wife-material and the (not quite) leap of faith

I wrote this story on a bus in Africa. I wrote it because my friend Lara had just said to me something along the lines of, “You’ve talked about having an amazing experience of God when you got baptised – I think if something like that happened to me, maybe I could have faith like you do. But I’m not the kind of person who could convince myself of something like that, unless something happened to me like what happened to you.” When she said it I realised that I was not very good at explaining what ‘faith’ actually is. And to be honest, I’m still not. But I like to give it a go anyway.

So the first thing to clear up, is that Jesus was never that big on ‘faith’ just in the abstract. No, what he was constantly going on about was faith in him. About believing in him, trusting in him. Kind of like you trust a person. I heard somebody pointing out the other day that getting married is very much not about certainty. You can’t be certain that you’ll live happily ever after, you can’t possibly hope to know everything about your spouse beforehand, and you can’t begin to know where the two of you will go together, or what shared life you will end up living! All it is, is that you know that person enough to bet your life on them. You know them enough to commit. To say,

 ‘I don’t know everything about you. I don’t know what kind of person loving you will make me, and I don’t know where or to what loving you will take me; but whoever and wherever that is I want to go there, because I trust you.’

That is faith right there. And it’s the same sort of faith that it takes to commit to God.

But please hear me that this is not a Vegas marriage – it’s not irrational and whimsical and misguided – it’s thought through. In fact, let me tell you my secret list of criteria that someone needs to fulfil before I will marry them:

Things I don’t need to know:

- What their hair looks like first thing in the morning

- Whether they secretly watch ‘Made in Chelsea’
- Whether they can currently, or will ever be able to, bake an apple strudel

- Whether they will always or ever earn any money

- Precisely what they will be like in 50 years time.

Things I do need to know:

- That they are good, that deep down they are trustworthy and true, that fundamentally their desire is to become more like Jesus and to love others as much as they love themselves, and…
- That they love me.

That’s it. I reckon to bet your life on someone you’ve just got to know that their deep down nature, their character, is the best one you have ever found, one that’s worth your trust; and that they love you back.

And it’s the same with God. There’s a weird bit where St Paul writes that while he was introducing this bunch of people to Jesus he “resolved to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” He’s telling all these people about God and they’re having all these conversations – and Paul’s got so many complicated, brilliant philosophical and theological answers to all these really important questions, but he refuses to remember them. Instead he decides just to stick to this one thing: Jesus Christ and him crucified.

To be honest, I’ve always thought that the approach was less than helpful! But I’m realising now that in a way it makes sense: he was saying, look, there’s loads of questions, loads of difficulties and ambiguities and uncertainties, and yeah there are answers out there, but there’s only two things you really need to know. You need to know deep down what God’s like, and you need to know that he loves you. And Paul reckons you can see both those things by looking at Jesus Christ on the cross.

By looking at Jesus, because he said himself that by looking at him we can see exactly the character of God. We think to ourselves, ‘if God became a person, what would he be like?’ And Jesus says, ‘I did, and I’d be like this.’ As he said to his friend, Phillip: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”

So what is he like then, this God? Well we can look at Jesus’s whole life, of course, and it’s incredible, but most of all we can look at the cross. And we see there someone who is utterly selfless – who literally pours his life out for the sake of others. Someone who is completely faithful – who endures the worst imaginable agony rather than fail his Father and his friends. Someone who is incredibly gracious – who prays for the very soldiers that have driven the nails into his hands. Someone who loves, outrageously. Unstoppably. Unquenchably and undefeatably. Almost unbelievably.

And we see that he loves us. He told his friends that he came “not to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many.” A ransom back then was not so much for kidnappings, it was the price you had to pay to buy a slave’s freedom. So Jesus said that he was giving his life to buy us our freedom. And not even just the freedom right now, from meaninglessness, and fear, and guilt, and delusion and shame, but freedom forever from the power of death – freedom to share in the life that raised him from the grave three days later.

He is good and he loves you. And if you get that, I think the two of you can work out all the other stuff together.

Now I’m not expecting you just to take my word for it – the whole Jesus thing – I’m hoping that you’ll investigate it. Because the beautiful thing about it is that its not just a private assertion – not one dreamer’s vision, or one sage’s teaching – it’s a public life, a public death, a public resurrection that we can submit to genuine scrutiny. Of course it takes some effort – it takes effort to get to know other people, it takes effort to know things about history, it takes effort to learn how to walk – but it’s not impossible. Maybe message me and ask about it, or read a book about it, or pick up the bible that’s in your drawer somewhere and have a look at Luke’s gospel about it. Because I’ve looked at this stuff quite a lot and I’m seriously convinced that there is sufficient evidence to bring you to Jesus. Of course it can’t force you to trust him – it’s not literally compelling – he’s not going to break down the door and blind you with heavenly light. When you’ve done the thinking and the looking and you’ve seen him, the trusting part is up to you. But you don’t need to take a flying leap of faith across some huge chasm of ignorance, you just need to start with a genuinely open mind and look at the evidence. A book I just read which is brilliant is ‘Why Trust the Bible?’ by Amy Orr-Ewing. I would love to lend it to you or send it to you if you’d like!

Anyway, that’s the end of this blog, but originally I was supposed to be introducing a story I wrote a while ago. I blogged it before, so some of you might have seen it back then, but if not, here it is. It was my attempt to explain in story form, all of this stuff about faith, and investigating, and trust. Hope you like it!

The Journey

Anna lived at the foot of Too-Tall Mountain. She lived in a little town on the flat ground in the shadow of the mountain, and it was the whole wide world. To Anna, its cobbled main street was the great Silk Road, its old well was the ocean, and its people were the human race. The only other thing was the mountain.

One day a little boy, about Anna’s age, nine or perhaps ten, wandered up to her as she was mending her raggedy doll on the back step of her little house. He introduced himself as Cescu. She told him her name was Anna, and then suddenly, as if there was no time for small talk, he rushed up beside her and whispered something in her ear. And what he whispered was a rumour. But not your average every-day nasty rumour. This was a beautiful rumour. A glittering rumour that made her heart leap and her eyes grow wide and her toes wiggle. He whispered that he had met a man – a strange and wonderful man – who claimed to be from the top of the Too-Tall Mountain. Not only that, but he said that he had not been alone up there, that at the very top of the Too-Tall Mountain, above the clouds of fog, there was a great city of gold. A shining city, where the people laughed and danced and feasted, where their faces almost seemed to reflect the light of the sun. And as the whispers poured into her head like a sparkling stream they seemed to awaken a startling array of dreams and hopes and hungers that somehow she knew had been there inside her all along. It was as if the whispered words were the first songs of spring, and now a hundred tiny creatures of her heart, that had been in hibernation for a winter that stretched back as long as she could remember, were stretching their dewy limbs and joining in the chorus. Yes – they sung – there might be a city beyond the clouds! There could be a land where the sun was warmer, and the soil was deeper, and even the tears were brighter! There should be. But then a new thought loomed up on her like a big, dark cloud.

“It must be a very long journey to the top of the mountain. Far too long. We’ll never make it.” But then another thought, “Maybe this man you met could carry us? He must know the way. Maybe he could carry us up the mountain while we sleep – I’m sure we couldn’t make it by ourselves!”

The little boy looked puzzled for a moment, but he slowly shook his head. The strange man had spoken about the way up the mountain. He said that to reach the city – to truly reach it – a person had to walk. Even a person with little legs. He said that in the days long ago some people had been carried to the city in their sleep, but when they awoke something was always wrong. The richly coloured streets and houses seemed dull to them, almost translucent, and they could never bring themselves to sit, or lean, or lie down to rest on anything in the city for fear that they would fall right through. He said the only way was to walk the mountain.

She wondered, rather loudly and with a troubled frown, how on earth, if they were not to be carried, they would ever find the way.

But Cescu remembered what the strange man had said about that as well. He said that the way to the city was easy to recognise. The path that leads to the city, he had said, is the steepest, narrowest path, and also the most beautiful. If you find yourself on a path that is easy, or wide, or ugly, you have taken a wrong turn.

Now Anna was not sure she liked the sound of that at all, but as she looked up at the Too-Tall Mountain, she found herself unable to stem the awful flood of hope that gushed through her chest and into the tips of her toes.

She looked at Cescu.

“Well,” she said, “I still don’t think we’ll make it.” She thrust her grubby hands into her pockets and grinned. “But it looks like we have to try.”

Now, to tell the tale of all their twists and turns, of all their bruises and blisters, would take many more words than I am prepared to write, or you are prepared to read, and perhaps will serve to make a tale of its own one day. So for now we will hear of just the greatest incident of the long, steep road.

The two young travellers had begun to notice, as they passed out of the foothills and into the real mountain, that more and more they swore they saw distant glimpses of the strange man on the path ahead of them, and although it seemed improbable, they began to stumble across marvellous gifts – sometimes big and sometimes small – piles of refreshing wild-fruits for them to eat, or little shelters of branches and leaves for them to rest in. And this strange and unexpected kindness came and went until one day they found a note, carved into the sticks of a shelter they had found:

SOON COMES THE CREVASSE.
YOU MUST NOT LEAP TOO SOON.
BUT YOU MUST SURELY LEAP.

Now this message both confused and worried the young pilgrims. So much so that they carried the engraved sticks with them as they continued in hopes of deciphering the mystery as they journeyed. And indeed they did, when the path brought them to a great divide in the mountain. The rock they were walking on suddenly plunged away in front of them, and only emerged again what must have been nearly ten metres away. Lying flat their two little bodies put together couldn’t have bridged the divide. They edged fearfully up to the brink, and peered down into the deep, terrifying darkness of the crevasse. They quickly stepped back and stared at each other, eyes wide and hearts pounding. Anna looked down at the stick she was holding.

“You must not leap too soon,” she said, calming a little.

“But you must surely leap,” said Cescu, fear heavy in his unbroken voice.

After a moment though his eyes wandered past Anna’s to what lay behind her. A rocky path along the edge of the crevasse, littered with boulders and uncertainty. As Anna’s eyes turned to follow his they both knew what they had to do. This path was harder work than any they had travelled so far, and they lived in constant fear of losing their footing and tumbling into the abyss that never strayed from the left-hand edge of their vision. But they balled up their courage and they kept their eyes on the obstacles ahead. They clambered and they crawled and they kept, anxiously, moving. And as they did, it seemed to them that the crevasse beside them was growing thinner. The far edge was creeping closer and closer until, after many days, many nights, many bumps, many scrapes, many scares and many dares, they looked to their left and saw a gap that looked – though their hearts hammered harder and harder – small enough to jump.

They knew that this gulf – once so utterly impassable – was now small enough for even their little legs. Their eyes and their brains knew this. Their legs and their hearts were less certain. Their knees shook and their hearts raced like the knees and the hearts of the heroes in their mothers old legends. Anna felt dizzy. Cescu felt sick. The abyss of uncertainty that had been threatening to swallow them up for days now stood before them – smaller now, weaker, but still utterly terrifying. They looked across to the other side. They saw the new path – still steep, still narrow – leading up and up to the city. To the city of gold. To the rumour of the city of gold. The strange man was nowhere to be seen. The fruits, the shelters, they seemed somehow foolish. They might have been made by animals. They might have been anything. They looked at the note on the sticks in their hands. It might have been a joke. It might have been a trick.

YOU MUST NOT LEAP TOO SOON.
BUT YOU MUST SURELY LEAP.

Anna felt dizzy. Cescu felt sick. They held hands. Tightly. They fixed their eyes on the solid ground beyond the darkness.



***

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.