Hypocrisy or Naivety?

Those who might occasionally stumble across this blog site will know a) that I have become loath to join the world that pontificates on issues too complex for meaningful comment and b) I have often commented about hypocrisy in the modern world. I write, therefore, only when I have reached boiling point and when I wish, for my own benefit, to record in journal form, my thoughts at this time in my life.

The subject that has been building up in the back of my mind is of death and Afghanistan. I have sat, as a media watcher, for many months pondering the futility of war in Afghanistan. History suggests that no one from outside wins in that country. We have been there before, the Americans have been there before, and the Russians have been there before, and none of us came out with flying colours. The current reason for being there is purported to be to thwart Islamic fundamentalist terrorists yet I suspect that if we managed to occupy the entire land mass of that country such terrorist activities will simply carry on somewhere else. It seems to many of us that it is like chasing symptoms but not dealing with the disease. That is hypocritical and, for the many of us who feel jaundiced and betrayed having watched and worried over Iraq, there is a subtle undermining worry that honesty does not prevail here either.

In today’s Times, Paddy Ashdown rather uncertainly makes a defence for being in Afghanistan on the grounds of what might happen if we pulled out. He is, in many eyes at least, someone with credibility yet even he appears uncertain. Possibly the only reason he gives that seems to have some certainty behind it (and I take his word for the truth of what he says) is that, “an overwhelming majority … despite all, still want us to be there and only 5 per cent of whom want to see the Taleban back.”

A second view was expressed earlier in the week in the Times by Nick Horne who had just resigned from being a political affairs officer at the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, who concluded, “I now believe that strategic failure is the most likely outcome of our engagement in Afghanistan.” He gave his reasoning as follows: “Among the greatest mistakes of the international community has been its laissez-faire approach to the corruption, cronyism and venality of the Afghan Government. The insurgency is winning not so much because the Taleban’s ideology and platform have popular appeal, but because the Afghan Government is seen as corrupt, unrepresentative and ineffective.”

There we have it! Put in Biblical terms there is an unrighteous administration which the West is supporting. How many times in the past sixty years has the West supported such regimes, simply because the alternative is worse?  If there are two evil regimes, the answer is not to choose the lesser of the two evils but to get wisdom to choose an alternative course of action. It appears that as the West has largely rejected God, that wisdom has not been forthcoming. Whereas there was once at least a Christian consensus with absolutes in the West, which helped foster a ‘reasonable’ democracy, with the abandonment of that the West seems to have lost any viable alternative to put to regimes who have never had the same Christian-philosophical underpinning. All we are left with is political pressure of a very shallow kind which subsequently seems almost powerless. The helicopter gunship, drones and missiles become the currency of persuasion and the end is highly questionable, as Paddy Ashdown is suggesting today.

Put aside the hypocritical aspects inherent in what we’ve considered so far, there was a further article in the past week that made me ponder on whether hypocrisy or naivety were the right words that apply. The article was headed, “Celebrities get more respect than dead soldiers, says George Cross holder.” It was the complaint of a young man who at 18 had won the George Cross in Iraq but who, now out of the army and “disillusioned by army life and angry at the Government” was upset that Government ministers didn’t turn up at Wootten Bassett to welcome home the dead bodies. It was left to a services spokesman to point out that they specifically restricted such times to close families and military personnel, but it left me wondering about the reality of public responses to deaths of army personnel in Afghanistan. Is it hypocritical or merely naïve?

Check this out. If you join the army you know you will be trained to fire weapons to kill enemies. Yes? Those enemies are going to fire back and inevitably, as much as we may dislike the thought, people are going to get killed. Yes? Yes, it is right and natural for families to grieve at the loss of a loved one, but why the surprise? If we are comfortable with this government taking us into Iraq (on false grounds it now turns out) and now into Afghanistan (on questionable grounds at least), why are we surprised and upset at soldiers being killed. Surely that is either hypocritical or naïve – or perhaps something else?

At this time of year as we are coming up to Remembrance Sunday we again pull down the shutters on logical and non-emotive thinking. The First World War was surely all about bad treaties that fell like dominoes dragging everyone into one of the worst blood baths of history. Governments and fickle and deceived public opinion dragged millions to their deaths. There was nothing glorious about it. The best thing we could say to such survivors as are left would be, “We are really sorry you were dragged into that mess and had to go through what you went through.”  When it comes to the Second World War, that was a bit of a different ball game and there appeared a much stronger case for calling men to go to defend their country against a horrific ideology which still has echoes today. But now we add in the dead of Iraq and Afghanistan and, I would suggest, there needs to be a similar apology from the present government as I have suggested need to be given to World War I veterans: “We are really sorry you were dragged into this mess and had to go through what you went through.”

There is an immense difference between being called to defend your country and going to another country to wage a philosophically questionable war. Is it hypocritical of the government to send troops to a questionable conflict? Is it naïve of young men joining up at a time when they know they will be called to fight and possibly be killed, to think it’s a safe and honourable profession?

With all the clever think-tanks that the modern world uses, is it beyond our abilities to come up with bigger, better, real solutions that genuinely face the problems, face the false ideologies, and come up with viable alternatives? Ah, but there we have the problem: we believe in anything and everything and are not very good at critically examining ideologies and pointing out their faults and failings – perhaps because we have too many of our own. Hypocritical or naïve?  Possibly both!

Whether these, in such a situation, are bad things is another question. Perhaps the word ’sincere’ should temper the discussion for undoubtedly our soldiers, at least, appear sincere. They may be naive but sincerity does a lot to cover that. Nevertheless we may still have to apologise to them and their families for not having come up with something better to solve the terrorist problem – those who live to tell the tale that is. For the rest we’ll appease our consciences by putting little crosses in a public place. We must do better!

I’ve often contemplated the subject of hypocrisy on this blog but I want to veer off to something that is not quite hypocrisy but something not far from it.

I’ve recently been browsing an article on TimesOnline where the writer was considering the angry younger generation. He quoted a young man who wrote into the Guardian last week (sorry about quoting a quote that quoted…..) and who asked, “How is it that your generation feels it can continue to shaft my generation? …. I am 23  and have many friends who are unemployed due to the economic crisis caused by your generation.” Three times he spoke of “your generation.”

Now I realise that this is an ‘angry young man’ but this generalising through careless language and even more careless thinking does him “and his generation” no favours! Where does this crazy idea that a ‘generation’ is responsible for the woes of our society come from? I am not a banker and I am not a politician. I am a minor social commentator and over the past few years warned on blogs that if ’society’ continued as it was, we would be in serious trouble.  No, I am not up to my neck in debt and no I am not a rampant materialist who purposefully seeks to use up the resources of the earth.

Now there is no doubt that I do use up the earth’s resources – as does the young writer – because the retail industry is pouring out goods using up resources regardless of whether I buy them or not. Moreover I have not been part of this present government or previous ones that have ploughed this country into the morass that it is in. We do seem to be suffering from deja-vu as this government takes a pounding in ways similar to the Conservative governments before them.  I have no say over the way our government leads us and leads the economy – don’t tell me I can vote them out, I will if everyone else does as well. My one vote does very little on its own. Most of us feel powerless. Democracy may be better than the alternatives, but it isn’t always all it is cracked up to be!

But where did this collective ‘generational guilt’ come from? It’s the generation below mine, if not two below mine, that caused the havoc of last year, a generation a lot nearer the 23 year old than me. But even so, the actual causes of the financial meltdown of last year was caused by people who probably numbered a few thousand, not the millions of us who now feel the brunt of it. It wasn’t any ‘generation’, it was greedy and negligent representatives of several generations.

Stop sounding so hard done-by please and stop blaming the many of us who feel adversely affected by what happened, in some cases far more than this young man who has still got years to redeem his situation. The older generations are stuck with it, if you really want to think about generational justice.

But now this is a faith blog so what does faith and the Bible have to say about this?  We’re all hypocrites, play-actors, and this angry young man is no different from the rest of us. His mask is just anger that he tries to pretend  is righteous. Sorry it is not.

Richard Dawkins is about to launch his latest shot in his crusade against God – The Greatest Show on Earth – not, he says, intended as an anti-religious book, yet still part of his anti-religious campaign. Today The Times Supplement printed an extract from this new book which comes out soon.

It appears to be a book founded on science and inference: “Given that, in most cases, we don’t live long enough to watch evolution happening before our eyes, we shall revisit the metaphor of the detective coming upon the scene of a crime after the event and making inferences. The aids to inference that lead scientists to the fact of evolution are far more numerous, more convincing, more incontrovertible, than any eyewitness reports that have ever been used, in any court of law, in any century, to establish guilt in any crime. Proof beyond reasonable doubt? Reasonable doubt? That is the understatement of all time.”

Now that language I find most interesting because it is exactly the same language that I would use to describe why we can be confident in our acceptance of the Bible and its veracity as a revealer of God. The only difference, I suspect, is that when I look back on the evidence for the Bible and use ‘inference’, I look at all possibilities before I arrive at a conclusion and Richard Dawkins considers only one possibility and ignores all others – well actually he doesn’t ignore, he denigrates!

Whatever he may try to convince us about evolution – and I am not anti-evolution (but wait before you rush to comment) – he comes at the subject, it appears from his past writings,  loaded with emotional, historical prejudices that are tantamount to a form of blind faith.  He believes on the basis of partial facts viewed, it seems, through the skewed eyes of atheistic emotional prejudice – and is utterly convinced he is right – just like the flat-earth extremist is.

Now if you think that is an unkind, unjust and unfair comparison, I can only say that that is how it appears to some of us watching from a slightly less emotionally charged position. In fact what I have just done is the same as he does when he denigrates those who wish to have open minds to other alternatives to atheistic, mechanical evolution, by equating them with holocaust deniers, which is what he does in the book.

Rather like some of Job’s comforters, he appeals now to questionable traditional figures such as some Church of England Bishops, who aren’t always known for their traditional beliefs. But let’s start from the opposite end of the scale, from the Biblical perspective, about which neither Dawkins nor his followers appear to have much knowledge. The Biblical picture of God is that He is both Creator and Sustainer of the world and interacts with it as He deems fit – both with people, animals and what we might call inanimate creation. (This is a tremendous subject, but it will have to wait for another time).

If we accept for a moment the general concept of evolution – and I have to say that although I am quite open to the concept of evolution, there appear to be a considerable number of question marks which throw doubt on the idea of ‘fact’ that Dawkins espouses – what is impossible to determine is WHY things happened (if they did) as the evolutionary scientist maintains.

If there is no God, then anything that happens is chance and given sufficiently long periods of time, anything can happen. Whether it is behavioural or genetic change it has to be purposeless. To speak of survival ‘instincts’ makes a major leap of faith, a questionable leap, I suggest. It prejudges. Why should ‘life’ want to ‘survive’? Chemicals don’t have that instinct.

Now if there is a God as revealed in the Bible then there is nothing to say that changes that have been observed have not been God-directed changes, i.e. it is simply the way He worked to bring about the present end result – IF those changes did happen.  Whichever way it is, it is a faith issue, and the starting point is whether you believe from the outset in God or that there is no God. Your end result follows from there. Thus I would suggest that Dawkins’ latest trend of trumpeting how wonderful this world is, is simply what the Bible has done for centuries before him – except it declares that it is not a mechanical accident, but the purpose of a benign and loving God.

Our applause, or otherwise, of Dawkins’ latest “controversial book” will depend entirely, I suggest, on our starting point, but it will be left to others commenting upon it to add light for those who want light.

There is no doubt about it, but we live in good times – at least there is a lot of good. Our society may be crumbling from the inside out, but there are a lot of things that are good about living in the early part of the twenty first century.

I was particularly made mindful of this when, on holiday recently, we went down an old disused coal mine and then went round the above ground museum later. There are some terrible things in this world, things done by mankind, that most of the time most of us are not aware of.  Coal mining, I concluded was one of those things.

Miners will tell you that it is considerably different today to what it used to be down mines. I can only go on what we were told by our guide, an ex-miner, but life as the family of a coal miner in the early part of the nineteenth century was nothing less than slavery! Miners at the face worked in a two foot high gallery hacking out the coal for their twleve hour shift, taking their food and drink down with them, working an living in virtual darkness.  Shifts were twelve hours. Accidents were common. Women and young children also worked down the mine.   Young girls were used to open and shut the draught doors in the the galleries and if their family couldn’t afford a candle, she would work in pitch darkness, often tied to the door to make sure she didn’t run away. The only light she saw in her shift was when men or women passing through came by with their own candles.  Yes, the mine owner provided housing but the workers didn’t receive money, only tokens to be spent in the mine owner’s shop for goods that were priced a third more than in the open market. There was no escape.

When the mines started to be closed down there were interesting conflicting views. On one side were miners saying these mines should have been shut years ago. On the other side were miners bewailing the closing of the pits because it was the end of the community. Because of the hardness of the life (the coal mining industry is the most dangerous industry) it brought a resilience and closeness in the community, seldom found elsewhere. It might have been a great community but I’m glad I never had to work there and have lived in a world of staggering ease by comparison.

There are countless of other ‘hard situations’ that could be cited both now and in history. We the human race haven’t done very well sometimes. Often we’ve justified it on a variety of dubious grounds.  Today we live in a (largely) different world, that is (mostly) considerably better yet we don’t have to look far to see lifestyles that are dubious at best.

In the major cities of  the world we have white collar workers who work long, tense hours for staggering amounts of money, workers who have forsaken family life, and permanent relationships. It’s a staggeringly different world to that of the miner: it lacks the physical hardship and danger – and it is clean! Both work, or worked,  long hours but the hardship of the miner seemed to create a strong community whereas the long hours of the money-driven lawyers, bankers and money makers of the city, seem to destroy community, and certainly family life.

In a completely different category we could perhaps include teachers in the world of wrongs, teachers whose hours don’t end when school ends, but who work on long into the evenings, teachers who often work under incredible stress at the coal-face of the breakdown of society. How many teachers simply live with almost permanent exhaustion and take it work granted?

Yes, these modern examples that I’ve cited would be scorned by the miner. These people have good salaries and expensive lifestyles. These people want for little, little that is except peace, quietness, family relationships and a stress-free life. Like the famous frog being slowly boiled to death, we tolerate these things and accept them as normal. May there come a time of civilisation when we look back and see these times as ‘the bad old days’. Is this how God made it to be?  No, it’s how we’ve chosen it to be – but we could choose otherwise.

I came across an interesting quotation recently – one I’d seen before, but it came afresh: “There is a long-standing tradition in Christianity that God wrote a Book of Works (Creation) as well as a Book of Words (the Bible).”

For the last two weeks my wife and I have been out in the midst of God’s “Book of Works”  The Psalmist wrote “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.” (Psa 19:1,2) and “The heavens proclaim his righteousness, and all the peoples see his glory.” (Psa 97:6). The apostle Paul wrote, “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” (Rom 1:20)

The clear declaration of those verses is that God’s greatness is obvious and should be obvious in what we might call ‘nature’ or ‘creati0n’.  I have lost count over these past two weeks of the number of times my wifre and I just stood and looked at the wonder of the country before us and just went, “Wow! That is incredible!”

Many years ago when I was having to write an essay with a strong philosophical base for part of my Teacher-Training Course, I chose to write about the existence of rainbows.  I’m reminded of that when I pick up Richard Dawkins’ book Unweaving the Rainbow. It is a book to show how wonderful creation is – without any God, it is wonderful. That is the message of it, I believe. it is a defensive book because in the preface he quotes from his colleague, Peter Atkins: “We are children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe.”

I like that quote for it reveals all that is left when you take away God from the equation. Solomon, in his latter years, when he had drifted away from faith and lost sight of God, declared similarly, “Meaningless! Meaningless! says the Teacher. Utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless.” (Eccles 1:2). What is fascinating is that Dawkins agrees with that quote YET feels he has to revel in the glory of the wonder of this incredible world.  He too recognises the wonder of the world in which we live. You can’t avoid it – only try and ignore it.

But I noted some interesting reactions within myself as we gazed over tremendous vistas or stood in awe in an arboretum of nearly three thousand specimens of trees, shrubs & bamboos from around the world. The variety of size, colour and shape was incredible. We marvelled at such beauty.

But hold on! Why should it be that if I am simply the product of random time and chance molecular activity that I should have such feelings and such concepts. Surely ‘beauty’ is a mere illusion, a chemical reaction? Why should I feel refreshed and restored  after spending time in these environments where my eyes and (sometimes) ears were made accutely aware of the amazing beauty around us? We can rationalise it, categorise it and try and explain it, but it is something that still has the capacity to make all such intellectual exercise seem rather pointless. I was reminded of the poem:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

(William Henry Davies)

As I have stood and stared, I have found a response rising within me, “Lord, that is wonderful. Thank you so much.”  I feel sorry for those who have no one to thank.

We live, we are told by some, in a postmodern world, where experience counts more than truth.  We live, the media tell us, in a corrupt world where politicians and bankers feather their own nests at the expense of the rest of us. We live in a world, it seems to many of us, that is falling apart at the seams.

Yet in all this nothing changes!   Many years ago when opportunities opened up for me to travel the globe and teach, in my weakness I cried, “Lord, what can I possibly say to people on the other side of the world, who have cultures so utterly different from my own?”  His reply was that their needs were exactly the same as those of the people around me in my own church and my own community.  And so it proved to be. As I travelled and spoke I found people with exactly the same needs, and it didn’t matter what colour skin they had or what sort of culture they came from.  They all needed to know that their sin was forgiven and that God loved them!

Nothing changes. The corrupt or self-serving politicians merely tell us what the Gospel has declared for two thousand years: we are all sinners and  when God lifts off His hand of restraint from our society, we are free to do outwardly what inwardly we have been thinking all along – and it’s not good!

I feel sorry for humanists and atheists who so often proclaim their optimism in man’s goodness, for life must be a real trial for them as every time they open their paper they see man’s badness being proclaimed. More money, more education, more technology, more of this or that, they proclaim – then man’s goodness will be revealed. The facts deny that.

How the Gospel of God is justified, day in, day out. Yes, we have great potential for goodness, but we squander it on self-centredness and self-serving.  We grab for ourselves and make the most of the moment – and then justify it, in our own minds at least, and we remain deceived.

Yet again and again, I see sinful men and women come to the end of themsevles and encounter the living God through His Son, Jesus Christ, and I see lives transformed for good. That is the Gospel at work, and it never changes, it is always the same – forgiveness and restoration and new life are always there for the taking. It is the only hope we have for the future. If we let the blind optimists lead us, we’ll continue to go down and down into a world of darkness and despair. Nothing changes! When we tuirn to God through His Son, Jesus Christ, then suddenly light and life pour forth and hope becomes real. Nothing changes – except when we come to God.

She followed the crowd. Why are they shouting like this? He hasn’t done anything! Well, no, that’s not true. He’s done so much. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.

The doctors had been no help; they hadn’t known what was wrong. I knew behind their whispers that people said I must have done something wrong, but it wasn’t like that. I didn’t know if I had done anything. All I knew was that I was ill and that they said I was dying. Then he came to my town.

My mother had helped me out to see what all the noise was about. We’d heard rumours. Then there he was with a big crowd around him, walking down the street. The crowd was noisy. We held back in the doorway and watched, but as they came level with our home, he stopped and turned towards us. He obviously said something to those with him, for they stood aside as he came across to us.

There was nothing special in what he did, and yet everything. He just smiled at us and said, “Hullo.” I found myself just gaping at him with tears running down my face; I don’t know why. Somehow… somehow, it was as if he knew, knew all about me, and still loved me…. He reached out and gently placed his hand on my head and almost whispered, “Be healed.” And then he was gone and we both stood there weeping and I was well. Yes, I know it sounds too simple, but I was. I was completely well. I can’t explain it, but I’m alive and well – because of him. So why are they treating him like this?

The soldiers are so brutal. They’re making him carry a large wooden cross. Why? Surely they can’t be……. They push at him and snarl at him. He falls. Oh why? They drag a man unwillingly from the crowd to carry the cross. They pick Jesus up and I see his face. There is blood all over it. There’s a crown made with long thorns that’s been pushed on his head, now askew, but the wounds from the thorns mean the blood runs down over his face. He can hardly stand, and then I see his back, or rather what is left of it. I am sick in the street. The crowd moves on and I stand there in shock. Why are they doing this to him? What has he done to deserve this? I remember the look as he stood before me. Here was utter goodness; it was that which broke my heart then – and now.

The crowd has gone. I am alone in the street. I must go. I must follow him. I must see where they are taking him. I follow the sounds down the street. Where is this all going, on this Friday?

I took a wrong turning. I found myself alone in the back streets of Jerusalem. Here there was silence. But then across the city came two stretched-out screams, just two. I eventually found my way to one of the gates of the city and there across the valley I saw three crosses being erected, three horrible symbols of man’s inhumanity to man. Even from this distance I could see he was one of the men being crucified. Why? What had he done except be good! I slumped down against the city wall and watched. The hours passed and eventually I saw them take the bodies away. It is over. I am past weeping. I am angry, no I am furious! Why? Why did they have to do this to him?

Two days later, when I woke on Sunday morning, something was different. No one else in the place where I was staying was awake yet, and so I quietly made my way outside. Something had happened! What was it? I still had that awful ache inside, but something was different.

I wandered down the street. There was hardly anyone else around. A woman scuttled by laughing and crying, but I hardly noticed. I came to one of the city gates and looked out over the graveyard area. I heard a sound of panting and two men dashed past me. Now it was my turn to be hardly noticed. I watched as they ran down through the olive groves to the grave areas. What a terrible place this is. Death hangs over it condemning all of us.

“I’m not there,” a gentle voice came from behind me. I started and turned and gasped. Again I found myself just gaping at him with tears running down my face. It was him. No, it can’t be. “It is,” he said reading my thoughts. “But why,” I sobbed, “why did it happen… and how are you alive?” Words were meaningless. I just sobbed.

“It’s all right,” he gently replied, “it will all become clear. The most important thing is that I’m here, so you can go home now and live and tell your family and friends what you have seen.”

“But they won’t believe me,” I sobbed.

“Not at first, but many will eventually. You’ll never be the same again now you know I’m alive. Go now.”

“But when will I see you again?” I managed.

He smiled, “When you come home.” Then he was gone, and I was never alone again.

Today has been a day of silence. It is as if the city has sunk in its shame. It is the Sabbath, the day of rest, but we aren’t resting. We are in anguish and turmoil. I sat listening to some of the others earlier, silent for most of the time but every now and then breaking out in self-justification, all that is except Peter and Judas.  Judas, of course, is dead. There were one or two, “How could he?” comments but mostly we all feel so bad about ourselves that none of us feels like pointing a finger. Peter has just disappeared. I think the guilt of his actually denying the Master has almost destroyed him, but I want to say to him that we’re all the same. In one way or another, we all denied the Master.

It may be that it’s because it is the Sabbath, but the city seems strangely quiet. When we’ve looked out, there seem few people around even though there are hundreds of thousand here for the Feast. I think the events of the past week have been so contrasting that there is a feeling of anticlimax. A week ago Jesus was being welcomed into the city like a conquering king. A week later the king is dead. A week ago our hopes and dreams of freedom from the Romans carried us away. Today those hopes and dreams are dead.

Our women sit around red-eyed and every now and then further sounds of sobs are heard. The men are mostly silent, just sitting there, too afraid to go out, but too fearful to look at each other. A week ago anything was possible; now nothing is possible. There is no future. What will we all do? Who cares!

We sit there and unsuccessfully try not to let the images of the past two days run again and again through our minds. I keep hearing the baying of the crowd madly egged on by the fanatical hatred of the so-called religious authorities. I hear the screams of the thieves as they are nailed to wood. I see the silence of my Master as they set his body in the most terrible of execution processes that mankind has ever devised. His silence was awful. From his lips had come such wonderful words of wisdom and of life over these past three years, but now they are silent. He was like a lamb being led to the slaughter. I hear the jeering of the crowds that had turned against him, and I remember my own silence, and I weep.

Somewhere out there in the grave area outside Jerusalem, in a new tomb is a cold, lifeless body of one who had been so warm and so full of life that it overflowed to all those who came to him. But now the life has gone. Now there is no hope. We are a condemned human race! What awful things will God do to us for this two day’s work? Yes, I know, most of the world hasn’t a clue what has happened but if they had been here, they’d have been the same; we’re all the same. We may like to kid ourselves that we are better than the next person, but these two days have laid that lie to rest. Instead of receiving this light and rejoicing in the wonder of the days that we were privileged to be part of, we snuffed out the light. We prefer darkness to light for the light shows us up for who we really are. On this awful Saturday we sit in silence and try not to think – but we do.

There are four more dead bodies in Jerusalem tonight.
It has been a most terrible of days. I really don’t want to write this, and yet something in me insists I confess it and record it. The world has changed. It will never be the same again. We have failed him and it has all gone wrong.

There is one side of me that wishes I had never met him; these past three years have been too wonderful. If I told you some of the things we’ve witnessed Jesus doing, you wouldn’t believe me. I can understand that. When we first started travelling with him, for the first week my mind was struggling with what we were seeing. My eyes saw it but my mind screamed, “This can’t be happening!” When a blind man sees, that is wonderful. When a cripple walks, that is amazing, but when you stand next to a leper with his revolting skin and before your eyes you see the skin changing and becoming perfect again, I tell you, at that point you are struggling. And it was three years like that!

It was also three years in a classroom of life. Day in, day out, we were being challenged as to who we were, about God, about life, with the Master preaching powerfully to the crowds and then quietly explaining to us. It was amazing. I can’t even remember what I used to be like. We are different people today because of him.

But then we came to Jerusalem for the Passover. We’d been before but this time it was different. It seemed like the Master was completely unafraid of the religious authorities and taught and healed right on their doorstep outside the Temple. It did seem provocative, but when you’ve been with a man for three years who is so totally in control of life itself, you don’t care. But we should have cared.

We’ve hardly slept these past forty eight hours. Last night was terrible, but not so bad as today. We’d had the Passover meal and the Master had suggested that we go over to Gethsemane to pray together. It was while we were there that a band of soldiers, led by Judas of all people, came and arrested him. We couldn’t believe it. Peter lashed out but the Master stopped him and gave himself to the soldiers. Yes, I think that is the right way to describe what happened – he gave himself to them. If he hadn’t wanted to go, I’m sure he needn’t have gone.

They took him to Caiaphas’ palace and some of us hung around in the shadows outside waiting for his release. Surely he wouldn’t let them hold him. The hours passed and eventually at daylight an armed procession came out and headed for Pilate’s residence. We followed at a distance. There was much arguing with Pilate but eventually he gave way to their demands. They were going to crucify him! They wanted him executed and that weak minded, half witted governor just washed his hands of the whole thing and said go and do it. So the soldiers took him and thrashed him. By the time they finished with him he could hardly stand. Then they took him outside the city to where there execute criminals and alongside two criminals they nailed him to a cross.

I’m sorry, I’m so sickened by it that I can’t describe it to you – perhaps later. He hung there for hours between the two thieves, in agony with life ebbing away. Then eventually, about the middle of the afternoon, it was like he had had enough and cried out, “It is finished!” and then he just hung there – he had gone. He was dead. Like everything else, it seemed like he was in total control. Then they took down the bodies – three dead bodies. I said four? Yes, that’s right; we’ve just heard that Judas has killed himself. He obviously couldn’t live with the awfulness of what he had done, betraying the master into their hands last night.

I’m sorry if I’m sounding somewhat hard and cold as I’m telling you all this but I think I’m probably in a state of shock; we all are. It’s crazy! It’s stark, staring mad! If you’d seen and heard what we’ve seen and heard for these last three years, you would know that this was the most wonderful person who has ever walked on this earth! He was utterly good! There is no way that he deserved to die; this was a complete travesty of justice – and we just let it happen! There’s a part of me that wants to follow Judas’ example. The religious authorities demanded it, our civic leaders went along with it, the crowd cried for it and the Romans did it – and we did nothing! There’s not an innocent person in this city tonight.

Tonight we are condemned. We followed him, our lives were transformed by him, many of us were healed by him, and we experienced life as never before. Yet the authorities were challenged by him and afraid of him and so arrested him, tried him, mocked him, scourged him, crucified him and killed him – and we did nothing! At no point did we intervene. We were too scared for our own lives, and the light that shone has gone out. What was odd, was that he didn’t intervene and stop it at any point, for I’m sure he could have done! It is indeed a dark night; it was a dark day. I’m sorry, I can’t say anything more.

Why do I feel that something awful is about to happen?

We have come into the city every day this week and the Master has taught in the area around the Temple, and that’s been great. Its great, white stone walls towered over us, a building built by a tyrant to glorify himself, taken over by the religious establishment to glorify Judaism, despite the rule of Rome. It is truly an amazing building and the Master has been continuing to do amazing things.

And yet it has been an uneasy week. When we arrived last Sunday the Master made straight for the Temple and we thought he would bring an offering but instead he managed to upset the Chief Priest and his men by overturning all the tables and releasing all the animals that are part of the Temple provision for the sacrifices. There was total pandemonium on that day and his anger was unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. It was probably only that which cowed the authorities and allowed him to get away with it, that and his popularity with the crowds.

That’s been the strange thing about this week; he has been becoming more and more popular with the crowds and more and more hated by the religious establishment here in the city. As he has taught and as he has healed people, the crowds have gathered and listened and cheered and then gone away and gossiped. The word on the street has been that he is getting ready to stage a coup to overthrow the Romans, but he hasn’t told us, and why he didn’t do it on Sunday when the crowds welcomed him like a conquering king, I don’t know. I’m told that the priests hate him because he is so unconventional and they fear he will upset the Romans who let them get on administering the ceremonial aspects of our law here in the home of our people. The Romans may be here, but it is still our home and the traditions of the centuries are still worked out here.

Of course we’re all here for the Passover and that in itself worries the authorities. Why? Because it is the remembrance of how our people were originally set free from slavery, about how God set us free from the oppressor in Egypt. Every year the Romans get very edgy, wondering if, as we celebrate the Passover, some zealot will stir the people to rise up against them and claim our freedom again. Perhaps it will be the Master who will do that but, as I said, he hasn’t said anything about that to us, and no one has had the courage to ask him about it.

The religious authorities do all they can to make it a formal, solemn feast, to keep control and prevent anyone stepping out of line to threaten their religious presence. I think that is it really; they are using religion to subdue the people and reassure the Romans, so that nothing threatens the ongoing working of the Temple. It is there, it was said of old, that God would come to meet with us, although His glory has never been seen in this building built by Herod. Indeed it’s been hundreds of years since He spoke prophetically to us – that is until John came and, of course, then the Master appeared three years ago.

But I can’t shake it off, this feeling of doom.  We all met this evening to share the Passover meal together – which was great – but the Master kept saying things that were not clear. I mean, I know his teaching is often enigmatic, leaving us puzzling over just what he meant, but it seemed that tonight he was doing it more than ever. I don’t know why but we’d hardly settled down when he took a towel and bowl of water and insisted on washing our feet. It seemed an odd way to start a celebration. And then when we sat down to eat he took the bread, prayed and broke it and said, “This is my body.”  His body? How can the bread be his body? His body was there in front of us, talking to us. And then when the wine came round again, he said, “This is my blood poured out for you.” I may be appearing a bit dim, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one around the table wondering what he was on about.

If that wasn’t bad enough, he seemed to go into depressing mode and started talking about one of us betraying him. Why? Why ever would we want to do that, and how? What was that about? Peter put his big feet in it and declared he would never let the Master down, but the Master only looked at him sadly, and very quietly said that Peter would deny him three times before next morning came. Peter was devastated, I can tell you. The Master went on to teach for a long time and I just felt there was an unusual urgency behind everything he was saying. I don’t know what it was. It just seemed like he felt he had to pour out a whole load of stuff he felt we needed to know, but I really don’t know why we should need it now.

Yes, I know I said I’ve got this feeling of doom hanging over us this evening, but it’s crazy really because the Master is more popular today than he’s ever been. There are many saying they believe he is the coming Messiah and the vast majority of the crowds here for the feast are just waiting for him to proclaim himself. We’re on the edge of something wonderful, so I really don’t know why I’m feeling like I am.  I mean we could be on the edge of a tremendous revolution and the world may never be the same after this weekend – if the Master makes his move. Everything he does thrills the crowds. We’re just ripe to take on the Romans. They may be armed but we outnumber them fifty to one. They haven’t got a hope. When our people rise up there’s no stopping them, so it looks like there could be a whole new day coming.

We’re just clearing up at the moment. The Master says he wants us to go across to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray, but something’s not right. I can’t put my finger on it, but something feels bad. But that’s crazy because the Master is in control; he always is. He won’t let anything bad happen, I know that. I’ve watched him these past three years, and he always knows what is going on. It’s just that… well, I don’t know…. there’s something…..