20th February 2022
Inshallah. I’m sure you’re familiar with that Muslim expression, Inshallah. Pronounced carefully, it is ’In Sha Allah, meaning ‘If God so wills’. We all know the Arabic word Allah as the, Muslim name for God, but it’s also used by many Arab Christians too. And it also has the same origin as one of the Old Testament Jewish names for God, El – E,L. Vowels are far less important in written Hebrew and Arabic than in western languages. So El and Allah are more similar than might be thought, and this similarity is a reminder of the Abrahamic origin shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims.
More than that, ’In Shah Allah or Inshallah, ‘If God so wills’, can be a magnificent utterance of trust and faith. Not necessarily fatalism, or even resignation, but trust in the Almighty, and rejection of that deep-seated worry that can grip our souls. We all know it, that almost existential anxiety, when life or memories become overwhelming and we feel we can’t help ourselves and no-one seems to be able to help us. The Danes and Germans have a word for it, angst.
This word, angst, is sometimes overused. Angst isn’t the natural worry that we all have for the future or even for next day, about what’s going to happen next. These worries are natural responses of anxiety, and sometimes more positively the trigger for action to resolve problems when they can be dealt with. For both everyday anxiety and angst, Inshallah can be a good mental response, at least an interim response to help us on our way. ‘If God so wills.’
Jesus said, ‘Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear . . . .Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life, [or, in a different interpretation], add 18 inches to your height’? Easier said than done, or course, particularly if you happen to be faced with 50% increases in energy costs that you can’t afford, or, worse still, if you happen to be stranded in in Afghanistan or parts of Syria with no guarantee of anything for the family to eat tomorrow. Or, of course, if we’re potentially in the firing line in Ukraine.
But I don’t think Jesus was addressing people in desperate plights of that kind when he said what he said. And I don’t believe for one moment he was decrying personal effort to find solutions to practical problems when they are available. I suspect it’s lesser anxiety and also deep existential anxiety, angst, that Jesus says is pointless, however natural it is for us sometimes. In the passage we heard, Jesus ends by saying:
So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.
In similar vein, John Lennon uttered an interesting aphorism:
Everything will be okay in the end.
If it’s not okay, then it’s not the end.
The other reading this afternoon came from the very beginning of both the Jewish Torah and the Christian Bible, the story of the creation of the world over 6 days, culminating with humankind on the 6th day and God then resting on the 7th. The Hebrew word for God here is Elohim, which is actually the plural of El, the name for God that equates to Allah. Elohim, literally ‘gods’, reflects the origin of the creation story in Babylonian mythology, but it too became a name for God, even though this plural form, in the Hebrew scriptures, our Old Testament, and is still spoken by Jews today.
Of course, we believe in one God, in the singular, and so do Jews and Muslims. But is God singular or plural in nature? The Christian doctrine of the Trinity suggests God, though singular in identity is plural in nature, the summation of all the good qualities we can imagine. Of course we can’t really describe God, though we try. There was once a little girl at school, busy at her desk. The teacher, going round the class, asked her what she was doing, and the girl answered, ‘I’m drawing God’. The teacher paused and then replied: ‘But no-one knows what God looks like’. Still busy and without so much as looking up, the little girl answered: ‘They will in a minute’.
Be that as it may, from this first story of creation, we can draw one conclusion about God, that God wants the best for us. The clue? At every stage of creation bar one, and I quote, ‘God saw that it was good’, or, on the sixth day, ‘God saw that it was very good’. We can only define goodness by human standards. But, since, humankind was, in this Genesis story, the climax of creation, it’s reasonable to suppose that the divine apprehension of goodness and human apprehension of goodness largely coincide.
So on that basis, our idea of goodness won’t be far from the truth. And on that basis, anxiety in all its forms is overruled by the divine goodness that is at the heart of the universe.
Robert Browning wrote the song that some us of will have sung at our primary schools:
The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn:
God’s in his heaven –
All’s right with the world!
Well, patently all’s not right with the world, once way and another, with natural and humanly-generated disasters abounding. And Browning’s words are now often derided for their naivety. But there is in them an underlying truth of faithful reassurance. Sometimes, poetic words can convey truth without being capable of literal understanding. And that, I believe, is true of ‘God’s in his heaven – All’s right with the world’. The world is fundamentally a good place.
For the moment, when we’re anxious, we can share our anxieties and our angst. Talking to a good listener can be such a relief. And then let’s appreciate the world as we know it as far as we can. Let’s hear Jesus’s words echoing down to us across the centuries:
Do not worry about your life
Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.
Let’s trust to the extent of adopting Inshallah as a watchword for life, a response to help us on our way. ‘If God so wills.’
