As you may know, the unusual link between these two names are the 13 painting of Jacob and his sons that hang in Auckland Castle, the seat of the Bishop of Durham. The paintings have been fhere since the mid eighteenth century when a bishop of those days bought them for Pound125, a tidy sum at that time. But Mr Ruffer paid the even tidier sum of Pound15 million earlier this year to prevent them being sold by the Church Commissioners to pay for repairs to the Bishop's Palace. "I happened to have $15 million", he told the Spectator magazine, " I wanted to do something for the north-east, where I come from and I collect paintings." And what did he think of the pictures ? "I've never seen them", he said " it sounds funny but I'm just too busy".
Talk about an impulse buy! That must be one of the biggest and best ever.
But even those of us on a different financial planet do sometimes feel the urge to support a cause that we know little about. A case in point was the recent campaign to save a painting entitled The Journey to Calvary that had been hanging in Nostell Priory, in Yorkshire. But it was saved for the nation not only by contributions from established institutions like the National Art Fund, but also by many thousands of small donations. This is an interesting victory because it defied expectations. First, art lovers gave money to this cause even in difficult economic times. And second, they did this for a painting that is not of great celebrity, by the younger Pieter Bruegel, less famous than his renowned father.
But none of that stops The Procession to Calvary being a powerful work. It is about human cruelty and human theatre - a biting work of art in which we can recognise our own world, with a powerful Christian message. When I saw a photograph of it something in me said this country needs to keep this picture. Given the amount of criticism that hedge fund managers have attracted in recent years, it's good to know that some are conspicuously generous. What makes Mr Ruffer exceptional is that he is a committed Christian who quite obviously puts his money where his mouth is. And this clearly was not just a generous gesture, hugely welcome though that has no doubt been. Mr Ruffer, I see, was Chairman of the Good Shepherd Mission in Bethnal Green for ten years from 1998.
This story set me thinking about how each of us can use our talents and our resources to promote Christian ideals. I don't know about you, but I'm not in Mr Ruffer's league. But we can emulate his commitment to the creation of a better world around us. This is what that Bethnal Gfreen Mission says about itself on its website : and I think that we could do worse than use it as a template for our own Uplands Group.
We are Christians from varied backgrounds who share the experience of knowing the forgiveness and new life that Jesus Christ offers to all. We belong to a welcoming, local church known as `The Good Shepherd Mission' based here in Bethnal Green, Tower Hamlets.
We long for others, whatever their background or belief, to share the great hope we have for ourselves and our world through the life, death and raising to life of our Lord Jesus. We seek to serve our local neighbourhood through a range of community based activities, including early years and family, and children's and youth activities that are open to all. We also have a concern for the Church's mission in the wider world.............and we see meeting together regularly to support and encourage each other in our faith as crucial for our spiritual life.
Jonathan Ruffer's association with that message contrasts then with the one that we normally associate with money men. What it says to me is that each of us must try to use his or her talents to promote the Christian ideal around us in whatever way seems best whilst we still have the time. As my doctor Dad used to say to his patients: the most important time of your life is time now. The Journey to Calvary begins to day on Palm Sunday when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on that ass. We know where it will end by Friday. And then there is the joy of Easter Sunday. This week, then, is a special time for all of us to be guided, and renewed, by the life & ministry Jesus, to think about what we are doing to make our world a better place.
As well as Mr Ruffer's example another one that I have been studying this week is that contained in a book called " The Warmth of the Heart Prevents the Body from Rusting.", Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4. The title is actually a Japanese proverb and the book discusses how given the inevitability of decline and death all of us can experience a happy and fulfilling old age.
The author a French psychologist speaks first of the desire to cling to youth that seems to be so much part of our western culture and when youth has gone too often to retreat into disillusion and depression. We need, she argues, to cultivate a positive awareness of ageing and to think about it day to day. She cites the example of the Japanese Islands of Okinawa where there are more centenarians than any other place on earth. Why? Food? Fish and green tea ? Not only that: because they die when they move to other parts of Japan.
It's what they do together and with younger people that counts keeping their interests alive. Using their experience and knowledge for the benefit of others. And what they do alone. Also acquire the gift of solitude and meditation. No one teaches us to be alone.
For a happy old age we need to cultivate charm and old age. This is the time when for all its handicaps we have the chance to experience what the Greek Stoics called true freedom, the freedom of allowing things to happen of putting oneself into the hands of God. That is why elderly people who really live their old age exert a certain attraction on others, passing on a kind of "disengagement" as the author puts is, a lightness or humour. They help others to grow spiritually.
The question then, the author poses, is how can we infect each other with fervour and life ? By his life and ministry Jesus, when you come to think about it, infected his hearers not only in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, of course, but for all generations to come. He has given us by his life blueprint for our own and by his death, a message that there is a new, eternal, life awaiting us when the time comes. We can through the work of the churches of this Benefice bring a new sense of purpose to our lives.
The Government wants to measure happiness, I read. And from some international surveys it seems we are a pretty miserable people. There is unhappiness out there, there is loneliness, there is lack of purpose, there is cynicism. We have our work cut out.
It seems strange that this should be so in a land that gave birth to the Anti-Slavery Society, the Salvation Army, the YMCA, The Scout Movement, St. John Ambulance and a host of charitable foundations dedicated to the improvement of human welfare. All of them were based on Christian principles.
We need then a sense of renewal: Holy Week 2011 can be the catalyst for that. We have a new Benefice and a new office; we are about to appoint a new Vicar At Hollowell we have refurbished the bell and are clearing up long neglected corners of the churchyard. There is that sense of renewal already around.
Let is then cultivate joy through our Christian faith whatever our age and transmit it as we journey to all around us. We don't have to eat seaweed to live to be a hundred. It may help of course. But it's more important to be positive to the end, secure in the knowledge that when we breast the tape we'll hear a voice saying, "well done thou good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."
