Category: Pastoral Reflections

5 Non-Religious Reasons to Oppose Euthanasia

In previous posts I have explained why Christian Social Teaching has always opposed something like euthanasia. In light of the Bill being presented to Parliament, however, here are five reasons to oppose it that are not founded upon spiritual convictions.

In previous posts I have explained why Christian Social Teaching has always opposed something like euthanasia. In light of the Bill being presented to Parliament, however, here are five reasons to oppose it that are not founded upon spiritual convictions.

Before proceeding further, I generally avoid all public political controversy. As a pastor my job is not to take sides between different political parties. In this case, however, the issue is recognised as one of conscience and not political allegiance. Moreover, given how many could die as a result of this Bill, I strongly urge people to do all they can to resist its implementation.

This is the content of my own letter to my MP. You can write to your MP by following this link.

Dear [MP],

I write concerning the Assisted Suicide Bill due to be before the House of Commons later this week. For the following reasons I urge you in the strongest possible terms to vote against this bill in any form:

  1. It places the aged, ill or vulnerable in an impossible and damaging position.
  2. All experience of euthanasia from elsewhere in the world demonstrates that the proposed safeguards and limitations rapidly come under pressure and are revised, almost inevitably to widen the scope of euthanasia.
  3. It fundamentally changes the nature of healthcare provision for all and, in particular, the relationship between a doctor and patient.
  4. It undermines the provision and funding of proper social care and particularly end-of-life care.
  5. Terminating the lives of the vulnerable, sick and elderly is intrinsically unethical, attacks the assumptions that have underpinned social care and the welfare state, and will have repercussions for the rest of society.

I briefly elaborate on each of these reasons below.

The Burden on the Vulnerable

The introduction of euthanasia for patients places an intolerable burden on them precisely at the point at which they are most in need of care and protection. The elderly and vulnerable often feel an acute sense of guilt or shame at the burden they perceive their care or situation to be placing on others. The pressure, intended or otherwise, to take a step to end their lives not because they truly want to but because they think it better for everyone else will be inevitable and powerful.

This is not a fanciful suggestion. Following the introduction of similar legislation in Oregon, 50% of people opting to end their lives cited the perceived burden upon others as a reason for their choice.[1] This is a terrible and invidious position for us to place those individuals in. Moreover, this position will be widely known and recognised. The physicians responsible for ending the patient’s life will therefore know that there is, in all likelihood, a 50% chance that they are doing it because they feel that they should in order to decrease the burden on others and not because they wish to end their own suffering.

Any lawyer can relate cases in which elderly people are placed either directly, or indirectly, under pressure to make transactions that are disadvantageous to themselves because they feel that it would lessen the burden on others or feel an inappropriate duty to do so. We have developed large legal frameworks to try and protect them precisely because we recognise that someone in that position is vulnerable to feeling under pressure to make such decisions even if that is not the intention of anyone else involved. Property transactions are reversible and the individual involved can be protected, to some extent at least, retrospectively. Euthanasia cannot be reversed. It is final. If even one person were to die because they felt under undue pressure to do so s then this Bill would be a disaster. In reality that situation cannot be avoided and the Bill should not pass.

Expanding Terms of Reference

Experiments with euthanasia in other comparable countries have shown that its safeguards and terms of reference are often rapidly and dramatically revised so as to expand the  scenarios in which it is available. For example:

  • In Oregon, the model proposed for the UK, the law was reinterpreted to apply to individuals who would otherwise live with medical treatment.[2] This includes illnesses such as diabetes.
  • In Canada euthanasia has been offered to people as an alternative to a new wheelchair ramp,[3] for those seeking help to live independently at home,[4] and even for otherwise healthy people suffering with depression or suicidal thoughts.[5]

Noone envisaged this being the situation when Oregon or Canada introduced euthanasia. This was not part of the intended outcome. But once euthanasia has been introduced as an acceptable method of treating certain conditions the pressure to expand its use to other situations has proved irresistible. There is no reason at all to believe that in some way the UK would prove to be different from others who have followed this path.

Change in the Nature of Healthcare Provision

The fundamental settlement that underpins healthcare provision in the modern West is the principle that doctors seek to heal their patients. The patients, by contrast, agree to submit to practices that in other situations would be intolerable (being cut open, ingesting unknown substances etc) because they know that the doctor will always act to promote their physical good. Euthanasia fundamentally undermines this relationship by introducing a layer of ambiguity into it. 

It is perfectly possible to imagine a scenario in which a particularly sick or depressed individual is not honest with his doctor for fear of the conversation it would open up. Or that it would change the nature of consultations to know that in some circumstances the person prescribing your medication would also administer drugs intending to kill you.

Moreover, the impact on medical professionals would be incalculable. They would be required intentionally to terminate their patients’ lives, the exact opposite of the calling they initially undertook. It radically alters the nature of the doctor’s profession and will inevitably have profound impacts on the mental, spiritual and moral wellbeing of those involved. I have not seen any long-term studies done of the impact of altering policy on those responsible for carrying it out. How can it be right to put medical professionals in this position without any sense of how it will impact them?

It is grossly irresponsible to proceed with a Bill that could have these profound consequences.

Undermining the Provision of Palliative and Social Care

The proposed reforms would undermine the provision of end-of-life care and social care. As the Health Secretary has noted,[6] end-of-life care and social care are already badly underfunded and poorly managed. The effect of this is that many of those involved would feel a pressure to euthanasia because of the sense of burden they might be to a system already under pressure and because the care they are receiving is not itself of a high enough quality. Such a situation would be unacceptable.

We saw an example of individuals making the decision to sacrifice themselves because they felt a pressure to do so in order to reduce the burden upon healthcare systems during COVID. It has been well documented that many, including many with signs of early-stage cancer, refused to go to hospital or to GPs because of the sense that the services were under strain and it was their duty not to go. It is at least possible, if not likely, that many would feel the same given the state of end-of-life care and the well documented pressures it places on the healthcare system’s resources.

Moreover, the provision of a relatively cheap alternative to end-of-life care will almost inevitably become attractive if not for the individuals involved then for the culture implicit in the systems themselves. This is not to say that any particular person would choose to push people towards euthanasia instead of offering them expensive palliative or other care. It is, however, likely that that pressure would begin to be felt simply because of the financial and other factors implicit in the system.

Finally, on this point, the presence of euthanasia as a relatively inexpensive alternative to properly funded and reformed end-of-life care would significantly weaken the position of those arguing for that funding and reform.

Long Term Consequences for Society

Finally, euthanasia will have long-term and as yet unexplored consequences for society as a whole. Modern British society is founded upon an intuition that all lives are valuable and are worth preserving. That is why we have policies of redistributive taxation, welfare provision, and healthcare for all. There is a fundamental understanding that all people are worth caring for, even at our expense.

Euthanasia damages this understanding in the most fundamental way. It is founded upon a noble desire to help those who are suffering. Yet it does so by ending those lives we would otherwise consider priceless. It introduces the idea that at a certain point it is better off if someone’s life does not continue and that we have the right to end it. Such a position attacks the principles that underpin the rest of the society we have built. 

Viewed in this light the developments in Oregon and Canada are unsurprising. Once we have conceded that it is legitimate to end life in some circumstances, that assisted suicide is a proper tool for public policy, then why not deploy it in other situations. Almost inevitably the consequences of this shift will not be felt uniformly. They will be experienced most harshly by those from minorities, the poor and the vulnerable; changes like this always are.

For all of these reasons I strongly urge you not to support this Bill.

I am, of course, happy to talk about any of the issues raised in this letter.

Rev. Phil Fellows,Hersham Baptist Church, 
80 Vaux Crescent, Hersham, Surrey, KT124HD

[1] Oregon Health Authority, Public Health Division, Center for Health Statistics (2021) Death with Dignity Act, 2020 Data Summary, p12. See https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/PROVIDERPARTNERRESOURCES/EVALUATIONRESEARCH/DEATHWITHDIGNITYACT/Documents/year23.pdf

Accessed 19 Jan 2023.

[2] https://www.carenotkilling.org.uk/articles/six-months-redefined/

[3] https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/paralympian-trying-to-get-wheelchair-ramp-says-veterans-affairs-employee-offered-her-assisted-dying-1.6179325

[4] https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/chronically-ill-man-releases-audio-of-hospital-staff-offering-assisted-death-1.4038841

[5] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/vancouver-hospital-canada-assisted-suicide-maid-b2390914.html

[6] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/09/07/end-of-life-care-assisted-dying-health-secretary-streeting/

Hope, Life and Death

To have faith in Jesus is to have hope. This hope sets us free to know love and purpose, to live and to die, and to look to eternity.
Deep and profound reflections from Heather Fellows.

To have faith in Jesus is to have hope. This hope sets us free to know love and purpose, to live and to die, and to look to eternity.

Here’s a brilliant guest post from Heather Fellows.

Life is hard.  Some days and for some people it may be so hard that they question if it can be endured much longer.  And yet, by and large, our desire to live wins through.  What is it that makes us want to live, even when life is hard?  What keeps us going?  Hope.

Christianity is all about hope.    Our faith is tied to hope.  We are a people of hope.

The letter to the Hebrews explains faith in this way:

‘Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.’1

To have faith – to trust in God and in Jesus – is to be a man or woman of hope.

As St Paul wrote, ‘in hope we were saved.’2

And it is by trusting in that hope – in Jesus, in his life and the life he has won for us – that we can face our present. 

Even though that present may be hard, it leads towards a goal that we can be sure of and which is great enough to justify the effort of the journey. 

But that leaves us with the questions: what kind of hope is this that saves us?

What kind of hope transforms lives, families, and societies?

What kind of hope can make our present pain and struggle worthwhile?

What kind of hope leads beyond the valleys of this life into the light of eternity?

These are the questions we are thinking about this morning.

Before I go any further I want to acknowledge my debt to Pope Benedict XVI’s letter to the church, Spe Salvi, Saved in Hope. It is a brilliant and rich document that I can barely scratch the surface of but has something very important to say to us.

Living Without Hope

To begin to understand the hope we have in Jesus, we need to start with where we were before he came.

When St Paul wrote to one of the earliest Christian churches in Ephesus, he reminded them that before they came to know Jesus, they were ‘without hope and without God in the world’ (Eph 2:12).  They had had other ‘gods’ that emerged from the different and conflicting myths they talked about. But those ‘gods’ provided little or no hope for their future or light for their present.  They found themselves in a dark world, facing a dark future. 

A dark present, facing a dark future. Does this sound familiar? 

Why don’t we pause for a moment and consider who the ‘gods’ of our age are.  Let’s start with money.  How often are we tempted to say: ‘If I could just have more money, then I would be happy.  I need to earn more money to buy more stuff.  I need stuff to give meaning to my life.’

Jim Carey, the famous actor & comedian once said,

‘I wish that everyone could get rich and famous and have everything they ever dreamed of so that they would know that’s not the answer.’3

Or what about the gods of power and success?  “If I could reach that position or get that promotion, then my life would be good.” 

Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of the rock band Queen put it this way,

‘You can have everything in the world and still be the loneliest man.  And that’s the most bitter type of loneliness.  Success has brought me world idolization and millions of pounds, but it’s prevented me from having the one thing we all need.  A loving, ongoing relationship.’4

Hope, Love and Purpose

There are lots of ‘gods’ in the world, but only one God. 

The thing that sets Christianity apart from the ‘gods’ of Ephesus, or of our time, is that Jesus promises a future. Wealth is lost or dies with us. Power and success are fleeting. But we have the hope of a life which will not end in emptiness.  Paul said in his letter to the Thessalonians, ‘do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.’ 5

As Christians we don’t know all the details of what our future holds whether in this life or beyond. But do know for sure that we have a future and this makes it possible to live in the present well. 

This is because the Christian message doesn’t only tell us something about the world; it does  something in us.  When we receive Jesus’ hope, we live differently.  We are given new life and it begins as soon as we accept Jesus. 

Benedict tells the story of an African slave girl, Josephine Bakhita, who was born around 1869 in Sudan. 

She was kidnapped by slave traders at the age of 9, beaten till she bled and sold in slave markets.  She worked as a slave for the wife of a general who flogged her daily.  She bore 144 scars on her body.  Finally in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the Italian consul who took her back to Italy. 

After her master had taken her back to Italy, he made the mistake of leaving Josephine at a convent while he went back to Sudan to conduct more business. As she listened to the Nuns, she came to know a new kind of master, Jesus Christ.   She heard there was a master above all masters, the Lord of Lords and that he is goodness in person.  She came to know that she was known, created and loved by this supreme master.  What’s more this master had himself been flogged and now he was waiting for her at the Father’s right hand.  Now she had hope.  No longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope that she was definitively loved and whatever happens to her, she is awaited by this Love.  She said, ‘my life is so good.’ 

Through the knowledge of this hope she was redeemed, no longer a slave, but a free child of God.  She was baptised, and confirmed in Venice, fought for and won her freedom in an Italian court and spent the rest of her life telling others about this great master in whom she has found hope.

Christianity brought for Josephine Bakhita an encounter with the living God and therefore an encounter with a hope stronger that the sufferings of slavery, a hope which transformed her life from within and thus world around her.  Through baptism she was joined to the Church as a sister, not a slave.  She was filled with the same Spirit and received from the same body of Christ together with those who were her ‘masters’ in her working life.  Even though the circumstances around us may remain unchanged when we come to know Jesus, we are changed from within and, through us, others are changed too.

Many early Christians were from the lower social classes and so were very open to the experience of a new hope.  But so too were those from higher social classes.  They were all living without hope and without God.  The shallow state religion of Rome offered them lots of ceremonies, but Christianity offered them God to whom they could pray and enjoy a relationship with. 

A friend who grew up in a Muslim culture once said to me that it was the most precious thing to discover that she could pray to God for herself; that she could tell Him what was on her heart; that she could ask Him for what she needed and that to do so was not selfish or unholy, but rather that God desired this intimate relationship with her.  Sometimes if we have been Christians for a long time, we can forget the preciousness of this gift.  Jesus invites us into a personal relationship with God the Father.  That’s awesome. 

Knowing the God who made all things and whose Son loves us and is redeeming all things sets us free. We are not at the mercy of life, of its trials, of chance or the world around us. The future is not written in our stars but in the loving will of our Father.

Benedict puts it this way in Spe Salvi,

‘It is not the laws of matter which ultimately govern the world and mankind, but a personal God governs the universe.  It is not the laws of matter or evolution which have the final say, but a person.  And if we know this Person and he knows us, then truly we are no longer slaves of the universe and its laws, we are free.  Heaven is not empty.  Life is not a simple product of laws and the randomness of matter, but within everything and at the same time above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit who in Jesus revealed himself as Love.’

So our hope in Jesus sets us free. But it also changes how we face life and death.

Hope, Life and Death

When archaeologists dig up ancient Christian graves they find Jesus portrayed in two different ways on them.

The first shows Jesus as a philosopher; the second as a shepherd.

In the ancient world, the philosopher was someone who knew how to live and how to die.  They would teach this art to anyone who could pay them for it. Many so-called philosophers were found to just be charlatans making money through their words who had nothing to say about real life. 

I don’t know about you, but this rings true for a lot of ‘philosophies’ about life that are circling around today. 

How often are we told to ‘Be true to yourself’ and anything less is a fake life?  Or that we need to break free of the traditions that enslave us, follow our own path and think your own thoughts.  This philosophy is everywhere from social media to Disney movies.  But does it help us to live authentically as a human?  Can I really have my ‘own’ truth rather than there being something external which is objectively true?   I don’t know about you, but I find it terrifying to think I am supposed to find ‘the truth’ within myself.  I am fairly sure there is a lot of rubbish deep inside of me and it is a huge comfort to know that I am not the source of truth, but that that is to be found in another, far greater than me.

But when we come to Jesus we find the true philosopher. He is one who can tell us who we are and what we must do to be truly human.  He shows us, in his own words, the way, the truth and the life.  He also shows us the path beyond death.  And only someone who is able to do this can be a true teacher of life. 

The second image was that of a shepherd.

This is most beautifully described in Psalm 23.  The true shepherd is the one who knows even the path that passes through the valley of death, the one who walks with me even on the path of final solitude where no one else can follow.  He has already walked this path, descended to death, conquered it and has returned to accompany us on that same journey and give us the certainty that, together with him, we can find a way through.

The realisation that there is one who even in death accompanies me was the new hope which arose over the life of the early church. It is what the world still desperately needs to hear today. 

Life is hard, suffering happens, death is real and we all need hope to sustain us. 

Hope and Eternity

Hebrews 10:34 the writer notes the counter-intuitive freedom of a group of persecuted early Christians,

‘You suffered along with those in prison and joyfully accepted the confiscation of your property, because you knew that you yourselves had better and lasting possessions.’

As Christians, we can give up material possessions, gladly, because we have found a better basis for our existence, one that does not depend on money or power or status.  We have a real hope.

This enables Christians to live for eternity, not for the here and now.

Because we hope for eternal life, we can give generously, even recklessly, for the sake of the gospel and in order to bring others to faith. 

If I told my non-Christians friends how much money I have given away, they would thing I was absolutely bonkers.  At the time we gave up our flourishing careers as barristers to come and work for the church they thought we were mad enough.  I don’t have a lot of money, but I feel compelled to give it away whenever I can anyway.  And do you know what?  That is incredibly freeing.  When you stop believing that earning money and getting a promotion is the goal of life and that serving Jesus is instead, it turns out he takes care of you anyway. 

Lots of you know our story.  God has provided houses, school places, ballet classes, music lessons, holidays, pushchairs and much for us when we could not afford them.  Some through miraculous gifts in the post and some through the generosity of others as God has moved their hearts.  The future has broken into the present.

But what does that future look like?  Do we really want to live for eternity?  If eternity looked like this life carrying on forever, many of us would say, no thanks, 70 odd years is enough for me!

So if on the one hand we don’t want to die, and those who love us don’t want us to die, and on the other hand neither do we want to live like this indefinitely, what do we really want? 

St Paul says that ‘We do not know what we ought to pray for’ we just know that it is not this life.6 

This eternity is not an unending number of days on a calendar, but rather it is like plunging into the ocean of love, a moment in which time no longer exists.  Jesus says it like this, ‘I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.’ 7

Or again,

‘Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.’ 8

And again, ‘Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.’9 

On and on and on and on it goes: Eternal life, our only ultimate hope, is centred on a relationship with One who does not die, who is life and love itself.  We are in him. 

Whenever we are moved by his love, we experience true life.

Every day we experience many greater or lesser hopes.  Sometimes they can appear totally satisfying – the hope of a great love, a new job or other success.  But when they are fulfilled it becomes clear that they were not the whole.  We need a hope which goes further. 

Only God can give us this hope.  And the very fact that it comes as a gift is part of the hope.  God is the foundation of hope.  Not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety.  His kingdom is not some imaginary hereafter that will never arrive, but it is present wherever he is loved and whenever his love reaches us.  His love alone gives us the possibility of persevering day by day, spurred on by hope in a world which by its very nature is imperfect.

This is hope and we all need it.

What Does It Mean?

So are these just pious thoughts or do they have a practical consequence for the way we live now? How can we know this hope in a way that is personally and socially transformative? 

Firstly, if you are currently living without hope, come and know Jesus.  Put your trust in him and get baptised.

He is our hope.  He shows us the path through life and beyond it to eternity with God in heaven.  He enables us to bear the present and to taste life now.

For those who are already walking this path, thought, I think we can grow in hope in three ways.

  1. Prayer – when no-one listens to me anymore, God still listens to me.  When I can no longer talk to anyone or call upon anyone, I can always talk to God.  When there is no longer anyone to help me deal with a need or expectation that goes beyond the human capacity for hope, he can help me.  Benedict puts it beautifully: when I have been plunged into complete solitude, if I pray I am never totally alone.

In his sermon on First John, Saint Augustine describes beautifully the intimate relationship between prayer and hope.  He defines prayer as an exercise of desire.  Human beings were created for greatness – for God himself; we were created to be filled by God.  But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined.  It must be stretched.  By delaying his gift, God strengthens our desire; through desire he enlarges our soul and by expanding it he increases our capacity for receiving him.10 

If you are barely hanging on to hope, pray.  Pray anyway, but especially in the darkness of life, pray.  Through prayer we draw near to God and he to us and he strengthens our grasp on his great hope.

  • Action – We cannot earn heaven through by what we do, it is a gift. But at the same time, our behaviour is not indifferent before God and the infolding of history.  What we do does matter.  We can open ourselves to truth, to love and to what is good. We are called to be ‘God’s co-workers,’ contributing to the world’s salvation.11 

We must do all we can to reduce human suffering when we see it in our everyday lives. 
It is not within our power to banish pain and suffering from the world altogether. But through Jesus, hope for the world’s healing has entered the world.  We are healed by accepting suffering, maturing through it and finding meaning through union with Christ who suffered with infinite love. 
Each of us can live out this when we see those in pain in our families, in our schools, or our work places. 

Where is God calling you to partner with him in reaching out to a suffering world?  Who needs to know the hope which you have found in Jesus?  How can you demonstrate his love to others today?

  • Words – As Christians we should never limit ourselves to asking, how can I be saved? We are given hope in order to share it with others. When we see those in pain or suffering, we should pray for them, we should comfort them. But then we need to share our hope with them. When all else has passed, that is what they ultimately need. That can be as simple as offering to pray with them, sharing our stories of hope with them or inviting them to Church with us.

To have faith in Jesus is to have hope. This hope sets us free to know love and purpose, to live and to die, and to look to eternity.

  1. Hebrews 11:1 ↩︎
  2. Rom 8:24 ↩︎
  3. 2005 December 16, The Ottawa Citizen, Carrey’s been busted, Continuation title: Carrey—Being rich not the answer by Jay Stone, Start Page F1, Quote Page F2, Column 2, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. (Newspapers_com) ↩︎
  4. https://queenarchives.com/qa/ ↩︎
  5. 1 Thes 4:13 ↩︎
  6. Rom 8:26 ↩︎
  7. John 16:22 ↩︎
  8. John 17:3 ↩︎
  9. John 13:1 ↩︎
  10. In 1 Ioannis 4, 6: PL 35, 2008f ↩︎
  11. 1 Cor 3:9 ↩︎

God is Love

God is love. He gives love to us. We give it away to others. 
A guest post from the inestimable Heather Fellows.

Here’s a guest post from the inestimable Heather Fellows.

God is love.  He gives love to us.  We give it away to others.   

I want to share some of the ideas I was meditating on when I went away on my retreat a few weeks ago. I have drawn particularly on Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, God is Love. You can find a copy for free online if you want to read it.

Introduction

Christianity has been transforming societies across the world for the past 2,000 years. The positive impact of the Church cannot be overstated: guided by the teachings of Jesus, Christianity has touched virtually every part of life. Over the centuries, the Church has founded schools, hospitals and orphanages. Christians have campaigned for prison reform, better housing and an end to the slave trade; they have helped to establish a huge number of charities to support the poor, the underprivileged, prisoners and their families, the homeless and those seeking justice. Churches run marriage courses, thousands of parent-and-toddler groups and provide support for the bereaved. The people of this church make sacrifices day in and day out for the good of others. 

Research in the UK in 2015 for the Cinnamon Network calculated that the time given by churches and faith groups to their communities through social action was worth more than £3bn a year.[1]  I imagine that figure is much higher now, if only through inflation.

And that is staggering, isn’t it?  So, what has, and what continues to motivate the Church to reach out in these kinds of ways day after day, century after century? 

Love. 

Love is at the heart of it all.  Jesus says that God is, Himself, love.  He defines what love is.  And Jesus ultimately demonstrated what this love looks like by laying down his life for us on the cross. 

Today I want to spend a little time dwelling on the love of God.  What does it mean to us and for us? And what is its impact upon us?

I’m not going to quote long bits of the Bible here. But if you want to dig into where this comes from, you can look at 1 John 4: 7-16 and Mark 12: 28-31.

God is Love

When looking at the subject of love, we must begin with God himself.  Only after that can we begin to think about what love means for us. 

What does it mean to say that God loves us?

We love, John tells us, because God first loved us.  God is the source of love.

We all need to be loved.  We know that if a child is deprived of love when they are an infant, it has huge implications for their life.  It leads to attachment problems, anxiety, insecurity and many other things. 

So perhaps it should come as no surprise to us that the Bible and especially the New Testament, is laced with references to love.  We need it like we need air to breath and water to drink and food to eat.  And so God, in his great mercy, came down to earth, to meet our greatest need. 

This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 

Our sin separated us from God and this was a big problem.  From that point on mankind has been restless.

I think we can sense that in the world around us, can’t we?  People are always seeking and searching for something and yet there is a sense that it is always slightly out of reach.  And God’s answer to the problem is love. 

Love looks like God himself taking the form of a man and coming to the earth to live and die in our place, bearing the weight of our sin upon his shoulders and paying the price we can never pay, so that we might be united in love with him.

God loves man with a personal, elective love.  He chooses Israel and loves her, but precisely with a view to healing the whole human race.  God gives her the Torah, the Law, opening Israel’s eyes to man’s true nature, his sin, and showing her the path leading to true life.  And man, through a life of fidelity to the one God, comes to experience himself loved by God, and discovers joy and truth and righteousness – a joy in God that becomes his essential happiness:

“Who do I have in heaven but you?  And there is nothing upon earth that I desire besides you…for me it is good to be near God” (Psalm 73).  

How beautifully the Psalmist captures the heart of one who has come to know something of the depths of God’s love.  There is nothing that matters more.

Our society is obsessed with love, but there is something distinct, something unique about God’s love.  If you know your Greek, you might know that the most commonly used word for love in the New Testament is agape.  This is the kind of love demonstrated by Jesus.  It is a kind of love whose concern is not primarily for oneself, but for the other.  The kind of love we often seek is more of an eros love.  This kind of love is a desperate, and hungry longing that desires to be filled for its own sake.  It says, I need something and you can give it to me.  But what God does is to intervene in man’s search for love in order to purify and perfect it.  He unites our eros desire with his agape selfless love and creates something beautiful and powerful. 

Jesus sums this up so well in Luke 17:33 when he said, “Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it.”  The essence of love and life itself is found in giving it away, just as Jesus himself so perfectly modelled.

But as well as there being a hunger in each of us to be loved, so too God loves.  God’s own eros desire for man, his passionate love for us, is also totally agape, totally self-giving.  God’s love is unmerited, we have done nothing to deserve it, in fact we rather deserve death for turning our backs on our Creator.  But God loves us with a passionate and forgiving love.  So great is God’s love for man that by becoming man he follows man even into death, and so reconciles justice and love.  The Song of Songs describes God’s relationship with man and man’s relationship to God.  It is a love poem and pretty erotic in places:

I belong to my beloved, and his desire is for me: (Song 7:10)

The essence of biblical faith is that man can indeed come into union with God.  Our search for peace has a true destination. 

In Jesus we see that it is God himself who goes in search of the lost sheep – the lover in search of his beloved, culminating in his death on the cross – giving himself in order to save man – love in its most radical form. 

When we take Communion we remember that Jesus has given his body and blood as the new food from heaven. 

Before Jesus, the Jews understood that God’s Word was man’s real food – the Old Testament says that man cannot live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.  But this same ‘Word’, the word become flesh as John puts it, now truly becomes food for us as love in the person of Jesus. 

When we take Communion, we enter into the very dynamic of Jesus’s self-giving.    And in taking this meal in communion with each otherwe remember that union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself.  I cannot possess Jesus just for myself.  We become one body with Christ, together.  And so we see how the love of God and the love of our neighbour are now truly united.  Communion includes the reality of both being loved and loving others in return. 

But this love doesn’t stop there.  As we accept and receive it, as we receive Jesus into our lives, God’s love is poured into us, saturating our hearts and minds and transforming us from the inside out into the very likeness of Christ.  God’s love fuels and enables our Christian life.

In Romans 5:5 it says: “… God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”

It’s the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise in John 7: 37: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”   If we want our lives to be characterised by love, then we need Gods love first. 

There is one God who is the source of all that exists, and we need to come and drink from him if we are to know love and life as he intended. 

Jesus himself tells us that the focus of our lives should be love.  When Jesus is asked which is the most important commandment, he answers by uniting into a single precept the commandments to love God and love your neighbour.  The two are intertwined.  And this echoes the passage we read in 1 John; we cannot truly love others, without first experiencing the love of the Father.   It is a response to the gift of love with which God has drawn near to us. 

That same love which prompted Jesus to lay down his life for us, God’s love, has been given to us if we have received Jesus into our lives. 

And so as we have considered something of the nature of God’s love for us, we must now look at what it means for us.  Because the very nature of God’s love is that it was designed to be given away, to impact the ones to whom it was given, to impact us. 

And how does his love impact our lives? 

We know from the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan told by Jesus that our neighbour is everyone and anyone.   Love for others should absolutely characterise the church family and it is the place where no-one should go without.  But loving our neighbour is a much wider calling.  It is a call to love everyone we meet. 

And Jesus had a particular heart for the poor and the least in society. This is what he said in Matthew 25:31-36:

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Jesus identifies himself with the least. 

The love of God and love of others are inextricably bound together. He is the stranger, the prisoner, the who is hungry and naked. 

Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. (Matt. 25:40)

In the least in society, Jesus tells us, we will find him.  And we know that in Jesus we find God. 

God is, of course, everywhere and we all bear his image, but Jesus says when we show love to the least, we are especially loving him.   God’s love is taking a hold in our hearts, we are beginning to love with a God-like love in response to his love for us.  And in doing so our own appreciation of God’s love for us grows.

When Gods radical, self-giving love is poured into our hearts, something happens.  If you are a Christian here today, perhaps you can identify with this.  As we receive God’s love, we find ourselves feeling a love for others that we cannot explain and didn’t previously experience.  Sure, was a nice enough person before I was a Christian and I was, mostly, hopefully, kind to my friends and polite to people I met.   But God’s love goes far beyond niceties.  God’s love extends to the poor and the stranger and the outcast. 

Putting Love Into Action

First, let’s ask God to help each of us to know more deeply and fully his love for us. 

Why not spend some time this week chewing over some of the verses we have looked at today? 

God loves you so much.  His desire is for you.  Do you know that?  If you aren’t a Christian, perhaps you are hearing this for this first time.  Perhaps this speaks to you and there is a deep desire in your heart to be loved.  Then God’s word to you today is this ‘I love you so much that I gave my only son for you, so that by believing in me you might not perish but have eternal life.’  Come to me, he says. 

And second, if you have received Jesus into your life, then do you know that his transforming love has been poured into your heart by the Holy Spirit?  Perhaps you have experienced hurt and your heart has grown a little cold.  Ask God to reveal his love afresh to you today, invite him to pour his love afresh on you, to warm your heart. 

Finally, Jesus’ s love for us was never meant to be kept to ourselves, but to be given away.  In fact it only truly finds completeness as it is given away.  Why not ask God to open our eyes to the people around us to know how we can love them today?

Who are your neighbours?  Who is at the school gates or in the office?  Where are the poor near you?  I once prayed a prayer asking God to show me the poor in Hersham and he did just that, which is another story.  It was a ‘take me deeper than my feet could ever wander moment’.  It’s a powerful prayer to pray.  But in seeking to love others, God has moved powerfully in my own heart too.

Who needs to know God’s love this week?  We could do worse than just ask that question each day. 

With all those we encounter in everyday life, we are called to reflect God’s love by seeking to see them as Jesus does, attending to their practical needs, but also keeping in need their deepest need of all, for Jesus himself.

God is love.  He gives love to us.  We give it away to others.  

[1] Cinnamon Faith Action Audit, May 2015, p.4; Louise Ridley, ‘Could The Staggering £3bn Social Contribution Of Religious Groups Be The Antidote To Austerity Cuts?’, HuffPost, 20 May 2015 <https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/05/20/church-groups-community-social-contribution-tories_n_7321288.html> [Accessed 17 May 2024]

Do We Still Need Pastors and Priests?

Faith, and the pastors and priests who embody it, not only remain relevant, in our current age they are essential.

Do we still need pastors and priests? Or has our society progressed made such people and posts irrelevant or actively harmful. It’s a question I think about a lot both as a pastor/priest myself and as I watch many of my colleagues struggling with a crisis of calling or identity, scrabbling for relevance to other disciplines or professionals.

To this question, Joseph Ratzinger gives a rallying cry: faith, and the pastors and priests who embody it, not only remain relevant, in our current age they are essential.

The shadows are becoming longer, the loneliness— more profound, and the question of those who remain— more difficult: What sort of a future do they face? Does it still make sense to become a priest in a world in which only technological and social progress matters now? Does faith have a future? Is it worthwhile to stake one’s whole life on this card? Is priesthood not an outdated relic from the past that no one needs anymore, whereas all our efforts should be applied to eradicating poverty and furthering progress?

But is all that really the case? Or is mankind, by running the machine of progress faster and faster, not at the same time rushing into suicidal insanity? The famous French aviator Antoine de Saint- Exupéry once wrote in a letter to a general: “There is only one problem in the world. How can we restore to man a spiritual significance, a spiritual discontent; let something descend upon them like the dew of a Gregorian chant. Don’t you see, we cannot live any longer on refrigerators, politics, balance sheets, and crossword puzzles. We just cannot.” And in his book The Little Prince, he says: How uncomprehending the world of adults, of clever people is. By now we understand only machines, geography, and politics. But the really important things, the light, the clouds, heaven and its stars, we no longer understand. And the great Russian author Solzhenitsyn records the cry of distress of a Communist who landed in Stalin’s prisons: We could use cathedrals in Russia again and men whose pure life makes these cathedrals alive and turns them into a space for the soul. Indeed, man does not live by refrigerators and balance sheets alone. The more he tries to do that, the more desperate he becomes, the emptier his life is. We need even today, and today more than ever, people who do not sell luxury items and do not make political propaganda but, rather, ask about the soul of a man and help him not to lose his soul in the tumult of everyday routine. The scarcer priests become in the world of business and politics, the more we need them.

Joseph Ratzinger, Teaching and Learning the Love of God, p.207-8

How does prophetic evangelism work?

Prophetic evangelism might be easier than you think. It requires listening, responding, and risk-taking.

One of the amazing things about being a Christian, and particularly belonging to the charismatic part of the Church is the belief not only that God sees and guides our lives generally but that he can lead and speak through us as we counsel, support and share his love with others.

We see this in the New Testament both in Jesus’s life and ministry and in the book of Acts. One obvious example is Jesus speaking with the Samaritan woman in John 4. Here the Lord receives insight into the woman’s circumstances and history in a way that shows her that God sees her and knows her. A slightly different type of encounter is recorded in Acts 8. Here Philip is in a place he’s not used to when he feels God’s Spirit provoking him to go to a particular chariot. When he gets there he doesn’t have great insight of supernatural guidance, rather he just shows an interest in the individual he finds there. The prophetic element was in putting him in that place to begin with. Finally, there is the story in Acts 9 of Ananias and Saul. In this story Saul is in bad need of prayer and baptism, of someone to make sense of the profound experience he has held of Jesus but which no one else knows about. Here the prophetic call comes when Ananias hears the Spirit telling him to go and pray with Saul in Jesus’ name for him to receive the Spirit.

These stories can feel a million miles away from our personal experiences. Even for those of us who enthusiastically affirm that the Holy Spirit is at work in and through his Church in much the same way now as he was then, it is hard to translate them into practice. In the rest of this post I am going to suggest a couple of principles we find in these stories which help us to start to experience prophetic leading in our evangelism and pastoral care. Then I will share a couple of stories of how this has worked out in my own (admittedly meagre) experiences.

Principles at Work

Each of these stories has, I think, three things in common that are simultaneously easy and hard for us to imitate.

  1. They all happen to people who are listening to God whether they are talking to someone (Jesus) or in a strange place (Philip).
    In turn this implies that they are paying attention to the impression they feel in their spirit. The voice of God rarely comes in an audible way. More often it is a strong impression that we should do or say something, combined with an awareness that it might not come from ourselves.
    This comes with practice and time spent in worship and prayer. It also means taking off headphones, sitting and being present to God and to the place we are in.
  2. They all involve being willing to take a risk in response.
    It’s great to hear what God might be saying. Then we have to take a risk and do something about it.
    The risk is usually that we will go up to someone and they won’t be interested. Or that we will fail to see any benefit. Or that we will be embarrassed. Or that we will waste our time.
    All of these things will happen sometimes. But unless we are willing to risk them, we won’t ever see the prophetic at work.
  3. They are all focussed on making Jesus’s love present in the moment.
    Prophetic evangelism (or pastoral care, for that matter) is never focused on ‘wowing’ someone or looking good. It isn’t a demonstration of power or ability. Rather it is the precursor to going into a situation in order to minister the love of Christ to someone. 

A Practical Example

So how does this work out in practice? Here’s a very limited and broken example.

Last week my wife and I were in a coffee shop talking about various bits of church admin. At the same time I was looking around and, as I often do, quietly asking Jesus what he was saying.

A lady walked in wearing a traffic warden’s uniform. As we carried on talking, I couldn’t get her out of my mind. Over and over again, the thought came to me that her job was horrible and I should offer to buy her a coffee. 

That’s the listening phase.

After a while of this (about 2 minutes), I got up and went over to the lady as she decided what to order. I said ‘excuse me’ and interrupted her. I asked if she was a traffic warden. She said she was. I explained that I’m a priest (that’s the language I find most people understand better than Elder or Pastor) and that I had been praying for her. I asked if I could buy her coffee for her because her job could be horrible.

She looked surprised and touched. The barista, to be honest, looked completely confused. I paid for the coffee and went and sat down.

That’s the risk-taking phase and love phases. She could have said ‘no’ and I would have felt embarrassed, especially as I was trying to do it in Jesus’ name. But equally if I succeeded, at very least she would have a coffee and know that there were people praying for her and that Jesus is kind.

Then, the twist. This is where the prophetic bit comes in.

After getting her coffee she came back over to the table where my wife and I were sitting. She was emotional and explained that she had been at Alpha in another village the previous night. She was finding life really hard but knew that Someone was holding her and caring for her.

I offered to pray for her and her daughter. She was very glad to accept.

I had no idea about any of this. But God did. He saw her, loved her, and showed her his care at a time when she was seeking him.

Prophetic evangelism might be easier than you think. It requires listening, responding, and risk-taking.

How Does God Love the World?

This is how God loved the world, he gave his only Son that whoever puts their trust in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Love is a big deal for Christians. It’s because of the centrality of love to Christianity that it appears so prominently in our culture. We all love to love.

But as soon as we say this, it begs the question: how? How does God love the world? What does ‘love’ mean in that context? In culture, ‘love’ is often a synonym for sex. Yet at the same time grown men will say they ‘love’ their football teams.

When Scripture talks about God loving the world it has something very powerful and particular in mind. It isn’t something that can adequately be summed up in words – it has to be shown rather than told.

The best I can do is to say that love consists in choosing to give oneself completely for the good of another. Thus, in John 3:16 we read that, God loves the world by giving his only Son that whoever puts their trust in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

That’s an idea that is quite easy to repeat. It is sufficiently well known that the wrestler, Stone Cold Steve Austin, used to parody the endless references to it on signs at Wrestlemania with his own version: Austin 3:16.

The rest of this post is trying to explain what these verses actually mean and why they matter.

I’m not going to quote John 3 here. But the rest of this post will make a lot more sense if you have read it.

  1. What’s Going On Here?

Our scene opens at night. That is significant. It is dark. As you read John’s gospel you will notice that he often mentions light and darkness as symbols of a spiritual or mental awakening. For example, we are told in John 1 that Jesus is the light that shines in the darkness.

So we are on the alert for someone who does not understand – who is, so to speak, “in the dark” and to whom Jesus is going to bring light.

Into the scene comes Nicodemus. Nicodemus is a very senior leader and religious teacher in Israel. He is part of the council that runs Jewish religious life and is a brilliant man.

I find this story so poignant.

Here is someone who is faithful, who is clever, who has worked hard and achieved an enormous amount. But even with all of that he knows he needs Jesus. He has seen something in Christ that goes beyond all the power and all the prestige and all the wisdom he has acquired. And he knows he needs it.

Whether you are the Teacher of Israel or a street Prostitute, eventually you have to come to Jesus and ask for help.

I love Nicodemus. I love his humility. I love the way a supreme official in the religious hierarchy has come to sit down with a provincial street preacher in order to ask him about the Kingdom of God. He reminds me of the best of brilliant people.

Nicodemus comes to Jesus and asks him about what Jesus is doing. He and his colleagues have seen Jesus at work and they get there is something going on here. But they don’t quite grasp its implications.

Maybe that is how you feel about church or Christianity. There is something you have seen that you recognise as good. It might be a feeling you get in worship, a peace that comes when you pray or hike, or a deep hunger you can’t quite understand (like an itch you can’t reach) but which seems to be satisfied when you listen to the Bible. 

If that resonates with you then you are the type of person Jesus is speaking to in this conversation.

  1. Why Jesus Came

Jesus tries two ways of explaining this to Nicodemus. 

First, he says, getting into God’s kingdom is like having a fresh start, almost going right back to the beginning, like you are born for a second time. But instead of this being a physical birth, it comes from two things: God’s Spirit moving on you and you being baptised; from Spirit and water.

Nicodemus doesn’t get that metaphor. So Jesus reaches for something he is very familiar with – the Old Testament.

There is a story of the people of Israel in the desert after God had set them free from Egypt and before they had entered the land they would call home. They were bitter and angry and complained about God, about being set free, about the food they had and the lives they lived. They began to reject God as provider and leader and look back towards the slavery of Egypt.

And so God allowed an invasion of snakes to come into their camp. They were biting the people and causing pain, even death. The people were sick. 

God provided a way out for them. He commanded Moses to make a bronze snake and put it on a pole. Moses lifted it in the air. Whoever looked up to the bronze snake was healed from the effect of the snake bites.  It was as if the bronze snake had taken all the effects of the snake bites into itself and the people could be healed.

This is what the kingdom of God is like, Jesus says. In fact this incident was put there in the Old Testament so people like Nicodemus could recognise this moment when it came and know what they should do about it. 

Human beings are sick and they are dying. They are dying from the inside out – spiritually killed by the decision to reject God and to turn inward to selfishness and pride. This is what we call sin – the human propensity to mess things up, particularly our relationship with God and each other.

And so Jesus has come, and would be lifted up on a cross and die, punished as a sinner, taking all the world’s sin on himself and offering healing to everyone who would look to him.

Notice three things about this description:

  1. The people aren’t condemned by Jesus.
    They are sick already. It is their choices, our choices, which kill us. That is why Jesus didn’t come into the world to condemn the world but to save it. The world is already dying. Naturally we are already dying, mortally wounded by a thousand rebellions, petty hurts, treasured prides and self-centredness. 
  2. It is God who takes the first step to redeem us.
    Jesus came to us, we didn’t go to him. The point about the bronze snake is that God (through Moses) gave it to the people so that they could be healed. This is what we call grace – the free gift of healing and forgiveness and a future. It isn’t earned, like exchanging a day’s labour for a fair wage. It is given, like receiving medicine.
  3. It has to be accepted and trusted.
    The gift has to be received. It has to be trusted. The people had to look up, away from themselves, away from the snakes, away from their staffs and solutions, and trust the provision God made.
    This is what we call faith. To paraphrase St Thomas Aquinas, it is the response of trust to the testimony of someone we believe. The way Jesus (and the Church after him) teaches we should exercise this trust is by turning away from ourselves and being baptised; be born of Spirit and water.
  1. Why Do We Choose (or Not Choose) the Light?

The conversation finishes with John (or possibly Jesus – the Greek is unclear) explaining how people react to this. 

We can react in one of three ways.

  1. We can hold on to our sin because of shame (misunderstanding what the light is there to do – he came to save, not condemn).
  2. We can refuse the light because we actually prefer our sin. This gets worse the more we choose darkness. When we refuse the light, it gets harder to choose it next time. 
  3. We can choose to say yes to the light and find it brings healing. This has the opposite effect- we find the light is pleasant and good and so the more we choose it, the easier and more desirable it is to choose it again.

Application

What does this mean for us?

  • The first response is for those who haven’t yet trusted themselves to Jesus. Maybe you’re one of those, like Nicodemus, who senses there is something good, vital, even divine about what Jesus says and does. God’s word to you is that he loves you and came for you.
    But you need to know that the yearning you feel is a symptom. It’s like a hungry body’s craving for food, a thirsty man’s need for water. Your soul is sick and it craves the cure.
    Put your trust in Jesus, be baptised, and you will receive a new start and a new life.
  • What about showing hope to others? Here we need to remember that Jesus came to a world that hadn’t asked for him but needed him. He came in love, to bring help and healing to people who had rejected him.
    Ask God to show you who needs your help. And then give it. That is the way of God.
  • Finally, what about sharing hope? Learn from the way Jesus deals with Nicodemus. He listens to him, knows him, and talks to him in a way he can understand. The first step to sharing Jesus effectively with others is to listen to them.

How Can We Understand the Bible?

For many people, reading the Bible can be hard. This is a quick guide to how we can understand it’s deep meaning and know God better.

For many people, reading the Bible can be hard. There are bits that seem easy to follow (like when Jesus teaches people), that seem irrelevant (tell me again about eating shellfish in the desert), that are obviously picture language or poetry (the trees in the fields don’t literally clap their hands), and that just seem weird (all of Revelation). 

Then there is the way Biblical authors use other bits of the Bible. For example, John the Baptist looks at Jesus and describes him as “the lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29), St Paul writes about the stories of Israel finding water in a rock only to say “the Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4). It is perfectly reasonable to ask: what on earth is going on?

The church has always believed that the Bible is a book that operates on a number of levels. I recently came across this summary of how this works in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraphs 109-118). It really helped me to categorise the different ways we engage with Scripture. I’ve reproduced it below (with some of my explanation at the end of each section) in case it helps you too.

First, read what the authors meant:

109 In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm, and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words.

110 In order to discover the sacred authors’ intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current. “For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression.”

This means that we can’t always simply read the text literalistically. Instead we need to work out what the original author meant and how his readers would have understood his words.

We do this all the time in English. If I said “it’s raining cats-and-dogs outside”, you get an umbrella. You don’t call the RSPCA. You know that in English that is an idiom or metaphor, not literal. And it would be completely inappropriate to treat it like it was.

Sometimes it’s appropriate to read the Bible like a history book (for example when dealing with the Gospels or biographies). Sometimes it’s obviously not (for example when dealing with the poetry in the Psalms). Sometimes it’s complicated because the Bible uses types of books that we aren’t familiar with (like collections of Proverbs or Paleo-History).

Things that can help with this are Pastors and good Bible commentaries.

Second, read Scripture as a whole, assuming that it is coherent and bearing in mind that Jesus is the point of it all:

112 Be especially attentive “to the content and unity of the whole Scripture”. Different as the books which compose it may be, Scripture is a unity by reason of the unity of God’s plan, of which Christ Jesus is the center and heart, open since his Passover.

The phrase “heart of Christ” can refer to Sacred Scripture, which makes known his heart, closed before the Passion, as the Scripture was obscure. But the Scripture has been opened since the Passion; since those who from then on have understood it, consider and discern in what way the prophecies must be interpreted.

This means that as Christians we believe that the Bible has lots of human authors (all writing in their own personalities and using their own styles) but one divine mind behind it. To put it another way, Scripture is loads of books but together they tell one story. And that story is ultimately about Jesus.

This means when you take two texts that seem hard to reconcile or contradict one another, they can almost certainly be read as complementing each other or as talking about different things. If you find something that troubles you in this way talk to a Pastor (or read a good commentary).

Third, read with the Church:

113 2. Read the Scripture within “the living Tradition of the whole Church”. According to a saying of the Fathers, Sacred Scripture is written principally in the Church’s heart rather than in documents and records, for the Church carries in her Tradition the living memorial of God’s Word, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives her the spiritual interpretation of the Scripture (“. . . according to the spiritual meaning which the Spirit grants to the Church”).

114 3. Be attentive to the analogy of faith. By “analogy of faith” we mean the coherence of the truths of faith among themselves and within the whole plan of Revelation.

The Bible is a book that is meant to be read in community. Jesus promises that as we live together as the Church, we are guided by his Spirit and learn how to read the Bible correctly (eg John 15:26). This goes for the Church in the world now but also throughout time. We want to hear how the Spirit has directed us to read Scripture, and that means reading it in the community of the Church. It also means that sometimes we have to have the humility to accept that we may have misunderstood something from Scripture and to be corrected.

Four, pay attention to the different senses of Scripture:

115 According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. the profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.

116 The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: “All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal.”83

117 The spiritual sense. Thanks to the unity of God’s plan, not only the text of Scripture but also the realities and events about which it speaks can be signs.
1. the allegorical sense. We can acquire a more profound understanding of events by recognizing their significance in Christ; thus the crossing of the Red Sea is a sign or type of Christ’s victory and also of Christian Baptism.
2. the moral sense. the events reported in Scripture ought to lead us to act justly. As St. Paul says, they were written “for our instruction”.
3. the anagogical sense (Greek: anagoge, “leading”). We can view realities and events in terms of their eternal significance, leading us toward our true homeland: thus the Church on earth is a sign of the heavenly Jerusalem.

118 A medieval couplet summarizes the significance of the four senses:

The Letter speaks of deeds; Allegory to faith;
The Moral how to act; Anagogy our destiny.

This is the hardest bit for us to grasp but it makes sense of how the apostles and other Biblical writers used Scripture and unlocks a lot of what God is wanting to tell us through it.

Put simply, there are four ways that we can interpret different bits of the Bible. They aren’t contradictory – they are like levels of meaning (kind of like a Russian doll). They are:

  1. The “Letter” or “Literal” sense.
    This doesn’t mean taking everything literally. It means asking what a passage would have meant to the original readers. This is what we talked about above. It means reading bits of the Bible according to the type of book they are (poetry, history etc). It is the basic question: what is the writer trying to say here. For a lot of modern Bible scholars, this is as far as they go (which is a shame and means we miss a lot of meaning that the ancient church understood).
  2. The “allegorical” sense.
    This means way that the bits of the Bible we are reading teach us lessons about Jesus even when he doesn’t explicitly appear. This is what John the Baptist is doing when he describes Jesus as the “Lamb of God” or what St Paul is doing when he describes a Rock from the Old Testament as being about Jesus. It realises that when God inspired the Bible he was always pointing us to Jesus, even when the original authors didn’t realise it. So, for example, the story of the creation of Adam and Eve is designed to teach us about Jesus and the church (see Ephesians 5:31-32). Another word for this is Typology.
  3. The Moral sense.
    This is obvious. Bits of the Bible are designed to teach us how to behave. When it says “don’t steal”, you don’t need to reach for a commentary (particularly if the commentary isn’t yours). Other narratives can also teach moral lessons. So, for example, the story of Cain and Abel can teach valuable moral lessons about the danger of anger, jealousy and the destructive consequences of violence.
  4. The “anagogical” or “mystical” sense.
    Stories we find in Scripture can ultimately teach us something important about our eternal destiny in Jesus. So, for example, the story of God bringing Israel out of slavery in Egypt, through a time of trials and testing in the desert, over a river (literally through something that kills people) and into a promised land is a picture of the way God rescues souls, leads them through life and brings them through death to heaven.

You don’t need to be an expert at spotting all these levels of meaning in Scripture right away. One of the good things about being part of a Church is that many men and women have spent their lives meditating on Scripture and explaining to us what they saw so that we can see it too. It’s also part of why God gives the church teachers – so that we can grow in understanding him and his word to us.

Suffering, Joy and Evangelism

The Gospel can be proclaimed credibly only by someone who, on the one hand, has suffered, who has not evaded reality, the difficult reality of this world, and has stood fast in his faith in the love that is stronger than suffering.

Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) is one of my favorite writers. Almost everything he produced is gold: joyful, wise and saturated in Jesus. Here he is on great form, preaching about suffering, joy and Christian evangelism:

“When a person receives a great love, when he is privileged to know that he is loved by someone who is good and powerful and absolutely reliable, then this is no guarantee that something terrible will not happen to him, too, and remain terrible. Nevertheless, it will not be able to destroy him, because there is something in him that all these terrors cannot touch: a light and a strength that are stronger than all that. The Christian, though, is such a person; for to him is granted the gift that he is loved by God, who is absolutely kind and powerful, whose love does not depend on any moods and whose fidelity never wavers. And therefore resignation, joylessness, sullenness, humourlessness, and cynicism do not suit one who is Christian… Joylessness in this most profound sense is the repudiation of the faith, the repudiation of the God whose Yes is still the foundation of our life, whatever may happen. “Rejoice” therefore means: be believers, immersed in the certainty of what the Gospel has proclaimed to us: God loves with a love that is not fickle…

But someone who is resigned or embittered himself cannot be a bearer of Good News. The Gospel can be proclaimed credibly only by someone who, on the one hand, has suffered, who has not evaded reality, the difficult reality of this world, and has stood fast in his faith in the love that is stronger than suffering. Only someone who is an evangelist in this way can hand on the joy that we need, which is not a surrogate, a brief anesthesia, but withstands the truth of this world.”

Teaching and Learning the Love of God, p.139-140

How to Be People of Influence and Purpose

Do you want to live a life of influence and purpose? Jesus wants that for you too.
Jesus wants you to live a life of influence and purpose by learning to pray, to talk and to listen.

One of the issues that comes up most often in my pastoral work, particularly as I and my peers hit middle-age, is how we can live a life of influence and purpose.

I think a lot of us crave both of those things. We want to know what we are doing with our lives and to feel it is worth it.

I’ve noticed that this sense is even stronger among the young people I meet. They struggle with the pressure (and desire) to change the world, but simultaneously with the knowledge that doing so seems next to impossible.

I have often wondered to myself if this is a major contributor to the epidemic of anxiety and self-harm that is well documented among under-20s. They know they want to do something about a world they are repeatedly told is dying (and have a moral obligation to do so) but practical forms of action that make a real difference are not available to them. The result is familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of religion and history: a sense of guilt accompanied by helplessness that generates anger and anxiousness. The guilt cannot be forgiven because there is noone to absolve, and the helplessness cannot be overcome because there is nothing an individual can do to atone for a shared sense of failure (that the planet is burning or some such) or to repent by putting the wrong right.

I was meditating on some of these concerns as I read Mark 1:20-39.

Before I explain what I think this passage has to say about this in any more detail, I what I’m going to say in one or two sentences so it is easy to remember. Here is today’s:

Jesus wants you to live a life of influence and purpose by learning to pray, to talk and to listen.

Before you go any further, you should read the passage using the link above. What I’m saying will make more sense if you know what I’m talking about.

  1. Let Jesus Influence You By Learning to Pray

The first thing we see in this passage is that when we choose to bring Jesus into our lives he can bring real and positive change.

The scene is set in Capernaum, a town in Northern Israel where Jesus was based. He and his students had been in the synagogue, worshipping and Jesus had delivered a man who was afflicted with an evil Spirit. You can read about it in the previous couple of paragraphs.

Now they go back from the synagogue to Simon and Andrew’s house. 

Notice that they don’t go there because Simon’s mother-in-law is sick; Simon doesn’t tell Jesus about it until he’s already at the house. They go because Jesus’ students are making Jesus a part of their whole lives. He isn’t just someone they listen to in the Synagogue and then try to remember what he said, or marvel at what he did. Those are good things. But the disciples do something more. They take Jesus home with them.

The benefits of making Jesus a part of our whole lives become obvious when we look at verse 31. Because Jesus is with them outside the Synagogue, they are able to ask him for what they need when they need it. So they arrive home and Simon’s mother-in-law is sick, very sick. And because Jesus is there, Simon is able to ask him to help.

It’s a process. First you accept you need Jesus outside church. You start to read your Bible (or a Bible app) and to worship at home during the week, build a devotional life, begin to pray about work, or family, or your day. Then when a crisis starts to emerge – your family are sick or you need help – you know who to ask and know he is there.

It is then that Jesus heals her. He responds to Simon’s request, in effect to Simon’s prayer. 

This is a pattern that occurs again and again throughout the Scriptures. Jesus doesn’t impose himself on people (unless they are completely bound by demons or sickness). He allows us to choose the extent to which we will accept his presence in our lives.

You might be thinking: “That’s fine for Simon. He had Jesus there with him. I’d invite Jesus around for lunch if he were here.”

That’s a completely understandable response. But I do have a couple of observations.

First I’d gently push back and say: would you? 

Lots of people didn’t. How can you be so sure? How can I? I know I make a lot of excuses for why I don’t cultivate my spiritual life – why I don’t pray and read the Bible that range from the good (I’ve been called to rush to hospital) to the bad (Spurs might score and I don’t want to miss it).

But more importantly, second: we can be with Jesus in all of our life, not just in church. 

Christ isn’t still here bodily. It’s better than that. That is the reason for his Ascension into heaven and the sending of the Holy Spirit. In Simon’s day, only one person’s house could have Christ in it. Now he can be with you wherever. 

That’s the starting point for everything. A great preacher once said that, “Jesus’ power is in his presence”. If you want to be someone of peace, purpose, and influence the most important thing is to be someone whose life is full of Jesus – not just someone who comes to church on a Sunday morning.

He’s what you ultimately need.

  1. Influence Others By Learning to Talk

The next thing I notice in these verses is that word spread.

We’re not told how, but at some point during that afternoon the word about what Jesus had done for Peter’s mother-in-law spread all around the village. 

Capernaum wasn’t a huge place. Even so, this is very impressive. In a matter of hours word has spread and there are queues of people outside waiting for Jesus.

What have they come for? For an evangelist or preacher it is tempting to want to see this as a revival – of people desperate to receive forgiveness or to hear Jesus preach.

That isn’t what Mark says, however. It’s much more relatable than that. 

Look at verse 33. The crowds come to ask Jesus to do for them what he had done for the man in the Synagogue and for Peter’s mother-in-law.

What has happened is that the man who was set free – who experienced mental and spiritual healing – and those who had been blessed by the physical healing have gone around and told people. 

They haven’t tried to tell everyone who Jesus is. As far as we know, they haven’t given them a tract or called them to repent (there’s certainly no evidence of that here).  They have just told their stories of how Jesus has helped them, of how they have benefited from his presence. And others have decided that they want some of that too.

Again, this is a pattern we see repeated over and over again. Heather touched on it a couple of weeks ago in her talk about how Philip and Nathaniel came to follow Jesus. 

One of the main ways, if not the main way, that ordinary people brought others to know Jesus in the New Testament was to learn to talk about how they had benefited from him, what he had done from them. Then others think they want a piece of that.

Again, we’re going to look at the practical way to do this more in a moment. 

Fundamentally, however, it relies on two basic ideas that I think most people who know Jesus would agree with but that we sometimes forget.

  1. Knowing Jesus is good for us – we get loads from it.
  2. Knowing Jesus would really help others – they would get loads from it.

If you agree with both of those ideas then it makes sense that we would want to talk about our own experiences of Jesus or church with others. I get this is difficult so I’m going to explain how to do it better in a moment (not that I’ve particularly nailed this, but I am learning!)

  1. Find Purpose By Learning to Listen

So I have argued for making Jesus a part of our whole lives – at work, at football, at school, at a care home, even at church. And that when we do, we should then want to share that with others.

But what about direction? This is one of the biggest felt needs I come across pastorally. And I don’t have a magic bullet. 

There isn’t a way to buy a cheat-map of life with all the right answers on it. And for good reason. 

A life of faith is a life that is necessarily built on trust. It isn’t about me knowing all the answers and then being able to implement them. It is more about me entrusting myself to someone else to lead me and guide me.

In that sense it’s more like rally-driving than it is Formula 1. 

In Formula 1, everyone knows the track – it’s easy. The question is how well can you navigate it as fast as you can. In rally driving the track is varied and variable. You’re driving but it is the navigator who knows where you’re going. The driver needs him and has to trust him.

A life of faith is like a rally-race.

But that doesn’t mean we’re helpless. What we see when we look at Jesus’s example in verse 35-39 is that, while we may not know every turn we should take in advance, we can know the principles that help us to make good choices. We can know why we are here, what we should prioritise, and when we need to be alert to dangers.

That kind of sense of purpose comes from spending time in quiet prayer with God. It might be sitting silently in a chair. It might be going for a long walk. It might be something completely different. But it is about learning to quiet every other voice, to present ourselves to God and then to say what do you want? What do you want for me?

When we do that regularly, we don’t get all the answers to every choice we should make. But we become aware of the values and principles that should guide us – why we have come, to paraphrase Jesus’ words.

It might be saying yes to a promotion because it allows you to provide for more people or lead in a way that will bless them. Or “no” to a promotion because God has called you to be a father or mother first.

It might be saying no to an opportunity because you know it will distract you from something else or to go and try something new because you want to meet new people to speak to about Jesus.

I can’t answer that question because I’m not you. 

But the only way to get peace and stop being restless is to ask, to make time to listen to the answer and then act on it.

Jesus wants you to live a life of influence and direction by learning to pray, share and listen.

Application

What does this mean for us as we try to know hope, show hope and share hope.

Choosing to make Jesus a part of our life isn’t harder now than it was then, it’s easier. This is a quick set of suggestions for how to do it. You can add to them or take them away as you wish. I’ll start at the beginning of the day.

  • Set up part of your house as a prayer area. That’s where you’re going to go to pray or meditate in the morning and evening. You might designate it with an icon or a cross or something.
  • When you wake up in the morning, pray. The amount you can pray is going to change depending on your circumstances. But everyone here can pray first thing. Everyone here has some time.
    You can make up your own prayers – using T.A.P. That takes about 4 minutes.
    You could use a prayer book or app – I’m happy to recommend them.
    But pray. First thing. Before checking Facebook.
  • Take on Scripture. You can do this by reading it, listening to it, or meditating on it. Again, everyone can do this. You can listen to a 10 minute podcast while you breastfeed or a 15 minute devotional while you drive to work. Or if you have more time, you can spend an hour in silent meditation.
    But do something. You probably won’t feel an immediate benefit but over time it will help immeasurably.
  • Pray before meals and before work. This sounds as simple as it is. Say thank you for your food 3 times a day. Before you start work or a task, thank God for it and ask for his help.
    This starts to build an awareness that Jesus is at work in these places and changes our attitude.
  • At the end of the day, before bed, spend 5 minutes remembering the day. Then say thank you for anything you are grateful for and sorry for anything you regret. I find it helps to journal this 
  • Find times when you can be away from others and quiet. Take headphones out or off. If there are decisions that have to be made, ask God about them and then walk or sit in silence. For at least 30 minutes.

Jesus wants you to live a life of influence and purpose by learning to pray, to talk and to listen.

The Wisdom of Hating Sin

It is much harder to warm a cold heart than to cool an overheated one, as it is much harder to light a fire once it has gone out than to change the direction of the air heated by the fire by adjusting the air vents. It is harder to make a saint out of an ice cube than out of a firebrand, just as it is harder to start up a car that is stuck than to change its direction once it is moving.

One of the most interesting and helpful authors I’ve read this year is Peter Kreeft, the Charismatic Catholic Philosopher. He’s written a wonderful book on the Psalms which, even though I haven’t agreed with every word, has consistently provoked questions, worship and delight on almost every page.

Here is Kreeft on the challenge to late Western indifference and relativism presented in the very first verse of Psalm 1:

We must clearly distinguish sins from sinners, for we are commanded to hate sins and not sinners, and to love sinners (our “neighbours”, all of whom are sinners like ourselves) and not to love sins. But we are impressed more by concretizations than abstractions; that is why examples impress us more than principles, why saints are more powerful teachers than scholars, why stories impress us more than sermons, and why great teachers always use parables. The danger is that we become so fixated on the concrete example (the person) that we take the attitude toward him that is appropriate to the principle—that is, we hate the sinner because we confuse him with the sin. This is a mistake that is natural and common to children and primitives, and it is correctable by a later sophistication and maturity of mind, when the mind becomes abstract enough to distinguish the sinner from the sin. 

The opposite mistake is much harder to correct. That is the mistake of failing to begin here, with passionate and concretely real hatred of sin, as embodied in sinners. It is much easier to correct an intellectual mistake (confusing the abstract with the concrete) than to correct a mistake of the heart, and it is a mistake of the heart not to love or hate anything passionately but to be bland and indifferent, “lukewarm” (see Rev 3:16). It is much harder to warm a cold heart than to cool an overheated one, as it is much harder to light a fire once it has gone out than to change the direction of the air heated by the fire by adjusting the air vents. It is harder to make a saint out of an ice cube than out of a firebrand, just as it is harder to start up a car that is stuck than to change its direction once it is moving…

We are all sinners, of course. But “the scornful” do not admit it or do anything about it, and they scorn and pity and sneer at those of us who do. The damned do not go to Hell because they sin but because they scorn and sneer at the idea of sin and repentance. They are scornful to those of us who hate the sins that they love. The difference between the damned and the blessed is not that one class sins and the other does not, but that one class scorns and the other repents, that the one class is happy with their sins and the other is unhappy with them.

(Peter Kreeft, Wisdom from the Psalms, p.21-24)

You can get a copy of the book here. I can’t recommend it highly enough.