This is the script of this morning's Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4's Today programme:
It's been an interesting couple of weeks, hasn't it? I never thought I'd be interested in people riding bikes around a track, but I got drawn into the Rio velodrome. There is a massive upsurge in pride in the flag the athletes carry, even if some of the national anthems do go on a bit.
Maybe it was while the world's attention was on Rio that a North Korean diplomat chose to shine a different light on national pride by defecting to South Korea last week. Later described as “human scum” by his old regime, Thae Young Ho had managed to escape with his family from the North Korean embassy in Watford before his defection had been noticed by his erstwhile masters.
This is interesting stuff. At the same time I saw this in the news I also heard about a guy who couldn't get into his national Olympic team, so joined that of a different country.
So, where does loyalty lie? And what, when we celebrate loyalty to Great Britain in Rio, does that loyalty actually mean?
The reality is that most of us live for most of the time with multiple loyalties. Just watch the battle on social media between Lancashire and Yorkshire over which county has done better than the other in Brazil. When does loyalty to Yorkshire trump fidelity to the nation? Or when does my commitment to my family or myself take priority over that devoted to the wider community? I come from Liverpool, but live in Yorkshire – I just have to deal with it. But, there is a serious point about where we draw the lines and where the lines need to be crossed.
The truth is that we live all the time with a complex hierarchy of loyalties: to oneself, to family, to community, to religion, to nation and to the world. The North Korean defector clearly decided that the balance of these priorities had changed. Yet, his experience also illustrates that in real life we sometimes have to live for a time with commitments that are conflicted – or that, for various pragmatic reasons, we hold a line with our voice when our head and our heart have moved elsewhere.
I have been wondering how to express this, and kept coming back to the lawyers trying to compromise Jesus over the conflict between his commitment to Israel and that demanded from the Roman Empire in the form of taxes. His reply: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's” was not a cop-out. It crystallised the conundrum. It made clear that those who claim a commitment to God in any way have to evidence that commitment in the choices they make and the ethical priorities they live to.
So, within the hierarchy of loyalties, raising a flag actually raises as many questions as it answers.