Thought for the Day-A Matter of Perspective

"The Class System" from The Frost Report

A Thought for the Day given during a lunchtime service of Holy Communion at St Olave Hart Street on Tuesday 9th September 2025 based on readings from Colossians 2.6-15 and Luke 6.12-19.

You may have seen a sketch that often features in programmes celebrating the greatest comedy moments. In it we see John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett standing in a line, each representing a different position in the British Class System.

John Cleese, tall, smart in a bowler hat, turns to Ronnie Barker and says, “I look down on him.” Ronnie Barker, sporting a Homburg and representing the middle class, replies, “I look up to him but I look down on him,” pointing to Ronnie Corbett, the shortest of the three dressed in the cap of a working class man, who delivers the punchline: “I know my place.”

First broadcast on The Frost Report nearly fifty years ago, the sketch still resonates because it lays bare our persistent tendency to view ourselves — and others — through comparison.

Who is above me? Who is beneath me? How can I position myself above that person? How can I stop them getting one over on me? How can I get one over on them?

It’s a way of seeing the world that perpetuates injustice, inequality and indifference — a perspective that Jesus came to correct.

In our gospel reading, Jesus goes up a mountain and spends the whole night in prayer to God the Father. At daybreak he calls from his band of disciples twelve to become his apostles. We learn later that these men are not drawn from the upper echelons of society but include fishermen and tax collectors — people others would have looked down upon. Jesus sees them differently. He sees them as God sees them — fearfully and wonderfully made. He calls them up the mountain. Their lives are changed forever.

We are left to imagine what words were exchanged up there. How they prayed. How the Apostles felt after learning of their new calling in life. But we do know that they didn’t have their heads in the clouds for long. There’s no time to pat themselves on the back. To enjoy the view from this new spiritual high. Jesus leads his newly minted Apostles down to earth and straight into the midst of a large crowd — the sick, the troubled, the desperate, crying out for mercy — as Jesus begins to heal them.

Unlike the famous comedy sketch, the disciples see these people through the healing work of Jesus — standing alongside them, side by side, on level ground.

The Letter to the Colossians appeals to us to adopt this same perspective: “As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught.”

The letter goes on to warn us not to be dragged back into the captivity of old ways of seeing the world and each other: the hierarchies, the judgement, the one-upmanship. But to embrace the freedom that comes from seeing the world as Jesus — as God — sees it. And as we can see it too, as his adopted children. Through our baptism we have been raised to a new life in faith and, like the Apostles, are led by Christ to see the world anew.

Rooting ourselves in Christ, as the letter implores us to do, means seeing the world and each other through him. Not seeing others in comparison to ourselves — looking up to, or down on them — but seeing each other through eyes of mercy, of love.

In the comedy sketch, Ronnie Corbett says, “I know my place,” and it’s meant in jest. But when we learn to see ourselves and others as Christ sees us — not through the lens of judgement or status, but with love — we can say the same with joy. We know our place: not above or beneath, but with Christ, on level ground, among the multitude of broken people crying out for healing. And when we see as Christ sees, we no longer look up or down at one another — we find ourselves standing together, in the light of God’s grace.

Amen. 

Image: Still from 'The Class System' sketch on The Frost Report, as published on this website.