Truth & its Side-effects

There are four qualified doctors in the Ampleforth community. One of them once told me that the only drugs without side-effects were drugs that had no effects at all! The more powerful the drug, the more likely its possible side-effects will be spectacular, e.g. steroids.

Ideas are the same, and the bigger the truth, the bigger the turmoil that will surround it. This is why, whenever the gospel is preached with integrity and courage, there are martyrs. This is why Jesus himself, inevitably would have to become a victim of the turbulence that his mission was bound to generate. But he talks more of the distress about wanting the mission to be completed, than about the distress the Cross will cause. In fact, we can even hear tones of peace and joy when he  says, as death finally finds him, “It is accomplished!”

He promised his disciples that in the world they would have trouble. He predicted that they would be dragged before kings and councils for his sake. But he also told them not to be afraid, since he himself had overcome the world. Here, however, he focuses not on the turbulence the gospel would make between believers and civil authority, but on the upset caused between people who are close to each other. Families even, would be divided over a truth that is so powerful that Jesus describes it as like a fire on the earth.

If we have begun to think that Christianity is just about being universally nice and decent and no bother to anyone. If we have begun to excuse ourselves by imagining that the faith is a private, domestic matter, causing no ripples, then Jesus asks us to look to ourselves. There is a charming moment in Middlemarch, by George Eliot, when someone faints, and a dim-witted friend offers her smelling salts to assist bringing her round, recommending these smelling salts particularly because they have lost the terrible smell that some of them have!

Our Lord warned us not to become salt without flavour. Today it is as if he adds that Christians whose witness never creates ripples have probably lost their point too.

(By the way, this is a good passage also to start us praying about the divisions between the different Christian communities!)

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