Tomorrow (Monday) is a bad day to be issuing a press notice about this blog. I am driving down to Lee Abbey in Devon to speak at a conference there until Friday. Now, that is very nice because Lee Abbey is set in a wonderfully beautiful environment where nature is at its wildest best. But it is also a place where there is no mobile phone signal and no wireless broadband internet access. So, I’ll be driving up the hill once a day to get phone and text messages – and I’ll have to find a way to get my emails and do some blogging.
The theme of the week is based on the earlier title of one of my books: Jesus and People Like Us (now re-issued as Scandal of Grace). It follows Jesus and his friends along a journey that is sometimes missed by people who read the gospels with a prejudiced eye. The Church is sometimes good at taking ‘heroes’ of the faith, putting plates around their head in stained-glass windows and calling them saints. At one stroke we make them people who are not like us.
But read the Bible and it is full of people who mess life up a million times and still find God on their side. The disciples of Jesus discover this as they journey from the hills of the north to a gallows outside the city walls of Jerusalem and an empty tomb in a garden. Life is transformed for them, but there is nothing religiously romantic about it.
This week at Lee Abbey will be an attempt to encourage people in their Christian faith by taking a fresh look at the gospels and the people in them – who are just like us. If I can get online during the week, I will explain more as we go along. Furthermore, I will do so in the context of Obama’s inauguration in the USA…
January 21, 2009 at 3:17 pm
People like us need to be reminded that when we set off on a journey we leave everything behind.Journeys are places where we are in limbo, and if we are lucky, we have space to mull things over and begin to see ourselves and our lives from a different perspective… so, Nick, although I am sure that there are one hundred and one people all trying to get hold of you, trust to the fact that if it’s REALLY important the land line will reach you. Let God take care of the rest until you return, and enjoy being with him in the space he has created for you.
February 14, 2009 at 5:06 pm
‘But read the Bible and it is full of people who mess life up a million times and still find God on their side.’
Yes, the disciples are given the secret of the Kingdom of God (Mark 4:4) and are personally given the power to raise the dead (Matthew 10:8)
Presumably that included Judas, and he must have been one of the 12 disciples that were given the power to cure leprosy (Matthew 10:8)
The disciples even see Moses return from the dead. Not all of them, but I can’t see a first-century Jew not telling his friends about seeing Moses return from the grave, never to die again.
I’m not even Jewish , but my life would be transformed by seeing Moses return from the dead.
These disciples presumably knew Jesus had been born of a virgin, and they had all sorts of life-transforming experiences, what with seeing Moses, walking on water, being able to raise the dead, and cure lepers.
And they had the benefit of having a close personal relationship with Jesus, being with him for 3 years, and watching him perform miracles and demonstrate all the Jesus-ness that Jesus was capable of.
And they still deserted Jesus in his hour of need.
Despite all these proofs and despite Jesus prophesying that he would rise from the dead after being killed, they just don’t believe him.
Modern day Christians have a million times more faith than the hand-picked disciples of Jesus, who allegedly saw Moses (!), were given the secret of the Kingdom of God and were given the power to raise the dead.
The faith of modern Christians is a living testimony to the falsity of the Gospel depictions of the disciples.