“Who does He think He is”?

This is a question that occurs to most of us at some point. It is usually unspoken, occasionally spluttered in indignation. It is most often prompted by the sayings or doings of someone else. Sometimes these sayings and doing only concern themselves. Occasionally they directly relate to us. Usually this question is rhetorical, prompting no great in-depth analysis. But I can think of one prime example of where this question has and is often asked, where analysis is possible and may even be a necessity for each and every one of us.

It is worth noting that the question asked above is first-cousin to another question: who is He? These are not identical. But in the case of the example I have in mind there is an important interplay between the two. The “He” is question is of course Jesus. Jesus, who although an historical figure, is being remembered today (“good” Friday) as having some continuing relevance to at least the billions of His (at least) nominal followers. That in itself is remarkable. Precisely because He is an historical figure, He can be investigated and has been. Indeed there have been concerted scholarly efforts to do so, often subsumed until the title “the quest for the historical Jesus”. Talk of “the” quest is, however, misleading. There’s an old quest that some argue was instigated by Reimarus in the eighteenth century. However, this produced a Jesus who sounded suspiciously exactly as you would expect him to depending on the philosophical convictions of whichever author you happened to be reading. The end result was a rather anaemic and a-historical Jesus. This quest was finally put out of its misery by Schweitzer in 1906 with the publication of his “The Quest of the Historical Jesus”. But while the “old” quest came to an end, the questing continued, suggesting that there was something important about these questions.

Just how one might parse the new questing that continued in the twentieth century, as a renewed quest, second quest, quest 1a, 1, etc is a matter of debate. But the continual interest in the question of who Jesus is, is remarkable given the view in some circles that we could know nothing directly of Him at all. In this popular mid-twentieth century view, what Jesus actually did and said had been lost entirely. The gospels were all slanted and mythological accounts that had little to do with history. They might tells us about the early church and the issues that were then current, but they could tell us little or nothing about Jesus Himself. Non-canonical writing about Jesus (ie writing outside the books of the New Testament) tended to be fragmentary or even less historically reliable, and much of this writing dated from well after the time of Jesus’ death. However, this turned out to be unsustainable because it simply ran counter to so much of the evidence. And there were two really big elephants in the room. The world was turned upside down by the events of around 30AD when Jesus died (so something remarkable was going on), and their was the multiply attested fact that Jesus continued to have real impacts on people’s lives right up to today.

Many will again have have found themselves contemplating Jesus’ death at the start of this Easter weekend. But many a great teacher has died a noble death (and arguably Jesus’ death was far from that). The classic example in the ancient world was Socrates, who accepted his death sentence, drank hemlock and died rather than live inconsistently with what he had taught. It is true that he has had a profound influence on Western thought (albeit mediated by Plato and others). Yet mention Socrates today, and many a mind will tend to remember a Brazilian footballer instead (“widely regarded as one of the greatest midfielders of all time”). In contrast, Jesus’ death was particularly cruel and appalling, and yet has been invested with such significance that many of us will have its instrument as an item of jewellery secreted about our person. And he steps right out of history in the story of contemporary men and women who claim not merely to know about Him, but to know Him. There is something in this that is more relevant to us than mere fascinating history.

And that’s where we come to the question that we actually started with. Given that there was an historical Jesus, is it possible to know who He thought He was? Well, it turns it out that what N.T. Wright calls “an impressive catalogue” of sayings are attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. Many of these are only explicable if they were actually originally said by Jesus. And it’s not just what He says, it’s what He does. The Gospel writers (and others such as Paul) are clear that they are communicating what was said and what was done. Do they do it as a twenty-first century journalist or historian would? Of course not (that would be a sure sign of something dodgy going on). They are clear and up front (in a way their critics are often not) that they are selecting from a much wider range of material that was available to them. They are organising their material to best effect. While all that academic questing was (or was not) going on, people continued to engage with their material, and found themselves engaging with Jesus Himself. And it turns out He was clear and consistent about who He thought He was. And so were the Gospel writers.

As an aside, I am not claiming that reading the Bible in general, or the Gospels in particular, can be done in some value free way such that some transparent meaning of the words on the page immediately moves into the mind of the reader. Reading doesn’t work like that. Text always has to be interpreted. And indeed, if the New Testament is being read in English, then the actual documents have already been interpreted once (by the translators). But by being aware of a few simple rules of thumb, many of which are known to us implicitly already, the question asked at the outset becomes clearly answerable from the Gospel accounts.

So who did Jesus think He was? In a very knowing way He speaks about His relationship with God the Father (whose name His original Jewish audience knew well), and does the sorts of things that they all knew only God could do. While distinct from God the Father, He also claims identity with Him. This so outrages His original audience, that they get ready to stone Him for blasphemy there and then (in part this is also the charge on which they eventually do get Him). He eventually heads to what looks like a very deliberate confrontation with both religious and political authority, knowing full well what this will entail for Him. But He apparently also believes that this is inevitable and necessary, and that His death will be the means by which life is secured for those who will align with Him, and only with Him. All because of who He is. If this is in any way near the historical reality, then only two response are left to us. One is the incredulous version of the question we started with, because He is clearly a crackpot or worse. He thinks He is someone He cannot possibly be. It doesn’t matter if He’s well-meaning if it turns out He’s just flat wrong about His own identity. But the second response is to take the question seriously, and look at the evidence in the round. But here it gets really interesting; that evidence does not end in His death.

If He only died, then He is simply another version of Socrates (or the Buddha, or Mohammed). All great and influential men in their way. But their most fervent admirers and supporters would all agree that they are dead. They didn’t make exactly the claims that Jesus made, and they didn’t die the death that Jesus died, but so far, so same. But that’s what makes Easter special. On Friday all is confusion. But Sunday’s coming, and with it clarity.

Easter retuning…..

We all perceive through filters. While this has a specific technical meaning, the technicalities needn’t detain us for too long; the general point is easily understood. Take vision (or seeing) as an example. Technically, because our visual system is designed to work in a particular visual environment (or if you prefer, it evolved in a particular context), it has assumptions built into its structure. Another way of saying this is that visual information comes to us through a number of filtered channels. Provided these remain appropriate, everything works fairly well and we can see what we need to see to do the things we have to do. Of course, in order to tease out exactly how this all works, sneaky scientists find ways of tweaking the circumstances in which a participant's visual system has to work (‘tweaked circumstances’ is essentially what an experiment is) to trip it up. This, it turns out, is not hard; it is the basis of visual illusions – stimuli that induce misperceptions. You can find lots online with which you can fool your own visual system. Personally, I rather like the “change blindness” phenomenon (although technically this is more an attentional than visual type of illusion). You can find a classic example here; see if you can spot what is changing as photographs are presented to you. If you can’t work it out (most people do eventually), the answer is at the end of this post. The general point is that we easily miss things that are different from our usual experience and expectations, that violate the assumptions we inevitably make about what is going on around us. Rather, we tend to assume that we are very aware of everything that is going on around us, and certainly that if anything important was going on, we’d certainly notice it.

Not surprisingly, what applies at the relatively low level of perception also occurs in different, arguably more complicated, contexts. Consider all that Peter and the other disciples of Jesus of Nazareth had seen and heard as they followed Jesus all over first century Palestine. Let’s take the shortest of the Gospel accounts of the experience they accumulated over a period of about three years, the one composed by Mark. Early on they are sufficiently impressed by Jesus and what he has to say to respond positively when he calls them to follow him. It’s unclear what they thought they were getting themselves into. Perhaps a private club or religious society? Perhaps they initially hoped that this would eventually develop into a larger popular movement of national revival. And yet from the outset this was a rather strange grouping (particularly in its membership), being told strange things by Jesus. They heard and saw Jesus’ explicit and implicit claims to be God! He claimed to be able to forgive sin and claimed authority over their holy day, the Sabbath. In a wilderness setting, just like the one they would remember from their national history as recorded in Exodus, he did the impossible and provided bread for thousands, something their history told them God had uniquely done in the past. Jesus healed the excluded and delivered the spiritually enslaved. He even restored the nearly and newly dead, as well as raised the thoroughly dead. What did they make of this? Not much at the time is probably the answer, as they, along with the crowds that Jesus often encountered, reacted in astonishment time after time. Much of what Jesus was saying and doing seems to have been as foreign to them, as out of kilter with their usual daily experience, as it is to ours.

But as well as publicly observable demonstrations and teaching, the disciples had personal time with Jesus that was way beyond what was accessible to the crowds. They could, and did, ask questions and for explanations. Jesus went out of his way to explain to them what he was saying, and indeed describe what was going to happen to him before it happened. Three times in Mark, and at particular points, he explains that he is going to be rejected, abused and killed, and that he was going to rise from the dead. Mark records that particularly this last point was completely lost on the disciples. It obviously was not to be taken literally; Jesus could not mean that having ceased to be alive he would return to life in any real sense. Like us, they understood the basic realities of life and death, how the universe worked – we live and we die, end of. There might be notions of some sort of existence after the point of death, but that was a matter of philosophy or complicated theology; it belonged with talk of spirits and collective memorialising of the dead. It wasn’t a real sort of thing, at least not really real. So, obviously Jesus had to be dealing in metaphors and pictures. But what could they mean? Eventually, as Jesus became ever more explicit about both his impending death and his rising from the dead, the disciples just stopped asking him what he meant.

So what were their expectations as they eventually arrived in Jerusalem, the location where Jesus had been telling them he would die and rise again? Perhaps they were swept up in the excitement of the welcoming crowds who thought they knew exactly what Jesus was about. Perhaps they hoped that Jesus’ talk of rejection and death was just that, talk. Things seemed to be on a more promising track. Here they were in at the religious and civil heart of their people, and it seemed Jesus was indeed about to lead a popular movement, with perhaps the disciples playing the role of trusted lieutenants. But then Jesus goes and messes it up. He seems to go out of his way to outrage the religious and civil authorities. In an apparently monumental miscalculation he even turns one of his own intimate circle against himself, such that one of his followers called Judas is prepared to conspire with the authorities to have Jesus arrested. The rest, as they say, is history. Perhaps you have been rehearsing some of it today on “Good Friday”. The tragic end to a promising beginning. And yet, had they really listened they might have known that things were not as they seemed. This was not a tragedy unfolding, not an ending, and more of a continuation than a beginning.

But then what was going on was so beyond their experience and expectations that inevitably they were no more able to understand it than we are today without external intervention. Their filters were on the wrong setting as it were. Their starting assumptions were wrong. And still today there is something about the way we are constituted that makes it hard to see and hear what's going on with Jesus. Even if we think it is worth trying to, it is hard to get beyond the mere rehearsal of historical events to a transforming understanding of the what and the why of his death in those appalling circumstances of rejection, betrayal, mockery, abuse, suffering and death. Fortunately the same help is available to us as would eventually allow Jesus’ first disciples (or at least eleven of them) to process the raw material of what they had seen and heard and understand what was going on. It takes nothing less than God himself, through his own word, by means of his own Spirit, to cut through our natural way of thinking and the expectations it generates, to retune our filters, so we can know, understand and respond to Jesus. Fortunately for us, he has always been happy to do exactly this. Just try asking.

And if you still don't get what changing in the 'change blindness' demo, pay attention to the engine under the wing of the aircraft in the pictures. Imagine not seeing that!

Easter 2023: How come the world still spins?

The death of a child, a spouse, a parent, comes as a shattering blow. It is one that I haven’t experienced personally yet but I know that one day I will. However, what I have observed in others is the way their world just stops. And then complete incomprehension: why hasn’t it stopped for everyone else? Do they not know what’s happened? Are they simply unaware? Or do they not care? How can this be? And so it goes on. It would be less than human if such a loss did not induce, at least for an instant, anger, compounding the grief. But then the death of any particular individual will not be known to the vast bulk of humanity. And consider the numbers involved; it is estimated that just over one hundred people die every moment of every day. It is a tragedy that not every single one will be mourned – there have always been those who die alone and unknown. But many will be mourned, and there will be those who grieve. For those impacted there will always be that question: How can your world continue to spin when mine has come to a shuddering halt?

I found myself wondering about this at church this morning. Although it is a Friday, it is “good” Friday, hence I was in church. Some other time perhaps I will investigate why this particular day on which we remember Jesus giving up His life in appalling circumstances is called “good” (here’s what I came up with previously). So much about that day is grotesque. The injustice of it. Jesus is declared innocent by His human judge, the Roman governor Pilate, three times in quick succession. The case brought against Him collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. One of His two fellow accused, a thief, recognises that while two of the three of them that day were being justly punished (albeit by crucifixion), Jesus had done nothing deserving death. Even His Roman executioner comes to appreciate something of Jesus’ uniqueness (albeit after the event). And yet, there He hangs, there He suffers, there He dies.

I want to explode. I want to point an accusing finger at those limp, wet disciples, and shout: how could you? Judas betrayed Him the previous evening, and Peter had repeatedly denied Him. The rest of the little band of His closest disciples had scattered. Only some women (including His mother) and John are left to watch Him die. He had invested years in a core group of twelve, patiently, painstakingly, teaching and shaping them, feeding them and occasionally rescuing them. They had heard amazing words, they had seen amazing things. And now, outrageously, they are nowhere to be seen, just when you think He might need them most. More startling still is Jesus’ restraint. When Judas and a mob arrived in a garden where Jesus had been praying to arrest Him, a fight had almost broken out. Violence started, but was stopped just as quickly by Jesus Himself. Could He have escaped if He’d let Peter and the rest “get stuck in”? Perhaps. Did He need their assistance? He certainly didn’t want it. But consider. He’d calmed storms, fed thousands and raised the dead! He could have snuffed out the very existence of those who now laid their hands on Him. And yet He didn’t. My immediate response is to ask: why didn’t you? Why didn’t you stand up to such obvious injustice? Why didn’t you make the likes of Judas and the rest pay there and then? I would have.

If I’m confused by Jesus' response, I’m stunned by God the Father who had spoken of His love for, and His pleasure in, His Son. I know that the incarnation takes us to the edge of, and well beyond, human understanding; how can one person be both God and man? But the claims made by Jesus are clear. He had willingly come from the Father’s side, at the Father’s behest, something long planned. Just as the Father took pleasure in the Son, so the Son sought to please the Father. And yet this Father watches this Son unjustly defamed and abused. Part of me me wants to cry out: how could you? Never mind stopping the world spinning, I wonder why God didn’t rip the earth from its axis and hurl it like a discarded marble across the galaxy. He is God after all, and this is His Son being abused and insulted.

As if all of that isn’t bad (or confusing) enough, as Jesus hangs on a cross, the Father apparently abandons His Son, who cries out in agony because this abandonment is so excruciating. And this only part of what is going on; things that those original observers could see, hear and infer. There are those things transpiring that are unseen and so extraordinary that if God Himself had not revealed what was really going on, one would hesitate even to hint at it. It is Paul who writes in 2 Corinthians 5:21: “For our sake he [God] made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin...”. Why? Part of me is outraged at how unfair this all is. How are we to understand it?

But neither my understanding or my feelings are of much interest. My perspective isn’t the one that matters. God is God, He is not me and He is not like me. In fact He is so unlike me (and you) that the very words that we use, human words, cannot communicate accuracy the fullness of what He is like, even if we could understand what He is like in the first place. We mustn’t slip into the misunderstanding that God is just like us, but bigger. He’s not; He is of a completely different order of being. But because we cannot know everything about Him, does not mean we can know nothing. That’s because He has revealed Himself using human language and images that we can understand. Why did He restrain Himself when His Son was brutally taken and crucified by mere creatures? Because this was the means by which that very rebellion could, in justice, be forgiven by God who is just. Breathtakingly, the world still spins on its axis, not because He is somehow indifferent and doesn’t care or love, but precisely because He does. And He does so with a perfect passion unlike anything that is ever true of us. So he watches as He had always watched, because as He is outside of time, the death of His Son has been and is always before Him.

Part of our problem is that we are time-bound and temporal; for us time is linear. Although this story isn’t over, and our picture is incomplete, we’ll have to ponder and wait until Sunday. Then we’ll learn why the world kept, and keeps, on spinning.

What’s so good about this Good Friday?

Just as grave concerns about a global pandemic, caused by a new virus for which there wasn’t initially a test or cure, begin to recede (whether they should or not only time will tell), war breaks out on the continent of Europe, a continent that everyone thought had learned its lesson in the 20^th century. And not the kind of war Brits have been involved in recently, whether in the Falklands (40 years ago this year), the Gulf or Iraq – wars of choice, mainly about politics – but an honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned war of national survival. A big state has picked on a smaller state, and for spurious reasons has attempted to steam-roller it into oblivion. In the pandemic we elected to follow the science. And science largely stepped up to the plate. Recent discoveries and new molecular and genetic techniques provided tests and vaccines, and then treatments, in record time. So now, even although there’s still lots of infection about, particularly from dreaded “new variants”, the fear and certainly the panic has largely dissipated. Nothing of any spiritual interest to see here, or so it would seem. And no particular spiritual lessons to be gleaned from war in Ukraine.

But there are two related things that strike me. The first is that surely now no one can cleave any longer to the naively optimistic modernist belief in the inevitable progress of humanity. For years (indeed hundreds of years) they’ve been telling us that the Christians and their Bible were just flat wrong. Humanity is not intrinsically and self-helplessly bad. Men and women are good, made bad by their environment and lack of education. Improve their environment, and educate everyone (neither of which is a bad idea), and all the bad stuff will stop happening. And, of course, it’s religion that starts wars. Do away with religion and that will also be to our benefit. No religion, no war. Anyway, religion in general, and Christianity in particular, belong to humanity’s adolescence; we can progress past that. We have progressed past that. Well, apparently not.

The war in Ukraine is every bit a cruel and violent as any fought in the 20^th century. And as for rules governing war, rules like not targeting civilians, or civilian infrastructure, apparently there’s a new rule book. The one that allowed for the systematic destruction of Grozny and Aleppo; that’s the one that is now being followed in Mariupol and Kharkiv. So far the numbers of dead and the geographical extent may not have reached the level of previous world-scale conflicts, but who knows where we are headed.

It turns out that radically improved living conditions, longer and better health and mass education, all good things in their own way, have in part only served to distract us from deeper realities. They have provided a veneer. They have improved the outside, but have apparently left the inside largely untouched, unreformed and unimproved. Yes, the war is about a bad man and his enablers and acolytes. But it’s a reminder of a central truth. There is something rotten in all of us (and not just “them”) that cannot be fixed from the outside in.

As troubling as this is, the second thing is a much trickier issue to raise, and I do so hesitantly. It is profoundly disturbing in its implications. And I claim no deeper insight than anyone else, and certainly do not claim any particular or personal revelation. One of the Old Testament prophets, Habakkuk, had a real problem with what God was doing in his day. Times were tough and things were bad. God was acting in judgement on Habakkuk’s people Judah. So far so good. Habakkuk knew that Judah had become corrupt, and they had all been well and often warned. But then God told Habakkuk how He was going to judge Judah. He was going to use the Babylonians! “But how can you?”, shouted Habakkuk, “They’re even worse than us!”. There was an answer to Habakkuk’s question of course, even if it was in part “You’ll see”. Those who lost loved ones as the Babylonians swept into Judah no doubt grieved. Those who were subsequently deported, becoming strangers in someone else’s country, were no doubt aggrieved. How could God do this to us using them?

Now, don’t get me wrong. There is a bad man at the heart of the Ukraine war, who is responsible for death and suffering we haven’t seen the likes of in generations, at least not in this part of the world. And as in time Babylon was dealt with, so will the President of Russia be. “Will not the judge of all the earth do right?”. And yet it’s precisely this part of the world, Europe, that has taken the lead in proclaiming that God is an irrelevance (if He exists at all). Either He’s made up or we’ve abolished Him. But don’t worry, because we can get along without Him very happily thank you. Now, if there is a God, not the unattached, uninvolved watch-maker of the deist, but the God who is intimately involved in this very world (because He made it and sustains it), how is He supposed to respond to all of this? 

Maybe, just maybe, as well as doing what we all can to alleviate real suffering, we also need to reflect on what He might be saying to us all, even in these current events. Maybe there’s a need to reflect on our whole spiritual and moral direction and recent tradition, and look for another way. Because the track we’re on just isn’t working. It hasn’t solved the basic problem - something deep in me, in us, that no amount of environmental or educational improvement can touch or fix.

But what makes me think that there is a God, and what makes me think that he’s bothered by any of this? That’s where we come to Good Friday. If there’s anything that shows that God is not an uninterested bystander in all the mess of this world, it is that He Himself, in the person of Jesus, stepped into precisely this broken, bloodstained world. And in order to provide a means whereby the real issue could be dealt with, how to bring about the internal revolution needed in each human heart and mind, He went to neither a lecture hall nor a pulpit but to a cross. There He gave up His life in appalling circumstances, not as an illustration or an example, but as a sacrifice. Making provision for all God-ward human failure, making it possible to break the power that holds us captive, and enable a fundamental break with our personal failure where God is concerned. Making possible personal, inward, revolution and renewal This is not a new way, or a newly concocted alternative to modernism’s (or post-modernism’s) manifest failure. It’s a rediscovery of an ancient truth.

Buried in another of those “obscure” and ancient Old Testament prophets, quoted by Peter after Jesus’s resurrection, and taken up by Paul in one of his New Testament letters is a startling statement about how entry into this different, new, old, radical way is possible. And it requires Good Friday. Precisely because Jesus died on the first Good Friday and was raised on the first Easter Sunday, it is the case that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Joel 2:32; Acts 2:21; Rom 10:13).

Now that’s good, whether it's Friday or not.

Life in the pandemic III: The ultimate act of self-isolation.

So much that might once have seemed strange now seems normal. I used to work in an office in a building in the middle of a busy city centre University campus. For the last few weeks I have been going to work in my dining room. In previous years, we would have gathered on the morning of Good Friday with about three hundred other people, in Bridge Chapel, to reflect on a pivotal event in the history of humanity – the death by crucifixion of Jesus 2000-ish years ago. Yesterday we sat in our front room, viewing prayers, songs and talks on the interweb. Today, a bright, warm, spring day, we might well have headed off somewhere to have a meal or a walk. We actually spent it at home, only going out for our one-hour, Government-mandated exercise (cycle ride for me, walk for my wife). We are of course “self-isolating”, our contribution in the fight against the Covid19 pandemic.

Self-isolation for us is far from intolerable. There are three of us in a large, comfortable house in a pleasant street in a quiet neighbourhood. And as there are three of us, we’re not that isolated. We see other folk from time to time walking past, and when we’re out and about for our walks or bike-rides. We’re in contact with our family and friends by means of the wonders of modern technology. We are safe, and well fed and watered. Solitary confinement this is not. I realise these are not the happy circumstances of everyone. Calls to the National Domestic Abuse helpline have increased 25% since the start of the lockdown, prompting the Government to announce today an extra £2M for domestic abuse services. Staying at home for some does not equate to being in a place of safety. For the old person living on their own, self-isolation might well be more like solitary confinement, particularly if they have no family or neighbours to keep an eye on them. Never-the-less the experience for many of us, at least in the short term, while trying, is far from tough. And of course it serves a purpose.

We have all become used to the mantra of “stay at home, save the NHS, save lives”; that’s the UK version, but it has its equivalents across the globe. The aim is to stop the transmission of the virus, so that fewer get infected at any one time, fewer are hospitalised, fewer need access to intensive care, and the whole system copes. My inconvenience makes a small, but I hope, tangible contribution to the overall effort. It seems incomparably insignificant to the efforts being made by so many on our behalf on the healthcare frontline. But the message is clear: isolation (even if it turns out not to be that isolating) saves lives.

Isolation is, of course, the central point of what transpired on that first Easter, and is one of its more controversial aspects. Easter really has not got a lot to do with pastel outfits, chocolate eggs (and the hunting thereof), and roast lamb rather than beef for Sunday lunch. Much as tinsel and trees obscure the meaning of Christmas, the aforementioned distract us from a supreme act of self-isolation that saves lives.

There are four accounts of the death of Jesus to be found in the Gospels and all of them repay close attention. Among many things that are striking about them, one is that they are all relatively matter-of-fact about the detail of what was done to Jesus at the cross – you won’t find much blood and gore. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, the original readers of the Gospels were familiar with crucifixion; they needed no reminder of the suffering endured by those condemned to die in this fashion. It was a cruel punishment, certainly; unusual it was not. But secondly, brutal as the physical suffering of Jesus was, in and of itself this could achieve little. If this was simply about the untimely albeit brutal death of a man for some political or religious but ultimately human cause, it would have been then, and would remain now, obscure. Far from unique. But the key to what was going on, and what makes it unique, was not what could be seen. It was something that was unseen, but was evidenced by that most desperate and devastating of all the statements that Jesus made during His suffering. After three hours of darkness, lasting from noon until 3pm, He is recorded as crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”. A cry of dereliction; a cry of isolation.

There is much about the mechanics of what transpired in those hours of darkness that I’m not capable of understanding. But this much is clear, in the darkness something fundamental changed. Just a few hours previously, Jesus had prayed in Gethsemane, addressing God as His Father, His Abba. But now, that relationship is broken; He can no longer address God as Father, but only as God. With the help of the rest of Scripture, we can reconstruct what has happened, and it is breathtaking. “God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us” is how Paul puts it in 2 Cor 5:21. As such, He is cut off, abandoned, isolated.

This state of affairs could have been avoided, and could not have been imposed. As you track through the events that preceded Jesus’ death on the cross, all the way from His arrest in the garden where he had prayed, via His show-trial and abuse, to the cross were he suffered, it’s clear that He is not being driven by events, but that He is driving events. His arrest, His trial, the procession out to Calvary, perhaps right to the very point of His isolation, a halt could have been called. So this was something He did and to that extent His isolation was self-isolation.

 Just as His suffering was qualitatively and quantitatively, breathtakingly, different from mine, so also is what was won by it.  His being isolated from God, His being cut-off, and as sin-bearer also bearing the answering anger of God for sin, wins for me the end of an isolation that is naturally mine. In my natural state I am isolated from the God I was made to know, with all the consequences that flow from that isolation. But that isolation was ended the moment I came into the good of His sacrifice for me. Does sin make God angry? You bet. And I was a target of that anger, until a great transfer took place – my sin to Him, His righteousness to me (that’s the other half of 2 Cor 5:21).

Our self-isolation in the great pandemic is endurable, partly because of that greater act of self-isolation that restores me to the most basic relationship I was created to be in. And the best bit? Have to wait for Sunday for that.

Life in the pandemic II: Between hubris and humility

In the midst of the pandemic that we continue to endure, there have been intriguing, even welcome, moments. Acts of kindness, like folk shopping for their elderly neighbours and then refusing to take payment for it; healthcare workers coming off shifts, being boosted to the front of supermarket queues. There has been the conspicuous bravery of those healthcare workers tending to the seriously ill in full knowledge of the risks posed to their own health. There have been moments of solidarity, like when us normally reserved Brits stand at our doors and in our streets and applaud all those on the front line. There’s been stupidity too of course, like the burning of 5G phone masts after nonsense on social media linked them to the spread of the virus. And there’s been the scary, like attacks on people of Asian heritage blaming them for the virus. But in general there’s been a lot to admire in the response to the pandemic (so far) and perhaps also a touch of pride. Maybe collectively we’re not as selfish or self-absorbed as we sometimes appeared to be pre-virus. Maybe we are not a “snowflake” generation, and can endure and prevail like our forebears who faced wars and disasters in their time.

The Government certainly continues to try to evoke that spirit of battling through that has been likened to the “blitz” spirit. Whether it’s the plucky engineers and manufacturers heroically struggling to mass produce medical ventilators or parents inventing ways to educate their own kids in their own homes (and quite possibly thinking wistfully of the teachers who had that burden up until a few weeks ago). By pulling together, by getting our heads down, by all doing our bit, we can win the struggle. You can’t fault them for the approach. Much more is likely to be achieved by encouragement than by coercion. And if in a few short weeks the crisis abates or even passes, if there’s a return to something that approaches normality, we will undoubtedly heave a collective sigh of relief and indulge in pats on the back all round. We’ll be proud that we did it. Don’t get me wrong. We should all be doing our bit. And we should be applauding the heroic contribution of so many. There is something genuinely touching about many of the stories emerging. There is selflessness to be celebrated, and cynicism to be avoided. But pride can quickly slide into hubris, and I do feel slightly conflicted about some of what’s going on.

Even among Christians, it seems that so far we’ve been concentrating on the practical things we should be doing and not thinking too much about what it all means. Of course, for many people the idea that there is any “meaning” to be gleaned from a pandemic makes no sense. Viruses come and go; they are neither good or bad, they’re just viruses. Occasionally a dangerous one comes along and a pandemic results. It has happened before, and will probably happen again. At least this time we have technology and science that wasn’t available to combat the Black Death or Spanish flu. But this pandemic is not a natural disaster (like an earthquake or volcanic eruption). It was caused by human activity and behaviour in a way that earthquakes are not. The spread of the virus and its effects have been enabled and amplified by human activity and behaviour. And to be fair, stopping the pandemic, or at least the speed of its stopping, will also depend on human behaviour. So at a minimum, there will be lessons for us to learn from our behaviour good and bad.

Big events, particularly big, bad events should cause us to pause, think and reflect. This is a global pandemic, the biggest of big events, so there is thinking to do. If nothing else, it is a dramatic reminder of how fragile life is - as fragile as it always has been. I don’t know how much time Boris (our Prime Minister) has for God and His ways; I suspect not much. Boris has been in an intensive care unit in a London hospital for the last few days. I am sure this is not what he was anticipating just a few weeks ago when he won a decisive election victory, and obtained the prize that he had spent years working, scheming, (lying?) and plotting for. I really do hope he recovers fully (he appears to be on the mend), and returns to do the job he was elected to do. But I also hope he returns with a changed perspective on his personal fragility, on his ability to control circumstances, and yes on the God he has probably spent his life ignoring. A bit more humility. And if Boris’ perspective should change, why not mine? But Boris is of course just one individual.  

I am emphatically not drawing a straight line either between Boris and the judgement of God, or between the pandemic as a whole and the judgement of God, although there are some Christians who are happy to do exactly this. But neither do I think that it is misconceived to look for explanations and meanings in current circumstances from a Biblical perspective (as N.T. Wright recently argued in Time magazine). Any explanation will be far from simple; any meaning will apply at multiple levels. And I claim no particular insight or authority. Indeed the Bible itself warns us about making bold explanatory claims in tough circumstances. God Himself challenged the “friends” of a man who suffered unjustly, who offered simple explanations for his predicament: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” (Job 38:2). I’m fully aware that there is a huge knowledge gap in the current situation. But not knowing everything is not the same as there being nothing to know.

I do know that these events are not just happening. Yes, there are natural and naturalistic explanations for much of what is going on. But underpinning all of these are the purposes of God. That’s a problem as much as an explanation. How a global pandemic, with the suffering and struggle implied, maps to the purposes of a good, faithful and gracious God raises difficult issues. Some will argue that it raises insurmountable arguments against even the existence of such a being. However, I also know that He is to be trusted, even when, as in current circumstances, I don’t understand His purposes either in their detail or their totality. And I also know that, given events of Good Friday, the same God in the person of His Son, endured suffering to good purpose. So there is no room for smart, slick, simple, arrogant, told you so, single Bible verse pronouncements here. No proud boast that thanks to my reading of the Bible I (or we) have it all worked out. But He knows all the things I don’t. So there is plenty of room for humility and trust.

It’s dark today, but Sunday is coming.