St Podwell's

My St Podwell's cartoon for this week . . .

St Podwell's

"So that's what he's giving up for Lent this year!"

Wilderness

A sermon for the First Sunday in Lent . . .

Two sentences to begin with - firstly, the closing sentence from the Gospel reading we’ve just heard: “Angels came and ministered to him.” And secondly, some very familiar words from the Lord’s Prayer: “Lead us not into temptation.”

Temptation is very much our theme this morning. On the first Sunday in Lent, we find Jesus in the wilderness. After his baptism he’s led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit. The Greek word is a strong one - so you could almost think of Jesus as propelled into the wilderness by the Spirit. He needed this time of testing, he needed the time to face up to the reality of temptation, he needed to know he could deal with the things that might otherwise lead him off course.

Now this only makes sense if Jesus is fully human, tempted in just the same way as us. And in fact the Gospel itself only makes sense if Jesus is fully human - God not just looking like one of us, but truly becoming one of us. And for the ministry of Jesus to be real and for it all to work, there would need to be a wilderness time first. That’s also true for me as a Christian, I find. I may not have to physically go out into the desert like Jesus, but I do need to face up to temptation, and to see myself, my strengths and my weaknesses, in an honest light, if I’m to be any use as a disciple.

So we’re given this purple time in our church calendar, Lent. It’s there so we spend some time in the wilderness. So I can strive to see myself as God sees me. So I can discover more of what he’s wanting me to do. God is calling me to a ministry that’s special to me. Peter writes this: “As living stones, you are being built up as a spiritual temple” If I’m to be part of this temple I need to know which is my particular place in the wall, the place God wants me to hold when I say yes to his call. But I don’t have to say yes. God calls, but I don’t have to follow. God makes himself vulnerable to my no. And if I say no, my place remains unfilled, and some particular loving hope of God for me is dashed.

Angels ministered to Jesus in the wilderness, but only at the end of the story. He was on his own to do the tough stuff first. I’ve been on a few retreats in my time; one I recall came at something of low point, when I felt under pressure and quite unsure about what I should be doing next. What I’d have liked on arrival at the retreat house would have been for the angels to be involved right from the start, so the rocky bits got smoothed out, and the dark and scary bits got brightened up. What I wanted was to feel good again, but that didn’t happen; the road stayed rough and the sky stayed dark. I had quite a tough time on that retreat, and yet it worked: by the end of my time I was in a much better place, and I could see more clearly where to go. Maybe there were angels there after all, they just weren’t going to do the work for me.

The wilderness is where we’re tempted, but temptation can help us to see things more clearly; it can be good for us, if it helps us to see the pitfalls and problems, and know how to deal with them. It was the devil who tempted Jesus, but it had been the Holy Spirit who first put him there to be tempted.
I think most of us are good at resisting the big obviously bad temptations, and most of them are going to be against the law anyway. But a lot of the temptations that come our way are not obviously bad. They can look plausible, they can seem to be a way of making good things happen, and anyway - the voice of temptation tells us - it can’t do any harm, and everyone’s doing it.

Let’s think for a moment about the temptations Jesus faced. He was tempted to turn stones into bread; and to jump from the pinnacle of the temple so the angels could come and bear him up, so they could catch him and save him, rather than staying hidden in the background. And he was tempted to go for earthly power. Or, in other words: Feed yourself - you need it - and you could feed the hungry too; dazzle the crowds, make them believe in you - isn’t that what you want? take power, be a king - think of all the good you could do.

Not one of those temptations was obviously bad in itself. Don’t we often wish that something difficult in our lives could be made more easy, that our work could be completed done more quickly, that our efforts could achieve more certain results?  But in all of them Jesus would have been going his own way and not his Father’s way. Taking a short cut, going for a quick fix, a lesser victory than the one set for him. This kind of short-termism means we put a makeshift idol, a false petty god, where the real God should be in our lives; and there are no short cuts to salvation. So Jesus uses holy scripture each time to reject what the devil has suggested - even when the devil himself has used scripture as part of his spiel.

The temptations Jesus faced would be there throughout his ministry, but his time in the wilderness meant he could know them for what they were. The same sorts of temptations will come our way as we do our best to follow him. Look for a moment at the last one, where the kingdoms of the world are laid out before Jesus. With political power, think how we can change things for the better! But who do we have to square with in order to get that power? No matter how pressing the needs around us may be, or our own concerns and ambitions and responsibilities, we must always be looking for where God is, and asking him where he would have us be. For if we always insist on letting God set our agenda, then the devil won’t get the last word.

So what is God’s agenda? When asked, Jesus quoted the summary of the Law, and we’ve used it already in this service: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself.” So love is at the very heart of all that God wants from us and for us. His love reaches everywhere and touches everyone, even the people who don’t or can’t recognise it, even the people who openly reject it. And Jesus tells us we should love even our enemies, and pray for those who treat us badly.

So though we may pray “Lead us not into temptation”, temptations can in fact work for our good, if we face them in the wilderness, and give ourselves time and space there to deal with them. That’s a process of self awareness that can reveal the desert inside ourselves - the places where we ourselves are dry and barren, and where our love is wearing thin.

Lent as a wilderness time is God’s gift to us. A time God wants us to use to get stronger, to become better disciples, and to draw nearer to him. So we can respond to his great call to us to be the stones from which his temple is built. Note by the way that we’re stones, rather than bricks. Bricks tend to be all one size and shape, they’re interchangeable. We’re stones, each one different, and each with a place we’re designed to fit in the wall.

So make the most of our forty days in the wilderness. We enter it to face reality, to hear God’s call and respond to it, and to identify and turn away from the things we might allow to get in the way of God, and stop us hearing his call as we should. To take Lent seriously won’t be easy and shouldn’t be easy, but it will be worthwhile. It’s about not choosing our own way, but going with God. That’s what Jesus set himself to do . . . “and angels came, and ministered to him.”

Transfiguration

On the last Sunday before Lent, we find ourselves on the Mount of the Transfiguration. We don’t actually know for certain what mountain Jesus ascended that day. The traditional site is Mount Tabor, and that’s where the Church of the Transfiguration can be visited by pilgrims. But some people think it was Mount Hermon, which isn’t far from Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus based his Galilean ministry. One thing we do know is that the Gospel story of this event marks roughly a middle point within the ministry of Jesus; it comes towards the close of his time in Galilee, and at the point at he turns to Judaea and the Holy City of Jerusalem.

Jesus takes with him the “inner three” of his disciples, Peter, James and John. And while they’re on the mountain, these three see Jesus transformed: his face shining, and his clothes a dazzling white. And they see Moses and Elijah suddenly there with him - two great heroes of the Jewish faith, both of which were believed not to have died, but to have been taken bodily into heaven.

People seem always to have ascended mountains to find spiritual refreshment and enlightenment. It’s one of the stock images of the cartoonist, the sage on the mountain top, along with the desert island. On a mountain the air is clearer, and you’re away from it all, lifted above the press and hubbub or ordinary human life. You can see an awful long way. And, as someone once said to me about the holy island of Iona, “the sky seems thinner, and you feel closer to heaven.”

Jesus regularly went to quiet places to pray, and often that meant climbing a hill, usually on his own, but not this time. For Peter and the others, what happens there is not untypical of the kind of spiritual “mountaintop experiences” people seem to have: a sense of something changed and transformed, made brighter and clearer, challenging even, that leaves you with the question, “What does this all mean? What’s it saying to me?” A momentary experience - time may seem to have stopped while it happens, but really it’s hardly more than the blink of an eye.

Peter wanted to know more, and to hang on to the moment, at least for a short while. So he talked some nonsense about building three tents; if they couldn’t stay there forever, he at least wanted to hold on to the moment long enough to grasp what was going on, to try to understand. But mountaintop experiences are just glimpses, nothing more; and just then, maybe they needed the experience itself more than to understand it.

More about that in a moment. But it occurs to me that one of the decisive Easter events Matthew writes about also takes place on a mountaintop in Galilee. Right at the end of his Gospel, Matthew tells how Jesus met with his disciples on a mountain, and from there he sent them out into all the world, to make disciples of every nation. Was it the same mountain, I wonder? And is that when Peter really understood what the Transfiguration had been about?

We use the phrase “Mountaintop Experience” to describe the moments when we feel spiritually lifted or enlightened, or when the penny drops in some new or special way. These don’t always happen on mountaintops, but maybe it always feels a bit like being somewhere high up, somewhere where you see further and more clearly.

A survey carried out a few years ago across the UK showed that many more people were prepared to admit to having had something that could be described as a religious or mountaintop experience than were prepared to admit to a religious faith. Each such event may be rare and special itself, but they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Maybe they’re something we need; so how was the Transfiguration important to Peter and James and John?

I think it had an immediate importance as an experience of God’s glory, something to lift their spirits, and it would also have a later importance, as they looked back and reflected, and began gradually to understand it. They needed the experience there and then, and they’d need the understanding further along the road.

If we read on from where our Gospel ended this morning, we’ll see that Jesus and his disciples came down from the mountain straight into a very testing experience of human need, and the battle between good and evil: a frantic father and the demonic possession of his young son. And soon after that Jesus made the decision to move on from the familiar home communities of Galilee, into Judaea, and on towards Jerusalem.

And what they’d experienced on the mountain must have given Peter and the others a new strength and resolve, as they returned to the hard grind of discipleship. And that’s something we need as well. Our faith is constantly challenged, and as Christians we can get stretched and confused and worn out. Jesus offered those he first called no less than a share in the cross, and a life on the open road, and even to be hated by those who hated him first. So it’s not going to be easy, especially when he instructs us to love our enemies, to do good to those who persecute us, and to pray for those who mean us harm. For us as for Peter and James and John, the brief glimpses we get of God’s glory are given us to encourage us and to cheer us and to keep us on the road. We should treasure them as gifts, moments when we glimpse the glory that’s always there, but mostly is hidden from us.

In the Greek language of the New Testament there are two words for time, and two concepts of time. Chronos is everyday time, the stuff that’s measured in our calendars and by our clocks and watches; the time that gets used up, the time that can’t wait, the time that we know we have only so much of, the sand falling through the glass. But there’s also kairos, and that’s time of a different sort, not measured, not ticking away. Chronos is our time, kairos is God’s. Kairos is opportune time, the right or critical moment; the still point that is a breaking-in of eternity into the chronological drudge of our daily lives.

For Jesus, and certainly for his disciples on that day, the mountaintop was a place of kairos; a place where time as measured down below just for a brief interval stood still. And Jesus was momentarily revealed to them for what he always is. The experience of that moment of kairos helped nerve them for the road ahead with its challenges and dangers. Later they’d begin to understand the real meaning of what they’d seen that day - but only after they’d travelled through the testing and confusing times of Thursday in the Garden of Gethsemane, and Friday at Calvary, and the empty tomb on Easter morning.

Then, and in the light of Pentecost, they’d understand and take out into the world the good news that what had seemed to them at the time like a disaster, like everything going wrong, darkness victorious over light, had been in truth just what God had always planned, his loving purpose unfolding, and evil finally and decisively beaten back. By then they’d met again with their risen Lord, perhaps on that same mountain top.

Meanwhile our journey through the Christian year continues into Lent. Jesus set his face towards Jerusalem, and so must we. And as we travel with our Lord toward the cross, hold on to whatever glimpses of the divine come your way, and never dismiss the kairos moments, the mountaintop experiences. They’re important and necessary to our journey of faith, but that faith then has to be taken back down the mountain and into the everyday world. Like Peter and the others, we discover that transfiguration is given us not as an alternative to the messy and scruffy realities of life, but to help us to get back into the scruffiness and keep up the work there, for here too is where we shall find our God.

Kingfishers

A "Nature Notes" article . . .

It’s nearly ten years since I last wrote about the kingfisher, so perhaps it’s time to do so again. Just occasionally I’ve been blessed with having a good view of this bird: kingfishers are small, shy, with short wings blurred in rapid flight. So mostly all I see is the briefest glimpse of a brightly jewelled arrow fleeting past. Each time I’ve really been able to watch one, rather than just glimpse it, has been special and stays in my memory - always from hides: at Llyn Coed y Dinas, by Welshpool, where the speeding jewel alighted on a post not far from the hide; Doxey Marshes by Stafford, where I was able to watch a bird perched just feet away for probably as long as ten minutes; Slimbridge in Gloucestershire, where we had taken a party of youngsters - a real red letter day for them; and Rye Meads in the Lea Valley, where there was an excellent view of a very active nest hole, and the parent birds coming and going.

Kingfishers are surprisingly small, so much so that the sturdy dagger-like bill can seem almost half as long as the bird itself (and indeed it is!). The upper parts are blue green, the cheeks and underside a dullish orange. Throat and the back of the cheek are white, with the forward cheek around the eye orange. The upper parts are iridescent, hence that sense of a mobile jewel when the bird flies by you! The bird has a shrill, piping call, which you are likely to hear before you see the bird itself.

Kingfishers are resident in the UK, and are found throughout England and Wales, though absent from part of Scotland, perhaps because they don’t cope well with hard winters. They feed on small fish and tadpoles, etc, spotted from a suitable perch before diving to catch it. If there isn’t a perch to hand the bird may hover before diving. This diet of fish helps give the bird itself an unpleasant taste, so kingfishers are rarely predated.

The nest hole is also rather manky and smelly, due to the accumulation of fish bones, droppings and the like. The birds (both parents work together) can excavate a tunnel as long as three feet into the bank. Five to seven eggs are laid, and both parents are involved with feeding. Kingfishers will always swallow a fish head first; often it will hold a newly caught fish by the tail and beat its head against a branch, before turning the fish round in order to swallow it. Of course, fish presented to the youngsters are also offered head first.

There are ninety or so species of kingfisher around the world: “Our” kingfisher is found widely across Europe and Asia, and into North Africa, and as far as Papua New Guinea. Most kingfisher species live in places warmer than here, but the belted kingfisher I’ve seen in Canada nests up into the Arctic, though flying south for the winter. The ten species of kingfisher found in Australia include the kookaburra, which I think is the largest species of kingfisher - a “tree kingfisher”, whose lifestyle has very little to do with water - it eats insects, small vertebrates, and the occasional snake!

Anxiety and Creation

Anxiety is a constant feature of modern life. Though it always has been, I suppose. Jesus told his disciples not to be anxious, so presumably they were anxious, or at least tempted to be - otherwise why would he say what he did? Mind you, if you were to go back to the King James Bible, instead of “Do not be anxious” as we just heard, Jesus is recorded as saying, “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” The word anxious doesn’t appear.

Any translation will use words appropriate to the day to translate the original Greek. The Greek word translated as “be anxious” is “merimnate” - and though the word anxious didn’t appear in the King James translation, by the time of the Revised Standard Version published in 1952, and presumably therefore the American Standard Version of 1901, “do not be anxious” was the accepted best translation.

In fact, anxiety became a word in English somewhere around the 1520’s, deriving from the Latin root “anxius” meaning “uneasy, or troubled in mind”. I’m not surprised that it should have been too new a word to be used when the King James Bible was produced less than a century later, because it took quite a long time to be used much in every day speech. In fact, it wasn’t much used as a word until the 19th century. But then from about 1904 it acquired a more technical usage: “anxiety” became identified as a condition by psychiatrists. And when I took a few weeks off stress back in 1993 the word actually used on my doctor’s note was “anxiety”.

We could therefore think of anxiety as “being so worried it makes us ill”. But we shouldn’t forget that the word “anxious” doesn’t always have to have a negative meaning. As a host, I might be anxious to ensure my guest has an enjoyable visit, and is fed and watered as he or she should be. That doesn’t have to mean I’m worried about what they might think or say if they’re not - just that I’m looking out for their welfare, and wanting to do my best to make sure they’ve enjoy their visit.

So it occurs to me that Jesus is not saying to his disciples that they should not be anxious, full stop, but that they should be anxious for the right things.

In which case, what are the things in our lives that cause us anxiety? A quick trawl through the magazine that helpfully came through my letter box as I was sitting down to write this suggests that we’re not short of people looking to persuade us into anxiety about the right things to eat and the right things to wear, like in our reading. And we may also be anxious about the right car to drive, the right watch to wear, or the right perfume to splash on ourselves. All in the ads in my magazine: advertising and anxiety are closely connected in today’s society - some of the most effective ads either latch on to our perceived anxieties or even create them. What will people think of us, if we don’t drive this, or wear that, or serve this to our families at tea time? Along with - just at the moment - look at these people enjoying themselves in sunny Tenerife or Bodum or Rhodes: we could be enjoying ourselves too, if we booked with whoever it might be.

But maybe we have some more serious anxieties: what will happen now we’ve left the EU, for example - you don’t have to have been a remainer to worry a bit about what leaving might mean in practice. Or there’s global warming; or hardening attitudes in world politics, radical Islam, increasingly illiberal regimes in (say) Russia or America. What about the perceived threat from immigrants who won’t conform to our ways, or the latest pandemic to emerge in China or Africa? The list is endless, and what’s on it probably depends on what newspaper you read, who you watch on TV, or who you last spoke to down the pub. And then we’ll all have our more local and personal anxieties: Is my job secure? Will I get on with the new people who’ve moved next door? Can I afford to get that gutter fixed? Am I eating too much cake? And so on - some of it trivial stuff, but not all of it; there’ll be individual anxieties that are really important and maybe quite scary.

In other words, anxiety is a fact of life, and we can’t escape it. If it gets out of hand, it disables us, both as individuals and also as communities and societies. Some of the most horrible things that happen in our world - ethnic cleansing in Bosnia or Rwanda, for example, began with a shared anxiety that was then stoked up and allowed to run rampant.

But anxiety can also be a force for good. It can change our lives and our choices in good and healthy ways, too. Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough have in their different ways encouraged not just awareness of global warming and anxiety about it, which is useless if all we do is wring our hands and tear our hair, but practical response - by individuals, by communities, and even by governments: maybe not enough yet, but a move in the right direction, even if some like Mr Trump remain to be persuaded.

So Jesus is telling us to be anxious for the right things, to be anxious in the right direction. And in particular, he says to us, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” - or, in the version we heard, “Set your minds on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else.” In other words, instead of being anxious about things that aren’t really all that important, be anxious for the one thing that really is important - that God’s kingdom is proclaimed and built where we are.

And how will that happen? The kingdom of God happens whenever and wherever people are doing God’s will. Martin Luther King said this: “When we see social relationships controlled everywhere by the principles which Jesus illustrated in life - trust, love, mercy, and altruism - then we shall know that the kingdom of God is here.”  And that starts within ourselves. Albert Schweitzer wrote: “There can be no Kingdom of God in the world without the Kingdom of God in our hearts.” So to be anxious for the kingdom of God means to let Jesus into our hearts, and into our lives, and to give ourselves in our living, in our behaving, in the choices we make, to be as like him as we can be.

The theme for today, the Second Sunday before Lent, is not anxiety - although that of course was there in our reading - but  creation. The state of God’s world is a major thing to be anxious about, and an important thing to be anxious for, for all of us.

Paul wrote to the Church in Rome that, as he saw it, “The whole created universe in all its parts groans as if in the pangs of childbirth.” There’s such a lot of anxious groaning around us today, and - to be honest - lots to validly groan about; in fact, we’re surrounded by so many and such huge problems they could just stifle and paralyse us. It’s too much, too big a task!

But Paul is writing not just about the agonies of the world, but also about opportunity. God is bringing something new to birth, he tells his readers in Rome. And Jesus tells his friends, “Be anxious for the kingdom, and God will give you all you need for the task ahead.”

So be anxious for the good things, be anxious in the right way, be anxious for the kingdom of God; and though what I might do, and what you might do, might seem not very much, might seem too small, what we can do together can be (and surely, in the cause of the kingdom, will be) earth changing. So let me end with one of my favourite quotes, from Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”

Some thoughts on law and light

Today’s Gospel reading requires us to think about Law. I have some friends who are well versed in the law, so much so that one of them’s just been made a judge. We expect our judges to be wise and learned people, and so she is, and she’ll need to be, because the law of the land is a complex business. But we’re thinking today not about the law of the land but the Law of God. So I suppose we’ll surely also to be thinking about sin, for sin is the word we use for when we break the Law of God.

Now for Jews the Law of God and the law of the land had been one and the same thing ever since they entered the Promised Land. The Law Moses brought down from the mountain top governed every aspect of their lives. But by the time of Jesus that had ceased to be the case, for now the people had to live their daily lives subject to the laws of Rome. There’ll have been many legal areas in which Rome and Moses were bound to agree - that murdering people is essentially wrong, for example - but even so, the very fact that a law made by an earthly emperor should take precedence over the law given by Moses would have rankled deeply with the faithful.

Most of us aim to be law-abiding, but all of us have times when we skate on some legal thin ice. The speed at which we choose to drive our car, for example, or if we ignore a “No trespassers” sign to take a short cut. Some laws we take more seriously than others. Or we may choose to break the law by, say, sitting down in the street as part of a demonstration against some action we don’t agree with, or by some form of non-violent direct action. And God’s law? How readily do we break that? Too readily, I guess. Maybe out of thoughtlessness, maybe out of self-interest or greed, maybe just because we’re in a hurry: times when perhaps we take more than we should, or don’t notice when someone’s been hurt, or rush past when we could have stopped and helped. It’s sort of hard not to break God’s law. Sometimes we have to choose the lesser of two evils: and whichever alternative we go for, we end up hurting someone or doing something we’re not happy to have done.

And then there are the times when we act with all good intent, and only realise afterwards that what we said or did was wrong. Hindsight can be a marvellous thing! And times when we’ve been wronged, but then what we then do or say makes things worse. And we could even find ourselves using the law itself as a means of wounding, limiting or excluding others.

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus tells his hearers that not a single letter of the law will be taken away by his teaching. Some folk, hearing the freshness of his teaching, had thought he was challenging the Law, rather like a 1960’s hippy in Haight-Ashbury saying, “Hey man, you don’t need all that law stuff any more, let’s all just love one another.” But Jesus tells them he’s come not to do away with the law but to complete it.

Rules are of course essential for the proper ordering of things. The Law is there for a good and necessary purpose. My freedom to do what I want has to be limited, so that I’m not damaging your freedom more than I have to. Rules keep a balance. But they also have their limits. You can be really good at keeping to the letter of the law, while still acting in a way that’s immoral or damaging - and you might even use the law itself as a means to do down others and make sure things go your way.

So laws don’t always do the job they’re meant to. To test whether a rule is working properly, we need to look at the effect it has on the person at its receiving end. Maybe a law is fair but the punishment is excessive. Or maybe it’s being applied without compassion or humanity. Bad law and badly applied law causes harm instead of limiting harm. Here’s where those who administer the law, including new judges like my friend, need more than just book wisdom and a detailed knowledge of the mechanism of justice. Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, claims to be speaking with a greater and higher wisdom than the wisdom of the world - for by the Holy Spirit he’s brought into a knowledge of God’s own nature, and that’s what guides his speech and his action.

As Christians, we should allow the Spirit to lead us into a Christ-like way of living. And when it comes to law and sin we do well to be critical of ourselves, and how rules and laws are applied and used. And our clue to what’s expected of us is there at the start of our Gospel. Before he talks about the Law standing unchanged, unaltered, with not one jot taken away, Jesus tells his hearers about what their role should be as his people.

They, and we, are to be salt and light to the world. In other words, making a positive difference, making things better, and affirming people, showing them the way. This is the higher and wiser application of the Law, whose true aim is never to beat people down but always to raise them up. The demanding question Christians need always to ask, especially if we’re tempted into any form of self-righteousness, is this: Am I standing up for righteousness and truth, or am I doing this to make myself feel good and maybe to leave someone else feeling bad?

Throughout what we call the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus encourages those who heard him there to show compassion to those around them, to care for others. His teaching takes nothing from the list of rules and laws that governed people’s lives, but it does turn that law on its head, and change the way it applies to us. All law, religious and secular, aims to order society and keep us safe – if you don’t have rules then you end up with chaos and anarchy. So the law merits our honour and respect.

But when law is used to exclude or to oppress, when law lowers one person’s status so that another’s may be enhanced, or when law boosts one person’s sense of righteousness and labels another person as useless or incapable, or for that matter when law is applied letter by letter but without compassion, then law isn’t doing what God intends it to do. We sin not when we don’t keep the law letter by letter: we sin when we’re not being salt, when we’re hiding our light, when we let God’s love go begging.

And we do these things more often than we recognise; but sin, praise God, has a remedy. When we face up to our failings, and confess our sins and mean it, God promises to forgive us. It’s like we get given instead of our tatty old workbook a brand new diary with no ink blots and no crossings out - a chance to start afresh, to have another go. That amazing forgiveness should itself challenge and change any self-righteous attitude to what law is there to do. How can I not have compassion on my neighbour who makes a mistake, when God has been so compassionate to me? At the heart of all that Jesus says about law and judgement - and he says a lot - is this plain truth: we are all loved, completely and without any question by the one who is the source of all law, and whose nature is all love.