A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

One way of looking at the Bible is to see it as a description of the many ways that God spoke to a people over a long period of time. To do that is to quickly realise that God is able and willing to speak to us through any and every thing. The challenge then is to use the Bible as a lense through which we look at our own lives in order to name where and how God is speaking to us, and to help others to do the same. The Bible thus invites us to look outward and not inward at itself.

This Holy Week and Easter we can do the same thing. To see Jesus’ suffering and death as a story that teaches us how we might ourselves handle suffering and our impending deaths, rather than one in which we primarily focus on what happened to Jesus for its own sake. Surely that is why the story was first told, to a people who were themselves facing persecution and death.

And so with Easter. Read the resurrection stories carefully and they’re not much interested in teaching us about life after death. Jesus has virtually nothing to say on that subject, and the early church didn’t either until Jesus’ anticipated return didn’t materialise, and some of His followers began to die. Rather the resurrection stories tell of Jesus comforting, forgiving and commissioning His followers to continue the ministry that God had called him to, namely to realise that we too are ‘God’s beloved children in whom God takes delight’, and to see our task as being to show that same love to others, especially those whom society treats as outcasts, as Jesus did, whatever the cost.

Again we are being invited not to look inward into the story for its own sake but as a lense through which we look at the world.