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The spiritual life of a blackcurrant

I finally came across a scripture passage that described this phenomenal blackcurrant! You really need to read the passage for this to make any sense.

A couple of years ago I created a Hügelkultur bed. I gathered discarded branches and logs of various sizes and buried them under a mound of earth, in the hope that the rotting wood would become a spongy mass and act as a reservoir for water, keeping the soil moist and reducing the need for watering. It was not a great success. Last autumn, I decided to turn it inside out, using the not very rotted wood to make a very rustic-looking frame for a more conventional vegetable bed. In so doing, I discovered a branch that had taken root and had even produced a shoot with some leaves on it. I was so amazed that this branch had spent those two years under the ground growing an extensive root system, to only in the previous few weeks emerge into the sunlight that I decided that I had to give it another chance (in its favour was the fact that I suspected it might be a currant). I replanted it into the newly-formed bed and waited. In the last week, I have been rewarded by a very vigorous bush producing clusters of succulent blackcurrants. When I read Ephesians 3:14-20 this morning, I knew that I had found the perfect Bible passage to describe this phenomenon.

The passage starts with the statement that every family in heaven and on earth takes its name from the Father – and so this anonymous branch maintained its identity as a blackcurrant, an identity written into the DNA of each of its resilient cells, despite being discarded and buried. Of all the branches that I buried, this was the only one that clung onto life – its inner being having been strengthened by the power of the Spirit that gives life to all things, according to the riches of the glory of Christ who rose from the dead. Through the faith of God in his creation, the life of Christ dwelt within the heart of this branch, which was literally rooted and grounded in the depths of the earth, nourished by the love of its creator.

And once the branch was ready, it sent a shoot to the outside world – and reached sunlight! As its leaves started to flow with energy, it comprehended, with all the other chlorophyll-containing saints (I’m looking at my glorious pea plants as I write this, the breadth and length and height and depth of the generosity of God who provides light –light which feeds and sustains, and fills them with the fullness of God. Then, wonder of wonders, the power at work within that discarded branch accomplished abundantly far more than all I could have asked for or imagined – beautiful clusters of delicious currants. To God be glory in the church, in my garden and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.

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My problem with Pentecost

A glorious mess of poppies, strawberries and tomato plants (and a rogue blackcurrant)!

Pentecost is another of those church events that I find difficult, and this morning I realised why. The original story (Acts 2:1-13) describes the coming of the Holy Spirit in the very physical forms of wind, fire and speaking in tongues.

In the circles in which I moved as a teenager, we were expected to have a similarly tangible experience of charismatic gifts, with the pinnacle being ‘slain in the Spirit’. But I was never slain in the Spirit nor gifted charismatically, which, at the time, left me feeling like there was something very wrong with me. Was I not worthy enough? Was I too closed? Did God not like me? (I knew he had to love me.) Now I see things differently, but there is still that place of vulnerability in me that wonders what I was doing wrong to not have this wonderful experience that others had.

I don’t believe that God hides from us; like Adam and Eve in the garden, we are the ones who hide from God – surely if we desire the Holy Spirit, she won’t refuse us? Even in traditions that don’t fall into the charismatic bracket, there is an understanding, expressed in liturgy and song, of the Spirit coming into people from the outside. Maybe it’s just semantics, but the language of being ‘filled with the Spirit’ implies that the Spirit is an external force that needs to be persuaded to enter into us, and probably in a limited way and only if certain conditions are met.

So how might we understand the Spirit differently? I love the idea of the Celtic wild goose, but spent too much time in close proximity to geese in my childhood to find it a genuinely helpful image (too much squawking and mud). Another concept is of the breath of God – something continually with us that keeps us alive, but that mostly goes unnoticed.

My current understanding is that the Holy Spirit dwells in that place within which is our point of connection to God, our inner being. This is something that every human being (and who knows, maybe all beings, and even all matter?) has within them, since we are made in the image of God. In this sense, as we are all connected to God – whether consciously or not – we are also all connected to each other through our connection to God. The degree to which we are in touch with this place is the degree to which we experience the Spirit; she isn’t something that God parcels out for good behaviour or right belief, but is available to all of us, all of the time. The Spirit is always there, but is sometimes experienced more deeply – when we reach into the depths of ourselves in silence or when we open ourselves to letting the Spirit bubble up out of our depths and into our consciousness, so that Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water (John 7:38).

I don’t want to deny people’s dramatic experiences of the Holy Spirit, but I would like to reframe them in terms of moments of special grace. When we are open, the way to that inner point of connection with God is made wider and our experience of the Holy Spirit is deeper, and it feels like the Spirit has made her home within us in a special way (Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them’ John 14:23).

Perhaps on the day of Pentecost a physical manifestation was needed to convince the early church of the radical new concept that the Spirit dwelt within them and connected them to Christ, or perhaps this is a mythical story to teach us about the universality of the Spirit and the power of connection to God. I don’t really mind either way, but what I do mind is when people feel that their experience of the Spirit (whether tangible or not) is not valid. God deals with each one of us as individuals and our very different experiences just cannot be compared.

The Spirit is within us, we are already connected with God; the invitation is to dig deeper into this reality.

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The one great fear

I just love the curling tendrils of pea plants!

As a kid, I loved storms, the sound of rain hammering on the roof and counting the seconds between the thunder and lightning to work out how far away the epicentre was. As an adult, I can’t help feeling anxious during storms, or any extremes of weather, as I instinctively associate them with climate change. I woke up during a violent rainstorm last night and felt a powerful jolt of fear – but rather than numb myself, which is my typical strategy for coping with feeling overwhelmed, I tried to take a more constructive approach. Richard Rohr talks about God participating in the one great suffering through Christ on the cross, and how we can stand in solidarity with the suffering of others by consciously aligning our small suffering with the greater whole. I so applied this principle to my reaction to the storm – my fear of damage to my little vegetable patch being a tiny part of that bigger fear already experienced by people who have lost their entire livelihoods due to flooding. I wrote the following words as a reflection of this experience:

I wake in the night to unseasonal rain,
Sudden, violent.
Visceral fear overwhelms me – my little garden!
Wildly disproportionate, yet
Connecting me to the greater fear
Of crops destroyed,
communities wrecked.
A fear known at Golgotha
And drawn into the godhead.
I close my eyes and try to sleep.

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Why did Jesus leave it to the last minute?

The very first of the first fruits… I wonder whether the slugs will leave me any of them?

This is a reflection on Luke 24:36-53 for Ascension day

I was a very impatient child and always in a rush. My mother would repeatedly say to me ‘more haste, less speed’, and I was covered in so many bumps and bruises from doing things too quickly that my dad worried social services might come round to find out what was going on. That impatient part of me was brought up short by one short phrase in verse 45 of today’s gospel reading.

Luke recounts Jesus’ last interactions with his disciples. He spoke peace over them, encouraged them to have faith and showed them the wounds on his hands and feet. But, for the disciples, the news that Jesus was alive was too good to be true and they struggled to believe. Jesus had to go as far as snacking on a bit of fish to convince them he wasn’t a ghost. These disciples are not exactly what we might consider to be role models of faith. Yet, despite this, v45 tells us that Jesus ‘opened their minds to understand the scriptures’.

I find it fascinating that while Jesus had spent three years with his disciples and had ample time to open their minds, that he didn’t do so until after the trauma of the passion, and just as he is about to leave them. Why did he wait until then? If only Jesus had kick-started this process of revelation much earlier, think how much better prepared the disciples would have been for their subsequent mission, how much pain they could have been spared if they’d known that the crucifixion was only a temporary setback, and how much conflict from theological disagreements could have been avoided over the millennia. It would have given the disciples time to digest the information, ask questions and get everything properly worked out while they could still check the details in person with Jesus.

But these questions of mine are framed within a particular mindset that focuses on learning, achieving and making progress as rapidly as possible; while Jesus had a different purpose in mind. We strive for knowledge and power, look at how we are embracing artificial intelligence, assuming that if just we put our collective brains together we can solve the world’s problems; while Jesus let his disciples walk a path of ambiguity and pain. Our impatient mindset has resulted in something known as the ‘great acceleration’, the rapid and widespread increase in human activity which began around the mid-20th century and is having a devastating impact on the Earth’s natural systems.

The great acceleration is illustrated by a series of exponential graphs – with a shallow gradient until the 1950s, that shifts to a sudden and dramatic increase in recent years – and this holds true for many factors, ranging from the global population and plastic production, to ocean acidification and telecommunications. The impact of our ‘progress at any cost’ mindset on our planet and her inhabitants is catastrophic. We have used our knowledge and discoveries to bring about massive and rapid change, much of it arguably for the good, yet we have done this without wisdom and without insight into the potential unintended consequences.

This is so different from the way that Jesus worked with his disciples. Rather than ensuring they learned, achieved and made progress as rapidly as they possibly could, Jesus let the disciples go though through the drama of the passion before he opened their minds. During the passion, the disciples went on their own journeys of failure, betrayal, loss, grief and confusion. Post-resurrection, their faith and hope were rebuilt slowly, and, rather than being announced with trumpet blasts and choirs of angels, the resurrection itself was met with disbelief and soldiers whose silence could be bought with a few coins. Even as he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, Jesus emphasized his suffering, saying ‘The messiah is to suffer and to rise’ and when He blessed them, he did so by lifting up his wounded hands – a visual reminder of his suffering. This painful process is incompatible with any route to success that our society can imagine.

Jesus’s whole ministry was full of ambiguity, hyperbole and parables, he certainly didn’t teach in straight lines, perhaps partly to avoid us ever being too sure about what he was saying – to keep us humble and teachable? And giving the disciples the understanding they needed at the last possible moment seems entirely in character with this!

Had Jesus opened their minds earlier, these insights might have prevented them from humbly engaging with the message of the Gospel. With the ‘answer’ in their pockets, without having failed so catastrophically themselves, and without then fully engaging with Jesus’s suffering and death, they might have too easily distorted the message from a place of self-satisfaction.

Which is what, I fear, the church has done many times throughout the centuries. From a position of certainty and strength, we have forced Christianity upon others, causing all manner of damage in the process. But failure, humility and grace is a red line throughout the Scriptures. One of our earliest role models, St Paul, is someone who first had to get everything very badly wrong, ruthlessly persecuting the early church, before he was ready to become arguably the most influential Christian of all time – he had that touchstone of his own total failure, coupled with grace given by a God who knows what it is to suffer.

It might also comfort us to know that those who walked with Jesus himself had to go through the threshold of suffering – since Jesus didn’t spare his beloved friends, we shouldn’t expect him to spare us either. Rather than asking why we are suffering as if it were an aberration, might we come to accept it as a normal part of life to be faced and even embraced as the material we have to work with in this moment?

For example, the material my daughter had to work with over the last few years has come in the form of two very difficult bouts of depression. Looked at through the lens of capitalism, this experience was nothing but an unfortunate set-back to her career that rendered her less ‘successful’ and less able to produce, consume and generally keep the system going. However, she was forced to engage with this material to find a way forward, and although she wouldn’t wish depression on anyone and certainly doesn’t ever want to go through it again, the work she had to do to get healthy again has helped her to become more true to who she really is.

There is so much unnecessary suffering in the world that seems to serve no purpose. And just as we struggle to accept the suffering in our own lives, the suffering woven into the very fabric of creation is a great mystery. Consider the parasitoid wasp, who lays its eggs inside the body of a living caterpillar. These hatch and feed on their living host until the day they paralyze it and bore their way out through its skin to escape. Or consider the cuckoo who hatches in other birds’ nests and pushes its rivals out to their deaths. As Tennyson wrote in his poem In Memorandum, Nature is red in tooth and claw.

But St Paul seems very at home with the idea, and frequently links the early church’s experience of persecution and suffering to sharing in Christ’s sufferings as well as in his glory. For St Paul, this is the normal Christian experience; and I would extend that to being the normal human experience. We all share in Christ’s suffering, and he shares in ours – I feel there must be an open wound in the very heart of God.

While God can work through our suffering to bring growth, we must be careful not to go either to the extreme of spiritual bypassing (whereby we avoid our negative feelings by telling ourselves not to get upset because it’s all part of God’s plan) or to the extreme of self-flagellation – life brings suffering enough on its own, we don’t need to add to it. And, of course, Jesus calls us to alleviate suffering wherever we can, to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and visit those in prison – it is clearly not something to encourage or ignore.

At the end of our gospel passage, Jesus blessed his disciples and left them – at which point they were filled with great joy. There must have been great joy in knowing that God wasn’t demanding perfection through flawless adherence to the law, as they had been taught, but that God welcomes broken, messed-up, failures to join him in the adventure of life. There is great joy in knowing that suffering isn’t something alien to us that we need to resist, but that it is part of what makes us the complex, beautiful people that we are. It creates depth as it hollows us out and makes a space where God is freer to work. There is joy and freedom in realising that the places we considered broken, shameful and ugly are the very places where God works to bring forth beauty, courage, and compassion.

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Intercessory prayer based on Psalm 65

It’s so easy to see the presence of God in the Springtime!

I wrote this prayer based on Psalm 65 – feel free to fill in the gaps!

O God of our salvation, O hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas

We bring to you our concerns today, knowing that you always hear us when we pray.

Happy are they whom you choose and draw to your courts to dwell there. We shall be satisfied with the blessings of your house, even of your holy temple.

We thank you for our communities of faith, and all the places where you sustain us. We ask for your blessing upon them. We pray for gifts of stamina, resilience, grace and wisdom to those who lead us….

You still the raging of the seas, the roaring of their waves and the clamour of the peoples.

We pray you will still the raging of leaders who do not follow your ways, or care for the people in their charge. We pray for leaders whose hearts are drawn to service and who seek your wisdom. We pray for so many troubled places of the world where the people clamour for peace, for a new desire to work together to find solutions that will last. We pray for … .

Those who dwell at the ends of the earth tremble at your marvels; the gates of the morning and evening sing your praise.

We pray for those in the morning of their lives, for the young people on our hearts…

We pray for those in the evening of their lives, in particular for …

We pray for those who have passed beyond the evening of their life, and for the families and friends of those who they have left behind. We pray for…

You visit the earth and water it; you prepare grain for your people, you soften the ground with showers and bless its increase and crown the year with your goodness.

We pray for those who live in fear of flooding or drought, who cannot depend on the weather. Help us to act in solidarity, treasuring the precious gift of water and striving to minimize our impact on climate change. We long for a world where everyone enjoys the fruits of creation. Give us the imagination and the courage to walk the road that will us lead there.

May the pastures of the wilderness flow with goodness and the hills be girded with joy.

We pray for those who feel they are in the wilderness, who are struggling with their health, fearful for the future, or dealing with other problems. May their wilderness begin to flow with goodness and their lives be filled with joy. We pray for…

May the meadows be clothed with flocks of sheep and the valleys stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing.

We share in the joy of those who are particularly aware of your blessings upon them…

Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion; to you that answer prayer shall vows be paid. With wonders you will answer us in your righteousness

We leave our prayers with you, trusting in your righteousness and readiness to answer us. Help us to notice your wonders and to live in praise of you. In the name of Christ,
Amen.

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But what did Tabitha want?

My neighbour’s cat seeing off an enemy cat on behalf of my (black and white) cat, who now considers turf wars beneath him.

I had a strong reaction to this morning’s reading from Acts 9:36-41. This was the story of Tabitha, a woman who was very active in the church community. ‘Full of good works’, she helped the poor and even made coats and clothes for widows. But then she fell sick and died, at which point Peter, who happened to be in the neighbourhood, was summoned. He prayed for Tabitha and summoned her back to life again.

But is this what Tabitha wanted?

It sounds like she had worked very hard for her church community, perhaps in death she had found rest and peace? Would she really have wanted to come back from that? Were they expecting her to carry on as before? In her death they had lost a valued member of their pastoral care team – is this why Peter brought her back to life again?

Perhaps something to bear in mind if we start to value others for their contribution to our community rather than for who they are, or if we are tempted to use other people for ‘God’s purposes’ rather than supporting them in their journey of faith…

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Death is swallowed up by life

Between my dad’s death and his funeral, I dug a new vegetable plot and wove a fence around it using willow branches I had just pruned away. Dad’s body was placed in a wicker coffin, and this plot reminds me of that. With the coming of Spring, the upright branches have begun to sprout with new life.

I tend to talk about my dad dying rather than passing away because I want to face what happened head on. This was my first direct experience of death and, although it was a great privilege to be with my dad as he died, it was quite confusing. He suffered a heart attack and while I waited for the ambulance I tried to reassure him that I was with him, at the same time as not being sure whether he was still with me.

I witnessed my dad struggle to cling on to this life – but what was going on with that eternal part of him, his ‘being’, for want of a better word? As I read 2 Corinthians 5:1-5 the other morning, I was struck by these words in verse 4: so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. This is an extraordinary image of what happens when we die – our being is somehow engulfed in that greater life that is God. Our very being joins with the ground of all being and we fully realise our unity with God, as we are hidden in Him with Christ. My dad was not religious, and he had good reasons for that, yet the things that were most important to him: justice, integrity, and the equal value of all human beings, are important to God too and, I am sure, continue to bind them together.

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Doubting Thomas

I wrote this nearly a year ago, but have been saving it for now. It’s a reflection on the passage John 20:24-29

I have a confession to make: I’ve never liked this story, in fact I’ve come to realise that I struggle with most of the resurrection stories. I know that might sound like a strange thing to say, especially since the resurrection is central to our faith, but somehow I’ve always found it difficult to navigate the journey between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The change in mood from distress to joy is too abrupt, I need more time to adjust.

We have this extended period of Lent to prepare ourselves for the awfulness of Jesus’ death on Good Friday. We have been soul-searching, penitent, and self-denying (in theory, at least) for this gravest and most tragic of days. Then on Easter Saturday, I don’t know what to do with myself. I find it hard to journey with the women and the disciples, because while we anticipate the good news, they are in a state of shock and grief. Then, over the course of one night from Easter Saturday to Easter Sunday, the mood totally changes and we are invited to rejoice; it all happens too fast for me.

We need time to recover from difficult experiences; even the best news in the history of the world takes a little time to sink in and heal our wounds. Here I wonder whether the story of Thomas can help us, and I beg your indulgence as I retell his story with a little poetic license.

Let’s try to put ourselves in his place. Thomas had come into Jerusalem with the women and the other disciples, full of hope and expectation, believing that Jesus would victoriously lead the people into the kingdom of God. Granted, Jesus had been rather opaque about the details of how this would work out, preferring to talk about yeast, seeds, coins and sheep rather than coronation ceremonies and forms of government; but a kingdom needs a king and so Thomas would have been expecting Jesus to claim his throne. He had thrown in his lot with Jesus, he had given up his livelihood, left his family, and followed this teacher around the country, believing that his future was inextricably linked with Jesus’ kingdom project.

And then it all went sour.

Firstly, Judas’ betrayal was an enormous blow, not only to Jesus, but to the rest of that tight-knit community. Traitors are particularly destructive, because when people betray our trust, it causes deep wounds, leaving us struggling to trust others again.

Secondly, there was the utter confusion about how Jesus had behaved during the last days of his life. Why had he refused to save himself? How could he establish his kingdom if he wasn’t there to sit on the throne? There were so many occasions where Jesus could have found a way out, as he did when he slipped away from the angry crowd in Nazareth – he could have overpowered the guards, or defended himself against the Sanhedrin, he could easily have charmed Herod and, even at the last, he could have cooperated with Pontius Pilate who clearly wanted to release him.

Thirdly, Thomas had witnessed Jesus being tortured to death in a long, drawn out, brutal way, which must have been incredibly traumatic to see.

And fourthly, on top of all this, Thomas’ hopes, dreams and expectations for the rest of his life had been shattered in one fell swoop. What was he going to do with himself, now that his leader, guide and friend was gone? The roadmap of his life had been ripped up in front of him.

What was there to comfort Thomas at this time? Well, there were the disciples and the women. But from his perspective, they were not dealing well with the grief. It’s a well-known fact that people in deep grief can imagine that they can see or hear their loved one. Instead of facing reality and trying to come to terms with it, as Thomas was, the disciples seemed to be fixating on grief-induced hallucinations, imagining angelic visitations and constructing a narrative to console themselves with – so desperate to believe that the adventure wasn’t all over. Thomas might sound cynical, but remember that the others had seen the resurrected Jesus while he hadn’t.

It was painful for Thomas to see his friends deluding themselves. He kept his thoughts to himself for as long as he could, but eventually he couldn’t contain himself any longer and exploded with the words ‘unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails, and my hand in his side, I will not believe’. Thomas got to the point of almost giving up on the disciples and returning home, but he joined them for one last meal.

Now this is where I start to have real problems with the story. I feel that the label ‘doubting Thomas’ is terribly unfair. He was feeling very fragile, and let’s remember that he had had a whole extra week of grief compared to the rest of the disciples. Certainly, they too were processing recent events, but at least the disciples had seen Jesus and been given new hope. Thomas was still in the thick of it.

Unfortunately, I think Jesus comes across as not very compassionate, he appears to take poor, wounded Thomas and make a teaching point out of him, almost reprimanding him for his lack of faith. Here, I hope you will forgive me for taking the liberty of locating the narrator of this story at the far end of the table. I am putting the disciple who observes and later recounts this story in a place where he cannot overhear the intimate conversation going on between Thomas and Jesus, he just sees Jesus show Thomas his wounds and fills in the rest himself.

Imagine Thomas’ feelings when he looks up from his bowl of soup and sees Jesus there, sitting opposite, looking at him with love. Shock? Shame? Joy? I like to think of Jesus gently teasing Thomas, insisting on showing him the wounds on his hands and his side. I imagine Jesus coaxing Thomas out of his grief and despair, helping him to start to experience the joy of the resurrection. I imagine them having a big bear hug of great warmth and joy – at which point, I’ll allow Jesus to make his proclamation of blessings for those who believe without seeing, but he does that from of a place of deep affection and compassion for his wounded friend.

So where might this take us?

Firstly, I think it gives us permission to take our time over the resurrection. To let the reality of Christ’s defeat of death dawn on us as slowly as we need it to. New life, the kingdom of God doesn’t all come in an instant. As it takes time for yeast to work through the dough, so God’s work also takes time. Yes, Christ defeated death in an instant, but we experience the effects of that on a longer timescale. Just look at what we are living through now – the multiple challenges that threaten our survival as societies and even as a species. What we don’t hear so much about are the counter-movements, the hopeful communities and projects that are part of that coming kingdom of God. Similarly, in our own lives, healing does come, but it rarely happens overnight, it usually takes time.

Secondly, I think it’s helpful in times of grief and sorrow to know that one of those closest to Jesus also experienced that grief. That he couldn’t be consoled by his comrades’ true, but unhelpful, encouragements. Yes, Jesus is alive, death is conquered, there is new hope – but when we are in that place of suffering these might just feel like empty words; it will take an encounter with Jesus himself to bring us healing. And that is his prerogative, we just need to make ourselves available to Him in prayer.

Thomas’ doubts didn’t exclude him from God’s kingdom, far from it. According to tradition, Thomas went on to found the church in South India, where it is alive and well today. God knows our weakness and our lack of faith; he meets with us in all that and keeps looking at us with love. We can and should bring difficult, confusing, and painful things to him in prayer.

We have five more weeks of Easter, which gives us plenty of time to digest the resurrection stories in the gospels. We have the time we need to adjust to the amazing news that even the worst things we do as human beings cannot overcome the life and love of God. Perhaps as we do this, we can keep in mind the journey that the disciples took. Thomas is an extreme example, because he was left grieving for an extra week, but all of them had been through betrayal, trauma and grief. And yet, after Easter, we come to the birth of the church at Pentecost and then we hear about the life of the early church. God took the disciples from a place of deep brokenness and breathed resurrection life into them. May he do the same with us and our broken world. Amen.

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Do we need Jesus to be perfect?

Snakeshead lilies and daffodils in the Forest of Dean, made famous by the brilliant TV series The Change.

Last week the wonderful Pray as You Go app invited me to reflect on the significance of Jesus’s actions in John 7. By this point in the Gospel narrative Jesus was keeping well away from Judea, since his life was under threat. Despite this, his brothers encouraged him to go to Jerusalem for the festival of Booths, but Jesus point blank refused. Shortly afterwards, he went to the festival after all, but in secret. By the middle of the festival, Jesus stopped hiding and started to teach openly in the temple.

What are we to make of this chain of events? Surely since Jesus was fully God, he must have known that he needed to teach in the temple. And if that were the case, how is it that he appears to have misled or lied to his brothers? Something else must be going on here and the most obvious answer is that we see Jesus changing his mind. We see him working things out as he goes along.

As well as being fully God, Jesus was fully human, and I believe this story is a lovely expression of that humanity. This is not the only example, we also see his humanity in the ‘disobedient’ child hanging around the temple when he should have been on his way home, and in the episode with the Canaanite woman where he learned a thing or two. After all, what is more human than to change our mind? To learn, to grow and to develop?

Which brings me to the question of perfection. If Jesus had been ‘perfect’ he would have known all along that he needed to teach in the temple and would have found a way to do that. Instead, he needed the gentle encouragement of the Spirit to move him from staying in Galilee, to going secretly to Jerusalem, to coming out of hiding. If Jesus needed some help, then so do we, which means that we needn’t be so concerned about making ‘wrong’ decisions. We too can be guided into new directions as the spirit leads and calls us. Fumbling our way forward and taking apparent blind alleys is not failure to adhere to God’s predestined path for our life, but is rather taking steps in a dance into an unformed future; a dance that requires both partners to move together.

And since Jesus wasn’t perfect, God certainly isn’t asking that of us. Instead of striving to ‘get it right’ the whole time, we are called to seek the kingdom of God – a messy, spontaneous, beautiful, ramshackle place that is easy for ‘prostitutes and sinners’ to find a home in – not sterile perfection. Were we ever to attain ‘perfection’ in any area of our lives, then we would have a reached a static point and, since one of the criteria for being alive is the capacity to move, we would effectively have died.

The people most committed to perfection in the Gospel stories were the Pharisees, and Jesus made it clear that they were going down the wrong track. Striving for perfection, and even excellence, can be toxic. Of course, there is a place for expertise, but at this point in history we urgently need people of wisdom and compassion, and such people have rarely led a ‘perfect’ life.

So, Pray As You, here is my reflection, heavily influenced by my own struggle with perfectionism.

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Speaking to the audience

Baby tomato plants!

Mtt 5:31-32
‘It was also said, “Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.” But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

I was listening to the excellent podcast Nomad the other day, and found myself increasingly uncomfortable with the interviewee’s critique of Jesus’ teaching on divorce and remarriage. At the time, it was very easy for a man to divorce his wife for no particular reason, all he had to do was hand her a certificate of divorce. In that patriarchal society, this practise could be devastating for women, as they would have potentially had to remarry (which wouldn’t have solved the long-term security issue) or take up prostitution to survive. As we might expect, Jesus speaks out against easy divorce for trivial reasons. However, the interviewee was, to say the least, disappointed that the reason Jesus gave for his opposition was that divorce pushed people into adultery rather than because it had negative impacts on women. While I don’t want to make excuses for what Jesus said, I do think it is unwise to read a first century passage with 21st century eyes and expect it to make total sense in our context.

What strikes me is that Jesus was speaking to his audience. This was a people who were deeply concerned about obeying the law, and so I imagine that breaking the seventh commandment (Do not commit adultery) would have hit home much more powerfully than expressing a concern for women’s rights – maybe Jesus was being highly pragmatic in that he found an effective way to advocate for women in a culture that had not yet developed an understanding of the equality of the sexes. A discourse about equal opportunities and women’s empowerment would probably gone over people’s heads, blinding them with the light rather than giving them enough light to guide them forward. I see it as a reflection of the imperfect reality of engaging with people where they are at and moving them incrementally forward.

The Christian faith is amazingly dynamic. We aren’t locked into a religion that was delivered fully baked in the first century, the Holy Spirit has been revealing the ways of God through the ages, moving us forward, sometimes despite ourselves, bringing us to the point of understanding women and men as being of equal value. Were Jesus born in the 21st century, I imagine he would speak to us in a way that we could understand, pragmatically guiding us forward, in an albeit incomplete way, since we seem only able to hear the truth in small doses.