Conclusion: The radical nature of Christ’s influence

Conclusion: The radical nature of Christ’s influence

Introduction: The story of Jesus

In Part II we considered the church’s varied presentation of Christ down the centuries. In Part III we reverse the order and consider Christ’s influence on the church, and indeed on the world. The question we are asking was well put by K. S. Latourette of Yale University towards the beginning of his massive, seven-volume work entitled The History of the Expansion of Christianity. It is this: ‘Just what difference has it made to the world that Jesus lived?’¹

The question is not as simple to answer as may appear at first sight. First, we have to distinguish between the influence of Christ on the world and the influence of civilization or culture, which is an amalgam of many (not only Christian) influences. Secondly, to quote Latourette again, ‘we must also remark the close connection between the effect of Christianity upon its (social) environment and the effect of the environment upon Christianity’.² Thirdly, we must humbly acknowledge that Christianity (though not Christ personally) has had a bad as well as a good influence. I am thinking of some of the church’s blindspots like the Crusades, the Inquisition, the failure to abolish slavery until 1,800 years after Christ, and the imperialism of some Christian missions during the past two centuries. Reflecting on such things as these, all we can do is bow our heads in shame.

Nevertheless, it is still possible to affirm – cautiously but confidently – that Jesus Christ has had an enormous influence for good, not only in art and architecture, music and painting, science, democracy and legal systems, but especially in moral standards and values such as the dignity of the human person.³ Indeed, one would hardly be guilty of hyperbole if one were to claim: ‘All the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected our life on earth as much as that one solitary life.’⁴

What fascinates me is that different Christians have been influenced by different aspects of Christ to undertake different tasks. Our focus in Part III is not now the story of the church (and its presentation of Christ) but the story of Jesus (and his challenge to the church). To be sure, the two stories overlap: for example, if Francis of Assisi influenced the way in which the church presented Christ (which he did), Christ also influenced the way in which Francis developed the Franciscan movement. Nevertheless the two influences are distinct. We will consider now the whole cycle of Jesus’ career, from his first coming to the anticipation of his second, and see how each stage (whether episode or teaching in the gospels) has gripped somebody’s imagination and inspired him or her to action.

1. The Bethlehem stable: Francis of Assisi

The nativity of the poor king

In 1926, the seven-hundredth anniversary of the death of St Francis, something like two million pilgrims visited Assisi, his birthplace in central Italy. At that time, Pope Pius XI officially confirmed the unofficial designation of Francis as ‘Alter Christus’, ‘the second Christ’, so closely was he deemed to resemble him.

What was it that inspired Francis to assume a life of absolute poverty and simplicity? It was partly Jesus’ teaching, namely his call to self-denial and his mission charge to the Twelve. But in particular it was Jesus’ example that Francis longed to imitate in strict and literal conformity. In particular, Francis saw in his birth in a stable the supreme expression of the Son of God’s self-imposed poverty.

Three or four centuries seem to have elapsed after the birth of Christ before Christmas enjoyed a fixed position in the Western church calendar and Christians regularly celebrated it. This may have been due partly to a confusion. People spoke of Christ driving his chariot across the sky like the Sun God. In fact, because Christians worshipped on Sundays, and often turned East to do so, many pagans thought that Christians were sun-worshippers. Not till the fourth century did the Western church begin to celebrate December 25 (the birthday of the Sun God at the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year) as the nativity of Christ.

Francis found enormous inspiration from the circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus. ‘He spoke charming words concerning the nativity of the poor King and the little town of Bethlehem.’⁵ He often called Jesus ‘the Child of Bethlehem’, and it was said of him: ‘The Child Jesus had been forgotten in the hearts of many; but, by the working of his grace, he was brought to life again through his servant St Francis.’⁶ So ‘the birthday of the Child Jesus Francis observed with inexpressible eagerness over all other feasts, saying that it was the feast of feasts, on which God, having become a tiny infant, clung to human breasts’.⁷

Although the centrality of the cross is clear in the faith and life of Francis, he kept together in his heart and mind the incarnation and the crucifixion, Christ in the crib and Christ on the cross. For he saw them both as manifestations of divine humility and poverty, which he determined to imitate. He believed himself commissioned to proclaim the kingdom, serve the needy, forsake money and even do without spare clothing.

This does not mean that he rejected, or even undervalued, the material world or the good gifts of the good Creator. On the contrary, he is well-known for his celebration of God’s creatures, hailing them as his ‘brothers’ or ‘sisters’, and finding joy in these relationships. His ‘Canticle of the Sun’ remains a beautiful expression of praise, not of course to nature but to the God of nature. He seems to have seen no dichotomy between an acknowledgment of the material world as God-given and a renunciation of material possessions.

Others, however, have felt an unresolved conflict here. G. K. Chesterton, for example, in his famous work on Francis,⁸ entitles his first chapter ‘The Problem of St Francis’. What was this problem? Chesterton, who is usually regarded as himself the master of paradox, found in Francis a mass of inconsistencies, and even contradictions. How can we reconcile Francis’s joy in nature and his rigorous asceticism, he asked; his ‘gaiety and austerity’,⁹ ‘his glorifying gold and purple and perversely going in rags’,¹⁰ his ‘hunger for a happy life’ and ‘thirst for a heroic death’?¹¹

It is impossible to read the story of Francis without being profoundly moved, even if we cannot quite echo G. K. Chesterton’s conclusion that Francis ‘has lived and changed the world’.¹² Further, I venture to ask: Was not Francis’s resolve to imitate Christ in all things too literal? Did he not fail to perceive the vivid, dramatic imagery which Jesus often employed? For example, in Luke 14:25–33 Jesus laid down three conditions without which a would-be follower, he said, ‘cannot be my disciple’. First, he must ‘hate’ his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters. Secondly, he must ‘carry his cross’ and follow Christ. Thirdly, he must ‘give up everything he has’. Now we certainly have no freedom to water down this strong gospel medicine. Nevertheless, to ‘carry the cross’ is definitely not literal; Jesus did not require all his disciples to be crucified. Nor can the injunction to hate our close relatives be taken literally; the Jesus who told us to love even our enemies is not likely to tell us to hate our own family. So the third command (to renounce our property) is surely not to be taken literally either. This is not a cowardly evasion of the teaching of Jesus, but an honest desire to discover what he meant. The cost of discipleship involves putting Christ first in everything, before even our relatives, our ambitions and our possessions.

2. The carpenter’s bench: George Lansbury

The dignity of manual labour

We know very little about Jesus’ so-called ‘hidden years’ before his public ministry began. The only story that has survived from those days is Luke’s account of how at the age of twelve he visited Jerusalem and got lost in the temple (Luke 2:41–51). The immediately preceding verse covers the twelve years between his birth and his Jerusalem visit, while the immediately following verse covers the eighteen years between the Jerusalem visit and his baptism. Both these verses (40 and 52) are therefore bridge verses; they tell us that he was growing in wisdom as well as in stature, and in favour with both God and man, and that the grace of God rested upon him. Presumably this is all we are meant to know, and all we need to know, about the first thirty years of Jesus’ life on earth.

Throughout the four gospels the word ‘carpenter’ appears only twice. Matthew refers to ‘the carpenter’s son’ (13:55), while Mark records the question asked by the villagers of Nazareth: ‘isn’t this the carpenter?’ (6:3). We assume from this that Joseph had worked as a carpenter, that Jesus had been his apprentice, and that he took over from him, perhaps at Joseph’s death.

The word tektōn could be used of any artisan or craftsman, but normally denoted a worker with wood, a carpenter, joiner or builder. As William Barclay put it, the tektōn could ‘build you anything from a chicken-coop to a house’.¹³ In other words, he was a handy man. At the same time Professor Martin Hengel emphasizes that ‘Jesus himself did not come from the proletariat of day-labourers and landless tenants, but from the middle class of Galilee, the skilled workers.’ He adds that tektōn meant ‘mason, carpenter, cartwright and joiner all rolled into one’.¹⁴ Justin Martyr, at about the middle of the second century, affirmed in his Dialogue with Trypho a Jew ¹⁵ that Jesus ‘used to make ploughs and yokes’. In addition to farm implements, it seems probable that he will have learned to make and repair household furniture like tables, chairs, beds and cupboards.

It is important to remember that the Romans and the Greeks despised having to work with their hands. ‘Among the Jews’, however, wrote Alfred Edersheim, ‘the contempt for manual labour, which was one of the painful characteristics of heathenism, did not exist. On the contrary, it was deemed a religious duty, frequently and most earnestly insisted upon, to learn some trade, provided it did not minister to luxury, nor tend to lead away from personal observance of the law.’¹⁶ Thus the Talmud records the dictum of Rabbi Judah in the second century AD: ‘He who does not teach his own son a trade, teaches him to be a thief.’¹⁷ The Jews knew that work had been commanded by God as a consequence of the creation, not the fall.

The apostle referred a number of times in his letters to his own trade. In Acts 18:3 Luke calls him a skēnopoios which, since skēnē or skēnos is a tent, is usually translated ‘tentmaker’, although some commentators prefer ‘leather worker’ or ‘saddler’, since tents in the ancient world were normally made of leather. What is certain is that Paul worked with his hands and took pride in his labour.¹⁸

Having sketched this background, we are now ready to ask who has been inspired by the knowledge that Jesus had worked at a carpenter’s bench?

We could begin our answer by referring to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, those painters in the middle of the nineteenth century who set themselves to revive fidelity to nature in art. In 1850 one of their members, J. E. Millais, completed his painting ‘Christ in the home of his parents’ or ‘The Carpenter’s shop’. The child Jesus is at the centre of the picture. He has evidently injured himself with a nail; Joseph is leaning over to examine the wound; Mary is seeking to comfort Jesus with a kiss; and the youthful John the Baptist is carrying a bowl of water with which to bathe the injury. Jesus is leaning against the work bench, which seems to symbolize the altar of sacrifice, and penned sheep can be seen through the open door.¹⁹

Twenty-two years later Millais’ friend Holman Hunt completed his picture ‘The Shadow of Death’. We are once again in the carpenter’s shop. But this time Jesus is an adult, stripped to the waist, and standing beside a wooden trestle. Pausing from his work, he stretches, raising his arms above his head and apparently appealing to heaven. As he does this, a dark shadow in the shape of a crucifix is cast on the wall behind him, where his tool rack looks like a horizontal bar and reminds us of the hammer and nails of crucifixion.²⁰

Both pictures are deliberately symbolical. They speak powerfully of the cross, but say nothing about the dignity of manual labour. So in my searching I turned next to the Christian leaders of the early British labour movement. I began with James Keir Hardie (1856–1915), pioneer of the Scottish labour movement. He created a sensation when he entered the House of Commons in his workman’s cloth cap and tweed suit. He was outspoken in his commitment to Christ, to whom he often referred as ‘the Carpenter of Nazareth’. But the main inspiration for his work was not the example of Jesus Christ but his teaching, especially the Sermon on the Mount which he interpreted somewhat naïvely as a socialist manifesto.

Other and later labour leaders, however, drew encouragement from the fact that Jesus belonged to the working class. An anonymous trade unionist in 1921 wrote a short book entitled Jesus the Carpenter and his Teaching. ‘At any rate’, he wrote,

the life of Jesus is the life of a working man. It may be said that it is far more and far greater! Be it so. Yet in the days of his flesh he was a carpenter. We have not had many great poets, heroes, martyrs among us workers. But Jesus, the Carpenter of Nazareth, was of us. And therefore, in these days when so much is stirring in the minds of the workers, every one of us might well study the life and teaching of the Carpenter of Nazareth.²¹

Similarly, Ira Boseley, in his book called Christ the Carpenter, his trade and his teaching, which he dedicated to the Worshipful Company of Carpenters, says that he aimed to portray Jesus as ‘the only perfect working man’.²²

But the best example I have found of a leader who was inspired by Jesus the carpenter is George Lansbury, who dominated the British labour movement during much of the first half of the twentieth century.

George Lansbury was born in 1859 in rural Suffolk, but he never stayed in the country. He kept moving home, because his father worked on the railways, and he lived most of his life in the East End of London. Leaving school at the age of fourteen, he got a job as a coal heaver, unloading coal from barges and railways. Even at this tender age, he experienced the challenges of manual labour and the dehumanizing influences of poverty and hunger.

But George Lansbury’s heart was in politics, and he spent more than half a century in local and national government. After a brief flirtation with the Liberal Party, and several abortive attempts to enter Parliament, he was eventually elected in 1910 as the Labour member for Bow and Bromley, but resigned his seat two years later. During the next decade, while he was without a seat in the House of Commons, he was nevertheless tirelessly active in the cause of the labour movement. He edited the Daily Herald and spoke at meetings all over the country.

In 1922 he returned to the House of Commons, but not until 1929 did he achieve cabinet rank as First Commissioner of Works, with special responsibility for the Royal Parks in London. He succeeded in making them available for the recreation of working-class people. In 1931 he became chairman of the parliamentary Labour Party and so leader of the opposition.

During all these years George Lansbury was immensely popular. His bulky physique, exuberant personality, ruddy complexion, side whiskers, booming voice, cockney accent, boyish smile and transparent sincerity endeared him to everybody. The distinguished historian A. J. P. Taylor described him in a footnote as ‘the most loveable figure in modern politics’.²³ An even better measure of his widespread popularity is that he was well known to the children of London’s East End, who would hail him when he visited their school with cries of ‘Good old George’.²⁴

Lansbury’s motivation in his indefatigable political career was undoubtedly a combination of his socialism and his Christianity. Not that he saw a need to distinguish sharply between them. ‘Socialism’, he wrote, ‘which means love, co-operation and brotherhood in every department of human affairs, is only the outward expression of a Christian faith.’²⁵ Again, ‘Christianity and socialism dominated Lansbury’s very being. In the former he found the principles and power of living. In the latter he found the system through which they could be expressed.’²⁶ He was passionate for a just society in which poverty, unemployment, hunger and homelessness have been abolished.

It seems to have been Fenwick Kitto, Rector of Whitechapel, who by his teaching and example led George Lansbury into a personal commitment to Christ. Kitto ‘entered into our lives’, he said. After being confirmed in the parish church, George became a Sunday-school teacher, and later preached in many churches.

Bob Holman has written: ‘It is important to note that Lansbury’s Christianity preceded his socialism, for the latter was to spring largely from his understanding of the former.’²⁷ In an East End Roman Catholic magazine an anonymous contributor wrote: ‘We younger men will never be able to say what we owe to George Lansbury from the example he has set us all, of a consistent self-sacrificing life, of a constant and fearless witness to Jesus Christ.’²⁸

George Lansbury admired the so-called ‘working classes’ for their courage, perseverance, mutual solidarity and sense of humour, and he steadfastly refused attempts to make him ‘climb the social ladder’. He determined to retain his own East End culture. Bob Holman, his biographer, has written: ‘Lansbury came home from, belonged to, and worked with and for the ordinary, working-class residents and, by his mode of life, he continued to be one of them.’²⁹

Bob Holman traces this resolve back to Lansbury’s theology: ‘as a Christian, he was captivated by the Christ who applied the principle of love to himself to the extent that he came to earth as an ordinary carpenter, and submitted to a cruel death for the sake of others’.³⁰

Theologically speaking, ‘it would be difficult to exhaust the significance of the fact that God chose for his Son, when he dwelt among men, out of all the possible positions in which he might have placed him, the lot of a working man. It stamped men’s common toils with everlasting honour’.³¹

Or to express the same truth in working-class language and syntax, J. Paterson Smyth wrote:

I don’t know right where his shed may have stood,

But often as I’ve been a-planing my wood,

I’ve took off my hat just when thinking of he,

At the same work as me.³²

3. The ministry of compassion: Father Damien and Wellesley Bailey

Touching untouchables

On a number of occasions in the gospels we read that Jesus was moved with compassion towards the leaderless crowds, the hungry, the bereaved, the blind, and especially the sick.³³ In fact it is quite clear that healing was an integral part of his public ministry. He went about ‘teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness’ (Matt. 4:23; 9:35). That is to say, he not only announced the coming of the kingdom, but demonstrated its arrival by his works of compassion and power.

In consequence, Christians have been in the vanguard of those who have sought to develop a ministry of compassion to those who suffer sickness or pain. On entering the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, one is confronted by a stained-glass window, whose central panel bears the inscription ‘To cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always.’

This is not to deny that proto-hospitals were developed by Hindus and Buddhists before Christ, and by Jews as well. It is rather to claim that Jesus of Nazareth introduced into the world a new threefold motivation – his parable of the good Samaritan, his golden rule and his personal example, all of which demonstrated his respect for human persons made in the image of God.

Dr Frank Davey has written:

Jesus reversed the social priorities of his day by demonstrating and teaching a special concern for the poor, the disabled, the outcast and the underprivileged. Such people had no claim to attention until Jesus became their champion...One cannot imagine Hippocrates showing much interest in a prostitute in trouble, a blind beggar, the slave of a soldier of the occupying power, a psychotic foreigner clearly with no money, an old woman with a chronic spinal condition. Jesus not only did so, he expected his followers to do the same.³⁴

Jesus’ respect for those the world despised was best exemplified in his encounter with a leprosy sufferer, close to the beginning of his public ministry:

A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, ‘If you are willing, you can make me clean.’

Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man, ‘I am willing,’ he said. ‘Be clean!’ Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cured (Mark 1:40–42).

His compassion motivated him to touch an untouchable, and his action has been a continuing inspiration ever since. It was the famous Cappadocian church father, Basil of Caesarea, who seems to have founded in AD 369 the first large-scale Christian hospital. He erected a cluster of buildings, which, in addition to the hospital of 300 beds, ‘included hospices for travellers, a hospice for the poor, a hospice for the aged, an isolation unit and a house for those suffering from leprosy, who were treated in isolation’.³⁵

During the following centuries hospices for the care of leprosy victims spread throughout Europe. They were known as ‘lazar (= leper) houses’ or lazarettos, the words being derived from Lazarus who came to be regarded as the patron saint of leprosy sufferers.

But perhaps nobody in the Middle Ages was so inspired by Jesus’ example, and in turn became an inspiration to others, as St Francis of Assisi. The story may have become embellished over the years, but Francis confessed in his last testament that ‘sweetness of soul’ first came to him when he was confronted by a beggar with leprosy. At first, Francis spurred on his horse to get away from the beggar. Then suddenly he became overwhelmed with remorse that, ‘having turned away from his brother’s need, he was galloping away from God, who suffered in every man’s suffering’. So he turned his horse around, dismounted, and kissed the leprous beggar’s hand.³⁶ Francis’s example was contagious. It is sometimes said that what people caught from him was not the disease but his care for the diseased. He went on to establish both a hospital for leprosy sufferers and a ‘company of brothers’ to look after them.

We jump now in our story to the middle of the nineteenth century and to two remarkable men who gave their lives to the care of leprosy sufferers. One was a Belgian Roman Catholic, Father Joseph Damien, born in 1840, who worked in Hawaii, and the other an Irish Protestant, Wellesley Bailey, who was born in 1846, worked in India, and became the founder of the Leprosy Mission.

In 1863 Father Damien sailed as a missionary to Hawaii and was horrified by the plight of the leprosy victims, who had been permanently banished to the island of Molokai. Here they eked out a miserable existence in disease, filth and poverty, without either family or church to sustain them. Father Damien volunteered to go and live among them. He buried their dead. He brought them hygiene. He built churches and chapels, cleaned their water supply, improved their homes and their hospital, constructed an orphanage, trained a choir, and served as their teacher, carpenter, mason, priest and friend. This selfless ministry continued for sixteen years, until one Sunday morning in 1885 during church worship the congregation was stunned when he began his sermon with the words ‘We lepers...’, indicating that he had contracted the disease himself. He died on Molokai in 1889.³⁷

Wellesley Bailey was born only six years later than Damien, but they worked at opposite ends of the world. It was while Wellesley Bailey was teaching at a mission school in North West India that he visited a small ‘leper asylum’ nearby and was appalled by what he saw. Later, he wrote,

[The victims] were in all stages of the malady, very terrible to look upon, with a sad woebegone expression on their faces – a look of utter helplessness. I almost shuddered, yet I was at the time fascinated, and I felt, if ever there was a Christ-like work in this world, it was to go among these poor sufferers and bring to them the consolation of the gospel.³⁸

Bailey was right. As he began to visit the asylum regularly, he saw the gospel completely changing the lives and outlook of the inmates. At the same time he set himself to improve their physical condition. So in 1872 he founded ‘The Mission to Lepers in India’, which later became ‘The Mission to Lepers’, and then, as it is today, ‘The Leprosy Mission’.

What was his inspiration? He tells us:

I desire now to give a little of my own experience amongst [the leprosy sufferers], and to lay before my readers a plan whereby all may help who are in sympathy with him who when on earth did not think the leper too loathsome to lay his hands upon, but who, ‘moved with compassion’, put forth his hand, and touched him, and saith unto him ‘I will; be thou clean.’³⁹

This fine Christian tradition of care for leprosy sufferers was carried on in the twentieth century by an illustrious succession of Christian leprologists like Stanley Browne (Nigeria and Zaire), Frank Davey (Nigeria and India) and Robert Cochrane, who, citing the example of Jesus, ‘led a campaign against the prevailing social stigma’.⁴⁰ Next came Paul Brand, who discovered that the clawed hand, the loss of fingers and toes, and the unexplained sores and bruises in leprosy patients were caused not by some mysterious aspect of the disease itself, but by their loss of sensation, their inability to feel pain.⁴¹

In our day, Aids is sometimes described as ‘the modern-day leprosy’, carrying a similar stigma and outlawed by a similar taboo. But Jesus set the compassionate example ‘by reaching out and touching – an act of unimaginable courage in those days’.⁴²

4. The Sermon on the Mount: Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr

The challenge of non-resistance

Everybody who knows anything about Christianity is to some degree familiar with Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which was probably an extended period of instruction. Most people also know that it contains the prohibition ‘Do not resist an evil person’ and the command ‘Love your enemies’ (Matt. 5:39, 44). Not only so, but Jesus practised what he preached. As the apostle Peter wrote: ‘When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats’ (1 Pet. 2:23). Instead, he prayed that God would forgive those who were crucifying him (Luke 23:34).

Generations of people, both Christian and non-Christian, have been challenged and inspired by Jesus’ combination of sermon and example, word and deed – by his endurance and self-control, his love for his enemies and his total freedom from the spirit of revenge. The radical reformers of the sixteenth century (various Anabaptist groups) and the peace churches today (e.g. the Mennonites, Quakers and United Brethren) are committed to total pacifism, and derive their mandate and their motivation from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as exemplified in his behaviour.

My concern in this chapter is to consider three individual leaders of the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, who all confessed the inspiration they had received from Jesus’ sermon and suffering, namely the Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), the Indian social reformer, Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), and the American civil-rights campaigner, Martin Luther King, Jr (1929–1968).

Tolstoy was born into an aristocratic home, spent a dissolute youth, and then turned to serious writing. His best-known novels remain War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but for our purposes we need to consider his short work What I Believe. In it Tolstoy describes how in a time of personal crisis he read and re-read the Sermon on the Mount, and suddenly understood (he claimed) what the whole church for 1,800 years had misunderstood.

This was that Jesus meant what he said when he called his followers to non-resistance.⁴³ It is impossible to believe in Christ, he continued, and at the same time ‘to work for the establishment of property, law courts, government and military forces...’,⁴⁴ because police, courts and army all use violence to resist evil and are therefore incompatible with the law of love. If only Christ’s commands were obeyed literally, ‘all men will be brothers, and everyone will be at peace with others’.⁴⁵ Then in the last chapter, defending himself against naïvety, he betrays his ingenuous view of human beings as being all basically good, rational and amiable.

Mahatma Gandhi, or ‘Gandhiji’ as Indians respectfully refer to him, is of course the father of modern India. Having studied law in London and practised it in South Africa, where he was insulted on account of his colour, he returned to India in 1914 and led the Civil Disobedience Campaign. He longed for an India freed from colonialism, casteism and materialism.

Already as a child Gandhi had learned about ahimsa, ‘refraining from harming others’. But then as a young man in London he read the Hindu classic, The Baghavad Gita, and the Sermon on the Mount. ‘It is that Sermon which has endeared Jesus to me’, he said, and it is known that he constantly reflected on it, especially through the eyes of Tolstoy. For in South Africa he read Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is within you, was profoundly affected by it, and determined when he returned to India to put his ideals into action. He described his policy as satyagraha, best translated ‘truth-force’, the attempt to win opponents by the power of truth and ‘by the example of suffering willingly endured’. ‘The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form’, he said. So in the perfect state which he envisaged, the police would still exist, but seldom use force; punishment would end; prisons would be turned into schools; and litigation be replaced by arbitration.⁴⁶ In all this Gandhi found inspiration in Jesus. ‘Though I cannot claim to be a Christian in the sectarian sense’, he said, ‘the example of Jesus’ sufferings is a factor in the composition of my undying faith in non-violence which rules all my actions...’⁴⁷

It is impossible not to admire Gandhi’s humility and sincerity. Nevertheless, his policy must surely be judged unrealistic. He said he would resist the anticipated Japanese invaders by a ‘peace brigade’; he urged the Jews to offer a non-violent resistance to Hitler; and he appealed to the British to cease hostilities. But, as Jacques Ellul commented, Gandhi had not considered the context. ‘Put Gandhi into the Russia of 1925 or the Germany of 1933. The solution would be simple: after a few days he would be arrested, and nothing more would be heard of him.’⁴⁸

Our main disagreement with Tolstoy and Gandhi, however, must not be that their position is unrealistic, but that it is unbiblical. We cannot interpret Jesus’ command not to resist evil as an absolute prohibition of the use of force (including the police), unless we are prepared to say that the Bible contradicts itself and the apostles misunderstood Jesus. For the New Testament teaches (e.g. in Rom. 13) that the state has divine authority to punish the wrongdoer, that is, to ‘resist one who is evil’, forcing him to pay the penalty of his evil. This truth may not be twisted, however, to justify the institutionalized violence of an oppressive regime. It justifies only the ‘minimum necessary force’ to arrest wrongdoers and bring them to justice.

It is clear, then, that the state’s duty is quite different from the individual’s. In Romans 12:17 the individual is told ‘Do not repay anyone evil for evil’ (surely an echo of ‘do not resist one who is evil’), and never to avenge himself, but leave it to the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘“It is mine to avenge, I will repay”, says the Lord.’ In other words, punishment is God’s prerogative, and he exercises it through the law courts, as Paul goes on to write in Romans 13:4, namely that he (a duly authorized representative of the state) ‘is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer’. This is not incompatible with the teaching and conduct of Jesus. He emphatically did not retaliate, but instead ‘he entrusted himself [and his cause] to him who judges justly’ (1 Pet. 2:23). To sum up this antithesis, Jesus was not prohibiting the administration of justice, but rather forbidding us to take the law into our own hands, and bidding us instead to love our enemies and be altogether free of malice and revenge. As has often been said, the way of the devil is to return evil for good; the way of the world is to return evil for evil and good for good; the way of Christ is to overcome evil with good (Rom. 12:21).

One person who understood this distinction was Martin Luther King, Jr. He had learned as much from Gandhi as Gandhi had from Tolstoy, although I think he understood Jesus’ teaching better than either. Founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he was committed to non-violence and led the famous march to Washington in 1963, which was followed in 1964 and 1965 by the Civil Rights Acts. So on the one hand, he frequently acknowledged his debt to the Sermon on the Mount. On the other, he knew the necessity of legislation, indeed of enforceable laws, if ever racial discrimination were to be banned.

One of King’s most eloquent sermons, entitled ‘Loving your enemies’, was composed in a Georgia jail. He described how ‘hate multiplies hate...in a descending spiral of destruction’ and is ‘just as injurious to the person who hates’ as to his victim. Love, however, ‘is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend’. He went on to apply his theme to the racial crisis in the US. For over three centuries African-Americans had suffered oppression, frustration and discrimination. But King and his friends were determined to ‘meet hate with love’. Then they would win both freedom and their oppressors, ‘and our victory will be a double victory’.⁴⁹

5. The love for children: Thomas Barnardo

‘An ever-open door’

A love for children and a concern for their welfare are such essential elements of Christian culture that we tend to take them for granted. But they have not always been assumed. Child sacrifice, for example, was practised in various pagan religions, and its practice by the Ammonites to pacify their god Milcom or Molek was regarded by the Old Testament prophets with outrage and horror.

There seems in the ancient world to have been no law against, and no ethical disapproval of, either abortion or infanticide. Parents had full rights to pronounce life or death on their children.⁵⁰ For instance, among the first-century BC Oxyrhynchus papyri a letter was found from a man called Hilarian to his expectant wife Alis: ‘If it is male, let it live; if it is female, expose it.’⁵¹

It is true that the Hippocratic Oath, which doctors took, included the undertaking ‘I will not give a pessary to a woman to cause abortion.’ Much of the oath may not have been written by Hippocrates (460–377 BC), ‘the father of medicine’, but by his disciples. Nevertheless, as W. H. S. Jones has written: ‘It is indeed hard to believe that the nucleus, at least, of the Oath does not go back to the “great” Hippocrates himself.’⁵² Yet this part of the oath was regularly breached, since in the permissive society of Greece and Rome the destruction or exposure of unwanted children became normative practice. On the other hand, Christians opposed it on theological and moral grounds. For example, Tertullian in his Apology accuses the Romans of infanticide, and then continues:

In our case, murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb while as yet the human being derives blood from other parts of the body for its sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to the birth. That is a man (sc. a human being) which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in its seed.⁵³

After Constantine’s conversion in AD 312, abortion became a crime, and orphanages for unwanted children were established in Rome, Athens and elsewhere. And this recognition of the sanctity and dignity of children the world owes largely to Jesus Christ. The Synoptic gospels describe two separate occasions on which he welcomed children and commanded childlikeness. The first was when little children (‘babies’ according to Luke 18:15) were being brought to him that he should place his hands on them and bless them. But when the disciples rebuked those who brought them, Jesus was indignant and said:

‘Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’ And he took the children in his arms, put his hands on them and blessed them (Mark 10:13ff.; cf. Matt. 19:13ff.; Luke 18:15ff.).

The second occasion was prompted by a discussion on who would be the greatest in the kingdom of God. This time Jesus took the initiative to call a little child and to have him stand among them. He then insisted that unless adults convert and become like little children they will never enter the kingdom. So it is those who humble themselves like a child who are the greatest in the kingdom (Matt. 18:1ff.; Mark. 9:35ff.; Luke 9:46ff.).

Among all those who have been inspired by Jesus’ respect for children, one of the most striking is Dr Thomas Barnardo (1845–1905). Converted to Christ at the age of seventeen, he entered the London Hospital as a medical student four years later, intending to go to China as a medical missionary. But within a few months events occurred which changed the direction of his life. He discovered the pitiable existence in the East End of London of destitute children, and in 1870 at the age of twenty-five he opened his first home for them in Stepney. He decided to remain in London and to give his life to the rescue of that ‘most helpless and needy of all God’s creatures – the destitute child’.⁵⁴ In forty years he raised £3.25 million, established a network of homes for the reception, care and training of home-less, needy and afflicted children,⁵⁵ and rescued 60,000 boys and girls from destitution. Today we might call him the patron saint of street kids.

Thomas Barnardo’s dedicated ministry to children had a dramatic beginning. Among the street boys he knew was John Somers, known as ‘Carrots’ because of his flaming red hair, aged eleven. He often slept out somewhere between Covent Garden and Billingsgate. On one of his midnight forays, Barnardo chose five homeless boys to be accommodated in his home. ‘Carrots’ pleaded to be included, but there was no room. So Barnardo promised him the next vacancy.

A few mornings later, as a porter was moving a large sugar hogshead lying with its open end to the wall, he disturbed a sleeping boy, by whose side lay another also apparently sleeping. One of the two, as slippery as an eel, made his escape, but when the porter touched the other, there was no response or movement...the boy was dead. It was ‘Carrots’. The verdict at the Coroner’s inquest was ‘Death from exhaustion, the result of frequent exposure and want of food.’

This tragedy burned itself into Barnardo’s sensitive soul...Gradually a resolution shaped itself in his heart. ‘Never again!’ he said, ‘Never again!’...He fixed a prominent sign-board outside the Stepney home which read in three-foot letters ‘NO DESTITUTE CHILD EVER REFUSED ADMISSION.’⁵⁶

To this he later added the words ‘AN EVER-OPEN DOOR’ – where shelter, food, clothing and medical attention, if necessary, could be provided at once at any hour of the day or night.⁵⁷

Later still Dr Barnardo was able to claim: ‘We receive children whom no other charitable institution will touch...children in the last stage of lingering disease; children who are lame, halt and blind; children who, as a result of a long course of neglect and suffering, can be admitted only to die. The one condition of eligibility is destitution...’⁵⁸

But what motivated this extraordinarily comprehensive charter? Barnardo’s widow surely uncovered his secret incentive. In The Memoirs of the Late Dr Barnardo she wrote:

Everywhere Barnardo sought out the children...For he loved them...He loved them all...In the unselfish ardour of youth he loved the worst best, with that passion which takes delight in unselfish service...Amongst a people professing to follow One who said ‘Suffer little children to come unto me...’, the children starved in the gutters, and there were few to care.⁵⁹

Just after Barnardo’s death, a memorial poem appeared in Punch, written by its editor, Sir Owen Seaman. It has eight verses. Here are its first two:

‘Suffer the children unto me to come,

The little children’, said the voice of Christ,

And for his law whose lips today are dumb

The Master’s voice sufficed.

‘Suffer the little children –’ : so he spake

And in his steps that true disciple trod,

Lifting the helpless ones, for love’s pure sake,

Up to the arms of God.⁶⁰

6. The washing of feet: Samuel Logan Brengle

A necessary lesson in humility

The washing of feet, whether by oneself or by somebody else, was practised throughout much of the ancient world. Most of it in the Bible was the provision of water to guests, so that they might wash their own feet;⁶¹ to wash somebody else’s feet was regarded as a signal act of condescension and humility, in fact the work of a slave.⁶²

Jesus’ act of washing the feet of his apostles, during his last evening with them, was rich in symbolism and significance. Indeed, Jesus himself indicated that there was mystery here, more than met the eye, when he said: ‘You do not realise now what I am doing, but later you will understand’ (John 13:7).

First, it was a drama, setting forth that the hour had arrived, and that he had come from God and was returning to God (vv. 1–3). So he ‘got up from the meal’ (v. 4a), as he had risen from his throne. He ‘took off his outer clothing’ (v. 4b), as he had laid aside his glory. He ‘wrapped a towel around his waist’ (v. 4c), as he had taken the nature of a servant. He ‘poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet’ (v. 5), as he had humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross. Then, ‘when he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place’ (v. 12), as he was about to return to the Father. It sounds like a deliberate dramatization of the five or more stages of his career which Paul delineated in the Christian hymn he quoted in Philippians 2.

Secondly, it was a sign. He claimed to be their ‘Lord’ and ‘Teacher’ (vv. 13–14). But instead of assuming the authoritarian manner of most masters, he humbled himself to serve them. Their master became their slave. What more evidence do we need to demonstrate his deity?

Thirdly, it was a parable of the universal need to be made clean from sin. Indeed, Jesus said to Peter: ‘Unless I wash you, you have no share with me’ (that is, ‘in my kingdom’, v. 8, NRSV). The implication of Peter’s protest was to declare the cross unnecessary.

Fourthly, it was an example. Jesus said so: ‘I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you’ (v. 15). That is, if we transpose Jesus’ teaching into our own culture, there is no work too servile or menial for love to undertake.

The church, however, has tended to interpret Jesus’ teaching too literally. The so-called pedilavium, or liturgical feet-washing, was observed for many years, especially in association with baptism, in the churches of both the East and the West. Canon 3 of the Seventeenth Synod of Toledo (AD 694) censured its non-observance and made it obligatory on Maundy Thursday (the day before Good Friday) ‘throughout the churches of Spain and Gaul’. And still today Mennonites teach that feet-washing is a necessary ordinance in addition to baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Seventh Day Adventists observe it quarterly as ‘the ordinance of humility’, and so do some Baptist groups.⁶³

In particular, an occasional, ceremonial performance by leaders of church and state is supposed to be a symbol of their humility. Thus in 1530 Cardinal Wolsey (not exactly a paragon of lowliness) ‘washed, wiped and kissed the feet of fifty-nine poor men at Peterborough’.⁶⁴ Still today, on Maundy Thursday in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church washes the right foot of twelve senior clergy representing the apostles, while in Rome the Pope does likewise, a custom restored by John XXIII after the lapse of about ninety years.

One of the most interesting examples of the literal interpretation of Christ’s command is found among English kings and queens, beginning with King John in 1213. In addition to washing feet, he gave thirteen pence to thirteen men, which came to be known as the Royal Maundy money. The distribution of the Royal Maundy continues in our day. The recipients are elderly people who have given a lifetime of voluntary service and are in financial need. Their number is the same as the years of the Queen’s age. Green, white and red purses are distributed, containing specially minted silver coins, in lieu of food and clothing. Although there is no feet-washing, the officials still wear white linen towels as aprons, and all the principal participants (including the Sovereign) still carry nosegays of fragrant herbs and flowers – as they did in days of plague, in order to ward off risk of infection.⁶⁵

But all this is very literal. I think Calvin was right in saying ‘Christ does not enjoin an annual ceremony here, but tells us to be ready, all through our life, to wash the feet of our brethren.’ And not to wash them literally, but to live a life of love, and of humble and sacrificial service.⁶⁶

A striking example of this is Samuel Logan Brengle, who became the first American-born Commissioner of the Salvation Army. He was a young Methodist minister when he first met William Booth, although he had a secret ambition to become successful and famous, a bishop perhaps. In 1887 he crossed the Atlantic to join the Army. But at first Booth was suspicious of him: ‘Brengle’, he said to him, ‘you belong to the “dangerous classes”’ (by which he meant the clergy). ‘You’ve been your own boss so long that I don’t think you’ll want to submit to Salvation Army discipline.’

In spite of these misgivings, however, it was agreed to give Brengle a trial. In order to instil in him some necessary humility, he was sent to Leamington to train as a cadet, and his first assigned duty was to blacken the boots of his fellow-cadets. He found himself in a dark, little, underground cellar ‘with eighteen pairs of muddy shoes, a can of blacking, and a sharp temptation’. Brengle was dismayed, even rebellious. ‘Have I followed my own fancy 3,000 miles’, he asked himself, ‘in order to black boots?’ Then,

in imagination he saw a picture: Jesus was the central figure, and he was washing the disciples’ feet! His Lord, who had come from...the glories of heaven and the adoration of its hosts – bending over the feet of uncouth, unlearned fishermen, washing them, humbling himself, taking the form of a servant! Brengle’s heart was brought low. ‘Dear Lord’, he whispered, ‘thou did’st wash their feet; I will black their boots.’ And with an enthusiasm heretofore unknown to the boot-blacking profession, he tackled his job, a song on his lips, and peace in his heart.⁶⁷

Brengle never forgot this humbling of his pride. ‘He lived...a Christ-like life’, wrote his biographer, ‘and Christ-likeness...was the essence of the holiness experience he taught...His name is a household word among Salvationists...He occupies a high place among the movement’s saints, and is still spoken of in Army circles with something approaching awe.’⁶⁸ And all because of a vision of Jesus washing feet!

To bring the record up to date, Chuck Colson, sentenced to imprisonment for his share in Watergate, was later transferred to the federal prison camp at Maxwell Air Base, where he was assigned to work in the laundry. ‘It was ferociously hot in the summer’, he wrote, and his job involved ‘endless sorting of sweat-soaked underwear and brown work uniforms’. ‘My assignment to the laundry was also, I’m convinced, another step in my ego-busting process. There was a certain lesson in humility in washing the clothes of other people, not too far removed from washing their feet.’⁶⁹

7. The cross: Toyohiko Kagawa

The revelation of the love of God

The cross of Christ has been an inspiration to millions. In fact, of all his works and words, nothing has been more stimulating than the cross. All Christians should be able to say with Paul that ‘Christ’s love compels us’ (2 Cor. 5:14), ‘leaves us no choice’ (NEB), or even ‘tightens its grip on us’, so that we determine to live no longer for ourselves but for him who died for us.

As my example of how the cross motivates people, I have chosen an Asian Christian leader, namely Toyohiko Kagawa (1880–1960). He was born in Kobe, Japan. His father was an aristocrat, a wealthy businessman, a cabinet minister, and an advisor to the Emperor, while his biological mother was a geisha, a Japanese dancing girl. Both his parents died when he was only four years old, and he was then sent to live on the family farm with his stepmother. Here he was physically abused, unwanted and unloved, and he bore the scars of loneliness for the rest of his life.

While he was at school in Tokushima, he was introduced to some American Presbyterian missionaries, especially Dr Harry Myers who became his mentor. Immensely impressed by the teaching and example of Jesus, Kagawa learned the Sermon on the Mount by heart and began to pray daily: ‘O God, make me like Christ.’ Then at the age of fifteen he was baptized. This was too much for his relatives, however. His uncle disowned and disinherited him.

On Christmas day 1909, aged twenty-one, he moved out of Kobe Theological Seminary, wheeling all his possessions in a handcart, in order to live among the poor in the terrible Shinkawa slum. His windowless shack measured only six feet by six, yet he shared it with anybody who needed care and shelter, sometimes several at a time. He lived on two bowls of rice gruel a day and wore the same ragged suit for several years. It is not surprising that he was often ill. He was also misunderstood, maligned and attacked. But he never retaliated and never gave in. One of his biographers, William Axling, wrote of him at that time as follows:

He visited the sick; he comforted the sorrowing; he fed the hungry; he lodged the homeless; he became an elder brother to the prostitutes, visiting them when they were ill and providing them with medicines. Parents turned to him for advice. Young people brought him their tangled life-problems. Criminals made him their father-confessor...The children swarmed around him.⁷⁰

These experiences, together with his continuing studies at seminary, convinced him of the need to go beyond philanthropy to social action. So when the dockers of Kobe went on strike, they turned to him for leadership, and he organized them into Japan’s first labour union. He also took up the cause of the tenant farmers and helped to organize the first nation-wide peasant farmers’ co-operative. As a result of his solidarity with the workers, Kagawa was dubbed an agitator, the police black-listed him, detectives shadowed him, and in due course he was arrested, dragged to the police station, and consigned to prison for thirteen days. Yet, stung by his writings, the government declared its intention to abolish the slums in Japan’s six largest cities.

After the terrible earthquake, which destroyed Yokohama and two-thirds of Tokyo, and killed about 100,000 people, Kagawa was active in reconstruction. But he never lost his evangelistic zeal. In 1928 he had a vision of one million Japanese people turning to Christ, and ‘the central theme of his preaching was the cross of Christ as the revelation of the love of God’.⁷¹

Before the Second World War he was arrested three times for subversive peace propaganda. But after the war (which for him meant four years of acute anguish) the Prime Minister appealed to him in these terms: ‘Only Jesus Christ was able to love his enemies...Help me to put the love of Jesus Christ into the hearts of our people.’⁷² And the Emperor gave him a half-hour private audience in which to explain to him the meaning of the cross.

Kagawa’s books were immensely popular, and when a new one was published, long queues would form outside the bookshops. All his works alluded in some way to the cross.

First, although his beliefs about atonement and redemption were not clearly formulated, yet Kagawa affirmed strongly that Christ ‘offered himself for the sins of others.’⁷³ ‘Only a sinner weeping over his sins can comprehend the marvel of this love.’⁷⁴ ‘To me, born a child of sin, this redemptive love fills and thrills every fibre of my being. It stirs within me a poignant sense of gratitude.’⁷⁵

Secondly, ‘the cross is the crystallization of love’.⁷⁶ That is, it exhibits both God’s love for us and the measure of love we should show to others. ‘As in a single word, Christ’s love-movement is summed up in the cross. The cross is the whole of Christ, the whole of love.’⁷⁷

Thirdly, Kagawa saw in the cross something altogether unparalleled. ‘The fact’, he wrote, ‘unique in the whole world, of Christ’s sacrificing himself and shedding the blood of redemption for the sins of the race, is the very revelation of love itself.’⁷⁸ Finally, here is perhaps his most eloquent personal statement:

I am grateful for Shinto, for Buddhism, and for Confucianism. I owe much to these faiths. The fact that I was born with a spirit of reverence, that I have an insatiable craving for values which transcend this earthly life, and that I strive to walk the way of the golden mean, I owe entirely to the influence of those ethnic faiths. Yet these three faiths utterly failed to minister to my heart’s deepest need. I was a pilgrim journeying upon a long, long road that had no turning. I was weary. I was footsore. I wandered through a dark and dismal world where tragedies were thick. Tears were my meat day and night...Buddhism teaches great compassion...But since the beginning of time, who has declared, ‘this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many unto remission of sins?’⁷⁹

With that unanswered question we leave Kagawa. His creed was that ‘the cross is the centre of Christianity’,⁸⁰ and his favourite hymn was ‘Jesus keep me near the cross’.

8. The resurrection: Joni Eareckson Tada

‘I’ll be on my feet dancing’

On 30 July 1967 an athletic girl of seventeen called Joni Eareckson had a diving accident in Chesapeake Bay. It left her a total quadriplegic, paralysed from the neck down.

At first in hospital she fought bravely against her condition, determined that she would walk again. But gradually she came to the realization that her injury was permanent, and that she was never going to regain the use of her hands or feet. She tells her story in her first book with great honesty.⁸¹ She felt overwhelmed with the whole spectrum of human emotions – bitterness, frustration, resentment, anger and even suicidal depression. She also experienced what she called ‘rebellious temper tantrums against God’.

Through a period of rehabilitation and therapy, however, and through the strong support of her parents, sisters, boyfriend and other friends, she gradually climbed out of her deep black hole. She began to trust God and face the future with realism. She learned to paint with her mouth. She became a popular public speaker and writer. And she developed JAF Ministries (‘Joni and Friends’) for the support of people with disabilities.

At the heart of her transformation was her rediscovery of the Bible. She relearned its great doctrines. She was helped by the vision of Jesus on the cross, ‘immobilized, helpless, paralysed’, as she was. But what helped her most was the resurrection. ‘I have hope for the future now’, she wrote. ‘The Bible speaks of our bodies being “glorified” in heaven...I now know the meaning of being “glorified”. It’s the time, after my death here, when I’ll be on my feet dancing.’⁸²

It is essential to note that what sustains Joni is the Christian expectation of a bodily resurrection. It would have been no great comfort to be assured of a mere survival of death. And to believe in a resuscitation, a restoration to this life, would have meant the horror of a further imprisonment in her wheelchair. ‘I can scarcely believe it’, she wrote,

I with shrivelled, bent fingers, atrophied muscles, gnarled knees, and no feeling from the shoulders down, will one day have a new body, light, bright, and clothed in righteousness – powerful and dazzling. Can you imagine the hope this gives someone spinal cord-injured like me? Or someone who is cerebral palsied, brain-injured, or who has multiple sclerosis? Imagine the hope this gives someone who is manic depressive. No other religion, no other philosophy promises new bodies, hearts and minds. Only in the Gospel of Christ do hurting people find such incredible hope.⁸³

Whether knowingly or not, Joni was echoing some fine words of Archbishop William Temple:

It may be safely said that one ground for the hope of Christianity, that it may make good its claim to be the true faith, lies in the fact that it is the most avowedly materialist of all the great religions. It affords an expectation that it may be able to control the material, precisely because it does not ignore it or deny it, but roundly asserts alike the reality of matter and its subordination. Its most own central saying is: ‘The Word was made flesh’, where the last term was, no doubt, chosen because of its specially materialistic associations. By the very nature of its central doctrine Christianity is committed to a belief in the ultimate significance of the historical process, and in the reality of matter and its place in the divine scheme.⁸⁴

Temple was alluding to the three great material truths, namely creation, incarnation and resurrection.

Whenever Christians recite the Apostles’ or the Nicene Creed, we declare our belief in two resurrections – the resurrection of Jesus Christ (which is past) and the resurrection of our body (which is still future). And these are related to one another, for Jesus ‘will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body’ (Phil. 3:21). Again, ‘just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man [Adam], so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven [Christ]’ (1 Cor. 15:49). Between our present and future bodies, however, there will be both continuity and discontinuity, as is the case of Jesus. His resurrection body was recognizably the same, yet it also had amazing new powers. This paradox of sameness and difference was well illustrated by Paul’s botanical metaphor. The seed determines the identity of the flower – thistle seeds produce thistles, not figs, Jesus said (Matt. 7:16), but the flower far surpasses its seed in beauty. Similarly our present body is weak and perishable, whereas our resurrection body will be strong and imperishable (1 Cor. 15:35–44). To sum up, the Christian hope is not the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection and transformation of the body.

It is the physical nature of the resurrection which has inspired Joni Eareckson. She is excited, she writes, ‘over how like the Rock of Gibraltar heaven is’. ‘We shall touch and taste, rule and reign, move and run, laugh and never have reason to cry.’⁸⁵

Joni describes a Christian convention at which the speaker, at the close of his message, asked his audience to kneel for prayer. She watched as they did so. But of course she couldn’t do it herself. So she couldn’t stop the tears. It was particularly hard for her because, brought up in a Reformed Episcopal Church, she had been accustomed to kneeling for prayer. Then she remembered the resurrection:

Sitting there, I was reminded that in heaven I will be free to jump up, dance, kick and do aerobics. And although I’m sure Jesus will be delighted to watch me rise on tiptoe, there’s something I plan to do that may please him more. If possible, somewhere, sometime before the party gets going, sometime before the guests are called to the banquet table at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, the first thing I plan to do on resurrected legs is to drop on grateful, glorified knees. I will quietly kneel at the feet of Jesus.⁸⁶

Joni writes repeatedly in her books, ‘I can’t wait.’

9. The exaltation: Henry Martyn

Zeal for the honour of Christ’s name

In some New Testament passages the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus appear to be telescoped into a single event. Yet his resurrection and ascension were separated from one another by forty days, and in addition they carry a different significance. The resurrection celebrates his conquest of death and the ascension his exaltation to the supreme position of honour and authority at the right hand of the Father. A good example of the telescoping is Paul’s statement that, because Christ humbled himself to the depths on the cross, therefore he has been exalted to the heights, and given the name above every name (that is, the dignity beyond every dignity), in order that every knee should bow to him and every tongue confess him Lord (Phil. 2:9–11).

Here lies the supreme missionary motivation. It is neither obedience to the great commission, nor compassion for the lost, nor excitement over the gospel, but zeal (even ‘jealousy’) for the honour of Christ’s name. Thus Paul writes of his vocation to preach to the Gentiles ‘for his name’s sake’ (Rom. 1:5), and John describes some early missionaries as having gone out ‘for the sake of the Name’ (3 John 7). He does not even identify the name, but we recognize it. It is the name above every name. No incentive is stronger than the longing that Christ should be given the honour that is due to his name.

I know no more striking example of this zeal than Henry Martyn. He was a Cornishman, born in Truro in 1781. At the tender age of fourteen he went up to St John’s College, Cambridge. He had many interests. He loved walking and horse-riding in the countryside, and had artistic gifts in music, painting and poetry. Then through the sudden death of his father and the witness of his younger sister Sally, he sought and found mercy in Christ.

His studies concluded with his being nominated ‘Senior Wrangler’, which is the most highly placed student in mathematics, and in 1802 he became a Fellow of his college. The following year he was ordained as Charles Simeon’s curate at Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge. He stayed for only two years, however, because some time previously he had announced his intention to go overseas as a missionary.

So in July 1805, aged twenty-four, he set sail for Calcutta, India, turning his back both on a brilliant academic career and (at least, he thought, for the time being) on Lydia Grenfell, the woman he loved. ‘My heart was sometimes ready to break with agony’, he wrote, ‘at being torn from its dearest idol’.⁸⁷ For some eight years Henry and Lydia continued to correspond, but she declined his proposal, and they never married.⁸⁸

Henry Martyn proved to be an exceedingly gifted linguist. He mastered Urdu (closely related to Hindi), Persian and Arabic, the three principal languages of the Moslem world, and his Urdu New Testament has remained the basis of all subsequent translations. Then he sailed for Shiraz, Iran, where, despite the intense heat, he completed his Persian New Testament within a year. He was helped by an Islamic scholar named Mirza Sayyid Ali, who one day told him about a recent victory over the Russians in which Crown Prince Abbas Mirza, son of the Shah, with his troops had killed so many Russian Christians that ‘Christ from the fourth heaven took hold of Mahomet’s skirt to entreat him to desist’.⁸⁹

Imagine the scene. Christ is kneeling before Mohammed. How did Henry Martyn react? ‘I was cut to the soul at this blasphemy’, he said. Mirza Sayyid Ali was surprised and asked what was so offensive to him. He replied: ‘I could not endure existence if Jesus was not glorified; it would be hell to me if he were to be always thus dishonoured.’ His scholar-friend was astonished and again asked why. ‘If anyone pluck out your eyes’, Henry Martyn replied, ‘there is no saying why you feel pain; it is feeling. It is because I am one with Christ that I am thus dreadfully wounded.’⁹⁰ One of his biographers accuses Henry Martyn of a ‘high degree of touchiness’.⁹¹ But no, it was his zeal for the honour of the exalted Christ.

On 21 October 1811 Henry Martyn wrote his last letter to Lydia, telling her that he was thinking of her incessantly. Four months later his Persian New Testament was finished. He prepared two ornate copies for presentation to the Shah and the Crown Prince, but they never reached them. Henry Martyn left Shiraz on horseback, and two months later arrived in Tabriz. He was already in a state of high fever from TB, but he set out again, expecting to reach Constantinople, some 1,400 miles away, within another two months. Then in early October he made his last diary entries, being in considerable pain. He managed to ride on for ten more days, but died on October 16, 1812 in Tokat, Armenia, only thirty-one years old.

What motivated Henry Martyn to visit both India and Persia as a missionary, to risk injury at the hand of fanatical Moslems, to learn three languages, to persevere in his translation work, in spite of constant ill-health, and to put his vocation before his love for Lydia? It was his determination that the exalted Christ be given his due honour. Henry Martyn ‘belongs to that band of missionary saints’, wrote one of his biographers, ‘devoured by a consuming zeal, which gave them no rest, but drove them ever onwards to greater endeavours for the furtherance of the kingdom of God’.⁹² His favourite hymn, another biographer tells us, was Isaac Watts’ paraphrase of Psalm 72:

Jesus shall reign, where’er the sun

Does his successive journeys run;

His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,

Till moons shall wax and wane no more.⁹³

10. The gift of the Spirit: Roland Allen

The Holy Spirit is a missionary Spirit

‘Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you see and hear’ (Acts 2:33, RSV).

So said Peter in the climax of his sermon on the day of Pentecost. The final act in the saving career of Jesus, following his resurrection and exaltation, was his gift of the Spirit to his waiting and expectant church.

Of all the Holy Spirit’s many ministries, the New Testament emphasis (though often overlooked) is on mission. Pentecost was essentially a missionary event. Indeed, the gap between the first and second comings of Christ, between the ascension (when he disappeared) and the parousia (when he will reappear) is, in God’s purpose, to be filled with the worldwide mission of the church. As the late Bishop Lesslie Newbigin put it, ‘the church is the pilgrim people of God. It is on the move – hastening to the ends of the earth to beseech all men to be reconciled to God, and hastening to the end of time to meet its Lord who will gather all into one’.⁹⁴ Indeed, the two ends will be reached simultaneously for, as Jesus said, ‘this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come’ (Matt. 24:14).

One person who was greatly inspired by this link between Christ’s gift of the Spirit and the church’s mission was Roland Allen. Born in 1868 in Bristol, England, he felt called from childhood to be a missionary. ‘From my earliest years’, he wrote, ‘I was as firmly convinced of my vocation as I was of my existence.’⁹⁵ He was ordained in 1892, and three years later sailed for Northern China. Although he served there for only eight years (he was invalided home in 1903), he developed some radical convictions about the indigenous nature of the church, and spent the next forty years writing about them. He also visited East Africa, India and Canada, and settled for a while in Kenya.

His first, best known and most influential book was Missionary Methods: St Paul’s or Ours?⁹⁶ He began with these provocative words:

In little more than ten years St Paul established the church in four provinces of the Empire – Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia and Asia. Before AD 47 there were no churches in these provinces; in AD 57 St Paul could speak as if his work there was done, and could plan extensive tours into the far West without anxiety lest the churches which he had founded might perish in his absence for want of his guidance and support.⁹⁷

For ‘nothing can alter or disguise the fact that St Paul did leave behind him at his first visit complete churches’.⁹⁸ Indeed, ‘the first and most striking difference between his action and ours is that he founded “churches” whilst we found “missions”.’⁹⁹

By contrast, as Roland Allen surveyed what was then known as ‘the mission field’, he saw ‘three very disquieting symptoms’. First, everywhere Christianity was still an exotic, a foreign plant. Secondly, everywhere Christian missions were dependent on foreign finance and leadership. Thirdly, everywhere he saw the same foreign forms of Christian life, bearing ‘a most astonishing resemblance one to another’, with no cultural originality. Thus Christian missions were ‘exotic, dependent, uniform’ – the very opposite of indigenous.¹⁰⁰ Instead, ‘we desire to see Christianity established in foreign climes putting on a foreign [i.e. indigenous] dress and developing new forms of glory and of beauty’.¹⁰¹

Paul’s missionary method was to plant a church and then retire, in order to give place to Christ. But was he not risking disaster? If all missionaries were to withdraw, would they not expose the church to false teaching and moral failure? Roland Allen saw these questions as a crisis of faith. Could God not be trusted to look after his own church? The only precautions Paul took were that he left behind him, when he withdrew, the Old Testament Scriptures, a local pastorate and his own apostolic teaching.¹⁰² But above all, Allen wrote, Paul ‘believed in the Holy Ghost...as a Person indwelling his converts. He believed therefore in his converts. He could trust them. He did not trust them because he believed in their natural virtue or intellectual sufficiency. But he believed in the Holy Ghost in them’.¹⁰³ He was confident that the Spirit would stablish, strengthen and settle them.

Roland Allen’s principles are still being debated, for there are significant differences between Paul’s situation and ours, which perhaps Allen did not sufficiently allow for. Moreover, as Alexander McLeish wrote in his Memoirs, Roland Allen was ‘always a rebel in spirit’.¹⁰⁴

Nevertheless, in his emphasis on the indispensable role of the Holy Spirit in mission he cannot be faulted. ‘His main concern and interest was in no usual sense in the place of the Holy Spirit.’¹⁰⁵ It dominated his thinking. To him the Acts was a missionary book and the Spirit was a missionary Spirit.¹⁰⁶ His vision for an indigenous church was of a church relying on Christ’s gift of the Holy Spirit.

11. The second coming: Anthony Ashley Cooper (Lord Shaftesbury)

A programme for social reform

The 1662 Prayer Book gave directions how to find the date of Easter Day for 500 years up to the year AD 2199. And according to an Act of Parliament in 1732 the American Episcopal Prayer Book enabled its readers to calculate the church calendar as far ahead as AD 8500. These Anglican churches do not exactly encourage their members to live in lively expectation of the Lord’s return! A notable exception, however, was Anthony Ashley Cooper, who on his father’s death became the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury.

Born in 1801, he had an unhappy childhood, neglected and abused by his parents. His only solace was their housekeeper, Anna Maria Milles, who told him Bible stories, taught him to pray, and seems to have led him to personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

At the age of sixteen, while at Harrow School, he saw a group of drunken men drop a poor man’s coffin in the street, cursing and laughing as they did so. He was sickened and disturbed by this incident, later calling it ‘the origin of my public career’, for then and there he resolved to dedicate his life to the cause of the poor and the weak.¹⁰⁷

He entered Parliament in 1826, aged only twenty-five, and soon began his programme of humanitarian reform, seeking to remedy some of the worst consequences of the Industrial Revolution. His unremitting labour continued for nearly sixty years, and the legislation for which he was largely responsible represents an astonishing achievement.

In 1842 The Coal Mines Act prohibited underground work in mines and collieries by women and girls, and reduced the hours worked by boys. In 1845 The Lunacy Act secured the humane treatment of the insane, and appointed fifteen ‘Commissioners in Lunacy’, of which he was one for forty years. In 1847, 1850 and 1859 he piloted The Ten Hours Factory Acts through Parliament, which regulated working hours for women and children. He was the acknowledged leader of all this factory reform. In 1851 The Common Lodging House Act sought to end the insanitary and overcrowded conditions of these lodging houses, laid down acceptable standards and permitted local authorities to inspect and supervise them. Even this list is far from complete. Ashley Cooper also founded the Ragged School Union and busied himself on behalf of boy chimney-sweeps, flower girls, orphans, prostitutes, prisoners, handicapped people and crippled children. Although his parliamentary bills were several times defeated, he refused to give up. ‘I must persevere’ his journal records.

What motivated him? To begin with, he believed and loved the gospel. ‘I am essentially, and from deep-rooted conviction,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘...an Evangelical of the Evangelicals’.¹⁰⁸ This means that in particular he emphasized ‘the divinity of Christ, his atoning sacrifice and his coming kingdom’.¹⁰⁹ And his good works of love and justice were the natural outflow of his faith.

During the 1830s, however, he became firmly and vitally convinced of the second coming of Christ. ‘It entered into all his thoughts and feelings’, wrote Edwin Hodder; ‘it stimulated him in the midst of all his labours; it gave tone and colour to all his hopes for the future’.¹¹⁰ For ‘there is no real remedy, he often said, for all this mass of misery, but in the return of our Lord Jesus Christ. Why do we not plead for it every time we hear the clock strike?’¹¹¹

‘I cannot tell you’, Ashley Cooper once said to Edwin Hodder, his authorized biographer, ‘how it was that this subject first took hold upon me; it has been, as far as I can remember, a subject to which I have always held tenaciously. Belief in it has been a moving principle in my life; for I see everything going on in the world subordinate to this one great event.’¹¹²

It is not surprising, therefore, that Ashley Cooper’s favourite text was the second from last verse in the Bible: ‘“Yes, I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus’ (Rev. 22:20). His life-long diary, to which he committed his private thoughts, is sprinkled all through with this ejaculation. It was a motto he had inscribed in Greek on the flaps of the envelopes he used every day.¹¹³ A few years before he died, he left instructions that this text (Rev. 22:20) should be one of three engraved on his tombstone. And on his deathbed he kept muttering ‘Come, Lord Jesus’.

Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, died in 1885. So richly had he deserved the epithet ‘the poor man’s earl’ that tens of thousands of people, from all walks of life, lined the route taken by the cortège carrying his body from his home in Grosvenor Square to Westminster Abbey. There was a great outpouring of public grief, love and respect. Representatives of the homes, asylums, schools and societies that he had founded carried banners, on which were emblazoned sentences from Matthew 25: ‘I was an hungered and ye gave me meat’, ‘I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink’, ‘I was a stranger and ye took me in’, ‘naked and ye clothed me’, ‘I was sick, and ye visited me’, ‘I was in prison, and ye came to me’ (vv. 35–36, AV). Even the pouring rain could not dampen their spirits.

‘My Lords,’ exclaimed the Duke of Argyll, in a political speech delivered soon afterwards, ‘the social reforms of the past century have not been due to a political party: they have been due to the influence, the character and the perseverance of one man: I refer, of course, to Lord Shaftesbury.’ The Times also acknowledged him as a man who ‘changed the whole social condition of England’.¹¹⁴

And why? What had been his incentive? He tells us. Towards the end of his life he said: ‘I do not think that in the last forty years I have lived one conscious hour that was not influenced by the thought of our Lord’s return.’¹¹⁵

12. The last judgment: William Wilberforce

The abolition of slavery and the slave-trade

My last example of someone who was profoundly influenced by Jesus Christ is William Wilberforce. He constantly remembered this fact, that one day he would have to stand before the judgment seat of Christ.

Wilberforce once summed up his life ambitions in these terms: ‘God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.’¹¹⁶

I propose to consider his two goals in the reverse order. Wilberforce’s influence on English moral values and standards can be attributed mainly to his famous book with its cumbersome title: A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the higher and middle classes in this country, contrasted with real Christianity. Published in 1797, reprinted five times the same year, translated into five European languages, and popularly known as Real Christianity, it made a sensational impact.

Most of its chapter headings begin with the words ‘Inadequate Conceptions of...’, since his purpose, from his extensive knowledge of the Bible, was both to expose the inadequacies of ‘nominal’ or ‘professed’ Christianity and to clarify the essentials of ‘real’, ‘true’, ‘vital’ or ‘practical’ Christianity. The chief difference between them, he insisted, ‘consists in the differing place given to the Gospel’.¹¹⁷ Its foundational doctrines are ‘the corruption of human nature, the atonement of the Saviour, and the sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit’.¹¹⁸ From these truths, believed and experienced, flows a radically new life, inspired by gratitude to God, characterized by love, holiness and humility, and permeating every part of us, both private and public.

Wilberforce was painfully aware, as he wrote, that religion and morals were in serious decline in contemporary England. ‘The Bible lies on a shelf unopened’,¹¹⁹ he complained. Above all, ‘the fatal habit of considering Christian morals as distinct from Christian doctrines has imperceptibly gained strength...Even in the majority of sermons today one can scarcely find a trace of biblical doctrine.’¹²⁰

In particular, Wilberforce became incensed with Britain’s involvement in the slave-trade. Its horrors have been described thus:

the sudden night raid on some peaceful native village (sc. in West Africa), the dragging of men and women and children in chains to the coast, the long slow voyage across the Atlantic, the filth and stench of the poisonous hold, where the slaves were packed in layers, and then the work on the sugar plantations beneath the overseer’s whip.¹²¹

Wilberforce entered Parliament as the member for Yorkshire at the age of twenty-one in 1780, and seven years later put down a motion about the slave-trade. He was not a very prepossessing figure. Small of stature, he had poor eyesight and an upturned nose. When Boswell heard him speak, he pronounced him ‘a perfect shrimp’, but later conceded that ‘presently the shrimp swelled into a whale’.¹²² He also encountered the determined opposition of vested interests. But in spite of all the problems, he persevered. In 1789 he addressed the House of Commons about the slave-trade in these terms: ‘So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did its wickedness appear, that my own mind was completely made up for Abolition...Let the consequences be what they would, I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its Abolition.’¹²³

So Abolition Bills (relating to the trade) and Foreign Slave Bills (prohibiting the involvement of British ships) were debated in the Commons in 1789, 1791, 1792, 1794, 1796, 1798 and 1799. Yet they all failed, until the Abolition of the Slave-Trade Bill finally passed in 1807. Then, following the Napoleonic Wars, Wilberforce directed his energies to the abolition of slavery itself. But in 1825 ill health compelled him to resign from the House, and Thomas Fowell Buxton took over the campaign’s leadership. In 1833 the Abolition of Slavery Bill was passed by an overwhelming majority in both Houses of Parliament. Three days later Wilberforce died. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, in recognition of his forty-five years’ persevering struggle on behalf of the African slaves.

Not that Wilberforce battled alone. He was certainly the campaign’s acknowledged leader, but he could not have won it without a groundswell of support from the country, and especially from his close friends in south London, whom the wit Sydney Smith, one of the founders of The Edinburgh Review, nicknamed ‘The Clapham Sect’, although in Parliament they were dubbed ‘The Saints’.

The Clapham Sect’s agenda was enormous. Indeed, ‘the most striking feature of evangelical charity in the Victorian era’, wrote Dr Kathleen Heasman, ‘is its vast dimensions’.¹²⁴ So what motivated them? Here is the answer given by R. C. K. Ensor, the radical journalist and historian: ‘No-one will ever understand Victorian England who does not appreciate that among highly civilized...countries it was one of the most religious that the world has known.’ Ensor was referring to evangelical religion, whose second essential in his opinion was

its certainty about the existence of an after-life of rewards and punishments. If one asks how nineteenth-century English merchants earned the reputation of being the most honest in the world...the answer is: because hell and heaven seemed as certain to them as tomorrow’s sunrise, and the Last Judgment as real as the week’s balance-sheet.¹²⁵

John Venn, Rector of Clapham (1792–1813), laid much stress in his sermons on our moral accountability to God. It was this, wrote Michael Hennell,

which gave the Clapham Sect that entire integrity which acted as salt and leaven in the House of Commons; it was this sense of accountableness to God that enabled the Anti-Slave Trade team to persevere with their campaigns during a major European war and in the face of twenty-five years of defeat, disappointment and disillusionment.¹²⁶

Michael Hennell also tells us that the young prime minister William Pitt once asked Henry Thornton (the banker member of the Clapham Sect) why he had voted against him on one occasion. Thornton replied: ‘I voted today so that if my Master had come again at that moment I might have been able to give an account of my stewardship.’¹²⁷

Wilberforce could have said the same thing. His strong sense of duty to his neighbour arose from his sense of accountability to Christ, his Saviour, Lord and Judge.

Conclusion: The radical nature of Christ’s influence

That Jesus exercised a powerful influence on the development of the human story is widely recognized by historians. Here is Kenneth Scott Latourette’s summary at the end of his seventh volume:

In this world of men, with its aspirations and its struggles...there appeared one, born of woman...To most of...his contemporaries he seemed a failure...Yet no life ever lived on this planet has been so influential in the affairs of men. From it has grown the most nearly universal fellowship, the Christian church, that man has known...

From that brief life and its apparent frustration has flowed a more powerful force for the triumphal waging of man’s long battle than any other ever known by the human race. Through it millions have had their inner conflicts resolved in progressive victory over their baser impulses. By it millions have been sustained in the greatest tragedies of life and have come through radiant. Through it hundreds of millions have been lifted from illiteracy and ignorance, and have been placed upon the road of growing intellectual freedom, and of control over their physical environment. It has done more to allay the physical ills of disease and famine than any other impulse known to man. It has emancipated millions from chattel slavery and millions of others from thraldom to vice. It has protected tens of millions from exploitation by their fellows. It has been the most fruitful source of movements to lessen the horrors of war, and to put the relations of men and nations on the basis of justice and peace.¹²⁸

This is not to claim that all these developments can be attributed exclusively to the influence of Jesus Christ, for many other people have left a wholesome mark on society. Nor is it to pretend that the Christian record has been spotless, for it has been grievously blemished by blind spots and blunders, of which we are ashamed. Nevertheless, in every place and every generation, wherever the name and story of Jesus have been known, the radical nature of his influence can be traced.

Behind the whole massive scientific enterprise there lies a belief in the rationality and uniformity of the created order stamped upon it by its Creator.

Behind the democratic process there lies the paradox of our humanness which Jesus taught – our dignity by creation, demanding that we be governed only by consent, and our depravity by disobedience, demanding that political power be dispersed.

Behind the drive for universal education lies Jesus’ respect for children, requiring the development of their God-given potential.

Behind the quest for justice and human rights, for improved conditions in factory, mine and prison, and for people’s health of body, mind, soul and community there lies the value of every human person for whom Jesus both lived and died.

Behind the current concern for the natural environment there lies the call to be responsible stewards of it, which Jesus inherited from the early chapters of Genesis, even if his followers have been slow to discern their duty.

Behind the search for harmonious race relationships there lies the conviction of the fundamental equality of all human beings, made in the image of God, irrespective of colour, culture or creed, which Jesus taught in his parable of the good Samaritan.

Behind human families as the foundation of human society there lies God’s institution of heterosexual monogamy which Jesus endorsed, together with the health-giving sexual restraint which it presupposes.

All these foundational social principles were taught and/or confirmed, directly or indirectly, by the words and deeds, the attitudes and example of Jesus Christ.

But, as Thomas Carlyle wrote in his famous book On Heroes and Hero-worship (1841), movements do not just arise; they presuppose innovative personalities. That is why I have chosen to tell the stories of a dozen such leaders, whose imagination has been fired, compassion aroused and action inspired by Jesus – by the Bethlehem stable or the carpenter’s shop, by his ministry of compassion or his Sermon on the Mount, by his love for children or his washing of feet, by his cross, resurrection, exaltation or gift of the Spirit, by his second coming or his final judgment.

One more question must detain us. It is prompted by the long story of the church, and is asked by Bishop Stephen Neill: ‘What kind of a stone could it be that, once thrown into the pool of human existence, could set in motion ripples that would go on spreading until the utmost rim of the world had been reached?’¹²⁹

My answer is: ‘Only the incomparable Christ.’ And if we are prepared to take the risk of familiarizing ourselves with his story, and exposing ourselves to his personality, example and teaching, we shall not remain unscathed. Rather we too shall feel the power of his influence and say with Paul that the love of Christ tightens its grip upon us, until we are left with no alternative but to live – and die – for him (2 Cor. 5:14).

↑ Back to top