Comfort In Times Of Loss

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted"

Comforted by whom? The ancient prophet Jeremiah spoke of God himself comforting those who suffered devastating loss, but Jesus' second beatitude just says they will be comforted. Is that because God works through people? People like you and I? But how?

How can a ten-year-old girl deal with the death of her father; or a middle-aged couple come to terms with the suicide of their son; or an elderly man who has already buried both his children find peace when his wife follows? You don’t have to travel far in Caversham and Reading - or doubtless wherever you live - before you come across stories like these. What can we say? What can any church – as a community of those seeking to follow Jesus – have to offer in the face of such loss? And where does Jesus come into the story?

Maybe you can turn to the Bible – Jesus often did that.

There are three approaches (at least) in the Bible to comfort in the face of devastating loss. There is the 'God will make it up to you' approach, for example Joel 2:25a: “I will repay you for the years the swarming locust has eaten,” and Job 42:10: “The Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends; and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.”

Then there is the 'God will bring them back,' approach of resurrection, for example John 11:23b: “Your brother will rise again” and 1 Thess. 4:14: “For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.”

And finally there is the 'God is with us in the midst of suffering' approach, for example Isaiah 13a: “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you,” and 43:2a: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you,” along with Matthew 28:20b: “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age,” as well as the evocative “Jesus wept,” in the middle of the story of his friend Lazarus, who had died:.

"When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked. “Come and see, Lord,” they replied.

Jesus wept."

You might want to consider when it is best to talk to people about such things. Is it useful to say them to someone who is already devastated? Or are they most useful to know in advance, before the devastation comes, so someone can cling to them in the storm?

And maybe, when the storm does come, the best comfort we can provide to someone is to stand with them in the heart of the storm and weep, then to provide practical support and help as long as it is needed – often longer than you might expect. Maybe share some Psalms of lament. And tell them stories of Jesus, who stood with his friend’s sisters and wept.

The Last Word?

I once knew a middle-aged lady whose marriage fell apart after the kids left home. A while after her husband moved in with someone else she found a lump on her breast ... which she carefully ignored ... and ignored ... until at last she could ignore it no longer.

She underwent treatment for the breast cancer and came through. During her phased return to work they found a secondary in her brain, which killed her. At her funeral a neighbour said:

"It's hard to believe in God when something like this happens."

I knew another middle-aged lady who had a very difficult childhood. In her twenties and early thirties she fought back and thrived, making something special of her life. Then the demons caught up with her, gradually tearing much of what she had achieved apart and eventually killing her:

It's hard to believe in God when the demons win.

I can see the point, but for me it is far harder to not believe in God when such things happen. To not believe in God is to say that disease and demons have the last word.  To me, God is about meaning and purpose even in the midst of destruction and despair, about Resurrection when evil seems to have won.

For those of us who do make it through middle-age there is another 'd' waiting - decay. The longer we live the more we fall apart. In God I can even see meaning in that; but without God there is little to learn, or at least not much future in learning it.

I believe God has the last word: after disease and demons and decay and despair have done their worst, God still has something to say. And God's final word is about hope and love and life and purpose and a new future in a world of justice and peace and meaning.

But sometimes I do feel very, very tired.

Blessed Are The Desperate?

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit...
Blessed is the lamb, whose blood flows...
Blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on...
Oh lord, why have you forsaken me?"

Blessed ... really?

I was at a "Continuing Ministerial Development" course on Thursday on "Preaching the Gospel of Matthew". I came away feeling it had been interesting but not really that useful. With one notable exception, it was full of academically inclined people talking in abstracts. Inevitable perhaps, given the CofE approach to selecting and training authorised ministers.

I don't mind abstract ideas myself, but it's been a really busy week and I have a painful back, so my initial response was that it hadn't been an effective use of the day.

One thing which we did look at was the Beatitudes - the opening to the Sermon on the Mount which Paul Simon so evocatively rephrases in his song above. I was part of a small group looking at this, which happened to include the one exception to the academic mould. She focussed us with the practical example of a young mum without the money to buy a can of beans. Is she blessed? Is that what the beatitudes are telling us?

Given a practical focus, the academic stuff sometimes comes in handy. Someone else in the group knew Oscar Wilde's De Profundis - a letter written from Reading Prison, where Wilde had been imprisoned with hard labour for 'gross indecency'. In this he writes that his first year of imprisonment was pure hell, but in the second year he was able to come to terms with all that was happening and use it to connect with Christ and with humanity.

"The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it. With people of our own rank it is different. With us, prison makes a man a pariah. I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to air and sun. Our presence taints the pleasures of others. We are unwelcome when we reappear."

To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of Wilde myself - to me he seems overly flowery and full of himself, even whilst celebrating his own 'humility'.

Nevertheless, there is something here about reality, and about our inability to face it when we are comfortable. There is also something, it seems to me, about God bringing good out of situations which are not good. To my mind it is wrong to speak of God making bad things happen, to serve a greater end. But it is true, I think, that God can take the bad things which inevitably do happen in this fallen world and can transform their outcomes: evil happens but in Christ comes resurrection.

There's a famous old sermon called "Sunday's comin'" which speaks of the hopelessness that goes with Good Friday - but, unseen and unexpected, "Sunday's coming".

Somewhere in the beatitudes stands a truth that sometimes it's easier to see light when we stand in darkness, that in Jesus despair transforms to hope, and that God can raise the deadest of dead. And, in due course, a full resurrection is coming when suffering and dying and hopelessness will be no more.

By the way, that young mum who couldn't afford beans - it was a local church who were her blessing. They went out and bought her a pack of food, including bread and beans. It's not a solution, but it was a blessing. The future is in God's hands ... and Christ's people stand as his hands and feet, heart and voice, and - sometimes - his shoppers for beans.

May your week ahead be redeemed by hope and grace in Jesus, whatever you may face.

Mark: Not The End

The 'end' of Mark's Gospel is odd, doubly so.

Firstly, the original ends very strangely and, secondly, later editors have stuffed on a couple of extra bits, to try to 'correct' the strange original.

The original ending says:

"Don't be alarmed," he said, "You are looking for Jesus the Nazerene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter. He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you."

Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

What sort of ending is that? Who would end a story this way?

Obviously, Mark would. The reason is that this is not a simple story, or biography, or history. It's not anything where the reader or listener is a passive observer. This is a story which continues and where Mark's listeners were called to be part of that story, and where you and I are called to be part of the story too.

As Mark told us, way back at the start, this 'Gospel' is the beginning of the good news of Jesus, Messiah, Son of God. We are, or can be, part of the continuation of that good news.

Mark's readers knew that the women had overcome their fear, moved past their initial reluctance, and told the disciples. They knew because they already knew the story - Peter had been with them in Rome for several years before he was executed.

Mark's story ends with an implicit question - what will the women do - to which his readers knew the answer. But Mark is also asking the Christians in Rome a question - will they give up after the persecution they have been through or will they carry on, however confused, upset and afraid they are feeling? We know now that the church in Rome continued and grew; but now the question is passed on to us. What will we do with the good news of Jesus? Will we pass it on, or does it end with us?

The 21st-Century church in Britain has different problems, different confusions, different worries, but I think it is fair to say that things haven't gone the way we'd have expected or hoped in recent decades. If we're really honest, the church hasn't done a particularly good job over many years, certainly not in following the example we've seen Jesus set in Mark's Gospel.

Just as Jesus told the disciples, it's time to go back to basics, to return to Galilee to meet him there and start again. The disciples hadn't done particularly well, but they had endured and God could use them. Maybe we haven't done that well in following Jesus in confusing times either, but God can use us.

Where is your Galilee? What lies at the beginning of your journey of faith, and where is its heart? How can you rediscover that simple walk with Jesus, that early enthusiasm, that honest appreciation of the life that Jesus brings? And how will you pass that on?

This is not the end!

Mark: Triumph Over Death

The end is nigh! This is the final week of the CTM Parish's Mark sermon series, as we come to the end of Mark's Gospel. Of course, we all know how the story ends - it's pretty much summed up in the title above ... isn't it?

Except that Mark doesn't really tell it that way.

At the end of last week's instalment, the trap had closed - Jesus was on his own, betrayed, abandoned and captured. The religious authorities had taken him and planned to exact their revenge. The outlook was bleak.

They give Jesus a mockery of a trial, and are still having trouble making their case. So Jesus helps them out, agreeing that he is "the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One." A reminder that Jesus is no helpless victim in this process; he has been prodding and poking and shaming the religious leaders to provoke a reaction from the beginning. He is not letting them off the hook now: they can choose to do evil or they can choose to do good, but they must choose.

Off to Pilate, the local leader of the occupying Roman power. He is playing his own games, but has no interest in blocking a determined drive by the native powers-that-be. Jesus is tortured, mocked and condemned to death.

Then they crucify Jesus.

There's more mockery, mostly along the lines of 'if Jesus is really who he says then he'll come down off the cross and avoid the suffering and death'. Maybe it's a cry of anyone faced with suffering: surely if God loves us then he would save us from this. Yet Jesus is telling us - as he has told us before - that in God's upside-down Kingdom life comes through death, and healing through wounds.

Mark's readers in Rome had been forced to endure terrible suffering and loss: they had made it through, but how to make sense of the cost? Mark, as ever, doesn't give a clear explanation, he just shows Jesus on a cross. Jesus quoting an ancient Hebrew song: a song which begins in lonely suffering - "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" - but ends in vindication and triumph, "All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him."

The sun goes dark, Jesus breathes his last, and the curtain in the Temple is torn in two. Just as the heavens had been torn apart at Jesus baptism, for God to affirm Jesus as his son, now the veil of the Temple - symbolically separating God from the people - is torn apart, and the foreign NCO in charge of the execution squad affirms Jesus as God's son.

It's strangers and religious leaders who have condemned Jesus, but it is also strangers and a religious leader who help him: Simon of Cyrene who carries his cross, the unnamed centurion who tells his identity, and now Joseph of Arimathea lays Jesus in his tomb. Women - two Marys - look on.

After the Sabbath is over the story takes a twist: the tomb is empty, Jesus is not there.

Our best estimate of the original ending is that the three women were told to tell the disciples that Jesus had been raised and is going ahead of them to Galilee, but they "said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." That's it: the alternative endings given in most Bibles are believed to be later additions.

But how can the story be known, how can Jesus' resurrection be known, if the women kept silent? That's the point, of course. They were terribly afraid, they wanted to keep silent, but at some point they must have spoken out anyway. And so the Church began.

In late 60's Rome Christians were terribly afraid, they would have wanted to keep silent, but what would they actually do? Can the Church carry on? Mark's Gospel is open ended.

In early 21st-Century Britain many Christians seem ... unwilling to speak up; at least those who are not modern day Pharisees. Uncertainty about what it all means, doubt about the place of faith in a secular world, unwillingness to force one's beliefs onto another, many different reasons perhaps.

But if the end result is that those who faithfully and lovingly follow Jesus are not heard, if the message of God's Grace through Jesus is drowned out, how can the Church continue?

Now, as then, Mark's Gospel remains open-ended.

Life Renewed

The tomb is empty; so is the cross!

A somewhat belated Easter follow-up to Life Matters from last Good Friday.

The basic Biblical picture of life is that we are born, we live, we die, then we are physically raised either to renewed life or to the 'second death', pictured as a lake of fire. The 'going to be with God in heaven when we die' stuff is, Biblically, something of a minor aside, although I have known Christians who thought that was what it was all about.

So, for a follower of Jesus who trusts him to see us through judgement and into that renewed life, death is not be something to be feared. Just as Jesus was physically raised that first Easter, so we will be physically raised when he returns. Death is not the end; renewed life is.

Sometimes people over-think this and decide that life after death is what matters, not the life we live now. This is nonsense. Life is life. The hope of new life forever may well give us a different perspective on the things which happen in our lives now, but that doesn't alter the basic fact that life matters - life now and renewed life in a renewed world.

I realise I have skated across a lot in the above - feel free to use the comments to drill deeper. But for now I want to pick up on a flip-side to the previous post.

There I used an example of extensive medical intervention to help keep a child alive and thriving. What about the other end of life? When someone is dying and technology is used to keep them alive? Sometimes there is a temptation to try to preserve life at all costs, to intervene even when there is no meaningful purpose (except perhaps to keep the surgeon's hand in).

If life matters, and if death is not the end of life, then surely the way that life is lived matters, even in the period before dying. Once there was the idea of a 'good death' in the sense that during the final moments relationships were healed - dying with your family around you, at peace with God and with your neighbours. It didn't necessarily mean a pain-free death, but one where neither pain nor drugs got in the way of these relationships. In modern times this sort of idea lies behind the hospice movement's approach to terminal care.

Easter is important in dying for several reasons. Firstly, Jesus' death and resurrection allow us to be reconciled to God, at peace with him. Secondly Jesus' resurrection foreshadows our own resurrections, and those of the people whom we love. If we live and die 'in Jesus' (whatever that means - a topic for another post) then we will be reunited at our resurrection - not only is death not the end of life, it needn't be the end of relationships either.

Finally, whilst we are alive, here and now, Jesus encourages us to reconcile any broken relationships we may have: to forgive and to seek to be forgiven. It saddens me how many families have factions who fell out years ago and who now never talk. Forgiveness is a great healer, and helps to avoid the 'if only's of death.

So, may your week ahead be filled with blessing, may you experience life which matters, and may you find peace in your memories of those you hope to meet again, come the resurrection.

Alzheimer's At Easter

The morning mist hangs

shapeless, without detail,

but clearly there,

 like the memories

which peel away to swirl

about me like a shroud.

But I don't mind

my life has been good,

by and large,

my memories are warm

and colourful, misty,

comforting around me.

I hear a voice,

in the distance,

very like mine,

swear words and crudity,

unwanted anger.

So I stay in here

where the small light shines

warm and comforting

like a candle

pushing back the dark.

Who was it who said

"I'll be back"?

I don't remember

Seeing & Believing

“Thomas, Thomas, Jesus is alive! The tomb is empty and the women have seen him!”

“Come off it, John, the women are deluded. I saw him with my own eyes: he’s dead!”

“Thomas, Thomas, Jesus is alive! The tomb is empty and now we’ve all seen him!”

“Don’t be daft, Peter, you’re all deluded. He’s dead, we were wrong, it’s over!”

“Thomas, Thomas, I am alive. Come and see, come and feel.”

“Jesus, my Lord and my God!”

“Blessed are those who do not see and yet believe.”

...

Thomas, ‘Doubting Thomas’, gets some unfair stick, it seems to me, largely because people get confused about doubt and faith thinking they are opposites. But the opposite of doubt is certainty, and church history shows only too well that blind certainty has little to do with faith. Faith is about trust, active trust, and the Bible’s use of ‘believing’ carries the same meaning, more often than not.

I know a lady whose life was kicked apart a few years back, from many directions at once, like Job’s. Her beliefs about God were smashed with it. Yet, somehow, in all the fog of doubt, there remains a spark, and still she is able to continue to follow God, with tiny faltering steps. She is amazing! Blessed are those who do not see and yet believe.

I used to know a man, some years back, who was a recovering addict. He became clean at a Christian rehab, and picked up there a simple faith of hard certainties. It was necessary: addiction is an evil, horrible thing, which will attack and exploit any weakness, any uncertainty. It makes for a difficult walk in the outside world, with all its complexity and ambiguity, but he walked that line, through the glare of crystalline certainty, with precise, carefully placed steps. Blessed are those who do not see and yet believe.

Sometimes people have no choice, but what about the rest of us? How diligently do we investigate our doubts, how humbly do we see other points of view?

...

Thomas, Thomasina, Jesus is alive! The tomb is empty. The women have met him, the men have met him, hundreds have seen him, most of whom were still alive when the bulk of the New Testament was written. The disciples were persecuted, tortured and killed, for claiming that Jesus is alive, raised from the dead, yet they carried on doing so. Most of all, as Jesus once told John the Baptist: 

“The blind receive sight,
The lame walk,
Those with leprosy are cleansed,
The deaf hear,
The dead are raised,
And the good news is preached to the poor.

...

Blessed are those who have not seen, yet have believed.

... Happy Easter ...

Funerals

Howard, with son & younger brother

I'm not a great fan of funerals at the best of times, but two in five days is clearly excessive. Especially when both were more-or-less my contemporaries, both died suddenly, and one had been a friend since college days, some thirty-five years ago.

I generally try to wear something green to funerals, in amongst all the dreary black, because I do believe in all the "unless a seed is planted" stuff about resurrection. But in the meantime there is separation, and a breaking of immediate ties. Ties of family and friendship and responsibility. There is a hope that all will meet again come the resurrection, but for now there is an absence and a space unfilled.

Although, when I think about it, both these friends died after their kids had grown up, not before. One - many years ago, whilst his kids were young - had suffered from a brain tumour, which was expected to be fatal but unexpectedly responded to treatment/prayer. The other spent many years wandering around the globe, so for him absence has not been unusual. He had been settled back in the UK for a while before he died, though, so there was some time to spend (the photo above is from last summer). Life is a gift, length of life can be a gift, but often we want more.

Of the two friends with funerals, one, George, was a committed churchgoer - he was actually my house-group leader when I first went to Caversham Baptist Church some 18 years ago - the other, Howard was not. Often that makes a difference to the feel of the funeral, to how well it reflects the person being mourned/celebrated. In this case it was a bit different.

The minister taking George's funeral did a decent enough job, but was perhaps too close, took it too personally. The result failed to reflect the breadth and variety of George's life and the people he had been involved with - and had come to the funeral - on the one hand, and didn't really reflect much hope on the other.

Although Howard wasn't a churchgoer, it turned out the minister there, 'oop north' in Runcorn Old Town, had actually met him a couple of times. He also remembered his sister dying six years ago. Their Mum is still alive and he made the link between the horribleness for a parent of seeing their child die and the experience of Mary in the Bible. A difficult link to carry off without being naff or unkind, I thought, but he handled it well. The family gave two 'tributes' before the minister spoke - as happened for George's funeral - and he let them handle the more personal stuff, whilst he focussed on pain, hope and resurrection. I thought he did an amazing job, myself.

So I guess funerals do have their place: a time to say farewell, a chance to get together to share memories, an opportunity to pay one's respects, a reminder of the Christian hope that we will meet again. I still don't like them, but I am glad I went ... to both, but especially to Howard's in far-off Runcorn.

Resurrection

Resurrection: Rob Bell.

Not long ago I heard a (rather rubbish) preacher claim that the gospel hope is "going to heaven when you die". This is a fairly common viewpoint - you get it in several Victorian hymns - but it does have two big problems: firstly it is not in the Bible; and secondly it makes this world seem like a pointless waiting room, like hanging around at Heathrow for a flight to Madrid whilst Spanish Air Traffic Control is on strike.

In the Bible the gospel hope is, on one level at least, clear enough: it is resurrection (see, for example, 1 Cor 15 and  Acts 23:6). The trickier bit is understanding what resurrection, in this context, is all about.

The Acts quote above looks to be about a general resurrection of the dead 'at the end of the age' - ie after Jesus returns, when God's Kingdom is fully realised in a 'new heaven and a new earth'. Whilst that's more concrete than just 'going to heaven', it's still not obvious what its relevance is to here and now.

The chapter to the Corinthians is different though. That starts from a statement of the gospel that Jesus died and was raised, in the past, and then argues from this that there will be a general resurrection in the future. So the basic gospel message that the Corinthians had already accepted was about Jesus' resurrection, and Paul was teasing out for them the implications of this for their present and future.

An expansion on resurrection as the 'gospel hope' then would start with Jesus' death and resurrection setting us free from anything that is wrong in our past.

Then the resurrection message for here and now is that however bad things may be, God will have the last word. When Jesus died on the cross it looked as though it was all over, but God raised him from the dead and defeat was changed to victory. When we are at our most hopeless, when darkness is all around, then God will act and everything will change in an instant. The resurrection message is that God transforms despair to joy and defeat into victory; we just need to hang in there as best we can.

Finally, resurrection is hope for the future: a double hope in that we hope to be reunited with those who we have loved, but also in that we hope to live in a renewed world where life, justice and love are all around (and within).

Rob Bell, of course, puts all this much better, so I have included a video of his about Resurrection at the top of this post. Enjoy!

Love The Sinner But Hate The Sin?

The total transformation that occurs within a chrysalis has always amazed me. A caterpillar ties itself up with a little silk, then its whole internal structure is reworked into something totally new. After a period of weeks or months the new butterfly is revealed, yet it is formed from just the same stuff as the old caterpillar - everything is reused except for a little silk and the outer skin. There's a wonderful description of the process, by Dr Lincoln Brower, here.

Comparisons between the caterpillar/butterfly metamorphosis and resurrection have been made before, of course, but these usually involve the thoroughly unbiblical image of some sort of immaterial butterfly casting off the shackles of material existence to fly free into heaven. It's a pretty image, and I can see why those who just want to escape from the world might like it. The God of the Bible, though, isn't interested in helping us escape from the world, he wants to renew the world, and us as well.

Jesus was the first true resurrection and he is the model for how it works. After he had been raised his tomb was empty and he was recognisably and physically human ... although changed in some odd way, maybe best described as more than human, but never less.

So for us the biggest, most important transformation to look forward to at resurrection is not the change to our bodies, but the change to our hearts and minds. That is where we will soar like a butterfly, rather than an earthbound caterpillar - doubtless the new improved body promised will be great (especially for those of us who are middle-aged or more), but renewal starts with the heart.

So why the post title: 'Love the sinner but hate the sin?' - what does that well-known phrase have to do with butterflies?

Over on Jared Byas' blog, he recently wrote a post with this same title (apart from the '?') which got me thinking and commenting to the extent that it became clear I really ought to do my own blog post. The heart of his argument is that the separation between sin and sinner is spurious, and a denial of the embracing power of God's love:

If we don’t accept that deep down we are still sinners and that sin is a part of our identity and yet Jesus still loves us, then we will keep naively and unintentionally hurting a lot people. By definition, sinners have sin as a part of who they are. So if you use this cliché, what you really mean is that I will love this part of your life but I will hate that part of your life. Or should I say, that’s often what people hear you saying. And you wonder why people find Christians judgemental and not very Christ-like? ... We are all sinners. We are all sin. We are all loved. All of us.

Jesus once said that the things we do and say come out of our hearts, from who we are. So separating 'sin' from 'sinner' is indeed spurious. So how can God love us (and our neighbours)? Does God love sin?

I think a good part of the answer to this lies in the transforming power of the Resurrection. Some churches and churchgoers talk in terms of judgement: God destroying anything that is tainted by evil. Yet resurrection promises transformation: God changing evil to good. It is like the chrysalis: all of the caterpillar is used in making the butterfly, nothing is rejected. So it is that God can see the potential for goodness and beauty in all that we are, even the parts that seem dark and ugly, and so He loves us - all that we are - and sends Jesus to save us, so that we may be made beautifully new.

Who We Really Are Ramble

Grandma?

I've never seen someone I love suffer from severe dementia, thankfully, but I'm told it is like seeing the person you know slowly disappear. I have seen someone I liked and respected fall prey to alcoholism - there is a sense in which it must be similar, as the person I know gradually disappears to be replaced by some strange, worn, ugly doppelgänger. It is a horrible and frightening experience, and one wonders what, if anything, can be done to bring that person back.

I believe in a core identity or spirit which is distinct from the personality (pneuma rather than psyche to be technical). I believe that this remains and therefore people should be treated with as much respect and dignity as possible, including addicts and victims of dementia. But relationships are primarily with the person, and that gets hard.

I heard a preacher recently talking about heaven "up there" ... saying nothing very meaningful to me. I believe in a resurrection "down here", when Jesus returns and heaven comes down to earth. When this earth is renewed, when injustice and hatred are replaced by love and justice, then we too will be raised and renewed - to be the people we really are, deep, deep down inside.

Part of who we really are lies in our deepest and truest relationships, so I expect to see those restored too. Although not necessarily as we expect: imagine someone we have only known as a quiet old grandma resurrected as a lively young flapper!

Now imagine someone you know who is self-obsessed and treats others appallingly. Maybe s/he has always been like this, or maybe they have become so because of things that have happened to them, or through bad choices they have made. Unless and until we meet them post-resurrection we have no way of knowing who they really are; although God does.

This post is turning shapeless, but I think there is something in here that I do want to say. Anyway it's a while since I did a 'ramble' post, so I'll adjust the title a little ;-)

Harry Potter & The King's Cross

We went as a family to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (a mouthful of a name!) at the Showcase Cinema in Winnersh yesterday. It was, like all of the HP movies, a fun watch: well-paced, visually dramatic, disjointed in plot, variously wooden and/or OTT in acting, and overall very entertaining. As with the other more recent HP movies it was also very sad in parts: as JK Rowling has said, if you want to fight evil there is going to be a cost.

I understand there are people who watch the movies without having read the books ... how on earth they manage to follow the plot I can't imagine. Maybe they don't; they just go along for the exciting ride. As the second part of what is really one story, this film is more incomprehensible than most. It's a year or two now since I last read the books (and about 9 months since I saw 'Part 1'), and I was feeling a little lost at times. Still, the film moves on so fast that it doesn't matter.

NB: There are spoilers coming.

When I was reading the books, waiting for the final instalment, one of the puzzles was how the climax was going to work out. The parallels with the Jesus story were already obvious, so Harry was very likely to end up sacrificing himself. But surely Rowling wouldn't be able to pull off a resurrection. Amazingly, in the book she not only pulls a resurrection off, but she also makes it obvious that this is the only way the battle against great evil could possibly be won. And she hammers the parallel home by having Harry meet Dumbledore at King's Cross station. I thought it was a masterful piece of writing. But not the sort of thing they could do in film, surely.

In fact the film handles this remarkably well, I think. Harry learns that the only way Voldemort can be defeated is if Harry offers up his own life, to be killed by Voldemort, in the final 'victory' of evil. So Harry goes to his death and is duly murdered. He carries Voldemort's evil with him down to King's Cross, then returns leaving it behind. About as clear an imagery of 'dying to sin and rising to new life' as one can hope for. Rather than fudging this, the film made it even more explicit, emphasising the 'man born to die' aspect in Snape's final gift of his memories.

The most poignant character for me, in both book and film, is Severus Snape, the Judas figure. The book gives more depth and detail, but still the film shows well how this unpleasant figure is redeemed by love, and given the courage to do what had to be done. As Harry Potter says to his son, many years later:

"Albus Severus, you were named for two headmasters of Hogwarts. One of them was a Slytherin and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew."

My finishing quote, though, is from Albus Dumbledore himself:

"Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living and above all, those who live without love."