Bishop Rachel reflects on the tragic death of Jason Arday

Much has been said and written following the tragic death of Jason Arday and I have been reticent to add to the words and opinions, yet I have also been acutely aware that many of those sharing wise and heartfelt insights are people of global majority heritage and I am concerned when those of us who are white too often stay silent and leave it to black and brown people to speak out on matters involving racial justice.

There has been much said about ‘difference’ in the life of Professor Arday and who he was, and indeed he spoke about this himself, yet there is perhaps more to be said about ‘sameness’ and shared humanity.  We are all equally precious and unique, created in the image of God, and we go on becoming who we are in interdependent relationship. When someone is isolated and scapegoated there is a wound in that interdependence.

I do not know what was or was not true in what Professor Arday said about himself, or what criticisms of him are substantiated and what are not, but if we recognise that people’s flourishing requires appropriate and interdependent relationship and mutual belonging, then it does seem that there are questions to be asked of the wider system in which he participated and from which he was appointed. What I do know is that a young gifted black man is dead and his exposure to public scrutiny and media has seemed to me far more prolific and of interest to people than would have been the case if Professor Arday had been an older white academic accused of plagiarism and various falsehoods.

As we form opinions, focused on a precious unique individual for whom family and friends now tragically mourn, and whose name is only known to most of us because we have read and heard of him from the media, one of the dangers is that we fail to join the dots and are deaf to the resonances with issues which exist within us and around us in our own local contexts.

In my role as Anglican Bishop to HM Prisons, I am only too aware of a society which is quick to blame and seemingly obsessed with punishment without a desire for redemption. My thoughts so often go to Jesus Christ’s parable in Matthew chapter 18 in which he tells of the servant who was unable to pay the king what he owed. Out of mercy the king cancelled his debt, yet the servant immediately went out and violently grabbed a fellow servant who owed him money and demanded immediate payment, and in so doing utterly failed to pass on the mercy which had been shown to him. The King’s subsequent words to the servant on whom he had pity, are full of righteous anger: ‘Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’

I wonder how in our readiness to take a keen interest in what we see to be the failings of other people, not least those who may be different from us, we fail to recognise the mercy that God has shown to us and too easily mete out our self-righteous and almost voyeuristic judgement. All of us, to use the words of the general confession in the Book of Common Prayer, ‘have erred, and strayed from (God’s) ways like lost sheep’ and we have each ‘left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done.’

In my work within the House of Lords, I often pause before the statue of Queen Victoria which sits in the Prince’s chamber just at the entrance to the Lords’ chamber where our questions and debates take place. Either side of the queen are the figures of mercy and justice, and I find it sobering to ask myself how well they reside together in my life. Justice does indeed demand consequences for our actions, whilst mercy demands compassion and a holding fast to the possibility of redemption and transformation. Justice and mercy are interwoven in the heart of God who is in the business of reconciliation and making all things new, most supremely revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And then there is the issue of our binary thinking. As I ponder much I have heard and read in the days leading up to Jason Arday’s sad death and in the days since, I am once more wondering why we have become so willing to live a landscape shaped by binary choices and views – whether it be the plethora of tick box questions asking us to choose yes or no, correct or incorrect, or the debate on an issue which implies we must opt for a position in which there appear to only be two sides. There is little place for nuance and discursive reflection, and we too readily seem to reject the possibility that views which might appear to be contradictory can in fact reside together, even at the same time. For example, it should be possible for someone viewed as an offender to be appropriately recognised as a victim too, or for someone whose behaviour in certain aspects of life are not to be condoned, to also be affirmed as a loving and loved individual.

In the Diocese of Gloucester, I hope and pray that individually and collectively we might ask ourselves what it is to which we are blind within the sphere of racial justice and difference and in all the places where we readily exercise judgement and blame. May we have the courage to challenge and encourage each other to stay rooted with thanksgiving in the God of justice, mercy and love, and to be committed to joining in with God’s work of transformation in our lives and the lives of other people – those like us and those different from ourselves.

Rt Revd Rachel Treweek, Bishop of Gloucester  22 August 2026