Last week I talked about moving and the challenge of change. You have to pack everything up, live in a state of upheaval for weeks, if not months, and then hope you can actually make it from one place to another with your stuff and your sanity intact. With the sacrificial help of a great bunch of friends, we did.
If you’re smart, you give away a lot of stuff, and take note of how we accumulate way too many possessions, especially for those of us who profess to follow a man who owned none.
Where is the best text to preach about the resurrection? Not where you think it is.
I think the place to start is Revelation chapter 12. There John paints a picture for us of a woman in labour. She is crowned with the sun, moon and stars. The woman represents the covenant line of the Messiah, just like in the dream Joseph had that got him into all that trouble.
She brings forth the child destined to rule the nations with a rod of iron. Genesis 3 and Psalm 2 show this is Jesus.
Truth is not a problem.
But that is the problem.
“You’re talking in riddles, David.” I can hear you saying it!
Let me try to explain.
When Jesus encountered the value system that had the power to set him free, it all boiled down to an issue of truth.
Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, was interested in power. And so he posed the question to Jesus: “Are you the king of the Jews?” What he meant, of course, was this: “Are you planning an uprising against me?”
Jesus wasn’t even thinking along these lines. And so he told Pilate his kingdom was not of this world. If it had been, his followers would already have been fighting in the streets.
This puzzled Pilate. And so he put the question to Jesus: “So you are a king?” Jesus didn’t bother to dignify Pilate’s question with an answer, which was extraordinary, given that his life apparently hung in Pilate’s hands.
His answer was this: “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world - to bear witness to the truth.”
Pilate’s answer, to me, is one of the greatest attestations to the accuracy of the New Testament. He said this: “What is truth?”
Pilate was reflecting the beginnings of the decline of Roman civilization. He had given up on truth. And we know that’s an accurate picture of where many of the Romans were at - and certainly cynical, disillusioned and corrupt politicians like Pilate, which is the picture Roman historians paint of him.
We live in a very similar world today.
For Jesus, and hence for those of us who follow him, truth is not a problem. God alone reserves the right to define truth and falsehood, right and wrong, good and evil.
But we live in a world Pontius Pilate would have been right at home in. Laughingly, we call it “post-modern,” when in fact it is as ancient as Pilate himself.
Pilate was bothered by Jesus’ answer - but not bothered enough to take a stand against the Jewish leaders and let him go. For him, truth did not matter. And that is why when he saw the personal embodiment of truth standing in front of him, he did not recognize it.
For the world we live in, truth is a problem. In fact, a massive problem.
Our culture demands that every possible personal preference or orientation be accommodated. Everyone lives in their own personal space as far as truth is concerned. In reality, no one is really interested in truth at all. What they are really interested in is the promotion of their own interests.
Here’s the catch. In the absence of truth, anything goes. But what happens when the interests of one group are hostile to the interests of another?
I’ll tell you exactly what happens. The group with the most power forces its interests on the others.
In the absence of truth, might becomes right.
Those with the most clout gain privilege at the expense of those with the least.
But Christians see things differently. Or at least they ought to.
Our world is living in a mass delusion. The delusion is this: everyone can have their own “truth,” and it won’t cause any problems. The reality is different. The “truth” belonging to the people with the most power will prevail.
In truth, it isn’t about truth at all. It’s about the power to force my views on everyone else.
But as Christians, we believe in real truth. We are interested in truth for the sake of truth, because we follow the man who said: “You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
We believe only God has the right to define truth. And Jesus is the only man who ever completely lived it.
That is a problem to the world around us, with its many interest groups trying to force their views on everyone else, to their own benefit.
Jesus stood for truth, and he died for truth.
How about you?
In June 2013 I had a heart attack which almost took my life. During surgery I suffered a cardiac arrest and for a short time had a sense of being somewhere else – a place filled with mellow late afternoon light; silent, without dimensions or boundaries. It felt very good. Peace, no pain, then suddenly with a bang the defibrillator kicked me back into the operating theatre, with sounds of frantic activity and anxious voices saying you’re ok, you’re going to be ok. (They were more anxious than I was).
The surgeon treating me said with a wry smile afterwards “you gave us a fright - that one was out to kill you.” Earlier one of the ambulance paramedics and a member of the surgeon’s team each used the same phrase – “you were in the right place at the right time.” It could have been very different but for a weather forecast which made me decide not to go cycling off the beaten track on that particular day.
Just two days before the heart attack I had a vivid dream in which I saw myself swimming in a rough sea when from nowhere a tsunami wave came straight for me. In my dream I knew I only had minutes to live. I woke up with a bang, alive and suddenly wide awake. I went to my office and wrote down what I had just experienced. I dream a lot, mostly nonsense and quickly forgotten. But I have had three highly significant dreams over my lifetime that I can still remember in detail and which communicated something which changed the course of my life, and in one case that of our church community.
My initial reaction to the dream was that’s not for me, it must be a warning for someone else. I don’t feel as though I’m out of my depth or in rough water at this moment, life is busy but that’s normal and I feel fine. So that morning I typed up the notes made at 3am and emailed them to about half a dozen people I thought might bring some sense out of what I had experienced in the dream. One of my friends replied by return – “that was for me I need to get out of the deep water I’m in right now before the wave hits.” Great, I thought, that’s a result.
Another of my friends had a different reaction as he read my email – this is for Adrian, he is going to die. How do you share something like that, fortunately he didn’t but prayed instead.
Like the dream, the heart attack came totally out of the blue. I was finishing off a job at a property half an hour’s drive from home. I recognised the classic symptoms - intense pain in the chest and arms, the feeling that I was about to pass out, difficulty breathing. But part of me was arguing back - I don’t do heart attacks, I keep fit cycling, the medics say I’m low risk….
The ambulance reached me within minutes of my call and two hours later, surgery completed, I was fixed. By the time my wife Nicky reached me I was sitting in bed drinking tea, feeling as though I had been run over by several buses. I truly love all the wonderful people who work in our National Health Service.
On the first anniversary of the heart attack I visited what is for me a special place of meeting: St Michael and All Angels Parish Church in Felton, Northumberland. Why would God communicate with me through a dream which mirrored the heart attack experience but did not include sufficient detail to send me scurrying to Accident and Emergency to avoid it?
As I sat in St Michaels I had a sense of Jesus saying that he was with me when the tsunami wave hit and left me defenceless and completely vulnerable. He showed me that we were both in the wave and then we beached and stood together on the shore watching as it receded, its power spent.
The dream had been sent to show me he knew the wave was coming. It came and he didn’t stop it, but he was with me, my journey and his were intertwined.
I feel as though I have been given some “extra time” and I want to use it to grow in friendship with the one who was with me in the “wave.” I trust him more now, even when bad things happen.
