The Pearl and the Furnace – Sermon Preached on 26th July 2026 (Eighth Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on July 25, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot, Christ Church, Bulkington, and Holy Cross, Seend

Romans 8.26–39; Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52.

“‘Have you understood all this?’ They answered ‘Yes.’

A woman stands bent over a large open trough or tub, her sleeves pushed back and her arms sunk into a mass of dough, working leaven through the meal. She wears long, plain robes gathered at the waist, her head covered, inclined toward her work. The setting is a spare domestic interior with a suggestion of a wall and floor behind her, and light falling from one side. The composition is close and shadowed, the figure filling most of the frame. Fine cross-hatching models the folds of cloth and the bulk of the dough.

Sir John Everett Millais, The Leaven (1864) in the Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, London.

Have you understood all this? The yeast and the flour and the treasure in the field, and the pearl of great price? And the good fish and the bad fish – and the furnace of fire?

The disciples confidently told Jesus that, yes, they had. But at this stage of Matthew’s Gospel, when He is still teaching and healing in Galilee, there is much they don’t understand about Jesus Himself. The disciples are far from working out that Jesus is the Messiah, further still from realising that Jesus is not here to bring them a lifetime of comfort and worldly success, but to die for the sake of their eternities. So perhaps one of the things that we’re seeing in this morning’s Gospel is how much the disciples have yet to understand about Christ, how much work the yeast has yet to do, how far the mustard seed has yet to grow. As with them, so also with us – or at least let us hope that God still has much spiritual growth to raise in us.

One point of parables is that people can never understand them in their entirety – they land differently with each of us, and each of us will read them differently at different points of our lives. Like the kingdom of heaven itself, when we try to grasp the parables too tightly, to turn them into definitive statements of policy that we can use to make ourselves into insiders and others into outsiders, then they disappear into meaninglessness.

Yet there are insiders and outsiders, says Christ. There are good and bad fish – and the bad fish will be thrown into a furnace of fire. I always like to sidestep the implications of this by talking about the refiner’s fire, the furnace that turns a cheap alloy into gold or silver. But what is left when you throw an unhealthy fish into a furnace, but perhaps a few charred bones? This set of parables isn’t just hard to understand, it finishes on a hard and judging note.

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Living Amid the Weeds – Sermon Preached on 19th July 2026 (Seventh Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on July 19, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Romans 8.12–25; Matthew 13.24–30, 36–43

“The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No…’”

What happens when the people we are supposed to look up to fail? What happens when the people we would like to see as examples and patterns for our own lives turn out to be no better than the rest of us – and often much worse?

Oil painting of a riverside landscape with windswept trees under a cloudy sky. In the centre, a bare-chested man scatters seed from a basket on his hip as he walks across a harvested field. On the left, two labourers lie slumped and asleep against a tree trunk; on the right, another man lies asleep on the ground, his head resting on his arm. A river with a small boat and distant hills is visible in the background.

Domenico Fetti, The Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (1620-21). Hangs in the Courtauld Institute, London.

As a society, we’re speedrunning that experiment. Trust in democratic institutions is crumbling. Only one in eight of us now trusts governments to put nation before party all or most of the time. There is a growing political gap in how much people say they trust judges, scientists, teachers, professors, and civil servants – for a large minority of the population, they are the political priesthood of the other side.

As for other sources of authority, they too have seen their credibility dissolve. The Royal Family? Let’s not dwell too long on Prince Andrew. The world of celebrities? Rife with abuse.

The Church, and its priests and bishops – [fx: LOUD CLEARING OF THROAT] – well, they certainly have their share of wrongdoers, with regard to sex and money, of course, but also in handling safeguarding disclosures and episodes of bullying.

Most people aren’t interested in the Church – and if what we were selling was the idea that we’re in a position to stand in judgement over others, then they’d be right. The Church will not be the judge of the world, only the Saviour to whom it points the human race, Jesus Christ. Those who call themselves Christians will be under His judgement as much as anyone else. Now, if we truly seek to make Christ the guiding light of our lives, we can hope to live better lives than we would otherwise, but we certainly aren’t perfect.

In this life, God allows the good and the bad to grow together. Often, the wicked flourish. Now, I’m sure most of us have chapters in our lives that we’re not proud of, and most of us know how they tend to start. We do something small that we know isn’t quite right, and we get away with it, and it doesn’t cause us that much worry – after all, other people are getting away with the same sort of thing and mostly they seem to be perfectly nice people most of the time. Then our moral compass starts to go awry, small steps lead to larger steps, and we find ourselves deep amid the weeds, living in a way that would once have caused us shame.

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Of Dandelions and Oaks – Sermon Preached on 12th July 2026 (Sixth Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on July 12, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Mary’s, Potterne

Romans 8.1–11; Matthew 13.1–9, 18–23

“Listen! A sower went out to sow…”

I thought I’d start today with a bit of science. Why does a mouse have dozens of babies, and an elephant just one? Some species, whether animals or plants, have a low number of offspring and put a lot of effort into raising them – we are one of these, so are elephants and gorillas, big animals like us, but so are parrots. Some species have lots of offspring, so cannot, of course, put the same amount of effort into raising any single one of them – rats famously breed like… well, rabbits.

A thickly painted oil landscape. A large yellow sun sits low on the horizon at the centre, its rays radiating outward across a yellow-green sky in short, dashed brushstrokes. Below the sun, a band of pale gold stubble or standing corn runs the width of the picture; a small blue farm building with a red roof stands at the far left, and dark trees mark the horizon at the right. The foreground is a broad ploughed field rendered in dense, choppy strokes of blue, violet, white, and orange, with a pale furrow curving through it. A peasant in a straw hat, olive jacket, and blue trousers strides across the field from the right, seed sack cradled against his body, his right arm swinging out as he casts. Three dark birds are scattered across the soil.

Van Gogh, The Sower (1888). Hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

A similar spectrum is seen in the world of plants – blow on a dandelion clock and many dozens of seeds will float on the breeze; oaks are very different, sometimes waiting for years to produce acorns, with each acorn loaded with enough reserves to survive decades of burial, drought, and being nibbled by squirrels – after all, the forest floor will still be there in fifty years’ time.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” writes St Paul to the Christians in Rome. There are many implications of the phrase “in Christ Jesus”. But one comes from remembering that Jesus is God, and God is Love – the Bible says so in those same three words. To be in Jesus Christ is to live in love. The Holy Spirit is love too – the love that flows between Father and Son, and a person in its own right, who ripples out from them through the whole universe, a universe whose beauty at every scale shows that it is loved.

We human beings are made in the image and likeness of our creator God; we reflect that image most clearly when we love. We are called both to receive God’s love as seed sown in us, and to sow seeds of that love in others.

God is constantly sowing seeds in our lives out of His love for us, usually without us really noticing. Some fall on the path, in the rocky ground, or amid the thorns. Sometimes our hearts are too hard for the seed to flourish; sometimes we’re too distracted by material things to respond; sometimes to respond to God’s love would mean doing unpopular or costly things, so we back off. We fear the condemnation of those around us, but the only condemnation we should truly fear is that of God, and when we respond to God’s love by sharing that love with others, then we are truly in Christ, and we need not, as St Paul reminds us, fear God’s condemnation. If you fear your harvest is thin, trust that the same God who sows in love also forgives and restores.

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Changing Politics, Changing Country

Posted on July 9, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

How does the Church of England navigate a Britain of a transforming party system, transforming demographics, and increasing division?

Workshop presentation for the Diocese of Salisbury Clergy Conference, 8 July 2026, Bryanston School, Dorset

A densely detailed satirical illustration in the style of an eighteenth-century engraving. On the left, an angry crowd of working people brandish brooms and placards reading "Fair Wages!", "Tax the Rich!" and "Voices Heard!" beside a cracked classical column labelled "British Institutions". A woman in a red dress and white apron holds up an angel pendant, an angel embroidered on her apron. On the right, anxious men and women in suits and lanyards clutch clipboards, charts and phones as poll data, banknotes, ballot boxes and televisions showing shouting faces swirl away in a vortex between the two groups. Behind them, under a stormy sky, a small parish church with a square tower stands on a green hill, its door glowing with light as small figures climb the path. Signs read "The City of Confusion: where all is flux" and "Truth found only on the hill".

I. On radical cultural shifts

None of us interprets the world entirely as a blank slate. All of us see the world through a set of assumptions, values, and ways of understanding the world that a society or group takes largely for granted. We can call this a paradigm – a paradigm is the collection of usually unexamined beliefs through which people interpret the world, judge what is normal or plausible, and organise their collective life. These are never entirely fixed – they tend to change, gradually and organically, over time. We need these mental models, as reality is too complex for us to grasp in its fullness.  But every once in a while a paradigm that had been convincing starts to become very poor at describing the reality that people experience. When that happens, the paradigm starts not to evolve, but to collapse: the old ways of seeing the world no longer make sense, and for a moment all sorts of new ideas seem possible; after a period of uncertainty, even chaos, a new paradigm starts to congeal.

My argument is that we are inside one of those transitions in the way that people understand the world – a paradigm collapse. Even if you’ve never come across the concept, we have lived through major collapses of a paradigm within living memory. One of them happened to the Church; one of them happened in another part of the world but was of global importance. How the Church responded to the first, and how the world responded to the second, tells us much about how to respond to the one which I believe we are about to experience.

1963: the collapse of Western Christendom

1963 was a time of radical change – television had arrived in every living room, car ownership was increasing rapidly while Dr Beeching was taking an axe to the railways, and the Pill was just starting to rewire people’s most intimate relationships.

Philip Larkin fixed the hinge of the British 20th Century in that year, in the poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, which starts:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

The joke lands because it is true. Church historians of every stripe now locate in the early 1960s the moment at which a Christendom in place for over a millennium gave way with astonishing speed. Callum Brown, an atheist historian of religion in Britain who positively celebrates the change, insists the data show this “was not the long, inevitable religious decline of the conventional secularisation story, but a remarkably sudden and culturally violent event” – one which followed a 1950s of rising church attendance and sacramental participation. Sam Brewitt-Taylor, who laments the change, has shown that senior Christian leaders suddenly conceded the arrival of the ‘secular society’ in 1963–64, making the collapse of cultural Christianity all but inevitable. The collapse of Christendom was less a case of gradual erosion since the Enlightenment, more an avalanche.

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You Bunch of Failures – Sermon Preached on 5th July 2026 (Fifth Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on July 5, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Christ Church, Bulkington

Romans 7.15–25a, Matthew 11.16–19, 25–30

“For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

The other day, straight after taking a funeral, I had a long chat with the immediate family, and I kicked myself afterwards when I realised I had been far cheerier than was appropriate with people who were clearly deeply in grief. Then there was the plan for a “good night’s sleep” that disappeared into Cape Verde’s late-night heroics against the might of Argentina. I could go on, but the worst things I’ve done aren’t things I’d volunteer to reveal from the pulpit on a Sunday.

An oil painting of an elderly man seated on a simple wooden chair beside a fireplace. He is bent forward with his face buried in both clenched fists, his elbows resting on his knees. He wears a loose blue working suit and heavy, worn leather boots. His hair is thin and pale. The brushwork is thick and visible throughout, with strong directional strokes following the contours of the figure's hunched body and the grain of the wooden floorboards. The chair is painted in muted olive-yellow. To the left, a low fire burns in a plain hearth with a dark mantelpiece. The background wall is rendered in pale grey with broad, textured strokes. The overall palette is dominated by blues, ochres, and muted earth tones.

Vincent van Gogh, At Eternity’s Gate (1890). Hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

We all know the feeling. We all do things that strike us as quite mad afterwards – self-destructive or sometimes just wrong – sometimes things done in the spur of the moment, sometimes wrong courses of action that we’ve continued with for some time.

St Paul recognised this in his own life, writing this morning that even when he was overjoyed by God’s commandments, he saw “another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin”. St Paul’s great insight was that human beings could never become truly good just by trying to follow God’s commandments, because we are all so prone to self-sabotage. That’s why the story of the Jewish people, although they were God’s chosen people, included the same failures and episodes of self-destruction as everyone else’s. Even when we know in our minds what the right thing is and set out to do the best, something inside ourselves, something that often seems out of our control, makes us turn to the worst.

Nobody’s perfect. We all know that.

So I find it odd that, if you pay attention to the way our newspapers are written and our TV programmes are made, they encourage us into a mood of feeling smug and superior. And that’s even before we discuss the algorithms of social media. It has all become much worse over the last couple of decades. I think that is because it is now possible to explore in minute detail what makes people tune in and tune out, what makes people disengage or click. The media and social media moguls wouldn’t press those buttons of smugness and superiority if they weren’t producing results for them.

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Would You Sacrifice Your Son? – Sermon Preached on 28th June 2026 (Fourth Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on June 28, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at St Peter’s, Ovington and Holy Cross, Seend

Genesis 22. 1-18; Matthew 10. 40-42

“Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest … and offer him … for a burnt offering…”

A large square oil painting dominated by expansive fields of blue, yellow, red, and green. In the lower centre-right, an elderly bearded man in red and brown robes kneels and looks upward, his right hand raised and gripping a knife. Beneath him, a younger man lies prostrate on the ground, clothed in yellow, his face turned outward toward the viewer. A large blue winged angel descends diagonally from the upper centre of the composition, one arm extended downward toward the knife. To the upper left, a green tree stands before a pale blue background, with two small crouching figures sheltering at its base. In the upper right, rendered in darker, earthier tones, a crowd of figures surrounds a crucifixion scene, with a cross visible at its centre. The background throughout is loosely worked in swirling washes of white, yellow, pink, and blue. A signature appears in the lower left corner.

Marc Chagall, The Sacrifice of Isaac (1960-6), hangs in the National Marc Chagall Gallery, Nice.

If God is merciful, why do men sacrifice their children to their gods? Today’s pairing of readings, seemingly so awkward and contradictory, is linked by the common theme of God’s mercy, and asks us how we should share God’s mercy with those around us.

The story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is at once gripping and repulsive. The temptation is, as always with the more difficult Old Testament texts, to distance it from our own modern condition, because we would never do anything as crazy or barbaric as sacrificing our children for God, would we?

The conventional way to read the story of Abraham is that his faith is being put to the test, and that’s what the text itself pushes us towards. At the end of this passage, the angel of the Lord says explicitly that because of Abraham’s iron faith, God’s promise to him so long ago that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars has been confirmed.

But here’s the thing – the story was clearly strange and fearful also for people of its own time, as much as for us. Although Abraham is acting on a commandment of God, there is something furtive about his behaviour. At no point on their three-day trudge to the place of sacrifice does Abraham explain to his two young servants what is happening, and when they arrive, he leaves them behind, plainly lying to them about what he is about to do with Isaac.

He also lies directly to the boy about what is about to happen – when Isaac innocently asks where the sacrificial lamb is, Abraham replies that the Lord will provide one. But that’s not what Abraham thinks is about to happen – Abraham thinks he’s about to kill his own son, and won’t tell him the truth.

So there is a shadow of dissembling resting over this story. Abraham may have passed a test of faith set by God, but it’s as if he knows there’s something shameful about the way he’s done it. Shouldn’t Abraham have asked if God would really have demanded he embark on a course of action that he had to lie about to those closest to him? Was there a better way to be faithful? Surely, we should always ask hard questions if someone is asking us to sacrifice our children.

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The Sword and the Sparrow – Sermon Preached on 21st June 2026 (Third Sunday after Trinity)

Posted on June 27, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Romans 6.1b – 11; Matthew 10.24 – 39

“Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Jesus, in white robes with arm outstretched, addresses a group of twelve men gathered on a rocky hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee. The apostles stand or crouch in clusters, some leaning on staffs, their expressions attentive and apprehensive. A smaller group of onlookers watches from the lower left. The landscape behind is arid and hilly, with pale water visible in the middle distance under an overcast sky.

James Tissot, Ordaining of the Twelve Apostles (1886-94), in the collection of the Brooklyn Musuem.

This morning’s Gospel reading doesn’t have many of those cuddly quotes you see on social media with AI-generated graphics attached to them. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword, says Jesus, and to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother. Whoever denies me before others, I will also deny before my Father in heaven. Fear God, for He can destroy both your body and your soul in Hell. Not the sort of stuff you see on Instagram next to a photo of some pink roses.

This is hard stuff, about division and failure and judgement. It’s also about the sovereignty of God, His rule over the universe and His power to dispose of us as He sees fit; not only His power, but His right to do so. It is stuff that we often prefer not to think about. We want to stick with the idea that God is love and can forgive all, and there’s no need for anyone to suffer or struggle – in particular, we hope that there isn’t any need for me to suffer and struggle.

But we’ve had a week of headlines that ought to remind us that a world where there is no judgement is a world where there is no justice – from the monstrous abuse and murder of a baby by the people who adopted him, to warmongers perpetuating the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine at horrendous cost in human life. And if justice requires that God will judge the world, that means justice requires that God will judge each of us as individuals. So let’s turn back to the Gospel reading fully aware that we live in a world where all of us sometimes choose intentionally to do wrong things, and some people sometimes choose to do truly monstrous things.

Our Gospel reading is part of the instructions Jesus gave to the Twelve Apostles the first time He sent them out on their own to preach and heal in His name.

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Faith over Fame – Sermon Preached on 14th June 2026 (Third Sunday of Trinity)

Posted on June 14, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Mary’s, Potterne

Romans 5.1 – 8; Matthew 9.35 – 10.8

“God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

A woman reclines while having her makeup applied by two unseen stylists. One stylist applies lip colour with a brush, while another works on her hair. She has dark, glossy hair swept back, heavy eye makeup with dark liner and mascara, and full, glossy lips. She is wearing a black top with a sequinned neckline. The image is shot at a slight angle, with a blurred red object in the foreground.

Natural beauty? Kim Kardashian in 2010.

Strong and perfect. That’s what we’re supposed to be. Well, to be fair, we all know nobody is perfect. So, strong and nearly perfect is what we’re told we’re supposed to be.

How often do you see an ugly person on a TV show? Oh, the odd time you’ll see a politician interviewed who is no oil painting, or perhaps a professional sportsperson whose sporting prowess makes them indispensable even if they have a face that could sink a thousand ships. But have a look at the presenters of the chat shows. Have a look at the actors – and even more the actresses. The odd flawed vessel slips through by force of personality – at least if they’re a man – but what is presented to us as what we should aspire to looks a lot different from most of us: far more glamorous and perfect, indeed far more perfect than anyone could be without plastic surgery and stage make-up.

If you look at the influencers on social media, they’re even more perfect. Not a hair out of place, most of them. Industrial quantities of hairspray in use there, so that companies can pay them to encourage us to buy their brand of make-up, or craft beer, or whatever it is. Let’s think through what that implies. We live at a time when some people are famous just for being famous, and this seems to matter to enough ordinary people for it to be worth companies paying people who are famous to endorse what they want to sell us – even if it is an empty form of fame.

So we should aim to be famous, to be strong, physically and mentally, to be attractive to an almost inhuman pitch of perfection, and most of all, to be successful. Failure is for losers. That is the world we live in.

In this morning’s Epistle reading, St Paul, writing to the first Christian community that ever existed in Rome, says something very different about what God thinks about us. He says that we are of immeasurable value to God when we are weak, and when we are still sinners. We are of such absolute value to God, just for being human, just for being God’s children, that God came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ to die on the Cross for us.

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Faith and Blood – Sermon Preached on 7th June 2026 (Second Sunday of Trinity)

Posted on June 7, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Romans 4.13–25; Matthew 9.9–13, 18–26

“Jesus … saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’”

A detail from Veronese's The Feast in the House of Levi. At the centre of a long banquet table draped in white, Christ sits in a rose-pink robe with a faint halo, his long hair falling to his shoulders, reaching toward a dish. He is surrounded by guests in richly coloured Renaissance dress: bearded older men in red, blue and orange, a young red-haired man leaning in at his right, and a servant in yellow raising a glass behind. Two large spaniels sit on the chequered marble floor in the foreground, with pale classical architecture and open sky behind.

An excerpt from Paolo Veronese, Feast in the House of Levi (1573), hangs in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.

Hanging? Too good for ‘em!

They’re scum! Blood-sucking parasites draining the people dry.

Well, that’s what the people Jesus lived among would have said about tax collectors. We might recognise the sentiments. But the Roman Empire’s tax men weren’t like HMRC. They used armed enforcers to collect far more than they were supposed to, and lined their own pockets; this was technically against the law, and later on Emperors tried to rein them in, but in Jesus’ time, abuse by tax collectors was rife.

Jews in Palestine despised their own tax collectors well beyond the ordinary contempt felt elsewhere in the Empire, because they were seen as collaborators with a foreign occupier. So tax collectors were not just parasites, but traitors too.

So Jesus bumped into a Jewish tax collector named Matthew, but didn’t call him a scumbag, or tell him off, or quote the Bible at him, but simply said: “Follow me”.

And Matthew placed his faith in Jesus. The first thing he did was to throw a dinner party for Jesus, with yet more tax collectors and other “sinners” present. It must have been quite the party; I bet it was lots of fun.

There were some people watching all this from the group called the Pharisees. The Pharisees really wanted to obey God, but had ended up obsessed by doing everything according to a strict reading of the letter of the Bible, to the point that they lost their focus on more important commands of God like justice and mercy. They told Jesus they didn’t like Him eating with these sinners and tax collectors. And he answered them by telling them to go and learn the meaning of this phrase – “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”. Now, that obviously has a direct application to the imperfect group of people eating dinner with Jesus, but that’s only part of its meaning.

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Unclean Lips – Sermon Preached on 31st May 2026 (Trinity Sunday)

Posted on June 1, 2026 by Gerry Lynch

Preached at All Saints’, All Cannings (Devizes Deanery Choral Evensong)

Isaiah 6.1–8; John 16.5–15

“Woe is me! … because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips!”

Starting in 1972, the animal psychologist Francine Patterson began to teach an infant gorilla named Koko a modified form of American Sign Language. Patterson claimed Koko could sign a thousand words and understand twice that number in English. I remember seeing Koko speaking on children’s programmes when I was a kid, where we were told that this was absolutely the case (and some people still claim that is so).

Other researchers, however, found that while Koko could indeed use signs to request food, play, or affection, her handlers were, to a large extent, seeing what they wanted to see and ignoring the many times that Koko signed arrant nonsense in search of a reward. Koko could only use signs in a simple, isolated way, with no evidence of the complex, rule-based sentences that even young human children use.

Koko’s life was not in vain, however. She transformed public attitudes to gorillas, previously seen only as dangerous and brutish, just as their habitats were coming under terrible pressure and needed protection. She died eight years ago at the ripe old age – for a gorilla – of forty-six.

Those with longer memories recalled a horse in early 20th Century Germany nicknamed Clever Hans, whose owner, Wilhelm von Osten, claimed that he could not only spell words by pointing his hoof at a blackboard, but could also tell the time and even do arithmetic well enough to work with fractions. Unfortunately, when von Osten died, nobody else could get Hans to multiply fractions, and the poor creature had a miserable end, drafted into the First World War as a warhorse, where he was either killed in action or, perhaps, consumed by hungry soldiers.

A black-and-white photograph, apparently from the early twentieth century, showing two men and a horse standing in a cobbled courtyard in front of a brick wall. On the left, a young man in a cap holds the horse's bridle. In the centre, an elderly bearded man in a long coat and apron stands beside the horse, which is dark-coated and tall. To their left, a large blackboard mounted on a stand is covered in rows of handwritten numbers and arithmetic problems, including fractions and multiplication sums. Several small round objects, possibly balls or stones, are scattered on the ground at the base of the blackboard. A second, smaller board with abacus-like apparatus is visible in the background.

Clever Hans’ owner claimed he could spell, tell the time, and even work with fractions.

Words are the fundamental thing that separates us from animals. Even animals who have an impressive range of calls use closed systems of communication – we see no open-ended creativity among them, or combining of existing elements to make new concepts. Humans can use the power of language to touch the hem of God Himself. We can use our God-given power over language to speak truth, or we can use it to facilitate deceit. This is not always a case of maliciously and wilfully telling lies. As the stories of Koko and Clever Hans show, people often hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest.

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