The Beggar – a poem, and some conversations dressed as an elf

Last week I went into Warwickshire Further Education College with my Dad, who’s the chaplain there, and spent the lunch hour wondering up to unsuspecting 17 year olds in a Christmas jumper, explaining to them that I was a Christmas elf (which will make sense if you’ve seen my jumper), and offering to perform for them a Christmas poem. Several wonderful people were bemused enough to say yes, and this is what I performed for them:

When I’d finished, I’d ask them something along the lines of, “Have you ever thought of Jesus like that before?” And the conversations that ensued were very interesting indeed.

One man – pretty old so I suspect he was a teacher – didn’t even want to hear the poem because he ‘doesn’t do Christmas’. We chatted for a bit, and after a while he explained to me that he was ‘completely agnostic’ because he was a ‘see it to believe it’ kind of person. I thought about spontaneously performing to him my other Christmas poem, about Hamlet and Shakespeare and Yuri Gagarin, but had just enough social sense to refrain. It was hard to stop myself though because it is in some ways an answer to that very question! (If you haven’t heard it, have a look at this gloriously poor quality video: https://youtu.be/A4hSh56BNX4 )

What I said instead was that God has revealed himself to us by coming as a human in Jesus, who lived a real, public life for 30 years – drawing huge crowds and huge opposition by performing miracles and claiming to be God and to be able to forgive people’s sins – and then died a thoroughly public death, and rose from the dead and appeared publically to many people over a period of 40 days, before giving his followers his Spirit and returning to his Father. If that’s true, the sort of evidence we would expect to have for its truthfulness would be the continued work of that Spirit – and I’ve seen tonnes of that but it’s by definition pretty hard to pin down so I wouldn’t necessarily expect a ‘sceptic’ (like I used to be) to be convinced by it – but also you’d expect to have the account of those who had been there during Jesus’ life, who had seen him with their own eyes. And that’s exactly what we have! There’s this great moment at the start of a letter from John – one of the disciples who wrote (surprise surprise…) John’s gospel. He says:

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands of touched – this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.” [that’s John’s favourite way of referring to Jesus]

So he’s quite emphatic that this is something he’s actually seen, heard, touched – not just something he’s made up. In fact, just in case we hadn’t got the point, he continues…

“The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it”

Oh really John? You’ve seen it? Why didn’t you tell us that before?

“and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.”

He ‘appeared’ to you, John? Like you saw him? How come you didn’t mention that earlier? Oh no wait…  Anyway, carry on…

“We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard…”

OK seriously John you can stop now we get it.

I wish I had asked the man whether he would believe his wife’s testimony about something she’d seen with her own eyes, whether he’d believe my testimony if I told him that the man over there was my Dad, whether he’d believe a doctor’s testimony about what the results of a scan meant, or a biologist’s testimony about how photosynthesis has been shown to work, or a historian’s testimony about how many wives Henry the Eighth had – none of which he could see and understand for himself! I wanted to talk to him about whether ‘testimony’ might actually be a crucial way that we come to know anything meaningful about the world we live in, and suggest that “I have to see it believe it” might possibly be a cultural myth that not even Richard Dawkins really lives by. But I didn’t, because all that stuff only occurred to me after he’d gone!

I wish I’d been able to ask better questions at the time. Not for the sake of my echo, because I wanted to win some argument. Just because I was gutted when he walked away – gutted because what I was trying to offer, what John and the others were offering when they went around the Middle East telling people, and when they wrote their gospels, was life. Real life, full life, joyful life, eternal life. I had one conversation with a student who said he went to church every week, but it was all pretty chilled, and all they ever said really was, “Don’t be a dick.” And that made me sad, because that’s nowhere near all that Jesus said. It made me think of the bit at the start of John’s gospel, his account of Jesus’s life, where he basically says everything I’m trying to say in the poem in two sentences:

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

He’s holding out to us grace and truth. Ridiculous love, impossible forgiveness, actual reality. That’s why it’s so gutting when people just don’t seem that bothered by it – you can hear the mixture of awe-filled joy and genuine tragedy when John says,

“He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognise him. He came that that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”

***

I had so many other conversations but I realise that I’ve gone on forever about that first one, so I’ll finish up. But here’s what I found myself saying to a lot of people as the chats drew to a close. I don’t expect one poem and a five minute conversation (or a blog) to have completely changed your mind about Jesus. That would be quite rash. But I think it would also be rash to not consider it any further. Because what if the testimony of these people is reliable and they really are describing the true source of real, both-now-and-forever, life? What if Jesus really is an unbelievably good God revealing himself to us so we can actually know him and love him? Surely it’s worth at least investigating, at least hearing them out? So I usually encouraged the people I’d been chatting to, and obviously I’d encourage you as well, to just have a read of John’s account of Jesus’ life (or any of the other three - they’re all good!) and see what you make of it. The New International Version is a modern, accurate and easy to read translation, and it’s free to read right here. It literally takes less than a couple of hours to read – and if you’d rather sit back and relax in your Christmas holidays then you can even download the ‘Bible app’ and get David Suchet to read it to you! (He reads the ‘NIVUK’ version.)

I’m serious – why not? I’m as aware as anyone that the primary-school-assembly version of Jesus, the nice bearded man who carried sheep over his shoulder and taught us not to push over other children in the playground, is at best a pleasant irrelevance! But the real thing is worth taking a look at. Why not see if God really did love you enough to come to you as a beggar, dressed in flesh and blood and skin, so you could know him as a person eye to eye, so you could start to fall him love with him? And once you’ve read it, if you’re intrigued, but you’re not convinced it’s true – drop me a message, we can have a think about where to go next!

Have a thoroughly Merry Christmas!