Paving the Way

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on December 8, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Luke 3: 1-6

The 2024 Netflix drama Joy tells the story of Jean Purdy, a British nurse and embryologist, who in 1968 comes to interview with the eccentric but brilliant physiologist Robert Edwards at his lab in Cambridge. Edwards has an outrageous ambition: to transform the condition of infertility by inserting an egg fertilised outside the body. Collaborating with the obstetrician and gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe, Edwards begins what becomes a ten-year journey towards this ambitious goal. The film highlights how Edwards faces opposition from the medical research community, while Jean’s increasingly vital role leads to strained relationships with her mother, her vicar and her church, who believe her work is morally wrong. After 200 failed attempts with women volunteers, finally in 1978 the first in vitro baby, Louise Brown, is born. The story is made more poignant as alongside it we behold Jean’s own experience of endometriosis. The same specialist whose expertise led to the birth of the first test-tube baby tells Jean ‘You cannot bear a child.’ Meanwhile only eleven years after her key role in this world-changing breakthrough, Jean dies of melanoma at the age of 39. When the Nobel Committee recognises the achievement of these three medical pioneers in 2011, they award the prize to Robert Edwards alone, since it can only go to a living person, and Jean Purdy and Patrick Steptoe are dead.

I want you to think of Jean Purdy as a modern-day John the Baptist. Like John, her work only makes sense in the context of the work for which she prepares – yet that story cannot be told without her contribution, even though for decades her vital role has been forgotten or ignored. The middle two Sundays of Advent are unique in the liturgical calendar because these are the only Sundays where our gospel readings don’t specifically focus on Jesus – but instead highlight another figure, the forerunner, who says ‘Prepare the way.’ Jean Purdy prepared the way.

One of the most ironic quotations in our culture goes like this: ‘There’s no limit to what can be achieved so long as nobody minds who gets the credit.’ The irony lies in the number of people who’ve claimed the credit for coining the phrase. It seems most likely that the first person to express the sentiment in this way was a Jesuit priest in the nineteenth century. But it’s highly appropriate that no one really knows where it comes from. John the Baptist was evidently someone who didn’t seek the credit for himself. Many people have walked in his footsteps.

Jonas Salk was born in New York in 1914 to Jewish parents. He became a professor of virology in Pittsburgh in 1948 and, over the next seven years, laboured to find a vaccine against polio. In 1955 he succeeded. But immediately he faced a choice. If he were to seek a patent for it, he could become a rich man. But that would significantly slow the speed and extent of global distribution. So he chose not to seek a patent, literally not minding who got the credit.  As a result, the vaccine reached 90 countries within four years. Within a generation, polio had ceased to be subject to domestic transmission in the West.

The story of Jonas Salk is different from that of Jean Purdy. In Jean’s case, her contribution was obscured for a generation and the credit was largely assigned to others; meanwhile she died young and never herself got to benefit from the procedure she helped to create. In Jonas’ case, he’s still celebrated as the father of polio immunisation; but he got little monetary benefit, preferring to highlight the role of the countless practitioners on the ground around the world who ensured the vaccine got to the places it needed to.

I’d like now to tell you about a third figure who in some ways completes the triangle of Jean Purdy and Jonas Salk. Bill Arlow was born in County Down as a Protestant Ulsterman, although one of his grandparents was a Catholic. He travelled to Edinburgh to study in the late fifties at the same theological college I was to attend 30 years later. In 1970, as the Troubles were taking hold, he became rector of a parish in East Belfast. One of his early experiences was to minister to a youth shot in the head by a paramilitary, cradling the young man’s head as he breathed his last. Bill began to form relationships with paramilitaries on both sides, and the attempt led to him almost losing his voice, thenceforth being nicknamed Whispering Grass, after the popular song. Finally in December 1974 in Feakle, County Clare, he convened a meeting between Protestant church leaders and the IRA army council. He got a pasting from Revd Dr Ian Paisley, who referred to the participants as ‘the fickle Feakle clergy’ and to Bill as a ‘Provo parrot.’ But the outcome was a unilateral IRA ceasefire over Christmas 1974, and a bilateral truce that lasted till the following September. Bill continued to meet not just with the paramilitaries but with families of their victims who were dismayed by any talk of reconciliation. It turned out the Troubles resumed and continued for another 20 years. But in the 1980s, Bill began to utter prophetic words to describe his ministry.

Bill’s words were these: ‘It is better to fail in a cause that will finally succeed than to succeed in a cause that will finally fail.’ Remember these words were spoken years before the peace deal was finally agreed in 1998. When the Good Friday Agreement was finally reached, not many people still remembered the contribution Bill and others had made 25 years before – but their work had been the forerunner for what John Hume, David Trimble, Tony Blair and Senator George Mitchell achieved a generation later.

Bill Arlow is the third figure in our John the Baptist triangle. It’s one thing to be shunned by those you love most, to face opposition from church, state, researchers and the media, to die before your work sees full fruition, and for your contribution never to be recognised in your own lifetime. That was Jean Purdy’s story. It’s another thing to change the world, to preserve and enrich the lives of millions of people worldwide, to make an immeasurable impact on the well-being of the globe in your own and every subsequent lifetime, yet never to be a penny better off. That was Jonas Salk’s story. But Bill Arlow’s narrative is different: his bold initiative was derided by his colleagues; after initial success seemed to languish in naïveté and failure; and now, 50 years later to the day, is almost completely forgotten, even though the vaunted achievements of those who followed are accorded endless praise.

I wonder if you know what it feels like to be John the Baptist. I don’t particularly mean the locusts and wild honey, the sparse hygiene arrangements and gruff manner, the denouncing of the powerful and the uncompromising approach to repentance. I mean what Bill Arlow meant: ‘It is better to fail in a cause that will finally succeed than to succeed in a cause that will finally fail.’ I wonder which are the causes in which you’ve succeeded that will finally fail. I wonder which are the causes in which you’ve failed that will finally succeed.

I wonder if you’re a teacher who’s taught music to classes of children for decades, and withstood the fidgeting and whispering and inattention and wondered about the homes some of the kids return to at night and the futures they have to look forward to. But then you meet one of the children, now grown up, who stops you in the supermarket and says, ‘My mum died last week, and I sang by her bedside that song your taught us in primary school, and she squeezed my hand just before she expired. Thanks for that.’ I wonder if you’re a helpline operator for Samaritans, and after a series of dark lonely nights you get call from someone who’s facing the abyss, and you listen as they pour it all out and gradually get to a better place; and you realise you’ve actually enabled them to live another 30 years. I wonder if you work in a finance team and, after your firm teetering on the brink of bankruptcy for months, you see a former apprentice who’s now thriving as a qualified accountant; and for once you realise that one seed you planted actually bore fruit that would last.

But John the Baptist comes not just to inspire us amid our many floundering endeavours. He comes to point us to Jesus. For who is it above all who fails in a cause that will finally succeed than the one whose own disciples betrayed, denied and abandoned him, whose popularity evaporated, who like Jean Purdy died at an early age, who like Jonas Salk never got any personal benefit from giving life to millions of those who followed, who like Bill Arlow is seen as naïve and a failure; and yet points to something – indeed, the only thing – that will finally succeed? John the Baptist may have been in significant ways a failure, but he succeeded in the only thing that finally matters – he lived a life that pointed to Jesus.

Oh and by the way, that line about failing in a cause that will finally succeed – it wasn’t first said by Bill Arlow, it was the Presbyterian minister Peter Marshall. Or maybe the American president Woodrow Wilson. Anyone else want to take the credit? Oh but hang on, we just said it doesn’t matter. Only one thing matters. And John the Baptist got that right. So can we.