REASON - a new poem & my mate emma* and refugees in Lebanon

Last Easter time, my mate Emily filmed me doing this poem – it’s a story, not my own, probably a fictional story rather than a real life one, but the poem is my own retelling of it. And it’s called ‘Reason’ because I think it is a good reason. Have a watch…

I’ve been thinking for a while about what I should write about, to go with this video, and then today it was completely obvious.

The thing is, the beauty of that story is the idea of this man, this soldier, who despite all his strength and power, realized that what the hostage needed – the only way he could really be rescued – was for someone to join him in his weakness, his vulnerability, his pain. Only then could there be trust; only then could there be the rescue; only then could he set the captive free.

There are a thousand ideas, ideologies, ‘gods’ and gurus around that will stand there shouting at us. It might be legalistic ‘Christians’ shouting that we need to smarten up our moral and religious act – stop smoking, stop drinking, go to church – so that God will accept us. Or ‘self-help’ books shouting that we just need to believe in ourselves, that we need to stand in front of the mirror and tell ourselves that we are successful until we force it to be true. Or maybe just a dizzying array of bloggers and journalists insisting that we simultaneously refuse to force our opinions on others and stand up against injustice; pointing out to us a thousand good reasons to feel guilty before breakfast and offering us zero help to put things right. And I don’t know about you, but even if sometimes I really make an effort to obey whatever or whoever is shouting at me, in the end I revert to giving up and trying to screen it out. Whether you give me three simple steps or a hundred, I can’t find the energy, the passion, even the compassion to rescue myself for very long. I read a blog explaining very convincingly that I should be checking the ethical status of any shop I buy clothes in, or getting everything from charity shops, and I completely agree at the time but something in me knows that by myself, there’s no way this is going to stick. Because it’s hard. And tomorrow there will be another hard thing that I know I should do. And I might make some progress, I might make some changes, but I’m never going to be able to carry the full weight of everything I know I should be, everything I know I should do.

And this is just one of a thousand reasons that I am deeply glad that I’ve come across Jesus – or more accurately, I suppose, that Jesus has come across to me. God has every right to shout at me – to shout at all of us and tell us to get up and sort our lives out. We more than owe it to him. But he doesn’t just want to assert his rights, he wants us to be restored, transformed, put back together in the full beauty we were created for in the first place. And so instead of shouting down at us, he came in Jesus. He took off his helmet and laid down his gun, he laid bare his chest and lay down with us in the darkness. He lived as a human – with flesh and blood and skin just as thin as mine, just as easily broken, just as easily scarred. He got hungry and thirsty and so tired he could sleep in a fishing boat right through a storm. He felt anger. He felt fear. You know when you feel so frustrated you actually find yourself crying? He had that. He felt the uncontrollable pangs of grief that come from the loss of a close friend. He went through the bitterness of betrayal, and got horribly humiliated. He has lived everything that it is to be a human being – even the one part that all of us reading (or writing) this blog are ignorant of: death itself. God knows what it feels like to die. He knows more about the pain of being human than I do. He has come and laid down next to us in the dirt and dried blood of our broken world and broken lives, and he has curled himself around us. Because he cares about us, and he came to rescue us.

But it’s easy for that to sound like a lovely theory, that’s all very far away because it happened 2000 years ago. It’s easy for our modern chronological snobbery and our postmodern disregard for history to make it all feel somehow primitive and irrecoverably distant. I think both those feelings are culturally determined silliness, but we feel them powerfully nonetheless! So what occurred to me today as the obvious thing I should write about in this blog is my mate Emma.* [*That’s not her real name, I figure it’s best for me to write this somewhat anonymously]

My mate Emma is actually Rachael’s mate Emma, but she’s very friendly and she does spoken word so I feel involved too! She acted in the same theatre company as Rachael – she’s a beaming, passionate, naturally quite anxious woman from Essex, I think she’s in her late 20s, with brown hair and eyes. Just to give you some kind of mental picture. She’s super lovely. And she really loves Jesus. She used to be really paralyzed by anxiety and guilt, to the point that in her first year with the theatre company she had to stop performing she was so scared – but she says that gradually God has set her free from that anxiety and shown her more and more of his grace, his kindness and forgiveness which means she doesn’t need to be full of guilt!

And now, after a very long journey of praying and discovering and changing and scariness, she is going to move to Lebanon, to live and work there with a Christian theatre company, reaching out to the thousands upon thousands of Syrian refugees in the country. The plan is to move to an apartment in Beirut, and for the first year to spend 3 days a week learning Arabic, and hopefully also learning to drive in the crazy dangerous way required to get around on the streets of Beirut. Then she’s going to see where she can serve and what she can do – but her deep, deep passions are for a few simple but huge things. She wants to help bring people together across the huge divisions in Lebanese society – to help Sunni and Shia and Christian to meet each other, and learn to love each other and understand each other. She wants to do anything she can to care for the refugees, especially the children. The young children whose parents couldn’t afford the paperwork for visas and things are being born stateless, with no country they can officially call home or return to easily, living in makeshift camps with barely anything we would call ‘facilities’ and nowhere near enough schools. When she went to visit for 2 months, she went with the theatre company as they performed a hygiene play, after which World Vision gave out soap and flannels – trying to encourage the children to wash, even when it’s snowy in the Baka Valley and they don’t have hot water or proper houses to keep out the cold. And she wants to love and care for and pray with the refugees whose homes and lives have been and are being destroyed by ISIS. And in and through all of this, she hopes to see these Muslim refugees that she loves coming to know Jesus, and find freedom and hope in him.

Years ago, she prayed that God would really break her heart for the refugees like his heart is broken for them – and he has answered that prayer. Answered it so emphatically that she is actually willing to leave her family and her friends and her home (the organization she’s going with suggest you don’t come back to visit at all in the first two years), and to pour herself out, risking her actual life, to show them some of his love. The other night, as Emma shared her hopes and passions and dreams, and the story of how God had brought her to this point, both me and Rachael found ourselves with tears in our eyes. And in the car as we drove home we kept trying to express to each other how exciting and beautiful it was to hear what Emma was doing.

Because it is just so completely like Jesus!

This is what Jesus said he would do for the people who trusted and followed him – he said that he would live in us by his Spirit, and that he would transform us so that we would grow to actually be like him. To love like he loves, to live like he lives, to suffer like he suffered, maybe even to die like he died, and then to genuinely, literally, rise to new life like he rose to new life. And right now you don’t have to look very hard at Emma to see that he’s really doing that. She’s not just throwing money at the problem – neither did Jesus. She’s coming alongside real people in their pain and brokenness and joining in with their vulnerability, so that she can love them and help them – so does Jesus.

That’s all I have to say really! (But if you just from this short thing are feeling anywhere near as stirred up by it as me and Rachael are, and you think you’d like to support Emma by praying for her or in some other way, do drop me a message and I can put you in touch.) So yeah, I hope that helps put some flesh on the bones of that poem – do please feel free to share it and this with anyone and everyone who you think might appreciate it!

A Poem Full of Instructions to My Big Bro and His New Wife

A couple of months ago, my brother got married to Rose, and it was a really joyful, beautiful, God-filled day! They very kindly invited me to write a poem for them and trusted me to read it at the reception... 'twas a bold move. But here's what I wrote.

Grace – On the occasion of the marriage of Andrew Colin and Rose Elizabeth

Love her, brother, like you are loved.
Love her gritty
Love her glorious
Love her patiently
Love her way too deep for wrinkled years and furrowed brows ever to reach
Love her lavishly
Love her like you'd walk five thousand miles
love her like, if the situation called for it,
you would amputate a limb
just to make her smile
and be glad to do it.
Love her joyfully,
Love her when the only way to say it is a cup of tea,
Love her when there’s something broken she needs you to see,
love her gritty
love her glorious,
Love her relentlessly.

Love him, Rose, like you are loved.
Love him gritty
love him glorious
love him patiently...
because patience will be necessary.
Love him when just can't think of anything to say
and love him the other 99% of the time.
Love him in the sunsets
and in the pouring rain,
love him in the long walks
and in the snatched five-minute breaks,
Love him when he's stupid
and love him when he's stressed,
love him when they won't let him on news 24 anymore
because his hairline's more than a little past its best.
Love him when you feel you're getting bored of him
Love him when you feel you've been ignored again
because this is what grace does.
And then tell him to sit down and listen up
because this is what grace does too.

Love her when she's scared,

Love him when he's lonely, even though you're there,

Love her in the morning, before she is awake enough to love you back,

Love each other, for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
love when it hurts,
love until there's nothing left but trust
and ‘til you barely need a word for 'me'
because its always, always about 'us'.

Love each other like you are already loved -
with the love you had before you even met each other
that was already more than enough

Love her brother like the eternal lover,
who turned earth and heaven upside down
to come and find us now and forever;
who sat on hills and fields and fishing boats
and told us stories there in hopes
that we would not forget him.
Love her like the one who will not forget us.
Love her like the one who came fighting for his bride
and bled the water into blood-red wine for his own wedding feast,
Love her like the one that asked us, "Will you marry me?"
arms wide head bowed exposed for all the world to see,
Love her like the one who let them nail "I do" into his hands,
who slept his wedding night in the lonely quiet of the tomb;
love her like the True Bridegroom.
Love her like the one who rose,
to call our names
and whisper to us "Do not be afraid"
Love her like the one who'll never leave
never show up late
never abandon
never forsake
Love her like the one who knows your heart your thoughts your grimiest flaws
who’s there beside you every single day
and sees each time you throw his life away
in a careless word or a bitter laugh,
but who kneels down in front of you
morning after morning
and washes your feet in his hands
to make you clean.
Love her like him, brother
love her like him.

Love him, Rose, like him;
like the one who loves you when you're scared,
who loves you when you're lonely, even though he's there,
love him like the one who loved you every morning
before you ever thought to love him back,
Love him, Rose, like him.
For better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
Love him when it hurts,
Love him like the one who loves
until there's nothing left but trust,
Who barely needs a word for me
because his every breath he breathes for us.

So do not love each other with just this love –
love with his love,
because you will need it.
Because his love
is patient
and it is kind
It does not envy
it does not boast
it isn’t proud
it is not easily angered
and it keeps no record of wrongs;
It always protects
always trusts
always hopes
always perseveres
and it never fails.

So brother don't you dare love her as much as she deserves,
love her so much more.
Because you are only jars of clay
and you will crack and shatter every single day
but his grace makes mosaics.

Love each other till you see his face.
Love each other so the world can see right through
the brokenness of the two of you
to the glimmering of his grace.

Some reflections on believing in God today (after the EU referendum)

Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God."

My Dad loves this sentence and he always says, 'Why will they get called children of God? Because it's the family likeness. God makes peace, so when we make peace, it's obvious that he's our Dad.'

The referendum campaign has been a brutal and divisive and there are a lot of wounds just from that. Every poll explaining the way a particular demographic voted (old/young, more educated/less educated etc.) just offers us all another way to define the ‘Other’ who we can take our stand divided from as an enemy.

More than that though there are painful wounds for everyone who has come here from Europe or elsewhere and made it their home, for whom this vote feels like a vote against them. Of course it’s especially scary for people who actually don't know what will happen to them long term, but also just those who feel like this vote has declared them unwelcome.

And on top of that I'm particularly worried about the way this result inevitably makes things much more complicated again in Northern Ireland, and I am praying that it won't start a series of events that pulls apart the incredibly hard won peace there.

Basically what I’m saying is, there’s a lot of un-peace going around right now. A lot of anger and division and fear. The sense that the Other is a threat to us, rather than a gift to us. Whether that Other be Europeans living in the UK or Leave voters. So it seems like an important time to remember that God is a peacemaker, and he makes his children peacemakers too.

The whole peace-making thing starts with God himself. He has made an offer to us of peace and reconciliation with him. In a weird, very metaphorical sort of way, the very worst elements of the Leave campaign (and I am not at all saying this is at all what all of my friends who voted Leave were thinking, it definitely wasn’t, and I have no way of knowing how significant this kind of thing was numerically) were actually echoes of what the Bible says about the fundamental problem between each one of us and God. God created us, and he is infinitely wiser and more loving than we are, so he is totally worthy of our complete obedience and allegiance. If we really saw who God is and who we are, ecstatically joyful submission to him as our King and our Father would be the only sane response. But we’re not actually famed for sanity as a species. And right down deep somewhere at the bottom of us we have a kind of resentment of being the smaller one, the creature and not the Creator. We don’t want to be told what we were made to be, we don’t want to orbit around the sun, we long to be the centre of our own solar system. And we are always tempted to be selfish – to look out for our best interests even at the expense of others. So we reject God as our King and our Dad and establish our own little solar systems where we’re the heaviest thing around and everyone else is supposed to revolve around us – or in our nobler moments around our family or our group or our nation, ‘people like us’. We splinter our rightful relationship to our God at such a fundamental level we don’t even know we’re doing it, and it shatters and twists our relationships to one another – the others that were created as gifts to us become threats to our Absolute Sovereignty over our own petty empires. Of course we create profound, loving, intimate alliances as well as purely business ones, but we always feel the tug, when push comes to shove, when we can’t feel the benefits, the tug back to looking out for our own interests, to ‘independence’.

And all of this has a cost. It deeply hurts our Father God and ultimately it mortally wounds us. But God’s response is not simply to give us what we deserve, to leave us to the consequences of our actions - to let us declare ourselves enemies and return rejection for rejection. Of course that would be entirely fair, and if we refuse all offers of reconciliation he will have no other choice. But he does make an incredible offer. He comes to us himself in Jesus, and utterly subverts the logic of selfishness and enmity – he dies, freely, the death we have earned for ourselves. He pours out his blood, his life, as an offer of peace precisely to those who have rejected him as the ultimate Other, the ultimate Threat. He dies freely with “Forgive them” on his lips. And then he makes a mockery of the whole system of zero-sum-game, warring, self-interest economics – even of death itself – by literally, genuinely, historically in time and space with an actual glorified body and holes in his hands and feet, coming back from the dead. He died to pay our debt but death couldn’t hold him. He bore the weight of hatred and evil but the love that would go that far was indestructible. This is Aslan rising in the light of dawn, this is Simba returning to Pride Rock as the rains begin to fall again, this is the tears in the eyes of every father and mother and lover and child who has ever lost hope and then had it gloriously given back. This is bigger than every moment of defeat, every political struggle, every black cloud of pessimism and apathy – this is Hope-beyond-despair, Life-beyond-death, Love-beyond-hatred, this is God himself, bearing every single one of our burdens, shattering them to pieces and then holding out his hand to us and saying, “Peace be with you.” God offers us peace.

I may have got slightly carried away there, but it is actually all totally relevant to today and the referendum, because God offers us peace even in the middle of all kinds of uncertainties and turmoil. All morning my brother has been reminding himself (and me by proxy) of the bit in one of the Psalms in the bible where it says, 

“Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.” 

As in, the strongest thing we can find to trust without God is whatever is most powerful in the world – whether that be chariots or the FTSE 100, or our citizenship in a powerful nation. But the strongest chariots can be overthrown and spit us out into the dirt. My brother was very confident last night that we would vote Remain, but he woke up today at 4:30 to discover that he was wrong. But he doesn’t trust in chariots or horses or the FTSE 100 and this is what he keeps reminding me of. He trusts in someone much more reliable, much more faithful, and much more powerful. He got a really cool text from one of his best mates today, that said something like, 
‘Me and Victoria [his wife] were just kind of looking at each other over breakfast, knowing that this has probably made a huge dent on the value of our house, and that realistically both of our jobs may well be at risk’ - they work in the city, if we actually leave the single-market a lot of that business will move away to stay in Europe – ‘but we were saying to each other that the real reason we’re here is to love and serve the people of Old Street and to share the good news of Jesus with them, and that hasn’t changed.’

That’s class. God is bigger, and he gives us a purpose and a peace that are indestructible by circumstances.

But also God calls us to peace with each other. I was thinking as I started to write this blog about this Sunday, and the fact that up and down the country people who love Jesus are going to gather in homes and halls and old stone churches and there will be people who voted Remain and people who voted Leave and we will look at one another and call each other brother, and sister, and mean it. We will actually love each other. Because – as the bible puts it in Ephesians – Jesus is creating a “new humanity” that cuts across every racial, national, political and gender division to make a new family, united because they are all united to Him, and in his own body he has “put to death their hostility”. This has been happening through this campaign and it is happening right now and it will happen face to face for thousands and thousands on Sunday. And when you see it in action, like we have done amazingly in recent years amidst ethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe, it is really beautiful to behold.

And finally God makes us peacemakers, if we’ll let him. All of what I’ve talked about so far is an indestructibly glorious context out of which to be a channel of actual peace – a group of people who love relentlessly even people with whom they profoundly, painfully disagree, and who pray and act and sweat and bleed for peace in every fight and between every faction. So I’m praying that God will make the people who love him co-creators with him of peace between Leave-voters and Remain-voters, between migrants and all who feel threatened by them, and between the two sides in Northern Ireland. And I’m praying that as we do, it will become gloriously obvious that we are being re-made in the likeness of our Dad.

So this is my prayer:

God,

Patient, faithful, reconciling and redeeming God,
Thank you so much that you didn’t just leave us as your enemies. Thank you that you actually died to offer us peace, to break down the barriers of division and enmity between us and you, and even amongst ourselves. I still haven’t really got my head around it but I am grateful and I want to be more grateful. Please let more people realise that you are real and good, and accept your offer and be reconciled to you. 

Thank you that you have promised that if we come to Jesus you will transform us and make us like him. Please God, I want to be like him today, and tomorrow, and relentlessly love every kind of Other that I am tempted to see as a threat.

Please make us like him. Make us humble, make us gentle, make us patient, make us kind. And give us a genuine hunger for peace and for unity. By your epic power work through our little efforts to actually bring reconciliation and kindle hope. Make us people who build bridges and not barriers.

Please restrain evil and enmity and aggression in this world. Teach us to care about problems that are not our own – teach us to care about Syria and Iraq and your people there as well as here and in Northern Ireland. And in our own places, our own relationships, our own countries, use us to bring about a world that looks more like what you made it to be – and more like it will be when you restore it completely and wipe away the tears from every eye.

Thank you for the peace that comes from knowing it’s not all down to us. But we really do want to be like you, and we long to be part of the peacemaking that you are doing, and have been doing from the very beginning.
We love you and we trust you.

Amen.

My last blog as a Cambridge student. (About treasure.)

Last weekend I got invited to give a little talk at a treasure trail (that’s right, I said a treasure trail) that the Selwyn Christian Collective put on for the rest of college. We decided that we would stick with the treasure theme, and have a look at one of the tiniest parables Jesus ever told – it’s just one verse I think in Matthew’s biography – and I thought it would be fun to blog something along the lines of what I said! So here’s the mini-parable:

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.”

So this guy is digging in someone else’s field for whatever reason (is he working? is he treasure hunting?) and his shovel hits something and he sees that it’s this immense thing of treasure! So then, cheekily, he covers it back up with dirt – and he runs home to sell everything he has! And then with only the shirt on his back left he takes his money and, grinning all the way, he goes to the guy who owns this field and offers to buy it from him. And then once it’s his he goes and digs up the treasure and it’s worth a thousand times what he sold to get it!

This is classic Jesus, because he is, as usual, making an outrageous claim about himself. Because the kingdom he’s talking about is what happens when he is the King – when people love him and follow him. So he’s basically saying: “I am so valuable, so precious – knowing me, loving me, following me is so glorious – that you would be right to drop everything else in your life to get me. With a massive grin on your face. I’m worth that much.” It’s times like this when it doesn’t seem so surprising that people had a tendency to throw rocks at him.

But he said this kind of thing all the time – somewhere else he puts it like this:

“Whoever wants to save their life will lose it. But whoever loses their life for me, will save it.”

Hold onto your life for yourself and it’ll slip through your fingers. But lose everything for his sake, and then you’ll really start living. Then you’ll discover what you were really made for, you’ll find out what ‘life’ really feels like. Like he said another time, “I have come so that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

But there’s a problem for us when we hear this. I think we have a problem because there are loads of people making that claim these days. In this time and this place, we are in a literally global market of people selling us different things, all claiming that they are going to give us ‘real life’, fulfilment, peace, joy, security, meaning. Saying ‘buy this product’ or ‘take this job’ (OK, this one doesn’t actually happen to English students that much but my friends tell me it’s a thing) or ‘join this cause’ or ‘follow this pathway’ and it will make you feel really alive. A thousand different ideologies and religions: right wing or left wing, Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism, spiritual practices and pathways, meditation and mindfulness and a thousand other things: and all of them saying “this is where you’ll find real life”.

But how on earth are we supposed to know who to believe? How are we supposed to know who to trust?

As I thought about this it occurred to me that surely the most popular solution to this problem throughout history, by far, has been this:

Choose whatever is most normal.

Cast your mind back to 500 years ago in this country. The average person is a Christian, basically because it’s normal. It’s the worldview which is socially acceptable and widely held around them. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t thinking, “I only believe this because it’s normal”, not at all. But the normalness of it means that to them it just seems obvious, sensible, good – and when they encounter other belief systems they seem just quite implausible. Other moral systems might well seem downright outrageous, deeply wrong.

But just because Christianity was normal 500 years back didn’t make it automatically true. Those cultural inclinations to see other things as implausible or morally unacceptable are actually a really rubbish reason to believe in Christianity! You want to go back and shake them and say, ‘’Think about it!’

So then the pressing question for us is, what’s the ‘normal’ worldview right now, in early 21^st century Western Europe? And I think it’s a kind of agnostic atheism – something along the lines of ‘There might or might not be something out there, but we definitely don’t know anything much about it, so you should just be true to yourself, and respect everyone else and their beliefs.’ This is so normal that for most of us anything else seems quite implausible, or even immoral. But in the same way as with Christianity in the past, just because it’s normal doesn’t make it right. Just because it’s normal doesn’t make it real. Just because it’s the most natural way of thinking for us culturally doesn’t mean it’s the way we’ll actually find real life, real fulfilment.

And Jesus clearly seems to think that going for the most normal, most obvious, most convenient option isn’t the way to find real life. The man in the story is digging. The treasure was buried – it was hidden – it wasn’t obvious! We have to some digging – we have to investigate. In fact, imagine he bumps into a friend as he’s selling all of his possessions with a grin on his face. To everyone else this field just looks like any other field, just another patch of dirt – to them he must look absolutely crazy! It’s not normal at all. But Jesus is saying, ‘knowing me, loving me, following me – it’s not normal, it’s not convenient, but it’s worth it. Because it’s where you’ll find real life.’

So the question is then, if there are so many options, and Jesus is quite open about the fact that what he’s offering is neither obvious nor convenient, why would we listen to him at all?

There are a thousand reasons, but a big one I’d want to point out is that Jesus lived what he claimed. He actually lived it – he proved what he said with his life.

So for instance, there are plenty of people who’ll tell you that they care about you, or about people like you, but actually it’s all about their own fame or profit or power. (If you insist on an example, might I politely offer Boris Johnson.) But Jesus says ‘I love you’, ‘I care about you’ and then he actually goes and dies. He lets himself be arrested and killed for our sake – to make it possible for us to be reconciled with him. He lived it.

Or as I said, there are a thousand different things saying they can give you real life, life to the full. But only Jesus has actually defeated death. The historical evidence (and this is why I decided to be a Christian in the first place myself) points inescapably to the conclusion that he actually did die, and actually did come back from the dead and people saw him and spoke to him and touched him. And if this guy has punched a hole in death and come out the other side, surely he’s someone worth listening to about where we can find real life!

So please, do some digging. I think Jesus is worth literally everything – I don’t expect you to believe that yet – but I think it’s pretty clear that he is worth a second look. Read one of the biographies of his life. They are eyewitness accounts. Read Luke. It’ll literally take you 2 or 3 hours. Read about Jesus, see what he was like, see if you like him. See if he intrigues you. Or if you prefer people to books, please talk to me or another person you know who loves Jesus – we love to be asked about this stuff!

If you want to try and be fair and investigate other beliefs at the same time – fantastic, do it! I’m just asking you, whatever else you look at, look at this. I’m asking you to do that because I’m like the guy in the story: I’ve found following Jesus and it’s amazing. It is worth everything. To be loved relentlessly, to be forgiven and restored again and again, to be entrusted with work of genuinely eternal significance – it’s so good. I’ve dropped everything for it, and I’d do it again a thousand times.

So yeah, have a dig. At worst you’ve given a few hours of your life, but at best you might find that you discover a whole new level to what life really is. If you’re in Cambridge and you fancy a chat about it, I would several hundred percent love to buy you a flipping massive fancy coffee and a cake of some kind, and chat. Because this is worth all the cakes in the shop – and if you know me you’ll realise those are very serious words. And I’m leaving Cambridge in less than a week’s time! So message me. Or just read Luke or talk to someone else because ultimately it’s not about me in the slightest, it’s about someone unimaginably better.

'may fail' - mid-exam truths

I’ll be straight up, I’ve had a pretty rubbish day. Last week I had my first two finals exams on Thursday and Friday, and on the Friday I went straight from the exam to a poetry competition in London and it was all very intense and exciting, and I got late with Rachael and then she stayed for the weekend and we rested together on Sunday and that was nice, but then I still have two more exams – one on Friday, one a week tomorrow. And my body and my brain are just not having it – they know what shape a story is supposed to be, they know that they were building to a climax and the climax was Friday, and then the weekend was that nice kind of epilogue bit you get where they’ve gone back to the Shire and it’s all good again, and the story is over now. So when I tell myself to go and start revising a whole different set of texts and ideas everything in me just does not fancy it.

Now this is of course not an exceptional situation, I’ve actually got a pretty tame schedule compared to a lot of people, and one friend from church is currently doing her exams while popping in and out of A&E so I’m thoroughly aware that I have no right to complain! So this is not me complaining, it’s just me being honest about how today has been.

And it’s also me writing so that I can publically remind myself of a glorious bit of truth that I was holding onto last week as it was getting intense, and which I need to grab hold of again right now.

In one of the Psalms, the writer is singing to God about how he had started to feel like life was unfair, and how he was tempted just to give up on trying to follow God because it didn’t seem to be getting him anything. But then in the last few stanzas he turns it around:

Yet I am always with you;

    you hold me by my right hand.

You guide me with your counsel,

    and afterward you will take me into glory.

Whom have I in heaven but you?

    And earth has nothing I desire besides you.

My flesh and my heart may fail,

    but God is the strength of my heart

    and my portion forever.

This guy just says to God, as if to remind himself that it’s true – ‘You are with me, You actually love me, You are looking after me and You have promised me incredible things, there is no God up there other than you and if there were a billion gods not one of them could ever be close to your goodness; You are better and more beautiful and more trustworthy than anything on this earth, it’s not even worth comparing any of the things that life outside you has to offer me with your love.’ And then here’s the bit that I really need to get hold of right now: “My heart and my flesh may fail”. The Psalm is wonderfully realistic. ‘Look God, I know that I’m weak. I know that I’m not as strong as I like to think I am, I know that there is a genuine possibility that I am just going to be a bit rubbish, or that I’m going to crack at some point and I won’t be able to do what I need to do.’ He says, ‘I don’t know if I’m enough for this.’

And I need to be realistic. I need to take a second to stop, and close my eyes and look at God, and say, ‘I might mess this up. I am not superman and I’m really tired.’

And then say, “but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.” I love the word portion because only the Bible really uses it for things other than chips. But the idea is the same – it’s what you’re given, it’s what you need, it’s the amount that is allotted to you and necessary for you. And God just says, ‘How about I give you myself? That should be enough.’ How about God – the Creator, the Sustainer, the Unimaginably Perfect, the Only One – pours himself out in love, even in death, and says ‘I will fill you if you want.’ I will love you if you’ll let me. And my love is better than life itself. I’m enough. I’m sufficient. I’m richer and deeper than anything I’ve ever made and that is everything else there is. And I’ll be your strength if you want. I’ll be there, beside you, supporting you. I’ll be your ‘help’, as demeaning and ridiculous as that sounds I want to do it for you. I’m the strength of your heart and your portion for ever if you’ll have me.

That’s the truth. And it helps to write it down. Because it’s true, and it will still be true on Friday morning at 9am, and it will still be true on Wednesday at noon when these exams are done. My heart and my flesh might have failed in various ways by then, but this will not have changed. Thank you.

How do you get to heaven? Part 4: A Letter to My Old Best Friend

What follows is a letter I actually wrote to my friend the other week, but I wanted to share it because I could write something like it to so many of my friends. (I explain about it being open in the letter cos I wanted to check they were OK with me posting it publicly, obviously with them anonymous. And they were indeed happy with it.)
Dear Friend,

We’ve been mates for a long time – it’s a while now since we were climbing over bus seats on long school trips. Well, to be fair it was mainly you climbing over the seats, I probably had my seat belt on. But still, even though we don’t see each other that much these days, I really do care about you.

And the day you told me that you thought you believed in God was one of the happiest days of all seven years of school; and it was good to see you today, but it was also gutting.

You said that you just don’t think about God much these days, and that you know you could never be someone who’s really committed to it. (‘It’, not Him.) You said you could never move it from your rationality into really believing it, really wanting to do something about it. So you’re happy to wait, and not bother about it – maybe something bad will happen, maybe you’ll just get old, or maybe God will speak to you in a dream or something – but until then you’re happy as you are. And I really love you and so that’s gutting for me to hear.

I wanted to make this an open letter because, as we said tonight, it’s not just you – tonnes of people I love are the same. People who don’t really believe in a God but they’ve never really thought about it for just the same reasons you’re putting it out of your mind. Or people who grew up going to church and have never really decided that it’s all rubbish but they’re just not that bothered with it anymore. In our particular demographic – young adult, uni-educated, rich, Western – feeling reasonably fulfilled by our lives and accordingly apathetic towards questions of ultimate meaning is pretty normal.

I wanted to write this because seeing that indifference in someone I care about is heartbreaking for me – and I know you already know that, and I feel like you half get why, but let me try and help you empathise properly. Let me try for a second to help you see what it looks like from my eyes.

I am convinced that God is actually real, and that he has revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ, who lived and taught so we could know what God is like, then died a hellish death that he did not deserve so that we could be forgiven for the deep wrongness in all our hearts and our lives, and then genuinely came back from the dead – smashing a hole in death and giving us properly solid grounds for believing that everything he said was true. I’ve become convinced that this means that God is real objectively. Not just true for me, not just a nice idea that helps me make sense of things – actually Real with a capital R so big that the uni/multiverse fits inside it. This means that I believe the following things about you:

I think that you were created by God. Not in a distant, indirect and indifferent Great-Great-Great-Grandpa kind of way, but in an ‘I knew you before you were born’, breathing life into your snotty little baby nostrils kind of way. He created you like an artist creates a masterpiece. He cares about you like a mother cares about her child. You’re not ‘just another human’ to him, he knows your name, and he knows your face, and he knows every single gift he planted in you. It seems insane but I’m convinced it’s actually true.

I think that you – like me, like everyone else – have run away from home. You’ve rejected God. For you it is actually a more explicit conscious thing than for most people, but you’ve done the same thing we all do in and of ourselves. We look at God – the Infinite Creator, the Passionate Father, the All-worthy King – and we say, ‘I’ll make the decisions thanks.’ You’ve said, ‘I get that if you’re there then logically I owe you everything, and I really ought to follow you, but that’s a really profound commitment. I prefer being in charge of my own life. And I don’t really feel like I need you.’ You’ve said that to God. Since the Enlightenment we’ve been very good in the West at teaching ourselves to forget that we are creatures. But the fact is, we are not gods. We are creatures and He is the Creator and in reality any attempt to set ourselves up against him – any stance towards him other than devotion and worship – is madness. It’s suicidal.

I think that Jesus died because of you, and for your sake. Against all probability, against all good sense, in the middle of our silent rebellion, in the face of our quiet hatred, this Creator came as a man and let us beat him, and spit at him, and kill him, in order to make a way for us to come back to him. It’s insane but he has loved us to death, even before we’ve done anything other than reject and ignore him. And right now, somehow, you are able to look – through the smoked glass of uncertainty and a bit of apathy – at the Son of God himself, nailed to a piece of wood and bleeding to death, crying out ‘Father, forgive them’; and decide that you’re not particularly interested in it. Let me be clear, here, I actually believe that if there had been no other human on earth to die for, Jesus would have died purely to offer you redemption, he cares about you that much, and right now you are shrugging and walking away.

I think that you, as a human being, created and loved by God, have the capacity to share in Jesus’ resurrection. He actually came back from the dead and said you can come with him and I mean that in two ways:

First, I mean right now. I mean this world, this life. God is at work putting the world to rights. Redeeming, restoring, healing brokenness and fighting injustice and putting the pieces of this smashed up world back together into a mosaic that glimmers with eternal beauty. And he’s doing it through real life, unimpressive, flesh and blood people who have trusted Jesus and are being filled with the same Spirit that raised him from the dead. He said he has come to give us “life, and life to the full” and he calls us to be so much more truly human than we even realise is possible right now. He’s inviting you into that. He’s inviting you to make a difference that will genuinely last forever. He’s inviting you to live a life of love – of selfless, sacrificial, servant love – and discover in it a joy and a peace that the world can never give, and the world can never take away.

And then I mean that life overflowing into forever, when God completely recreates and restores heaven and earth and he is inviting you to be part of that perfect creation forever. And I know that’s hard to actually conceive of – because I find it hard myself. But if an arts student can learn anything from serious physics it’s that just because I can’t wrap my head around something doesn’t mean for a second that it’s not utterly real. I’m not going to try and describe it to you, but I can tell you that I’ve only been properly learning to love Jesus for 6ish years, but already my excitement and longing at the thought of seeing him face to face is growing pretty strong. There is nothing truly good about this world that it won’t be, and better than it all he will be with us, close enough to wipe the tears from our eyes.

But right now, instead of accepting that life, that smashed-through-death life, that once-was-lost-but-now-I’m-found life, you’re settling for less – for so much infinitely less.

There’s a bit in the Bible where – as so often – the people have forgotten God and decided they’d be better off without him, and God says,
“My people have committed two sins:

They have forsaken me, the spring of living water,

and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”

CS Lewis put it like this:

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

And so two things scare me right now.

One is that you’re on course to waste your life. You might do amazing things, you might not. But either way, you were created to love God and be part of the eternal work he’s doing restoring this world, and while as it is you might stumble into being part of it for a moment, without him you’ll miss the point entirely. The point for which he knit you together in your mum’s womb. You are brilliant. You are so blatantly bursting with abilities and gifts and you are unique and you are creative and you have the capacity for deep love. Please don’t waste your life.

The second thing that scares me is that right now, as far as I can see, you’re on the wrong side of Jesus’ warnings about eternity. I know it’s uncomfortable, but I’m trying to show you what this is like through my eyes, and this is a big part of why it’s so painful for me – I believe in hell. I don’t know exactly what it means, what it will be like, but Jesus again and again warned people, and talked about darkness and fire, and weeping and gnashing of teeth. As much as I wish I could find a way to explain it away, I’m convinced that whatever he means by that imagery he doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t worry yourself too much about it. I worry about it.

That’s what I believe about your life. Infinite potential. Insanely loved by God. Offered real life, to the full, now and forever. But right now, walking calmly towards eternal death.

And I know you said you’ve ‘tried’ this stuff before, but it’s impossible to ‘try’, really, because what Jesus asks is for you to ‘turn and trust’ like I explained before. And you can’t experiment with turning around completely and throwing yourself on Jesus. I remember someone telling me about going skydiving once – they make you sit on the edge with your feet dangling out, and you’re only allowed one buttock in the plane, and then they count down and say ‘jump’, and you just have to jump. You can’t half jump out of a plane. You can’t half follow Jesus. And you know that, I think.

But here’s the thing, that doesn’t mean you need to make a blind leap of faith. That means you need to put every effort in to actually work out for certain whether you trust the parachute. (Please forgive me for the fact that a parachute is a really rubbish metaphor for the all-consuming richness and brilliance of Jesus…) So this is me half daring and half begging you: think about it again, look at it again. Read Luke’s gospel and ask yourself, ‘What if this were true?’ Investigate the evidence, hear out the arguments on both sides. Get serious about this. Don’t you dare spend your life with one buttock in the plane. Use your brain, engage your heart, think through what it would look like in practice. I’m always keen to talk – so so keen – and I’m always up for pointing you in the direction of any resources you need on whatever topic. I would cut my arm off if it would help.

But it wouldn’t. Cos it’s up to you.

Love,

Mike

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.