A great poem from the Book of Proverbs, chapter 3:

Happy is the man who finds Wisdom, who gets understanding;

For trade in it is better than trade in silver and the profits greater than fine gold.

She is more precious than rubies, and all the things you can desire are not to be compared to her.

Length of days is in her right hand; in her left hand, riches and honour.

Her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace.

There is not much that has been said by human beings that means more to me than these words, for although I have many passions in my life, nature, art, politics, literature, my greatest passion is for understanding, that is, the comprehension of the universe and its life, by means of any discipline open to me. My adventures of understanding have included astronomy, physics, biology, geography, philosophy, ecology, systems theory, marxism, psychology, history, politics, and theology, along with Latin Greek, French, Spanish and a tiny bit of Welsh. Obviously I have only a very sketchy knowledge of some of these, although my study has never been trivial or second hand, as I’ve always tried to read the original masterpieces in these disciplines rather than secondary sources. Sometimes that has been a journey into complete bafflement, as for example my grappling with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, but I have gained at least a direct exposure to genius.

Even yet I refuse to allow myself the excuse that I’m getting elderly, and have recently been reading about parallel universes on the one hand, and the history of modern economic disaster on the other. A marvellous book by Yanis Varoufakis on contemporary economics is on my desk as I write. I hope I can rely on my readers to see this information as a simple statement of my peculiar addiction, rather than as any sort of boast. Nothing gives me more pleasure thnt the adventures of understanding, which I hope will lead to wisdom rather than the mere accumulation of knowledge.

My late best friend, Bob Cummings, of Glasgow University, was a man who loved to know things just because they were so, and accumulated knowledge as naturally as a sponge soaks up water some would say, but I would say, as naturally as a buzzard kills: there was a savagery about it. My brother Colin, head of the Scottish Government’s Improvement Service, is another such, in whom the desire to understand is a passion, rather than a means to an end. I also have to admit that there is a competitive edge to my love of wisdom: I don’t like anyone to be wiser than me, which is of course, a sin against the very wisdom I seek, as it requires humility and cooperation.

For example I have just read a theological book entitled, “Jesus the Forgiving Victim”  by James Allison, which is full of such well-informed and persuasive interpretations of Bible passages, that I am left a) wiser than before and b) resentful that this Allison fellow knows so much more than me, and can express his knowledge so eloquently. Mind you, it also spurs me on to know as much about these texts as he does. Well, more than him preferably.

I have no clear idea of how the specific knowledge that I will gain, can become useful to me, but I do know that I will find the sources of information used by the book and familiarise myself with them. The discerning reader will realise that this kind of search for equal expertise is doomed, as no sooner have I caught up with one source of information than I will be presented with another. Yet this sad comedy is the continuing story of my intellectual adventure.

In and through all of these daft attempts to know everything, Lady Wisdom, that creative companion of God, asks me if I have learned anything about how to live well in this world; and when I confess that I’m not sure if I have, she encourages me to keep travelling, for “all her ways are pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.”

I noticed in today’s news that a man and a woman have just been convicted of causing or permitting a child’s death and then pretending it had taken ill on a London bus. I am grieved at this story, but even more grieved by the large number of results I got on Google when I entered , “convicted of child killing.” It made me realise how many of these there have been recently and how easily I had read about them, without shock.

A fair proportion of these killings are carried out by people whose own lives are a mess: poverty and addiction are frequent factors. Violence between partners,  especially by men on women, is another. A significant proportion however seem due to an unexplained malevolence in the perpetrator’s character, and even more disturbingly, to a malevolence shared by partners, directed at their child. Although people express their revulsion by asking how people could do these things to their own child, I fear that the harm is done precisely because it is their own child.

One of our ingrained beliefs is that a child belongs to its biological parents, which allows them rights over the child which they do not have over any other child or person. The right to use violence, for example. This cherished right is now being legally questioned in Scotland, attracting a denuciation from Rev. David Robertson of Dundee Free Church of Scotland. I could be guarranteed to vote for any social policy which had on the wrapper, “Denounced by Rev David Robertson.” I guess he believes that kids should be smacked in the name of Jesus. In this he is supported by majority opinion, which remains convinced that what people do to their kids is their business. Until they kill them, of course.

Most people don’t know that child- killing can be traced in the Bible. Let’s look at Exodus 22: 28,29:

The first-born of your sons, give to me.

Do this also with your ox and with your sheep:

for seven days let it be with its mother, then give it to me!

The example of the animals shows that the text is commmanding sacrifice of the first-born animals and sons!  There are many other indications that the sacrifice of children to God was an issue for the Israelites, a custom which they gradually learned was abhorrent. The famous story of the binding of Isaac by his father Abraham is the best known example of the change from human to animal sacrifice only. The story in no way criticises Abraham’s readiness to kill his son; in fact it praises him for his obedience to God. Of course, if we interpret the Bible as a human document we can see a development away from a bad custom towards a better one. But those who have a fundamentalist view of scripture are left with what the texts say. Small wonder that some of them insist that God had to ‘kill’ his own son Jesus in order to forgive the sins of humanity.

The biblical evidence, along with anthropological research from around the world, reveals that children were often sacrificed to  secure the blessing of the gods for the family or the tribe. I’m not making the mistake of judging these customs as cruel in the way that modern child abuse is cruel, but rather taking them as evidence of how children, albeit precious or maybe because they were precious, could be considered disposable for the benefit of adults. The contemporary view, that parents have rights over their children, is an extension of the classic view, that under certain circumstances, children are disposable.

The tradition about Jesus found in the Gospels contains a strong rebuttal of the classic view because it asserts the worth and dignity of children as children over against all adult denials, so much so that “being a child” becomes one of the most desirable conditions of humanity under God. This is one of the charateristics which distinguishes the Jesus tradition from all other ethical and religious traditions in the world.

In a startling subversion of the classic view, Jesus taught that just because children belong to God, their lives and welfare should be a primary concern of human beings. In a week when we also note the death of the child -killer Ian Brady, this gospel has especial relevance.

Hollywood actress, Paris Jackson, has been criticised for placing nude images of herself online. Now she has hit back at her critics with a public statement:”I’ll say it again for those questioning what I stand for and how I express myself.

“Nudity started as a movement for ‘going back to nature’, ‘expressing freedom’, ‘being healthier’ and was even called a philosophy. Being naked is part of what makes us human. For me it helps me feel more connected to mama gaia. I’m usually naked when I garden. Not only is your body a temple and should be worshipped as such, but also part of feminism is being able to express yourself in your own way, whether it’s being conservative and wearing lots of clothes or showing yourself.”

I’m sure Ms. Jackson is a good person, but just as surely this statement shows that she has been touched by a sort of unapologetic narcissism which is all too common. It consists of a need to be noticed, to make your intmate self into public property, and to gain approval or at least notoriety thereby. Often this need is justified by specious philosophies; in this case the reference to mama gaia, a personification of the global ecosystem, which is trivial, as if her current ailments could be cured by rich young women taking their clothes off. Were this an effective remedy I would be as much in favour of it as the next man, but alas, it is not.

The narcissism is particularly evident in the passage about the body as a temple. The phrase, which was coined by St Paul, has become a modern cliche which is hard to use without irony. “I like to say that my body is a temple but my friend says it’s more like a bouncy castle.” Ms. Jackson, however,  wants people to take it seriously. Unfortunately, she interprtets the phrase in a mistaken way which reveals her underlying narcissism: she thinks a temple is TO BE WORSHIPPED. Yes, that’s what she’s saying, that the body as temple should be worshipped. She lives at such a distance from any genuine religion that she imagines people go to a temple to worship the building, rather than the God/ Godess whose name it bears. This gives her, she believes, the right, indeed the duty, to worship her own body, and to make it available for worship by others.

Does she in fact suspect that this kind of image worship is idolatry, and so deny it by her use of the temple image? In any case, we are faced with behaviour which is trivial in itself, but a a matter of concern for what it reveals about the consciousness of rich people in the rich world: that they are gods and goddesses to be worshipped by more ordinary people, as once the stars of Hollywood movies were worshipped by cinema- goers all over the world.

Now don’t get me wrong. As far as human nakedness is concerned, I’m with Mae West: “skin ain’t sin.” Even public nakedness may have a place, although with my body, I’m grateful for clothes. My concern is with the taken-for-granted privilege, the pervasive preening, and the ignorant pseudo- philosophy, of this particular form of popular culture.

Most decent people in the world, who have to work hard for their survival, also have a beauty that can be appreciated: the marks of their labour,  pain and longing are inscribed in their bodies, which are revealed, not as god-like presences, but as frail assemblies of dust, subject to time and chance, and as such, marvellous. These are the bodies of which Michelangelo knows nothing, but which are precious to Rembrandt, Goya, and Lucien Freud. In fact they are not bodies but people, whose bodies, like that of the risen Christ, tell the story of their struggle.

St. Paul wanted his Corinthians to know that their bodies were temples of the Holy Spirit. He taught that their bodies were mortal and therefore subject to decay, but open to an ultimate transformation into the splendour of spiritual bodies, through the power of God’s spirit. But even now, in the midst of their struggles, that Spirit would, if allowed, take up residence in their mortal bodies. “Therefore,” he urged, “honour God with your bodies.” A glimpse of ultimate splendour could be seen in the lives of ordinary people who were learning to love each other as children of God.

Peace to Paris Jackson, but I prefer St. Paul’s vision to hers.

 

One of the genuine illuminations in the history of my faith was the discovery, in my theological education, that “lead us not into temptation” was a misleading translation of Matthew chapter 6 verse 13. The Greek “peirasmon” certainly has the sense of “testing”, and while the Elizabethan “temptation” of the King James’ Version may have retained something of this sense, the modern use of the word does not. Modern translations which insist on the “testing” are more accurate: “Do not put us to the test”, / “Do not bring us into hard testing” give good impressions of the original, which may refer to the severe testing that life can bring at any time or to the supreme test that the end times of the world might bring.

In the Gosepl story, Jesus experiences his own arrest, trial, torture and murder as a supreme “test”, but has also been tested in his ministry by encounters with people in need as well as religious leaders trying to trip him up. In his suffering he wins through while not being ashamed to reveal his weakness and need; and in the tests of his ministry he copes marvellously, with every- ready compassion, wisdom and humour. He is always the one who is balanced, able to respond either with calm help or robust refutation. This aspect of Jesus’ character fascinates me, because I am always caught unawares by such tests, unsure of my capacity to help someone in need or to reply to sharp questioning. Afterwards, ah yes, afterwards, I can reconstruct an adequate response to need or a smart answer to a challenge, but by then the moment of testing has passed, and may not return in that form. The next test will be different and just as likely to find me wanting.

This is where ten year-old Juliana Ossa of Florida comes in. The other day ahe was swimming in two feet of water at Gatorland, Orlando, when a large alligator clamped its jaws on to her leg. She tried hitting it which didn’t work, but remembering what she had been taught on a previous visit to the park, she stuck two fingers up its nostrils so that the beast could not breathe. It unclamped her leg in order to breathe and she was able to escape with minor wounds. Wow! What coolness in the face of danger, what presence of mind under pressure, what a speedy, resolute response to a test!

I think I would have failed this test. Doubtless I would have struggled, while screaming for help, but I probably would not have remembered the relevant information, and if I had I would have delayed while trying go decide which fingers to use and how hard to push, by which time the alligator would have strolled off with half my leg. The incident also reminds me of all the occasions when I’ve rejected information because I thought it was an overload and unlikely ever to be needed. Once I was in the water I’d be thinking, “Now what was it the stewardess said about inflating the lifejacket or was that to do with blowing the whistle?” So if I’d remembered something about disabling alligators, I’d have been unsure whether to use fingers or toes.

So, as far as practical matters are concerned, Juliana Ossa should remain a aymbol of excellence. Anyone boasting their presence of mind should be asked to take the Juliana test. (Would we need wild ‘gators for this or would pet ones do?)

All this convinces me of the wisdom of Jesus’ prayer, that we should be spared hard testing. In the Gospels, Simon Peter is the one who is always saying, bring it on and I’ll be up for it, only to discover that he is unready. Jesus himself doesn’t meet his fate with the steely disdain of some heroes. Rather, he admits his unreadiness, seeks support from his friends, pleads with God. He doesn’t rush cheerfully to death but allows himself an honest weakness. Then indeed he meets the test, but he does not urge his followers to make light of what life may throw at us. For him, evil can happen, hurt can be done, suffering is real, and they can all break us. He does not expect us to be Superchristian, winning all battles. His prayer should inculcate a realistic humility about our own virtue.

That is not to deny that there may be tests that God wants us to meet and conquer, crucial challenges that either enable us to grow or disable us because we have run away from them in denial. Peter’s denial of Jesus seems to be like this, yet the Gospel tradition shows that even his unreadiness can be forgiven for the sake of the new person he can become. Even if God does not spare me a hard test, he may still spare me the consequences of my cowardice.  The prayer itself and Jesus’ forgiveness of the disciples who failed the test, should be a clear instruction his community to be realistic about its members’ ability to face tests, and compassionate to those who foul up, not for the sake of letting us off the hook, but in the hope that we may one day be as ready for our test as Jesus…… or Juliana.

 

 

I decided that I would talk to the church kids about food waste, and was doing some preparatory reading, only to discover that I had vastly underestimated the true extent of the problem. First of all, I had failed to appreciate how much waste, especially in poorer countries, is caused by inadequate harvesting and poor distribution. But I was amazed at the estimate of total annual food waste in the world: 1.3 billion tonnes and increasing. This means that about 30% of all farmland is producing food that will be wasted. 15 million tonnes are wasted annually in the UK, including almost a third of all lettuce and quarter of all bread. 

There is an assumption that if we were not wasting so much we could feed all the starving people in the world. This may be no more factual than my mother’s assertion that the starving children of India might somehow benefit from the uneaten lettuce on my plate. Even then I wondered how she would get the lettuce to them, albeit she was a woman of outstanding determination. Nevertheless if the system can put guavas on my supermarket shelves it could probably make sure that available foodstuffs got to where they are most needed.

But the sheer quantity of waste is staggering, because it must be the unintended result of an equally huge communal carelessness. How did we get to be so bad at estimating the amount of food we need and so tolerant of packaging that forces us to buy quantities in excess of our requirements? The packaging isssue is the responsibility of the food trade, especially of supermarkets and is an example of the truth that capitalism is nothing to do with the needs of the buyer: the needs of the seller are much more important.

Domestic food waste on the other hand makes me much more uncomfortable, because my own household always has the heaviest food and packaging bins in the street. By far. We go through more bottles, more bags, more plastic containers, more cardboard boxes than anyone else, and consign more pasta, rice, bread, and vegetables – we are vegetarians – to the swill pail than the family next door with three kids. As we  would also claim to be good recyclers – good? We’re unbeatable-  with a concern for the planet, this is hard to explain and impossible to justify. And there’s more! There’s all the Internet purchase packages that are too big to go in the bins, which have to be taken to the tip by car. Where are we going wrong?

1. We don’t really plan our weekly eating but shop daily for our evening meal.

2. We try to stick to a veggie diet even when this means buying more than we need.

3. At least once a week we use ready meals, buying too much rather than too little.

4. We’re getting older and often find we can’t eat as much as we thought we would.

5. We are quite well-off and spend a greater proportion of our income on food than most people.

We’ve noted these behaviours and are trying to modify them, but I’m not sure that change will be either radical or speedy.

But we would like it to be.

The waste of food reveals a lack of appreciation of it; a carelessness that denies any reverence for gifts of nature or agriculture. People become consumers of food rather than eaters of their daily bread. The modesty of daily sustenance and the extravagance of occasional feasts are equally negated by routine overconsumption.

The prayer of Jesus is relevant:

“Give us this day our daily bread”

1. It acknowledges that no matter how hard-earned, daily bread is a gift.

2. It speaks of “our bread”, that is, nourishment for the relevant community, rather than “my bread”. It includes a responsibility for sharing.

3. It is a daily prayer asking for daily provision. Of course it does not rule out wise storage, but it refers to the old story of the manna in the desert which couldn’t be gathered in bulk and stored because it became degraded after a day. If we try to secure all possible future supply we go against the teaching of Jesus.

4. It asks for bread not caviar. A slightly mocking phrase from my middle class Glaswegian culture comes to mind, “a modest sufficiency” is the ideal.

 

My title phrase was coined by a researcher into the life of bacteria within the human body. I grew up thinking of bacteria as enemies which had to be defeated by washing my hands before eating and after using the lavatory. But modern research has shown that the total number of genes in the human genome – 23, 000- is vastly outnumbered by the millions of bacterial genes in our bodies. The human gut alone contains 40,000 bacterial species and 100 trillion microbial cells. 

Most of these cause us no harm, while a substantial proportion are beneficial. Research has also shown that bacteria provide maybe a quarter of the earth’s biomass, and occupy some of the most hostile of its environments. Because they are able to share their genes with one another, they can exchange information easily and adapt to change speedily, as we have seen in the emergence of bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Because these creatures are so small we have neglected until recently to study them and their relationship with their environment, including ourselves.

Of course, human beings have reacted to the new wave of bacterial research by latching on to its commercial possibilities. Think of all the so-called probiotic foods which are on sale, especially in the yoghurt aisle of the supermarket, promising with a load of pseudo – scientific gobbledygook to improve the bacterial balance of our guts. It would be a pity however if their exaggerations and misunderstandings put us off considering the results of genuine research.

The role of micro-organisms in the evolution of life is central. First of all they came into being and colonised the very unfriendly environment of the young planet. They did so by cooperation with each other, sharing their different abilities for the common cause of survival. Eventually the sharing cells seem to have joined together in one new kind of the cell named eukaryotic, which is the basis of all multicellular life including homo sapiens.

These clever creatures share my life, or maybe I share theirs. Being human includes being a bacterial zoo.

This is a revelation not provided by the first biblical account of creation, in which God’s creation of human beings in his own likeness is separated from the creation of all other life. We can see that account as a theological diagram rather than a description of how God did the job. The second account in Genenis is less exalted: God fashions some dust into a shape and breathes his life into it. Perhaps we can see this dust, a gramme of which contains millions of bacteria, as the source of bacterial life in humans.

The two accounts are not mutually exclusive: the first depicts the making of human beings as similar to the making of stone “likenesses” of themselves by contemporary rulers, to represent their presence in their distant territories; humans are meant to be images of God’s rule on the earth. The second depicts the actual origin of human beings, as of all beings, from the dust, the fertile dust of the planet, reminding men and women of all they share with the planet and its other life. Indeed the Genesis story tells how germane this reminder is, as it shows how human arrogance leads to expulsion from God’s garden into the familiar harshness of the world we inhabit, and threatens to make it uninhabitable.

Although I have responsibility to represent the rule  of God in the world, along with a range of skills which enable me to do so, I am also a composite creature, made of the soil of earth, sharing the life of innumerable tiny creatures. The latest science joins the Bible in directing me to a wise humility ( Latin: humus =dust), to realise the intimate ecology of my existence: I  am a shared life, whose continued health depends on my partners. I cannot simply be or do anything I want without an understanding of my place in the web of life. And the life I share is not only inside me, it does not end at my fingertips: my very breath is an exchange with the planet, and if I pollute it, I pollute myself.

This “dustiness” does not negate the revelation that I am made in the image of God, for God is the life which humbly shares itself with all creation; nor does it exempt me from the duty of representing God’s rule, which persuades all creation towards the perfection of shared goodnesss. Me and my microbes are called to cooperate.

 

 

I have just spent a couple of days reading avidly, as I used to when much younger, devouring books like others devour chocolate. I completed three books: Havergey by John Burnside, The Schooldays of Jesus by  J.M. Coetzee and Of all that Ends, by Gunter Grass. These are all books which deal with what theologians call eschatology, teaching about The End. In the case of the Grass book which has been published after his death, the ending in question is mainly the end of his life, but there is also the end of an era in which the second world war stood as a warning even to the worst politicians. Coetzee’s novel is a sequel to “The Childhood of Jesus” and like it is situated in a time and place to which its characters have been transported from their previous lives, which however have been wiped from their memories. Burnside’s parable is set in the future after a catastrophic series of disasters have decimated human civilization.

Grass and Coetzee are two of the great masters of contemporary writing, while Burnside is a very fine Scottish poet, novelist, and teacher.

Grass faces the imminence of his own death with a characteristic mixture of gusto, wit and inventiveness. “Of All That Ends” is a collection of short meditations, poems and drawings from the perspective of one who knows he’s leaving the scene pretty soon. This gives him the opportunity for some elegiac evocations of what he has enjoyed, like sex or the writings of Rabelais, some acerbic commentary on current politics,  and some exploration of the fact of death. There is a story for example of how he and his wife order their coffins from a skilled wood worker, and enjoy trying them out for size; and how these are stolen from their house, and mysteriously returned with the addition of a pair of dead mice. There is a confession that the only phrase he can remember in one of his native tongues, Kashubian, is that of a local man asking him in his youth, “What’s new in politics today?” Even a dead language poses a question to which contemporary politics cannot provide an answer. For Grass, the end confirms the value of human life, while questioning its capacity to solve the problems it creates.

Burnside imagines a future in which nature has taken its overdue revenge on human beings in the form of devastating plagues which have depopulated most of the world. On a mysterious Scottish island there is a community of anarchist nature-lovers who explain their history and beliefs to a newcomer. Their most important conviction is that no human method can ever be superior to nature’s method. The fact that human beings with their ingenuity are part of nature seems not to have occurred to the author. Although there are a few indications of how these people have transformed their lives, the story simply assumes that this has happened. This means that within the narrative there is no test of the realism or efficacy of the community’s philosophy and lifestyle. It is described and assumed to be admirable. The agony of the ending of one era and the birth of a new is bypassed, leaving the reader with shallow aphorisms, unsubstantiated judgements, and inflated hopes. Easy targets, like Donald Trump are clumsily assailed, but survive without serious damage. The author has failed the challenge of eschatology, namely, to represent the way in which an imminent end questions every aspect of the present, and only through such an examination offers a future – if there is to be a future. (In Norse eschatology, there is no future beyond the death of the gods.) This reader at any rate wants to be supportive of the author’s vision but it remains fuzzy and a little peevish.

Coetzee tells the story of how his peculiar family -precocious child, adoptive mother and adoptive father (who are not partners to each other) – manage the education of a five year old child of great ability and arrogance. The details of family and school interactions are  vividly if soberly recounted, nearly always from the point of view of the adoptive father, although the child’s passionate engagement with the world is fully expressed.

All the people in the narrative have come from elsewhere but with their memories wiped clean. Everyone can therefore make a new start, but for their future to be good or better than the present requires knowledge of  the world and the self, which is not simply  given but is gained through learning. And the learning happens through attention to one’s own action and suffering as well as the action and suffering of others. Learning can be blocked by wilfulness on the one hand or lack of initiative on the other. The kindness or knowldge of others may confer grace, but one has to be willing to receive it. Cruelty may also be offered and one has to be willing to resist it. It is, in other words, a world where goodness can happen now, but it must be done by people who have learned how to do it. An old world has ended, but the new world has to be created.

I think that for Coetzee the name Jesus does not designate any particular character in the story, but this process of moral education. This is a very rich fiction of which I have only given a brief glimpse here.

 

 

The other day The US Airforce dropped a huge bomb on a set of tunnels in Afghanistan inhabited by IS jihadis, 36 of whom were reportedly killed. There were no civilian deaths. Publicly no one regretted the deaths, but many voices criticised the action as trigger-happy and unwisely threatening to the USA’s other enemies. Along with the destruction of a Syrian Airbase earlier last week, the bombing been widely interpreted as a warning to North Korea, which has replied by parading its own weapons and making suitably hysterical threats.

Most British commentary has focused on the incoherence of Trump’s foreign policy while Chinese voices have warned him to be much more cautious.

For myself, I considered the Syrian attack proportionate and perhaps effective as a deterrent, and the big bomb in Afghanistan as no more than a strategic initiative. The aggressors of this world require restraint,  and their victims need support; the case for international police action is obvious in such situations. But that’s just the point: if actions like these are to be seen as just, that they must actually be international, that is, of the United Nations preferably, and if that is not possible, of a as large a coalition as can be obtained. The USA made only a token effort to get UN action against Assad, and none at all in the case of the Afghan attack, where they relied on a small existing coalition. In fact, in both instances, the USA seemed to pride itself on acting alone.

That cannot be right. Nobody has elected the USA as the world’s default policeman. When it acts as it has done this week it reinforces the suspicion that it believes it has the right to do as it pleases in any part of the world, by claiming that anything counter to its interest anywhere can be considered an attack on its territory, so that actions on the other side of the globe can be justified as “defensive.” None of this is new, and is certainly not an invention of President Trump. The much-admired President Obama held just as firmly to this policy of defending US borders at a distance. Indeed Mr Trump had promised a welcome departure from unilateral intervention by the USA.

Psalm 60 in the Christian bible confronts a situation in which nations surrounding Israel are crowing over a recent Israeli defeat. The psalmist imagines God rallying his people by reassuring them of his power over all nations. Of two of the nearest of these, God says, “Moab is my washpot and over Edom I have cast my shoe” using the picture of a traveller washing his feet by pouring water over them into a basin, after throwing his shoes into a corner. The nations of Moab and Edom are treated as negligible before the might of God.

The weapon used in Afghanistan this week was called MOAB, that is, Massive Ordnance Air Blast or more popularly, Mother Of All Bombs. It is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever used in war. Perhaps President Trump and his generals should listen to the book they frequently claim to cherish, and learn humility before the justice of God, which in secular terms means that humility is always wise, while arrogance is always stupid, sometimes terminally so. This MOAB is also God’s washpot.

 

P: ….so what do you think you know about me?

Me: Not a lot. Only what appears in the four gospels, plus one or two bits of information in the historian Josephus….oh and the legend that you were born in Scotland….

P: The legend may be more accurate than some of what you read in the gospels. Ask yourself who witnessed the various conversations I’m supposed to have had with your Jesus, not to mention the fact that the gospels each tell different stories.

Me: Different in detail, yes, but basically they agree that you didn’t want to crucify Jesus because you thought he was innocent, but gave in to agitation by a Jewish crowd, which was set up by The Jewish religious leaders.

P: Yes, yes, but you should ask yourself why they take that line…

M: What d’you mean?

P: I mean, my little Christian, that after we had destroyed the jewish Jihadis who rebelled in 70 CE, even Christians knew it might be very dangerous if they depicted their saviour as a man justly condemned by a Roman governor. Far better to throw the blame on his own people.

Me: So you thought Jesus was guilty….on the evidence of the priests and Pharisees?

P: Of course not. How could a Roman accept the evidence of manipulative barbarians? I had my own spies with the Nazarene prophet from his early days in Galilee.

Me: And what did they tell you?

P: That he was a decent man, doing tiny miracles for tiny people in a tiny corner of the land….

Me: And that made him dangerous to Rome!

P: ….listen, Christian, listen! They told me that he was popular, so popular that some people considered him a Messiah. Zeus spare me, I spent years hearing about divinely inspired Messiahs annointed by God to murder Romans and turn the world into God’s Kalifate.

Me: But Jesus wasn’t like that, he wasn’t political!

Pontius: I don’t want to be rude,  but as you’ve never been in government, especially imperial govenment, you would have difficulty in telling your political arse from your political elbow. Any man who can gather 5000 men around him in the desert, or stage a mockery of a Roman Triumph as he entered Jesusalem, is political. Any Jewish man talking about the Kalifate of God and allowing his followers to call him Messiah, is dangerously political….

Me: But he never intended…

P: How do you know what he intended? In any case,  a governor cannot waste time guessing intentions when he has facts before him. If a man acts like a jihadi, if he promotes a story about God’s Kalifate, and radicalises young men, then he must be treated as a jihadi whatever his intentions. Public order must be protected.

Me: Jesus never recommended violence against Rome or anyone!

P: Even your own gospels have to admit he staged a violent pantomime in the Temple and was personally violent to blameless small businessmen.

Me: But that was against Jewish people, not Romans, and for religious reasons not political ones.

P: Truly faith is harmful to the intelligence! The motives behind public disorder are of no importance; it simply must be stopped. As for your carelessness about harming Jews, isn’t that of a piece with the nauseating anti- Jewishness of your church down the centuries? But a Roman Governor has to protect all citizens, even barbarians. The man had to go.

Me: But even if I admit you may have had some justification for finding Jesus guilty, I can still point to the unnecessary death penalty you imposed.

P: Ah, now you are moving to another area of your expertise: criminal justice! So perhaps you think I could have put him in prison?

Me: It would have been more merciful….

P: I have to remind you that unlike your own filthy system of justice, Roman justice never used prison as a punishment, not even for slaves or barbarians. We never kept a living man in prison except when awaiting trial or execution. Restitution, fines, forfeit of property, exile, enslavement, and death were the punishments which made our justice the envy of the world.

Me: People tortured by beatings followed by a prolonged death on a stake, that’s the image of what you call justice?

P: The part of our justice reserved for rebellious slaves and jihadis. It was designed to cause fear if not respect, and I may say was quite successful in doing so. You may think I am pained when I hear your creed being repeated, ‘ suffered under Pontius Pilate, ‘ time and time again. But no, I feel a modest pride in having done my duty.

Me: And you’ve no regrets at what you did to Jesus?

P: None like the feelings ascribed to me in your gospels.  But yes, I did regret what I had to do with Jesus of Nazareth. He was a decent man, intelligent, honest and brave,  but with an unfortunate belief that he had been chosen by God to establish his rule in the world. Yes, I’m sure he thought this rule would be kindly, except maybe in respect of people like me. God would have to get rid of me.  But as you can see, He hasn’t, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this entertaining chat, my fellow Caledonian. But look, dawn is imminent and I have to get back before first light, I have to get back to…eh, I have to get back.

There are activities of Jesus which can be assigned to particular days in the last week of his earthly life, such as his entry into Jerusalem (Sunday) , clearing the Temple (Monday) the Last Supper (Thursday) and his crucifixion (Friday) but although he is said to have done other things, they cannot be attached to specific days. This opens up the possibility that he might have a day off in the middle of the week, without showing any concern at all for the poor people who would have to construct Holy Week liturgies!

The idea that he might have spent time with friends or gone shopping sheds a curious light on how we think of him. I mean, he was here to do and say significant things that his church could remember, so he’d have been dodging the column a bit if he did take some personal time out! That kind of thought should remind us that we tend to package Jesus for church consumption, and in that we are only continuing a tactic which was begun by the gospel writers and their predecessors. The gospels themselves package Jesus for church use, by assigning events to the one day, the next day, during a festival, or throughout a week. In all probability the stories about Jesus passed on by word of mouth, contained no timeline into which events could be placed, leaving the writers to construct their own. Most bible scholars think that they did so to highlight the meaning of the events rather than to reflect historical facts. John’s gospel for example places Jesus clearing of the temple at the start of his ministry rather than the end, as in the other three gospels. This is not to do with historical fact but because he wants the issue of God’s holy place to frame his entire Gospel.

If this is true of time it is also true of place. The geography of the gospels is related to the meaning of incidents. Matthew puts Jesus’ sermon on a mountain because he wants to compare Jesus with Moses; Luke puts him on a plain because he wants to emphasise the humility and earthliness of Jesus’ ministry. Most gospel stories involving voyages reflect the Hebrew notion of the great deep which only the creator can control.

We may guess that the gospels are right in placing the culminating events of Jesus’ life in Jerusalem,  but we should have some doubt as to whether they took place within one week. The gospel timescale is constructed deliberately to fit into a week, so that churches could remember them more easily and celebrate them day by day. So what’s wrong with that? Nothing, but the interpretation of Jesus’ prophecy that the Son of Man would be raised on the “third day”  – which in truth just means ” the day when everything changes” – is turned by the gospels into a weekend which generations of believers have taken as historical fact. Would it dismay us to discover that the third day was in fact a year or so later as Jesus’ followers began to trust his aliveness?

I am not at all sceptical about Jesus’ resurrection, but the gospel stories of it are again told to  bring out key truths about Jesus’ aliveness, rather than to present an historical account. In most eras of its existence the Christian church saw the gospels as a set of stories with meanings rather than as factual history. Indeed the assumption that they are factual is quite modern and has only been prominent for 150 years. Doubtless there is some factual history in the gospels, but the very notion of historical accuracy would have been utterly foreign to their authors, who were in effect, preaching the good news rhrough stories.

This view  of scripture allows us to listen to what they want to tell us about Jesus rather than imposing our own demand for scientific history on them. It gives us space for interpretation of the biblical writings according to what we know of their  author’s methods without forcing them to walk in our shoes. This method in no way reduces my trust in Jesus Messiah, Son of God, my rescuer, crucified and risen. But it does lead me to hope that as he faced his almost certain death in Jerusalem he had time for a  quiet chat with his mother or for sharing a flask of wine with a friend.