to marry seven brothers, if each of them had died in turn without producing offspring.

Jesus tells his hearers that such a woman would be the wife of none of the brothers, because in the afterlife there is no marriage, but then he goes on to say that the Sadducees have got it wrong about life after death. ‘When God speaks to Moses from the burning bush,’ says Jesus, ‘he announces himself as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. How can he be the God of these men if they no longer exist?’ It’s a strange argument, to say the least, and not a terribly convincing one, but you can see what Jesus is doing here: he’s taking an episode from the books that the Sadducees considered authoritative and using it to refute their point of view. He does something similar a little later. By quoting a passage from the Psalms, he questions the universally held Jewish belief that the Messiah would be a descendant of King David. I won’t go into detail, but suffice it to say that Jesus’ argument is pretty specious here as well. But – and this is the point – it was meant to be! What the Gospel writer is saying – and what we all know to our cost – is that given enough time and enough ingenuity you can make the Bible – or the Koran, or the Bhagavad Gita – say anything you like! Taken together, these two incidents make a very subtle case against what we might call Bibliolatry – worship of a book, the acceptance of any book as the definitive revelation from God.

Why would God in his infinite wisdom provide a written text as the basis of his self-revelation when every reader knows that all writing is shot through with ambiguity, and the more poetic a piece the more ambiguity it contains? Indeed, poetry relies on ambiguity. The only texts which strive to be free from all possible double meanings are unreadable insurance policies; the ‘heretofores’ and ‘hereinafters’ are there in profusion because insurance brokers know that ambiguity can be costly. But the Bible is poetry, and so it is a veritable cornucopia of double-meaning, contradiction, and implausibility, and I could give you, right now, off the top of my head, a dozen examples of each of these. In fact, Mark’s Gospel itself contains an absolutely glaring error. At the end of chapter 2, Jesus says to his opponents, ‘Haven’t you read what David did when Abiathar was high priest, how he took the temple bread and gave it to his hungry men to eat?’ But Jesus gets it wrong! Abiathar was not the high priest at that time. The high priest was Ahimelech – check it out for yourself in chapter 21 of the First Book of Samuel.

Did Jesus make mistake? Did Mark make a mistake? Unthinkable, say the literalists. Abiathar must have been another name for Ahimelech, or Abiathar must have been the high priest as well, or some such strained reasoning. Maybe it was a copyist’s error, say some. Perhaps, but if we admit that there are copyists’ errors in the text, how can we go on to say that it is infallible? I think the real explanation is quite startling, quite liberating, and quite amusing: this, and similar ‘errors’ in the Bible are deliberately put there, and deliberately left there, in the hope – forlorn as it appears – that readers will not be tempted to treat the whole thing as an oracle.

But, sadly, we have, and we do. Religion has been in the hands of pedants and literalists since the beginning of time, and the world pays for such pedantry with interminable argument and disastrous division.

No book – no matter how exalted, no matter how beautiful, no matter how venerable – can be the sole basis for our religious and moral life. Nor can any institution, any guru, any priest, any minister, any tradition. Matthew’s Gospel – in the parallel section to the passage of Mark that we are considering – puts it very succinctly: ‘Call no man on earth your father,’ it says, which means, give no one the kind of power over you which the paterfamilias exercised in the Roman Empire. Do not allow traditions, authorities, books, religious institutions, university professors and the like to usurp your inalienable right, and your absolute duty, to come to your own conclusions. Books, companions, traditions, teachers, are undeniably useful but they should never become idols to worship, they should never be permitted to do your thinking for you, and they should never be allowed to stand between you and the experience of the divine. Religious figures and institutions are, in the words of the Buddha, simply ‘fingers pointing at the moon’, and they should not be confused with the moon itself. The Buddhists say, ‘If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him!’ meaning, don’t even allow the Buddha to get in your way. You have your own journey to make. The Buddha can be your companion; the Bible can be your guide; Jesus can be your mentor; the church can be your refuge, but none of these can do your thinking, your praying, your acting, your doubting, your praising, or your suffering, for you.

We cannot worship with the Unitarians because they don’t believe in the Trinity,’ says the Anglican rector of Padiham, allowing an inherited, sixteen centuries’ old dogma to stand in the way of human decency, community spirit, female solidarity, and common sense. ‘Unitarians deny virtually every one of the crucial Christian doctrines,’ says the Rev. Jones. No we don’t. We deny nothing. We simply affirm, with St. Paul, that now we ‘see through a glass darkly’, and, since our knowledge of the things of God is partial and relative – like the blind men’s knowledge of the elephant – we must draw our conclusions tentatively. We refuse to be shackled by ancient dogmas, and we refuse to exclude others from fellowship on the basis of tenuous metaphysics. We respect the past and its many wonderful literary and spiritual masterpieces, but we refuse to allow tradition to tyrannize us. If we stand in any tradition, it is that of Socrates who told us that ‘the unexamined life is worthless’, or of Brian in The Life of Brian, who constantly tried to dismiss the sycophantic crowds with the immortal words, ‘Think for yourselves!’