God owes us nothing

Reflect on gifts given and received at Christmas, and spot the key to a whole lot of wisdom.

Graham Tomlin

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

A large stone house is wrapped in a red ribbon and bow.

Howard Dickins, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

One of those difficult Christmas Day moments is opening a present from someone, only to realise you forgot to get them something. Or the reverse – expecting a present, but not getting it. It leaves you feeling awkward. Like you owe them something. Or they owe you.

The familiarity of the Christmas story also plays into this. We know how it goes. God gives us the baby Jesus. He does it every year. If he didn’t we’d feel short-changed. After all, life is hard sometimes, and, surely, God owes us something.

God Owes us Nothing. This is the title of a book by the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. The book is actually about Blaise Pascal and the way the Catholic Church rejected the legacy of the great St Augustine when it rejected the Jansenist frame of mind in the seventeenth century, but that's by the by. What got me thinking again is the title: God Owes us Nothing. It's a powerful thought, maybe on first sight depressing, but the more I have thought about it, the key to a whole lot of wisdom.

If God owes me something and he doesn't provide it, I lose faith in God. Our natural cry 'it's not fair' when something bad happens to us reflects this same basic idea – that we somehow deserve fairness or justice.

Kolakowski's point is that this is essentially the insight at the heart of the Augustinian tradition in Christianity, something that runs through much mediaeval thought, to the Middle Ages, through Luther, Calvin and then on to Pascal and beyond.

If God owes me something – happiness, wealth, health or whatever, I will naturally feel short-changed if I don't get it. You regularly hear stories of people who believed in God, until a friend got ill, or died, or they encountered tragedy in the raw, or experienced the aftermath of an earthquake, a war or a tsunami, or encountered real suffering and 'lost their faith'.

I suspect this kind of thing happens because deep down we think that God owes us something, and if God doesn't give it, then the problem is with God – either that he is unkind, or simply doesn't exist. God should step in every time we make a bad choice, or someone else does, because, basically, he owes us. If God owes me something and he doesn't provide it, I lose faith in God. Our natural cry 'it's not fair' when something bad happens to us reflects this same basic idea – that we somehow deserve fairness or justice.

'Gifts' make us grateful, always delighted with the new things that come, and a bit more philosophical about the stuff we lose.

To begin however from the perspective that God owes us nothing – that we have no rights over him, no claim on him, means that everything we do get comes as a gift – as a sheer delight, something to be deeply grateful for. Every breath, friendship, act of kindness, chocolate, football, mistletoe, wintry walks on bright December days – all these are gifts not rights. It suddenly turns everything about my life from something I feel I have right to, and moan mercilessly about if I lose it, to something that is a true surprise.

To that extent the Dawkins atheist brigade have a point – we should not think the universe is made for us, or that we are any more than specks of life on a distant planet, and we should give up our delusions of deserving divine intervention when things go a bit wrong. The essence of Christian faith is the faith that although we should not expect to receive any divine favours, the surprise is that we do receive so much from the hands of God. Despite our insignificance, we have been privileged by God to play a key role on this planet of reflecting his image to the rest of creation, caring for it on his behalf. We do often enjoy gifts of health, laughter, sport, music, shelter etc., and these are neither random accidents of a faceless universe, nor things we have a right to expect because of our inherent deserving, but gratuitous, free gifts from the heart that beats behind it all. And most of all, we are given the gift of Christ as a brother, a friend and a rescuer.

It is so much better to view everything as unexpected and gratuitous gift than as a right. 'Rights' make us grasping, holding onto things and insisting on them – they centre life around me and what I deserve. 'Gifts' make us grateful, always delighted with the new things that come, and a bit more philosophical about the stuff we lose. In the Christian life, if I think God owes me something, then grace and mercy will not seem a miracle to me at all – after all, it's only what I deserve. If God owes us nothing, his grace, the gift of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, his provision of my needs are all miracles, things I don't deserve and thus to be given thanks for with a constant sense of wonder and amazement.

As you look around the living room post-Christmas at the gifts you have been given, whether wanted or not, try to think of them as given from people who owed you nothing, yet gave you something. And then think of everything you receive each day as pure, surprising, delightful gift. And then take that into the new year. It might lead to a truly thankful and (relatively) more carefree life. It is perhaps the key to happiness.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

8 March 2024

4 min read

The Zone of Interest’s peripheral vision of evil

Director Jonathan Glazer bests Spielberg thanks to a quality of attention.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

in an immaculate garden a family play in and around a small swimming pool. Beyond the garden wall, a barracks is visble with crematorium smoke rising beyond it.

The Höss family at play at their Auschwitz home.

This has been a tremendously difficult review to write. I’ve written and re-written this review for two weeks now. You will see why.

The Zone of Interest begins idyllically. A family is picnicking by a lake. The men swim, the women pick berries in the woods. It's a gorgeous sunny day. The family happily drive home down an evocatively headlamp-lit country road. The father walks through their palatial house, turning off every light. The next morning the family are gathered outside to give the father his birthday present: a canoe. Two boys lead their blindfolded father gently down the steps from the house to the garden. The garden is magnificent: filled with flowers and immaculately kempt.

The father is wearing an SS uniform. The camera pans round the garden. Behind the garden wall you see glimpses of barbed wire, belching chimneys, rows of dormitories. You hear shouts, moans, cries, gunshots. This is no ordinary house, no ordinary garden, no ordinary family. This is the home of SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig, and their five children. This is Auschwitz. Höss runs it. Hedwig runs their beautiful home. The children run around. That is the next 100 minutes of film. It's a realist family drama from the 1940s. The children are children, the wife is house-proud to a fault, and the husband is hard-working, ambitious, and keen to do a good job. I don’t want to say much more. You simply need to go and see the film.

When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil it was controversial. Many commentators misunderstood or misrepresented her point. Evil acts - especially an evil act as totemic as the Holocaust - are not ‘banal’. The people who commit evil on such a scale often can be. A genocidal machine of such scale and complexity needs a tremendous number of cogs… they can’t all be murderous sociopaths. Eichmann was banal in himself - he was of average intelligence, uncreative in his thinking, a follower of fads and joiner of organisations.

This is exactly how Rudolf and Hedwig are presented. Christian Friedel plays Höss with an almost continual ambience of low-level boredom. Pillow-talk with his wife, reading to his children, a discussion about the most efficient way to incinerate the Jews in his camp, is all spoken with roughly the same expression and tone. He clearly wants to do well in his work, but it doesn’t matter what the work is. Sandra Hüller gives Hedwig a marvelous, slightly nervous energy. She always seems to be keeping a combination of grasping envy and slimy smugness just barely contained beneath the surface of her features. She can’t think of much beyond the order of her house, the beauty of her garden, and her status among other SS wives. Their quality of attention is essentially absent.

Glazer has the maturity to recognise that looking directly at evil stops you from really seeing it.

Heretic: Hugh Grant’s brilliance wrestles this tranquilized take on holy horror

Yaroslav Walker

If not original, a dissection of belief needs to be sincere and agile.

15 November 2024

4 min read

Not to be flippant, but they would be dreadful dinner-party guests, and not just because they are Nazis: they seemingly have no capacity for a thought that goes beyond themselves, and their immediate environment, and their immediate needs and wants. They are banal.

Between them Jonathan Glazer (director), Łukasz Żal (cinematographer), and Mica Levi (musician) give a remarkable demonstration of the power of restraint. The camerawork is naturalistic and almost never showy. The performers look like they were given the latitude simply to be in the scene: no over-direction. The soundscape is hauntingly bare. There is little music or sound beyond the ambient. The mood is, of course, set by the fact that the ambient sounds are roaring furnaces, gunshots, and desperate screaming. The film does not attempt to make a point or demand a response; Glazer simply gives you a slice of domestic life that just happens to be located next door to a death-camp.

Steven Spielberg has suggested this is the best film tackling the dreadful subject of the Holocaust since Schindler's List. He is wrong. The Zone of Interest is a far superior film. I love Spielberg, but Schindler's List is offensively bad. It takes a subject of such abject depravity and then tries to emotionally manipulate you into feeling bad: the music, the speeches, the more-is-more approach to showing you the pinnacle of human cruelty. Glazer has the maturity to recognise that looking directly at evil stops you from really seeing it. As Augustine says, evil is nothing in itself. Evil is the corruption and annihilation of what is good and lovely. Evil isn’t some great monster that forever battles with God. God is good…no…God is Good. So evil is literally nothing - goodness in decay to nothingness.

Glazer, whether intentionally or not, recognises this theological truth. Looking at the full abyssal nothingness of evil is beyond human comprehension. But if you see it in the periphery, then you see it. When you hear the screams of the innocent and at the same time see a woman cheerfully ignore them while she plays in a flowerbed with her infant daughter, then you recognise the potential for human depravity. You can’t truly encounter the nothingness of evil, and the dangers of letting its parasitical and destructive hunger spread, until you’ve watched others ignore it without missing a beat. I’ve never cried while watching Schindler's List. I cried while watching The Zone of Interest. Twice.

Glazer et al have done the world a great service with this film. They’ve reminded us that the weapon against evil is the rejection of empty banality. Banality is loving yourself. To reject banality is to embrace a quality of attention that is truly outward looking. Rejecting banality is loving your neighbour as yourself.