Ignorance is bliss

Do we ever really forget our schooldays? If only. I certainly remember mine,  those far off days of  gas lights, corporal punishment, rote learning, and writing slates (the twentieth century came late to the North of England). Anyway, back then, when I was in Wackford Squeers’ sixth form, several of my fellow pupils, despite being attenders at a Church of England school, took themselves off to a mass Evangelical rally and underwent a born-again conversion at the glitzy hands of Billy Graham.They returned, not to put too fine a gloss on it, full of it. God, they happily and frequently declared, was good. Smile, they asked us, Jesus loves you. God, after all, had smiled on them. 

For several weeks their Bible-fuelled bonhomie continued apace much to the chagrin of the denizens of Abbey Grange C/E High School, hardened Anglicans for whom religion was like going to the toilet: everybody has to do it but it’s the height of bad manners to talk about it. And then,  despite several weeks of fervent preparatory group prayer, despite the sure and certain knowledge of a personal saviour, despite being born again of water and the spirit, one of this group of the Godly  failed his driving test. 

Suddenly, the scene changed from that of  assured blessedness to one of confusion and consternation with just a tiny sprinkling of condemnation. Perhaps the group had had insufficient faith when praying for the driving test. Perhaps the novice driver had not sufficiently repented of his former life. Perhaps Satan had stepped in to thwart the Godly driver in his pilgrim’s progress towards a full licence.  Or- call me a cynic-  perhaps he wasn’t at that point that brilliant a driver- all the best people take at least three goes to pass their test- perhaps no matter how fervent and dedicated your prayer, how strong your faith or holy your life, perhaps that does not prevent bad things happening to you. 

It certainly didn’t stop bad things happening to Jesus. Things much, much worse than failing a driving test.

Those who want our fill out faith with triumphalism seldom seem to remember that the Christian triumph is the triumph of the Cross. You can’t go straight to Easter. There is no diversion past Calvary.

We live in a world where we see dangers round every corner, harm in the face of every stranger; where we must fight for what we want and fight to stop what we have being take away from us; where no-one and nothing can be trusted; a hostile world that we need to insulate ourselves from and insure ourselves against. Many come to the Christian faith hoping for a buffer against this world, a defence against the miseries and horrors of the human condition and, just possibly, a bit of extra help from above for things like driving tests and parking spaces. At its extreme you end up with a faith that proclaims something known as the ‘Prosperity gospel’ the idea financial blessing is the will of God for Christians, and that things like faith, positive speech, and donations to Christian ministries will always increase your material wealth. Even if few churches are quite so extreme, many still teach a gospel of worldly success: find Jesus and watch your good things multiply.

This is not to say that finding or refinding the faith can not be a joyful occasion. How astonishing the realisation that our lives exist in three dimensions and we are not Flatlanders, that there is a lot more to this than meets the eye and that that which we don’t see is the best of it. It is no wonder the recently converted are often ebullient and exuberant, intoxicated with faith.

For all this optimisticjoy the reality is that Christians are just as much subject to the ups and downs of nature, the slings and arrows of fortune and the vagaries of the human condition as anyone else.  In fact, not only are the faithful likely to suffer just as much as anyone else, but if we are taking our faith seriously, it is quite possible that we will experience more misfortune that others.

The Church of St John Lateran is a  memorable place. Even in Rome, where the pilgrim soon wearies of impressive basilicas, heart-stopping architecture and stunning artwork, it stands out in the memory. This is mainly because of its statues of the Apostles. Larger than life, sculpted by the finest Baroque artists from pure white marble they tower over the visitor reducing even the most philistine to stunned silent awe. But for all their grandeur, they are a bit, how shall we put it weird. This one is holding a saw. Another holds a spear, one a sword. One is holding a club and one, apparently in competition as males always seem to be, an even bigger club. Most memorably, and revoltingly, one appears to be holding his own skin, removed in one piece from his flesh. Each apostle is displaying the instrument of his martyrdom and the guy with the forced exfoliation, is St Bartholomew. Here are the Apostles, Princes of the Church recognisable by the ways they were tortured and killed.

There are a lot of people in the world who would rather not hear of the good news for the poor, the mighty cast from their seats, the victory of the King whose kingdom is not of this world.  From the chains of communist prisons to the scorn of the secular West the world can be quick to add a bonus of suffering to those who follow Christ.This is not a novel observation. The Bible, from  cover to cover bears  witness: bad things happen to those who love God.

Take the book of Job. The whole tome, some 40 plus chapters of the best of Hebrew poetry, is devoted to the single vexing question: why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God let humanity, represented by Job, suffer in all sorts of horrible and demeaning ways? Why indeed?It’s a question that echoes down through the  ages, that each anguished generation asks afresh.

God’s answer when it comes to Job is not what he was expecting, it is not what we are expecting. The answer, is “Who are you to ask? You couldn’t possibly understand. 

Job, as we may well do, must have felt just a little bit cheated by God’s reply. After all, it’s not, on the surface, a very satisfying answer to the cry of the suffering human heart. 

But what seems like evasion on the part of God isn’t. It’s not a “get-out” of the type that might be used in answer to one of those embarrassing questions that children direct at unsuspecting adults with an uncannily accurate aim;  it is not an ‘It would be way too embarrassing for me to even start to answer that’ answer, nor is it a substitute formula for ‘I don’t know’.  It is quite simple; we would never understand.

Fair enough. Even the notion that we wouldn’t understand is something we never seem to quite understand. When the writer of the scriptures known as second Esdras in the wake of the horrific destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 AD asks the archangel Uriel why such bad things happened to good people he seems somewhat taken aback to receive the same answer as Job, despite ‘you wouldn’t understand’  by that point being well known as the divine answer for hundreds of years. 

When there are those parts of the Bible where the writer has glimpsed a little less dimly through the veil- the much maligned and misunderstood apocalyptic of Revelation, Daniel or indeed 2nd Esdras, say, what is written there appears thoroughly bizarre, the weird rantings of madmen. When we have even the briefest glimpse beyond our earthbound horizons, our rules of grammar, semantics, sequence, symbol even narrative very quickly disintegrate, our ability to describe and recount evaporates. We do not understand.

Christians, like anyone else, will suffer and we will never be able to see a direct chain of cause and effect with God at one end and us at the other. It may be tempting to think we can- newspapers frequently feature people who have been thus tempted and end up telling us that earthquakes are God’s response to our sinfulness, AIDS is the wrath of God or 9/11 was God’s judgement on a rising divorce rate. The obvious lack of the ultimate Christian virtue of charity should lead us to discount such statements; so too the impossible claim to intimate knowledge of God’s mind.  As Christians we know we cannot understand, we know we cannot know.  

But we can know God and we do know God supremely in the revelation of Jesus Christ. We cannot understand, but we know our shepherd, we hear his voice and he will never, never let us be lost. That is all we need to know.