Worth the bother

Whatever it is you’ve done, someone, somewhere will have an explanation for why you did it. You don’t have to go very far, because, actually, pretty much everyone, everywhere will have their take. Your friends. Your family. Random strangers you’ve never met who were told about your odd behaviour by your friends and family, particularly the ones who promised you they wouldn’t tell a soul.  The dog walker who made sure they looked long and hard when you were doing it, thus ignoring their pooch evacuating their bowels in the middle of Beddington park. Everybody on Facebook, Threads, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon. The person with a degree and a diploma you’ve paid to tell you why you’ve done it, though as a professional therapist it would be unethical and uneconomical for them to actually express an opinion until you’ve been paying them at least a year. The  broadsheet columnist, the tabloid agony aunt, the trash TV host. Everybody knows why you did it. And are quite happy to share their conclusions with anybody who’ll listen.

Those conclusions are, most of the time, completely and utterly wrong, with variations of incorrect from wide of the mark to couldn’t get it right even if you told them the answer beforehand, wrote it on the back of their hand just to be certain and then came and told them again just to be belt and braces. The lion’s share of our explanations for each other’s behaviour, almost every time, are even worse than guesswork, which is pretty bad going, as a stab in the dark is precisely what they are.

Our laughable inaccuracy is partly down to the fundamental attribution error— we think other people’s behaviour comes from their personality rather what it actually is, a random response to random things that happen in their vicinity— at random. Also, we’re nowhere near as smart as we would like to think we are, and none of us can read minds. Apart from the clergy, but we never, never let on that we can. This hidden talent does explain the permanent look of disappointment on our faces.  

And then we are frequently clueless about what’s behind somebody else’s behaviour because we like to think too big, too dramatic, too, well, exciting and the world just isn’t like that. But we’d rather like it to be. I mean who would bother wasting time trying to work out what was going on or repeating that juicy tidbit of gossip if the truth behind it was that the unfortunate subject of your gaze had just dropped the vegetable peeler while cleaning the sink wearing only their underwear and the wrong glasses? Not much of an ‘OMG have you heard’ if the unfortunate was momentarily inattentive, or didn’t think it was any sort of big deal to be doing what they were doing. Hardly worth the bother at all if behind what looks bizarre there was a indubitably dull, wholly humdrum, perfectly  prosaic explanation: which,  keep it to yourself, but, truth be told,  the vast number of explanations are. How much more exciting if it was really the outcome of a conspiracy of shape-shifting alien lizards and 5G mind control than the reality of chance coincidence, all-too fallible politicians and predictably greedy billionaires? We can be too busy looking at the bigger picture that we don’t notice the little things that actually make all the difference; too overcome by the size of the tower to give any thought to the bricks of which it is made.

Big–picture thinking means we’re not only getting the wrong end of the stick when it comes to explaining other people’s actions; we’re wholly wrong about ourselves as well.

For example. 

We’re certain that we’d know something was wrong when it came into our lives; we’d spot sin if it slithered up to us; we’d recognise Satan when he offered us his hand. But it isn’t true. We’re thinking the bad things always run on an IMAX screen,  but the tempter’s favourite trick is to be very, very small. We think sin is the stuff of epics— treachery, murder, idolatry, adultery— and it is all those things certainly, but it’s mostly the things we do without really noticing, because they’re too small really to merit our attention.

Think of the devil tempting Jesus in the wilderness. Yes, he climaxes on the offer of all the kingdoms of the world, but Satan starts small, with half a dozen baps. 

‘If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread’

Boulder bake-off: it’s small scale stuff for a God. 

Think of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.  Edmund is trapped by the White Witch not by promises of power—they came later— but by his fondness for Turkish Delight. Turkish Delight: nobody has ever fought wars over this sweetened starch gum, this candy has never set anywhere alight, or even buzzing,  and yet that was the sprat that caught the mackerel known as Ed. Yes, it’s a children’s book, but when you read about Edmund stuck in his sticky trap you don’t think ‘how ridiculous!’ because you know deep down, without having to think about it, that that’s precisely the sort of way we would become ensnared ourselves. With cheap confectionery.

I’m not trying to suggest that sin is a slippery slope— start craving Turkish Delight, end up selling your grandmas kidneys to buy crack. That’s not the point I’m trying to make. The point is, big sin is sin and small sin is sin, and our task as Christians— an impossible task, but ours all the same— our task is to strive to be be without sin, to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. It is impossible, of course it is, we all know it is, it always has been, always will be, but it’s what Jesus has asked of us. 

‘Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’

So where do we start? With the small stuff of course, because that’s what makes up the world most of us live in.  We hold the smallest possible portion of the sum total in our hands, our influence spreads just about as far as our arms can reach so we have to begin small, we have to start with the achievable. And when we’re following Jesus, nothing is too tiny that it doesn’t matter, no step too small it doesn’t get us further along the road, no effort so slight it doesn’t register in the heavenly domain.

OK, so it’s a peccadillo not peccata mundi, but small things matter, or so Jesus says:

“Because you have been trustworthy in a very small thing I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.”

Your wedding robe is sewn with the smallest stitches but it’s compulsory dress code for the heavenly banquet.

Now, this is not to say that our faith is all about fussing about fripperies, obsessing with trivialities and fixating on small-minded scrupulosity. Let me explain.

In one part of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives a series of teachings based around the format ‘You have heard it said… but I say’, for example:

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Each time the formula repeats– for lust, anger, revenge– Jesus is both expanding the range of his moral teaching (you know that murder is wrong: so is anger. You know that adultery is wrong: so is lechery) and making the focus of faith smaller. It’s no longer just about not murdering: it’s about not being angry too. It’s no longer just the big stuff that matters, it’s the small stuff too.

This particular chain of teaching culminates with the saying we considered a little earlier:

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect

Life following Jesus is, then, both more difficult because he’s drawn the boundaries much wider and much easier because the concerns of our faith are on our scale; our small, human scale. So, if we are to truly follow Jesus, we must sweat the small stuff as well as the big stuff.

That could sound inescapably oppressive. Too many in the past have experienced Christianity as a relentlessly punishing micromanagement of their lives: usually by someone else but sometimes self–inflicted.  But it shouldn’t be. Don’t beat yourself up about every tiny temptation, every wee wobble or minute misdemeanour. All sin is important but all sin is not equal. 

And, it’s good for us that the small stuff matters. Because that’s what makes up the world where most of us live our lives. We don’t have to climb a mountain, trek the camino, walk barefoot to Jerusalem to experience God. We don’t have to imitate saints by standing in the North Sea all night or living on the top of a pillar or wearing a hair shirt. We can practice our faith in the smallest things of our small lives. We just need to remember that they’re there, and they matter: all those things we usually think are too small to bother with. Because there too, in the small things of life, is where salvation is to be found.