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Good morning. ‘All banking depends on trust’. That was a statement that came across loud and clear on yesterday’s programme. And that of course was why the government stepped in to persuade HSBC to buy the Silicon Valley Bank’s British subsidiary and why the Swiss National Bank stepped in to rescue Credit Suisse. Photos of people lining up to withdraw their money from bust banks which we know from the 1930’s and other parts of the world still rightly haunt us. All banking does indeed depend on trust, that the money we save and deposit with a bank will still be there when we want it.
But it’s not just banking that depends on trust. All human relationships do, and so does the use of language itself. We live our lives on the assumption that most people for most of the time, mean more or less what they say. Without that trust no human relationships would be possible and indeed human society as we know it could not exist.
Trust is fundamental to our political system too. We look to political parties to deliver what they say they will.
Trust is fundamental to our sources of information, whether it’s in the news or from a research institution. When people lie or mislead us we feel badly led down.
It is not surprising then that in Shakespeare and so many of the great dramas of the world, issues of trust and betrayal are central. Nor should it surprise us that this is true of the story in the Gospels as well. Jesus handpicked 12 people to form the nucleus of a new humanity and one of them betrayed him. One of the most poignant of all Christian works of art is the scene by Giotto in the Scrovegni chapel in Padua when a mob come to arrest Jesus and Judas identifies him with a kiss. It brings to mind a verse in the psalms ‘Even my close friend, someone I trusted, someone who shared my bread, has turned against me’.
Although Jesus was badly let down, it wasn’t just Judas. All his followers denied him or fled. He had staked his life on the belief that at the heart of the universe is a trustworthy wisdom and power. He lived his whole life and death in that trust. And that’s why his life and death continue to pose a big question to me and many still today. At any one moment life may or may not be going our way, but in the moral and spiritual struggle is there a wisdom and power for good on our side? It is not just banking, all life depends on trust and that may possibly reflect a wider truth about the source of life itself.