Dr. John Jarick

We congratulate John Jarick on his appointment as Departmental Lecturer in Old Testament for three years from 1st October 2010. His duties will comprise lecturing and teaching in place of Professor John Barton, who is absent on a Leverhulme fellowship for the period. The association of this post is with Regent’s Park College, so John will leave St Stephen’s House after nine years in post at the end of September. We wish him well on his appointment and express our thanks for everything he has contributed to the life of the college during his time here.

-The Revd Canon Dr Robin Ward.

Epiphany IV - Dr John Jarick

Dr John Jarick, Old Testament tutor at St Stephen's House, preached on Jeremiah 1:4-5 & 17-19 at the Solemn Mass for Epiphany IV.

We heard in this morning’s Old Testament reading that “the word of the Lord came” to Jeremiah, telling him that he was to be “a prophet to the nations”. I wonder if you realize just how intriguing that statement is, that the word of the Lord came to a man named Jeremiah.

Well now, any person’s name is of course part of that person’s identity, but in the Old Testament a prophet’s name is also almost inevitably connected with that prophet’s proclamation, in that it usually resonates in some way with the message that the prophet enunciates.

Take the name Isaiah, in Hebrew yeshayah, a name that combines the element of yasha, meaning “to save” or “salvation”, with the divine element yah, designating the God of Israel, “Yahweh” or “the Lord”. The very name Isaiah is thus proclaiming that “the Lord saves” or that “the Lord is salvation”. And so we read in the book of Isaiah such resonant elaborations upon the prophet’s name as “Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid, for the Lord God is my strength and my might, and he has become my salvation. With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation, and you will say in that day, ‘Give thanks to the Lord, call on his name’” [Isaiah 12:2-3]. Or again: “It will be said on that day, ‘Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation’” [25:9]. Or again: “The Lord is our judge, the Lord is our ruler, the Lord is our king; he will save us” [33:22]. Isaiah, Isaiah, Isaiah: the Lord saves, the Lord saves, the Lord saves. Now that’s what I call a word of prophecy — an entire teaching effectively summed up in the message-bearer’s name.

Or take the name Ezekiel, in Hebrew yechezeqel, a name that combines the element of chazaq, meaning “to be strong” or “to strengthen”, with the divine element el, designating the deity as “Elohim” or “God”. The very name Ezekiel is thus proclaiming that “God strengthens” or that “God is strength”. And so we read in the book of Ezekiel such resonant elaborations upon the prophet’s name as “The spirit lifted me up and bore me away…, the hand of the Lord being strong upon me” [Ezekiel 3:14]. Or again: “I will strengthen the arms of the king of Babylon, and put my sword in his hand… I will strengthen the arms of the king of Babylon, but the arms of Pharaoh shall fall; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I put my sword into the hand of the king of Babylon” [30:24-25]. Or again: “‘Ah, you shepherds of Israel, … you have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick or brought back the strayed or sought the lost… I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep …’, says the Lord God. ‘I will seek the lost and bring back the strayed and bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak’” [34:2,4,15-16]. Ezekiel, Ezekiel, Ezekiel: God strengthens, God strengthens, God strengthens. Now there’s another exceptionally fine word of prophecy — the great prophet of the exile is in his very name bringing flesh back to the bones of his broken people.

So let’s now take the name of Jeremiah, whose book sits in our Bibles between the book of the prophet “The Lord saves” — Isaiah — and the book of the prophet “God strengthens” — Ezekiel. Uplifted by the company he keeps, let’s see what his name has to say. That’s Jeremiah, in Hebrew yirmeyah, a name that combines the element of ramah, meaning “to deceive”, with the divine element yah, designating “the Lord”. Mmmm. The name Jeremiah thus appears to be saying that “the Lord deceives”. And indeed we read in the book of Jeremiah such startling outbursts as “Ah, Lord God, how utterly you have deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying ‘It shall be well with you’, even while the sword is at the throat” [Jeremiah 4:10]. Or again: “O Lord, you have deceived me, and I was deceived; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me… For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long” [20:7-8]. Jeremiah, Jeremiah, Jeremiah: the Lord deceives, the Lord deceives, the Lord deceives. Now just what kind of prophetic proclamation is that?

Perhaps this Jeremiah is simply an intensely angry young man, bent out of shape by his experience of being a prophet unloved in his own land and rejected by his own people. We can certainly detect in the reading we heard earlier that what he felt compelled to do in his time and place was a decidedly uncomfortable and friendless pursuit. We listened in to Jeremiah’s representation of the Lord’s call upon him in these words: “But you, gird up your loins; stand up and tell them everything that I command you. Do not break down before them, or I will break you before them. And I for my part have made you today a fortified city, an iron pillar, and a bronze wall, against the whole land — against the kings of Judah, its princes, its priests, and the people of the land. They will fight against you!” [1:17-19]

Well, that’s hardly a recipe for the easy life, is it? And yet Jeremiah might previously have imagined an easy life for himself. He was “the son of Hilkiah, of the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin” [1:1], so he was a privileged youngster in the national priestly system of that time, and he could so easily have gone along with the expectations of that system and benefited from the structures within which his family was embedded. Everybody else was going along with the system: “the kings of Judah, its princes, its priests, and the people of the land” [v. 18] — they were all more than content with the way things were, and they were determined to believe that things would always go on in exactly that way. And here’s the crux of the matter: Jeremiah’s society possessed an unquestioned confidence that God was on their side, smiling down upon them no matter what they did, so long as they kept up the religious rituals that tradition had laid down for them.

And then along comes Jeremiah, who would have been expected to take his place as one of the dutiful performers of the rituals in the temple, and indeed to take his ease as one of the beneficiaries of the system. But instead of quietly parading into the temple complex, he stands at the gates and yells out (in the words of chapter 7), “Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah, you that enter these gates to worship the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: ‘Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place. Do not trust in those words that deceive: “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.” For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place … but here you are, trusting to no avail in words that deceive’” [7:2-8].

Notice that expression, “words that deceive”. The confident assertion of the temple custodians and of the people flocking there that “this is the temple of the Lord” was shown to be a deceptive assertion, in view of their wanton disregard for what the Lord truly desired. They claimed that they were doing the Lord’s will, but they were self-deceived and deceiving others. Only Jeremiah, the man whose own name referred to deception in the name of the Lord, actually spoke the unsettling truth. How’s that for irony? — though not an irony appreciated by “the kings of Judah, its princes, its priests, and the people of the land”. They would rather fight against the divergent voice, and silence it, than question their own comfortable assumptions about God or their own lives. They would rather sleep-walk into a disaster than re-examine their ways. For who, after all, wants to contemplate that they might have been deceived?

Yet Jeremiah persists in this nagging suggestion. In a letter that he writes to the citizens of Jerusalem who had been deported to Babylon, he hammers away on the same theme. “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel”, he writes, “‘Do not let the prophets and the diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them’, says the Lord” [29:8-9]. So there it is again, that unsettling notion that you can be led astray by someone claiming to speak in the name of the Lord.

Does Jeremiah really need to keep coming back so insistently to this same theme? He evidently felt so, that there was a recurrent need to remind his listeners or readers to be alert, and not simply to go along with anything that is said by self-styled leaders or opinion-shapers. The gadfly that is Jeremiah indeed proclaims already in the very name that he bears this need for discernment between ideas that seem persuasive, or appear to be widely and unquestionably held, and ideas that bite and nudge and unsettle. Jeremiah himself did not choose the easy life that his society and its religious traditions had mapped out for him, but instead stood against the consensus of opinion in the kingdom of Judah. It cost him a great deal personally, and there were times when he railed against the Lord who had compelled him to be the counter-voice to the prevailing sound of his day. But he remained true to the calling that we heard repeated in this morning’s reading. His name may seem strange and almost heretical in its prodding of his own people, making them contemplate the notion that they have been deceived in their understanding of God; yet the prophet’s pained voice resonates still for us, calling on us too to re-evaluate where we stand and where we are going.

Actually I’m rather glad that in our Bibles we have the resonant names of Isaiah — “The Lord saves” — and Ezekiel — “God strengthens” — on either side of the book that supplied today’s Old Testament reading, but nonetheless the uncomfortable name of Jeremiah — “the Lord deceives” — has something to say to us as well, to alert us to the need to re-examine the easy assumptions that we make about our lives and our views. And let’s not overlook the last words of today’s reading, which resonate strongly with those other two prophetic names: “‘They shall not prevail against you, for I am with you,’ says the Lord, ‘to deliver you’” [1:19]. Isn’t that another way of saying that “God strengthens” and that “the Lord saves”? Our friend Jeremiah is not in disagreement with our other friends Isaiah and Ezekiel; he just has his own unsettling angle on things, and maybe it’s no bad thing for us to be unsettled from time to time.

“The word of the Lord came to [a man named] Jeremiah.” Now there’s a riddle to reckon with.

Second before Advent - Dr John Jarick

Dr John Jarick, tutor in Old Testament at St Stephen's House, preached this sermon at Pusey House, Oxford.

A few years ago, in a series of art galleries around the world, there was a touring exhibition of the work of the Japanese artist On Kawara. The exhibition included two sets of books, entitled One Million Years (Past) and One Million Years (Future). I saw the display early in its tour, when it was at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, and I was struck, so to speak, by those particular volumes. Let me try to describe them to you.

Imagine, if you will, the set of digits that make up the figure 2001, and that accordingly symbolize one year, the first of our present millennium. Now imagine that figure followed by 2002, and then 2003, and then 2004, and so on. Let’s have these figures arranged in sequence across a large page, large enough for us to have ten years side by side, from 2001 to 2010. Then, underneath that line of figures which collectively represent a decade, let’s have another line that represents a further decade by means of the figures from 2011 to 2020, and then another line and so on until we have ten such lines of ten years each, at which point let’s leave one blank line — as a kind of paragraph spacing — in order that the century of dates that we’ve listed from 2001 to 2100 might be clearly delineated. After that visually-useful blank line we can move on through the years of the next century, and so on for the full length of the page, in all fifty lines of figures set out in five paragraphs of ten lines each, and all in ten columns. In that way, we have neatly listed on one page all the years from 2001 to 2500, a full five centuries of year-dates.

Good. But let’s not stop there. Let’s follow that page with one that sets out in the same neat arrangement all the prospective years from 2501 to 3000. In fact, let’s have those two pages facing each other in a double-page spread, and we can have an entire millennium of years spread out before us. And let’s carry on in the same way, with the potential years set out page after page, half-millennium after half-millennium, until we’ve reached one million years into the future, spread out over two thousand pages. If you can imagine all that, then you have imagined On Kawara’s work, One Million Years (Future), and you can similarly conceptualize his companion work, One Million Years (Past), which applies the same process to year-dates of the past, working its way back through the centuries to just two millennia short of the year One Million BC.

Well, it’s a thought-provoking experience to see such a list of years, even to imagine them. The artist out of whose initial imagination those books arose, On Kawara, has long been fascinated by the notion of the inexorable passing of time, and one wonders how much time it must have taken him to produce those pages and pages of time-symbols. But as you contemplate the seemingly endless columns of year-dates, you realize that in those terms your own life consists of only a few lines; that whole empires rose and fell within a single page; that all of recorded human history spans no more than a dozen or so pages. As the art critic Richard Dorment put it, “Suddenly, you have a tiny glimpse of the awesome expanse of time, a sense of your own brief flicker of life across a medium in which 20,000 years is but one chapter”.

Now some people might find that sort of contemplation rather unsettling. We perhaps prefer to think of ourselves as bestriding our times somewhat more majestically than a wide-angle lens might reveal to be the case. And for that matter it’s not always psychologically helpful for us to dwell on just how infinitesimal we might be in the grand scheme of things. But there are times when stepping out of the immediate time-frame in which we are caught up, and contemplating matters from what might be called a higher perspective, is very worthwhile indeed, and from time to time the Church in its wisdom invites us to step for a moment into a different kind of time-frame.

I’m referring to the fact that today’s Old Testament reading is taken from the book of Daniel, a book that has much to say about time, and yet its time-talk can seem almost incomprehensible to us. The creators of the book of Daniel sought to step out of their immediate time-frame, with their experiences of anguish and oppression, and to envision a broader sweep of virtually cosmic history. They tried to look beyond the moments of time in which they were buffeted and frustrated, to cast their eyes over the parapets towards what they call variously “the appointed time of the end” or “the decreed end” or simply “the time of the end”. On occasions they get caught up in speculation about supposedly precise lengths of time, speaking at one place of a period of “2,300 evenings and mornings”, or at another place of a period of “70 weeks”, or at yet another of a period of “1,290 days”, although they immediately change their minds about the last figure and recalibrate it as “1,335 days” instead, all of which has provided seemingly fertile ground for naïve souls ever since to keep trying to calculate and recalculate “the time of the end” from the figures in the book of Daniel (combined, of course, with selected figures from the book of Revelation). But the overall time-talk of Daniel, stated near the beginning and again near the end of the catalogue of visions, is thoroughly imprecise and enigmatic: How long shall the evil empire stand? “For a time, times, and half a time.” How long shall it be until the end of the wonders partly spoken of in today’s reading? “For a time, times, and half a time.”

Right, so that’s clear, then. The compilers of the book of Daniel didn’t know, any more than you or I do, the time of the end. They couldn’t even be sure how long they were to be caught up in the particular epoch of time in which they found themselves. They knew that they were living in a time of incessant warfare, a time when the latest set of imperial authorities that were constantly angling for control of the land of Judah had abolished the normal worship services at the temple in Jerusalem and had erected an offensive pagan statue at that very site. In the thick of that experience, it must have seemed to some that the clouds would never lift. But for others, our Daniel scribes among them, the eye of faith and hope, though it cannot know the precise timings even when it yearns to know them, does see something of a bigger time-scale than the moment-by-moment drudgery and anguish that can so easily get on top of us when the world seems hell-bent on a godless path. And for one glorious moment, those scribes broke right out of all our normally-understood time-frames when they proclaimed:

“At that time Michael, the great prince, the protector of your people, shall arise. There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.” [Daniel 12:1-3]

Now that’s what I call an earth-shattering vision. It steps right outside of the box of general Old Testament thinking, and puts forward for the first time the idea of resurrection, an idea that earlier parts of the Hebrew scriptures hadn’t dared to canvas but an idea whose time had come. Pharisees and Sadducees might disagree about it later, but no one could ignore it any longer. It was Daniel chapter 12 verse 2 that established the concept of resurrection within biblical religion, both Jewish and Christian, and in hearing it read here today we too step for a moment outside of our normal time coordinates.

Just for a moment, though. The Church doesn’t want us to get caught up in fruitless end-time speculation, and so it devotes only three minutes every three years to reading from the book of Daniel in Sunday worship, about a minute today and about two minutes next Sunday. Then we’ll close Daniel for another three years — the same amount of time, incidentally, that it took the exhibition of the work of On Kawara to move from gallery to gallery on its three-year circuit of the world.

We don’t know how many three-year cycles will pass before the end comes. Perhaps it will be infinitely more than the million years that Kawara has set down on paper in the pages of his work One Million Years (Future), or perhaps it will be appreciably less than that. “The End” in any grand sense certainly seems to have been considerably longer than Daniel’s contemporaries could have imagined that “a time, times, and half a time” could last, just as there have been far more “times of anguish” for Daniel’s people and for the world in general than they could have predicted. But yet the final words of the book of Daniel are surely words that we can still take to heart so many years after they were written and no matter how many years may yet remain: “Happy are those who persevere.... You shall rise for your reward at the end of days.”

At that time, according to today’s reading, “Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky”. May we too be wise, and in due time we too will shine brightly.

Easter VI - Dr John Jarick

“The Lord has shown his salvation to all the nations” [Response to Psalm 98 (97) in the Grail Psalter]. Today’s psalm is a splendidly resonant hymn of praise and thanksgiving, an exuberant proclamation of God’s presence in a world that is invited to respond and reinvigorate itself. “Sing a new song to the Lord”, the psalmist calls to us, as he reminds us of the “truth and love” that God has shown to “the house of Israel”.

But in fact we’ve only heard the half of it so far, in that the setting we used this morning was of the first four verses of the psalm, set as three stanzas of English verse in the Grail Psalter. As good as that half is by itself, and fully worthy of comment from an Old Testament Tutor, I trust that you will forgive me if, after sharing some thoughts on those verses with you, I also go on to make some comments on the second half of the psalm as well, the remaining five verses of that splendid composition, which is similarly set as three stanzas of English verse in the Grail Psalter. You might say that today’s sermon is a game of two halves — indeed, that may be regarded as quite appropriate on the weekend in which the Premier League football title was won, but of course the sentiments expressed in today’s song of salvation are far more profound, much more a matter of life and death for the earth, than the latest battle at Old Trafford.

Well, then, the first half. Let me remind you of what we heard earlier, when those opening verses of the psalm were sung:

Sing a new song to the Lord,
for he has worked wonders.

His right hand and his holy arm
have brought salvation.

The Lord has made known his salvation;
has shown his justice to the nations.

He has remembered his truth and love
for the house of Israel.

All the ends of the earth have seen
the salvation of our God.

Shout to the Lord, all the earth,
ring out your joy.

Those students of this House who were recently examined on the book of Isaiah will be able to pinpoint the historical circumstances that plausibly first gave rise to the singing of this particular kind of song in honour of the God proclaimed by the prophets and teachers of ancient Israel. It was that great prophet of the end-of-exile, whose soaring poetic utterances are recorded in the second section of the book of Isaiah, who first sang the new song of salvation to a people who were languishing in exile from the Holy Land, no longer able to sing the old formerly-confident songs of Zion as they sat and wept by the rivers of Babylon. Among such downtrodden, anything-but-exuberant people, the so-called ‘Second Isaiah’ taught new songs, with words such as these:

See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them. Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise from the end of the earth! … Listen! Your sentinels lift up their voices, together they sing for joy; for in plain sight they see the return of the Lord to Zion. Break forth together into singing, you ruins of Jerusalem; for the Lord has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem. The Lord has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God

[Isaiah 42:9-10a; 52:8-10].

There were those among the exiles who had thought that God had abandoned them; that the promises once made to the ancestors of Israel — Abraham and Isaac and Jacob — were not worth the ancient scrolls they were written on; that the grand old Song of Moses — “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea” [Exodus 15:1] — was null and void after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the deportation of the people from the promised land. But songs of lament changed to songs of joy when the redemption of Jerusalem did indeed come about, with the dramatic demise of the Babylonian superpower and the return of the exiles to rebuild the temple that had lain in ruins for close to a hundred years. Those songs of the ‘Second Isaiah’ certainly resounded in the hearts of the returnees, and it is no surprise to see them reflected also in such psalms as today’s Psalm 98. To the psalmist too, the sudden end of the Babylonian captivity manifested anew the saving nature of Israel’s God: “The Lord has made known his salvation, has shown his justice to the nations; he has remembered his truth and love for the house of Israel.”

With a song like this, the worshippers in the reconstituted temple could renew the celebration of the most time-honoured experience of Israel, the exodus from slavery in Egypt, through the addition of the newer experience of liberation, out from the darkness of that later imperial juggernaut of Babylon. And we latter-day singers can add more resonance to the song as well, as we celebrate not only those foundational divine acts in the experience of Israel, but also the new experience of God that came in the person of Jesus.

But let me hold back for the moment from saying more about that, because I promised you a sermon of two halves, and before I develop further comments, I need to put before you the second half of today’s psalm.

This, then, is Psalm 98, Part 2:

Sing psalms to the Lord with the harp,
with the sound of music.

With trumpets and the sound of the horn
acclaim the King, the Lord.

Let the sea and all within it, thunder;
the world, and all its peoples.

Let the rivers clap their hands
and the hills ring out their joy

at the presence of the Lord: for he comes,
he comes to rule the earth.

He will rule the world with justice
and the peoples with fairness.

Well, students of the Old Testament can get rather excited about the first of those stanzas, with its itemization of three particular musical instruments that were evidently deployed in the worship life of the ancient temple: the intriguing triplet of the kinnor (a harp or lyre), the chatsotsrah (a metallic trumpet), and the shofar (a ram’s horn). But for myself, who could never successfully play a musical instrument of any kind, I find the middle stanza much more exciting, with its picture of thundering seas, hand-clapping rivers, and hills being alive with the sound of music.

This part of the psalm also has resonances with the prophetic words of ‘Second Isaiah’, whose songs similarly called upon the natural world to join in the celebratory shout: “Let the sea roar and all that fills it, the coastlands and their inhabitants… Sing, O heavens, for the Lord has done it; shout, O depths of the earth; break forth into singing, O mountains, O forest, and every tree in it! For the Lord has redeemed Jacob, and will be glorified in Israel” [Isaiah 42:10b; 44:23].

The joy of the prophet, and of the psalmist, is infectious. It’s simply not enough to have the temple musicians strumming their harps and blowing their trumpets and sounding their shofars to acclaim the Lord. All of nature is seen as echoing back the exuberance of the human protagonists, a great harmony — or is it a glorious cacophony? — of praises sung to the glory of God.

This wider chorus is in fact too big to be contained only within Israel. The experiences of Israel led them to discern that the Creator is also a Redeemer and a Sustainer, but the song that those ancient prophets and psalmists have taught to the world finds further resonances in ways that the ancient tradents might barely have imagined. I intimated earlier that I wanted to say something about how we latter-day singers of the Lord’s song celebrate not only those momentous events of the deliverance of the ancient Israelites from Egypt and from Babylon, but also the opening up of the proclamation of liberation to the whole world through the mission of Jesus. And to that end, I would like to bring to mind the adaptation of Psalm 98 that was made three hundred years ago by the great English hymn-writer Isaac Watts. He phrased it this way:

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare him room,
And heaven and nature sing.

That hymn goes on, as does our psalm, to describe a situation in which not only do humans employ songs to express their gladness at the Lord’s coming, but also “fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains repeat the sounding joy”. And the concluding verse proclaims that:

He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of his righteousness
And wonders of his love.

Yes indeed, as Psalm 98 originally stated it, “The Lord has shown his salvation to all the nations”. The use of this psalm on Christmas Day, in its own guise in many liturgies as well as in the guise of Isaac Watts’ great hymn in countless services, and the further use of this psalm in the Easter Vigil, and again today in the season of Easter as we move towards the commemoration of the ascension and of Pentecost, is one of the Church’s ways of indicating that the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus belongs with the exodus from Egypt and the return from exile in Babylon as a sure sign, indeed the surest sign, of God’s desire and power to save.

So it is that we “sing a new song to the Lord, for he has worked wonders; his right hand and his holy arm have brought salvation.”

Last Sunday after Trinity - Dr John Jarick

You may have heard it said that the meaning of life is 42. That strange, mathematically-precise but philosophically-dubious claim was made in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in its various incarnations as a radio programme, a book, a television series, and most recently a Hollywood movie, all arising from the comic genius of writer Douglas Adams. His work contained many gems, and not least among them was the fundamental piece of advice to all creatures travelling on life’s journey: “Don’t panic!” Ever since I saw those words, emblazoned in large red letters on the back of a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’ve thought they embodied very sensible advice indeed, and I’ve endeavoured to follow that advice at various stages of my own journey, such as when I sat my Bachelor of Theology examinations back in Australia and I encountered some unforeseen questions about certain matters I hadn’t revised; or when I tried my hand for the first time at driving on the narrow, twisting roads of Britain; or when the Senior Tutor of St Stephen’s House asked me to double my teaching load for this term. At all such times a policy of “Don’t panic!” is a prudent one to follow, and I’m grateful to Douglas Adams for having drawn it to my attention in the way that he did with his Hitchhiker’s Guide.

But when it comes to the matter of the number 42, which The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy claims as the amusing answer to the great question about life, the universe, and everything, I must beg to differ. The meaning of life is not to be found in the number 42, but in the number 206. Yes, 206. Let me explain.

The Bible begins with a special and unique collection of five books that have traditionally been called the Torah, or the Pentateuch, or the Books of the Law. They are the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Together they constitute the fundamental teaching of the Hebrew religion, the inexhaustible source from which the rest of scripture and beyond that the whole of Jewish and Christian tradition has sprung. They tell of the relationship between the human world and the divine sphere, of God’s intense yearning to be with us and among us, to woo us and liberate us, to set before us possibilities and prospects that we could never dream of if left entirely to our own devices. And as part of that encouragement for us to be more than simply self-centred individuals pursuing our own little petty and unsatisfying agendas, these books of the Pentateuch present for our consideration a number of commandments or precepts, advice on how we might conduct ourselves in this tricky business we call life.

Now how many commandments do you suppose there are? Most people would probably say that there are Ten Commandments, and that is what Christian tradition has generally said, drawing upon a twofold setting-out of ten particular precepts in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. As it happens, not everyone agrees on precisely which ten precepts are to be included — Catholic and Lutheran catechisms have two commandments prohibiting coveting but no commandment prohibiting the manufacture and worshipping of idols, while certain other churches include an injunction against such idol practices and make do with just one anti-coveting clause — but there is a general agreement that 10 is a good figure for commandments. It certainly seems an intuitive figure for ten-fingered creatures like ourselves, but in fact the total number of commandments in the biblical Books of the Law is 613.

613 commandments are an awful lot to have to come to terms with, wouldn’t you think? And actually, if truth be told, some of them are probably not particularly edifying, or at least not so relevant any longer in the modern world, such as the 46th commandment, “You shall bring from your settlements in the land two loaves of bread as an elevation-offering” [Leviticus 23:17], or the 291st commandment, “You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard” [19:27]. I’m using, by the way, the traditional rabbinic numbering of the commandments. And I want to say that many of the 613 commandments to be found in the first five books of the Bible are in fact abidingly relevant and essential, such as the 211th commandment (better known to many of us as either the 4th or the 5th commandment in the more familiar reckoning of the Top Ten), “You shall honour your father and your mother” [19:3], or the 177th commandment (which doesn’t make it into the Top Ten but is still rather important), “You shall not render an unjust judgment” [19:15].

All of the commandments I’ve just quoted are to be found in the book of Leviticus. That particular book isn’t among many people’s favourite reading, and perhaps you groaned a little when you noticed that this morning’s first reading was from Leviticus. But within that reading was the 206th commandment, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”, to be found in Leviticus 19:18. The compilers of the lectionary want us to notice that particular commandment, since they’ve taken out of the reading some other rather good commandments that come in between verses 2 and 15 — such as an injunction against manufacturing and worshipping idols (just what is it about that commandment that makes us want to cut it out all the time?) — and they also stop the reading from going on to distract us with other matters — such as the prohibition in the very next verse against wearing a garment made of two materials (who among us can honestly say that we’ve never worn a garment made of two materials?).

Commandment Number 206 is at first glance almost hidden within this overload of 613 commandments. But stop. Coming in at Leviticus 19:18, it’s situated close to the very centre of the book of Leviticus, the book which itself lies at the centre of the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy). In other words, at the heart of every Torah scroll is this 206th commandment, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”. The whole law focuses in on this one precept; commandment after commandment coming before or after it can be summarized in this one. Everything else flows out from this point, and all the complicated injunctions are attempts at fleshing out this principle. Such at least was the teaching of the great Rabbi Akiva, who taught that the fundamental principle of the entire Law of God was to be found in this one brief saying. And it was the teaching too of the apostle Paul, who wrote in his letter to the Romans that “the commandments, ‘you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet’, and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: ‘love your neighbour as yourself’” [Romans 13:9]. Or again in the letter to the Galatians, it’s said that “the whole law is summed up in [that] single commandment” [Galatians 5:14]. Everything, then, boils down to Commandment Number 206.

Perhaps you’re wondering, since I mentioned earlier that a popular number associated with the meaning of life is the number 42, what the 42nd commandment might be. Well, it happens to be this: “You shall offer, at the beginning of each month, a burnt-offering to the Lord, consisting of two young bulls, one ram, and seven male lambs a year old without blemish, with three-tenths of an ephah of choice flour mixed with oil as a grain-offering for each bull, and two-tenths of choice flour mixed with oil as a grain offering for the ram, and one-tenth of choice flour mixed with oil as a grain-offering for every lamb” [Numbers 28.11-13]. It’s simply not in the same category as “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”, is it? If you don’t love your neighbour, if you don’t care about the people beside you or the ones with whom you share this life and this world, then any fastidiousness you may have about offering burnt offerings at the beginning of every month — or whatever other pious patterns you follow to the letter — will be meaningless. And so I say again that it’s not the number 42, but the number 206, that expresses the meaning of life. We’re all fellow-pilgrims with others on this journey of life, and meaning is to be found in living for others rather than simply for ourselves. That’s the profound truth at the heart of the Old Testament laws.

But my little equation wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention the number 3, for the third commandment in the traditional listing of all 613 commandments (not to be confused with the third commandment in the traditional lists of Ten Command­ments) is this: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” [Deuteronomy 6:5]. That’s an essential part of the equation, for without it we might be very good humanitarians in our concern for our fellow human beings, but we would still not have grasped the full meaning of it all, that we are in fact creatures under God, and that we’re incomplete without a relationship with our creator and redeemer and sustainer. So it is that we heard in the Gospel reading today [Matthew 22:34-46] that Jesus coupled that saying from Leviticus about loving your neighbour with the saying from Deuteronomy about loving the Lord your God. Love towards one’s neighbour is an expression of love for God as surely and inextricably as love for God demands love for the neighbour. “We love because he first loved us”, says the first letter of John. “Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who don’t love a brother or sister whom they’ve seen, cannot love God whom they haven’t seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also” [1 John 4:19-21].

How many commandments are there? 613? 10? Essentially, there are two, and essentially those two are one: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might”; and “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” [Matthew 22:40]. Amen.