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  Walking from where I park my car, I pass the school playing fields down at the University.

Out of shot some football training or PE taking place at the goalmouth.

Those who enjoy people-watching should try going to a football match and ignoring the play on the field. The real entertainment is the emotional outpourings of spectators whose life frustrations are like heat seeking missiles looking for a legitimate, or illegitimate, target.

Indeed the synonym for illegitimate is a popular preferred term used at football matches quite inventively as an adjectival verbal participle, or more commonly a common noun used with uncommon intensity.

The cathartic surge of anger, frustration, unreasonable claims of unfairness, apopleptic name calling at the referee – these are all suggested by the performance of this crow.

Impressive balance as natural as you like on display here, as it cawed out its complaints, derision, technical instructions. Come to think of it, more reminiscent of a manager frustrated by the technical area but inhibited neither in volume nor vocabulary. It was so intent on firing abusive volleys it ignored the wee guy with the camera behind it, and not very far away!

Amongst my more likeable idiosyncracies is my belief that birds are funny – whether intentionally or accidentally they are nearly always fun to watch.

It was a dreich day on the shoreline yesterday. Big waves, mild but strong wind, mist and drizzle combining as mizzle.

I took time to enjoy a coffee in the Inversnecky Cafe and came out the door to see this juevnile tweenage herring gull, looking bewildered and a bit miserable.

Used to being fed by its parents it was hungry and seemed a bit put out. My guess is it was being taught lessons on independence.

Past experience has made me wary of juvenile gulls when I'm carrying food. They have laser eyesight, nil conscience and a primordial instinct for fast food for free. I remember being mugged from behind when taking the first, and last, bite of my pie in the University quadrangle.

But he's standing there for a reason, within a few feet of the rubbish bin. And actually these birds do a lot of the cleaning up behind people who throw food away.

I hope he got some supper. And learns how to survive into and to the other side of winter.

Most Sundays of the year I travel to Montrose where I am part time minister in the Baptist Church.

Down the coast road are several towns and villages – Stonehaven, Caterline, Inverbervie, Gourdon, Johnshaven, St Cyrus and then Montrose.

The weather dictates the scenery. From the road above Gourdon one Sunday, the sea loomed large over the houses. The zoom foreshortens the distance, but the sea was big, at times pouring over the harbour wall, and I guess the path between Gourdon and Bervie would have been a spectacular walk at full tide.

For generations people have lived that close to the elemental power and occasional rage of the sea. In years past Gourdon was a flourishing fishing village and still has a robust well maintained harbour, and small lobster boats operate from there every day. And on the harbour one of the best fish restaurants in the country, The Quay. People travel for miles to eat there, keeping fish as a continuing commercial interest in the life of the village. They do the usual, and occasionally the unusual – like a smoked haddock supper!

It isn't often I quote Breitbart as a source on this blog. But this time I wanted to nail the source. Notice the piercing, violent metaphor of steel hitting steel into wood. I'll come back to that.

So here's the quote, straight from the mouth of the US President, speaking to one of his base rallies in Montana yesterday, reported on the Breitbart website. 

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/03/donald-trump-in-montana-barbed-wire-used-properly-can-be-a-beautiful-sight/

"I noticed all that beautiful barbed wire going up today,” Trump said, referring to military soldiers setting up fences on the border. “Barbed wire used properly can be a beautiful sight.”

We have become used to rhetoric aimed at the lowest common denominator of moral discourse. There is nothing new in the President of the United States using grotesque metaphors, inflammatory humour and the recurrent mockery of truth as his speciality party piece. But his words of eulogy on the virtues of barbed wire demonstrate culpable historical ignorance, dangerous cultural illiteracy and ethical irresponsibility, and this in someone obliged by office to embody the moral and political leadership of an entire people. And not just any people. A vast, diverse, powerfully resourced nation now more polarised than any time in living memory.

Let me deconstruct the President's sentimental attachment to barbed wire. I begin with acknowledging the historical significance of this coming week. We will remember the tragedy, indeed the millions of tragedies that took place over the four and a half years of World War I. Amongst the most lethal and terrible inventions deployed in modern warfare is barbed wire. It is, and is meant to be, an instrument that injures, tears and pierces. Beautiful it is not. Unless of course you are behind a machine gun in World War I, and all that beautiful barbed wire holds up other human beings who happen to be the enemy making them easier to kill.

Thirty years later, electrified barbed wire elevated the usefulness of barbed wire, and enhanced  its beauty as a weapon to a quite new level. Auschwitz provided a prototype for concentration camps where death would come to those trying to escape by climbing over or trying to cut through barbed wire. Beautiful it is not. Unless your goal is to herd human beings, do them harm, and make that harm fatal by the imaginative genius of electrified wire twisted to sharpness that pierces, tears and ensnares.

Alexander Solzhenytsin wrote of the hell of the Gulags and, in his exile, educated Western democracies in the realities of political oppression and the brutalising of human beings. The imaginative ideas factory that is the dictator's mindset, aims primarily for power over rather than power in the service of the people. And one of the more effective instruments for power over is to make someone physically captive. For that, barbed wire is good, you might almost say, is beautifully fitted to purpose.

For weeks now the Trump administration has racked up the threat posed by a caravan of refugees travelling from Honduras, through Mexico towards the United States border. Amongst the measures to be taken to prevent a mass rush on the border is the deployment of barbed wire. Desperate people who have nowhere to stay, no means of support, and who by internationally recognised critieria are refugees, will find themselves confronted by a barrier whose primary purpose is to deter by the certainty of injury and torn human flesh.

"Barbed wire used properly can be a beautiful sight." Loud applause and cheering from the crowd at the rally. Why? Because Trump has once again manufactured the spectre of fear, then shown how as a strong man he can keep them safe, though it means using force against others who are precisely the ones being depicted as a threat to be feared. Create a bogeyman, stir the fear and anger, talk big about being the great deliverer, and use that as an excuse to further demonise and brutalise others. It's the classic tactic of the fascist. Madeleine Albright's recent book evidences that time after time.

But here's the thing. Trump's words expose the danger he himself poses to the American people. "Barbed wire used properly can be a beautiful sight". Did an American President actually say that? Words that are the cry of the powerful, bent on the subjugation of the vulnerable through actions that despise their weakness and degrade their humanity; is that what America now is? Really?

Beautiful barbed wire is a moral oxymoron betraying the aesthetic nihilism of the powerful. From the native American peoples whose free ranging way of life was destroyed by guns and, yes, barbed wire; to the soldiers on both sides who were crucified on endless coils of barbed wire during the maelstrom of World War I; to the millions of Jewish people herded and murdered in killing factories within walls made of barbed wire; to the gulags of Russia, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Berlin Wall, the Concentration camps in Bosnia, the one common factor was the deployment of barbed wire as deterrent and instrument of laceration of human flesh.

I said at the start of this post I wanted to nail my source for the quote, and emphasised my deliberate use of that metaphor of violent striking of steel into wood. I am a Christian. At the centre of Christian faith is steel tearing into human flesh, military power using steel as deterrent, weapon and instrument of pain or death. Barbed wire is ugly, never beautiful. In conception and reality it is a weapon. And it has been used repeatedly as a weapon of oppression, a militarised threat of laceration for those who do not comply with the orders of those who own the wire.

Immigration is a global problem. It is also a global reality that will not go away. But behind the labels of immigrant, refugee, asylum seeker, there are human beings, people of flesh and blood. The use of barbed wire as metaphor and weapon, to threaten the lives and the flesh of other human beings is not something that a Christian can ever view with moral neutrality. "The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us." Barbed wire used against flesh is for me a blasphemy, a refusal to see that of God in the other person. I have no difficulty whatsoever answering the question, "What side of the barbed wire would Jesus choose to stand?" Because Jesus is walking with the refugees in that caravan. He knows about barbed wire, steel through flesh, and the long trek from bloody Bethlehem to the safety of Egypt.

The white stone is not quite egg shaped, nor heart shaped.

Yet similar enough to suggest those familiar images.

The pebbled beach at Stonehaven is a geological kaleidoscope, awash with fluid formations of millions of fragments, coloured and contoured by sea, sand, and sun.

Fleeting fluid images can be captured by the framing of a photograph, an act of deliberate limitation and focus.

That white stone caught my eye, an image startling in its unexpectedness.

Surrounded by colours reminiscent of autumn shadow and sunlight, it seemed to absorb and contain the light.

The mysterious image of the white stone in the Book of Revelation was for me an inevitable connection.

"To the one who is victorious, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it." (Rev 2.17)

Those are words redolent of promise, embedding assurance in hearts vacillating and anxious about the future.

In John's troubled world, and in our own troubling times, the white stone points to a mystery beyond our controlling confident cognition, and resists our arrogantly assumed omniscience about what matters, and to whom.

That white stone is both promise and judgement. It is not there for the taking, it is a gift that comes from beyond our ken and power.

It is God's yes to those who stay faithful to Christ, it is an identity marker that cannot be faked, and it is the award of God's recognition of those whose lives have been given to the things that truly matter.

The white stone of justice, love of neighbour, mercy, walking humbly, hospitality, forgiveness, peacemaking, reconciliation, hope-building.

The white stone, with the new name written on it, given to those who in doing these things to the least of Jesus brothers and sisters, remained faithful as embodying the Gospel, performing the faith, and bearing witness to the love of God in Christ, by the power of the Spirit.

It takes a long time to make a pebble. And a lot of friction. You need water, sand, and renewable, repetitive lapidary motion. It takes megajoules of energy. But gradually the pebbles take on shape, and the colours settle into patterns and tones, enhanced by the wetness. The beach is a place of slowly worked transformation.

These stones weren't just lying around like this, though they were near each other. Two of them were already there, and as the waves washed over them I placed another two from a foot or two away. It doesn't matter which is which.

I had been thinking about community, that mixture of coming together and bringing together that is human friendship, neighbourliness, various people in their diversity mutually complementing each other. So I brought these four together for a group photo.

As a pastor in a church you come to realise there are those who just happen to be there, been there for years. Then there are those who intentionally come, or recently arrived. Others come rolling in with the next wave. They are differently coloured and shaped and they have come from very different places. But by powers beyond their control they find themselves together, and find each other. They are shaped by friction and moved by waves that come from God knows where.

No attempt at symmetry, no tidy presupposed pattern of arrangement, just four very different pebbles brought into proximity. Which one am I? Where and what did I come from? What gives me my shape, and the colour or character that runs right through all that I am? Reflecting on how a Christian community begins, and exists, grows and declines, changes and is transformed, there is a sense of the divine undertow, the providence that works through our freedoms to bring new opportunities, new movements and directions, and yes, new neighbours we are called to be alongside. 

So I chose four stones. But they were already there, they are what they are, not what I want them to be or would like to make them. Not my call. Indeed, not my calling. My call is to respect the uniqueness, but also to enable each to find a position and place of belonging that honours the story of their journey. There is something non-negotiably given in each of these wave-washed and sand-shaped stones, thrown onto the beach from wherever they have come. But there. And so too each person who is part of a Christian community. There is, likewise, something non-negotiably given in this person, who has arrived here at this time in this place. The divine undertow has pulled them, and rolled them, and shaped them to this point. And here they are, as the gift they are.  

In Church

Often I try
To analyse the quality
Of its silences. Is this where God hides
From my searching? I have stopped to listen,
After the few people have gone,
To the air recomposing itself
For vigil. It has waited like this
Since the stones grouped themselves about it.
These are the hard ribs
Of a body that our prayers have failed
To animate. Shadows advance
From their corners to take possession
Of places the light held
For an hour. The bats resume
Their business. The uneasiness of the pews
Ceases. There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

                                    R S Thomas

Faith is no easy trust for this poet. R S Thomas was no pietist, nor was he one for whom dogma provided emotional ballast or intellectual comfort. Yet for all his complaints and hesitations, his metaphysical doubts and theological impatience with tidiness and certainty, there is the glint of steel in his words. He neither claims easy faith nor surrenders easily to the felt absence of ground for faith. "Is this where God hides from my searching?, he asks, reversing the expectations of those who come to church to seek God that haply they might find him.

The vocabulary is laden with previous disappointments; silence, waiting, failed animation, shadows, uneasiness, darkness, emptiness, and that final theological clanger, 'untenanted cross'. This is faith so often disillusioned it comes close to resignation, and regret if not resentment. Thomas walks the via negativa, from church porch to altar, as he has done before, often, time after time.That's why the poem reads as a long pondered questioning, frequently undergone, of what the priest is about, serving an unresponsive God, in a building "prayers have failed to animate".

"Often I try to analyse the quality of its silence…I have stopped to listen". Silence varies in quality, and purpose, and explanation. There is the silence of absence, no one there to communicate with; the silence of mystery when the question asked has no yes or no answer; the silence of the vigil, waiting with expectation and no guarantee of fulfilment. Then late in the poem the silence is disturbed:

There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

"The sound of a man breathing" has a primordial referent, going all the way back to Genesis, the Creation, and a garden when God breathed into the first human and he became a living soul. Breath and prayer mingle in the cold church, like an exhalation in the frosty air. "Prayer is the Christian's vital breath" as well as the "soul's sincere desire", in Montgomery's hymn. And prayer is "God's breath in man returning to his birth" according to George Herbert's sonnet, which Thomas would know by heart. And Thomas was too steeped in Scripture and liturgy for the sound of a man breathing to mean less than 'the burden of a sigh'.

The interrogative mood of so much of R S Thomas's poetry can become irksome to those whose sense of God is more obviously felt, more easily experienced, and even more easily explained. But for those whose disposition is less sure and sanguine, and whose questions are more persistent and unsettling, Thomas describes a spirituality of intellectual struggle and chronic discontent with questions too easily settled. Which brings us to those last words, "an untenanted cross". Jesus is depositioned, and deposited in the grave. One by one the poet nails his questions to a cross on which the work is done, but the fruit has not appeared. In the liminal time of Easter Saturday, the priest struggles to understand the meaning of atonement without resurrection. One by one he nails his questions, but there is nobody there, he is testing his faith on emptiness.

In Church is a poem for our 21st Century. All over European and North American society, the church is losing its grip, Christian faith is in recession, and the faithful struggle to arrest decline, and to maintain credibility, and resist the undertow of a growing disillusionment. This too is a body our prayers have failed to animate, as the Church and the churches are pushed to the margins of a culture no longer all that interested in, because no longer in need of, the Christian God with the human face of Jesus. And we have questions of our own, if we have the courage to ask them and the integrity to refuse that false optimism which is denial. It seems that the cross is untenanted and faith is being tested on emptiness. But every instinct tells us to nail our questions, one by one, on the untenanted cross. Because there will soon be an untenanted grave. "It's Good Friday but Sunday is coming", as Tony Campolo once quipped.

And Thomas knew this. In another poem, 'Suddenly', he looks at the cross once more. Still untenanted, the cross is the place where life suddenly erupts.The poem ends:

The gamblers
at the foot of the unnoticed
cross went on with
their dicing; yet the invisible
garment for which they played
was no longer at stake, but worn
by him in this risen existence. 

It occurred to me reading these two poems, that 'In Church' is a description of an interior where air recomposes itself into vigil, there is the silence of the grave, and shadows cast by receding light, and then there is the sound of a man breathing. The cross is untenanted because the one who died there breathes "in this risen existence." And that's the thing with Thomas. He nails his questions to the cross, but eventually finds himself heading towards a garden, with a tomb, where he will test his faith with its emptiness.

The Station of the Cross is one of a triptych, personal gifts from a personal friend, the Scottish sculptor Alexander Stoddart.

The news today that Eugene Peterson has died will be greeted by thousands of pastors with a mixture of reactive sadness that his life has ended, but also with enduring gratitude that it was lived the way he lived it. Eugene Peterson was a pastor, never anything else. In the second half of his life he became a teacher of spirituality at one of the premier Evangelical seminaries in North America, but the person who became a professor was first, and foremost a pastor. His professorship was merely the medium through which he continued to be a pastor and spiritual guide to hundreds of students and thousands of pastors.

I met Eugene Peterson only once. It's worth telling the story. I was booked to go to the Conference at St Ninians in Crieff, in Central Scotland, in September 1997. I had to cancel due to the sudden death of my mother in law. The day after the funeral, which was also the day after the conference in Crieff finished, I phoned St Ninians and asked if Eugene was still there. He was, and when he heard I was willing to divert to come through Crieff just to meet him, he rearranged his timetable and asked if I could be in Crieff by 11.00am for coffee. Yes I could, and yes I did.

I wanted to thank him for his books, and for the way they had reshaped my thinking, realigned my heart and reconfirmed that the calling of a pastor is fulfilled by faithfulness and pursued in disciplined love for Christ and His church. A long obedience in the same direction, working the angles, being a contemplative pastor, choosing five smooth stones for pastoral work, answering God – what I mean is these and otther titles of his books rang with a clear pastoral intent. If I had to choose which of his books have meant most I'd be hard pushed.

It was a sunny cold day, so we sat on the bench in front of St Ninians and talked theology, pastoral care and spirituality. His appreciation of my own book on evangelical spirituality was one of my more humbling moments, and I suspect his way of deflecting my admiration and indebtedness to his own writing ministry. Because amongst the most obvious characteristics of this man was his self-deprecation, not in false modetsy, but in genuine Gospel humility. We spent an hour or so, we prayed together and he commended our family as we sorrowed in bereavement, we shook hands and parted.

But not before he went into the St Ninian's bookstore, bought one of his own books and inscribed it as a memento of our conversation. It's one of those moments, and one of those gifts, that has taken on increasing significance over the years. Now reading it and remembering Eugene Peterson is a sacramental act, bringing back so much of the sense and sensitivity of someone who embodied so much of what over the years I have aimed at. So that is my personal debt.

But many others knew him better and met him oftener, and they are the more blessed for it. But amongst his most important gifts were the books he wrote. Once he began to teach on spirituality and on pastoral care in Vnacouver, many of the themes which enriched and expanded our understanding of ministry began to recur, so that his later work tended to be derivative from his earlier work. That isn't a criticism so much as a recognition that certain key principles and stated priorities would always find their way into whatever he wrote on pastoral care, prayer, preaching, spiritual direction, and pastoral counsel.

His writing and his thought, indeed his way of thinking, was thoroughly biblical, drenched in scripture and mixed with wider reading across the classics of literature, theology and biblical studies. He was a poet and a lover of poetry. He lived in the Psalms and quarried in the Prophets, walked in the Gospel stories and cultivated those occasionally tetchy and pastorally oriented letters of Paul. And out of all this Peterson wrote about the ministry, the pastoral life, the ways of prayer, the psychology and spirituality of Christian experience, and he did so as one who knew he was as fallible, vulnerable and in need of grace as the rest of us who read his words.

But read them we did. And ministers who were bruised, disillusioned, exhausted, wounded, bored, anxious, defensive, or confused, were helped to get things in proportion, to see all the down sides in the light of eternity, and to recover a hopefulness that depended not on their skill, technique or eagerness to fulfil expectations, but on the Gospel of a grace that overwhelms, a wisdom that seems foolish, and a love that undergirds and underwrites every instance of ministry offered in weakness. And alongside the reorientations and return to true vocation, Peterson taught the disciplines that sustain ministry, that cultivate the soul to a fertile tilth and a suitable depth to contain and nurture more of the eternal love of God in Christ.

Bible reading and long pondering of the text aiming at a familiarity of habit to know the text. But not as cognitive control or academic curiosity, more as a pharmacist knows medicine, or a fly-fisher knows the flies, the river and the light, or a driver knows a road that is familiar but still, not to be treated with familiar complacency. Such reading presupposed long and persevering prayer, and the cultivated trustfulness in the ministry of the Holy Spirit who takes of the things of Jesus and brings them to remembrance, leads us to deeper apprehension of truth, and equips us with gifts we never knew we had.

If I were to chose one book from the plethora of options, I couldn't. Yes I think Reversed Thunder the finest writing he ever did tied to a biblical text. But what about Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work and Working the Angles as fundamental texts of any pastoral theology presupposing a Christ centred spirituality? His longest series of volumes on a spiritual theology are his most recent, and probably now his best known because most recently in print. But they gather so much from those earlier books wrought out in the workshop of being a pastor in the community of Christ the King. And these earlier books I treasure because they have the footprints of my pastoral journeying all over them.

Eugene Peterson never sought fame, or the accolades of grateful readers. But in evangelical circles his work is well known, and amongst ministers a trusted resource. The vision of ministry he commended and enacted, and out of which came so much of his best and most durable writing, is now in turn enacted and incarnated in the many whom he taught through his writings and in Regent's College, Vancouver.

For myself, I owe deep unpayable debts to this man. Not that he ever sought or wanted to be seen as a planet around which acolytes orbit; and in faithfulness to his own teaching what he would want more than anything else is for ministers to minister out of those deep places of contemplative prayer and faithful study and passion fuelled vocation, nourished by Bible, community and the intimacy and majesty of prayer. From early on in my ministry, I have been privileged to have encountered a mind and a ministry that does something very hard to do; makes you want to keep on being a pastor, a servant of Christ and of the Body of Christ.

Jesus spoke about rain too. He didn't seem too bothered about getting wet. Rain didn't dampen his mood. In fact the one time he spoke about rain he spoke about sunshine in the same breath. What rain and sunshine have in common is that they are indiscriminate. If you're outside in rain you'll get wet just as surely as if you're outside in sun you'll feel the warmth and get your vitamin D replenished.

There are times when Jesus sees deeply into the surface of things. He sees and states the obvious and changes people's worldview. Which is the start of changing the world. Well into the Sermon on the Mount, on the other side of the Beatitudes, he says "Love your enemies." We're used to reading that, yet his words are still unsettling, even upsetting. For those first hearers that imperative "Love your enemies" pulled the carpet from a way of life embedded in God's law. Not so much a reinterpretation, but a flat contradiction. 

Don't hate, love. Don't curse, pray. Later, in one of the most explicit echoes of Jesus in all of Paul's letters, he will speak the same nonsense to the Christians in Rome. (Romans 12.14, 17-21)  And it is nonsense, in the technical sense of not making sense. What makes sense to us is what we are used to, the familiar, those experiences we have come to understand, predict and which contribute to the stability and smooth running of our lives. We live by the values we've gotten used to. Then Jesus asks the impossible, give up what you're used to. The pragmatism of the everyday and ordinary, the familiar and the secure, our long established comfort zones, Jesus simply turned outside in, upside down, back to front. Or use any other phrase for radical reversal of expectations. And then, that scary way Jesus took the responsibility for a whole series of apparently irresponsible words, "You have heard that it was said….but I say to you…" These are amongst the most revolutionary words Jesus ever spoke within people's hearing, and they forced a reorientation of life for those who heard them.

"Love your enemy sounds" like a moral oxymoron from anyone other than Jesus. But why? What's the reason for such unrealistic commands?  Loving your enemy seems like an act of emotional self-harm. Love your neighbour makes sense. Neighbourliness is built on all those instinctive and long established principles of human community like mutual protection, reciprocity of gift, collaboration and co-operative action, communal sharing, agreed values and upholding the common good? You could almost define "enemy" as someone who rubbished all these social bonds and refused, or worse subverted by deceit or suppressed by force the very things that make people neighbourly. Which brings us back to rain.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

Why? Why love my enemy? Jesus gives one of those answers that shows why his Kingdom is not of this world, not even close. "So that you may be children of your Father in heaven." To be a child of God is to bear the family resemblance; to behave in ways reminiscent of God's purposes; to align our way of being with God's way of being God. What's God's way of being God? "He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust." Indiscriminate rain argues indiscriminate love. Neighbour or enemy, friend or persecutor, if they're out in the rain they get wet; if they encounter a Christian they get loved. Neighbour or enemy, friend or persecutor, if they're out in the sun they get warmed, and if they meet a Christian they encounter love.

Simple. It's the logic of a Kingdom that makes no sense in the world of eye for eye and tooth for tooth. It's a logic that seems plain daft in communities founded on quid pro quo, competitive advantages, trading and trade-offs, and long memories for wrongs awaiting payback. The logic of enemy love is a theo-logic. It requires a way of being that is enabled by God's grace and energised by God's love. The love of God in Christ, reproduced in the followers of Jesus is enacted, embodied in the practices of love – peacemaking, reconciliation, forgiveness, compassion, kindness, self-giving service. In short, love for enemy is Christlike love for the other, any other.

This makes me wonder if another approach to rain, to add to the options in the cartoon above, might be called "The Nazarene". Perhaps a picture of two people standing in a downpour, one with empty hands and outstretched arms waiting to greet the person with clenched fists and the body language of hostility. And as the rain falls on the just and the unjust, that gesture of love, goodwill and conciliation may turn the enemy's world upside down, inside out and back to front, and the result a changed worldview. Loving the enemy is a Copernican revolution in a relationship by which enemy becomes friend, and the shadow of hate is dispelled by the sun shining on the just and the unjust.

And therefore, Christians should now and then walk in the rain, quietly praying those words of Jesus, while reviewing the list of those we dislike and who dislike us, those whose past offense is in danger of hardening into enmity, those for whom we have chosen not to care. Living in Scotland such opportunities come round regularly – it rains often. And if we go out we get wet; and if our enemy goes out they get wet too. So, if we should meet during a walk in the rain, seeking to be children of our Father who is in heaven, our love learns to be as indiscriminate, as persistent, as life laden with potential, as rain. Rain therefore, is a sacrament of that grace that pours into our lives in uncountable drops, soaking us with all that is needed for life, and life in all its abundance.

Paul. A Biography, Tom Wright (London: SPCK, 2018).  464 pages, £19.99.

James Denney once said to his friend J P Struthers that he wanted a break from writing about the apostle Paul because “There are other interesting things in this universe.” Those familiar with the writing of N T Wright must be wondering what can be left to say about Paul given his own long list of publications dating from his Tyndale Colossians commentary now over thirty years in print.

Since then Wright has produced a small library of Pauline scholarship which includes a major commentary on Romans, several mid-level state of play treatments of Paul, and dozens of essays and articles dealing in detail with Pauline themes and texts. Most recently his magnum opus, Paul and the faithfulness of God, and the recent collected essays, Pauline Perspectives, supplemented by Paul and His Recent Interpreters gather together his most important work on Paul. This is apart from other published research and a whole range of popular and mid-range volumes exploring various theological themes from Kingdom of God, to Christian hope, ethics and biblical interpretation, and including a complete series of daily study New Testament commentaries.

This book is not intended as yet another tendentious reconstruction of Pauline life and thought, although the above titles demonstrate Wright’s credentials to do so. Instead he is looking for the man behind the texts; he wants to make historical, emotional and theological sense of the man who more than any other gave decisive shape to Christian thought and practice in those first decades of the Christian church, and for two millennia thereafter. Paul is not to be pigeon-holed either as hero or villain, but to be understood as a converted Jew, whose life work was within Jewish and non-Jewish communities in the context of the Roman Empire and within the cultural milieu of Greco-Roman civilisation.

The book reads like a well-researched novel. Lucid, imaginative, rooted in long maturing thought, informed by encyclopaedic knowledge of sources, history and alternative viewpoints, and driven by a narrative with built in impetus and interest, this book could  easily replace the meaty novel you planned as the summer holiday read! If it does, you will be taken into a world of politics and philosophy, religious intrigue and change; and into the smaller worlds of house churches made up mainly of the small and marginal people, but with influential and well-off members too. And you will also be pulled into the local politics and problems of those churches, with their personalities and characters, their plots and sub-plots, and each of them a context  in which Paul either had influence or sought to be an influence in his mission to spread the gospel of Jesus crucified and risen. The “brilliant mind and passionate heart” of Paul is complex, challenging, resistant to preconceived theological patterns and interpretive grids. Paul, says Wright, would be a high maintenance friend, but the rewards would be amply rewarding.

Near the end of the book Wright expresses Paul’s gospel and ethics in a nutshell:

“God will put the whole world right at the last. He has accomplished the main work of that in Jesus and his death and resurrection. And through the gospel and spirit, God is now putting people right, so that they can be both examples of what the gospel does, and agents of further transformation in God’s world.” (Italics original)

Much of this book is a contextualised exposition of Paul’s gospel and ethics in those terms, from Galatia to Rome, from Corinth to Ephesus, and many a place in between. The chapters on Ephesus and Corinth, for example, are scintillating accounts of what Paul was about and why, the problems he confronted and those problem people who confronted him. Throughout the volume Wright opens up so many new ways of thinking about Paul’s mission strategies, pastoral challenges and passionately pursued goals, as he worked from within and often from a distance with such varied communities in all the overlapping social and cultural complexities of the first century Mediterranean.

For example Corinth fixated with celebrity culture, and dismissive of a vulnerable and quite ordinary apostle; or temple ridden Ephesus with multiple gods, idolatry as the norm, and the call to Christians to discern what they could and couldn’t eat, and in Galatia who to eat with and who to refuse to eat with. Wright is like a brilliant documentary narrator, observing behaviour, explaining local customs, being both critical and questioning of what is going on in order to understand better, the motives and responses of the main players. 

Central to Paul’s gospel, because central to his own experience and subsequent thought, is the transformative reality of Jesus, crucified, risen and Lord of the church. Jesus is the fulfilment of all that God purposes for his creation and its renewal.  

For Paul, “it was always Jesus: Jesus as the shocking fulfilment of Israel’s hopes; Jesus as the genuinely human being, the true “image”; Jesus the embodiment of Israel’s God – so that, without leaving Jewish monotheism one would worship and invoke Jesus  as Lord within not alongside, the service of the “living and true God”. (400)

The life work of N T Wright to date is distilled into this excellent biography of Paul. It does what good biographies do: it tells the story of the subject with fairness, verve and critical appreciation; it intrigues, poses questions, offers solutions to problem areas in the narrative; above all you come away from a good biography with a more informed, more sympathetic, and less prejudiced (positively or negatively) judgement of who he was and what he was about. Add to this the biographer’s  expertise in the life context, the cultural swirls and movements, the social and political pressures of change and conformity, within which the subject lived and moved and had his being, and you have a biography worth the time in reading about, and later, in pondering the wonder of that life.

However this is like no other book on Paul I have read. There is imaginative reconstruction, albeit earthed in erudition. As one highly significant example, the chapter on Paul’s Damascus experience is portrayed as very different from the classic conversion narrative. This isn’t so much an individual experience of regeneration, as a radical reorientation of worldview, a defining reversal of life’s meta-narrative for a zealous Jew whose zeal has just been flipped from enmity to Jesus and his followers, to apostle of the good news that Jesus is God fulfilling God’s eternal purposes for Israel and the world. Throughout the book Wright in similar fashion repeatedly pulls the rug from established, and as he would see it, too long unquestioned assumptions about what Paul was about, and why. 

The book has no footnotes to secondary studies, and no bibliography. If you’ve read Wright’s other work there are echoes and familiar themes, and you’ll recognise where his interpretation of Paul and Paul’s theology is contested, sometimes vigorously, by other scholars. But the absence of scholarly paraphernalia is deliberate on Wright’s part, and in my view a wise decision. What we have is a flowing narrative, richly informed, long pondered, imagination mostly disciplined by textual rootedness, and with its own internal coherence. The result is a very satisfying and persuasive account of Paul, the human, fallible, mercurial ambassador of Christ, and of his gospel which starts and ends with Jesus, the one of whom Paul wrote with incendiary passion, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself….and has given to us the ministry of reconciliation.”