genuine happiness among them. Be driven by love, not by ice cream – in your romantic relationships, in your worship of God, in your relationships with others in the church, in the way you treat everyone with whom you engage from tomorrow onwards.
Please, says Paul, don’t have relationships with your parents ruined by resentments for things they did years ago that have shaped your life. Try to find a way through that with love, because ‘love does not keep an endless record of wrongs’. Please don’t have no-go areas in a church so as to avoid people with whom you have fallen out over the rota for flower-arranging. Try to find a way through that with love, because ‘love is not easily angered’. Please don’t find yourself secretly pleased when a friend doesn’t get the promotion that would have got them to a place one better than you. Try to find a way through that with love, because ‘love does not envy, it does not delight in evil’. Please don’t give up when your attempt to reach out to a fellow human being is met with a lack of gratitude. Try to find a way through that with love, because ‘love always perseveres; it never fails’.
Risk getting real about love. It may lead to some things you assumed to be love melting like a choc ice. It may lead to you recognizing as love some things that you had thought were just unremitting hard work. Love almost certainly won’t look like what you expect it to be. But the real thing, even at the cost of sacrifice and tears, will make you happy.
In front of me on the desk is a lilac envelope. Inside is a drawing of a man with an exceedingly round, bald head. There are hearts fluttering all around it like butterflies. The message says, in very wobbly handwriting, ‘Please come on holiday with us again soon.’ I believe I am loved.
| ‘And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?’ I did. ‘And what did you want?’ To call myself beloved. To feel myself beloved on the earth. Raymond Carver, North American poet, 1938–88 |
| Lord God, fill my whole being with love. Not the slushy kind or the greedy kind, but the kind that will help people I know be sure that their lives are worth living. Amen. |
| Be happy! Make a mental list of those you love. (This is not the same as the list of those whom you feel you ought to love.) It will probably consist mainly of people, but there is no reason why you shouldn’t include animals or even places and activities if it is easier to think of them than men and women. Read the list of qualities of love from the Bible that appears earlier in the chapter, and dwell on how it relates to those in your thoughts. For the situations where you recognize that the love you have is absolutely real, be happy. If you have ended up with some challenging questions, I am hoping that the chapters to come will help you work out what to do in response. |
Be Happy! Day 5
Come clean
| To some who … looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: ‘Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.” But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.’ Luke 18.9–14 |
One of the joys of listening to a story is being one step ahead of the storyteller. We hear thousands of stories in a lifetime, and from our earliest days we become canny at recognizing what lies ahead. So when someone begins, ‘I want to tell you a tale about Ivan the Terrible,’ we already know that it’s not going to be about how he won everyone’s hearts through his skill at flower-arranging. Likewise, we don’t settle down to listen to a legend about St Agnes the Chaste expecting to hear how she used her seductive feminine wiles to lure innocents to a hideous slaughter. The name gives it away!
A good storyteller can catch us out. And Jesus was a very good storyteller! But sometimes we are so familiar with his stories that we forget how good he was. For instance, as soon as we encounter a Pharisee in the Bible, we know he is going to come out of the story badly. We automatically assume that a Pharisee was a bad influence on the world. But to Jesus’ original hearers Pharisees represented something good about the world, and it was shocking that he criticized them. Pharisees did wonderful things for the culture and religion of the time. In the dust and heat of Jerusalem they went without water two days a week in order to pray for their nation. That puts me to shame!
| Who is a God like you, who pardons sin? … You do not stay angry for ever but delight to show mercy. You will again have compassion on us; you will … hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea. Micah 7.18–19 |
There were about 6,000 Pharisees. They were a middle-class Jewish pressure group united by a passionate commitment to the holiness of God. They were convinced that the standards of their society were in decline, and believed that the dreadful things that had befallen Israel had come about because people had been disobedient to God’s laws in their day-to-day behaviour. They gave themselves the task of expanding those rules to give specific instructions for how to live in every single area of a person’s life. They were a good and necessary thing! But they knew it, and that was the problem!
In contrast to the crowds who were listening to Jesus’ captivating tales, a tax collector had an altogether different reputation. The Jews of Jesus’ time were a race who had been overrun by a foreign superpower and were subject to military occupation. The Roman empire that ruled the Jews by might had conquered them because it needed the economic clout that these people, who lived on a profitable trade route, could bring. So the Roman authorities had forcibly established a method of collecting taxes from their conquered people, who obviously loathed having to pay. They employed Jewish people to collect the taxes from their own countrymen. Clearly these people were going to be despised by their own, because effectively they were collaborating with the enemy. Why would anyone do that? Money! It was because the Romans allowed the tax collectors to set their own rate of commission on top of the revenue they were collecting. So they were the kind of people who would tolerate being despised in order to be rich. Wealthy traitors!
| Humanity is never so beautiful as when praying for forgiveness or else forgiving another. John Paul Richter, German novelist, 1763–1825 |
| If I can now forgive, it is only because I have been forgiven – I and all other men and women who have ever lived. John Austin Baker, English bishop, born 1928 |
So who would you expect to come out well from a story about a Pharisee and a tax collector? It’s like putting St Agnes up against Tsar Ivan.
Well, when Jesus told that story, the St Agnes figure emerged terribly. The Pharisee was standing in front of a God who is perfect and almighty, and trying to establish that somehow he was good enough to earn God’s respect. He told God about the sins he had not committed. He stressed how he had faithfully kept all the correct religious rules. And he compared himself favourably to others.
Oh dear! You know, I’ve found myself doing all those things. I’ve read about people who have done terrible things while professing to be Christians and thought to myself, ‘Well, at least I’ve never done anything that bad.’ And I sometimes write a chapter of a book and think to myself, ‘I come out of this rather well, don’t I?’ All that might make me impressive in other people’s eyes, but it does nothing for me in God’s eyes!
Why does the Ivan the Terrible character come out of the story well? Because the tax collector stooped before God precisely as he was. No pretence! He was completely honest with God about how he was, even though he felt grim, remorseful, unworthy.
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Lord God, the truth
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