Christian doubt and St Mark

This Easter morning, I ate a meal of bread and wine (and fish) with about fifty people on Pendower Beach on the south Cornish coast. I had walked the mile to the beach and had listened to the dawn chorus. We watched the sun rise over the Nare Head.

A few years ago I would have been swept up in the greatest of the Christian festivals. Now I doubt.

I wrote on Good Friday how that for me is the most significant day in the Christian year. Easter Sunday with all its rejoicing just jars. Good friends post on Facebook, Alleluia Christ had Risen. I love them for it. I just no longer know what it means.

St Mark, who wrote the earliest of the four gospels may have had a similar difficulty.

I wonder if I am alone in valuing the way St Mark approaches the Easter story.

The women go to the tomb early and find it open. They see a young man who tells that the Jesus is risen and that they should follow him to Galilee.

St Mark then tells us that they go away terrified and bewildered; more than that, they tell no one of what they have seen. And that's it.

Yet, possibly like St Mark, I don’t walk away. The life and death of Jesus is abundant in significance, relevance and meaning. It is the rest that I have trouble with. I guess I am with Philip Pullman, but not entirely.

The life and death of Jesus hold an imperative to us who inhabit the world. We must love our enemy, we must care for those left out, we must tend our planet.

Happy Easter!

The sun already up! A few years ago.

Good Friday

In recent years, Good Friday has become more and more important to me and is now the most important day in the Christian calendar. Let me explain.

The historical character, Jesus, stood unequivocally for love.

I place that assertion in its own paragraph because it is so hard to grasp. Can anyone do this? Should anyone do this? Is he an historical character?

For the third question, I refer back to this article and my observations on Philip Pullman’s book The Good An Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.

For the first two, I turn to the gospel accounts of his life. He really did.

It is, though, something we just can’t stomach. It’s not practical; it’s not how the world is. It goes against the flow; it runs counter to how societies work. It was for that reason that he was killed on Good Friday.

He stood up for love and we couldn’t hack it. If this weren’t bad enough, he stood up for outcasts, for people who have left or never belonged to society. On Good Friday his love drew him to the depths of human suffering.

If this is at the heart of the Christian message, then it is the inspiration we need for right living.

Sinner or Miracle

All human beings are miracles to whom the only possible response is to offer love.

This, said to me by a clergyman friend, jars so completely with a church convinced that we are all sinners and which sees its sole job as saving them.

The world and humanity are, of course, messy. We might be miracles but we are not all or always good people. We do though manage to do good things from time to time, perhaps despite ourselves.

Imagine a church where we don't confess our sins in the hope of the slate being wiped clean by absolution, but rather reflect on what good we have done and plan to do.

St Mark and Easter

I wonder if I am alone in valuing the way St Mark approaches the Easter story.

The women go to the tomb early and find it open. They see a young man who tells that the Jesus is risen and that they should follow him to Galilee.

St Mark then tells us that they go away terrified and bewildered; more than that, they tell no one of what they have seen. And that's it.

On Maundy Thursday I visited Coventry Cathedral for the first time. All was ready for Good Friday. I was researching for my book on WW1 and the cross of nails couldn't seem more right.

I went to the Good Friday mediation at St Nicholas in Lincoln. The thoughts in my mind were of boys dying in the trenches, children in agony from chemical weapons in Syria, people of all ages starving in East Africa. This seemed to speak to the world of today.

On Sunday I went to a busy Church in Manchester full of people filled with the joy of Easter. This jarred. Whatever happened on the cross did not put an end to death; death still has its sting.

So, what did the cross do? Like the women on that first Easter Day, I am bewildered. I do believe that there is meaning in Jesus' life and death. In his life, he shows us a way to a fulness of living. In his death he stands with all the pain of world.

Perhaps that is all. If it is, it is still vastly more than words of Easter concerned mainly with some sort of personal salvation.

The two natures

Diarmaid McCulloch's BBC history of Chistianity offered a wonderfully simple metaphor for the enigma that Jesus is considered both human and divine. He took three glasses at his restaurant table: one of water, one of wine and one of olive oil. He poured the water into the wine and they mixed; the oil, though, floated on the water with a definite seperation. An early argument was whether the two natures were mixed or seperate. Reading the gospels, they seem very much mixed.
I wonder whether Philip Pullman has managed to seperate out from this mixture a sense of what the man Jesus might have been like? For Christians this is hugely important. It is after all the man whom we follow, his teaching which nourishes us and whose command we joyfully obey when we meet for bread and wine.