What is the Gospel? Some speak as if the essence of the Gospel is a set of static (eternal) propositional truths requiring mental assent. Mission then becomes the mechanical attempt to persuade people to ‘sign on the dotted line’. Propositions have their place (I myself am committed to the proper place of doctrine), but elevated too highly they become the desiccated remains of what was once something living. Rather, do not the gospels themselves teach us that the primary ‘text’ of Christianity is not sentences on a page but the life of a person: Jesus of Nazareth (c.f. Markham, 2010, p.99). And that, going a little deeper with the apostle Paul, it is through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus that Jesus opens up the possibility of our sharing in his relationship to the Father through the Spirit (c.f. Gal 4:4-7). The Gospel then is nothing less than the invitation to life, the invitation to share in the eternal life that is God’s very self. Propositions help – I’ve used them here – but they guide us to something which has to be lived, experienced and hoped-for to be understood.
Moving from the letter to lived experience (spirit) may be of some assistance to the work of chaplaincy, but so far my description of the Gospel remains couched in grand and general terms. Part of our role, of course, is to take the Gospel which holds true in a general sense for every time and place, and make it relevant to our particular time and space. So what relevance might this invitation to life have in the contemporary university?
Visit your university late on a weekday evening, or walk its corridors at the weekend and you will find people working. Some, of course, may well be present according to a scheduled rota which will compensate them at another point in the week. But others are there because they consider such effort the necessary ‘price of success’. And the ones we observe to be putting themselves under such pressure are a reliable indicator of what others are doing invisibly at home. That ‘price of success’ may mean a working day that begins at before 7am and finishes after midnight. A routine of this kind is isolating in two respects. Not only does it separate people from their colleagues, friends and families, but it also separates their lived identity from the full range of aspects of who they are. Only the aspect ‘professional’ or ‘academic’ finds expression. Such imposed isolation thus leads to lack of relationship with others and with the diversity of dimensions of the self. I speak with the authority of personal experience here because there have been a number of lengthy periods when I consistently worked a 90 hour week and I can painfully recall its cost not just to myself but also to those I claim to love.
According to Eberhard Jüngel in Death the Riddle and the Mystery (1975), the essence of death is relationlessness. Death means the severing of every connection. For the vast majority of the Old Testament the ultimate sting of death is that it means separation even from God (Ps 28:1; Isa 38:18). It is over against this stark realism that the radical newness of the New Testament can be seen. For Paul death is no longer the absolute, it has now been made relative to God since ‘nothing can separate us from the love of God’, not even death (Rom 8:38f). Love, the pinnacle of relationship has, in Jesus’ resurrection, triumphed over the relationlessness of death.
Let me be clear. I do not think the restoration and triumph of relationship that the resurrection enables can be squeezed down to a relationship with God in abstraction from all others. That is not my understanding of the new creation which the resurrection foreshadows and makes possible. There is a strand of Christian reflection that so concentrates on relationship with God that human beings might just as well be ‘brains in jars’. This grisly image from the realms of science fiction is overcome if we take God as creator seriously. Perhaps, for all I know, God could have called us into relationship with himself (or herself) as we floated in some vacuous void. In fact, however, we have been set in the midst of a whole nexus of relationships. And the scope of redemption, I assume, is determined by its character as the consummation of creation.
Helping someone to reassess her or his ‘work-life balance’, then, has redemptive significance because it will have something to do with restoring relationships that are in danger of being lost or disfigured. If this is to happen, and in a Church Foundation institution it should be a priority, then the University needs to construct a shared and collective vision of what is the desirable shape of work; it needs to set out what can reasonably be expected from its members. Too often those who work exceptionally hard end up creating expectations of their capacity that are simply taken for granted, or extended unthinkingly into an unspecified future. What for the university can be accepted as an efficient return on resource can for the person concerned mean a severely truncated life in terms of both quantity and quality. And this is a particular problem when the conscientious work to contracts which simply require one to do the work necessary to fulfil the objectives described. But work need not and should not be alienating. It can be a satisfying from of self-expression and an instantiation, as in Adam’s symbolic ‘tilling and keeping’ of the garden of Eden (Gn 2:15), of our status as beings that share in something of God’s own creativity. In a Church Foundation University work should be an expression and celebration of life, not a pressure towards the death of relationlessness.
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