Why should anyone consider Christian faith today? The author offers an overview of Christian belief in a collection of five short essays, each shedding fresh light on a different aspect of the faith. It has been said that what the church needs today is not better arguments but better metaphors: this booklet offers startling new images which open doors to Christ for sceptic and believer alike.

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Everybody has a story. One of the most interesting things when we came to Canada over 20 years ago was discovering that you could ask anybody, How long has your family been in Canada? and get an interesting answer. Some had emigrated from Europe after the Second World War. Some were descendants of the original New England pilgrims who had emigrated to Canada after the war of independence. Some were first nations, who had a different kind of answer. And so on.

Stories like that are important because they make us who we are. We say things like, Our family have always been hard workers. Or, Our family always did love a good party. If we had no stories like that, we would have a real problem with our identity: it would be a form of amnesia. We need stories to tell us who we are and what we should do.

The story is told of a mother who was trying to get her son out of bed to go to church on a Sunday morning, and it was getting late. “Give me two good reasons why I should go to church this morning” he complained. “Well,” she replied, “you’re 38 years old and you’re the priest. Is that good enough?”
Our stories tell us who we are and what we should do.

But all of us from time to time have a hankering for a bigger story, a story that tells us not just who we are as individuals, or as families, or as nations, but who we are in the universe.

• Why am I here?
• What am I supposed to do with my life?
• How do I know right and wrong?
• Where is it all going to end?
• Where is there a story that will tell me this kind of thing?

Sometimes people ask, Why would I want to be a Christian? I’m a good person. I believe in God. I pray sometimes. I just don’t feel any need of religion. What’s more, I’m very busy and my job and family are very demanding. So why?

One answer to think about is that Christianity is one of these big stories that helps us make sense of our lives, know who we are and how we should live. It’s a story that children can understand, but also a story that can stretch the greatest intellectual.

Think of it this way, that Christian faith is a story in six acts.

In Act 1, God creates an incredibly beautiful world with imagination and intricacy, diversity and vitality, and…love. It is fresh and alive. At the heart of it are human beings, male and female, made to reflect like a mirror image the character of the Artist who made them, with love and creativity. They live in a dance of perfect harmony with the Creator and with one another, and with their environment.

In Act 2, however, things go horribly wrong. Human beings try to play God. They behave as though they’re the centre of the universe. They treat the world as though they were the landlord, whereas of course they’re only the tenants. They step out of God’s cosmic dance and get out of step with one another and with the environment, and, most importantly, they get out of step with God. Instead of love being the thing that binds the world together, now the loudest voices now are often those of self-centredness and anger.

At this point, a lot of artists would simply give up on their work of art and start over. In the film “Waterwalker,” Bill Mason, on a canoe trip across Lake Superior, stops and paints a picture of a waterfall. Bill Mason was not only a great film-maker, but he was also a very skilled painter. Thanks to the way the film is edited, you see the painting build up in just a few seconds. It’s wonderful! Then Bill stands back to admire his handiwork. Unlike us, however, he is less than satisfied, and, to the viewers’ horror, he takes the canvas off the easel…and dumps it into the campfire!” Many artists are like that. God, however, is not that kind of Artist. God is more patient than Bill Mason! God decides, instead of trashing this world, to restore his work of art to its original glory and, what’s even better, God invites human beings to co-operate with him and become his apprentices in the project.

God starts with one couple, Abraham and Sarah, and tells them “Through your descendants I’m going to create a great nation and their job will be to bring my healing to the whole world.” The story of this nation, the Jews, is told in the book traditionally called the Old Testament. This is Act 3.

In Act 4, God’s restoration project reaches a crucial stage. God writes a part for himself in the drama of human life. It’s as if Shakespeare should write himself into the script of Hamlet to be one of the characters in his own creation. That way we can see what God is like in a way we can relate to, and we can learn what God’s dreams are for us and for the world. This character in the play we call by the name Jesus.

And there is Act 6: the Bible doesn’t tell us a whole lot, but it does give tantalizing glimpses of the end of the story, when Jesus will return, the earth will be restored to its original beauty and then some, and God will set everything to rights. J.R.R.Tolkien (who wrote The Hobbit) made up a new word to describe this. Since it was the opposite of a catastrophe, not so much turning the world upside down as turning it right way up, he called it a “eucatastrophe”, a good catastrophe. This is the final act, although, as C.S.Lewis says at the end of the Narnia series, this is “only the beginning of the real story… the beginning of Chapter One of the Great Story which no-one on earth has read.” But we’re jumping ahead.

You may have noticed I missed out Act 5. (That was a deliberate mistake! If you spotted it, help yourself to an extra cookie.) The reason is a simple one: Act 5 has not been written. It’s being written today!

One writer, Tom Wright, says this: suppose a previously unknown play of Shakespeare’s was discovered, but with one act, Act 5, missing. What could you do? He suggests that what you could do is get together the world’s most experienced Shakespearian actors, get them to read Acts 1 through 4, and Act 6 till it is second nature to them, and then set them loose to act out the play, -and when they came to Act 5 they would ad lib! If they’re going to do that well, they would have to be true to Acts 1 through 4, and it would have to connect with the start of Act 6.

Now, says Tom Wright, that’s where we are in relation to the Christian story. God has given us a framework for our lives in Acts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. All the clues for how to act out Act 5 are right there. And God says to us, Do you want a part in my story? I’d love for you to be a part of it.

This blending of our story into God’s story is illustrated very powerfully in the movie, The Neverending Story.

The hero, Bastian, is reading a book entitled “The Neverending Story,” but as he reads, he discovers little by little that he is a part of the story. When the hero Atreyu is hungry, Bastian decides he is hungry too, and eats his lunch. When Atreyu meets a scary monster, Bastian screams: then he reads in the book, “Atreyu heard a scream, and looked around, but there was nobody there.” Weirder and weirder.

At the end of the book, the land of Fantasia, where the story takes place, is in danger of being destroyed by the Nothing. Nothing can save it except an earthling child who will give the Childlike princess a new name. Bastian realizes he is the boy, and full of fear and trepidation, calls out the Princess’ new name, “Moon Child!” And Fantasia is saved.

In a sense, the Christian story is like this. It is as though God is writing the story of the universe, and invites us to be a part of it. Indeed, many people, as they read the stories of Jesus in the Bible, find they have the same sense that Bastian had, that somehow they are meant to be a part of this story, that it applies to them in a way they did not expect or even hope for.

But there’s one more thing. Among all the Oscars, there is one they never give, and I think they should, and that’s for casting director. So much depends on getting the right actors for the right parts. (Imagine “Titanic” with Sean Penn instead of Leonardo diCaprio, and you’ll get the general idea.)

In the story God is writing about our world, it is as though Jesus is the casting director. And whenever anyone comes and says to him, I’d really like to be a part of God’s story, Jesus smiles and says, “You’re welcome. I have just the part for you. It’ll stretch you, there will be adventures you could never have imagined, sometimes it will be hard, but it will bring you joy. And it will be the right part for you, the part for which I made you in the beginning.”

In the next four sessions, we’ll look in more detail at different acts from this story, and see how they relate to today’s world where we are invited to live out God’s story.

It’s a crazy mixed-up world: but why?

People disagree about most things in our world: whether it’s politics or religion, morality or fashion. You name it. But there is one thing on which there is agreement around the world. It doesn’t matter whether you ask an Aboriginal leader in Australia, a black woman bishop in the US, a rice farmer in China, or a fisherman in Newfoundland. They will all agree about this one thing: something is wrong with our world. I don’t think you would find anyone anywhere who would say, “What do you mean, something’s wrong? The world is perfect just the way it is.”

Our awareness of this starts young. Calvin complains to his father: “It’s not fair.” And his father (like parents the world over) replies, “Life’s not fair.” But Calvin has the last word: “Yes, but why is it never fair in my favour?”

There are at least five possible explanations of why the world is a crazy mixed-up place:

1. The Universe is just a bad place

This point-of-view says, The universe is a sick joke, and human beings are the punch line. The problems of world are really not our fault. If there is a God, well, maybe we can blame God. And if there’s no God, well, we just have to blame the way the world is.

Samuel Beckett wrote a play which expresses this point of view. It’s called Breath and it lasts all of thirty-five seconds. The curtain goes up, and the stage is in darkness. The sound of a newborn baby’s cry is heard, and then two things happen: you hear a breath being drawn slowly in, and, at the same time, the lights slowly go up on the stage, to reveal….a pile of garbage! Then, the breath is let out, just as slowly, and at the same time (you guessed it) the lights are dimmed, until the stage is in darkness again. There’s a second cry, and the play is over.

What is the message? Life is over in a single breath, and at the heart of it is nothing more than a pile of garbage. If Beckett is right, then it’s no wonder we have a hard time hanging on to goodness, truth and beauty. The universe is a pile of garbage: what do you expect?

But it’s difficult to argue that human beings have nothing to do with the state of world. Most people would agree that human beings share at least some of the blame. One way to look at this is to say:

2: Society needs to change

If human beings are party of the problem, maybe we can change the way society functions, and then things will improve.

Maybe what’s wrong is a lack of education. You can think of programs for educating people out of their racism, for example; or programs to re-educate men who abuse their wives. Could we maybe educate ourselves out of all our problems?

What if every country in the world was democratic? That would be another way to improve society. Wouldn’t that make the world a better place and solve a lot of our problems? Then dictators like Saddam Hussein could simply be voted out of office. Unfortunately, problems still happen even in democracies: the Colorado shootings didn’t happen in Iraq or in Kosovo for that matter.

So maybe these solutions don’t go far enough. For one thing, they tend to blame other people: I’m OK, they’re the problem. If only they would be more like us. Other voices, including the Christian one, would say, nobody is innocent in the problems of the world. We are all implicated. It can be a cop-out to blame society, as Calvin discovered. “I’ve concluded that nothing bad I do is my fault. Being young and impressionable, I’m the helpless victim of countless bad influences. An unwholesome culture panders to my undeveloped values and pushes me to maleficence. I take no responsibility for my behaviour. I’m an innocent pawn. It’s society’s fault!” To which his father responds, “Then you need to build some character. Go shovel the walk.” Calvin complains as he begins his chore: “These discussions never go where they’re supposed to.”

So maybe:

3: Human nature is the problem

Victor Hugo, who wrote the book on which Les Miz was based, believed this. He put it this way: “The heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart.”

Canadian novelist Timothy Findley has a fascinating paragraph in his book,
Famous Last Words. The novel is set in the Second World War, and he comments on those who collaborated with the Nazis like this:

“We should never have done these things,” they will say, “were it not that men like… Mussolini, Dr. Goebbels and Hitler, drove us to them. Otherwise, we should have stayed home by our quiet hearths and dandled our children on our knees and lived out lives of usefulness and peace.” [Findley comments:] Missing the fact entirely that what they were responding to [in Hitler etc.] were the whispers of chaos, fire and anger in themselves.
This is powerful stuff! Nazis are part of our cultural mythology, the ultimate symbol of evil! But Findley dares to say Nazi evil was not caused by the nature of the universe, nor by the structures of society, nor just by a few evil individuals, but by something present, latent, inside human nature. That’s heavy.

The trouble is, once we start blaming human nature, the problem begins to become rather personal. Calvin discovers this for himself: “People are so self-centred”, he complains. “The world would be a better place if people would stop thinking about themselves and focus on others for a change.” “Gee,” asks Hobbes, “I wonder who that might apply to?” Calvin’s answer is immediate: “Me! Everyone should focus more on me!”

If problem is human nature, I am human too, so that makes me part of the
problem:

4: There’s something wrong with me

Earlier this century, there was a correspondence in The Times newspaper of London on this topic of what is wrong with the world. Various famous and learned writers voiced their opinions. But the last letter was also the shortest, and it brought the correspondence to an end. It was from G.K.Chesterton, the Catholic journalist. His letter simply said:

Dear Sir:
What is wrong with the world? I am.
Yours sincerely,
G.K.Chesterton”
Now the trouble with this diagnosis is that it is so radical! If we are the problem, if each one of us contributes to what is wrong with the world, what can we do to help ourselves? Who is left to do anything about it?

That leaves the last circle, and it’s specifically a spiritual one. If we ask what exactly it is that is the problem with me, the answer concerns:

5: My spirituality: I am out of step with God

This view says that the world is in a mess because we have made ourselves the centre of the world, instead of giving God God’s rightful place at the centre.

It’s as though the human race is like an orchestra, capable of the most marvelous music when we follow the conductor. But the reason the music so often sounds chaotic is because we no longer bother to follow God the conductor.

Frederick Nietzsche was an atheist, but he understood clearly the consequences of turning your back on God. In his Parable of the Madman, he writes:

What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now?
Nietzsche sees that we are like planets, designed to revolve around God our sun, which gives us our light and heat. But, says Nietzsche, we have unchained ourselves from that orbit, and made ourselves free, but as we move away from the sun, we move also further and further away from the only true source of heat and light.

Jesus told a story which makes the same point as Nietzsche, but uses a different metaphor. And Jesus’ story has a different ending: he tells us what we can do about our situation.

The story of two sons…

There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father,”Father, give me my share of the estate.” So he divided his property between them.

Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country, and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no-one gave him anything.

When he came to his senses, he said, “How many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death? I will set out and go back to my father and say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven ans against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son: make me like one of your hired men.’ So he got up and went to his father.

But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him: he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.

The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and againt you, and am no longer worthy to be called your son…’ But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and let’s kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.

(The Gospel according to Luke, chapter 15)

Jesus is saying that the problem is this: as a race and as individuals we have turned our backs on God and left our spiritual home. We’ve gone our own way, done our own thing. We’ve ignored God’s norms and direction for our lives

The only way to cure disease is by dealing with what caused it in the first place. Like the boy in the story, we have come to our senses, return to our Creator, and say we’re sorry.

And the good news is that, in spite of all we’ve done, before the speech is even out of our mouths, God is delighted to take us back and throws a great party to celebrate.

The theme of the next Christian Basics session is “What’s So Special About Jesus?” Let me leave you with this thought. There is a strange thing in this story: although Jesus and the cross on which he died are central to classic Christian belief, here Jesus himself tells a story about the heart of Christian belief, and he doesn’t come into it, and neither does his death! Why is that? We’ll pick up that question next time.

What’s so special about Jesus?

In the 1960s, lots of people liked Jesus but didn’t believe in God. I guess Jesus was seen as a rebellious kind of guy, while God was an authority figure. You can see why the 60s might react the way they did!

Now, it seems to be the other way round. Everybody believes in God but a lot of people ask, What’s special about Jesus? Why do I need Jesus? Jesus just complicates things.

I guess now God is a nice vague word, and can mean whatever you want, whereas Jesus is pretty specific: a particular guy in a particular place, at a particular time in history, saying some particularly awkward things. In a world of no-name-brand spirituality he sticks out like a sore thumb.

So in this series on basic Christian spirituality, it’s important to ask this question: What so special about Jesus?

In the history of Christian faith, three things about Jesus seem to have stood out as special, whichever branch of Christianity you look at. The first is to do with:

1. Jesus’ life

As the first Christians reflected on the life of this strange, intriguing, compelling man, they wrestled with who exactly who on earth he was. And as they tried to account for everything they had seen him do and heard him say, they found themselves pressed to a conclusion that seemed unthinkable, a reality that was scary and overwhelming but irresistible, and for which they really didn’t have the right words in their theological dictionaries. Yet what alternative did they have but to try and say it? So they gulped and things like:

“Jesus perfectly mirrors God…” ó so that if God stood in front of a mirror, what he would see reflected back is the face of Jesus?

“… and is stamped with God’s nature.” ó this is a stamp like the face stamped on a coin: the die has the face of the queen on it, and the coin has the exact same face of the queen on it: well, says the writer, God and Jesus are like that.
Or they say this kind of thing:

“Jesus had equal status with God… When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, becoming human!”
Remember these are Jewish writers, who believed passionately in one God and only one God. But their experience of Jesus led them to rethink what it meant to say there is one God.

Think of it like this. Imagine a Calvin and Hobbes strip where the two of them are arguing about how they came into being. One (and in my imagination it’s Calvin) believes they were created by a great invisible Cartoonist and the other (Hobbes is generally the more cynical one) thinks they simply happened through inkblots coming together by chance on a page. They can’t decide for sure.

Bill Watterson, the cartoonist, listens to this argument, and decides to help them out. But how can he communicate with these characters who exist in two dimensions, and who talk in bubbles coming out of their heads? He lives on a totally different level of existence that they could never understand.

Then he hits on a plan. He creates a new cartoon character, and draws him into the strip. His name is Bill Watterson. He exists in two dimensions, just like Calvin and Hobbes, and he communicates through speech-bubbles. And this cartoon says to Calvin and Hobbes all the things the “real” Bill Watterson would want to say; and he behaves towards them in the way Bill Watterson behaves.

This means that Calvin and Hobbes can get to know their creator in a way that’s real even though it’s limited, and, of course, they can decide whether or not they want to relate to him.

Christians believe that this is precisely what God has done. Our understanding of God is limited because of course God is far more complicated than we could figure out for ourselves. But God has written himself into the script of the cartoon strip we call human life, and said those things God wanted to say, and shown his character by the things he did, so that we could understand something of what God is like, and, of course, choose whether or not we want to relate to the Creator. And as Christians understand it, when God did that, the name he was called by was Jesus.

So Jesus shows us what God is like in a way that no-one else has ever done.

This is the first reason Jesus is special: he shows us in a unique way what God is like. We’re not left to figure it out for ourselves. The second reason Jesus is special is not to do with his life but to do with his death:

2. The death of Jesus

In the earliest biographies of Jesus (the Four Gospels), the story of the death of Jesus takes up no less than one-third of the pages. This is rather strange! I have an 800- page biography of John F. Kennedy at home: guess how many of those pages are taken up with describing his death? Ten. A classic biography of Muhammad has 250 pages, of which 6 are devoted to his last year, and one to his death. But that doesn’t seem strange, does it? What’s important is a person’s life, surely?

So what was so special about the death of Jesus that caused his biographers with one accord to make it a major theme of his biography?

Classic Christian spirituality over the centuries has used shorthand explanations for this, such as, “Christ died for our sins”. But what on earth does that mean?

There is no one simple explanation. There are many theories which may help, but none of them is ever going to be adequate. Anything important can’t be described in just one way. Let me offer you an illustration I personally find helpful:

The movie, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? is about a dysfunctional family. There is a mother, two sons and two daughters. The mother, Darlene Cates, has not stirred from the couch in front of the TV for years, and is painfully overweight as a result. The younger son, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, plays a mentally challenged 13 year old whose main joy in life is climbing the water tower in the little town where they live, so that the fire department have to come and rescue him. Finally, the police get tired of dealing with him, and decide to lock him in a cell to teach him a lesson.

His mother decides to do something about it. She goes to the police station, and demands, “Give me my son!” with such passion and authority that the police, breaking all regulations, release him into his mother’s care. As they leave, however, a crowd forms. They stare at the mother, giggling and whispering behind their hands. One man even takes a photograph. But she doesn’t care: she has her son.

Forgiveness is never cheap. The mother had a choice. She could have said,
Well, he did a stupid thing, he needs to pay for it, it’ll teach him a lesson ó all the sorts of things we say when we’re concerned for justice. And she would have stayed comfortably at home. But she decides that although she has not done anything wrong ó the police are not mad at her ó she is willing to go through suffering and humiliation so that her son doesn’t have to suffer, and so she can get him back.

In the same way, we have done wrong. We are like the runaway kid in Jesus’ story we had read in Part 2. We have hurt God and messed up God’s world.
Like the mother in the movie, God had a choice: God could have said, Hey, let them suffer, they got themselves into this mess, let them pay for it. That’s fair. But God chose the other option: to come after us in person to get us back, even though it meant suffering and humiliation. And what we see in the crucifixion of Jesus is the suffering God goes through in order to be reconciled with us. The pain of Jesus’ death was the pain we caused to God’s love.

I asked you in Part 2 why there is no mention of a cross in the story of the runaway boy. The answer is: there is a cross in the story, but it’s not a visible cross. The cross is in the heart of the father, who chose not to punish his runaway son but absorb the pain and keep it inside. That pain in the heart of God is made visible in the crucifixion of Jesus.

That’s the second thing that’s so special about Jesus. The third thing concerns what happened after his death.

3. Jesus’ resurrection

Jesus died on a Friday ó and there seems to be no serious doubt that he was really dead ó but by early Sunday morning his followers, terrified, defeated and demoralized by his death (of course), began to say he was alive again, and got to the point where they were even willing to die for their conviction that he was alive.

This was not like people saying Elvis is alive: if Elvis is alive, it’s because he never really died. Nor is it like people in the 60s and 70s saying about Che
Guevara, the South American freedom fighter, “Che lives” ó meaning, his life is still an inspiration to us as it was when he was alive; or maybe that his spirit inspires us.

No, the followers of Jesus were convinced that he had come back to them in a physical form which was recognizable yet mysterious. They said he had conquered death. They said this showed that Jesus was lord over heaven and earth.

Could such a thing be true? It depends how you think of the world. If there is no God, then no, probably not. But if there is a good God like the God Jesus taught about, then it would make perfect sense. In fact, what would be really puzzling is if Jesus had not been brought back from death!

Yet even some of the first followers of Jesus doubted, and God has kindly given us lots of evidence to help us with our doubts. In 1930, for instance, a journalist named Frank Morison tried to write a book that would show that the resurrection never happened. By the time he had examined the evidence, however, he realized that book couldn’t be written. Instead, he wrote a book setting out the evidence in incredible detail (which, in my humble opinion, makes it a very boring book) called Who Moved the Stone? which is still in print, and the first chapter of which is called “The Book That Refused to be Written”, in homnour of his original intention. (Incidentally, Morison’s book was one my wife Deborah read as a student at Oxford when she was figuring out her personal faith.)

Why does this matter? It matters because, if it is true, then the world is a quite different place from what it is if it is not true. For instance, if it is true, then it means God has put his stamp of approval on all that Jesus did and said, and we should sit up and take notice. It also means that when we face death (our own or others’) we don’t need to be afraid because there is someone available who has overcome death, someone we can trust to take us through it.

What’s so special about Jesus? Lots of things, but in particular, his unique life, death and resurrection.

When my daughter Anna was about six years old, one Sunday morning before church, she said to me, “Daddy, I like Jesus, but I hate church.” It can be a helpful distinction. Many people in our society say things like, “I’m really not into organized religion.” (Though it could be argued that organized religion is a bit of an oxymoron anyway.) That’s OK, but it is a tragedy if they throw out the baby with the bathwater, and miss out on Jesus just because they don’t like church.

The important question for us to consider in figuring out our spirituality is not whether we like church, but as Jesus once asked his first followers, “Who do you say that I am?”

The School of Jesus

Whatever you think of political correctness, it has had some good spin-offs. One of them is that we try to call people what they want to be called. That seems to me a matter of simple courtesy. So we no longer call the Inuit Eskimos because they call themselves Inuit; we no longer call the First Nations Indians because that’s not who they are. (I am waiting for this fine principle to be applied to the Welsh, since the word Welsh is actually an Old English word meaning foreigner. But I’m not holding my breath.)

But by the same token, Christians haven’t always called themselves Christians.

Christian is a label that was stuck on them by people who were not Christians.
(In fact the word is only used three times in the whole of the Bible: it doesn’t seem to have been that important to them.) The first Christians had another word for themselves which they preferred, and which they used far more frequently, and which actually tells you a lot about how they understood Christian faith.

That name by which the first Christians called themselves most often was “disciple.” And the literal meaning of the word “disciple” is actually “learner” or “student.” For them, it seems, when they thought of Christian faith, the thing that came to their mind first was not church or services or the ten commandments or being a good citizen… but learning! Which means that for them the church was first and foremost a school, and the Christian life a process of learning.

Well, that raises some interesting questions. Where is this school? What is it for? What do you learn there? What are the teaching methods? Who are the teachers? And where are classes held? And can you graduate? Is it true that the graduate programs are out of this world?

The easiest question to answer is: who is the teacher? Jesus! Many times in the pages of the earliest biographies of Jesus he is called teacher; and a couple of times he calls himself by the same title.

But what is it that he teaches? What is the curriculum in this school Jesus is running? In the 1940s, Dorothy Sayers wrote a series of plays for radio based on the life of Jesus and called The Man Born to be King. In one of those plays she puts into the mouth of Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus’ first followers, the sort of thing Mary might have said to Jesus as she recalled the first time she met him:

“Did you know? My friends and I came there that day to mock you. We thought you would be sour and grim, hating all beauty and treating life as an enemy. But when I saw you, I was amazed. You were the only person there who was really alive. The rest of us were going about half-dead ñ making the gestures of life, pretending to be real people. The life was not with us but with you-intense and shining, like the strong sun when it rises and turns the flames of our candles to pale smoke. And I wept and was ashamed, seeing myself such a thing of trash and tawdry. But when you spoke to me, I felt the flame of the sun in my heart. I came alive for the first time. And I love life all the more since I have learnt its meaning.”

(The Man Born to be King, 186f)
Sayers explains elsewhere: “What she sees in Jesus is the Life, the blazing light of living intensely.”

What did Jesus come to teach? He said on one occasion, “I have come so that people might have life and have it in all its fullness!” (John 10:10) That’s it!

Jesus is a teacher of life: he teaches us how to live as God’s person in God’s world in God’s way, and in the friendship of God. That’s what people saw in Jesus: it’s what gave him that unique quality of being fully alive; it’s what attracted people like Mary to be his followers. They wanted to learn the life that they saw in Jesus.

In a sense this is true of any good teacher: they communicate much more than just their subject. Think, for example, of Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poets’ Society: John Keating is supposedly an English teacher, but in practice he teaches his students about life with a capital L.

But then I want to ask: how do you learn this kind of life? I’ll tell you how you don’t learn it, and in this Jesus is different from John Keating . Some time ago I received in the mail a Bible study guide entitled “Jesus the Teacher” with a picture of a classroom on the cover! I didn’t spend a lot of time on it, because it was so deeply wrong. Jesus’ kind of learning never took place in a classroom with a blackboard and a big desk. Jesus’ school is not an academic kind of place. The school of Jesus is not a school for passing on information. (You may know the definition of a lecture as the process whereby the professor’s notes become the student’s notes without passing through the minds of either. Jesus was not into that kind of learning!)

So in the school of Jesus, how do we learn? Jesus has a specially vivid image for this:

“Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light..” – Matthew 11:28-30

There in the centre of this saying of Jesus is his offer to be our teacher: “Come… learn from me…”

But he gives us a powerful image to explain how we learn. He says, “Take my yoke upon you.” Before we came to Canada twenty-something years ago, I thought I understood this image. Jesus was saying he is the farmer, I am the ox, I submit to his yoke, and as I pull the plough he follows behind and directs me. Right? Probably not. Soon after we came to Canada, we went to one of those living museums where everything is done as it was 100 years ago. And I saw there something that completely changed my understanding of Jesus’ words: an ox-cart pulled by two oxen yoked together. And it was explained to us that one use of the double yoke was to train young oxen. The farmer would link together an experienced ox and a young ox, and, as they pulled the plough together, the older ox would demonstrate how it was done: the discipline, the patience, the obedience, the stick-to-itiveness.

That’s what Jesus is saying by this picture. He is saying, I am already wearing the yoke of being God’s person in God’s world. Come and walk alongside me, share the yoke I’m already carrying, and I will teach you what I know.

What kind of learning would that be? It will be very different according to who we are. But just as in those first days, it may well involve such things as:
Learning to be generous with what we have, perhaps more generous than we feel comfortable with at first; learning to express our anger in more constructive ways; learning how to forgive; learning to come alongside someone at work or at school who is a bit of a misfit; Jesus the Teacher may also want to mess with our career plans, or retirement plans, or holiday plans. The list is endless: the lessons of Jesus’ school are as diverse as the situations people can find themselves in in the course of a week!

There are encouragements here.

Jesus says he is a teacher who is gentle and humble. Many of us have had teachers who are not like that: they delight in showing how clever they are, and in putting down their students’ mistakes. Jesus is the opposite: encouraging, nurturing, patient with our mistakes, taking time and trouble with us individually, to help us learn.

Then too he says his yoke is “easy.” For anyone who has been a follower of Jesus more than about 24 hours, that sounds a little strange. Being a Christian is often tough! The original biographies of Jesus, from which this saying is taken, were written in Greek, the main language of Jesus’ world, and I am told that the Greek word for “easy” can be better translated “well-fitting.” My yoke is well-fitting. Actually, we still use the word “easy” this way. If you’re looking for a pair of new shoes, you might try a couple of pairs that really don’t fit and then you find one that’s just right, and you say, “That’s a really easy fit”, you mean it’s comfortable, it’s right for you. This is the sense in which Jesus’ yoke is “easy”, it’s well-fitting: not that it’s no sweat but that it fits us well. After all, in those days, yokes were made one by one for individual oxen, there was no mass production, so Jesus is saying, my yoke is made specially for you. It doesn’t mean there won’t be work, it doesn’t meant there won’t be difficultyñ but it will still be the yoke I made for you.

In Part 5, the theme is “Where do we go from here?” and we’ll think about some of the nitty-gritty ways the school of Jesus functions in practice. But right now, I want to give an opportunity for us to consider what this says to each of us. After all, Jesus was being pretty practical when he said these words. I know that because he begins this saying with the words, “Come to me!” That wasn’t a theoretical statement, and his hearers knew it.

In my imagination, when he had finished, and the crowds were going home for supper, there were some who didn’t leave straight away. They pushed through the crowd and came up to Jesus, maybe a little hesitantly, and said something like this, “Jesus, you know what you said about being your student and sharing your yoke? I really think I’d like to do that. Is there some kind of application form? Do I have to get transcripts?” And whoever that person was, whatever they had done, wherever they had been in their spiritual journey, Jesus said, “That’s great. You’re welcome. We’re just going to have supper. Come eat with us and I’ll introduce you to the others.”

In one sense, nothing has changed since that first day. I talked in Part 3 about Jesus coming back from death and being alive forever. So we can speak to him just as if he were present here in the flesh. And the offer of becoming his student, learning to live as God’s person in God’s world in God’s way, still stands. And his invitation, “Come to me”, is just as real today as it was 2,000 years ago. And now, just as then, he waits to see what we will say.

Let me offer you the sort of thing you may wish to say to Jesus in response to his invitation. If it makes sense to you, you may wish to echo these words silently in your heart to him.

Jesus -

Thank you for inviting me to join your school.

Thank you for offering yourself as my Teacher, and for shaping a yoke just for me.

I do want to learn what it means to live as God’s person in God’s world in God’s way.

Please enroll me as a student in your school.

Teach me to share your yoke and to be your faithful student day by day.

Amen

Where do we go from here?

I knew a family a few years back where the couple had adopted twins, and they were proving to be quite a handful. While I was there, one came in from the yard where she had been playing with a friend, and said to her father, “Daddy, was I adopted or adapted?” He said with a wry smile, “You were adopted, sweetheart: we’re still working on the adapting.”

One reason I’ve never forgotten that exchange is that in our relationship with
God also, those two processes take place. There is adopting and there is adapting. I suggested in Part 4 that the Christian life is like a school, but
Jesus also taught his first followers to think of themselves as family, as sisters and brothers, with God as their Father. First we are adopted into God’s family, baptism is the symbol or sacrament of that, but then God adapts us to the culture and values of God’s family.

Paul, in one of his letters, summarizes this aspect of being a follower of Jesus. You can almost sense his excitement as he writes about our adaptation:

All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

(Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 3, verse 18)
God’s plan is to make us like Jesus, not with a long white robe and sandals and a beard and piercing eyes (or however you envision Jesus), but in character: God longs for us to have the same blazing compassion, the same impatience with hypocrisy, the same passion for justice, the same generosity and creativity and single-mindedness we see in Jesus.

But how is such an unlikely thing ever going to happen? Think of it in terms of a wheel with four spokes.

The centre is where we start: we are adopted into God’s family, or (to use last week’s picture) we join the school of Jesus. The circumference is when we are fully adapted to be all that God has in mind for us, like Jesus. The four spokes of the wheel indicate four of the most important ways God has made available for us to get from the centre to the outside. So what are they?

Paul says that this change comes about in us by our “seeing the glory of the
Lord.” God’s glory is simply God as God really is. So how on earth do we “see the glory of the Lord”?

One way is through:

1. Worship

Calvin thinks he understands worship. He has waiting for weeks for his free beanie from the cereal company, and he thinks he needs a little divine assistance. He prays ñ sort-of: “Please let my beanie come today! I promise I won’t ever be bad again! I’ll do whatever you want!” Of course, when he gets home, it hasn’t arrived, and he screams at the sky, “WHAT’S IT TAKE, HUH?!” For Calvin, it seems, worship is a way of bribing God to give you what you want.

But no. In fact, one reason for worship is that it helps us see God more clearly as God really is. Every part of worship speaks about what God is like, what God has said, what God has done, whether it’s the Bible readings, the songs, the prayers, confessing our sins and being forgiven, the talk or sermon, or the creeds.

And supremely, we are reminded of what God is like in the service that is the heart of Christian worship, the Communion, Eucharist, Mass, Lord’ s Supper, it has many names. Why? Well, because it speaks of the death of Jesus. And, in Christian tradition, it’s in the death of Jesus that we see in highly concentrated form what God is like: God’s love, God’s patience, God’s opposition to evil and violence, God’s willingness to forgive, God’s welcoming of us whatever we have done.

Worship, then, is spoke number one, whether it is private worship, by myself in my room; or public worship, with others who feel the same way about God.

2. The Bible

An experiment was done a few years back to see how far it is true that married couples get to look like each other. They took photos of the couples when they were first married, mixed them all up, and got outsiders who didn’t know the people to try and pair them up. They failed dismally. Then they took photos of the same couples after they had been married 20, 30, 40 years, and did the same experiment. This time, most of the couples got paired up correctly. Over the years, as those couples had spent time together, cared for one another, empathized with one another, they had come to mirror one another, and, without knowing it, begun to imitate one another’s gestures and body language and facial expressions.

In a sense it’s always true: we become more like those we admire and hang out with and model ourselves on. How can we do that with Jesus? One way is by reading the Bible. In a sense, it’s a way of spending time in the presence of Jesus, watching how he responds to people, how he deals with crises, how he expresses anger, and so on. And as we enter into the stories and see Jesus in action, without our being aware of it, we are little by little changed.

The earliest Christian writers don’t talk about married couples getting to look alike. But they do use other images to show how important they think God’s words are:

Peter says it’s as crucial as milk for a baby (1 Pet.2.2);

James says it’s like a mirror for you to see yourself in, the good and the bad, and can get yourself cleaned up (James 1.23);

Paul says it’s like a sword for the student of Jesus to oppose evil (Ephesians 6.17).

They are all telling us in different ways that reading the Bible provides our essential daily intake of spiritual vitamins. It doesn’t matter how we do it, but it does matter that we do it.

Calvin is not a great fan of books. As Hobbes is engrossed in a book, Calvin taunts him, “While you’re reading that book, I’m going to do something fun.” But when Hobbes suddenyl reads something that makes his eyes bug out and to scream, “AIEE!!” Calvin suddenly becomes interested: “I’ll just kind of read over your shoulder, OK?” Whatever the book is, it’s startling, maybe scary, engrossing. The Bible can have that same kind of effect. I was talking to a student who has recently become a follower of Jesus. And he said that for him, reading the New Testament for the first time was like that scene in The Truman Show (you may have seen it) where he is beating on the wall of his artificial world trying to get out. He said, “Like Truman, I realised there was a world on the other side, and I had to get to it.” Reading the Bible had that effect on him.

That’s why reading the Bible is spoke #2. Here’s #3. Jesus once told a story that went like this:

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was its fall.” – (The Gospel according to Matthew 7:24-27)

I have asked many groups now what they think the rock stands for in that story. I get a lot of different answers: it’s faith, it’s Jesus, it’s the words of Jesus, it’s the church. Actually, Jesus says quite clearly what it is. Listen again, and I’ll edit it to make it clear: “Anyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like… Anyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them…” Get it? The difference is what we do about the words of Jesus. In a word, do we obey and follow? So that’s #3:

3. Obedience

Obedience, of course, gets a bad press in our world. If you are obedient, it implies you’re passive, you can’t think for yourself, you’re not exercising your rights, someone’s oppressing you. Calvin knows this well. In response to a request from his teacher, Miss Wormwood, he begins to march zombie-like around the classroom, intoning mechanically: “I have been suc-cess-ful-ly pro-grammed to obey all di-rec-tives. I have no will of my own… my own… my own… my own.” Miss Wormwood is not amused.

But hold on: obedience is not always like this. My son Ben is a trumpeter. Some years ago, after several years of trumpet lessons, he was fortunate enough to have lessons with one of Canada’s top trumpeters. At the very first lesson, Mr. Olds said to Ben:

“Ben, your embouchure is totally wrong. I don’t know why no teacher has told you this before, but you’re going to have to change your whole technique. It’ll be tough, you won’t like it, it won’t come as naturally as the old way. But if you’re going to get anywhere with your trumpet, this is what you have to do.”
Do you think Ben did it? He might have said, “No way. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ll do what’s comfortable for me. Don’t cramp my style. I’m not going to conform to your old-fashioned stereotype. I just gotta be me!”

In fact, he didn’t. He worked and worked at what Mr. Olds had said until it became second nature and he could move ahead in his playing. Why did he do that? Because Bob Olds is perhaps the second best trumpet player in Canada and a great teacher. Did Ben obey him? Yup. Was that a good thing? Absolutely. Did it undermine Ben’s individuality and creativity? No way. In fact, it enabled him to develop his individuality and creativity way beyond what would have been possible otherwise.

So why do we obey Jesus? Because he’s a celestial policeman, ordering us around and stopping our fun? Of course not. Because he is (as we thought last week) a great teacher, The Great Teacher, the one best qualified to help us move ahead in our individuality and creativity. Why? Because God made us, and Jesus brings us the maker’s instructions for how we work best.

What might it mean to obey Jesus?

Stuart was a bright young business graduate. In his interview for a job with a top consulting firm, he was asked, “Mr. Allcock, it’s clear from your application that you are a man of… religious convictions. Does this mean that you would not be prepared to bend the truth on occasion for the good of the company?” Stuart smiled, and said, “No, you’re right. I wouldn’t be able to do that.” He didn’t get the job.

One friend of mine told me one day she had just received an unexpected windfall of $1,000. Wow, I exclaimed, what are you going to do with that? Without missing a beat, she said, “Well, you know Fred just lost his job? I felt God wanted me to give it to him. So I did.” Crazy? Maybe. Christlike? Definitely.

It’s different for each of us.

I still remember the first time I spoke to a class of philosophy students.
The professor, a Marxist atheist, had invited me to come and explain why I believe in God. I remember vividly how, as I went in, I said to a friend who came with me, “Going to your execution must feel a bit like this.” And then, when I came out an hour later, I said, “Wow. I feel as though I’ve got a reprieve, almost as though I’ve been… resurrected.” Why do something like that, that made me feel uncomfortable? Because I had a sense that for me this was obeying Jesus.

I suspect that obeying Jesus often involves risk and discomfort, simply because he wants to stretch and grow us until we are like him, and we have a distance to go! Hence spoke #4 is important:

4. Christian Community

If you had to come up with an image or a metaphor for the church, what would it be? A bunch of religious people doing strange religious things in a strange religious building?

The earliest Christian writers, as they watched this new group, the followers of Jesus, in action, some different metaphors came to their minds. They said, this bunch of people works together as smoothly as a body, they are as close as the stones in the wall of a temple, they care for each other like a family, they stand shoulder to shoulder against evil like an army, and they’re as difficult to tear apart as a loaf of bread (1Cor. 10.17). Wow! Those pictures speak of a closeness and an interdependence that is rare these days.

The students of Jesus need one another. David Watson once said:

If Christianity doesn’t begin with the personal, it doesn’t begin. But if it ends with the personal, it ends.

We can’ t make it by ourselves. God hasn’t made us that way. Even Calvin has to acknowledge this: “When I grow up,” he tells Hobbes, “I’m going to live a million miles away from everyone!” Hobbes asks, logically enough, “How will you survive? What will you eat?” and Calvin reflects, “Well, Mom could come by twice a day to cook, I suppose.”

Following Jesus is hard at the best of times, and the current of society is a different direction. Indeed, we need one another not only as we try to obey Jesus, but to help us learn to worship, and to help us read and understand the Bible too. That’s one reason there are so many different groups in this church: we know we need one another.

Well, four spokes to a wheel, all taking us to the same destination. Does it sound like a challenge? Earlier this century, Archbishop William Temple addressed precisely this question. He said:

If I were asked to write plays as good as Shakespeare’s, there’s no way I could ever come close. But if by some miracle the spirit of William Shakespeare could come and inhabit my personality, and influence my mind and fire my imagination, then I could write plays like Shakespeare’s.

In the same way, no way could I ever hope to become like Jesus. Yet if by some miracle the Spirit of Jesus could come and inhabit my personality, and influence my mind and fire my imagination, then it is possible that, little by little, I could become more like Jesus.

And, of course, that is the case: the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of God, is available to us to breathe life into our efforts to follow Jesus. That’s why Paul says at the end of his statement about adapting: “This comes from the
Lord, the Spirit.” He knew it from personal experience and from watching other followers of Jesus develop.

Being a follower of Jesus, then, doesn’t mean becoming a weirdo or a religious fanatic It means becoming more like two people: we become more like Jesus, a human being as human beings were always meant to be. But, by some mysterious chemistry, as we follow Jesus in these ways, we also become more like… ourselves, more the person whom God made us to be, the person God longs for us to become. There is no more wonderful destiny for any human being.

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