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‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery’.

In that most powerful of stories from the Old Testament, Job looks at the world, reflects on life and on his own suffering and misfortune, rightly rejects the platitudinous explanations of his so-called comforters, and with ruthless honesty says ‘This is how it is’.

Mercifully, misery is not the only ingredient in life for most people, but for most people on our planet throughout history and still today, life is hard. And even for sophisticated, enlightened, problem-solving people like us, our internal, emotional landscape is as filled with contradictions and struggles as is the world around us. Whether it’s soldiers and civilians being blown up in once-beautiful middle eastern cities, knife attacks on our streets, dissension within the Anglican Church, political arguments about education and exam results, or more domestic problems with our marriage partners, colleagues or neighbours, it is a picture of ‘conflicts and fears, within, without’.

Thus it has always been. Trouble seems to be the default position for much of human life. In the Psalms, there are scores of references to the sea of troubles out of which the faithful call on God. God only can save them. ‘God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble’.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta once said ‘I know that God won't give me more trouble than I can handle ... but sometimes I wish he wouldn't trust me so much."

And one of the things that gives the Gospel story of Jesus such credibility is that Jesus lives in recognisably the same world as we do - full of arguments and misunderstandings, even with his family and closest friends, full of tears and sorrow, self-doubt, betrayal and injustice and lonely death.

And his teaching is realistic too; it acknowledges where we are starting from - he doesn’t waste his breath saying ‘Don’t have enemies’, he takes for granted that we will, but says ‘Love them’. He doesn’t pretend that we live in a world of sweetness and light, it’s not peace-keepers he calls blessed - people who already live the dream, but peace-makers, people still in the war-zone.

In the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Gospel offers us the only truly satisfactory way of dealing with conflict. It says you conquer death by dying. It says you save your life by having it taken away. It is radical, subversive and effective but far too difficult for all but the saintly few. For most of us, it’s far too late to start living like that. We’re too well-protected - we’ve made sure of that. Our habits of self-preservation are too ingrained and run too deep. ‘Self’ matters just too much. That is our tragedy. We’re like the rich young man over whom Jesus weeps - we know what we have to do, we’d like to but we just can’t do it. When we encounter confrontation our irrepressible reflex is to fight back, and so the cycle turns. As the man (Abraham Maslow) said, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."

Today’s readings however offer us flawed and fearful conflict-junkies some consolation, some strategies to fall back on as we live with our tragic condition.

Solomon’s dramatic proposal - literally to split the child between the warring women - unleashes in the true mother something deeper than calculation or self-interest - an instinct of love for her child. In that moment, the child mattered more to her than her own desire. Maybe in the heat of our battles and arguments, some deep-seated impulse of love can save us from the consequences of our self-centredness - a voice within us that tells us that there is something more important at stake here than ME. It may be that the other person’s needs are greater, it may be that the relationship itself is worth preserving, it may be that we can no longer handle the acidic corrosion and just want to get off the treadmill of mutual recrimination. And it may feel like compromise or withdrawal or surrender - but if this is the true instinct of selfless love then some greater good will be served. That goes for warring tribes, bishops at Lambeth, and me and my colleagues, wife and kids.

A different strategy is offered by our reading from Acts. The apostles Peter and John are engaged in a fantastic public row with the Jewish priests. The captain of the guard and the Temple police get involved and Peter and John are arrested, and next day put on trial before the rulers, elders and scribes, with Annas the high priest and the whole high-priestly family present. All this fuss is because Peter and John had healed a middle-aged crippled beggar.

And they are arguing not about whether the man is healed or not, but about in whose name and by whose power the apostles have healed him. It is an interesting theological debate - oddly familiar - about authority in the Church and who holds the keys to salvation - and it’s not a trivial argument - other apostles were stoned or executed for less. There’s a lot at stake when these questions are raised. Voices and temperatures and blood-pressures rise, and nobody says ‘Excuse me, but isn’t the important thing here the fact that this man standing here can walk again, is a person again?’ How easy it is for the human reality at the centre of our arguments to be lost as we spiral away into abstractions. Nationalism, immigration and asylum, homelessness, law and order, women bishops, sexual preference - these interesting and passionate arguments become very dangerous when they become detached from the human realities they refer to. Re-anchoring the big theoretical arguments into particular human experience - ‘let’s not talk about black people, let’s talk about George whom we all know’; ‘let’s not argue about women priests in theory, let’s talk about Anna and Jane’. Doing it that way may not answer the big philosophical abstract questions, but it might put them back into proportion and stop us killing one another.

I said earlier that handling conflict in Jesus’ subversive way is probably beyond us. History suggests that is so, but I hope it isn’t completely true. In fact these two approaches proposed by our readings today are parts of the way of the Cross: letting some deep instinct of love for the other drown out our own selfish needs, like the true mother, is part of it. Getting our arguments about who’s right and wrong back into perspective by anchoring them back to human realities - ‘the man has been healed’ - is also part of it.

Maybe by adopting and practising those two lesser strategies - and laying aside the hammer - we might find within ourselves - even as troubles persist and conflicts surround us - a capacity for the more radical love of the God who saves us from ourselves by his own self-giving.
 

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