BBC Radio 4 2016-01-08

Good morning. All the talk this week about the Shadow Cabinet reshuffle has made me think a lot about loyalty. We invoke loyalty frequently as a virtue and yet it’s complex and multi-layered. On Wednesday at a store checkout I was asked if I had a loyalty card. Our preference for a particular supermarket hardly compares with our loyalty to family or friends. Some writers on the subject argue that loyalty is only properly due to a person or group of people, and when we say we’re loyal to our principles or convictions we’re mistaking loyalty for commitment.
Perhaps, but language like life, isn’t always very tidy. Most of us live with multiple loyalties of different intensity – to marriage partners, colleagues, causes and ideals. Without such loyalties, life would seem empty of meaning. Some of our loyalties may go deep but the strength of them can puzzle others. Think of sport and especially football. In my childhood in Cornwall I chose to support Crewe Alexandra, largely because they kept coming bottom of the Third Division North and I thought they needed my juvenile help. In 1960 the whole team sent me their autographs. They probably didn’t get asked too often. My loyalty was tested when Crewe regularly played Norwich City in my early years here. Now that Norwich are in the Premiership and Crewe bottom of League One no such conflicts arise.

We live reasonably easily with those sorts of divided loyalties. Others are much more testing. I remember someone caught between his loyalty to his company and a job he loved, and his wife. He’d been offered his dream post in America but his wife wouldn’t go. She asked him to choose between that appointment and her. He chose his marriage but it didn’t last. How our loyalty is demanded has a big impact on us. Loyalty doesn’t create love. But love, affection, gratitude: these breed our deepest loyalties.

It’s surprising in the gospels that the disciples are sometimes shown as disloyal to Jesus. It’s not just Judas. Think of Simon Peter. He denied he even knew Jesus. And he did so three times. At least he had the decency to burst into tears afterwards, ashamed of himself. Later, he’s forgiven when Jesus asks him, also three times, “Do you love me?” It’s this once disloyal character who turns out to be the rock on whom the Church is built. We’re tempted to regard personal disloyalty as almost unforgiveable. Yet sometimes we learn most from our worst errors of judgement. It’s called being human.