You may be aware of the saying ‘people in glass houses should not throw stones’; it is a warning against hypocrisy. When your name is Glasse, it becomes quite personal, particularly if, like me, you went through your school years being called by your last name.
Hypocrisy is a trap easily fallen into, something that came home to me on a trip to Malaysia and Indonesia in March 2016. Back then, as a business, we were already looking hard at supply chains and very concerned about palm oil. In particular, land use, burning and treatment of palm growers by the larger collection and refinery businesses. We wanted to support supply chains that were committed to cleaning up their act.
In the office meeting room of one business in Malaysia, sitting beneath pictures of The King, George VI and Sir Winston Churchill I had one of the most pointed history lessons of my life. These plantations were originally rubber plantations, created by Europeans and while they brought prosperity, once rubber gave way to oil based products, many fell into redundancy. To salvage something, in the post-Colonial era, they were replaced with palm trees, with a market for the palm oil produced.
The message to a British Company from a Malaysian one was simple – work with us to improve because we all have an interest in this, historically and for the future.
Jude moves on to reflect on taking responsibility for our own sin with an illustration of pure circumspection. Some people make huge mistakes in their lives. In the following verses, the reference may well be to an apocryphal Jewish work, The Assumption of Moses. Loosely, it is about the dispute over what happened to Moses’ body. The point is that even the great Archangel was careful in his words to the Devil. It is for God to rebuke, no one else.
I cannot really imagine an Archangel needing to worry about ‘people in glass houses’ but then again, it’s a good habit to think that way because by so doing the door to working together remains open. Condemnation is easy; circumspection and finding solutions to shared problems is much, much more difficult but demands our time.
In the very same way, on the strength of their dreams these ungodly people pollute their own bodies, reject authority and heap abuse on celestial beings. But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not himself dare to condemn him for slander but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you!Yet these people slander whatever they do not understand, and the very things they do understand by instinct – as irrational animals do – will destroy them.
A Prayer
Lord, as we face hard questions about the changing world, help us to work together as a human race and not to lapse into mutual blame. You see a bigger picture than even the greatest human minds can see and we adore you for that. Forgive us if we sometimes condemn and give us the grace to work together as Jesus worked with those who committed sins to find healing; for his sake.
Amen.