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Messy Lives and Good Friday


Messy Lives and Good Friday

“Duncan, watching you live your life is like watching Scotland trying to qualify for the World Cup” said DI Jimmy Perez, in the closing scenes of the latest season of Shetland, to his hapless friend Duncan.   Many of Duncan’s projects and relationships are either sabotaged by his own mistakes and poor decisions or by the machinations of others.   He is not a nasty person just a very flawed one, who has many good qualities.  Sounds like me, actually, and many people that I know.   And I am drawn to remember this on Good Friday

This is not to deny that humans can be wonderful, as last week’s post made clear.   Yet we have made a mess of things from a global level all the way down to the most intimate and personal of dimensions, our souls.   There is a flaw running through it all.  I am talking here about something dark and damaging, that causes hurt to those around us through selfishness and pride.   In his wonderfully refreshing book “Unapologetic”,  Francis Spufford has this to say:  What we’re talking about here is not just our tendency to lurch and stumble and screw up by accident, our passive role as agents of entropy.  It’s our active inclination to break stuff, “stuff” here including…promises, relationships we care about and our own well-being and other people’s….(You are ) a being whose wants make no sense, don’t harmonise: whose desires deep down are discordantly arranged, so that you truly want to possess and you truly want not to at the very same time.  You’re equipped, you realise, more for farce (and even tragedy) than happy endings.   You’re human, and that’s where we live; that’s our normal experience.  (p27)

Just as recovering alcoholics at an AA meeting start by introducing themselves by their name followed by “I’m an alcoholic” we too need that candour which is willing to admit that we need help, that we can’t help ourselves.

In Jesus most famous story, The Prodigal Son, in Luke 11 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+15%3A+11-32&version=NIVUK)                   we have the classic bad boy returning home with his shame and failures hanging all over him.  The generosity of the Father’s welcome is pictured in the undignified run of an elderly man in long garments down the road to embrace his son.   Good Friday is the day we celebrate that undignified run of God towards us made possible because of what Jesus has done on the cross.   A dying man on a cross and an elderly father running to a broken son appear to be two very different things, yet they are one and the same.   The offer is there to all the Duncans in the world, admit our haplessness to save ourselves, no amount of ‘having another go’ will fix things.  Certainly not the deep culpability we have before God (all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…Romans 3:23). 

The older brother ( in the right of the painting) was lost also, even though he had never physically left home.  His hardness of heart and coldness towards the returning failure of his brother and his anger at his father’s generous forgiveness reveal a judgemental pride clothed in moral rectitude.   I suspect more of us are lost this way, unaware that we are lost, unwilling to really face our flawed nature.   This is what society often perceives the Church as being like, judgemental and condemning.  How ironical that an over familiarity with mind bending stories of God’s generosity can make us dulled to our ongoing need of it.   God’s death for us on that first Good Friday raises the question of how serious do we take our situation?    Such an extreme measure implies an utterly desperate predicament.   Both the brothers are lost in very different ways but at least one admits it.   This Good Friday we are invited to start on a journey home, to believe that perhaps there is hope, that there is a love that sees us as we truly are and yet still runs towards us.

 Audio Version:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5W52ptYlhVwT0hkWVh2U1lzM29DZEhkRzBteTBLT1NOakEw/view?usp=drivesdk 

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