So thank goodness that today’s story of him turning over the tables in the Temple disrupts that calm, passive image. Outraged by injustice and commercialisation masquerading as religion, he seems to have found that a peaceful demonstration didn’t meet the occasion – he just went and trashed the place. “Holy”, in this story, certainly doesn’t mean wet and wimpish.

There’s a great scene in Denys Arcand’s movie Jesus of Montreal where the leading character trashes a TV studio where actors are being exploited. The movie’s plot revolves around five actors who perform a Passion play, and over the course of the play’s run, their own lives become completely affected by the gospel stories they are playing out. The stark reality of what happens when these not-very-religious people engage with the gospel is contrasted by the way Arcand depicts the Church as insitution, which in every way has insulated itself against the radical effects of the gospel.

In this particular scene, two of the actors go to a TV studio where the female actor is auditioning from a part in an advert. There she finds herself on the receiving end of some of the common abuses that models are subjected to, and her friend (who plays Jesus in the Passion plays) becomes incensed and steps in to protect his friend, his reaction being a kind of calculated anger – calm on the surface, but fearless through a passionate reaction against the abuse. He trashes the studio, turning over the tables and tripods, smashing thousands of pounds worth of cameras and computers as he goes along.

The story of Jesus turning over the tables in the Temple can be way too sanitised. Have you ever been told that he was only acting out anger, not really angry? Or that he was angry but completely in control? Or acting to make a point but calm and kind really? A Jesus with no passion or anger is not a real person – and to train people to suppress their own anger is a recipe either for cdepression or dangerous outbursts somewhere down the line. I love the Jésus de Montréal adaptation of that story precisely because it delivers a Jesus who is a real human being, with the kind of passion and commitment to the cause of righteousness that makes him (and his followers) fearless even against the powers that be.

I can’t easily draw the conclusion that we should go out and commit acts of crminal violence in the name of Jesus. Recalling recent public protests, incidences of “kettling” and the death of Ian Tomlinson, the question as to what level of law-breaking is either advisable or acceptable, and the consequences to both protesters and bystanders are not inconsiderable. But I do think we should register the level of anger and social unacceptability that was going on in this story. There are moments when nothing less will do: as Edmund Burke once said, All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

The image of Jesus turning over the tables also colours how you read the events of the rest of Holy Week. Read the Temple story and it’s hard to see Jesus limply giving himself up as a victim; instead he is walking eyes wide open into the inevitable consequences of the radical protest he had embodied, and which the powers that be wanted to damp down at any cost. Earlier in his ministry he had “slipped through the crowd” once or twice to avoid coming to grief. I imagine he had weighed up the possible consequences of continuing to live out his radical message of justice, equality and freedom in a volatile environment. I imagine he had figured out that he had two choices: make less noise, or face the music.

The Industrial Revolution led to people increasingly working and living a significant distance from home and family, and the Refreshment Sunday tradition was kept by many as a day to return to the home community to worship. And in the nineteenth century those who were working in domestic service, who would be working through Easter, were allowed to return to their own communities on Mothering Sunday. More sympathetic employers sometimes allowed them to bake and take with them a Simnel Cake as a gift for the  servant’s own mother and family.

So when did Mothering Sunday morph into Mother’s Day? It’s only very recently – in the last 40 years or so – that the day has become focussed entirely on celebrating one’s birth mother, largely helped along by the greetings card industry. Now, I’m entirely in favour of celebrating mothers – in the context of the family it’s a great thing to do. But to require a whole community such as a Church or a school to celebrate Mothers Day sets up all kinds of problems. Because for every person who is happy about motherhood there is another person whose mother has died, or who is themselves a bereaved mother, or who hates their mother for good reason, or who never knew their own mother… the list just goes on.

I remember, before I was a mother myself, how profoundly excluded one could feel in Church when the celebrations of Mother’s Day gave out subliminal messages that one wasn’t a “real” or a fulfilled woman if you weren’t a mother. And one awful year when my first pregnancy ended in miscarriage I just abandoned church and headed far away into the countryside on the weekend of mothers day rather than put myself through all that sugary stuff again. I was already awash with grief; I didn’t need daffodils and guilt to make it worse.

What should the church do, then? The fifth commandment orders us to ‘honour your father and mother’, and theology uses the image of motherhood as well as fatherhood to picture God. Perhaps, then, we should celebrate a far wider understanding of motherhood. The focus could be on the church as the mothering community, or those theological allusions to God as our mother. Or the alternative idea of refreshment could be brought into play, with the traditional scriptural reading for the day of the feeding of the five thousand. A robust sermon on the fifth commandment could be turned to thoughts of justice for an ageing community. There are ways of thinking about the deeper idea of Mothering or Refreshment that can draw everyone in, not just those with happy families.

We certainly need to take care, if we celebrate motherhood in any way at all, to be sharply aware of the pastoral needs of those who long to be mothers but can’t, those who have suffered miscarriages and stillbirths, those whose mothers have died recently, those who suffered from abusive mothers (yes, they do exist), those men who have lost their wives and the mothers of their children, or who for any other reason struggle with Mother’s Day.  So as we approach this Sunday, perhaps recovering the older ideas of Refreshment and Mothering Church would be far better than going along with the twee-ness of the greetings card invention.

I wrote another post on the subject: Laetere Sunday and for the book-length version click on the icon of “Giving it Up” in the column to the right of this post.

It looks good enough on the surface. The shops are full of eggs and chickens and sunshine and cheer, and with the school term only ending yesterday, there’s a buzz of demob happiness in the air.

But Good Friday and Holy Saturday are the most sombre days in the whole Church calendar, recalling the death and disappearance of God.  Not much there to celebrate or feel happy about.

For those who enjoy a degree of certainty in their faith, maybe Good Friday and Holy Saturday don’t really “bite” – they are more about the anticipation of a certain resurrection than about entering into the devastation of grief.  But for  those of us who live with a fragemented faith, a faith that has had too many holes punctured in it, too much damage ever to recover a naive certainty, there is something reassuring about the rise and fall of the Church seasons. It’s a relief to be honest, to acknowledge the disappearance of God and the uncertainty of the outcome.

That’s not to say that there is no hope of the resurrection. But that hope doesn’t forestall the depth of blackness that can descend even upon people of faith. And the recollection that the Easter faith was born in the darkness is, perhaps, a reason to hold on and not to give up.

Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea.

It’s followed immediately by the parable of the sower, a story much beloved by Vincent Van Gogh, but the parable is often the starting point for a round of analysis as to what the Church should be doing. I may be guilty here of subverting the bible, but it seems to me that in a form like the gospels where there isn’t really much “spare”, no sentence appears without reason. And all over the gospels we get told that Jesus went out to pray – Mark says that Jesus got up early, while it was still dark, to go to a solitary place and pray (Mk 1:35); Luke says he withdrew to lonely places and prayed (Lk 5:16). But here he didn’t go to the beach to pray, he just “sat beside the sea”.

What does it feel like to sit on the beach? – perhaps on a hot summer’s day with waves lapping and children’s laughter and sails flashing in the distance, or maybe on a brisk winter’s morning, wrapped up well against the elements and walking through a stiff wind to sit in the shelter of a large sand dune and watch the crashing waves. Jesus went down to the beach, not to pray, just to sit.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine came to stay in my house while carrying out a research project. One evening I was cooking dinner when the phone rang. While I was answering it I also nipped upstairs to see if my son was out of the bath yet, and then the doorbell rang, and after I’d dealt with that the phone rang again. I got back to the kitchen to rescue the dinner, to find that my friend had taken over. He put a glass of wine in my hand, pointed to the chair in the corner of the kitchen, and said with a smile, “Sit down! Now! Honestly, don’t you ever just sit and do nothing?”

I used to be better at sitting still, I think, before I began the juggling act of bringing up a child and holding down a job. But it’s not only single mothers who get drawn into a frenetic pace – it happens to all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons.

Our culture likes speed: we like things to go faster and smoother and more efficiently. And in some areas of life speed is excellent. Clearing bureaucratic hurdles at speed is good, your computer running quickly and efficiently is good, the post arriving on time is good. But there are other ways in which speed is not so good for us. Fast food, ready meals, eating on the run, driving too fast, never having the time to pause and take stock, or look into someone’s eyes and really listen to what they are saying. Author Carl Honoré, in his book In Praise of Slow (Orion 2004), called this the cult of speed; not just speeding up things that need to go faster, but winding up of the whole of life until it’s like a centrifuge that pins us to its revolutions.

Even our spirituality can be subject to this tendency towards speed and drivenness. Jesus went to sit by the sea and get the space he needed, but soon found himself besieged by the crowds, who wanted more of him. So from his moment of stillness he pitched out in a boat and began to tell them his stories.

He told them about a farmer who walked about throwing seeds onto his land. The seeds went everywhere, and no doubt he knew that some of them would come to nothing, because if you’re going to grow things, some seeds are always wasted. And there were seeds that were eaten up by the birds in no time, and others that started well but grew too fast, and couldn’t mature for lack of depth.

The ones that did grow, though, were the ones that vanished for a while – went a bit deeper into good soil. They didn’t sprout so quickly, but this was good because they were putting down roots first. And when they eventually came up, they didn’t grow quickly at all. They grew at the proper speed, developing strong stems and good fat seed heads.

Spirituality that bears fruit is not a fast food business. You can try to make the Kingdom of Heaven more efficient if you want to; you can try and maximize effort and produce more fruit per hour of work. But in the end, like growing wheat, real spiritual growth has an optimum speed, and accelerating the growth and maximizing the harvest will be about as much good for the soul as fast food is for the body. Some things just take time.

The parable of the sower, then. Not so much a call to do more things, achieve more evangelistic goals, hunt for more spiritual scalps, get more bums on seats. More of a call to recognise that spirituality that lasts involves letting quite a lot of stuff go to waste, and having the patience to ignore the fast growing weeds and wait for the good stuff to grow. In the meantime, there is plenty of time to go and sit on the beach.

I remember listening to a sermon once by a man called Jack Hayford. He was a pastor in some USA denomination, and I happened across him by accident. Much of what he said was in the kind of religious language that leaves me wondering about someone’s connection to the real world, and when he said he “heard God speak to him audibly” I wondered a little more.  But apparently God said to him, as he was driving around town, “If you don’t slow down, you’re going to crash.” He spent some time considering what kind of spiritual application this had – were his church programmes being developed too quickly? Was this some wisdom about regulating Church growth? Eventually, Mr Hayford realised that the words in his head had to do with his speedometer, not his church.

Steve Taylor once wrote about a challenge to the culture of speed in Church:

“I believed in a fast God. I was part of a system that gave altar calls for instant salvation, prayed for healing, and expected instant church growth, if not this week, then at least this month. Did I follow a fast God? And what would it mean for me to follow a slow God; the God who took 80 years to prepare Moses for leadership; who took 40 years to get a people across a dessert; who took 30 years to prepare a Messiah ministry; who gave Paul 3 years for integration? Where is the slow God in my spiritual formation?”

Here are some of my Lent slow-down pledges:

1. Walking instead of driving where possible.

2. Say no.

3. Go to bed earlier.

The bad behaviour and shocking wastefulness of the son is beyond doubt, but I think there’s a bit of a twist in the tale. I can’t help noticing that the son wastes his money by spending it all not just on himself, but on his wayward friends. Have you ever stopped to wonder where he learned to be quite so outrageously, unquestioningly openhanded? You could argue that his father should have been sterner, more intent on teaching his young son self-discipline; that instead of parting so easily with the inheritance he should have pulled his son into line. But the father himself is outrageously generous, and far more interested in building a relationship with his two sons than looking after the family wealth. Dividing the property for his son was in itself lavish to the point of recklessness. He was certainly infinitely wiser than his son, but surely this is where the son learned to be so generous.

The Prodigal Son is a story that sets off all sorts of associations, and irresponsibility with money is one of them. Worth pondering, then, that the first person in the story to throw the cash around was actually the Father, not the son…

(I wrote more about this in Giving It Up – see above right)

The usual mantra is to ‘try harder’. Trying harder is impossible when you’re already trying as hard as you can.

But you can always try different…

Exodus 3: 1-4

Moses was born to a family of Hebrew slaves, but brought up in an Egyptian Palace. In adulthood, he murdered an Egyptian and had to flee for his life. He went into hiding in the desert, where he married the daughter of a nomadic shepherd who was also a Midianite priest. By the time he saw the burning bush, Moses was middle aged, still living in the desert, and still looking after his father-in-law’s sheep. I think we could reasonably say that Moses had got into a rut. He’d made a couple of major mistakes early on, and now he was still lurking below the parapet for fear of being found out. As a result he wasn’t sure anymore who he was, or what his purpose was in life. He was just settled in for the long haul somewhere comfortable that paid the bills, but it wasn’t what he dreamed of when he was young, and it wasn’t his heart’s desire.

On this particular day Moses led the sheep out to new pasture in the foothills of Mount Horeb. Moses, of course, had no idea he was about to meet God. When he saw the bush, he didn’t know why it seemed to be on fire and yet not burning. All he knew was that he had spotted something bright and sparkly, something intriguing and very exciting. “I will turn aside,” he said, “and see…”. Moses dared to step out of his routine, left the sheep to look after themselves and followed where his intellectual curiosity led him.  And it was only then that he heard God’s voice calling his name.

Often when we think about the idea of God’s call to us, we end up trying too hard to figure out what it is God is saying to us. We tend to think that our calling must be something obviously Christian, the kind of thing we call a “ministry”. Sometimes we thrash around trying to fit ourselves into some existing ministry or project, or to meet some unfilled needs, and yet we end up feeling like Moses – settled in for the long-haul, but wondering whether we’ve missed our dreams. And, especially if it’s good work that we’re involved in, we may also feel guilty for not feeling sufficiently enthused about what we’re doing.

If you think you hear a call that gives you a sense of gloom and despondency, a loss of energy and interest, a feeling of joyless obligation, then it may be God’s call to somebody else, but it is almost certainly not his call to you. Jesus didn’t say – “you have to give up being yourself to have a ministry,” he said, “The kingdom of God is within you.” Jesus didn’t say “my call is heavy and difficult.” He said “My yoke is easy. My burden is light.” When Moses dared to break out of his routine and went to look at something that fascinated him, he discovered that his natural curiosity did not lead him away from God at all – rather it led him into an encounter with God that transformed his life. It was precisely through Moses following what he thought interesting that God eventually turned him from an isolated shepherd into a political reformer and religious leader.

If we try to fit into a mould that wasn’t made for us, we become stiff and inflexible. We mustn’t let the fear of losing our faith limit our imagination and our sense of adventure. When we allow our natural gifts and inclinations to lead us – whether that’s into the world of history or medicine, computers or astro-physics, music, art or literature – that’s when we see clearly who we are, and what we’re meant to do with the gifts we’ve been given. That’s where we hear God calling to us. And that’s where God is able to speak through us to others…

…So put aside what other people say you ought to do, and put aside your own mental commentary about what you think God will make you do. Instead, do what Moses did. Follow whatever you find intriguing, intellectually or artistically stimulating; go where your curiosity and your natural gifts lead you. And when you do, keep an ear open. Because sooner or later, you will hear the voice of God whisper your name.

an extract from Giving it Up

But really the whole tenor of Christianity and the New Testament is that we are saved for something – saved to be more fully human, saved to be “in” Christ, saved to be re-connected to each other, saved for life, for love, for justice…