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Good Morning.

Over the past 3 days the election heat-wave has been stoked up by the unveiling of a number of political manifestos - and there’ll be more to come.

And as we’ve been hearing, these have been duly challenged and analyzed in specialist settings like the Radio 4 studio.

Of course, the debates are not limited to professional political analysts. Across the landscape, political hand-to-hand combat is taking place on doorsteps and in small hustings as voters try to separate social fact from political fiction.

All political manifestos must run the gauntlet between qualified approval, cynicism and downright disbelief.

But our manifestos are not just warzones between trust and disillusionment. They are the social contracts within which broad political ideas are transformed into hard political currency.

Our politicians are selling and we are buying.

It’s a transaction between political promise and our legitimate self-interests. And as Archbishop William Temple once suggested, any politician who thinks we can be governed without appealing to our interest is (I quote) ‘living in dreamland and is a public menace.’

But they do have a seriousness – almost a sacredness - about them, because they’re promises to look out for our best personal and community interests.

And promises are really important. Even a child gets it.

And in Christian faith God gets it. Throughout the Bible, the promise is the created environment in which God includes people into his own ideas for a better world, and the final restoration of everything that’s been broken in human relationships.

The promise of a new way of being human was never limited to holy huddle of happy 1st century Christians. It was a promise that the God-with-us idea should affect relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children. And yes, masters and slaves. The fundamental issues of economics.

In Christian theology the place of promise has never been politically neutral. In his own time, Jesus was something of a political commentator. If he was in our studio today, I suspect he would still insist on the tough principle that a politician’s ‘Yes’ should mean ‘Yes’, and their ‘No’ should mean ‘No’.

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