The Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, 3 October 2021
Eldroth, Clapham
You may have heard the news that Jeff Bezos, executive chairman of Amazon whose personal wealth exceeds 200 billion dollars, having already tried space travel, has now decided to pour millions into a company seeking the secret to eternal life. Like other tech multi-billionaires Larry Page and Peter Thiel, Bezos is convinced that 'death is a problem that can be solved'. He’s been reading Richard Dawkins who in The Blind Watchmaker in 1986 wrote that 'Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself – when it dies – the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. We end up the same temperature as our surroundings.' Ashes to ashes, dust to dust is just not acceptable to these men. Having mastered life, or so it seems, now they just want to master death. [1]
And before this critique of mastery gets too gendered, let us bring to mind the American socialite Jocelyn Wildenstein and her penchant for extensive cosmetic surgery - mastering her looks - through which she has achieved her greatest desire; for she now looks like a cat. And Gwyneth Paltrow who through her lifestyle brand Goop, recommends products for increasing one’s ‘wellness’ but which are often discredited for being unaffordable to the ordinary woman, based on pseudoscience and either useless in practice or potentially harmful, such as the coffee enema. [2]
And before this critique of our desire to master our world becomes a mockery of the ultra-rich, let us acknowledge how we all feel this urge: this desire to get on top of our health which drives the keep-fit culture and causes us to fill our medicine shelves with multivitamins; this desire to get on top of our work by putting in ever-longer hours, losing sleep over it, through fear of failure and at risk of ruining our personal relationships; and this desire to be immortal - not in the way that Jeff Bezos wants to, by actually reversing his physical age, but by slapping on Wrinkle Repair Regenerating Cream; or more profoundly, by striving to be admired by our peers and revered by our children, worrying about leaving them something memorable to put on our gravestone. [3]
Now, you might be thinking, hang on, there are good reasons why we want to master our world, to get on top of our lives. Because we all need to find ways to feel safe and secure in this world, to have good relationships, to feel accomplished, to realise our full potential - to live life in its fullness, as the gospel says. None of these desires are wrong, they’re fundamental universal human needs. [4]
And with me, you may also be thinking, actually I’m very grateful to those people who have striven to master an aspect of themselves, even if that has been at the exclusion of everything else. I’m very grateful to the youthful wonder Emma Raducanu for mastering her sport, for what delight this tremendous tennis player has brought to our world this autumn. [5] I’m actually grateful to Jeff Bezos for mastering the business of home delivery for I am one of the 200 million Amazon Prime subscribers, and I’m not sure I could now - I’d find it very hard to be - without it.
However, we may find the idea of ‘mastery’ uncomfortable. And the reason for this is that all too often the means we have used to exercise mastery have been destructive of others in the human and non-human world, and ultimately diminishing of ourselves.
Taking Jeff Bezos again, his mastery of business is remarkable for those who measure success in dollars: his personal fortune recently increased in just one day by thirty times the personal fortune of The Queen. But he builds Amazon on ruthless competitive practices, low pay and poor working conditions for its workers and blatant tax avoidance. In the views of small competitors elbowed out of existence, employees punished for organising themselves, tax reformers and everyone who’s ever been sold a dud by Amazon online, Bezos is already being immortalised in terms he probably would not choose for himself. [6]
He is not alone, for as a race humankind has always tried mastering life through domination and control. In every generation this has played out in unequal relationships between men and women, in patriarchal cultures enforcing manipulation and violence. Cultures which have created men like PC Wayne Couzens and the at-least 80 other men who have killed women in the UK since the murder of Sarah Everard. [7]
In more recent generations we have tried mastering the earth through industrialisation and technology. The result has been a life of unprecedented ease and luxury in the wealthier parts of the world; but the consequences we now witness are a scorched dead earth, overheating seas and increasing numbers of climate refugees.
But hold on again, you may be thinking, doesn’t the book of Genesis tell us that we are masters of the earth, shouldn’t we embrace this truth rather than avoid it because we find it uncomfortable? You may have heard me speak on this before, accepting that our scriptures were written from within a male dominated society, but arguing that a close look at Genesis underlines that it wasn’t Adam who created woman, it was God; it reveals that the word we translate as ‘helper’ is actually closer in meaning to ‘counterpart’, suggesting that the man-woman relationship is about ‘identity, mutuality, and equality’. [8] And increasingly biblical scholarship is moving us away from the idea that humankind must aggressively enforce our domination of the earth, towards a view that we should practice our stewardship of the earth in reverence and respect for every other living being we share it with. In the words of Edward Echlin, quoted in James Jones’ book Jesus and the Earth,
When we question the human place, our role and duties within the earth community, we discover that, as his image, we are God’s responsible representatives within the earth community. Far from being vertically above the creatures, as Aristotle, the Stoics, and many Christian writers would have us, we are within the created community. [9]
The mystery of mastery is that it is achieved through humility. This is the underlying message of Genesis’ creation stories in which man and woman are tasked with partnering with God in the good work of caring for the earth, a message repeated in Jesus’ teaching on divorce, when he affirms that in marriage men and women are joined together ‘as one flesh’, co-creators in life.
The mystery of mastery is that it is achieved through humility. This is why Jesus counters his disciples’ assumptions in their world of adult dominance by teaching that ‘whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’
Jesus also said that ‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’ [10] The mystery of mastery is that we are given it by God - but that we must practice it humbly, justly, for the good of all with whom we share this life on God’s good earth.
Notes
[1] Marina Hyde, Jeff Bezos is on a quest for eternal life – back on Earth, we’re searching for Amazon’s taxes. Guardian, 10 September 2021; Mike Lewis, Here’s why Jeff Bezos quoted a 1986 book about human evolution in his shareholders letter. GeekWire, 15 April 2021; Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p.10.
[2] Wikipedia: Jocelyn Wildenstein; Wikipedia: Goop (company).
[3] Neutrogena Rapid Wrinkle Repair® Regenerating Anti-Wrinkle Retinol Cream + Hyaluronic Acid. ‘Really works in a week!’ - Eisleymac.
[4] Wikipedia: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; John 10.10.
[5] Amy Lofthouse, Emma Raducanu wins US Open by beating Leylah Fernandez for maiden Grand Slam. BBC Sport, 11 September 2021.
[6] Rupert Neate, Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, added £10bn to his fortune in just one day. Guardian, 21 July 2020; Wikipedia: Amazon (company); Wikipedia: Criticism of Amazon.
[7] Marina Hyde, All women know they are prey – and that no one with any authority seems to care. Guardian, 1 October 2021; Megan Nolan, The police don’t see Wayne Couzens as one of them. That’s the problem. New Statesman, 1 October 2021.
[8] See my Adam and Eve: together, overcoming loneliness, 24 February 2019
[9] Edward Echlin, The Franciscan, 15.2, May 2003, quoted in James Jones, Jesus and the Earth, p.48.
[10] Luke 14.11; Matthew 23.12.
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