Tag: spirituality

Good News for the Poor – but what about the rest of us?

On By revrayvincentLeave a comment 
When Jesus stood up to read from the Scriptures in the synagogue at Nazareth, he read the passage which begins: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor" (Luke 4:18; Isaiah 61:1). This was the opening statement, the manifesto, of his mission.

But where does this “good news” leave those of us who are not poor? Most church-going Christians in the developed countries today are middle-class people with a comfortable home and a steady income. What is the gospel, the “good news” for people like us?

There is a story in three of the Gospels about a man who asked Jesus what he should do to have eternal life. He looks rather like many idealistic young people today. He had grown up taking for granted the comforts of what we would call a middle-class life. He was honest, law-abiding, and faithful to his religion. But he felt something was missing. Perhaps he thought Jesus might show him the way to a deeper spirituality. The answer Jesus gave him was an invitation to sell all his possessions, give the money to the poor, and then, “come, follow me” (Mark’s version adds the touching little detail that “Jesus, looking at him, loved him”). The answer was not the one he wanted to hear, and he walked away disappointed.

Much Christian preaching today presents the gospel as an extra dimension to life. Life, it says, can be more than just a comfortable home, a happy family, and a steady nine-to-five job with a good pension at the end of it. Christian faith offers a richer experience: a personal relationship with God, and the prospect of going to heaven when we die. But this is a pale and cheap version of what Jesus said to that young man. The “personal relationship with God” offered to him was not a richer prayer life: it was a practical life-changing experience, leaving all his wealth and security behind and joining Jesus on the road. Jesus seems to be saying that eternal life, a deeper spirituality, blessedness, or whatever you want to call it, is not “the icing on the cake”, something we can just add on to what we already have: it comes at a price.

In the teaching of Jesus, “good news for the poor” seems to go together with bad news for the rich: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. … But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.” (Luke 6:20-26)

In Luke’s Gospel (16:19-31) we find the misnamed story of “Dives and Lazarus” – misnamed, because the rich man doesn’t have a name. “Dives” is simply the word for “rich” in Latin, the language of the Catholic Bible. Of all the stories Jesus told, this is the only one in which one of the characters has a name. Because of this, preachers came to think the other character should have a name too. This is not only an unnecessary addition to the story: it is a misunderstanding of its whole point. In real life the rich man would have a well-known, respected name, a name that could get a lot of things done if mentioned in the right places or signed on the right documents. The poor man sitting outside his door would just be known as “that beggar”. By giving a name to the poor man and not to the rich man, Jesus was turning the values of “normal” society upside down.

When the rich man dies, he is buried, and presumably given a dignified funeral procession and a fine tomb. The beggar’s body would probably just be tossed into a common grave or rubbish dump. But beyond death their status is reversed. The poor man is taken up by the angels to sit with Abraham in heaven, but the rich man is suffering in the underworld. Why is he being punished? Nothing is said about any sin he has committed. He is apparently being punished just for being rich while the man sitting at his gate was destitute. The story seems to be saying that sin is not just in what we do but in what we tolerate without doing anything about it.

In today’s world the richer nations happen to be mostly those of a Christian tradition, those who sent missionaries to preach the good news to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, in those “mission fields”, millions of people are living every day with grinding poverty, undernourished, exploited, sick with no access to medicine, held back by lack of education, working in dangerous and unhealthy conditions to provide luxury goods for the rich. Those of us who are comfortable and well fed need to hear both sides of Christianity, the good news and the bad news, the promise and the warning.

The Physical is Spiritual

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‘Love God’ … ‘love your neighbour’ … ‘We’re in love’ … ‘let’s make love’ … ‘I love my children …’ ‘I Iove my job …’ ‘I love being out in the fresh air…’ ‘I love chocolate’ …

There seem to be so many meanings to the word ‘love’. Sometimes it is even used in a negative sense. To say someone has a ‘love child’ tends to imply a dark history of adultery or illicit sex. In some parts of the world there are establishments called ‘love hotels’ where you can book a room by the hour for a ‘quickie’. It has even been known for posts containing the word ‘love’ to be removed from social media because some censoring algorithm has assumed they are indecent.

Clever theologians claim that there are different kinds of love. The love of God, or the kind of love Christians should have (agapē in Greek), is quite different, they say, from ordinary human friendship (philia), and even more different from romantic or sexual love (eros). This distinction owes a lot to the Greek philosophical idea that the more ordinary or physical a thing is the less ‘worthy’ it is, the further it is from the spiritual, or from God. The Hebrew way of thinking we find in the Bible doesn’t bear this out. To that way of thinking, a human being is not a pure soul trapped in an earthly body, but a thinking, feeling, breathing body with passions that can be good or bad.

When the prophet Jeremiah says (in the words of the King James Bible, Jer 4:19) ‘My bowels! my bowels!’, he is not complaining of the result of a rather too spicy meal. He is expressing his ‘anguish’ (as modern versions more politely put it) as he foresees terrible times coming for the nation. He goes on to say ‘my heart maketh a noise in me’. Strong emotions, whether of fear, love or human sympathy, are felt in the body. Rational biologists can say what they like about emotions being a function of the brain and the heart being just a muscle to pump the blood around, but we know from experience that fear sets the heart racing, that a shock can bring on a heart attack, and that the unexpected sight of a loved one can make your heart miss a beat. Further on in the same book (31:20) Jeremiah talks even of God’s bowels. He hears God expressing his deep love for the wayward Ephraim (another name for the nation of Israel): ‘my bowels are troubled for him; I will surely have mercy upon him, saith the LORD’.

The apostle Paul expresses his love for his friends at Philippi by saying, ‘I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ’, and goes on to appeal to them to be of one mind ‘if there be … any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies’ (Phil 1:8; 2:1). In his mind there is clearly no separation between spiritual life and the feelings of the body.

We find the expression ‘heart and reins’ in a number of places in the Bible, as in the saying in the Psalms (Ps 7:9 etc.) ‘the righteous God trieth the hearts and reins’. We usually miss the significance of this by not realising that ‘reins’ is an old English word for ‘kidneys’. People in biblical times thought of the heart as the seat of the intellect and the kidneys as the seat of the emotions. We often feel an emotion ‘in the pit of the stomach’, and sometimes nervousness or strong emotion can give us a need to pass water.

So love, whether we think of the love of God or of human love, is bodily. Sex is spiritual. Being attracted to another person in a way that makes us want to get close, to be united with them, is as spiritual as prayer. Like prayer, it can be superficial or short-lived, and it can be hypocritical and mixed up with all sorts of selfish motives. Loving sex that honours the partner and their needs as much as one’s own is part of the love of God, but even the most superficial sexual attraction that lasts only a moment is a brief taste of that love.

Spirituality Begins With Love

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‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8) – the simplest and most profound statement in the Bible.

It is often pointed out that everything we say about God is a metaphor. A metaphor says that one thing is like another, but not exactly the same. It is like it in some ways but not in others. When the Psalm says ‘the Lord is my shepherd’ it means that the Lord cares for me, guides me and feeds me like a shepherd, but it doesn’t mean he is fattening me up to sell me for slaughter. When we call God a Rock, we mean he is strong and reliable, but we don’t mean he is hard, cold and dead. Calling God ‘Father’ is a great statement of trust, but it doesn’t mean he fathered us in the usual human way.

But what about ‘God is love’? Is God like love in some ways but not in others? And how can God be ‘like’ love anyway? The biblical writer could have said ‘God is a loving person’, but I suspect that in saying ‘God is love’ he was trying to express something more than that. Even ‘person’ is a kind of metaphor when we are talking about God. A person is an individual, distinct from others, who can only be in one place at a time. So how can the God who pervades the universe, ‘walks’ alongside us and lives within us be simply a person? Perhaps ‘God is love’ means just what it says. Where we find love, God is there.

This is good news for everybody – not just for religious people, mystics or a spiritual elite. Every one of us knows what love is. Some experience more of it than others, some give more of it than others, but even the most deprived (or depraved) have some perception of what it is. There is something in every one of us, even if we deny it, that longs to love and be loved. If a relationship with God has to start with love, we are all ready to start.

At the same time, to believe that God is love is the most audacious act of faith. Where is the evidence? The universe doesn’t seem to care about our safety or happiness. Living things live by destroying and feeding on other living things. We share the planet with viruses and parasites that can cause us terrible pain and sickness, and animals that can kill us if they get the slightest chance. Human beings can do atrocious things to one another. Most of the universe is space in which nothing can live, and even this planet – which, as far as we know so far, is the only place where intelligent life exists – is subject to earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes and collision with comets and meteors. In this universe, where is the evidence of a God who is love?

And yet love exists. We are loved and we love, and somehow we know this is the greatest thing there is. Something tells us to believe in spite of the evidence, and somehow by believing we make the evidence. In a world where absolute certainty does not exist, this is the best we have.