BRAKE LIGHTS - the real story

I hope you enjoyed the poem – if you liked watching it anywhere near as much as I love performing it then I’m happy. I’ve done it so many times now for different things, but for the first couple of years after I first wrote it, I genuinely couldn’t read it without tears coming to my eyes. Please don’t get me wrong – that’s not because I find my own poetry is so beautiful that it makes me cry; that would be, you know, quite weird. No, I cry because this poem is based on a true story, and it’s genuinely my favourite story in the world.

When I say it’s a ‘true story’, I don’t mean that there was literally a father who let his son run away from home and then welcomed him back – although I hope that there have been a few – I mean that it’s a story Jesus told to explain something that is deeply, deeply true. (If you want to read it in his words, it’s here.)

Jesus says that a son came to his father and demanded his share of the inheritance there and then. Which is basically like saying, “Hey, Dad, you know that thing that’s supposed to happen when you die? Can we just act like you’re dead already so I can take the money and get out of here?” But what’s really strange is that the father doesn’t flip into a rage and tell his son that the idea is ridiculous and how dare he insult him like that – no, strangely enough, he says yes. He breaks up his family land, sells half of it, and half of his stuff, gets the money together, and gives it to his son. He lets him go. And Jesus is trying to tell us that God is like that. God loves us so much, that he lets us go – he gives us freedom. He doesn’t want us to be robots – incapable of anything but obedience – he wants us to be free. He loves us desperately and he wants us to choose to love him back. So when the son says he doesn’t want his Dad anymore, says he wishes he was dead, says he wants to leave, the Father swallows down the lump in his throat, holds back the tears and says: ‘yes’. And that’s where the poem starts – the son drives off into the distance, and his brake lights fade away until it’s all just dust at the end of the day.

And of course after a while the life he’s carved out for himself starts crumbling away in his hands. All the meanings he’s been weaving for himself tangle and fade, and his heart cries out there must be more, yes please yes please, there must be more.

And there is. Because what he doesn’t know is that the father’s waiting. Heart breaking, hands shaking. This is the bit that makes me cry every time. God waits.

Because in the story Jesus doesn’t say, ‘And like a rejected lover, God picks himself up and moves on.’ No. He tells us that when the son finally decided to make the long journey home, the father saw him coming while he was still a long way off. Because he was waiting. Every day since his son had run away he had loved him, and longed for him, and watched and waited for him to come home. And here’s the really crazy thing: God longs for you. He genuinely does. He hasn’t given up on a single one of us. Whoever you are, whatever you’ve done. If you are sure for some reason that if there is a God he certainly isn’t interested you – he is. If you’re sure he couldn’t love you, he does. Even if you’re sure that if there is a God you aren’t interested in him – he’s still desperate for you. He’s still waiting, and as strange as it might sound, his heart is breaking. Because loving someone means becoming vulnerable to them, it means handing them the power to cause you incredible joy or intense pain.

Jesus’ best friend wrote these words: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son as a sacrifice.” God loved us first. He made himself vulnerable to us, and when Jesus died with “Father, forgive them” on his lips, the world saw how much it cost. How much it hurt for God to love us. But Jesus died so that we could come home. So that if we’ll swallow our pride and come back, the Father will run out to us. And he won’t notice that we’re a mess – that we stink of sweat and dirt and humiliation. He’ll just pick us up like we’re still three years old and he’ll hold us close. And he’ll give us his best clothes to wear, and lift up our heads so that our faces will never again be covered with shame.

And he’ll throw a massive party for us – a party to celebrate us. He just throws him a feast and tells everyone he knows that his son is back from the dead, and yes that is what I said, his son is back from the dead. Because here’s the thing: Jesus didn’t stay dead, so now we don’t have to either. Jesus didn’t stay behind the stone, cold and empty and alone; so now we don’t have to either. He says that if we’ll die with him – if we’ll forget about ourselves and get completely lost in love with him – then we will surely live with him. He will bring us out of the darkness and into a life of love that starts right now and never, ever stops. And it sounds too good to be true, but it’s not. Because Jesus said that we’re God’s kids. And he loves us. Loves us enough to let us go; but then if we’ll choose him, he is always ready, always waiting hoping someday we’ll come home; and when we do there is nothing that could hold him back and nothing that he wouldn’t do for us.

I have no idea what you think about all this stuff. But I genuinely think it’s true, and obviously I think it’s the most important, most beautiful thing there is. So if you’re interested at all I’d love to chat with you, or help you think about it in any way I can. And in that spirit, I thought I’d offer everyone an early Christmas present. There’s a brilliant author called Tim Keller, who has written a whole little book about this story, and about how Jesus shows us a God who is so wonderfully different to the one we expect – it’s called The Prodigal God, and I can’t recommend it enough. And if you would like to read it, I’d love to send it to you! Whether I know you already or you're just a friend of a friend or whatever, just email me your address and I’ll send you a copy! It’s mikehood1994@gmail.com

Or if you’re thinking, actually this all sounds nice, but is there any reason at all to think that it’s actually true? - the same guy wrote another book, which is also brilliant and was actually a huge best seller, called The Reason for God. It’s about the big challenges to the idea of faith, trying to answer those big questions, and then hoping to explain why faith in Jesus might make sense. So if you fancy giving that one a go, also just email me, and I will send it to you. Because it would genuinely be a pleasure for me to give it to you – and of course it’s Christmas. Nearly.

mysterious errands and the root of peace

Tonight me and my mate Georgie went to watch some fireworks. And they were epic. And we got a toffee apple and some candy floss and that was thoroughly pleasant. And as we walked to and from the fireworks, and then for quite a while afterwards, we had some very deep chats. So deep, that they made me want to write a blog. So you know, cheers Georgie. And here goes.

As we followed the crowd of furry-hatted people to the park, Georgie was telling me that when I say, ‘God is real’, she thinks that’s definitely true for me. But she also thinks that for a person who believes God isn’t real, that’s also true for them. To be honest, it took me a while to understand what she meant, but we kept trying; and as we climbed up the big bridge to cross the train tracks on the way back to her house, I actually summarised what she was saying in a way that she agreed with. I said something like this:

“So what you believe is that what I’m referring to when I say something is “true” – the idea of it being fundamentally, universally true; true for everyone in the universe whether we believed it or not – that kind of truth doesn’t exist. Instead, you think the closest thing that does exist to the idea of ‘truth’ is the way that a person or a community perceives the world, makes sense of it, and lives in it. So in that sense, whatever a person (or a community) believes, which shapes how they perceive things and what they do – that is by definition ‘true’ for them. Not in the sense that they are actually right that there’s some fundamental reality which they’re accurately describing, but just in the sense that it’s how they understand things. So everyone has their own ‘truth’ – their own understanding of things and their own way of life – but there is no such thing as a fundamental reality that is actually True, regardless of whether anyone believes it.”

This is, I think, Georgie’s quite well articulated and thought through version of what is a pretty common belief in our current culture: ‘that’s true for you, this is true for me, we’re both ‘right’, sort of.’

Once we’d got out of the cold, Georgie started, amongst many other things (because you know, we’re really cool people who talk about many things at once…) to fill me in a bit more on why she believed this – why this idea had struck a chord with her, why she liked it. She said she liked that it enabled her to accept someone whose belief was different to hers. She liked that it meant that we should listen to each other because everyone has something to contribute, that no one was belittled or made less valuable because everyone was equally right. That made sense to me.

But this reminded me of something that I’d thought a while ago in a chat with a different friend, Elena. It had occurred to me then, that maybe our philosophical ideas about everyone having their own ‘truth’ are actually based on these things Georgie was talking about – these inter-personal, social, political things. The desire to respect people who are different to us, to listen to and accept people with different cultures and beliefs; the refusal to belittle someone because we disagree. I think these are great desires to have for our social and political life – this is definitely how we should be treating people. But I wondered whether it was really true that these social ideas could only exist if we had the philosophical version as well – I thought, what if we’re going for the philosophy because we like the social stuff, but they don’t actually need to come together?

So as far as I can see, and I couldn’t be quite sure but I think that Georgie sort of agrees, the way that the ‘everyone-has-their-own-truth’ philosophy allows us to be tolerant and respectful is this: by allowing us to agree with people, while meaning different things. So a religious person says, ‘I believe that [insert deity here] exists’, and we can say, ‘I think that’s true, [insert deity here] does exist.’ And of course we are showing them respect, and we are accepting them. But we’re doing it by changing the meaning of the word ‘true’, and the meaning of the word ‘exist’. Because the ‘everyone-has-their-own-truth’ philosophy starts with a sort of linguistic magic-trick, that whisks away the old meaning of the word ‘true’, and replaces it with something along the lines of ‘your perception of the world’. So we can say, “I think your understanding of the world is true,” and make the other person feel respected, and actually mean, “I think your understanding of the world is your understanding of the world.”

So my next thought was, what if there is a less slippery way to base these great social and political ideas on a belief system? What if there’s a philosophy that would make better sense of why we should act like that? And – horribly predictable as I am – I think there is. And I think it is believing in Jesus.

If you believe that Jesus really is God – universally, absolutely, for everyone – that God is the fundamental reality and that he has revealed himself to us in Jesus, then I reckon you should definitely desire to love and respect people who are different to you, to listen to and accept people with different cultures and beliefs; and you should absolutely refuse to belittle someone because you disagree. And here’s why.

John describes for us in detail Jesus’ last meal with his disciples before he was arrested and killed. John says Jesus loved his friends “to the end”. But the strange detail, almost ruining the picture, is, of course, that Judas is there. One of these friends, who he loves to the end, is the one who has betrayed his trust and is about to go, fetch the authorities and get him arrested and killed. And Jesus knows this, he tells the disciples that one of them will betray him, and he knows who it is. But John tells us that,

“he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel round his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped round him.”

He takes on the servant’s job, bends down, and wipes the dust and dirt and dung off their feet with his hands. And he goes round the whole table. No exceptions. Which means that he washes Judas’s feet. He bends down at the feet of the man who has decided to betray him, who is about to sell his life for silver, and takes his feet in his hands and washes them. I almost just want to type that sentence again and again until we all realise how incredible that is.

So if we believe in Jesus, we believe that the God of the whole universe was so humble that he washed the feet of his own betrayer. That God loved and respected people – people who were utterly different from him and ignored his truth – so intensely that he came into the world as a human being, lived with them and died for them, so that they could know him and love him. How can we not listen to and respect and serve people who disagree with us, when God himself is willing to wash their feet, even if they reject him? How could we possibly dare to belittle someone because they think differently to us, if we know that God considers them so significant, values them so outrageously highly, that he actually died for their sake. Of course we can disagree with them – we can try to persuade them of what we believe is true – it’s not like Jesus agreed with what Judas was doing! But we can disagree, and try to persuade, and not stop loving for a second. I believe in a God who seems to have decided that his enemies weren’t just worth his respect, they were worth his life. And I know it, because we were his enemies, and he loved us to death, and all the way out the other side.

So here’s the thing. Respect, and tolerance, and listening, and love, are utterly right. Peace is beautiful, and it is essential. And I think that we want more than a surface-level tolerance – we want a real, boundary-shattering, family-making kind of peace. We want something deep; and a deep peace needs deep roots. And for that, I think we need a God who takes off his outer clothes, wraps a towel around his waist, bends down in front of his enemies, and washes their feet.

me, rachael and the opposite of love

I’ve got a theory about why couples fight. I mean obviously on some level it’s because any two people will disagree about some things, and will sometimes deal with this by arguing. But I think that with couples, there’s a deeper kind of subconscious thing going on. Because it seems to me, that it’s only when a relationship is under threat that you feel anything close to the full weight of your affection for the other person. So in a way, every time you fight and make up you get to experience again how much you really care about them.

Me and Rachael to be fair don’t argue very much, but what we do do, with the whole Exeter/Cambridge distance thing, is say goodbye. A lot. And on Wednesday morning this week, I had to walk her back to the train station, and then walk home alone. And on that walk, I really felt it. I was gutted. And the ridiculous amount that I care about Rachael, was at least as tangible then, maybe even more so, than at any point when we’d been together. Of course there were some beautiful moments, but I think that maybe when the other person gets taken away, it’s like (if you’ll forgive the cliché) you realise that you were only noticing the sparkling tip of an iceberg and there was a lot of weight going on much, much deeper than you could see.

Anyway, for the rest of Wednesday I wasn’t quite my jovial self, but then it got to Thursday morning. And on Thursday morning I read a tiny little bit of John’s account of Jesus’s life. There’s this bit towards the end where Jesus is with his friends just before he’s going to get arrested and then killed, and he’s trying to tell them everything they need to know before it happens, trying to say everything he has left to say so that they’ll be OK when he goes. And he says this:

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”

As I read, I remembered something I’d heard a long time ago. In the Jewish culture Jesus was living in, marriage happened in two stages, the first one a bit like getting engaged but loads more serious. And what would happen was, that there would be this engagement ceremony, and they would make promises and everything, but then the husband would go back to his father’s house, and build an extension for him and his new wife to live in. Then when it was ready, he would come back for her, they would be fully married, and they would go to live together in the place that he’d prepared.

And I’m not an expert on first century Jewish culture, but I remember being told by someone who was that what Jesus says here comes almost straight out of that engagement ceremony. He tells us he’s going away to prepare a place for us in his father’s house, but he’s coming back and he’s going take us to be with him so that where he is, we will be also.

And as I read those words it just kind of hit me, that Jesus actually has affection for me. For us. He wants us to be where he is. He really likes us and he wants to be with us, and he doesn’t want to say goodbye.

It’s starting to make sense to me as well that God calls himself a ‘jealous God’. It always used to seem strange – it seems like jealousy has got to be a bad thing, a negative emotion, so I always put it next to the bits where God seems to be angry in my special box of ‘things that I gently ignore because I don’t get how God could be like that’. But I heard someone say this the other day:

“The opposite of love isn’t anger. The opposite of love is indifference.”

And I think that is true. If I try, unpleasant as it is, to imagine how I would feel if it turned out that Rachael was seeing someone else, and I knew this guy and I knew that he would not care for her and he didn’t really love her; I know for sure I wouldn’t be saying ‘Oh well, I love her so I don’t mind.’ My heart would be coming out through my ribs. My face would be melting.

And strange as it is, God says that’s how he feels – and I’m starting to believe him. He is not indifferent to me. He really, actually cares about us. He has affection for us. And it really does matter to him whether I love him back. Too often and too easily we think that we don’t really matter – but I’m pretty sure that the reality is that we have been given the power to break the heart of God. Or to delight it. I don’t know about you but I find that so beautiful that it’s almost frightening.