In the real world... April 2006
8 February 2008 - 8:54pm — Sarah Hall
It's the beginning of April - and still no Easter. How are you doing with your Lent challenges, I wonder, whether it's ideas from that little book given out at church on the first Sunday of Lent, or your own programme? Myself, I find that it takes determination to keep on after the first flush of enthusiasm wears off. Wouldn't life be so much easier,
I wonder to myself, if I gave up on my hope of changing things with the rueful words, ‘That's all very well in theory, but in the real world...'?
It's tempting to split up life into theory and practice: what we would love to do if we only had time/energy/more help, set against what's actually possible/sensible/the only way to survive. Some people pile everything into the ‘practice' category, and end up facing burnout; others push away anything outside their comfort zone into ‘theory' and end up bored stiff. Most of us waver between the extremes, comforting ourselves that, after all, unlike those driven activists or those couch-potato theorists, we live in the real world. But what is this real world, anyway?
When I was a student, I used to get irritated with people who assured me that university was a rest-cure compared with ‘the real world', by which they presumably meant the more mundane side of life. What sort of world did they think I lived in: an ivory tower where housework automatically did itself, bills paid themselves, everyone thought Christians were right and all I had to do was sit around in libraries? If they lived my life for a bit, they'd realise it was ‘real' too!
We may be tempted, too, to think of the first-century world of the Gospels, so far from our own experience, as rather unreal. Old Sunday-school pictures may show a blond, blue-eyed Jesus in a spotless white robe - but that sort of image has little to do with a first-century Jewish young man, who would have been walking on dusty roads all day, on smelly feet that would need washing when he came into the house! Again, the agricultural word-pictures Jesus chose to talk about God's kingdom can have a nostalgic ring to us in twenty-first century Sheffield - a sort of Archers serial, with a bit more religion added in. But it can be a bit of a shock to think how many parables he told that involved money (if you get bored in a sermon this month, why not try counting them?) And of course, as any farmer knows, country life is very much part of the ‘real' world - the storylines of the Archers involve government regulations, business takeovers and migrant workers as much as flower shows and bottle-fed lambs.
I find it challenging that Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem, that hub of political and religious power and the place where his death awaited him, lived in ‘the real world'; that means we cannot say he has no part in the mundane side of our lives, arguing that the Gospels belong to the ideal world of ‘wouldn't it be nice if...'.
Yet in a strange way it's comforting too. For if God's power and God's love were seen in Jesus, in the real world of first-century Palestine, and confirmed in the events of Easter, then we can stop trying to be superhuman ourselves, and instead can look to that power and that love in our own struggles to live as God wants, here and now. But, of course, that's the theory - will you have a go at putting it into practice, this Easter and beyond?
I wonder to myself, if I gave up on my hope of changing things with the rueful words, ‘That's all very well in theory, but in the real world...'?
It's tempting to split up life into theory and practice: what we would love to do if we only had time/energy/more help, set against what's actually possible/sensible/the only way to survive. Some people pile everything into the ‘practice' category, and end up facing burnout; others push away anything outside their comfort zone into ‘theory' and end up bored stiff. Most of us waver between the extremes, comforting ourselves that, after all, unlike those driven activists or those couch-potato theorists, we live in the real world. But what is this real world, anyway?
When I was a student, I used to get irritated with people who assured me that university was a rest-cure compared with ‘the real world', by which they presumably meant the more mundane side of life. What sort of world did they think I lived in: an ivory tower where housework automatically did itself, bills paid themselves, everyone thought Christians were right and all I had to do was sit around in libraries? If they lived my life for a bit, they'd realise it was ‘real' too!
We may be tempted, too, to think of the first-century world of the Gospels, so far from our own experience, as rather unreal. Old Sunday-school pictures may show a blond, blue-eyed Jesus in a spotless white robe - but that sort of image has little to do with a first-century Jewish young man, who would have been walking on dusty roads all day, on smelly feet that would need washing when he came into the house! Again, the agricultural word-pictures Jesus chose to talk about God's kingdom can have a nostalgic ring to us in twenty-first century Sheffield - a sort of Archers serial, with a bit more religion added in. But it can be a bit of a shock to think how many parables he told that involved money (if you get bored in a sermon this month, why not try counting them?) And of course, as any farmer knows, country life is very much part of the ‘real' world - the storylines of the Archers involve government regulations, business takeovers and migrant workers as much as flower shows and bottle-fed lambs.
I find it challenging that Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem, that hub of political and religious power and the place where his death awaited him, lived in ‘the real world'; that means we cannot say he has no part in the mundane side of our lives, arguing that the Gospels belong to the ideal world of ‘wouldn't it be nice if...'.
Yet in a strange way it's comforting too. For if God's power and God's love were seen in Jesus, in the real world of first-century Palestine, and confirmed in the events of Easter, then we can stop trying to be superhuman ourselves, and instead can look to that power and that love in our own struggles to live as God wants, here and now. But, of course, that's the theory - will you have a go at putting it into practice, this Easter and beyond?
