"Orangutans learn to trade favour" ran the BBC website on Christmas Eve
“Orangutans can help each other get food by trading tokens, scientists have discovered - but only if the help goes in both directions.”
We read that researchers from the University of St Andrews have found that orangutans can learn the value of tokens and trade them, helping each other win bananas. Two orangutans - Bim and Dok - from Leipzig Zoo, Germany, were especially good at helping each other.
Initially, they were given several sets of tokens, and learned the value of the different types. An animal could exchange one type for bananas for itself, another type could be used to gain bananas for a partner, and a third had no value.
Dok, the female, was especially good at swapping tokens to get bananas for Bim, the male. But he was less interested in trading tokens that would win bananas for her.
As she became less willing to help him out, Bim responded by trading more and more, until their efforts were more or less equal.
What fascinated me in this report is the assumption that this suggests Orangutans are something like humans. I don't know about you, but that is sort of the behaviour I would expect from animals (although they are maybe rather better at it than we had realised!)
Of course, there is nothing wrong in trade! We need it – indeed, lots more of it. But trading isn't what makes us human!
I think tonight is about what makes us human. The ability to rise above self interest, selfishness if you like, and to put someone else first. Bethlehem is where it first happened.
God gave his Son, as a gift, pure gift, knowing we would kill him. But because by giving His Son he would be able to welcome His Son's killers into His eternity – heaven we sometimes call it.
Not that people hadn't been unselfish before Jesus. But no-one had taught that it was the supreme good. And certainly no-one had ever lived it out.
Jesus came into the world so that we might look not downwards to Orangutans, but upwards to Him
This last week I spoke with the family of someone who had died. He had had a miserable childhood, rejected and taken into care. The sort of childhood that is used to explain why some of the awful criminals in the news do the awful thing they do.
But this man had lived differently. He had risen to the challenge. He had lived an adult life full of love for the new family he made through marriage. He had risen above his circumstances.
Christ comes into the world and calls us to rise above – rise above all we face, and become truly human. But not just rise above. He shows us how trust in the Father will see us through all things – even death. Indeed, trust in the Father through Jesus is the only way to living a truly human, eternal, life.
There is much to face. Woolworth's speaks for so much. It is being almost demolished in front of our eyes. All that we love and grew up with – Ladybird clothes, etc. - gone. Others are joining them. There is so much uncertainty.
Tonight, we remember and recall that in the midst of all this, what really matters has not changed
When people is dying, no-one ever says, I wish I had worked harder, I wish I hard earned more money. What they say is, I wish I had spent more time with my family. Deep down we know what really matters.
And what really matters – that we are loved by God and who holds out his arms to us to draw us into his family, has not changed.
And God who welcomes us when we turn to him, will then strengthen us into the new year where so much seems to be falling apart, enabling us to, by His Spirit, rise above the things around us, and, full of trust in God, be those who go out to love others, not those who learn to be Orangutans.
