How do you get to heaven? Part 3: Piggybacks.

Grace means that… We all need a piggy back.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11:28

So in the last two blogs we’ve established that ultimate reality is about our personal relationship to God, rather than our ranking on the Hitler-Teresa scale, and that Jesus made it very clear that the way to put right our relationship with God isn’t ‘moral goodness’ as we know it. So what is it? What did Jesus say we needed to do to be in a mutual relationship of love with God that starts now and lasts forever? Who’s in that and who’s not?

Now I’m not going to get into here the whole question of people who don’t know anything about Jesus. That’s an important and complicated question but it’s one for another blog, because anyone who is reading this right now, has heard about Jesus. So we’ll leave that question for another day and think about what Jesus demands of us. And what he seems to demand, as we read the stories of his interactions with people, is a particular kind of response to him.

Jesus’ message, from start to finish, was this: “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news.” (Mark 1:15)

The kingdom of God has come near because he has come near. The theologian Glen Scrivener puts it like this: “Jesus is like a walking, talking garden of Eden – a sphere of paradise on earth. With him wrongs are righted, darkness is dispelled and everything that’s twisted gets smoothed out again.” He walks around being the kingdom of God, bringing the kingdom of God, revealing that he is God come amongst us to put things right. And the response he’s looking for is to ‘repent’ and ‘believe’. Or as a friend of mine translates it: to ‘turn’ and to ‘trust’.

To ‘repent’ means to turn around. It means realising that I’ve turned my back on God and tried to ignore him, and that that has grieved him. It means recognising that that was wrong. It means deciding to turn around and follow him instead.

And to ‘believe the good news’ is to trust him, and what he’s done for me. It means saying, ‘Yes, I trust you when you say that you love me. I trust you when you say that I had messed up the relationship between us so badly that you had to die to put it right. I trust that when you died, you took all of the pain that I deserve on yourself. I trust that you came back from the dead, genuinely, so I know that if I’m willing to trust your death for me then I can share your impossible life as well.

And in a really important way, it’s as simple as that. Repent, and believe; turn and trust: that’s all he asks.

Of course though, just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy or painless. Repenting hurts, because it takes a deeply uncomfortable level of humility. The people Jesus was always warning, were the ‘good’ people. The ones who didn’t think they needed anything more than advice from him, certainly not him dying on their behalf. It’s why he leaves the older brother outside in the story (from the last blog, in Luke 15) – he’s saying, ‘Look, you’re going to have to swallow your pride and come inside.’ You’re going to have to admit there’s something wrong before I can put it right.

I know a Christian who says, “All you need is nothing, but a lot of people don’t have it.”

If you run up to someone in the street saying, “Thank goodness I’ve found you!” but they don’t think they’re lost, they’ll just look at you like you’re a lunatic, and that’s exactly what ‘good’ people did to Jesus and still do today. They declared him a madman, or they just smiled and politely ignored him. He can’t find someone if they insist they’re alright where they are. He can’t save a drowning person who shakes off his hand and assures him they can swim just fine. This is the tragedy that followed Jesus all his life. It’s what made him weep when he looked over Jerusalem. And the same tragedy makes him weep today.

Turning and trusting Jesus means admitting that we need help – it means refusing to trust ourselves – which means wanting to follow him instead of following our own plans and preferences, which is a pretty big step.

So what does this actually look like? Luke gives us two dramatically different examples.

Early on in Luke’s biography Jesus comes across a guy called Levi – later called Matthew, the one who wrote Matthew’s gospel. Jesus says to him, “Follow me.” And he does. He leaves everything – profession, home, family – and goes with Jesus. Why? Because there’s nothing better. Because from what he’s seen of this guy, he wants to be close to him. Because he wants to be more like him. Because this guy seems to be living a life that is properly human – human like it was meant to be – and so close to God it’s like being in the Garden of Eden all over again and Levi wants in. He wants in so much he’d give anything for it. And Jesus comes and just says, “Follow me.” No entrance exam, no initiation. The only qualification he needs is that he wants it.

Towards the end of Luke’s book Jesus has allowed himself to be mocked, spat on, and nailed to a cross to die. People are calling out – laughing at him – “Save yourself!” “If you’re really the Son of God, you could get down from that cross whenever you want!” And he could. But he won’t because he’s saving them. He’s dying the hellish death that they and I and we deserve. He’s experiencing the agony of separation from the Father he never even rejected, so that we wouldn’t have to. And as he’s dying, there’s a criminal dying next to him. He’s lived a terrible life – he admits that he deserves the death sentence he’s received. But he does admit it. And as he struggles for breath, biting back the pain, he looks at Jesus and asks,
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
He’s saying, Help. You’re the King, I know that. I’m going to die and I’m not sure that’s going to be the worst of it. Please have mercy on me, I want to be with you in your kingdom.
He knows he’s helpless. There’s literally nothing he can do now but die. No chance left for good deeds, no chance left to earn his way, to pay off everything he’s done. All he has is ‘Please’. All he can do is throw himself at Jesus and trust that somehow this King can save him. And Jesus says:
“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” He says yes.

For both men, it’s the same decision – one with half a life ahead of him, and one with just a few hours more of excruciating pain. The message of Jesus, the message of Christianity, is that ultimately the question is not how many points have you earnt. It’s not some crazy system whereby you could have been on track for an eternity with God but then in your last day you got angry with your mate and said something you shouldn’t have and you slipped beneath the pass mark. Or where you weren’t going to make it but in a rush of last minute fear you gave away all your money just in case it would help you get into heaven and it actually works.

The question Jesus asks of people is, Who are you counting on to get you God’s approval? Yourself? Are you relying on your own merits, achievements, character, record? Do you reckon that you’re probably a good enough person that if there’s a God he should be generally pleased with you? He’s supposed to be pretty forgiving anyway, right?

Or have you looked at Jesus and felt all your good deeds falling apart in your hands – because this is something else entirely. Have you let Jesus show you that you are lost and you don’t even know the way home? Have you thrown yourself at him and said, ‘Jesus, can I rely on you instead? Can I come with you?’

And the answer to that question, when it’s really asked, is always, Yes, child. Yes of course.

Piggy-backs.

Jesus was always picking up little children and telling people that the way to the kingdom of heaven was to be like one of them. Which confused people quite a lot, I think. But I love that idea because when I was a kid, I loved getting piggy-backs. I was asking for piggy-backs all the time. And in everything he did, everything he said, Jesus kept telling people, basically:

You want to come to God? You want to find your way into a relationship of love with him that will last forever? There is a way – absolutely there is. But you’ll need a piggy-back.

And he grins, and crouches down, with one knee on the ground – and he bends his back forward – and it reminds you of how he looked on that day as he staggered, bleeding and faint, under the weight of his own cross. And he looks up and asks:

Do you want to get on?

How do you get to heaven? Part 2: The Story That Messes With Everything.

Grace means that… Both sons are prodigals.

In Luke’s account of Jesus’ life he tells us about a moment when Jesus was teaching, and he’s speaking to these two very different groups. There’s a bunch of ragtag, messed up, reject ‘sinners’. People who’ve gone off the rails and know that they probably deserve the social exile that’s been imposed upon them. And then behind them there’s a bunch of Pharisees and teachers of the Law. These are good, respectable, middle-class people. They are the pillars of society. They give away at least a tenth of everything they have to the poor. They are religiously devout, and careful to keep all their social, religious and moral duties. They pray often, and earnestly. But Jesus always seems to have a problem with them. He keeps warning them that if they don’t repent – turn around 180 degrees on the deepest level – then they are heading towards ultimate separation from God. Why? He can’t stand their presumption. He says they walk into the presence of God himself and say, ‘Thank you God for making me good – not like those other people, those sinners,’ and that makes Jesus livid. He can see them right now, looking down at the ‘sinners’ who are there; he can see them silently, secretly placing these people somewhere in the bottom half of the Hitler-Teresa scale, and bumping themselves up a little bit in the process. So he tells a story. It’s Jesus’ favourite way to pick a fight.

There was once a Father with two sons. And one day the younger son comes to his Father and says,

“I want my share of the inheritance now.”

That’s the inheritance. That’s what you get when someone dies. He’s saying, basically, ‘I wish you were dead. I want your stuff instead of you please.’

So obviously the Father is gutted. He loves his son, but his son doesn’t care about him. That hurts in a way that no one who’s never had a child can really understand. And he doesn’t want him to leave. But, strangely, he says yes. He doesn’t shout – he doesn’t beat him – he doesn’t throw him out on the street with nothing – he sells half his land and hands his son the money, and lets him go.

And where he ends up, as far away as he can get, the son spends all his money on having a great time – parties, prostitutes. He’s really enjoying himself right up until the money starts to run out, and his friends run out with it. Then a famine hits that country. He ends up struggling to survive, with a job feeding pigs, so hungry he wants to eat the slops and pods he’s supposed to give them. And then it dawns on him, there in the muck with the pigs –

‘What am I doing here? The servants back at my father’s house have got enough to eat and good jobs. I’ll go back. I’ll have to face the shame, apologise to my Father and beg him to hire me as a servant, and maybe if I work hard enough I can start to pay off all the money I’ve wasted.’

So he gets up and starts the long journey home. Exhausted and alone – stinking from the pigs and the sweat – and full of shame.

And then Jesus gives us a powerful detail.

While he was still a long way off, the Father saw him in the distance.

How come? Because the Father had been waiting for him. Every day since he left he’d been watching and waiting and hoping that his son would come home.

And when he sees him – bare feet caked in dust, disgusting and ragged – he hitches up his robes, and he runs. He runs out to him, and he doesn’t care that the people in the village are pointing and laughing he’s just fixed on his son, and when he gets to him he throws his arms round him and picks him up like he used to when he was little, and he kisses him, and the son knows for sure that his father still loves him. And the father calls back to a servant from the house and says “Bring my best robe, put it on him!” – he doesn’t want him walking through the village dirty and ashamed. “Bring the family ring put it on his finger to show everyone that he belongs here, he’s my son. And bring sandals for his hurting feet. Then let’s kill the fattened calf and invite everyone round: we are feasting tonight! Because my son was dead and is alive again, was lost, and is found.”

The ‘sinners’ are wide-eyed, mind-blown. Their whole world is turning upside down. But Jesus looks up at the Pharisees and the teachers because he hasn’t finished yet.

Remember that other brother? The older one? That evening he’s still out working in the field like always. He’s a good boy, very respectable, always does his duty. And when he hears all the laughter and the dancing coming from the feast inside he calls a servant and asks,

“What’s happening in there?”

The servant explains that his brother has come home and his father’s thrown a feast, he beckons him inside. But the older brother turns his back and walks away.

When the Father realises that his eldest son is still outside he runs out to him.

He runs out to him. Just like he ran to the younger son. Just as humiliating for the father. But it’s the big brother who’s far off now.

He says, “Son, come inside, come to the feast!”
But the son replies, “Look. I’ve been slaving for you all my life and you never even gave me a goat to have a party with my friends. But now this son of yours, stinking of prostitutes and pig shit comes back and you kill the fattened calf for him?”

And once again, the father is gutted. He’s hurt. He never asked him to ‘slave’ for anything – it wasn’t supposed to be like that. Biting back a tear, he says,

“My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate because your brother was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found.”

So here we are, asking the question – will he go inside? Will the family be reunited? But Jesus stops the story. He stops talking and he looks at the respectable crowd, as if to say, ‘Well then, are you coming in? The ball’s in your court. It’s up to you now.’

And with this story he’s redefined everything.

Redefining God: First of all a father.

This is a revolutionary picture of God. The Pharisees and the teachers were seeing God as a kind of distant arbiter. A referee. Watching us live our lives and assessing our performance. And of course the Bible does describe God as a judge – Jesus promised that he himself would be the ultimate Judge of every person in history – but Jesus is turning everything on its head by teaching the Pharisees that God is first of all a father. A loving father. A father who is deeply wounded by the rejection of his children. Who longs for them to come home. Who longs for the relationship to be put right.

Redefining sin: Not even a postcard.

Jesus takes a sledgehammer to the Pharisees’ definition of a ‘sinner’. He gives them a character that fits their categories down to the ground: dissolute, rebellious, sexually promiscuous, he’s even non-kosher with the pigs. But by showing us God as a father, Jesus points us to the heart of the problem. What is it that’s breaking his Dad’s heart all those days he’s sitting, looking out, waiting for him? Is it the parties? Is it the prostitutes? Is it the pigs? Not really, no. It’s that his son has run away from home. It’s that his son doesn’t love him back. It’s that his son wants his things and not his affection. It’s that his son wants him dead, and is living life as if he was. That’s the heart of ‘sin’. It’s not chocolate and lingerie. It’s the thing where we want God’s world but we certainly don’t want to hear his words. It’s the thing where we want the life that God has given us but we want to live it like he’s dead. That’s what grieves the heart of our Father in heaven.

Redefining goodness: Lost in your own back garden.

And then he goes a step further. The older brother: middle-class religious respectability through and through. Does everything he’s supposed to do, never puts a foot out of line, goes to church every Sunday. “I’ve been slaving for you all my life.” But hear that word, ‘slaving’. That doesn’t sound quite right. Why has he been doing everything the Father wanted him to do? Not because he loves him. Not out of joy and gratitude and affection. I don’t ‘slave’ for Rachael. He felt obligated. Not just that: he thought he was earning something. “You never even gave me a goat to have a party with my friends.” He’s been hoping for payment. He’s been working, obeying his Father so that he will get some of the Father’s stuff and can have some fun with his friends – people who are not his father. He doesn’t want his Dad’s love, he wants his stuff.

Sound familiar?

Jesus makes sure we know that the Father had to go out to both his sons. They were both ‘prodigals’. They were both lost all along. The older brother has just been lost in the back garden, digging away. And they both break the Father’s heart. They both bring dishonour on him as he runs out to get them.

Jesus is saying something deeply controversial here. He’s saying that the heart of the problem with all the ‘bad’ people in the world, is their rejection of God. And the heart of the problem with all the ‘good’ people in the world, is their rejection of God. Everybody is a prodigal because everybody is trying to make themselves somehow – whether that’s by running away from rules and religion, pursuing expressive self-discovery, or by strict obedience to convention. Everyone’s trying to save themselves and Jesus is saying that it’s never going to work. Everything Jesus did and said insisted that we have a problem that is so much bigger than bad behaviour, far too deep for ‘goodness’ as we know it to ever fix. We’ve all run away from God. We all want him dead.

Redefining hope: We can come home.

So Jesus is pretty clear that there’s no chance our self-generated ‘goodness’ is going to fix things between us and God – there’s no way it can reorient us at the deepest level so we actually want God, want to love and obey him, and don’t just want his stuff. So what hope is there for us? Well, there’s grace.

There is no better picture of grace than Jesus’ image of the father sitting, weeping, waiting, and then running out to his son. Wrapping his arms around his dirt-caked rags and picking him clean off the ground with the strength of his affection. Dressing him in the dignity of robes he does not remotely deserve – declaring him a member of the family he had tried to destroy – dancing all night with laugh-out-loud joy.

That’s God. That’s what he’s like. If we come home, if we want in, he is ‘gracious’ in the sense that nothing we could ever do will stop him throwing his arms wide open. He loves us, he wants us. He has seen every arrogant thought, heard every bitter murmur, he knows even the darkest, deepest secret and yet he looks at us and if we look back we’ll see nothing but irresistible affection. That’s what grace means.

And the ‘sinners’ in the crowd saw that look in Jesus’ eyes. And in time, so did some of the Pharisees. They heard him claim to be the judge of the whole world and they also saw him saying again and again to those who longed to hear it:
“Your sins are forgiven you.”
“Friend, your sins have been forgiven.”

“Daughter, your faith has saved you.”

“You’re faith has saved you, go in peace.”

But Jesus didn’t say that to everyone – it wasn’t a blanket proclamation. To some people he warned them that exactly the opposite was true and something needed to change. So what’s the difference? How do you know if you’ve really come home, or if you’re still lost in the back garden? I’ll have a look at what he said about that tomorrow.

How do you get to heaven? Part 1: A Weird Way To Propose

Recently I shared this photo on Facebook:

One friend commented saying that he really objected to this idea. Another messaged me saying that it might be a really stupid and annoying question but could I explain more about what this means?

But this is not an annoying question, this is one of the most important questions anyone could ask. How do you get to heaven? And how does ‘grace’ come into it? These are life-transforming questions. So I’ve thought a lot about it, and tried to write it down.

I’ve written this blog in four parts, and I’ll post them one a day for the next four days.

In the meantime, if you’d rather go straight to the source – almost everything I say here I’ve drawn from Luke’s biography of Jesus’ life. Luke’s a much better writer than I am, and he’s the one who spoke with the eyewitnesses, so please do read that instead of (or even as well as) whatever I have to say. It’s all available for free up here.

So that’s all sorted then. Here goes for thing one.

Grace means that… Ultimate reality is personal.
Intensely personal.

If I say ‘heaven’ what is the picture that comes into your mind? What’s the logic? I half-remember drawing a picture of heaven in Sunday school once in which Skittles played a fairly large part. Maybe for you it’s not Skittles, but I reckon there are two ideas about heaven that in our culture most of us absorbed pretty naturally when we were kids. One is the vague harps/dresses/clouds imagery, which is deeply lame compared to the images in the Bible. (A city – a feast – glorious physical bodies – hate-free, pain-free, death-free loving community between people – heaven and earth colliding to create something spectacularly, immaculately, concretely new.) The other is the idea that basically heaven works like nectar points. You build up credit as you go about your daily life, and then heaven is the reward that you cash in at the end. Or maybe more like a holiday in Majorca: as in, heaven is for putting your feet up after a long life’s work and getting some well-deserved rest.

But those ideas didn’t come from Jesus, they didn’t come from the Bible. That’s what the institutions want to teach us – the school assemblies, the semi-secular versions of religion that politicians prefer, even the big, powerful churches who’ve largely forgotten about Jesus. They want to take that lurking possibility in our minds that there might really be a God who made us, and use it to produce in us a vague sense of niceness and conformity.

“Jesus says, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’” as every primary school assembly for seven years reminded me, “So what he means is that if you’re nice to other people, they will be nice to you.”

I mean, that’s not quite what he said…

But it’s close enough, right? And anyway you won’t notice the difference because you’re 6.

And as I drank this ethical system in with all those little cartons of milk, I was also swallowing the corresponding idea of heaven as a way in which God gives you a cosmic gold star for good behaviour. If you keep being nice to other people on the playground, then God will be nice to you in the big assembly at the end of time and maybe even give you a prize.

The Bible’s idea of what God wants for us after we die, however, is all in all a bit more adult. One might even say X-rated. When Jesus talks about ‘heaven’ he talks about it as a wedding feast. He loves to call himself ‘The Bridegroom’. At one point, St. Paul is talking about how incredible the mystery is of a husband and wife becoming ‘one flesh’ – and he means it in the fullest, most explicit sense – and then he turns around and says, “but I am talking about Christ and the church.” God and his people. Bride and groom. Heaven is not nectar points. Heaven is a marriage.

That’s not to say it’s just a kind of zen union of disembodied souls with the Ultimate One. No – like I said, Jesus’ vision of ultimate reality is much more interesting and much messier than Plato’s. It’s a whole new world, as Aladdin would say, glorious, physical, perfect, infinitely exciting, unimaginably beautiful, full of culture and relationships and everything that is good about this creation. But in and above and beyond all of that, it’s a world utterly drenched in the person of God himself. God. Right there.

“Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.”

“They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.”

 “They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.”

Not only that but “He will wipe every tear from their eyes.” Consider that image for a second. Have you ever felt what it is for someone else to wipe a tear from your cheek? Think of that tenderness, that intimacy. When I think about ‘heaven’, I want to try to think about that.

So I think maybe when we ask, ‘Who gets to go to heaven?’ we’re already on the wrong track because if we asked it to God I think he’d look at us like he’s not sure that’s the right question. For a start it’s quite a self-centric way of looking at the ultimate destiny of the universe. The more fundamental question is surely, ‘Where is the world headed – and what part do I play in that?’ But even if we’re thinking about our own personal future – which is still a fair enough thing to consider – we’ve got our mental geography all wrong. ‘Who gets to go to heaven? Don’t you mean, come?’

I think the more I read of how Jesus talked about it, the more I realise the question is something a bit more like: ‘Who has, forever, a relationship of mutual love and passionate devotion with the living God of the universe, revealed in Jesus?’ (I realise that’s a bit wordy.)

And already at this stage we can see something of how drastically the normal, dare-I-say-CofE-primary-school way of thinking about it has missed the point. Forget for a moment that I’m with Rachael (this will be easier if you didn’t know it in the first place…). Imagine that I met a girl at uni, and I really liked her. So I thought about it, and I remembered all the times that someone has said to me that I’m a really nice guy. I remembered all the times I’d been kind to someone, or made a sacrifice for someone else. I remembered all the times I’d told the truth, and all the nasty things I hadn’t done, certainly in comparison to some other people I know. So I drop this girl a facebook message and I ask her out for coffee. And we have a nice chat, and she laughs at a couple of my jokes, and after half an hour or so I kind of shuffle in my seat and rearrange my hair in that way I do when I have something important to say – then I look up at her and say:

“Look, I’ve been thinking about it. And I’m pretty confident I deserve to marry you.”

That’s not how it works, right? Because relationships with real, personal people don’t work on the basis of merit. They are not a points system. This is a fundamental difference between Christianity and a lot of other religions and beliefs, maybe all of the others. Grace is a concept which only makes sense if we start by seeing that if God is a person. So life is not a kind of gameshow where our ultimate good is the prize of an all-expenses paid eternal holiday on the Costa-del-Sol, instead it’s an ultimately personal, everlasting life with him so close he can wipe the tears from our cheeks. Because if that’s the case then a merit system would be pretty weird.

So if it’s not a merit thing like the assemblies/politicians/general-defenders-of-respectability say, what is the situation? If Jesus doesn’t draw a line somewhere on the spectrum from Hitler to Mother Teresa and declare everyone above it to be ‘in’, what does he propose instead?

Tomorrow I’ll start to answer that question by taking a look at possibly the greatest, and scariest story, ever told.

A story of forgiveness

This is just a quick blog post to share a story that really moved me. Around this time last year, ISIS released a video in which they beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians because they refused to renounce their trust in Jesus. A few days later, Beshir Estafonos Kamel, the brother of two of the men who were killed – Samuel and Bishoy, aged 23 and 25 – called into a Christian television programme, and said he wanted to thank ISIS. He thanked ISIS for not cutting the sound feed on the video as his brothers and the other men cried out the name of Jesus in their final moments.

He said that Christians have been being persecuted since Roman times, but that we have been taught to love our enemies, and bless those who curse us.

The host asked him how his family was doing, and he said that he had been speaking to his mother about it earlier – she was an uneducated woman in her sixties – and he had asked her what she would do if she saw in the street one of the men who had beheaded her sons. She had said that she would pray for them, that God would open their eyes, and invite them into her home.

The host then asked Beshir if he would be willing to pray for those members of ISIS, there and then. And he said yes. He prayed, once again that God would open their eyes.

And I wanted to share this because I think this is something that the world desperately needs. The kind of tolerance that isn’t exclusive to well-educated Westerners under 50. The kind of tolerance that runs so deep literally nothing can shake it. The kind of tolerance that doesn’t only put up with people who agree with us, but is willing to love and forgive those who do things that we believe with every fibre of our being are wrong. The kind of tolerance that invites the ‘enemy’ into our home and prays for them.

Thinking about this I’m so aware that I’m nowhere near as loving of the people who disagree with me as Jesus is, and if I want to be like him as his disciple, his apprentice, I’ve got a lot of growing to do yet. But that’s where I want to go.

I wrote some considerably fuller and more articulate thoughts about this a while ago, which I’d love you to give a read if you’re interested in this question of tolerance:
http://stuckontherooftops.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/mysterious-errands-and-root-of-peace.html

And if you want to hear the interview itself, it’s on here: http://www.sat7uk.org/announcements/brother-of-egyptian-christians-murdered-by-islamic-state-prays-for-killers-live-on-sat-7

It's my final year, and I'm a bit gutted. Also - Antiques Roadshow.

There’s something deeply poetic about Antiques Roadshow. This person has been living with this clock, or whatever it is, right there next to them – maybe for their whole lives. Perhaps it was sitting in the living room, ticking away quietly. Perhaps it was up in the attic, out of sight and out of mind. It always seemed fairly unexceptional, slightly irrelevant. It was quaint, maybe, nothing more. And so every day they’ve wondered to and fro, getting on with their lives, never giving it much of a thought. It sits – quiet, unobtrusive, meek. But then a moment of thought – perhaps a friend who is interested in these things, perhaps something seen on the TV, perhaps just a flicker of curiosity – makes them ask, ‘I wonder, is it worth anything, that old thing?’ Perhaps it is – perhaps – perhaps it is worth far, far more than you had ever imagined...

I’m about half way through my final year of university. In a few months’ time I’ll be leaving Selwyn, leaving Cambridge, and leaving – if we’re being realistic – the majority of the people I’ve met and got to know and love over the last two and a half years. And to be honest, I’m quite gutted about that.

Not because I’m not looking forward to what happens next (and I certainly am looking forward to not being 4 and a half hours of train journey away from Rachael!) but because I feel like there are so many loose ends – so many people who I think are brilliant, and who I’ve started to care about, but I’ve just not been able to invest that much time in getting to know them better and talking with them about life, the universe and everything!

Paradoxically, one of the reasons that I haven’t had anywhere near as much time as I would have liked to just be with people in the last year is that I’ve been really involved with the Cambridge Christian Union – helping to support all the different little groups of Christians in colleges as they try to share the love of Jesus with the people around them, encouraging Christian freshers to get to know God better and let the joy of that overflow into their lives and relationships, and helping to organise and lead the whole group of us in Cambridge as together we try to introduce as many people as possible in this university to Jesus! I say this is paradoxical simply because I’ve been so busy with all the stuff we’re doing to support other people in sharing Jesus with those around them, that I’ve not been able to spend that much time doing it myself with the people around me, who I love!

I think it’s been worth it, and I’m so glad to have been part of the big family of the Christian Union this year, but now I’m feeling the cost of it. Next week is #nofilter week – where we are putting on events every day for the whole university to come, and consider life, and ourselves, and Jesus, without the filters of our preconceptions and assumptions. I’m really looking forward to it – I know both the people who we have got to come and speak and answer questions at the events, and they are brilliant, lovely, funny, and insightful and I think they will be really helpful for people to engage with. I’m even performing poetry and being interviewed on Wednesday and Friday evenings, so that’s especially exciting! But the build up to the week has made me think: how many people who I’ve met, and who I really care about, are also in final year, and might literally never have as good an opportunity as this again to consider Jesus without any of the political or ecclesiastical wrapping – just genuinely think about who this man was and what he really said? It’s made me ask myself, how many people know me, but we’ve not spent enough time together to have had a meaningful conversation about the reality that changes everything for me every day? How many people do I love who I’ve never even asked them what they think about this man who has set me freer than I thought was possible?

And the answer is, quite a lot. And I’m gutted about that, because honestly every day that goes past I realise more and more both how intellectually viable Christianity actually is, and how utterly beautiful it is. And over the last two and a bit years, I’ve also become more and more convinced that it’s not a kind of optional extra to life that’s nice for me, but might not be relevant for other people who are happy as they are – I really believe that Jesus is interested in every single person, and that all of us need him.

So I’m really praying that lots of third years will hear about this week of events, and that they’ll decide that actually, if it’s all a myth, then it’s just a free lunch, but if it turns out to actually be real, it would be the most important free lunch they’ve ever eaten! If you’re reading this and you’re a final year as well, I’m really serious – give it a hearing. In my experience I’ve met lots of people where it turns out the God they don’t believe in, isn’t very much like the God that I know.

All the details are on the website – nofiltercambridge.com – and I’ll be going to basically everything, so either I’ll just see you there, or you can drop me a message and I’d love to go with you - whether we’ve been mates since freshers week or I’ve only met you once or twice!

Maybe they shouldn’t go on the show – maybe it’s worthless, and they are very busy. But then again, you never quite know, do you? Perhaps…

Arriving at Uni - a little blog about how I felt yesterday

Yesterday I packed up my stuff and came back to uni with Mum and Dad. I was really tired, because from Tuesday to Friday I’d been running a retreat and it was both brilliant and exhausting. And coming back made me hugely aware of the massive amount of work there is to do this term – the fact that I didn’t manage to get anywhere near as much reading done over Christmas as I’d hoped – and how painfully busy I’m about to be. So I wasn’t in the best of moods. I was leaving home, feeling weary and scared.

One of the reasons I started this blog three years ago was because I hoped it would be a little way that people could get an insight into what it’s actually like following Jesus from the inside – because most of the time I’m too British and awkward, or maybe just too cowardly, to talk very openly in normal conversation about the difference it makes to me day to day that I know Jesus and I trust him. So I thought that it would be worth a little blog just to share what it was like to be a follower of Jesus yesterday!

As I say, when I was packing, and in the car, and as I arrived – not feeling great. Weary and scared. Then I arrived at 4:30ish and for an hour and a half I unpacked my stuff, while listening to Kate Tempest’s epic narrative poem, Brand New Ancients. It’s really cool, and powerful, and sometimes really sad and sometimes really beautiful, and I hadn’t ever listened to it before so it was a really great distraction! I enjoyed it and as I unpacked my head and my emotions were caught up in her words and her stories, and that was good. When it finished and I’d finished unpacking, I basically felt the same as before, a bit better, partly because I had something interesting to be thinking about that wasn’t how busy this term is going to be.

Then I went for dinner in college with my mate Alice – this also was really nice. We bumped into various other people I know who I hadn’t seen since last term and that was fun, and we went up to her room afterwards and chatted for ages and it was great. She’s really fun, and we’re good mates, and so that was good and especially nice because arriving in a new place can feel quite lonely. After a while I came back downstairs to my room, thinking I’d probably go to bed quite soon. I felt slightly better again because I felt less isolated, and because a person is a much richer and more interesting distraction than even a good poem!

And then I spent some time on facebook catching up on messages and stuff, which – as is normally the case – had basically no impact on my emotional state other than a slight deadening effect. But then I thought, ‘Mike, you really haven’t spent much time just praying and reading the Bible by yourself this week’ – because the retreat was so full on from the moment I got up to when I went to bed, I’d only really snatched little bits of time to pray, and hadn’t properly read the Bible by myself all week. And I had a weird feeling of simultaneously really wanting to do that, to spend time with God, and really feeling like I couldn’t be bothered. This is a pretty normal emotional contradiction for me when I think about reading the bible and praying! But I decided to do it, so I grabbed my bible and a notebook and pen and sat on my bed.

And as I started to pray, I started talking to God about how I was feeling and what I was thinking; so all my feelings of weariness and all my fears about the term ahead and everything I had to do came right up to the surface again. For while then I was in a weird place of becoming increasingly aware of all those negative things, but at the same time knowing and talking to God about the way that actually I didn’t need to be scared or anxious because He is the God of the Universe and he cares about me. “Cast your cares on him, because he cares for you.” I won’t pretend this made the anxiety go away – all it did really was give me a good reason not to give in to it.

But then I started reading the Bible – I have this book that’s the book of Isaiah from the bible, broken into small sections so you can read one a day, with notes and stuff to explain things that aren’t obvious or where it’s good to know something about the original Hebrew or whatever. I hadn’t read it for ages, and I opened it up to where I’d got to and the next part was Isaiah chapter 52 and 53 – this bit: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+52%3A13-53%3A12&version=NIVUK . And as I started to read it, it was just so powerful. I’d read it before, quite a few times: it’s a prophecy, written about 600 years before Jesus was born, but God gave Isaiah this kind of vision of a Servant who was going to come, and he would be the Arm of God himself. And it speaks of how this Servant would suffer, he would be a “man of sorrows”, he would be despised by people and rejected, and his suffering would be like nothing anyone else had ever suffered. And it says that people would think that he was suffering because God was punishing him, they would think that he had been rejected by God; but that actually the truth is that he would be suffering on behalf of God’s people – that God would bring together upon him the punishment that was deserved by everyone but him. It says we have all, like stupid sheep, wondered away from our shepherd and tried to do things our own way, and yet this Servant would willingly suffer all of the pain that we had created for ourselves. And it says that at the cost of his wounds, we can be healed.

And as I read it, and re-read it, I was honestly weeping – weeping with a kind of mixture of joy and incredulity and gratitude, thinking, ‘God, how – how on earth could you love me like this?’ Thinking, ‘This is ridiculous. I’ve known it for years but it’s still ridiculous – that He would willingly walk into this immensity of suffering and not complain for a moment but be delighted to do it, delighted to die, because by his wounds we could be healed.’ That he would be despised and rejected, so that we could be utterly loved and accepted when we do not begin to deserve it. That at the cost of his death, we can share in his resurrection and have life forever. I knew it all already but it hitting me all again and I was genuinely weeping with the beauty and the joy of it.

And I just thought, ‘A love like this dwarfs all of my problems.’ As in, if this term turns out to be really really hard and stressful, well you know what, God himself loves me to death! Genuinely. And in front of that it just shrinks and it doesn’t frighten me. If I end up actually stuffing up my dissertation so badly that I don’t get the degree I could have done, well you know what, the Creator of the World will still be delighted with me. Not because I’m a particularly good person but because he has adopted me to be his kid! It’s just really good. It’s just better than everything. And most of the time I don’t realise that at an emotional level but last night I did, and I thank God for that, and I wanted to share it with you.

So feel free to stop reading here (not that you’ve been compelled to carry on until now…). But if you’re interested I’ll just copy it out below – the bit that I read – and I’d encourage you to give it a read, and ask yourself, ‘If this was true, what would I do about it?’

Here you go:

See, my servant will act wisely;

    he will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted.

Just as there were many who were appalled at him –

    his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being

    and his form marred beyond human likeness –

so he will sprinkle many nations,

    and kings will shut their mouths because of him.

For what they were not told, they will see,

    and what they have not heard, they will understand.

Who has believed our message

    and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

He grew up before him like a tender shoot,

    and like a root out of dry ground.

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,

    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by mankind,

    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.

Like one from whom people hide their faces

    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

Surely he took up our pain

    and bore our suffering,

yet we considered him punished by God,

    stricken by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,

    he was crushed for our iniquities;

the punishment that brought us peace was on him,

    and by his wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray,

    each of us has turned to our own way;

and the Lord has laid on him

    the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed and afflicted,

    yet he did not open his mouth;

he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,

    and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,

    so he did not open his mouth.

By oppression and judgment he was taken away.

    Yet who of his generation protested?

For he was cut off from the land of the living;

    for the transgression of my people he was punished.

He was assigned a grave with the wicked,

    and with the rich in his death,

though he had done no violence,

    nor was any deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,

    and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin,

he will see his offspring and prolong his days,

    and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.

After he has suffered,

    he will see the light of life and be satisfied;

by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,

    and he will bear their iniquities.

Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,

    and he will divide the spoils with the strong,

because he poured out his life unto death,

    and was numbered with the transgressors.

For he bore the sin of many,

    and made intercession for the transgressors.

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!

Who's afraid of #FOMO? (And who killed #YOLO?)

I was thinking about hashtags the other day. #relevant

I never managed to sustain both facebook and twitter so I dont know for sure, but it seems like #YOLO has drifted out of use a little bit - and I was thinking, what was that all about? Why did that go so big? And what did it even mean?!

My understanding of the logic of #YOLO is this:
You only get one shot at life, so at all costs, do not waste it. Take every risk, every opportunity. If you want it, take it right now because it's never coming back.

And that makes some sense; it actually reminds me a bit of Nietzsche, which isn't always a bad sign.

For me the defining #YOLO experience, the one that always comes to mind, was my mate - who I'll call Kat for the sake of anonymity - on a girls holiday in Magaluf. Someone suggested jumping off the pier into the sea and it seemed like the sort of diem that just has to be carped and so she went for it! #YOLO. And the water was slightly too shallow and she broke her ankle.

And this is the problem with #YOLO. I have a vague feeling it was pointed out by various sarky middle-aged people - or it may just have been the sarky middle-aged voice in my own head - but the thing is, if you only live once, that's surely all the more reason to be careful!

Of course that sounds a bit granny-ish to say (nothing against either of my grannies - you're great) but I think it actually is a genuine dilemma that cuts right to the middle of the whole #YOLO thing.

Maybe it's easier to see it in terms of #FOMO. #FOMO seems to me to be basically the dark side of #YOLO - for a popular hashtag, it's a shockingly vulnerable thing, isn't it? Our fear? That powerful fear that we can't quite escape because we know we do only live once, and if we miss out now, if we're not there, if we don't try it, even if we do try but somehow we mess it up: this chance is never coming back. As a wise man once said, You only get one shot do not miss your chance to blow, this opportunity comes once in a lifetime. The pressure is immense - uni years are the best times of your life apparently and right now most of my mates and me have only got two terms left. And then its gone. So it better be good, it better be fun, you better make the most of it.

But what are we supposed to do? How could Kat have just stood there and watched everyone take that risk, have that epic moment, and miss out on it? It would have been agonising. But then, how much did that broken ankle force her to miss out on? For the rest of the holiday; for the next few months? And in the last year of uni it's the same, you want to enjoy it but at the same time everyone's always asking, 'Do you know what you're doing next year then?' We're at networking events, and interviews, and writing endless applications and at the same time trying to work as hard as possible so we can get a good enough degree to get those jobs we're hoping for? It's exhausting.

And the bigger the #YOLO slash #FOMO moment, the bigger the risk, the more stark the paradox gets - if I've only got one life then I've got to really live it, but what if I end up throwing it away? Then I'm just a story in the local paper and that's that, I'm never getting it back. Or what about the more likely version, no spectacular accident, no tragic story; what if I just spend my whole life pursuing something, trying to be a [insert valid life ambition here] and I get to the end and look back and think, I wish I'd done something else. What if I end up feeling like I've wasted my only life?

The reality is, that having just one life is a pretty stressful situation. We usually don't think about it on the big scale, but we feel it whenever we face some big decision, the pressure is ridiculous. Our lives are so precarious, our plans are so fragile, the whole thing could swing completely on one choice and who knows what we'll miss out on?

So for me, I'm really grateful that my first thought every time I see or hear #YOLO is: what if you don't? What if you don't only live once? I saw a guy do a spoken word poem once for Easter, called 'the Death of #YOLO' - Jesus, in all seriousness, came back from the dead and discredited the #YOLO hypothesis. There is, at the very least, one exception to that rule, and Jesus said that if anyone will follow him, give themselves to him, he can take us through death with him and out the other side. #You don't OLO - not necessarily.

There's this epic bit in one of the letters in the New Testament where Paul, writing from prison, thinks he might be about to die. But he's happy - strangely, ridiculously joyful - it's the most joyful letter by far of the one's we have in the Bible - at one point he even says this:

For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

He's saying, why would I worry? Look at my options. If I live, whatever happens to me, whether I stay here in chains or wherever I end up, whatever I get to do or don't get to do, I get to do it with Christ. I get to do it with Jesus, in Jesus, with the True King, the ultimate lover, so close to me that no power in heaven or earth could pull us apart. And it's so good to know this - me and Rachael were talking about it the other day when we were trying to make big decisions about what to do next year, we were just reminding each other - all of these options are good options. Because wherever we go we get to love Jesus and be loved by Jesus, wherever we go we get to be part of God's work to redeem the world that he made, wherever we go there is peace, and meaning, and joy, and love. There's no getting away from it, no way we can miss out.

But then there's the other option - to die is gain. Death - the ultimate loss. The final moment where the examiner calls time and you have to put down the pen on the story of your life without even finishing the sentence. You had your chance. But Paul can put his pen on the paper and call death gain. He's excited about it, he can hardly say which he'd prefer, death or life, because he knows for a fact that he's not only living this once. His heart is racing with glorious anticipation - because he's met Jesus, the risen Jesus, the Jesus who has smashed a hole in death and come out the other side and that Jesus has promised that he's going to bring Paul with him. And there's nothing to fear. John Donne was a crazy poet around Shakespeare's time, and he wrote this:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

…

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

And for me, that confidence is so deeply liberating. The pressure is just nowhere near as intense - of course I'm going to go for it, and try to enjoy God and his world and do something meaningful with every minute of the life he gives me, but if it's not everything I hoped it would be; that's OK. If I pour everything into some particular cause and in my whole life I never see what I'd hoped for come to pass; that's gutting but it's OK. If I've given my life to something, and let so many other opportunities pass me by, and in the end when I die everything I've done dies with me; that is sad, but it is, literally, not the end of the world.

On the days when I remember the truth, I realise that I have been set free by the guarantee of glory. Utter joy; unfading beauty; inconceivable depths of love. I've been set free from #FOMO and from paralysing fear in general because #YOLO is not true. For me, to live is Christ, to die is gain. What about you?

[That can be a rhetorical question or not it's up to you - have a think about it or feel free to drop me a message, I'd love to hear what you think!]