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The other day someone said something that I am beginning to hear with some regularity. The exact words don't matter all that much, but the feeling with which they were said exposed a vulnerability and anxiety that is becoming increasingly common. My friend said she could no longer bear to listen to the news. I knew exactly what she meant; I've felt much the same this past year or two. Now two things immediately knocked at the door of my attention. Actually the first knocked on that door, the second kicked it down in order to be seen and heard.

First, the woman is a thoughtful, committed and long time follower of Jesus, a Christian active in her church and with as healthy a view of life and herself as you're likely to meet these days. What does a Christian mean when they say they can no longer bear to listen to the news? Isn't switching off the realities of the world in all its brokenness the last thing a Christian should do?

Second, I felt such a surge of agreement with what she said I realised it was time to sit down and ask, and think through just what the Hell is happening in our world. I don't use that word Hell much. It's too serious a word to bandy about as a lazy expletive. But as I began to think about the news we listen to day in and day out, and the drip feed of information selected by a media industry whose main mission is to hook our attention, engage our emotions and shape our view of the world, I realised that much of that cycle of news was about Hell going on all around us. So the question I'm now pondering is, 'What in heaven's name are we to do with what the Hell is going on around us?'

Of all people, Christians are equipped to look on the world without despair, to face the realities of its brokenness without giving up, to confront evil with hope and hatred with love and enmity with forgiveness. So if that's even halfway true, what difference might it make if Christians did what Christians are called to do, in the face of so much bad news? What if Christians like myself, and my friend, gave ourselves to a different kind of listening to the news? Christians are good news people. But the constant flow of up to date information and graphic images of human suffering, global disaster, brutal conflict, economic doom, political instability and social disintegration come at us from all directions and without interruption. Online immediacy of latest information, intrusive television from restaurants to supermarkets, the mobile phone attached with an umbilical cord to the ears, large civic digital screens in stations and city locations – it is hard to escape a world where connectivity is now necessary norm.

So, What in heaven's name are we to do with what the Hell is going on around us? We are coming to Advent season, a season of contrasts such as darkness and light, fear and hope, emptiness and fullness, waiting and arrival, anticipation and fulfilment. My question begins to find its answer in Advent. Listening to the news for an Advent people will mean listening in stereo to two news streams. What in heaven's name I do with the Hell that is going on around me is listen to the good news which is the counter-balance to the bad news. To the darkness I speak light; to the cynicism of political agendas I trust in the God of the Magnificat; to the suffering of the migrant, the refugee and those bereaved and wounded in war, I sing a song of hope in Emmanuel, God with us; to the poor and hungry and marginalised and lost I enact the Beatitudes, become one of those who sees Christ in the naked, hungry, imprisoned and broken-hearted.

This Advent that will be the theme of my preaching. It's not the most politically correct or politely constructed title, but it is born and borne out of being with a friend whose sigh and sadness first prompted the question, "What in Heaven's name are we to do with what the Hell is going on around us?" 

(The photo is by a friend, Charlee Maasz, taken inside Thomas Coats Memorial Church (Baptist) in Paisley. I was minister in Coats Memorial from 1980-84.)   

Yesterday I wrote about the death of a man who for the first 12 years of my Christian life was a mentor, friend and leader amongst our Baptist Churches in Scotland. Andrew Macrae was an inspirational, visionary leader and preacher on a Europe wide scale, who went on to take these same gifts into the academic world of theological education for mission in North America. I mention him on this blog again because he first pointed me to a certain kind of Christian reading that set my mind in a particular direction. As I began to take up night school and day release to gain qualifications for University, and as I began to prepare myself to meet the formidable Ministerial Recognition Committte, he lent me three books to read which have remained important milestones on my journey towards learning and growing in the knowledge of Christ. Life has moved on. The three books are now dated, though one of them remains in print. All three were books of substance, and my reading of them acted like the turning of an intellectual ignition key. I'll return to these three books below.

On Sunday speaking with one of our church members who like me reads for fun, as work, and just for the love of reading anyway and anywhere and anytime. The first two books I read as a new Christian were The Cross and the Switchblade, and Tortured for Christ. In conversation about such things she immediately said snap, these were amongst the first books she remembers reading as a young Christian. Both are books of testimony, written from the more extreme edges of Christian experience and conversion. One the story of an urban minister and the story of his work in New York city, in the violent world of drugs, street gangs and disillusioned lostness hungering for belonging and significance. One of the gang leaders, Nicky Cruz, was converted and so began a work of mission amongst the other gang members. 

The second is the story of a Romanian pastor, imprisoned for his work in the underground church during the Communist era. Richard Wurmbrand is unsparing in his description of deprivation, beatings, secret police, informers and the machinations of a State which saw Christian faithfulness as a serious threat to State security in the paranoid world of the Cold War. I went on to read other books of testimony and the costs and consequences of Christian witness in dangerous places; but I also started to widen my reading to include authors like Watchman Nee, Roy Hession, and Andrew Murray. I'm not sure anyone still reads them, or would even recognise the names today.

It was into those early months of reading that Andrew Macrae dropped three of his own books, lending them to me to help me get some idea of what theological reading might do for me. The first was Mere Christianity, C S Lewis's classic apologetic for the Christian faith. The book has been a phenomenon amongst Christians of all shades and ages, but especially popular amongst evangelicals for two or three generations. I read it as the eye-opener it is. To my young mind Lewis produced knock down arguments, made faith sound and read as reasonable as expecting sunrise tomorrow; he opened my mind to the scale and subtlety of Christian faith. It was thoughtful theology and yet it was an interesting, hard to put down read.

The second book was by the great Scottish scholar preacher, James S Stewart, A Faith to Proclaim. This is a book about preaching, about a faith worth preaching, and preaching worthy of faith in a Saviour who takes upon himself the universe changing work of forgiveness, reconciliation and renewal. I read it like a revelation. I had never heard preaching till I was sixteen; and exposure was limited to my own church and a few other occasions. But Stewart was writing about the highest calling to which the human voice is called, the thrilling responsibility of expounding and exegeting the love of God in Christ crucified and risen. This book made you want to preach, and at the same time warned that preaching requires your hardest work, your deepest thought, your prayerful dependence on God, and all of this in the service of a Gospel that saves the world.

The third book was T C Hammond's classic, In Understanding Be Men. In the nearly 50 years since I first worked through this book, I have read thousands of books of theology. But this book was foundational for three reasons. It was methodical in going through the classic doctrines of orthodox Christian faith. Each section was broken into pragraphs and had whole lines of biblical references to anchor thought into biblical text. There were suggestions for further reading, and to this day the bibliographic pointers of books I read remain amongst the most valuable features in a book. All in all this small handbook, one of the triumphs of the early Inter Varsity Press, introduced me to theology proper and set me on a road that would lead up the mountain ranges of Christian theology, history and biblical studies.

Three books, borrowed for a few months, and each of them an impulse towards training my own mind towards the things that matter in ministry. Amongst my debts to Andrew Macrae, is the discovery of Christian thoughtfulness in the service of others. Those books explored the inexplicable mystery of God's call to preach and the never to be forgotten privilege that such a call is. And they instilled a love of learning as one essential element in those called to ministry, and to a discipleship that requires understanding of people, of Gospel, of world and of Bible, and a lifelong commitment to bring all four of these into conversation whose centre is Christ.

In all of our lives there are encounters with people that have lifelong significance. At the time it may not seem like it, but something they say, the way they look at you, the sense that this person understands you, or wants you to grow into the potential they see in you, hints at that elusive quality of shrewd but generous judgement that sums you up, and makes you want to add up to their judgement. I can think of several people whose appearance in my life came at a crucial moment, when they helped me see the crux of the matter, and gave me the courage to stand at a crossraods and choose.

One of those was Andrew Macrae, whom I first met in 1968. For months, maybe a year, I had been both excited and troubled by the thought that I wanted to be a minister. Excited because here was something for reasons I found it hard to put into words, that I really wanted to do. Troubled because I couldn't match up my own sense of who I was, with what I thought a minister might be about. I was eighteen; I had been expelled from school, and had no O Levels, let alone Highers. There were serial episodes of being in trouble. I had just started an apprenticeship as an electrical engineer, an opportunity sponsored by my Probation Officer. My discourse was hilariously broad working class Lanarkshire, and up till then nobody from my family had ever been within thinking distance of a University.

But two years earlier I had been converted. I had come to know Jesus Christ and trusted in His love as the renewing power in my life. I had discovered the joy of being forgiven, a new life of being reconciled with God and with others I had alienated, an experience of being renewed in heart and mind, and now hungry to know what it meant to follow Jesus and live for God in the power of the Holy Spirit. In the small Baptist community in Carluke I had been accepted, welcomed and trusted. Listening to an old fashioned and in your face minister preaching from the Bible, was to me like water stations for a marathon runner. And as I read and learned and realised how much I didn't know and wanted to know, so began the thought that one day I would love to do this. That word love isn't lazy writing of an overused affective noun; it is the correct and precise word. For the love of God, because of the love of God, in answer to the love of God, I wanted to tell and show and live that love.

Early in that process of longing and self-dismissiveness, knowing what I wanted to do and not knowing how I ever could, my prayers became like day dreams of what it would be like to preach and to care for people in a Christian community. And just as often, I'd have to wake up to the reality that from where I was it wasn't very likely.

It was at that point I met the Rev Andrew Macrae, General Secretary and Superintendent of the Baptist Union of Scotland. I told him the whole story including all my reasons why it was an unrealistic hope, or an immature cry for attention, or significance, or belonging, or whatever. That day I learned a lesson I have never forgotten. Read the first paragraph again, it says as best I can what meeting Andrew Macrae was like for me at that very particular crossroads of my life.

I left his office affirmed, encouraged, firmly told to stop thinking of myself as inadequate as if inadequacy could ever be a disqualification from the service of Jesus. But to begin to think of myself as one who belonged to Christ, and who if called to be a minister will find that "I can do all things through Christ who strnegthens me". Yes, Andrew not only quoted that verse as answer to all my hesitations and self put-downs. He gave me that verse, to go away and begin to think about all this in the light, not of my own self-assessment, but in the light of the fact, yes, fact, that when God calls, we say yes, and in obedient trust, rely on God's grace and provision for what is needed. The first sermon I ever preached, and I still have the handwritten notes in an old brown paper-covered notebook, was on that text.

So when I heard yesterday that the Rev Dr Andrew Macrae had died, I took time to remember, with heartfelt and heartfilled gratitude, a busy gifted man, who made time to see me and who took the trouble to understand me, and discern the undercurrents of a confused but increasingly certain heart, about the call of Christ to ministry. It would be eight years of night school, day release, University and College before I was ordained in 1976.

But that first meeting with Andrew Macrae was decisive, as a previously awkward, wayward teenager was encouraged to believe the Gospel truth that God's grace is sufficient, and our weakness and inadequacy are simply God-given opportunities for that grace to come to fruition. In the words of Paul, and from a distance of 40 years, "I thank God upon every remembrance of Andrew Macrae", to whom I owe much that over the years has confirmed and reassured me in my own ministry amongst our churches, and in our College.

In a long life, Andrew gave himself tirelessly in the work of the Kingdom, as visionary leader of Scottish Baptists, then at Acadia University, Canada, as early academic exponent and passionate expositor of mission and evangelism as core activities of church life, and as theological educator and ministry mentor to countless students and future leaders throughout the Church of Christ. Thanks be to God for the great gift Andrew was to the Christian church, to our Baptist communities, to the wider ecumenical world where he was a known and loved figure, and to many ordinary folk who sought his counsel and help, I count myself privileged to be included amongst those his shrewd kindness and wise counsel touched.      

Eileen Kennedy is a contemporary American artist whose telling of the story of "Jesus in the house of Martha and Mary" is a powerful image of contrasts. Jesus is dressed in the traditional white robe, sandals, long brunette hair, beard and sitting in the classic pose of the teacher, hands gesturing towards the listener. Mary is sitting relaxed but attentive, leaning towards Jesus, eyes on his face, hands clasped either in prayer or in restful inaction. The sleeping cat adds to the impression of unhurried, non-stressful space.

A larger than life Martha looms over them, dominating the painting by size, demeanour and colour contrast. Her body language is impatient and annoyed, hand on hip holding the cable, other hand gripping the hoover, looking only at Mary, her whole presence an interruption of the conversation between Mary and Jesus; in addition, imagine the noise of the hoover, and the non-negotiable expectation of every hoover operator that those in the way should move to allow their space to be cleaned.

Yellow roses are variously linked with platonic friendship, wisdom and joy, affirmation of life as reminders of the sun. That they act as a partial screen for Jesus, while by contrast the two women are in full view, and their conflicting moods made plain by the body language. Kennedy has some fun with the rose screen. Beside Martha's elbow are two small bluebirds, looking into each other's faces. Lovebirds? Above them a golden bird with feathered tail in full display; frustrated at being left out? And near Jesus ankle a small red bird, meaning what? A tiny intimation of the Passion which lies ahead?

Whose side is the artist on? There is no sign in the painting of Jesus even noticing Martha, His head is facing directly at Mary, whose own head stays level so we are assuming she is looking up. It is an image of intense and exclusive exchange. Martha is annoyed, and from the composition of the painting the viewer may well have sympathy with her. In contrast to the biblical story in Luke 10.38-42, there is no sign of food, kitchen or hospitality. Martha is doing the housework; the hoover is an instrument of interruption, its noise a drowning down of the voice of Jesus and a distraction for Mary by created by Martha, who is driven to distraction by her sister's supposed selfishness. Is Kennedy hinting that Martha is about to bump Mary's seat with the hoover, which occupies the focal centre of the painting?

Kennedy's painting is cunning in a constructive way; it is also subversive of a story too often framed by pious stereotypes that miss the complexity of relationships put under strain by emotional tensions. The painting doesn't resolve those tensions; it highlights them, leaving the viewer to decide what is going on in the heads and hearts of the three protagonists.

Harry Emerson Fosdick used to be a name to conjure with in the first half of the Twentieth Century. He is largely forgotten now. One of the great preachers of a liberal and generous Gospel, he was long time minister of Riverside Church, built by Rockefeller in 1930. Fosdick started off as a Baptist, but was no Fundamentalist, held a progressive view of revelation and a non literalist approach to the Bible, and in social concern and social justice issues was outspoken, influential and often enough controversial.

I was thinking about him this morning, having chosen his famous hymn "God of grace and God of glory" as the hymn opening our worship. Sometimes our hunger for innovation, over-concern with relevance, insistence that hymns reflect personal experience rather than objective affirmation of faith in God, all combine to dull our awareness of that world out there and the realities that have to be encountered and navihated every day. Not so Fosdick, though his hymn was itself thoroughly contemporary, painfully and unuashamedly relevant. But its strength is in its unflinching confession of the mess of things, and its recurring refrain for us to be granted wisdom and courage for this hour, these days, this time. As we sang this there was an unmistakable sense of a congregation in serious agreement with words that spoje with prophetic clarity into the stae of our world, our country and of the heart and mind of contemporary culture. It is a hymn adaptable to our deepest prayers, and an affirmation, if we need it, of our faith in God when a whole lot else is proving transient, unpredictable and uncertain.

In the world of Aleppo and Haiti, of Trump and Clinton, of Brexit and the fallout in an increasingly divided society, of concern about increases in hate crime, anti-semitism and xenophobia, the rise of international scale emergencies such as mass immigration and the breakdown of international stability and the slow erosion of the authority of the great institutions such as the United Nations, the increasing undermining of the work of the Intenrational Red Cross and Medecin sans Frontieres, to the slow progress in action to slow down climate change and avart permanent damage to our planet and all the living creatures who share it with us – yes that is one long sentence, a whole paragraph!

But it is only a select and small list of what it is our world faces, the world in which I as a follower of Jesus am called to live as peacemaker, reconciler, carer of creation, worker for justice, conduit and inspirer of hope. So I need hymns like this, to remind me, of the brokenness of the world, and the redemptive grace and glory of God.

1 God of grace and God of glory,
on your people pour your power;
crown your ancient church's story,
bring its bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
for the facing of this hour,
for the facing of this hour.

2 Lo! the hosts of evil round us
scorn the Christ, assail his ways!
From the fears that long have bound us
free our hearts to faith and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
for the living of these days,
for the living of these days.

3 Cure your children's warring madness;
bend our pride to your control;
shame our wanton, selfish gladness,
rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
lest we miss your kingdom's goal,
lest we miss your kingdom's goal.

4 Save us from weak resignation
to the evils we deplore;
let the gift of your salvation
be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
serving you whom we adore,
serving you whom we adore.

H E Fosdick, 1930

One of the significant thinkers about forgiveness and reconciliation is Miroslav Volf, whose book Exclusion and Embrace was written out of the tragedy of the Balkan war in the 1990's. His home village was attacked by Serbian Cetniks, and subjected to atrocities such as rape, summary execution and arson. In the Preface Volf remembers being asked a question following a paper he had delivered at a theological conference about forgiveness and reconciliation. The influential theologian Jurgen Moltmann asked if, for all the fine theology and theory, he could now emabrace a Cetnik. Volf's answer was searingly honest, and radically charged. He said no he could not – but as a follower of Jesus he must.

And there it is. The dilemma of the enemy, whether perpetrator or victim. How to do the morally impossible even when it is a moral imperative; how to be obedient to God when the whole being revolts at what is demanded. To witness atrocity against our neighbours, our family, to bear the consequences and memory of cruelty, intentional affliction and hate articulated in word, action and cultural violence; how to even think in terms of forgiveness without satisfaction, redress, indeed justice?

Volf's book Exclusion and Embrace was a watershed treatment of how humans respond to inflicted violence, enacted enmity and deliberate relational rejection. Either the heart builds walls that exclude and reject, or it finds a way to embrace, dismantle walls and pursue friendship as the ultimate security of justice. It's a hard book to read, not only because of the subject matter. It is at times technical, socially analytic, psychologically exploratory, and all this in pursuit of a theological foundation for seeing the other, however hated and hating, as one we will seek to embrace rather than exclude. 

One of Volf's more accessible treatments of this whole nexus of ethical and theological problems is Free of Charge. Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace. Even the title is a reset button for many of our assumptions about the drivers and motives of a consumerist and competitive society. Near the start of the book he writes a paragraph that will be unfolded throughout:

God generously gives, so God is not a negotiator of absolute dimensions. God demands, so God is not an infinite Santa Claus. So what is the relation between God's giving and God's demanding? In other words, what is the difference between a Santa Claus God and a gift giving God? The bare-bones answer is this; a Santa Claus God gives simply so we can have and enjoy things; the true God gives so we can become joyful givers and not just self-absorbed receivers. God the giver has made us to be givers and obliges us therefore to give. page 28

And out of that generosity of giving and receiving is born the disposition to forgive. Later Volf speak out of his own experience of the courage and moral faith that enables forgiveness:

We give when we delight in others or others are in need; by giving we enhance their joy or make up for their lack. We forgive when others have wronged us; by forgiving we release them from the burden of their wrongdoing. The difference lies in the violation suffered, in the burden of wrongdoing, offence, transgression, debt. And that's what makes it more difficult to forgive than to give. page 130

The cost of forgiveness, and the connection between Christian forgiveness and the Christian experience and understanding of God are major strands in all of Volf's writing. The giving God is a forgiving God – but forgiveness is not indulgence of evil, which would neither be justice nor mercy. The dynamics of forgiveness, the anatomy of justice in relation to both mercy and punishment, the moral imperative not to hate and the equal demand to protect the vulnerable and bring justice to the victim, mean that forgiveness is no simple wiping of a slate, no ignoring of offence, no obscuring of the consequences of evil. The Christian faith instinctively turns to ponder the cross and its meaning in the heart of God and for the life of the world. While the ideas of a giving and forgiving God can be spoken as a sound byte, in reality they are truths rooted in the eternal love of God and the tragedy of a broken creation. Hence the focus of the first post in this series.

When it comes to forgiveness Christians should be well ahead of the game. At the dark centre of the Christian message is a cross, occupied by a crucified Messiah, whose last words were a howl of abandonment (Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthami – My God why have you forsaken me? Mk 15.34), followed by the brokenhearted sigh of resignation (Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. Lk 23.46).

The earliest Gospel is unflinching in its storytelling, and offers no comment on that anguished cry of dereliction. Several decades later it would take Paul at his most penetrating as out of that story of crucified love he forged a theology adequate to the Christian experience of forgiveness. "God made him who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." (2 Cor 5.21)

And those words only tiptoe to the edge of the abyss;there is much more, hinted at earlier in Paul's argument about the necessity, meaning, cost and consequences of reconciliation: "He died for all that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for him, who died and was raised again." (v15)

Sixteen hundred years later the quiet Anglican parson, George Herbert, also teetered on the edsge of the mystery. In a poem that demolishes human pride, whether from complacency or defiance Herbert distilled words into such a concentrated sequence of images that his poem remains one of the most potent analyses of the anguish and cost of forgiveness. In "The Agonie", the forgiver is the Holy Creator redeeming fallen humanity and absorbing into the eternal heart of God the sin and suffering of a broken creation, turning judgment to mercy and guilt to forgiveness in an alchemy of holy love condemning sin to nothingness. But at a cost both fatal and vital.

The Agonie

Philosophers have measur'd mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of the seas, of states, and kings,
Walk'd with a staff to heav'n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.

Who would know SIn, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skin, his garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through ev'ry vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach, then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

Paul's magnificent argument for reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5 is anchored in the granite of a grace that is eternal, infinite, unsearchable, and embodied in Jesus. "No one has ever seen God; the only son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known…and from his fullness we ahve all received grace upon grace."  Herbert takes that bedrock truth of grace unspeakable and unthinkable and uses it as a lens to look at the passion story of Jesus. And the mystery, abysmal and beyond any horizon reachable by reason, is that the man so wrung with pains is the one in whom the holy love of God confronted and suffered the deepest sin, the darkest hours, the fatal consequences, of the soul abandoned by God to the point of extinction. Reading that poem, entitled "The Agonie" is an education in the greatest mystery of human life – the existence of evil and suffering as negations of hope, joy and life itself.

Herbert is not offering explanations; neither is Paul. To "sound" sin and love, to plumb the depths of that eternal antithesis, is beyond human capacity. But out of that antithesis came a reversal of reality so potent with creative power that it is best described as a new beginning. The death and resurrection of Jesus called in question, indeed contradicted, the powers of hate, the destructiveness of violence, the permanence of despair and death as the ultimate threat to life. That's why Paul could say, "If anyone is in Christ they are a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come." (2 Cor 5.17)

Forgiveness is the reality that is called into being by a holy love that confronts sin and nullifies it by absorbing its cost and consequence, by an eternal patience that both judges and suffers the worst sin can do, and by a grace of such rich mercy that through it God evokes and answering love, a grateful gladness and a hope both durable and plausible.  

The photo was taken by my friend Graeme Clarke – sunset on one of the iron crosses on the cloister railings of Paisley Abbey

There's a lot of work being done currently on the Four Gospels in the New Testament. Why four gospels and not five, or three or more? Then there's the question of four gospels telling the same story but with differences of style and content, a variety of emphases and changes in the narrative flow, conflicting chronology and major omissions and additions. But they are each examples of what came to be called a Gospel. Not biographies, or anthologies, more than history and more than theology but with both as powerful streams in the literary genre we now call Gospels. All four are a telling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth, and in the telling each is an interpretationof who Jesus was, and is, for those who heard and followed him, and for those who encountered him whether as supporters, as opponents and as enemies.

Amongst the great British scholars of the 20th Century, the Methodist Vincent Taylor was a leading mediator of responsible historical criticism of the Gospels, and used the relatively new discipline of Form Criticism in his own Gospel studies. His commentary on the Gospel of Mark was for decades a defining voice in the exegesis of Mark's Gospel, and though now dated it remains a magisterial close reading of the text. Seven hundred pages, 500 of them in double column and small print bear witness to an exhaustive and exhausting treatment in the days before word prcoessing. It is a triumph of New Testament scholarship, superceded only by the passage of time, changing methodologies of study and analysis, torrents of new information about the social and cultural context of the Greco-Roman world, advances in linguistics and in the research tools available from online primary sources, to lexical and semantic databases, not to mention the entire industry of publishing in biblical studies. 

And for all our advances, are we any closer to understanding, comprehending, pinning down, encapsulating explaining in any provisional let alone final way, who Jesus is for us today? What was and is the meaning of that life lived in such obscurity, ending in such ignomy, and that after-life which has gone on and on for two millenia as historical challenge and intellectual scandal. An early essay by Taylor is as true, wise and intellectually wondering now as it was 70 years ago when he wrote it. Here is one telling extract, written as a prose poem:

We ask who He is and He gives us no answer.

Enigmatic as in the days of His flesh,

he is enigmatic still to the questing mind.

But He so works in history and life that,

after He has left us “in suspense”,

we come to know of a surety who He is.

He makes Himself known in His deeds,

in the breaking of bread,

in the cross,

in prayer and worship.

He is what He does.

His secret cannot be read:

it must be found.

(Vincent Taylor, "Unsolved NT Problems: The Messianic Secret." Expository Times, 59 (1948), 151. Quoted in David Garland, A Theology of Mark's Gospel. p.25.)

Enig 

Late in her life Denise Levertov discovered Julian of Norwich, and found in her a deep source of healing wisdom, immense and optimistic love for her fellow humans and patience with the world and with the eternal love and purpose of the Creator. A small suite of poems weave some of the themes most resonant with where Levertov was in her own life journey.

Her conversion to Christianity was neither routine nor typical. As a poet who deiberately wrote in prophetic and political mode about the injustices, cruelties and violence scarring the world she was never going to be be content to toe any credal or ecclesial line that was drawn in the wrong place on the sand. In the early years of environmental concern she picked up on the threats to the future of the earth and to the future of humanity and wrote about the exploitations of nature, the militaristic mindset of conquest, dominance and greed. 

Positively she was passionate about peace, and  no more passionate about peace than about its negatives, war, inflicted suffering, systemic injustice, racism and the avoidable poverty of countries stripped of resources and labour to feed the markets and appetites of the rich powerful nations. Levertov was a poet, a prophet and a political activist whose poetry was protest against abuse of power, truth telling to the deliberately deaf and moral resistance to the market assumptions that flatten the hopes of the majority of the world's people.

So when she came to read and write about Julian, she discovered a theologically wise and and spiritually resilient guide who had looked the Black Death in the face and clung nevertheless to her faith in the Divine Love.

And that brief parable of the hazelnut – Levertov considered that image, held the hazelnut against the vast night sky, the complexity of existence, the  ludicrous insignificance of humanity in a universe exploding outwards and away from all that we know, and nodded her agreement with Julian. The reesult is this poem. 

The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich 1342-1416

Julian, there are vast gaps we call black holes,
unable to picture what’s both dense and vacant;

and there’s the dizzying multiplication of all
language can name or fail to name, unutterable
swarming of molecules. All Pascal
imagined he could not stretch his mind to imagine
is known to exceed his dread.

And there’s the earth of our daily history,
its memories, its present filled with the grain
of one particular scrap of carpentered wood we happen
to be next to, its waking light on one especial leaf,
this word or that, a tune in this key not another,
beat of our hearts now, good or bad,
dying or being born, eroded, vanishing–

And you ask us to turn our gaze
inside out, and see
a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and believe
it is our world? Ask us to see it lying
in God’s pierced palm? That it encompasses
every awareness our minds contain? All Time?
All limitless space given form in this
medieval enigma?
                             Yes, this is indeed 

what you ask, sharing
the mystery you were shown: all that is made:
a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, held safe
in God’s pierced palm.