Among the most well-known opening lines of any novel, certainly in the English language, is the opening sentence of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between. I don’t know if anyone here has read that book, I haven’t myself but I’m certainly familiar with how it begins, and I think many other people might be in that same position. Perhaps many people know the opening lines but don’t know where they come from. And for those who don’t know the lines or aren’t sure, the novel begins,
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
Notwithstanding that sentence comes from a novel, a work of fiction, I don’t think there have ever been any truer words written. Things were different in the past, they weren’t the same as they are now, and so things were done differently in the past than they are now. And that’s something we always have to be aware of when we’re studying the past, including the Scriptures.
One very great mistake that people make when they study, or even simply read history, is to view it and judge it from the perspective of their own time. And so they view and judge the people in historical times as though they’d acted in modern times. But we simply can’t do that. Actions are linked to thoughts, and thoughts are always conditioned by the world and society we live in. And so, because the world of the past was different to the world we live in now, people in the past thought differently than we do now, and so they acted differently than we do now, or would do now. I’ll give you an example of what I mean.
It’s not too many years ago that the idea of driving an electrically powered vehicle was a joke. The only people who did that were people who delivered milk and drove milk floats. But, in those not-too-distant days, hardly anyone gave a thought to the environment, global warming had never been mentioned and the only people who cared about climate change were scientists who studied the Ice Ages of tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago, or mass extinctions tens and hundreds of millions of years ago.
But all that’s changed now. In today’s world, people do know about global warming and climate change, and most people do care about the environment. And so, electrically powered vehicles aren’t a joke anymore, in fact, it won’t be too much longer before vehicles powered by petrol or diesel fuel will be the joke, and a very bad joke at that. And how long will it be, I wonder before we start to see people like Nicolaus Otto, Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach, Karl Benz and Rudolf Diesel, people who are credited with inventing the various forms of the internal combustion engine being demonised and start to hear calls for statues and monuments to them to be torn down and for their names to be obliterated from streets and buildings, for their names to be expunged from history for the crimes against the world that these evil men committed? I’m sure that will happen, perhaps in our time, just as I’m sure that, in their own time, these men really believed they were acting in the interests of humanity.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. That’s something we always have to remember, and if we can remember that we’ll understand the past and things that were written in the past so much better. And that’s very important for us, and to us, as Christians because the Scriptures were written in the past and the people we read about in them lived in the past. So, if we’re really going to try to understand them, we need to try and read them on their own terms, rather than through modern eyes and from a 21ts Century perspective. We can adapt them to our own situation after we understand them, we have to do that so that we can apply what they teach us to our own lives. But we have to understand them properly first, before we adapt them.
This is yet one more example that we’re set by the Blessed Virgin Mary. In a number of places in the Scriptures, when unusual or miraculous things happen, we’re told that Mary stored these things up, pondered on them and tried to discern what was going on. We find the same thing in Joseph too, but especially in Mary.
So, as we go through the stories from the archangel Gabriel’s visit to Mary to the time the young Jesus is found by his parents in the Temple in Jerusalem, we read that, when Gabriel spoke to Mary,
“… she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be.”
When he hears that his betrothed is expecting a child, that clearly isn’t his, before he decides what to do, Joseph,
“… being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But … he considered these things …”
And, as he considered these things, an angel appeared and told him that his initial response wasn’t the right one.
Then, after Jesus had been born and the shepherds told their story about the angels and what had been said about the child, we read that
“… all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.”
And then, 12 years later when, after 3 days of searching for him, a young Jesus is eventually found by his distraught parents in the Jerusalem Temple and he simply dismisses their worries and concerns with a response that, in modern parlance, amounts to,
‘What’s your problem? Where else did you think I’d be?’
Instead of the clip round the ear we might expect Jesus to get from his parents, we read that, even though Mary and Joseph
“… did not understand the saying that he spoke to them. … his mother treasured up all these things in her heart.”
When we read these stories, perhaps especially when we read about Mary storing or treasuring these things in her heart, we might get the impression that Mary was kept these things as nice, warm, happy memories. That’s because we think of the heart as the place of love and emotion. But to ancient people, the heart was a person’s centre of thought and reason. We get an inkling of that in the story of Jesus’ Presentation in the Temple when Simeon says to Mary,
“Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.”
So what these stories are really telling us is that Mary, and Joseph too, did some really hard, serious thinking about these things before they decided what to do. Today, we think of the brain, or the mind as the place we do our discerning and pondering don’t we? So when we have a decision to make, we might say,
‘The heart says this; the head says that.’
And what we usually mean by that is that, emotionally, we’re drawn to one course of action, what the heart says, but logically, we’re drawn to a different course of action, what the head says. But even so, we still do use this old-fashioned way of speaking at times. When we’ve got a hard decision to make, we sometimes say we’ve had to do some real heart-searching or soul-searching, before we made a decision, don’t we? We don’t mean that literally because we think about it in our heads. But for the people we read about in the Scriptures, it really was all about searching the heart and the soul for an answer.
So when we read the Scriptures, we do have to try and look at them through the eyes and with the mindset of the people we’re reading about. If we can do that, we can get a much better understanding of what the stories are about, and then we can go about trying to apply the lessons the stories teach us to our own lives.
Once we understand that Mary and Joseph put some serious thought into the dilemmas they were faced with before they came to a decision, that, even after he’d come to a decision, Joseph was still open to other ways and different answers, and that Mary, in particular, didn’t simply go with her heart, her emotions, but did some real heart-searching, some very deep thinking, in these situations, we can see another aspect of the example they set us in these stories. As well as examples of faith and obedience, these stories are also examples of our need to put some serious though into what we do, especially in difficult situations. They’re examples to us that going with our initial instincts isn’t always the right way to go, and that we shouldn’t make knee-jerk responses to problems and difficulties but should always think about what the best, and right thing to do is before we make a decision and act. And for us, as Christians, the best and right thing to do always means the most Christ-like thing to do.
Amen.
You will find the Propers for Holy Family Sunday / Christmas 1 27th December, 2020 here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 