Abstract
If John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs can be relied upon (which even its harshest critics concede it sometimes can) the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner’s interrogation of John Rogers during the reign of Queen Mary spotlights one of the key issues at stake in the English Reformation. Rogers had possibly the best scholarly brain of any among the English protestants of his generation and had published his own translation of the Bible that, while based on Tyndale’s, made use of his excellent Hebrew and Greek. In his questioning, Gardiner insisted that the Church’s teaching office was necessary to mediate between the Bible and Lay Christians. He insisted to Rogers: ‘thou canst prove nothing by Scripture; the Scripture is dead, it must have the lively expositor’. To hear God’s word, Gardiner maintained, one needs good teachers, authorised by the Church for this task, and by virtue of that authority, able to make sense of Scriptural texts liable to be badly and even dangerously misinterpreted by lay readers. Gardiner, it seems, was unwilling to believe that God might Godeslf speak through the witness of Scripture.
Rogers, however, had found otherwise. In translating Scripture for his ‘Matthew Bible’ (so-called because he published it under the pseudonym Thomas Matthew), he had found God addressing him directly in the words of Scripture, not in a written record of God’s past dealings with humanity, but as a living Lord. Answering Gardiner, therefore, Rogers is uncompromising: ‘No, the Scripture is alive’. It was a reply that led him inexorably to the stake at Smithfield in 1555. (A little unusually, a fine contemporary portrait of Stephen Gardiner hangs in my office at Trinity Hall, Cambridge where he was once Master and where, today, I teach and preach. Since my own views lie closer to Rogers’s than to Gardiner’s, I dimly sense the Bishop’s disapproving eyes following me every time I enter the room!)
Rogers’s reply could well have relied in part on the letter to the Hebrews, whose writer, in today’s Epistle, also held that ‘the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword . . . able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart’ (Heb 4:12). In today’s Gospel reading too a distinction between good teaching and the living word of God, may also be discernible. In Mark 10 we encounter a man (Matthew describes him as young, Luke as a Ruler—Mark is more sparing with his words) who, addressing Jesus as ‘Good Teacher’, asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus replies with a question of his own that seems perplexing: ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone’. Perhaps Jesus is somehow being modest, or simply distinguishing himself from God? But it seems to me that more is at stake. In the first century, it was usual, not least in Judea, for young men to seek out a teacher to guide and instruct them, looking for a teacher with a reputation, a name for integrity, wisdom or moral probity—much as potential PhD students now shop around for a supervisor from one University to another. But instead of being flattered that the man has fixed on him as the best among several options as a potential teacher, Jesus’ answer suggests he thought true teaching can only come directly from God. Saying that God alone is good Jesus makes clear that however good, however wise or clever a human teacher may be, the only answer that can really matter to life’s deepest questions will come from God. And so when Jesus looks at the man with love—a truly affecting moment in the Gospel narrative—it is not a wise teacher who sees into the deepest recesses of the man’s heart, but God Himself: ‘You lack one thing: go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor . . . then come, follow me’. Jesus knows as he tells him this what the man’s response will be. He knows that there remain some things that matter more to the man than healing his fractured relationship with God, and until he comes himself to value God more than those things, he will find no peace. The man had come seeking a good teacher but is answered by the living word of God. He comes looking for wisdom but is met by one who is ‘able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart’.
Reading Mark’s Gospel, two Millenia after he wrote it, it is hard not to identify with the young man, who with good intentions sought Jesus out, only to walk away shocked and grieving. Or, if not with the man burdened by his attachment to his possessions, then to identify with the disciples who, witnessing the conversation, find themselves asking: ‘Then who can be saved?’ It is clear to the disciples that if this man, obedient from childhood to the law and willing to go still further by seeking out Jesus as his good teacher, can find himself turning away then not only he, but they are in trouble. But to this Jesus has one further thing to add. For human beings, but their own desires, knowledge or efforts, it is impossible to ‘inherit eternal life, ‘but not for God; for God all things are possible’.