Jesus sounds like someone I want to be associated with!

Tim Chester’s book, A Meal with Jesus: Discovering grace, community & mission around the table, looks at six particular meals that Jesus was at and explores what they tell us about grace, community, hope, mission, salvation and promised. It’s a wonderful book, beautifully written. I don’t want to give a full review, just highlight a few bits that particularly jumped out at me.

1. Jesus sees the heart

I was very moved by the episode in Luke 7 when the meal that Jesus was having at Simon’s house is interrupted by a woman, (who we presume was) known to be a prostitute, crying over and kissing his feet and then rubbing expensive perfume into them.  As my kids would say, that really would have been a bit awkward…

Jesus’ response to Simon’s inevitably judgmental thoughts shows that Simon’s definition of righteousness is completely upside-down to Jesus’. The shocking thing, as Tim says, is that ‘Jesus sees the heart of this woman and he sees the heart of Simon – and he’s more disgusted by what he sees in Simon’s heart than by what he sees in the woman’s heart’.

CHALLENGE and HOPE: those are the two words that strike me here. Challenge because I know that all too often I am and have been like Simon, judging people without really knowing what’s going on in their lives. I wish I would stop doing that. And also hope, because at other times I am like that woman, and I know that in those times God looks at my heart and understands.

2. In a Desolate Place

In a chapter entitled, ‘meals as enacted hope’, Tim talks about the telling in Luke 9 of the feeding of the thousands of people who had come to listen to Jesus and had found themselves, in the evening, in a ‘desolate place’ (v. 12). In his feeding, Jesus is enacting out a vision of the messianic kingdom, welcoming all people, whoever they may be, to come and take their place, find inclusion, and eat with him. Tim comments, ‘this is more than a picnic; this is a banquet with Jesus as the host. Jesus is known through his catering’.

And the same happens when we gather as church to take communion, and I was made to sit up by Tim’s statement that, ‘when your church family gathers together as a group of needy people and shares food with Jesus at the centre and with Jesus as the provider, you glimpse God’s coming world right here, right now.

What struck me about that statement is that church too often doesn’t look like a group of needy people – it looks like a group of sorted people, all friendly with one another, with perfect lives. If you feel like you’re far from sorted, church can be a hard place to be.

And yet scratch beneath the surface and you’ll discover a different reality.  Actually your church will be full of dysfunctional people: people with money problem, marriage problems, friendship problems, work problems, eating problems, identity problems… you name it, it’ll be there!

What brings all of us together is that, in Jesus, we find hope. That isn’t a glib, plastic statement: it’s a statement of reality. Jesus is our sustenance, and in him we have hope for the future and for the present.

3. Our Daily Bread

I wonder how many times in your life you’ve prayed the words, ‘give us each day our daily bread’ (Luke 11:3)? It’s a slightly odd thing for us to pray because, for most of us, our daily bread is pretty much guaranteed – it isn’t really something that we need to pray about.

And so I was interested when Tim said, ‘we need to pray for our daily bread not because we’re worried about where our next meal might come from, but because we’re not’.

For most of us reading this we have lost any sense of dependency on God for our food. In fact it would make more sense to pray to Tesco to give us our daily bread than to God! And so to pray this prayer reminds us that our food is not guaranteed. It could run out. We depend on so many things in order to eat: on the soil, on the rain, on the sun, on the farmer, on the farm worker… and ultimately on God. And to pray this prayer reminds us to be thankful and mindful of every mouthful that we eat

FINALLY…

I want to finish this post with the words of church leader Simon Carey Holt who Tim quotes, who says, ‘At base, hospitality is about providing a space for God’s Spirit to move. Setting a table, cooking a meal, washing the dishes is the ministry of facilitation: providing a context in which people feel loved and welcome and where God’s Spirit can be at work in their lives. Hospitality is a very ordinary business, but in its ordinariness is its real worth’.

When I read that I scribbled in the margins, ‘THIS IS WHAT I DO EVERY DAY’. I’m sure many of you reading this will feel the same, and God bless you for doing that.

Ingredients (serves 4)

A bunch of purple-sprouting broccoli, as much as you think you can eat (but maybe about 200g), halved if big

1 tbsp vegetable oil

1 or 2 tbsp sesame seeds

2 cloves garlic, sliced

1 or 2 tbsp soy sauce

Method

1. Heat the oil in a frying pan to a medium/high heat and add the garlic

2. Add the broccoli and toss around, making sure you scrape the garlic off the bottom so it doesn’t burn

3. Add the soy sauce and a splash of water, turn the heat down low, cover and leave to cook for a couple of minutes until the broccoli spears are just cooked through

4. Toss the sesame seeds in and serve

What she says is reflected in Bishop Bill Ind’s statement that, ‘as our experience of the world becomes increasingly global, so it becomes increasingly important for us to know where we belong, where our home is’, and by Professor Tim Gorringe, who makes the simple point that, ‘to be human is to be placed’.

If that is the case then E.S. Casey’s perspective is disturbing, that, ‘‘the world is nothing but a scene of endless displacement. The global village has become a placeless place’.[1]

I wonder if this notion of place is something that you think about or not? I suspect it isn’t – it’s easy to think that place is trivial, just incidental to who we are, but I want to say that it isn’t. We are not disembodied beings; we are located. Place is a central part of what it means to be human and I want to make three simple statements about that:

Firstly, our fundamental home is this earth: it’s the land that feeds and sustains us. We are literally earth creatures – adam from the ‘adamah (Hebrew for earth). As human beings we have been placed in a garden and that is where we belong, as gardeners.

That may seem a strange concept because, apart from maybe spending some time in a little patch at the back of our houses, most of us live lives that are disconnected from the earth and don’t see ourselves as gardeners at all (caretakers or stewards maybe, but not gardeners). But we are, even if from a distance. All of us are involved in tending and caring for this earth that we live off, and it’s high time we found ways of rediscovering what it means for us to be gardeners in this globalised world.

Secondly, whilst our primary sense of place is rooted in the land, within that we also find our place within the human community, with our neighbours, family, friends, work colleagues. So often it is the people around us who make up our sense of place.

In my busy life I find that a challenge. I can spend too much time building up my own life, focussing on myself, and that isn’t wrong in itself, but I want to make sure that I’m thinking about those who are around me – how can I invest in them and root myself deeper into their lives?

Thirdly, for those of us with a Christian faith, we are rooted in Christ. Colossians 1:2 says literally, ‘to those in Colosse the holy and faithful brothers/sisters in Christ’: in Colosse, in Christ, are like two bookends relating to where we are. Yes, we are located physically in Colosse, in Chichester, Little Upton or wherever, but alongside that we are also located in Christ.

I wonder how our sense of place in Christ changes our sense of rootedness in the land and with people? Positively, a strong sense of being in Christ can be deeply comforting to those whose physical existence is painful, and many find that being in Christ leads them to uproot from where they are to follow him in a different location

Alongside that, though, it has too often had the effect of de-rooting us negatively, causing us to focus on ‘saving souls’ and not to be interested in the physical place that we live in and the physical needs of the people, species and eco-systems that share that place with us.

What does it mean to you to be placed – on the land, with other people, and in Christ – and how do you hold those three things together?

I’ve been joyfully re-discovering the Narnia series through my nine-year old, who has just finished reading it through for the first time, and so was excited to read Rowan Williams’ thoughts on this and his other writings. (I ought to confess at this point that I bought the book for Christmas for Greg, but oops, I’ve read it first!) And I have to say I wasn’t disappointed – in fact this is the best, most inspirational and beautiful book I have read in a very long time (mind you, I have been doing doctoral reading for the last seven years…).

This post isn’t a full review but a sharing of some of the most exciting points that Williams draws out.

1. Sex

Well, you weren’t expecting me to start with this now were you… and I’ve got to say it is a bit of a surprise to find a man with such a big beard and bushy eyebrows writing on sex and CS Lewis! But Williams highlights again and again that Lewis’ depiction of Aslan is riotous, bacchanalian, hedonistic and very physical (Susan and Lucy roll on the ground with him; he gives Caspian ‘the wild kisses of a lion’).

Williams is clear: ‘Aslan’s animality permits the evoking of physical pleasure without trespassing directly on the realm of adult erotic experience’. Nonetheless, through the Narnia series and elsewhere (eg the experience of Jane in That Hideous Strength) Lewis is able to ‘evoke a world in which the profoundest physical enjoyment is one of the best and clearest images of what it is to meet God. That meeting is … never a substitute for physical fulfilment, nor is physical fulfilment a means to encounter with God. It is simply that erotic satisfaction fully enjoyed is one of the most powerful glimpses we can have of what union with God is like’.

Wow!

2. Aslan’s Response to Our Wrongdoings

There is failure in Narnia. All the humans who visit there are flawed and make mistakes, some of them serious, and the animals do too – just think of Puzzle in The Last Battle.  Lewis’ depiction of how Aslan deals with that failure is deeply moving: through a look; through a conversation out of earshot of the others; always in love and grace.

Williams makes the comment that, ‘Lewis is reinforcing a point familiar from St Augustine – that most sins are actually not dramatic acts of defiance but a half-conscious and certainly half-witted drift towards falsehood or a course reluctantly undertaken out of feebleness and cowardice. Aslan does not despise any of this, nor does he make light of it; he simply deals with it’.

Can I be honest? When I read that I cried and saw myself burying my face in Aslan’s mane as I accepted his forgiveness for my own half-wittedness and cowardice.

3. Aslan Grows

There is a moment in Prince Caspian when Lucy meets Aslan for the first time since The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, and exclaims that he is bigger: “‘That is because you are older, little one’, answered he. ‘Not because you are?’. ‘I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger’. It’s a stunning depiction of the growth of faith through the years of our lives and of what happens when that faith is allowed to mature.

As Williams says, ‘Lewis is determined to turn on its head the common assumption that faith is one of those things that the intelligent human will simply grow out of: on the contrary, we shall be constantly growing into it, without end.’ But, ‘part of the growing also means that the habits of faith that serves us well at earlier stages may not survive untouched’.

This is exhilarating reading for those of us who have walked this path of faith for many years and seen it change and develop.

4. Putting Us in Our Place

In my last blog post I looked at how Jesus’ Kingdom theology encompassed the whole of creation, not just human beings, and the Narnia series is a wonderful depiction of that reality. Williams highlights how Lewis helps us appreciate the role that we play within the wider created order: as Aslan says to Prince Caspian, ‘‘You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve… And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth’”.

The humans in the Narnia series are actors among many others and have to learn how to take their place within this. Williams writes about this characteristically insightfully: ‘human beings are always already embedded in their relations with the non-human world and … their moral quality is utterly bound up with this as much as with their mutual relations. To be invited to see trees and rivers as part of the “people” of Narnia, and to have to ask what proper and respectful relations might be between a human and a talking beast is to be jolted out of a one-dimensional understanding of human uniqueness or human destiny under God’.

To put it another way: ‘In Narnia’, says Williams, ‘you may be on precisely the same spiritual level as a badger or a mouse’. Now that puts me firmly in my place.

(Rowan Williams, The Lion’s World: A journey into the heart of Narnia, SPCK: 2012)

We often talk about the Kingdom of God in terms of Jesus’ manifesto of Luke 4, with its emphasis on proclaiming good news to the poor and setting the oppressed free. This is absolutely right, but there is a broader dimension to Jesus’ Kingdom message that we can miss when we concentrate only on Luke 4. I’ve been aware that my last two posts have been pretty focussed on the impact of Jesus and the kingdom of God on human beings. To counterbalance that I want simply to outline Richard Bauckham’s ecological reading of Jesus’ Kingdom message – it’s fresh, innovative and we need to hear it!

He makes the point that, although we tend to focus on Isaiah and Daniel, Jesus’ Kingdom theology would also have come very much from the Psalms, which he would have been brought up with. The Psalms feature the kingship and rule of God very prominently and these themes are closely related to the wider creation. The creation theology that we see in the Psalms tells us that God created all things; that he created them good, and that he is lovingly involved daily with their care. The non-human creation acknowledges that God rules now and look forward to when he will reign in fullness, and they praise God and declare his glory.

Jesus would have had this broad (‘cosmic’) understanding as a foundation to what he meant when he came proclaiming that the Kingdom of God had come in him, as shown in the the Lord’s Prayer. Bauckham sees the phrase ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ as relating to each of the three petitions: ie, ‘may your name be hallowed, may your kingdom come, and may your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’. It can be easy to see the earth as simply a backdrop against which God’s will is done in people’s lives, but that is a misreading of what Jesus is teaching his disciples to pray! For Jesus, the Kingdom of God was never something that only impacted people.

Jesus’ Kingdom message thus encompasses the wider creation, as well as human beings. Two instances are particularly interesting in this regard. The first is Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness and Mark’s description of Jesus as being ‘with the wild animals’ (Mk. 1:13). In the Hebrew Bible, one of the things that was anticipated when God came to his people and reigned fully was that there would be peace throughout the created order: peace between wild and domestic animals, and peace between wild animals and humans. Isaiah 11:6-9 is the classic picture of this with its description of the wolf lying down with the lamb and the child putting its hand into the snake’s nest.

When Jesus goes into the wilderness Bauckham highlights that he meets three groups: Satan, the wild animals, and the angels. Satan is Jesus’ enemy and the angels are his friends, but standing between them are the wild animals, enemies with whom Jesus makes friends. The phrase ‘to be with someone’ is used elsewhere by Mark to signify friendship (eg. 3:14, 14:67) and is the phrase used of the animals in the ark (they were ‘with’ Noah). So here, Jesus makes peace between the human world and the wild animals in a way that begins to fulfil the Bible’s future messianic hope.

The second instance is the stilling of the storm in Mark 4:35-41 (and its equivalents). This story reflects the ancient imagery of the primeval waters in the creation narrative, which God controlled by putting boundaries around it and giving it limits, hence creating a stable environment for life. But these waters were only confined not fully abolished. When Jesus speaks to the wind and the sea he evokes the way that God spoke to the waters of chaos at the dawn of creation. ‘What Jesus enacts, therefore, is the Creator’s pacification of chaos. In this small-scale instance he anticipates the final elimination of all forces of destruction that will distinguish the renewed creation from the present’.

Jesus is the Lord of all creation, the one through whom and for whom all things have been created (Col. 1:16).  When we read the Gospels with that belief in our minds, we might find we discover some surprising new things!

This post is based on Richard Bauckham’s writing in chapter 3 (‘Reading the Synoptic Gospels Ecologically’) of, Living With Other Creatures: Green Exegesis and Theology (Paternoster Press, 2012).

Another good Lent scheme is 40Acts, which Debbie Wright has been coordinating. In this Guest Article on the A Rocha Living Lightly site she reflects on what she’s learned from running the scheme and on how it has turned Lent upside down for her. Do take a look – I think her words are challenging and stimulating, and I hope will give you something to reflect on as we continue through this Lentern time.

However, a Jewish understanding of salvation in the First Century would not have been primarily about ‘life after death’, it would have been about God’s Kingdom coming fully onto this earth, bringing with it all the things that the Old Testament prophets spoke about: abundance, peace, a direct knowledge of God and intimate awareness of his presence, restored relationships between people and between people and the wider created order.

We see this in the disciples’ question to Jesus in Acts 1:6: ‘Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?’. Even after having lived with Jesus and heard his teaching; having watched him die and then seen him as a resurrected person, their focus and understanding of what Jesus was doing was still on the literal restoration of Israel, rather than on an individual being ‘saved’ and gaining eternal life.

This is not to say that that aspect is not a crucial part of salvation, for it surely is, and, as one reads the letters of the early church in the New Testament, one can see how that realisation developed as the first Christians reflected on who Jesus was and what he had done. Rather it is to suggest that salvation is impoverished when restricted to this notion alone.

Salvation, then, was – and still is – about the kingdom of God. It is about seeing God’s kingdom established on this earth, and salvation for individuals, communities and nations means entering into the kingdom of God and being set free from Satan’s hold. Because of this, the lines are blurred in the Gospels between salvation as including the natural elements, as physical healing, as demonic exorcism and as something that leads to eternal life in Jesus.

I find two incidents particularly interesting.

Firstly, in Luke 8:26-39, we hear of a man who is set free from a multitude of demons. Our English translations tell us, in verse 36, that ‘those who had seen it told the people how the demon-possessed man had been cured’ (NIV), but the Greek could equally well be translated that they ‘told the people how the demon-possessed man had been saved’.

The second incident is the beautiful story – in Matthew 9 – of the woman who touches Jesus’ cloak and is healed of the bleeding that has kept her not only physically ill, but socially estranged from being a part of the people of God. In all three cases where the word ‘healed’ is used (vs.20 – 22) the word ‘saved’ could, again, equally well be substituted. The story would then read, ‘She said to herself, “If only I could touch his cloak, I will be saved”. Jesus turned and saw her. “Take heart, daughter”, he said, “your faith has saved you”. And the woman was saved from that moment’. Here is a woman saved by Jesus: physically healed and brought by him into the Kingdom of God.

Now read these incidents in the light of Jesus’ reading from Isaiah 61 in the synagogue (in Luke 4). In placing this incident right at the start of Jesus’ ministry, Luke makes it clear that an important part of Jesus’ Kingdom announcement was the Jubilee motif. Found in Leviticus 25, the Jubilee legislation was based around the return, every fifty years, of people to their tribal and familial land. It included the cancelling of debts, the freeing of slaves, the regular resting of land and animals and the possibility of the redemption of land by relatives of the original owner. Its aim was to be a radical system of social reform that prevented massive social inequalities occurring.

The Jubilee concept became a part of the hope of the exiled Israelite people for the future. Chris Wright says, ‘its two central concepts, restoration and release, became symbolic… of the new age of salvation when God would intervene to establish his kingdom of peace and justice. Then there would be the restoration of all things to their intended purpose, the release of God’s people from sin and all that oppresses and binds and enslaves’.[i] Jesus takes this motif, with all its implications – personal, social, physical, economic, political, and spiritual – and declares to the people listening, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing’ (v.21).

Jesus thus came proclaiming that the kingdom of God had come in him. This kingdom was good news (see Luke 4:43) and it was good news because the salvation that Jesus brought was personal, social, physical, economic and political.

That has not changed for us today and we rob the good news of Jesus of its full potential when we restrict it only to the attainment of eternal life. When we pray for someone to ‘be saved’ we are praying that they might enter into God’s kingdom and be set free from Satan’s hold, and that will have implications on all levels. As we seek to be, say and do good news into society, we remember that, whilst it is centred on an individual receiving new life, it goes much further than that too: we also preach that a part of this new life is that people can be set free from economic oppression; that relationships can be mended; that political repression can be stopped; that healing can come from physical and psychological ailments and that whole communities (and ecosystems) can experience the blessings of God’s kingdom.

This blog post is coming out of thinking I’m doing for the Spring Harvest 2013 event: ‘The Source: Encountering Jesus Today’, at which we are looking at how Jesus is the good news and what it means to be, say and do that good news today. There’s still space, so if you fancy more thinking along these lines then come along!

Ingredients (serves 4)

1 small butternut squash (or half a large one), peeled and sliced into medium sized cubes

2 small leeks or 1 large one, thoroughly cleaned and sliced thinly

400 g macaroni

2 tomatoes, thinly sliced into rounds

40 g butter

40 g plain flour

425 ml milk

Wholegrain mustard or mustard powder

Lemon juice

110 g cheddar cheese

110 g breadcrumbs

Method

1. Place the cubes of squash on an oven tray, drizzle olive oil and cook in oven at 180 degrees C (170 fan oven)/GM 4 for about 25 minutes, till cooked through.

2. Cook the macaroni in boiling water till just cooked.

3. Make the leek and white sauce: melt the butter, cook the leeks for 5 minutes or so until soft, stir in the flour, stir in the milk and bring to the boil, stirring all the time to avoid lumps. Add mustard and lemon juice to taste (tip: if you think the sauce should be thinner you can add in a little of the pasta water)

4. Combine the macaroni, squash and sauce in an oven-proof dish and top with the breadcrumbs, grated cheese and tomato slices.

5. Bake in the oven for about 25 minutes till nicely browned on top.

Enjoy!

Jesus came with one overall message: ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand’ (Matthew 4:17; Mark 1:15). But what might Jesus have meant when he called people to repent? Can we assume we know so obviously?

The Hebrew word for repentance means, literally, ‘to turn’ or ‘to return’, and Jewish thinking in the first century saw repentance along two lines. Firstly, as Tom Wright has hammered home to us so clearly, it was bound up with their hopes for liberation and return from exile. Israel’s exilic condition was the result of her sin as a nation in rejecting Yahweh as her one God, turning to the other nations’ gods and forgetting her call to practice justice and righteousness. For Israel to be restored and returned to her land, she must repent so that her sins might be forgiven.[i] ‘Repentance’ thus had an eschatological focus in that, when the people as a whole repented, the hope they longed for would come to pass.

Secondly, ‘repentance’ had a more every-day meaning. This is best illustrated by an event that happened in AD66. Josephus – an aristocratic Jewish historian who became an interpreter for Emperor Titus – went to Galilee to sort out some trouble there being caused by a Jewish faction. Having foiled a plot against his life by the rebel chief, Josephus told him that he would overlook his actions if he repented and believed in him.[ii] In other words, the insurgent leader was to abandon his militaristic, revolutionary way of achieving the overthrow of the Romans and trust in Josephus’ way instead.

Thus, Jesus’ call to repent carried two emphases: ‘it was an eschatological call, not the summons of a moralistic reformer. And it was a political call, summoning Israel as a nation to abandon one set of agendas and embrace another’.[iii] This is not to say that there is no individual aspect involved as, of course, personal repentance from sin was well known to the Jews (hence the complex sacrificial system of the Old Testament). Rather, it is to highlight that the concept of repentance should not be reduced to the individual alone.

Repentance, then, is about more than an individual saying sorry for their sins and committing themselves to Jesus, although it certainly involves that. It is a broader concept to do with how we expect ‘salvation’ to come, both for or communities and for ourselves. What are our agendas today? Where do we expect liberation and salvation to come from?

For many the answer lies in consumerism, in the things we buy and surround ourselves with. There is an underlying agenda of self-satisfaction and a continual quest to see that happen. Other messages say that liberation comes from our own selves. We have the ability to do it. It is up to us to stand strong and not let ourselves be mucked about and messed around. Our inner selves should be strong, beautiful and calm! For our communities, salvation is looked for through government initiatives and projects; through better education and improved laws and policing and, on an international level, liberation is secured through war and militarism; economic might and aid and development.

Jesus, however, says we have to repent: leave all that behind and follow him. As individuals and communities, we must admit that we have not got all the answer and that we cannot do it ourselves. Jesus calls us to abandon our agendas and false expectations of salvation/liberation; follow him and pursue his agenda. Our next job is to think through what that agenda is and how we might pursue it…

This blog post is coming out of thinking I’m doing for the Spring Harvest 2013 event: ‘The Source: Encountering Jesus Today’, at which we are looking at how Jesus is the good news and what it means to be, say and do that good news today.

Ingredients (makes 12 medium-sized burgers)

200g cheddar cheese

250g fresh bread, roughly torn

1 medium-sized leek, roughly chopped

Some fresh parsley and thyme

2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped

3 eggs, well beaten

Method

1. Place the cheese, bread, leeks, garlic and herbs in a food processor and whizz them all up together

2. Tip into a bowl, add the eggs and mix well

3. Shape into 12 burger shapes and place on a well-oiled oven tray

4. Cook in the oven at 180 C/gas mark 4 for twenty minutes, turning over half-way through (or you can fry them if you prefer)

Enjoy! I serve mine with baked potatoes cooked in the oven at the same time, veg, and tomato sauce.