Totally Missing the Point

I had a good weekend last weekend. On Saturday, we went up to see my daughter Anna in her new house in Carlisle; this was an opportunity to help her get settled in. I built a flat-pack wardrobe, put up a curtain pole and curtains, and assembled her kitchen table and four chairs. This was a blessing for both of us - her because she’s tired from starting her new job, and me because I could help… When our son Tim and his wife Laura moved into their new house, it was 2020, and we were unable even to visit, let alone help, and I’ve had that ‘need’ hanging over me ever since.

On Sunday morning we bunked off church, as it was a gorgeous day, and went out on our bikes to enjoy the beauty of creation. In the evening we went to the monthly Taizé-style Eucharist at Christchurch - and that’s where this reflection really starts. The Taizé Eucharist has become a ‘don’t miss it’ event in our calendar - it’s such a beautiful way to encounter God. For one thing the vicar, Carol, has an angelic voice, which doesn’t hurt the atmosphere one bit. There’s singing, and scripture with a ‘reflection’, followed by silence, and the Eucharist.

The passage was as follows:

…Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? Matthew 16:21-26

As Carol said, Peter is, in a sense, ‘everyman’ - just like the rest of us, if you can get it wrong, Peter gets it wrong: if you can misinterpret something, Peter’s right there; if you can jump in with both feet and make an enormous, unedifying, splash, yes, that’s Peter to a Tee.

Here, despite being told clearly, by Jesus himself, what must happen, Peter has a very firmly fixed idea of what the messiah is, what the messiah ought to do, and is very definite about what must not happen if the messiah is to be a ‘success’. As far as Peter’s concerned, the messiah is coming to liberate Israel from the Roman Empire - He’s to lead a rebellion and throw them out. Simples. Dying is absolutely not on the cards. That, as far as Peter’s concerned, isn’t the plan - instead it’s abject failure. And so, as we see so clearly, with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, he just doesn’t ‘get it’. He’s not the only one - I think his was the general expectation - but being typically Peter he’s the most vociferous in saying so.

Then we get the infamous ‘get behind me Satan’ speech from Jesus. I don’t think Jesus meant it in any way literally - but He was clearly exasperated and needed to get His point across so it couldn’t be misinterpreted… Actually, I don’t think it helped a great deal - I don’t think Peter ‘got it’ until Jesus ‘restored’ him by the Sea of Galilee after the resurrection (see the Gospel of John chapter 21); at that point, finally, ‘the penny dropped’ and he understood the plan (possibly!) - and by the time he preaches to the crowd (Acts 2), he is ‘fully on board with the plan’.

I think we miss the point too. We too are obsessed with ‘liberation’ and ‘vengeance’ in a literally violent sense. So many Christians have got the impression (largely from misreading Jesus’ prophecies, and misinterpreting the words of Revelation) that when Jesus comes again it will be to ‘rescue’ only those who ‘love Him’, put everyone else to the sword and then throw them into a lake of fire to suffer for eternity. And yet…

There is good scriptural evidence that Jesus, and God, is not like that. The biggest hint is in John’s first letter in which we’re told that ‘God is love’. And we do our best to ‘wriggle’ out of that so we feel we are going to watch God have vengeance on our behalf, enjoy our pound of flesh, and see those who aren’t ‘on our side’ get what we feel they deserve.

It’s well worth considering that the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ detailed in Galatians 5:22-23, are actually attributes of God (the clue is in the name!) - as we can see there’s no anger, no vengeance, nothing like that at all in the list of ways in which our character grows to be like God’s:

…the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Scripture seems clear to me. God isn’t like us in our unrepentant, unsanctified, fallen, state. God’s plan is to forgive everyone, and to make everyone, and everything, whole again - as they were originally meant to be, without any ‘fall’ having happened. Indeed, I would say that, if They don’t succeed in this, then the entire ‘mission’ of Jesus was a failure. In a sense Jesus is a new Adam, recapitulating what went before; but getting right what Adam got wrong; and restoring creation and all within it in that way.

But we have ‘created God in our own image’ - making for ourselves a god who is petty, vindictive, spiteful, and interested primarily in rules and punishing whoever has broken them - so much like us in our ‘fallen’ state. Reading the gospels, and paying particular attention to Jesus’ interactions with the Scribes and the Pharisees, we ought to be able to see that God is not like that; God is not just like us but bigger and badder - if we think that we’ve got Them entirely wrong: we’ve got the wrong end of the stick; we’ve missed the point entirely.

But we have a good excuse for our error - it took Israel a very, very, long time to realise that our God isn’t like other Gods - and if we read the Old Testament carefully, in roughly the order in which it was written, we can see what we might describe as a progressive revelation (or a gradual dawning realisation), that God is much more, much more ready to forgive, and overall much nicer and much less like us in Their character than we (or they) expect or would like - and quite different from other gods of the time. And then we get Jesus, who is the perfect revelation of God because He is God!

In the words of Brian Zahnd: ‘God is like Jesus - God is exactly like Jesus - God has always been exactly like Jesus.’ (‘Beauty Will Save the World’ - and many other places in his writings). And so, if we see a portrayal of God as being other than like Jesus, we need to examine it and ask why does God appear that way - wherever that image occurs, even in scripture…

And that is probably a good point to stop this line of argument, before I find myself having to delve into exactly why scripture appears sometimes to portray God as other than ‘exactly like Jesus’ or, as Jesus Himself said:

He who has seen me has seen the Father. John 14:9

Let’s move on a little.

I had a strange, yet comforting, dream on Sunday night. Earlier this year, an old, old, family friend (in fact my mother’s oldest friend - she’d known her for about ninety years) died, but because of my mother’s failing mental faculties I didn’t find out until well afterwards - so I had no opportunity to ‘say goodbye’ to ‘Auntie Dolla’ in any meaningful way.

Briefly, when I was a child, she and her late husband ‘Uncle Mo’, and their family (four children around my age) had had a influence on me out of all proportion to the amount of time we actually spent together - they ‘modelled’ an entirely different way of ‘being family’ than I was used to. They were, at the time, my favourite people bar none, and I used literally to live for their next visit - I could ‘keep on going’ because I knew they would come again. They were all so kind, so loving. When they were around, life was very different.

My dream was incredibly vivid - it was a ‘re-creation’ of one of their family visits - Auntie Dolla, Uncle Mo, the kids and the caravan into which they carefully, joyfully, ‘folded’ their lives for weeks at a time. The most ‘significant’ part of the dream was right at the end - with them driving off and me stood, alone, in the place I always stood to wave them off - and oddly, as they drove off, there was only Dolla, leaning out of the car window in the way she did, waving madly and shouting (somehow only to me) ‘See you again soon!!’ And so, somehow, now it’s okay - I feel as though I have said my proper farewell to her. And I know I shall, one day, see her (and all of them) again, on that glorious day when Christ returns and restores everything and everyone to how they are meant to be.

Death will be no more;

mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

for the first things have passed away. Revelation 21:4