the challenge

Christianity has come a long way in two thousand years, but it has not always kept in touch with its roots. Our church buildings, weekly services, creeds and various events now sort of keep the show on the road, but many people know there is more to authentic Christianity than this. In some situations belief has become an abstract theory divorced from daily life and Christian practice has become focussed on attendance or finance or just on keeping people busy maintaining what is essentially a specialised club. These things are signs of the death of a religion.  Perhaps it is time to have a fresh look at what Jesus actually taught.

Can we hear?

If we focus on the teachings of Jesus and what it meant to follow him, we come up with some surprising answers. Jesus, for example, did not speak about the theory of faith very much at all. Instead his message was a radical challenge to the way that people were living and his concern seems to have been with how people would receive what he had to say. The substance of that message was (as I have argued in Introducing Shalom)  Shalom, the good news of the great peace that was coming on the world, that included living in a new harmony with the earth and its creatures. And this message demanded a response.

The great challenge that Jesus brought  is spelt out most powerfully in the parable of the sower.  This  is the parable about parables, the story that sets the scene for the whole gospel.

The sower sows the seed, which is ‘the word’, the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, or Shalom, with the call to seek this great peace actively and urgently. This was the one thing that was needful about life. This was the pearl of great price. And people would respond differently. There is a grief about this parable. Jesus identifies himself with the prophetic experience of Isaiah, the great despair concerning those who would ‘see and not perceive’, who would ‘hear but not understand’. He brackets his words with ‘those who have ears to hear, let them hear’.

There are clearly many who would not hear the message of Shalom. They have erected defences against this good news, refusing to understand the need to respond. In our day we see the climate change sceptics refusing to hear, grasping at pseudo-science, and any opinion that will defend against them having to make a genuine and radical response to the environmental destruction that proceeds around us. Likewise within the church there are those with their rigid theories of salvation and criteria for who gets to heaven, who care little for this world and see Shalom as another ‘add on’ or even a distraction from what they proclaim as the gospel. Both sets of people are represented in the parable as the path.

Then there are the superficial ones, the rocky ground in the parable.  In the secular sphere these are the greenwash people. These are the companies, who are keen to embellish their green credentials, who will want their name on the latest initiative, but will actually do almost nothing about it. Similarly there are those in the church who are sympathetic to the message of Shalom, will say yes eagerly enough when challenged, but will actually do very little about it and, when the heat comes on with regard to other interests of the church, it will be quietly left aside.

You see the thing about the challenge of Jesus was that belief was tied into how you lived. This is inescapably obvious in the third picture of the parable, the seed sown among thorns, where the ‘cares of the world and the delight in riches and the desire for other things, enter in and choke the word…’There could surely be no more apt illustration of the place we find ourselves in today in the West. Pacified by retail therapy, embracing a view of progress measured by gross domestic product, we are bent on a process of earth destruction. Such thinking and practice are prevalent both within the church and outside it. The message of Shalom comes to us, but can we hear?

So, to summarise so far, the message of Jesus challenges us in terms of our will, are we willing to hear and respond? This challenge is deep and difficult for a people addicted to the lifestyles we have become accustomed to. Our defences against this message are both religious and secular, but they are in the end simply defences.  Dare we embrace the call of Jesus to a radical lifestyle change in response to Shalom?

Dare we follow?

It is important to notice that Jesus called his disciples to ‘follow’. It was through following that they would learn what they needed to know. So it might be wise for us to pay fresh attention to what such following actually involved.

Jesus’ disciples were to embrace a certain sort of vulnerability.

He charged them to take nothing for their journey, except a staff, no bread, no bag, no money in their belts…’

I believe this had a specific purpose. It was to allow them to experience the interconnectedness of all things, and to appreciate the gracious hand of God through other people and through creation itself.

So in this passage about their missionary journeys it is not hard to see how these stipulations would mean that they must involve themselves deeply in the communities which they visited, depending  vitally on their hospitality. ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ was to be their real prayer, not a pious platitude. It was to be a lesson about the interconnectedness of us all.

In our relatively affluent Western lives we are able to live more independently than many of our forbears. Material wealth has gone together with the promotion of individualism. We simply don’t need others like we used to. Both family life and neighbourhood life are at a low ebb and particularly so in the richest areas. It has been said that the great British disease is loneliness.

These instructions of Jesus also concerned the interconnectedness of all creation. Jesus understood the natural order as continually upheld by the gracious hand of God with each part dependent on the other. It is a view of the world remarkably in keeping with good science. What we now call ‘ecosystems’ were part of this biblical way of thinking.  Psalm 104 illustrates such ecosystem thinking, but it is also expressed by Jesus in the famous passage about seeking the kingdom of God where he admires the lilies of the field  and comments on the birds, saying

‘see the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them…’

What is fascinating about this is that it is a passage about not being anxious. Jesus is convinced that if we can discover this proper sense of the interconnectedness of all things we will find a certain peace.  Such peace is known to those who tend gardens. They don’t rush. They enjoy. The Alan Titchmarsh’s of this world are deeply attractive personalities even without making any overt spiritual connection. They clearly know the piece that comes from communion with the natural world.

This attitude is contrasted by Jesus with the pursuit of material wealth, or mammon. He is convinced that ‘you cannot serve two masters’. In Luke’s gospel this same lesson is spelt out in the story of the man whose land ‘brought forth plentifully’ and who built many barns to store it all then suddenly died. And God said ‘You fool’. The take home message of this story is said to be ‘ beware of all kinds of greed, for a person’s life does not consists in the abundance of their possessions’.  Jesus is deliberately contrasting the false peace that people seek through mammon with the true peace that is found through being in touch with God through nature. These two attitudes are diametrically opposed. It may be that the goals of our present society are more antagonistic to genuine Christianity that almost any other society in history.

If peace is one fruit of this way of life, contact with creation may inspire us in all sorts of ways. It is no coincidence that so many of Jesus’ metaphors were drawn from creation. He spent time meditating on it, feeling it, struggling with it. In that moment of great inner trial at the beginning of his ministry, where did he go? He went to the wild place, the wilderness, to make the big strategic decisions and to battle with his own inner life.

There is something about the voluntary vulnerability that Jesus commends that puts us in touch with life. We need this sense of being in touch with creation. As creatures of the earth ourselves we know our home and feel at peace when we are in tune with it.

So hard that it is impossible?

In this way Jesus drew together a community of people to live a radical lifestyle. It was vulnerable. It was in touch with creation. And it was to embrace the most radical of social forms. Jesus clearly worked against simple hierarchies. As James and John vied with one another for the positions of status so Jesus declared that other people might behave in this way but ‘it shall not be so among you’. At other similar moments he would put a child in the middle of them as a lesson in humility. Somehow they were to try to confront the status anxiety that besets so many of the groups in our society. 

Even harder than that, in the central defining passage of Mark’s gospel the disciples receive this call.

‘If any of you will come after me, you must deny yourself, take up your cross and follow. For whoever would save his life will lose it and whoever would lose his life would save it. What does it profit  if  you gain the whole world but lose your soul?’

What does this mean in practice? It seems so difficult as to be almost oppressive. Perhaps most of all these words are an affront to the ego, our great drive for recognition, fame and fortune.

As we search around our society it seems very reasonable to question whether these words about status anxiety and ego are possible to implement. Our institutions are full of people who are acutely aware of their status. So are our churches at times.  Wars are fought over the office reorganisation and who gets the best space. The life of some institutions is little more than a continuing ego struggle between dominant individuals. Wisdom may have taught us over the years to beware the idealist, to work with the grain of human nature and not to ask too much of people for fear of creating an even more oppressive monster.  But is there a way that Jesus vision here might become realisable? I wonder. I think the answer may lie in the fact that Jesus disciples were aware that they were living in a special time. A massive crisis was brewing in their society and the message of ‘Shalom’ or the’ Kingdom of God’ gave them an urgent and radical purpose.

We live in similar days (see ‘living in a prophetic age’). A crisis is about to break on the world as a result of climate change. There is an urgency about our reaction. Can we hear the message of Shalom and respond? Can we live the radical lives that we must live if the earth is to survive in its present form? It may be that the seeking of Shalom is precisely the great purpose that we need to form Jesus-like communities today.

Don’t forget to have fun!

The community that Jesus formed may have been focussed on a clear and very serious purpose but that did not make it dour in spirit or obsessively hard work. John the Baptist may have worked like that but not Jesus.

To be a member of Jesus’ community was to be led in ways of compassion and creativity. These things marked his interaction with people. Jesus was also a great party goer. There was a deliberate fun element to the sort of life Jesus modelled for us and it is all too easy to lose that in our earnestness to live well. Jesus lived in the present. Being vulnerable, being in touch with people and creation led to a rich and spontaneous relational life, focussed on Shalom, but not as a theory for the future, but something to be made real in the present. Now that sounds more attractive.

Lifestyle was at the heart of Jesus mission

Let me prove to you that Jesus saw Christianity at heart as a lifestyle movement. Where are the core teachings of Jesus? Where are the true non-negotiables, the things that every would-be disciple must confront. The answer is that they are in the Sermon on the Mount. Those who have tried to discern the make-up and purpose of Matthew’s gospel are confident that the collection of teachings in Matthew chapters 5 through 7 formed the core teaching for the earliest Christian communities. We have various courses introducing the faith to people today, but sadly they do not begin where Jesus, or Matthew, did.

To read the Sermon on the Mount with fresh eyes is to recognise that these words were an exhortation to live the faith. This extraordinarily deep set of teachings has appealed to people from many religious backgrounds. It moves seamlessly between inner and outer life, but expects this Jesus movement to commend itself to others primarily through the adoption of a radical lifestyle. There is no space to go into it thoroughly here, but I have already pointed to the anti-materialist assumptions that are so much at odds with our current society. Exhortations like ‘Do not lay up treasures for your selves on earth’ are an affront to modern ears. No wonder we have re-engineered the faith. Yet these few pages lay out a whole approach to the Christian life that hinges around how we live. Our radical lives will be a ‘light to the world’. We are to let this light shine so that ‘they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven’. For ourselves we are told that this ‘way is hard’, that we need to strive to ‘enter by the narrow gate’, the one that leads to life.

Simple declarations of belief like ‘Lord, Lord’ are not enough, nor great feats of religion. In the end it comes down to ‘Did you do it?’ I think I must have heard the story of the wise man who built his house on a rock more than a hundred times in churches and never have I heard it explained with Jesus’ own message. For Jesus said that the one who built his house on the rock was the one ‘who hears these words of mine and does them. The story refers directly to the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. That is the challenge.