The View from the Vicarage - July 2009

I rather suspect, although I write these pieces nearly a month in advance, that people will still be angry with our politicians. I expect that the parties will be vying with one another to assure us that their party ‘has the answer’ about how to fix things.

Their problem is that “people today are suspicious of anything that claims to be the answer, the truth, the system, the solution – and understandably so. So often the people who have made such claims have ended up advancing them by force. The Church had its Inquisition. Fascism had its Auschwitz. Communism had its Gulag Archipelago. Islam has its Taliban. They have made us wary of totalitarian systems of government.”
(Michael Lloyd ‘Café Theology’)

Jesus said:
‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.’ John 14:6

Quite a claim, but Jesus didn’t impose His agenda upon others. God gives us freedom and insists we should respect that freedom in others. So despite claiming to be the way, truth and life he never imposes that way on us. Rather he allowed others to impose their agenda on him. This apparently weak, stumbling, wounded God, made us and respects us, gives us freedom and respects that freedom, allows us to rebel against him, to reject him and to kill him. Such a God is Love, and knows the nature of love, that it cannot be forced. He insists that we give others the same freedom he has given to us all.

Only this way of looking at the world, based on such a God, can thus defuse the justifiable fears we have of being told ‘the answer’.

The truth is that the truth, the answer, the way, the life is only safe in nail-scarred hands, Jesus’ hands. God does not impose it upon us but gently invites us to try it out for ourselves.

Why not try it for yourself? – Because, as they say on the ads, you’re worth it.

Shalom

Revd Derek Witchell
01296 682320