The Banquet / A Party Worth Going To

In my last post I explored the central place that community has in Jesus's imagery of eternity, with the picture of a banquet being a repeated theme. The main place this banquet imagery occurs is in Luke 14:15-24. We saw that God is pictured as a man who sends out invites to a dinner party. However, "all the guests made excuses" (v18). One guy's bought a new field, one guy's bought some new oxen and another guy's got married. They all claim that these new distractions prevent them from coming to the party, despite the RSVP list being sent out well in advance (v16). The excuses aren't outlandish - something new coming into each of the guests' lives merited an investment of time. But, considering the importance of the occasion and the advance notice they were given they sound pretty pathetic. It's like saying you can't come to a wedding because you've just bought a new Xbox. The point is this: the guests would've come if they'd thought that the party was worth the effort.

There are probably countless reasons for being wary about Jesus's presentation of eternity but I just want to explore two. This matters because how dedicated we are to God's kingdom in the present is determined, in part, by how convinced we are that the eternal life He offers us is actually worth accepting. So, what are these two stumbling blocks to seeing heaven as the perfect party?

Firstly, there's the concept of unlimited friendship. As I mentioned in the previous post, we all know what it's like to have friendships fade or die. It's because we only have a certain ammount of space for friendships, both in the ammount of time that we have to spend with people and in our emotional capacity to know people properly. Intimacy requires exclusion. People on facebook with 3,000 'friends' obviously don't have 3,000 friends. Nobody has the capacity for it. With the disclaimer that this is speculative (i.e. just my gut reaction), I think that we won't have this limitation in eternity. A parallel might be found in what Jesus has to say about marriage, a relationship which is obviously exclusive in this life but won't be in the future. Jesus says, "When people rise from the dead, they will not marry, nor will they be given to someone to marry. They will be like the angels of heaven" (Mark 12:25). In other words, emotionally content in God. Just as the angels don't need exclusive companions because of the nature of heaven, neither will we. I strongly suspect that the community of heaven will be such that we'll be capable of sustaining a limitless network of friends without ever feeling like we're apart from anyone.

Secondly, there's the people who aren't there. Every Christian knows people, some of them very dear, who don't know God. Unless you subscribe to a universalism that contradicts what Jesus of Nazareth actually taught throughout His life then heaven isn't the only future, eternal reality. Can it really be possible to enjoy paradise when people you love aren't there? A couple of points might be helpful here. Dispensing with the notion that hell is a torture chamber where God maliciously takes His revenge through suffering on non-Christians, an idea which is neither necessary nor Biblical, is a starting point.

Another parallel that might be helpful is Isaiah 65-66, which serves as the key supporting influence on the image of heaven in Revelation 21-22. Isaiah 65:17-19 gives several key images that Revelation repeats: a new heavens and a new earth, a renewed Jerusalem, God with His people, a promise that sadness and crying will end. Isaiah 65:17 says that God's people "will not remember the past or think about those things". And in 66:22-24, where the imagery of a new heavens and a new earth picks up again, there's a new picture of a pile of bodies. These are the corpses of the nations that stood in opposition to God and which God has judged. 66:24 says that "everyone will hate to see those bodies". There's an implication there that God's people can see those who've been judged if they want to...but that nobody will. That's a sobering message, but one which doesn't, I think, contradict the goodness of eternity for God's people. If we really believe that living in rebellion to God is akin to spiritual death then we don't want the contaminating influence of sin to enter God's kingdom, even if that means that people we love (and which God loves) are excluded. Salvation has to be more than an optional extra. There's doubtless more to be said, and more to be prayed over, here but I hope that this image from Isaiah provides a window through which to view the problem: the loss in separation from loved ones may be great but doesn't spoil a future in which all the pain of the past will be eclipsed by an unsurpassed present.

This may be tough stuff. We may not have all the answers. But our response is important. We've been issued with an invitation to an eternal banquet. We can choose to make excuses, which might take the form of intellectual objections to what heaven's like. Or we can send back an eager 'yes!' and, together with our questions and worries, wait for the news that dinner is served.

Let's be clear of one thing. The party is utterly worth going to.

The Banquet / He Will Reunite Us

We all have friendships that have changed over time, people that we once used to be best of friends with but whom we haven't spoken to for years. It varies from person to person but I know that, for myself, the friends that I was incredibly close with in primary school are now nothing more than acquaintances. Even right now I have friends whom I like and respect immensely but who I just don't see as often as I would like.

This post has been prompted by a couple of friends coming to mind who I know from university but who have now graduated. These are people who I miss a lot, people whose conversation and presence are a gaping hole in my life. Thankfully, I'm not without friends and there are a whole spate of friendships which have started from scratch or which have gone from strength to strength in the last few months. I'm incredibly grateful for these relationships, together with the more long-term relationships which continue to remain strong. But these new relationships don't replace the old ones. The people who are no longer part of my day-to-day life are missed for who they are as individuals.

When I think of and miss people from my past I remind myself that we will meet again. I know that with certainty, not in a wishy-washy way or as a petty consolation. It stems from the absolute truth that we are eternal beings. That this life isn't all there is. We have always been created for never-ending existence, not just for the single, earthly lifetime we're currently experiencing. You might have heard that before. But just think about it: you're going to live forever. (Try to avoid singing Fame at this point). We all are. We're eternal beings. It's simply how we've been created.

This principle of eternity is right at the centre of Jesus's teaching and message. There are a variety of different images that Jesus used to represent what life in the 'kingdom of God' is going to be like. One of the most persistent ones is of a banquet. He unpacks it extensively in a parable in Luke 14:15-24 (although it also occurs, for example, in Matthew 8:11, Luke 22:29-30 and Revelation 19:9), where heaven is presented as an invitation to a huge dinner that various people turn down. This recurring imagery of eternity as a shared meal makes me both joyful and excited. It confirms to me that heaven will be about community.

What images first come to mind when you hear the word 'heaven'? Perhaps you think of a grand, majestic scene of unceasing worship like the throneroom vision in Revelation 4-5. God's sovereignty is an absolutely vital part of Biblical eternity, as God's rule becomes absolute and His kingdom comes. But I feel that we lose something crucial to the way in which Jesus presented heaven if that's the only aspect we recognise. Part of that is to do with our understanding of worship, which is surely unimaginably minute if we confine worship to collective singing in a church service. That's part of worship, but true worship - the kind of worship we should all be aspiring to - means honouring God with our whole lives. It means that everything we do or say is wrapped up within that worship (Colossians 3:17). Why shouldn't that include a good meal shared with friends?

Some might say that seeing heaven as a dinner party undercuts God's place at the centre of the image. But good human friendship isn't incompatible with a proper acknowledgement of who God is. In actual fact, being in a right relationship with both God and other humans is always how we were created to live (remember Mark 12:29-31?).

How will friendship work in the new creation? I'm on more speculative ground here, but I'm convinced that it will include an opportunity to catch up with old friends. To see family members that we've been separated from by death. To maintain friendships established in our earthly life. Yes, even to make and sustain new friendships throughout eternity. All of these things necessitate a space where you can have a conversation, like the kind that you get when you sit down and eat with someone. Eternity will create an unparalleled opportunity to really talk with and enjoy the company of people, without either the pressure of time constraints or the destructive influence of sin. I was going to explore some of the other potential consequences of having eternal friendships but, on second thoughts, that might be best left to a future post. For now, let's recognise the essential role that community has in God's future.

We all know what it's like to lose touch with friends. Hopefully, we also all know what it's like to share a good meal with good friends, where everyone has their guard down and simply enjoys one another's company. I'm convinced that heaven will be like a banquet and that Jesus was very particular in choosing this imagery. God's going to create a reality that involves worship but which also involves all the best things that are part of human friendship now, renewed so as to be made perfect. And, naturally, that involves talking and connecting and laughing and sharing and listening...and eating.

Ambition and Coach Carter

Ambition can be a crippling thing. Coach Carter (Thomas Carter, 2005) is a film about a group of young people who don't have any. Their lives resolve around basketball but they generally don't have any aspirations to greatness. Career, fame, glory - all these things mean nothing to them. They do care about other things, though: self-esteem, popularity, image, the ability to convince others that they're macho. The new, no-nonsense basketball coach, Ken Carter (Samuel L. Jackson), instils discipline in the team, aspiring them to make themselves into better men. The way he does this is through requiring academic success alongside sporting talent. What kind of ambition does Coach Carter advocate? And is it really the kind we should aspire to?

By the end of the film most of the team have improved their schoolwork and several win sports scholarships to university. There's a sense of achievement in what Carter's managed to do. I don't doubt the message that a university education is better than a life in gangs and prison, the radical contrasts the film offers us. But there's an celebration of ambition behind that stark choice that effectively makes a god out of self-betterment. Towards the end of the film one of the students, Kenyon, tells his girlfriend that he's got into university. He's made plans for the two of them and their baby to make a new life for themselves there. She reveals that there is no baby, that she's had an abortion. Others may read this scene differently, but to me it seemed like the magnitude of this news was undercut by the fact that he'd secured a college place. As if the abortion didn't matter. Whatever your views on the rights and wrongs of abortion I think we can all agree that it's a big deal for the people affected. The ideology behind the scene marginalises everything else except what could give you a better job. It says, "Improve yourself! Get to college! That's all the counts".

You can picture society like a ladder. Those people that we esteem the most are at the top - celebrities, the young, the talented. The people we ignore are at the bottom - the elderly and the disabled, for instance. Most people spend their lives trying to get one rung higher, even at the expense of others. Coach Carter effectively says that this is worthwhile, a good way to live your life. It's not the only way of seeing things.

Jesus - Upside-Down Ambition

Jesus shows us a completely different way of seeing life. Instead of a 'race to the top' Jesus sees life as a 'race to the bottom'. Jesus paints a future where "those who are last will be first and those who are first will be last" (Matthew 20:16, my translation). He says that real happiness doesn't belong to the rich, the famous and the self-secure but to the spiritually bankrupt, the humble, the justice-seekers and the peace-bringers, the persecuted, the pure and the grieving (Matthew 5:3-10). It's a privileging of the overlooked and the ignored that challenges the way in which we judge and categorise those around us.

Jesus reflected this in His own life. As God, Jesus rightfully had authority over everything. He was top dog (Philippians 2:6). Yet Jesus' whole life on earth was a giving-up of that place of honour (Philippians 2:6-11). He still carried God's authority and deserved to be worshipped 24/7. But people had to give it to Him, and not everyone did. It seemed like, with Jesus, you either loved Him or you hated Him. His ministry went between giddy exaltation and scornful rejection. Sometimes this came from the same people. The most dramatic example of this is in John 6, where a crowd go from wondering at Jesus (v12) after He miraculously feeds them to walking away from Him with complaints about His teaching (v41-42, 60). Yet Jesus never wavered from His mission.

At times, Jesus had to run away because the people wanted to turn Him into a human king (John 6:15). At times, He had to run away to stop them from killing Him (Luke 4:28-30). The temptation to take the human promotion of kingship must have been huge. But His identity in His Father kept Him fixed on the task at hand, which was much less prestigious and yet much more important. Alongside those who wanted to push Jesus into human leadership were those who challenged Him. The Pharisees challenged His authority constantly (e.g. Matthew 21:23). He was accused of siding with the devil (Matthew 12:24). He was betrayed. At His trial He faced a barrage of untrue accusations (Mark 14:56). Even on the cross He had scorn poured on His authority: "He saved other people, but He can't save Himself" (Mark 15:31). Jesus consistently turned down those who offered Him status and prestige when it wasn't in His Father's plan for Him. At the same time, He faced constant accusations and insults. I find it remarkable that, in the face of all that questioning of who He was and what He was doing, Jesus held true. He never sought a higher position but humbly persisted in what God had called Him to.

Think about that image of the ladder again. Jesus shows us that true satisfaction is found in climbing down it. Jesus Himself went right to the bottom rung. Through His death He placed Himself below all people. His example and the life He calls us to offer something so much better (and harder!) than either of the forms of ambition I described in the first paragraph. It's neither the ambition to seek a more wealthy, more successful, more prestigious life nor that of trying to prove yourself through how your friends see you. Jesus had a totally different notion of what's worthwhile (Matthew 20:22). Want to be great? Then serve. We need to master Jesus' lifestyle of one-down-manship. Not finding any need to have ambition because of who we are in Him.

The way God sees us makes any earthly ambition completely unnecessary.

We All Fit Together

So this week I went to the dentist. I'll be honest - I had a couple of fillings put in. The anaesthetic left me without crucial abilities such as swallowing for a couple of hours and, I'm sure, made more than a couple of bystanders concerned for my general well-being. Since Monday I've been getting used to my new mouth. It feels bizarre. The new additions to my teeth feel like alien intruders. I keep mistaking them for bits of food and trying to dislodge them. Every time I run my tongue along the teeth in question they feel unnatural and unfamiliar, certainly not like the teeth that I'm used to. After a couple of days, though, I've learned to live with them.

The church is like my mouth. (Bear with me here). Some bits of it seem weird. Some bits of it seem alien. Some bits of it feel so different from ourselves that we wonder if they really belong there in the first place. The church is obviously varied - across countries, cultures, beliefs, styles of worship, traditions - and it can be tempting just to huddle around an exclusive group of people who are so like you that you feel completely comfortable. And to avoid the others.

That's obviously a limited approach. You only need to scratch the surface of Biblical Christianity to realise that the connection between believers is so much more than a common tick-box response on a survey. It's about family. God has made us His children (John 1:12, Romans 8:16, 1 John 3:1 etc.). There's an 'upwards' aspect to that whereby God is now our Father. But there's also a 'horizontal' aspect - fellow-Christians are our brothers and sisters. The word for brother (adelphos, sometimes literal but mostly metaphorical) occurs 343 times in the New Testament alone. God has joined us together to be His people, and no ammount of strangeness can contravene this basic fact.

Some parts of the church are newer than others, just like my bits of tooth. The older parts need to avoid being like my tongue which tried to dislodge the newer members because they were unfamiliar. They need to be open to fresh ideas and the power of cultural or religious change to make the whole stronger. The newer parts need to respect the power in the tradition and that, as James Bond said in Skyfall, "youth is no guarantee of innovation". Both old and new parts are needed for the mouth to be the full working whole it was intended to be. Neither is dispensable (1 Corinthians 12:18-20).

Bond and Q in Skyfall

Paul had a similar image of the church in Romans 11:16-24 as a Jewish tree with a non-Jewish tree grafted into it. He emphasised that the only reason any of the tree could be there at all is because of the root (v18). I don't know what the root is in my teeth analogy but the One holding it all together is obviously God. Without Him there would be no church. It's vital that we stay close to Him, and that means valuing our brothers and sisters.

We need to deal with our differences and conquer them with love. One of the marvels of the church is that it transcends social and cultural boundaries. I've met and called friends people that I never would have known otherwise, all because we're united by something more significant. Why don't you challenge yourself about your attitude to other Christians, and maybe go and chat to that unfamiliar person at church over coffee?

Christ himself is our peace. He made both Jewish people and those who are not Jews one people. They were separated as if there were a wall between them, but Christ broke down that wall of hate by giving his own body...His purpose was to make the two groups of people become one new people in him and in this way to make peace. It was also Christ's purpose to end the hatred between the two groups, to make them into one body, and to bring them back to God. Christ did all this with his death on the cross.

 Ephesians 2:14-16

A Landmark and a Survey

It's now been a little under five months since I launched this blog, and I'm really happy with how people have been interacting with it. This week we passed the landmark of the 1,000th view. I'm really trying not to focus on the view-count, and I'm sure that a great many of those are me refreshing pages in an attempt to see if pictures work, but it offers me a neat opportunity to thank you all for your time in reading posts and for your support and affirmation. Thank you!

I want to extend a quick survey about the blog to gather your opinions on how things are going, particularly the blog's appearance. There's also the (potentially one-off) chance to suggest a topic or Bible passage for me to blog on in the future. Go for it!

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/M8DM98K

My God Laughs

Over the past few months I've found myself taking on a number of unfamiliar new roles: blogger, film critic and comedian. The latter can confuse people. How can a Christian do stand-up? Doesn't God disapprove of that sort of thing?

But one of the great joys for me about doing comedy is that it's both a profoundly Christian and a profoundly Biblical thing to do. If anything, it's us rather than the Bible who have the biggest difficulty with accepting that humour is wholesome. In their letter to the Phillipians, Paul and Timothy give the church this instruction: "Be full of joy in the Lord always. I will say again, be full of joy" (4:4). It's almost as if, even for its original audience, the command to be joyful can be easy to brush over and ignore. But it's deliberately restated. It's a message that we need to take on board. Following Jesus doesn't mean forsaking happiness for an existence of dour, lifeless self-sacrifice. Knowing God is actually the source of true joy and contentment. Let's be honest: some Christians haven't exactly been renowned for having a laugh. Some Christians have explicitly frowned upon any sort of humour whatsoever. But that sort of attitude tragically misrepresents the warmth and laughter of our God.

That's not to say that all humour is Godly. There are some things which just aren't funny, some times where it's genuinely inappropriate to laugh. I'm not advocating the taking-on of a guffawing persona with no sense of proportion - laughter no matter what. There are plenty of situations in life that require a response from us that's not laughter. And humour that exploits, humiliates or demeans others is, in my book, never healthy.

That said, I'm convinced that God Himself has a great sense of humour. Again, we're often the ones who reject this out of hand. For instance, in three stories told in response to those who criticised His radical acceptance of outsiders Jesus portrayed an exuberant, joy-filled, celebratory God. In each story, something of great value gets lost: a sheep, a coin, a son. After some sort of search the lost item/person is found. A huge party is thrown to celebrate. God? Partying? Well, yeah. Jeff Lucas writes about the partying God:

Risky though it might seem to some, God loves the imagery of a good party and consistently uses it in the inspired words of Scripture to point to his own nature and the reality that he calls his people to be a partying people...And God himself is not the wallflower, the stoic, unsmiling spectator or party pooper who sits every dance out because he is above that sort of thing. 

(Will Your Prodigal Come Home?, p152-153)

Jesus included parties in the stories to point to the truth that "In the same way, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God when one sinner changes his heart and life" (Luke 15:10). Lucas notes that, although it's often been taken to mean that it's the angels who are showing the joy, in actual fact they're just witnesses. The image in my head is of a God celebrating so loudly and emphatically that even the angels are a bit taken aback.

Broken clocks. They're so rude. They won't even give you the time of day.

I don't know whether you find that funny or not - it doesn't really matter. But we all know that feeling of finding something really funny, whether it's online, in a comedy act or just in everyday life. Quite simply, I think God's behind that. I'm encouraged to be among Christian comedians like Tim Vine who believe the same sort of thing. Laughter's from God. It's his invention. Why would we think that God doesn't laugh with us? I don't think that it's an exaggeration to say that anything funny that I come up with is actually second-hand material from God. They're His jokes (thankfully, I don't think He'll be suing me any time soon). He's the source of laughter and joy.

We have permission to laugh in God's presence. I can't overstate that. The Christian life is one of joy, the living out of the celebratory heart of God. I often think that your average guy on the street thinks that a sense of humour is extracted from Christian kids at birth ("We won't be needing this,  thank you, doctor"). But my God laughs. And every 'ha-ha' joke points to the complete and abundant joy that's only found in knowing Him for yourself.

Is God OK With Slavery?

Christians often find it awkward to talk about slavery. It's seen as one of the fundamental injustices of human history and yet it's felt that we can't really speak out on it because...well, doesn't the Bible condone slavery? We're troubled by Old Testament passages like Leviticus 25:35-54 that discuss owning slaves but don't say that it's wrong. We might right that off as an obscure Old Testament passage. But then we're concerned to find Paul give advice in the New Testament like: "Slaves, obey your masters here on earth with fear and respect and from a sincere heart, just as you obey Christ" (Ephesians 6:5).

So is God OK with slavery?

It's obvious from the passages I've referenced above (and others which I haven't) that slavery was commonplace when the Bible was written, both for those who worshipped God and those who didn't. The Bible doesn't contain an explicit statement that slavery is wrong. Why might that be?

When we think of slavery today our minds tend to jump to the image of America and the slave trade. We think of cotton plantations and ships crammed to capacity with human cargo. And we're absolutely justified in being repulsed at the degradation of human dignity and barbarity that happened in the slave trade. We misunderstand what the Biblical authors mean by slavery, though, if we read this image into the text.

God is not OK with this.

In God's law the slave is very much part of the family. You thought of them that way - my wife, my daughter, my son, my slave. They were included in your household and as such you were responsible for them. You could draw a parallel with the domestic workers, doing cleaning and tidying, that are commonplace in some parts of the world today. Slaves did more work and could sometimes be treated cruelly but generally it was in your interest to treat your slaves well. If you beat your slave then he'll necessarily be unable to do his job well.

And the Bible contains the precedent for a radically compassionate treatment of slaves. Nowhere else in the world but in God's people were slaves entitled to one day off a week in law (the Sabbath). There are laws requiring you to release your slave if you mistreat him in certain ways. It was enshrined in law that Israelite citizens could only be enslaved for a maximum of seven years, no matter how great their debt. There's even an allowance for a slave to remain with a family upon release if he's grown attached to them (Deuteronomy 15:16-18). When you reach the New Testament the requirements are even more radical - treat your slaves like you'd want your real Master to treat you (Ephesians 6:9).

We can have peace with slavery as it's required to be practised in the Bible. When the master is fair and honest then the slave was little more than a domestic employee tied into a short-term contract. But what about modern-day slavery? Can't that be understood as Biblically wrong?

1 Timothy 1:10

As I said, there's no all-out statement condemning slavery in the Bible. But there is a passage that condemns trading in slaves. In a list of people who "are against God and are sinful" (1 Timothy 1:9) Paul lists those "who sell slaves" (NCV). The NIV and the NLT also use the phrase 'slave traders' whereas the NASB goes for 'kidnappers', the ESV for 'enslavers' and the KJV for the wonderfully archaic 'menstealers'. Why is there such a divergence of translations? The Greek word used (andrapodistes) appears to be a technical term stemming from the practice of enslaving defeated soldiers in war. It refers to those who stole other people's slaves in order to sell them on for profit, a practice already condemned in the Old Testament. This is slightly more than kidnapping. It's trading in human life for the purposes of money. And that is sinful and wrong. We can overstate the meaning of this - it doesn't say that owning slaves is wrong. But it does give us an indication about how God might feel about slavery today.

I think that Biblical authors like Paul would be horrified by human trafficking today. Enslaving someone for the purposes of sex or smuggling someone across a border with the promise of work and then exploiting them is sick, even by ancient standards. It's far from the family-based model of slavery practiced in the Bible. I'm proud that Christians were at the forefront of opposing the slave trade. Christians today have no reason whatsoever not to follow in their footsteps in rooting out slavery in the modern age.