Video for December 4th, 2025
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.
Ministry brings with it many rewards alongside the challenges. As I look back over the past year, one of the most rewarding have been a series of Spiritual Question time evenings I’ve led with Dean Sarah. They are very simple to organise. We gather, usually in a room in a pub or village hall; people write their questions and Sarah and I attempt to answer them. The answers are not glib (I hope). Where that answer is, “I don’t know!” that’s the answer we give. Where we can only live with mystery based on trust, that’s what we share also. Honesty, authenticity and humanity can gain a hearing, even amongst the cynical. We are going to carry on next year. There are still some slots available, so do check out the diocesan website for details. Its one of the easiest things you could invite a spiritually curious friend to.
As we read the accounts of Jesus ministry we often find he started his teaching from a question. Just like today, people were spiritually curious. They wanted to ask about the big questions of life, death and judgement. The less educated loved it when Jesus got one over on the scribes and the Pharisees, who deployed their great learning to get around scripture’s plain teaching rather than obey it. They asked questions about mysteries like suffering, although unlike us they saw God’s hand in every part of life. Their world view of God’s sovereignty meant they were always seeking a reason for everything that happened. Rather like Job’s useless comforters, they thought that if bad things happened it must be God’s judgement and punishment for doing some thing wrong. Conversely, if good things happened it was a sign of God’s deserved blessing for good behaviour. This attitude remains common in popular spirituality and is embedded in the truth frameworks of Islam and Hinduism. In pastoral encounters I frequently hear people say things like, “what have I done to deserve this?”
In Luke 13 Jesus is in conversation with people asking about an atrocity in the Jerusalem Temple where Roman soldiers killed some visitors from out of town in the very act of worship. He says, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered in this way? I tell you no!” He goes on to draw on a natural disaster to make the same point. “Or those 18 who died when the tower of Siloam fell on them – do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no!” So, he rules out a direct cause and effect. Bad things do happen to good people. It wasn’t their fault. There is a necessary randomness about life in the way God has ordered it.
However, he doesn’t leave it as a philosophical conundrum. There are things that can be learned at a personal level. He follows each ‘no’ with the stern injunction, “But unless you repent, you too will all perish”. In this season of Advent, we are invited to consider the eternal judgement Jesus alludes to in these stern words. Whilst human suffering can’t be explained in a simple transactional way, nonetheless actions do have consequences. His stern rebuke to contemporary Jewish religious leaders was the presumption that they could basically do what they liked, and they’d be OK in the end because they were God’s chosen people. Pauls encouragement to the persecuted Christians to pray for their persecutors was predicated on the idea that they like the early Christians would repent and be forgiven or experience eternal consequences for their brutality. Justice would be served one way or the other and therefore there was no need to take their own revenge.
Our culture today balks at the idea of such accountability. An accusation of being judgemental is about the worst insult you can thow at someone. But having a sense of ultimate accountability for one’s actions can be a strong motivator for behaving well. This is not the same thing as Orthodox Patriarchs saying to Russian soldiers that their war in Ukraine is a sacred duty that will get them into heaven more quickly. Such vile distortions of the truth have been deployed by unscrupulous leaders throughout history. However, if we approach life secure in the knowledge that the gospel enables forgiveness when we fail – which we all do, whilst holding out a standard to which we are called and to which our adherence will one day be called to account, we will be appropriately serious about moral purity. The grace of the gospel is not to be presumed upon as a get out of jail free card to avoid responsibility for our actions but as a blessed gift to deliver us from the consequences of our sinfulness. This framework of judgement and grace is a powerful incentive to pursue a life of holiness.
+Richard
You can find details of next year’s Spiritual Question Time events here.