Being Mr. Kenny

John 11

Lazarus has died, and Martha meets Jesus first.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” It’s an accusation, an observation, a desperate cry of disbelief all at the same time.

Her sister, Mary, is inside. She is newly bereaved, still coming to terms with what’s happened. She hears that Jesus is here, and rushes out. In her grief and loss, she knows that Jesus brings hope. She falls at his feet, and says the same thing as Martha. And then, I imagine, she collapses in desperate sobs.

When Jesus sees her weeping, and when he sees the people who knew Lazarus weeping, he asks where they have buried Lazaurus, and someone shows him to the tomb. It’s now that Jesus weeps. He has been moved by everyone’s grief so far — moved as in gut-wrenched. The Bible simply says, “Jesus wept,” but the word in the Greek is more like “sobbed his heart out.” Maybe he falls to the floor with Mary.

His display of grief proves to everyone there that he loved Lazarus — really, really loved Lazarus, and that his death is like losing a part of himself.

I love this story. It shows the humanity of Jesus and the divinity of Jesus. In this story, they are one and the same thing. Jesus knows grief, but he knows hope, joy, peace, love and power. Even so, the grief is no less painful to him than it is to Martha and Mary and the people who knew and loved Lazarus.

Jesus tells Mary, “Your brother will rise again.” She replies that she knows he will rise in resurrection at the last day. Maybe this is something he has taught earlier — the resurrection of the dead. At the time there were different schools of thought, those who believed that there would be an afterlife, and those who didn’t. At any rate, it would have come up in conversation, after all Jesus was a religious leader, people would have asked him questions like this.

But Mary misses Jesus’ point. She thinks he is offering a platitude — “You’ll see him again in Heaven,” but he is saying more than that. Sometimes we can use belief in Heaven as an excuse for a dreary life now. We treat Heaven as a kind of cosmic 5 o’clock when we can finally clock off and go and do something we want to do instead.

Heaven is supposed to start now. This life is preparation for it. What are we delaying until Heaven? What part of life — passions, dreams, loves — have you decided will be fulfilled in Heaven, when really they are for this life?

People often hear words like “grace” and “mercy” and associate them with weakness. In fact, grace and mercy are not ‘less’ than justice in any way; they are more. It is bigger to forgive than it is to seek justice. There is nothing weak, unmanly or feeble about forgiveness. Forgiveness is definately not the soft touch.

Forgiving someone takes strength, determination and guts, and it hurts. Joseph was sold into slavery by his own brothers and wasted most of his youth in a jail cell as a result. The best years of his life, he spent in a dungeon, but he knew that he had to forgive. The Bible says that when he met his brothers again, years later, he was so anguished that he wept loud enough for Pharoah’s household heard him. Joseph was second in command of Egypt after the Pharoah: this is like Gordon Brown breaking down at the Dispatch Box in the Houses of Parliament, or at a press conference. Joseph’s pain went deep.

Jesus forgave, and he ended up battered, broken and bloody, finally dying on a cross.

Forgiveness isn’t cheap, nor is it easy. Forgiveness is seen as a way of letting people walk all over you and in a way this is true: forgiveness isn’t justice, forgiveness isn’t fair. Forgiveness isn’t just ‘letting something go’ — that’s a nonsensical idea. Forgiveness is a fight not to let yourself be dominated by hate and spite. Forgiveness is man’s work (unless you’re a woman, in which case it’s woman’s work), and it takes courage.

But forgiveness always brings healing, and not just to the forgiver, in the end. Seeking justice so often becomes seeking revenge. The Bible says “an eye for an eye” and many people see this as promoting vengeance, but in actual fact it was probably to limit vengeance. “You can pay that person back, but only for what they did, and then you must stop.” The Bible doesn’t condone vengeance, and clearly places mercy above justice.

Forgiveness breaks the vengeance cycle and brings wholeness. Genesis 45:14-15 reads: “Then he threw his arms around his brother Benjamin and wept, and Benjamin embraced him, weeping. And he kissed all his brothers and wept over them. Afterward his brothers talked with him.” Who knows what was said after all those years? But it brought restoration to his family. Later on it says that Joseph’s father’s spirit is revived: after all he’s been mourning a son for decades. As if that’s not enough, the whole family — and it’s a huge family — moves to Egypt to live in abundance instead of poverty.

Forgiveness is hard, but it’s worth it.

I found this a few months ago. It’s Gandhi talking about the Bible.

You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.

I’m very interested to hear what people think about that. Leaving essays in the comments is more than welcome!

I recently stumbled across The Christian Guide to Fantasy, a website set up by a Christian to review fantasy books after the release of the Harry Potter books, more specifically the opposition they received from many Christians.

I am genuinely curious about your opinion of this website, so please take a look and tell me what you think: the address is www.christianfantasy.net and the introduction is a good starting point.

I’m going to withhold from commenting for a little bit, so as not to bias your opinion :)

PS: I’m making this post stay at the top of the page to help generate a bit of discussion. New posts will still be made and will appear just under this one.

Update: Turns out I can’t be arsed to wait. Comments are open if you want to leave your opinion, but mine is one of being slightly pissed off, but not too much. I love fantasy novels (some of them) and I don’t happen to agree that a book can pollute your faith. But at least it isn’t all “God hates Harry Potter and abortionists and gays”. There’s always something positive if you look for it.

AA Gill is one of my favourite writers. He has a weekly TV-critic column in The Sunday Times culture magazine, and I do believe he can do no wrong. I usually despise TV critics because it seems such a lazy and pointless way to make money. I am a TV critic every time I change the channel and I don’t see me getting paid for it, so why should anyone else?

But I have always been quite happy for AA Gill to receive any accolade that might be bestowed upon him. He’s funny, clever and right all of the time. And he’s friends with Jeremy Clarkson, apparently, which I thought was quite interesting.

Anyway, I was reading his column a while ago, and I came upon this little gem regarding Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is the scientist every Christian loves to hate (or should that be hates to love?) because he is staunchly and stubbornly opposed to religious belief, and Mr Gill writes a very satisfying review of a program he recently appeared in.

(I will just note here, as an aside, that I read a very good book by Alister McGrath, Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life in which the author put forward a very sensible and rational rebuttal against some of Dawkins’ ideas. It was immensely refreshing in that it didn’t dismiss the theory of evolution as bunk and was, in fact, very persuasive).

Scientists all over the nation must hold their heads and groan whenever Richard Dawkins appears on television, as he did in The Root of All Evil? (Monday, C4). He is such a terrible advertisement such an awful embarrassment, the Billy Graham of the senior common room. His splenetic, small-minded viciously vindictive falsetto rant at all belief that isn’t completely rooted in the natural sciences is laughable. Dawkins is a born-again Darwinist, an atheist, so why is he devoting so much blood pressure and time to arguing with something he knows doesn’t exist? If it’s not there, Richard, why do you keep shouting at it? He looks like a scientific bag lady screaming at the traffic, and watching him argue with a fundamentalist Christian, you realise they were cut from identical cloth, separated at birth. Dawkins is, of course, the archetype of a man who protests too much, and I’d say he’s well on his way to, if not a Pauline, then at least a Muggeridgian conversion. Any day now, he’ll be back on telly quoting CS Lewis.

AA Gill, The Sunday Times, January 15, 2006.

When is this man going to be knighted?

Just stumbled across this website. It’s about a documentary which questions the origins of Christianity. I watched a clip which talked about how the gospels were written. I noticed one factual error, which was that the narrator stated that Mark was the earliest Gospel and that the other three were clearly derived from it. This is not true: the first three are clearly related in some way, either because two of them were copied from another, or that all three drew on an unknown source (called “Q”) now lost. The fourth Gospel, John, is completely separate and was written independently. This is the first thing anyone learns when they begin to study the New Testament.

Now, I’ve not been in Church for about four months, and I don’t really know if I could call myself a Christian any more (at the least I’m questioning it), but it irritated me that a basic thing like this was left uncorrected.

It seemed that the documentary was designed to shock, which is always a shame because it doesn’t lend it very much credibility, especially when basic errors like that above have been made.

Links:

• The clip I saw
• The Movie’s website

I was mid-way through my ecotoxicology exam today, when some thoughts occurred to me about conserving the environment and how it might relate to Christianity. (This wasn’t entirely irrelevant, since ecotoxicology is the study of man-made chemicals and how they interact with environmental systems.) There are more important things to worry about, but I do think that the environment should still be a concern for Christians.

Firstly, we don’t own the Universe. When we pump the air full of toxic chemicals, we’re not only damaging it for ourselves (there is a link between air pollution and asthma, and other diseases) but we’re also messing around with Someone else’s property. It must hurt, and possibly even anger, God to see his creation damaged with such recklessness.

Secondly, the Universe does not revolve around us. While I heartily agree with the idea that we are the things most precious to God in the Universe, I don’t think that we are the only reason for its existence. Think about all the things that go on without humans: the Universe carries on just as well, or even better, in the absence of humans. There are parts of the Universe that humans will never see, or be able to visit—how can these be made ‘for’ us?

Note: This was originally posted in articles. It made more sense to put it on the blog.