Weekend essay
Creed
Ethics
Justice
7 min read

After the fall: the Post Office scandal and the search for justice

Falls from grace, like that of the Post Office’s CEO, prompt Graham Tomlin to dissect the problems of justice and mercy.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A tense-looking woman, sitting at  desk, stares into the middle disance.
Lia Williams as Paula Vennells in Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
ITV Studios/ITV.

It was November, and I was in Rome. With the new year on the horizon, newsagents were displaying calendars for 2024. One in particular seemed to show up in just about every street vendor available: the ‘Hot Priest Calendar’.  

It had pictures for every month of young, bronzed, good-looking priests, resplendent in brand new, ironed black clerical shirts, smouldering into the camera. I've no idea whether they were real priests or just models in clerical garb. I didn't buy one, but it did get me thinking of why they had produced it. Was this a recruitment drive for clergy in the Roman Catholic Church? Something for the nuns to put on the wall of the convent? It was hardly aiming to attract women by saying if you become a Catholic you could bag one of these hunky chaps, as priests are, well, supposed to be out of reach.  

I suspect it was just trying to tell the world that the Church is cool after all. That the church is for good-looking, shiny people, not just the regular ones with wrinkles and expanding waistlines.  

The embarrassment and shame are real and proper and yet there is, in my view, something at the heart of it which seems to be mistaken.

I was thinking of this recently while watching the story of the Post Office scandal unfold. This dreadful story is, to be frank, a bit of an embarrassment for the Church of England. This horrendous miscarriage of justice has its heart not just a Christian but a priest. I met Paula Vennells once. While I was Bishop of Kensington, we planned a big conference for all the vicars in the Diocese of London. At the time, Vennells’ star was rising in ecclesiastical circles. People had just noticed that the head of the Post Office not only went to church, but was also ordained, and so she was getting invited to speak at all kinds of conferences. She agreed to come and, to be fair, was gracious, unassuming, polite. There was nothing to suggest she was soon to become the object of public opprobrium that she is now. 

She would definitely not go on a Church Calendar these days. But then who would? The last decade has seen a succession of scandals and falls from grace – Harvey Epstein, Huw Edwards, Russell Brand, Philip Schofield - and Christian leaders are not exempt. Jean Vanier, Ravi Zacharias, Mike Pilavachi – the list goes on – and now Paula Vennells. We Christians hang our heads, as it seems such a deep failure - how can someone profess to be a Christian – even a vicar - and yet do such things? The embarrassment and shame are real and proper and yet there is, in my view, something at the heart of it which seems to be mistaken.  

Celebrities are celebrated because we believe they are different from us ordinary mortals. But sooner or later, it turns out they have the same temptations, their bodies sag, their flaws get exposed. 

Helmut Thielicke was a German theologian who opposed the Nazis during the Second World War and somehow survived. His was a crucial voice in the German church and nation as it struggled to its feet again after the trauma and destruction of those years. The big question Germany faced at the time was how a modern sophisticated Christian nation had been so easily seduced by evil? They also struggled with the question of shame. What were German Christians to do with the guilt that hung over them after the Nazi years? 

Thielicke was a brilliant preacher and drew huge crowds to his church in Hamburg. In one of his sermons he took as his text St Paul’s line, that Christians are “a letter from Christ, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, on tablets of human hearts.” He asked his congregation the question: what kind of letter are you? Is a Christian meant to be an advert for God? Is the Christian a shiny product of divine handiwork so that God, like some marketing agent, says ‘Look at her – isn’t she is fine person? Wouldn’t you like to be like her?’ 

When she was being feted by all, we might have said that about Paula Vennells. But not any more. And that’s the problem of celebrity Christians, or celebrities of any kind for that matter. They are used as adverts for the brand they profess, religious or otherwise: “Use this shampoo, follow this diet, believe this religion, like this celebrity does, and you could be like them.”  

Celebrities are celebrated because we believe they are different from us ordinary mortals. But sooner or later, it turns out they have the same temptations, their bodies sag, their flaws tend to get exposed in the extra scrutiny they face in a gossipy age like ours. The hunky priests in the calendar may look good but I suspect their lives are as shadowy and compromised as the rest of us. Every now and again you find a life that is remarkable, but even then there are dark corners. Mother Teresa famously said that she rarely experienced the presence of God and struggled with lifelong depression. If we are meant to be adverts for God, we’re not very good ones. 

Thielicke’s point was that Christians are not meant to be adverts for God but letters from him. And the letter, written on the human heart, says something like this: “Here is a poor, weak human being with their own strengths and frailties, moments of courage and moments of great weakness, struggling to live a good life but failing much of the time. And yet, despite that failure, God still forgives, accepts, loves and stands by them.”  

And forgiveness is not an excuse. It doesn’t say ‘it didn’t happen’, but it says, ‘it did happen’ and it was bad, but a new start is always possible.

It sounds scandalous I know. Hearing about the Post Office scandal, all we want is for the perpetrators to be found guilty and punished. And rightly so. Justice must be done. Paula Vennells and her staff seems to have stuck stubbornly to the laughable view that the Post Office had been infiltrated by hundreds of criminal sub-postmasters, intend on defrauding the public purse. They lacked the sense or courage to question their own IT system, despite being warned it was faulty.  

Yet divine and human justice work in different ways. Not least because God, unlike human judges, sees the dodgy things we all do, not just those whose sins get found out because they are in the public eye. Human justice systems must take their course, crimes must be punished, and attempts made to turn around the lives of those caught in patterns of criminality. Yet underneath human justice lies divine justice, which promises an ultimate judgment, even for those who escape human justice. Yet at the same time, it offers not just justice, but mercy - the gift of a more profound and ultimate forgiveness, which, if accepted, does not override the penalties of human justice, but enables the possibility of redemption in the longer term. 

Martin Luther often used a Latin phrase to describe Christians – that they are simul iustus et peccator - ‘at the same time righteous and sinful’. Like an alcoholic who is never encouraged to say that were an alcoholic, but that they are a recovering one, an honest Christian doesn’t say ‘I was a chronic worrier, greedy, someone who struggles with lust,’ but ‘I am such things, and yet faith in Jesus makes a difference in helping me not to be.’ St Paul once said: ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the worst.’  Not I was the worst, but I am. I remember Frank Bruno once saying “I’m not much of a Christian – I’ve been a sinner all my life.” He hadn’t quite understood - Christians are only ever recovering sinners.  

Paula Vennells and the others responsible for the Post Office scandal will have to face justice one day. It may, for some, even mean prison. But, as many in our prisons up and down the country know, lots of people find God in prison - not as a literal ‘get out of jail free card’ – the justice system doesn’t play Monopoly – but a realisation that however bad your crimes, however murky our misdemeanours or sly our sins, forgiveness is possible. And forgiveness is not an excuse. It doesn’t say ‘it didn’t happen’, but it says, ‘it did happen’ and it was bad, but a new start is always possible, and the love and forgiveness of God is available, even for the worst of people - for good-looking priests who struggle with temptation, for celebrities who fall from grace. Or even ordinary people like us.  

 

Snippet
Creed
Easter
Eating
3 min read

Simnel cake and the power of forgiveness

All-encompassing mercy can be hard to swallow.
A close up of a Simnel Cake shows 12 balls on top.
James Petts, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Simnel cake, yum – I love it. Though because it’s a rich heavy fruit cake, quite a lot of people disagree with me. It also has a layer of marzipan running through the middle which is an equally divisive issue, at least in our household. 

Anyway, like it or loathe it, Simnel cake is a traditional Easter delicacy that’s been eaten in Britain since at least medieval times. And the way it links with Easter is that it also has marzipan decorations on the top, in the form of eleven ballies placed around the edge – one for each of Jesus’s loyal disciples. The twelfth, missing, one represents Judas Iscariot, who forfeited his place on the cake by betraying Jesus to the Romans. Famously he accepted a bribe of 30 pieces of silver to lead the soldiers to Christ as he sat with his friends in the Garden of Gethsemane, and marked him out as the one they were after by greeting him with a kiss. It was the act, in short, that precipitated the events that subsequently resulted in Jesus’s trial and crucifixion. 

Such treachery, clearly, brands a person as the worst of sinners, and history has consequently judged Judas as exactly that. Literature too. Dante for example, in his Inferno, has him being chewed eternally in the mouth of Satan (along with Brutus and Cassius, betrayers of Julius Caesar) down in the lowest circle of Hell, specifically dedicated to traitors. It doesn’t get worse than that. 

But last Easter something interesting happened, which has made me feel rather differently about Judas. We had a new vicar arrive in our church, who came into the nave at the start of one of the Easter services holding a Simnel cake – minus the decorative ballies. He also had a pack of marzipan. He handed both cake and marzipan over to the children of the Sunday school, and sent them off to go and make ballies (along with suitable instructions on handwashing) for the top of the cake. They reappeared proudly at the end bearing their handiwork… one festive looking Simnel cake, complete with disciples. Eleven of them. 

Only what was this? Lo and behold, the vicar had another marzipan ball – a twelfth one, that had been lurking in his pocket. He held it up between finger and thumb. 

‘Uh oh children,’ he said. ‘I’ve just found Judas. Now I want you to imagine for a minute that I am God. What do you think I should do with him?’ 

One little girl, round-eyed with alarm, gasped, ‘Are you going to eat him??’ 

Chuckling from the congregation – and a few approving nods here and there, it has to be said. 

But the vicar just smiled. ‘I think the whole point of Jesus’s death was to give all of us a second chance… everyone that is, no exceptions,’ he said. ‘With God, forgiveness is universally available, particularly if someone is sorry – and in Matthew’s gospel, it says that Judas tried to give the money back because he knew he had done something terrible. I think that God would say Judas belongs back with the other disciples. And I also would like it if we could be the sort of church that says all are welcome, whatever they have done. So let’s put him on the cake with the others shall we?’ 

I thought of all this as I was making a Simnel cake this year ready for Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent, when they were traditionally produced. And yes, my cake has twelve ballies on it… Peter, Matthew, James, John et al, with Judas alongside. I keep pondering this idea of all-encompassing mercy. It was completely and utterly revolutionary in the violent period of history that Jesus lived in, and I’m not sure things have changed much. The thought of every person being offered forgiveness, no matter what, sounds mad in these days of cancel culture and moral indignation. Imagine what the Twittersphere would say.

But actually, I think the vicar was right: I’m pretty sure God would want Judas to have a spot. And let’s face it, as a very small side benefit, it’s also much easier to space twelve disciples evenly around a cake than eleven. 

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