“Honor and majesty are before him: strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.”

(Psalm 96:6)

 

In England there stand many magnificent churches and cathedrals, but there is one that is honored above all others. It is called “Canterbury” for there resides the Archbishop, the head of the Church of England. But why such an honor for Canterbury, over Westminster and St. Paul’s in London, and the splendid cathedrals of York and Durham and Salisbury? Oh, because it was at Canterbury that Thomas Becket took his last stand for “the honor of God”.

The funeral service in Westminster Abbey for Princess Diana a week ago culminated in a public stand-off between the Royal Family and the people of Britain over the questions of how best to express their grief and do honor to the deceased.

That stand-off called to mind a similar circumstance in Britain, centuries ago, between monarch and people over the question of honor. That historic confrontation has been portrayed for us on stage and in a movie called, “Becket”, in which it is revealed that an enormous transformation took place in the character of Thomas Becket. In his youth, Thomas Becket was hot-tempered, riotous, immoral — the companion of the young King, Henry the Second, in all the king’s wildest debaucheries. But the king, in a sly move contrived to make the church an abject vassal of the state, maneuvered the appointment of Becket, his best loved friend, to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, the supreme head of the Church of England.

But when installed as Archbishop a strange change comes over the worldly Becket. He disposed of all his wealth and gave it away to the poor. He renounced his wild and immoral ways. He even opposed the King’s will, which before he had never crossed.

Henry cannot understand what has come over his best-loved friend. He accuses Becket of no longer loving him. Becket in explanation says: “I fell in love with the honor of God (When you made me Archbishop). I felt for the first time that I was being entrusted with something, that’s all. There, in that empty cathedral in France, that day when you ordered me to take up this burden, I was a man without honor — and suddenly I found it — one I never imagined would be mine — the honor of God. A frail, incomprehensible honor, vulnerable as a boy-king fleeing from danger.” (Becket by Jean Anouilh — p. 114)

We all know that “honor” is a highly charged, emotional word. Men used to fight duels to the death in defense of their own honor or a lady’s honor. Nowadays, a more likely response to an attack on our honor would be to sue our defamer in a court of law for an incredible sum of dollars. There is something more than instinct which tells us that if our honor, or our family’s honor has been sullied, the best of life has been lost.

Once in a press conference, in speaking about the Vietnam crisis, President Lyndon Johnson said: “Our national honor is at stake.” And the New York Times, commenting editorially, called the President’s words “a portentous statement” and went on to explain:  “Obviously, if the honor of the nation is at stake to such a degree that American aims must be achieved, then the struggle is a war to the finish whatever the cost. If the United States were to lose its honor in Vietnam, it would lose its predominant place in world affairs.”

But too often nations, as well as individuals, have fought to defend their honor with blunderbusses and bombs. Adlai Stevenson, in a speech in 1952, said: “Man’s tragedy has all too often been that he has grown weary in the search for an honorable alternative to war, and, in desperate impatience, has turned to violence.”

We understand what honor is in the realm of human relations, and in national and international relations, however, irrationally we may have behaved in order to defend or preserve that honor — but what is this business of the honor of God that obsessed Thomas Becket? And what have men and women today to do with God’s honor? Is not this a misplaced concept out of harmony with theological thought? Was Thomas Becket out of his skull when he avowed, “I have fallen in love with the honor of God?”

Well, the Bible does speak of the honor of God. The Psalmist says: “HONOR AND MAJESTY ARE BEFORE THE LORD: STRENGTH AND BEAUTY ARE IN HIS SANCTUARY?”

But what is the honor of God? The honor of God is the good name of God among people. It is human respect for God’s character. But how do people defend the honor of God? By showing a wholesome regard for God’s desire that righteousness, justice, and mercy prevail among men and women whom God has created in his own image.

The prophet Elijah was a man who fell in love with the honor of God. When the people of Elijah’s day transgressed God’s righteous commandments, and forsook his altars of worship, and bowed down to other gods, Elijah was very jealous for the honor of God among his people. He challenged the priests of Baal to a contest of divine power and courageously risked his life in defense of the honor of God.

When Moses emerged as a great deliverer of his enslaved country-men in Egypt, it was not primarily as an enlightened humanitarian, bent and determined to get civil rights for his people, that Moses stood before Pharaoh with his stern demand: “let my people go.” It was rather as the servant of the Lord God whom he had encountered in the burning bush, the man whose conscience had been seared by the blazing heart of God for justice and mercy and loving-kindness among his people, that Moses went to Pharaoh, saying: “Thus saith the Lord, Let my people go that they may worship me.” Moses had fallen in love with the honor of God.

But the supreme Biblical example of the man who fell in love with the honor of God is Jesus Christ. Where Elijah’s falling in love with the honor of God made him very jealous for national righteousness even to the point of laying his life on the line in a contest with the prophets of Baal in order to enthrone the Lord God, Jehovah, alone as the national deity; and where Moses’ falling in love with the honor of God drove him to do battle with formidable social structures in order to bring the righteousness and justice and mercy of God’s character into the life of his people; for Jesus, falling in love with the honor of God meant confronting church and state and individual men and women with the compassion of God for everyone of God’s children, especially the lost, the outcasts, the rejected ones.

Like every other man, Jesus loved to see sunrise and sunset, to look into dear eyes that returned his love, to experience cool water slaking his thirst and a comfortable bed resting his tired body, but the honor of God meant more to him than life.

He could not tolerate a church and a society which rejected what he knew to be the cardinal quality of character in the nature of the Eternal God, a love that forgives and seeks and suffers and redeems. So, Jesus laid his life on the line for that. The honor of God had been entrusted in superlative measure to him. So, we call him both God and man.

Now, can it be that the honor of God still stands in need of defense in our day? Can it be that in this late, technological age that to some the honor of God is even now being entrusted?

Thomas Becket saw the crucial assault upon the honor of God in his day to be at the point of King Henry’s attempt to strip the church of all legal power and make it subservient to the state and to the king’s tyrannical will. Becket would not stand for this dishonor to his God. He took up the fight of resistance. The common people of England, according to T. S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral, sensed that this would cost the life of their beloved archbishop. Begging him to knuckle under and give in, they said:

“We have been living and partly living;

 Picking together the pieces,

Gathering faggots at nightfall,

Building a partial shelter,

For sleeping and eating and drinking and laughter.”

In other words, the people were saying: “Don’t be a silly idealist, Thomas. This is an imperfect world and always will be. We’ve been living, even though it’s only partly living. Don’t upset the status quo, Thomas.  Don’t offend the all powerful king.”

But Thomas replies: “Unbar the door of the cathedral. Even to our enemies. I give my life to the law of God above the law of man.” So, in came the king’s men. They slashed with their swords the body of Becket. But by his death Thomas Becket made safe the church in England for 300 years for the honor of God.

Many now are saying that in our time the most powerful and destructive assault on the honor of God comes from the materialistic, hedonistic, immoral and demonic forces that are degrading and killing the spiritual life of men, women, and children. A pervasive evil culture, they are saying, like a black cloud of poisonous gas has settled over our homes and schools and churches, paralyzing and suffocating immortal souls.

A Sunday school teacher was recently leading her six year old children in making Mother’s Day cards. She told them: “Don’t forget to mention God in your Mother’s Day greeting.” One little six year old girl presented to her mother on Mother’s Day the card she had made in Sunday school. The mother opened the envelope to read this message from her darling daughter: “Mom, I love you. God, you’re cool!”

How defend the honor of God against the all pervasive onslaught of a demonic pagan society?

But there are many others now saying that in our time the chief assault on the honor of God is the withholding of compassion from people. I remember a remarkable Sunday night in a youth meeting of New York’s Broadway Presbyterian Church, when I heard the Reverend David Wilkerson speak. He told of how he came to New York, a minister from a small Pennsylvania town, to work with the youth gangs and the drug addicts of the city. I heard several of the young people who had been reclaimed from the waste and violence of their former life, tell what happened to transform them when the loving concern of God for them was made real through the compassion of David Wilkerson. I heard Wilkerson say: “What I fear most in all the world is that the compassion of Christ would go out of my heart — that I would walk these city streets, and look upon men and women in all their difficulties and sufferings and sins, and not have the love of God for them in my heart.”

Last week, when Mother Teresa died in India, someone remembered hearing her say in explanation of why and how she had spent her life in giving loving care to the poorest, the most wretched, the dying in the slums of Calcutta – these were Mother Teresa’s words: “Whenever I see a crippled beggar, or a leper, or one dying from AIDS, I see Jesus Christ in distressing disguise.”

Did you see the cartoon in last Wednesday’s Commercial Appeal? Mother Teresa is standing before St. Peter. The Pearly Gates are in the background and St. Peter is saying to the tiny, humble woman: “Go right in, Mother Teresa. He wants to thank you personally for the grub, the drink, and the threads.” And on the lectern in front of St. Peter is a Bible, opened at Matthew’s Gospel 25:40 and these words: “Inasmuch as you did it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, you did it unto me.”

Yes, Mother Teresa, fell in love with the honor of God.

On the Mount of Transfiguration the disciples saw three figures — Elijah, Moses, and Jesus. They were all three bathed with an other-worldly light of glory. Whatever else the Transfiguration meant — it certainly meant this: that everyone who falls in love with the honor of God and offers himself or herself for the defense of the honor of God as he or she understands it: either as Elijah, jealous that his nation worship the one true God; or as Moses, jealous that his society incorporate the moral qualities of God’s character of justice, righteousness and mercy; or as Jesus, defending to the last drop of his blood the revelation of the compassion of God for the lost — those who live under the assurance that the honor of God has been entrusted to them — are always transfigured into a higher and more glorious quality of life, and are the instruments through which God transforms human souls and society and culture.

Do we sometimes feel that the life we are living is hardly worthwhile? Are we occasionally fed up with the meaninglessness of our existence, the oppressive burdens we bear, the frustrations we feel?

What to do? Oh, if only we could feel that God has entrusted to our keeping the honor of God! If we could believe that he has committed this precious possession to us, and then cherish it ourselves more than estates or positions or our own good name and honor, how that would set our spirits free and make our hearts sing!

The honor of God — who will defend it?