蜜芽传媒

Governments, inevitably, have to focus on affordability, just as much as we all do when balancing our household budgets. In the last few days, it鈥檚 emerged that ministerial advisers are going to study evidence about automatically raising the state pension age, according to life expectancy. It means that we could see the pension age, now at 66 and rising next year to 67, go up to 70 sooner rather than later.

There are not far short of 10 million people over 70 in the UK; 50 years ago there were more like seven million. I know from my own family just how long people can claim the state pension; some of my relatives had 30 years of retirement. Actuarial advisers question if it鈥檚 really sustainable for the public purse.

There鈥檚 something very significant about 70 鈥� that鈥檚 the Biblical three score years and ten, the agespan mentioned in Scripture.

And yet, much as it鈥檚 good to see people living longer, and that 70 is not the end of our lives but the start of supposed years of leisure, I wish notions about old age today reflected Biblical ideas more strongly.

Many people complain they鈥檙e written off when they reach retirement 鈥� that they have nothing left to offer, because society so often values people only for the paid work that they do. And in an era when technological change happens so fast, even plenty of people younger than retirement feel disregarded.

But rather than be identified by their work, the Bible sees those getting older as still having purpose 鈥� for their life experience, for their knowledge and particularly for their wisdom. Wisdom, says the Book of Job, is found with the elderly and understanding comes with long life, while the Psalms say 鈥淚n old age, the righteous will still bear fruits; healthy and green they will remain.鈥�

A faith like Christianity sees a person as made up of not only the body, which diminishes in time, and the mind, which might lose its intellectual vigour, but your spirit too, which is constant. This was highlighted when the parents of Jesus took him to the temple, where they met Simeon and Anna, both very old people whose final years were spent focused on prayer. They recognised Jesus, according to the Gospel writer Luke, as the Messiah. Now, Simeon prayed, let thy servant depart in peace. His life was complete.

Simeon represents someone whose last years were not a time of frustration and thwarted ambition but fulfilment. In other words, old age need not be a time when purpose fades, but grows.

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