Bolivia (Church of England Paper Article)
 It seemed a great idea, as Chairman of the Trust that each year puts on the Detling Summer Conference – a kind of New Wine event in the South East of England. I was invited by Compassion International to go and look at some of their projects. I knew they would be good. It was Tony Campolo who first put us in touch with Compassion International, and since then we have had an ongoing relationship with them.
When I was asked to go on a church leaders’ trip to view some of the projects, I was thrilled. When I learnt it was to be Bolivia, I was bemused. What was the purpose of taking us so far, to a land-locked country in the middle of South America, far away from the usual well-beaten tourist areas, or the usual charity projects route? We wouldn’t discover the answer to that question until we arrived. First, we had to get there. There were three flights, including an extra one, because we were dodging a national general strike the following day. So altogether we were travelling about 35 hours, but it was fun. There were some great people - some of them people I’d known for years, and others I’d always wanted to meet.
Our first centre was the city that sits in the middle of Bolivia, Cochabamba, a city of a million people. It is spread out across the surface of a huge bowl surrounded by mountains. Travelling on our bus to visit the projects, it did not take long for the relative prosperity of the city to be lost behind us. Soon we were travelling through areas as miserably poor as anything I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. Finally we arrived at the area where the project was. The surface of the street was packed mud and stone. Many of the houses looked as though they had been transplanted from one of those westerns where people have strayed across the border into Mexico. But the street was lined with children, waving their flags and welcoming us. When we turned the corner, there were yet more children.
Finally we arrived at the project and were surrounded by children, some pretty, some plain, some lively, some painfully shy. But all of them curious. We went to visit the home of two of the children – a brother and sister - who lived about a quarter of a mile away, across the dried-up ditches and parched fields of an area that had been too long without rain.
When we arrived at the house, we were greeted by their mother. Her name was Concepcion. She stood on the packed mud floor of a mud and straw brick hovel. Her children clustered around, clutching at her skirts. Outside, the early summer temperature was already quite high. It can rise as high as 36 degrees Centigrade. At nights it can plummet to 0 degrees. There was no fireplace in the single living room, and no electricity. Water had to be fetched from a hundred metres away. Her husband was sick, but walked several kilometres every day to a back-breaking job that paid just enough to keep the family alive. A single home-made ladder led to the upper room. The whole family slept up there, on the floor. The daily meal would be cooked over a wood fire in the open-air hearth outside, or over the single gas ring linked by a tube to the Calor gas cylinder.We learned that she was about 25. She looked 45. Her eastern Andean origins showed in her coppery colour and high cheek bones. But it was her eyes that got to you. There was so little hope there. Only when she talked about the two children who were sponsored by first-world Christians did the burden lift a little. When one of us asked gently ‘Is there anything special we can pray for, for you?’ her voice became strangled by the attempt to hold back her tears. Through our interpreter she said ‘I would like to be able to own this house and the land that goes with it – but I do not see how that could be.’ We learned that tenants who stay in property for 10 years automatically gain rights to the house and land, so the landlord moves them on in the ninth year. There is no possibility of building a stable community, and no way to guarantee continuity of education for the children.There were five of us visiting. She had done her best to clean up, and the family’s best blanket had been spread along a single plank balanced on bricks to form a seat for her guests. The family’s entire wardrobe of clothes was bundled over two ropes, hanging across the corners. When we asked how much it would cost to buy the property, we were told the princely sum of £2,000 would do it – just £2,000. It was shattering to realise that a sum of money that, in Britain, would be relatively small, would make such an enormous difference to this family. Now in lots of ways I’m a typical bloke; a bloke from a prosperous first-world country, where we worry about the stability of our banks, our mortgage payments, and the prospect of England’s football team ever winning anything. Suddenly my concerns seemed stupid, shallow and selfish. It was like God was saying, ‘Open your eyes, Eric. This is the stuff that breaks my heart. When is it going to touch yours?’ The following day we did it again; visited another project; went and visited another home. This time the family lived in a single concrete box that had been built into the base of a water tower. The two children sponsored in this home had only just started their involvement with Compassion and the mother was only beginning to appreciate how much difference this was going to make to those children, and to the whole family. Yet again, we came away humbled.The next day we flew from Cochabamba to the capital, La Paz – the highest capital city in the world. Beautiful and amazing. A city set on steep valleys and surrounded by magnificent mountains. Once again, a visit to a project attached to a church – meeting with a pastor who has built a community – a little foretaste of the kingdom that is to come, built out of the lives of the poorest of the poor. Living stones, building an eternal kingdom.This time our home visit takes us to the home of a girl called Naomi, who had nearly died from heart failure. But the entire project, the school community and the church all got together and raised for them the amazing sum of £3,000, to pay for her to go to hospital and to receive life-giving surgery; something that would never have been possible had it not been for the work of Compassion.I looked at this beautiful girl, and reflected that Naomi had been someone through whom all sorts of people, who would not otherwise have made connections with each other, had done so. How like the one after whom she was named, through whom Ruth, the Moabite, met Boaz the Jew and gave birth to Jesse, the father of David, from whom came David’s greatest son, Jesus himself. Did she know how God would use her? Of course not. Does this girl know how God will use her? Of course not. But someone, somewhere in the world, has made it possible for this girl to live.On the last day we came to the highest navigable lake in the world. A lake sacred to the Incas – Lake Titicaca. A place of such beauty that it takes your breath away. We journeyed on a boat across the lake. We’d been warned that this would be the coldest day of our trip. In fact, the sun blazed out of a cloudless sky, and I got sun-burnt.We arrived at the island of Suriqui; in so many ways a perfect place, and yet a place of great need. I looked at the children and decided I would just have to sponsor two more. It really was the least I could do. In the sacred lake of Titicaca we discovered once again the Jesus who is there in the least of these.We returned to London with unforgettable memories. I’m an ordinary bloke from a prosperous first-world country. I’ve never had much time for the guilt-mongers – the bleeding hearts and their collecting tins. But I’d been face to face with human need; with the poverty that blights the lives of little children and grinds the poor into the ground. Oh, they manage – they have to. It’s what they do. But don’t let’s excuse ourselves with the fondly maintained illusion that they are ‘happy with their lot’. It is breaking them down – human beings like you and me; made in the image of God.I returned sobered, ashamed of a Christianity that justifies us in our affluence and does not compel us to generosity. We’ve got so much . . . and we give so little. If church is boring, it’s because it’s all words. We never do anything. It’s time to change all that. Sponsor a child. Go on a mission trip. Open your eyes and start to agitate for a church that makes a difference where it counts – among the poor. After all, Jesus did say ‘When you did it to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me.’
Eric travelled to Bolivia with Compassion International.
If you want to sponsor a child through the, go to their website www.compassionuk.org
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Eric Delve, 19/10/2009 |
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Christianity Mazagine Interview "Staying Power"
 He was well known as a fiery evangelist in the 1970s but then, to the surprise of many, became an Anglican vicar. Now at an age when many retire, he continues to preach, teach and lead. John Buckeridge discovers how Eric Delve is still going strong at 65.I first heard you, in the late 1970s when you were a firebrand itinerant evangelist with Youth For Christ. Does ‘firebrand’ still characterise you now?I guess it would in some ways. As an evangelist you’re focused on just one thing, you want to get people to commit themselves to Jesus and that’s it. You can’t bash people with that if you preach to them every week at your own church, although you do need to explore the implications of ‘You’re committed to Jesus’.Am I still fiery? I certainly hope so. I still believe that God wants to do far, far more than we are allowing him to do. I still believe his biggest problem is the Church. I still believe that one of his desires is to use the Church of England far more than it has allowed him to do. So I’m passionate about those things and I get very steamed up about them.So you were a fiery evangelist, now you’ re a fiery vicar, at St Luke’s church in Maidstone. Tell us about that journey.I was on the road as a travelling evangelist for close to 20 years. I felt that all too often Jesus was represented merely as a kind of conductor on the bus to heaven, doling out tickets that other people were paying for. And in fact, of course, he paid for the tickets. Real Christianity isn’t about getting a ticket for heaven. Real Christianity is about a passionate commitment to Jesus that means he comes top of your list and heaven would be the most natural progression when you die because you’ve been living there for decades anyway with him. So that’s the kind of Christianity I want to see happen, I want to see heaven released on earth.But more and more I was being used by Christians as a kind of ‘Let’s entertain the troops’[figure]; ‘Eric’ll make us laugh’, and, to be honest, I began to get very cynical and very angry. I got to the point where I was just raging, and God kind of asked me whether that was a good state to be in, as he gently does.One day I was reading the New Testament and I came across Paul casually mentioning that for three years he’d been in Ephesus. And I thought, ‘Wow! The evangelist par excellence has spent three years in one place.’ I had thought to be an evangelist I had to go on this treadmill of going to places.I began to pray. I thought I was going to get a church in a city centre close to a university, loads of nurses and doctors from medical schools and all that kind of thing.Actually what God did was to send us to Liverpool, to the inner city. I went to a place called Kirkdale. The Bishop of Liverpool had asked if I would go and look at a parish, so we drove into this little square in the middle of a housing estate and saw this building that had been built as a small supermarket for the local area. It had iron shutters on every door, and we sat there. The cloud cover was like it is sometimes in Liverpool, sort of 20 feet above your head, rain coming in horizontally, McDonald’s wrappers blew across this car park, and I looked at this dump of a building. I said, ‘God, this is a wasteland’. And instantly I felt God say to me, ‘It’s a wasteland where people live, Eric.’ And that was the moment that I thought, ‘Oh blast.’ Actually I said something else but...This was not where you wanted to be.No! But I thought, ‘He wants us here.’ I turned to my wife Pat and said, ‘What do you think?’ She turned to my son Andrew and asked him and he said, ‘Well, I don’t like it, but I think it’s where we’re meant to be, Dad.’So we went to Liverpool and it really saved me because I’d gotten so used to just the thing on the road and had become cynical about preaching. I went there and discovered once again the power of the gospel to change the lives of ordinary people, to transform them, and saw people not only come to faith in Jesus and give their lives to him, but begin to grow. And that was so amazing. The people in that church were brilliant, we loved them and they loved us. Our time there was a real time of healing.After Liverpool came Maidstone and St Lukes where you’ve been for 12 years. And I gather that a distinctive part of your ministry there is with men.We’ve got five separate ministries for men. There’s a group called the Journey Men who are a walking group who get together on Saturdays and often have a breakfast before they go. Somebody speaks and then they go off and walk together for the day. Then there’s the Men’s Dining Group which I head up, which meets once a month at a local hotel where we’ve negotiated a really good three-course meal for £15. Then there’s Lionhearts, which is a group that works with small groups in churches. They are associated with Christian Vision for Men, and they are passionate about getting men into what they call ‘Bands of Brothers’ and I think that that’s vital. I think men need each other, they really do. Then there’s The Shed – called that because the man who started it thought that it would be like a garden shed, you know where you go to retreat.Most men like sheds.They do, they do. But this is a shed for men who are kind of in their gardening years, of 60 or over. They get together once a month, sit and chat and pray and so on, and encourage one another and there are about 15-20 in that group. Plus we have a men’s breakfast where they have a guest speaker. We are thinking about a sixth group which would be a film club, so men could sit and watch a movie together and then talk about their response to it.What’s the best thing about being a vicar?I think the fact that you can have a great deal of fun.That’s not the answer I was expecting!Once you become a vicar, what the Church of England calls an incumbent, once you become that, they can’t get rid of you. So actually you have enormous freedom. Nobody can get rid of you, the bishop can’t, unless you steal loads of money, or run off with several people’s wives! So you can have enormous freedom to have fun in the name of Jesus.People will say, ‘Oh, you’re one of the happy, clappy mob aren’t you?’ and I just say, ‘Oh yes, yes we are, absolutely, but there are plenty of the other sort around if you want those,’ If you want to go to a non-happy, non-clappy church you’re perfectly at liberty to do so, you know!What really amazes me is we get people come to us and they moan and say, ‘We don’t like the music, it’s too loud.’ But that’s what we do here, we do loud music! Why did you come if you didn’t want that? It’s like walking into McDonald’s and saying, ‘Why aren’t you serving prime fillet steak?’ And they go, ‘Because we don’t do that,’ and you stand there complaining about it.And what’s the biggest difference now in terms of being based in one church, in one location with one parish, compared to travelling around the UK?There are huge responsibilities on a vicar. Any church leader knows this. Being a vicar, being the point man for almost everything, senior pastor, whatever you call it, is a tremendous challenge. It can be the best job in the world and also at times be the worst job in the world.Do you think people appreciate that there’s a big cost to Christian leadership?Some do, but there are always those people who are coming from their own place of hurt, of rejection, of maybe an abusive father, not necessarily sexually abusive, but abusive in terms of physical violence, or emotional violence, and everything comes at them through that prism. So the moment you do something that they don’t want you to do, they feel rejection, and they feel it’s coming at them, all that stuff from the past, so they’re not seeing you, they’re seeing the dad or they’re seeing the brother or the husband that beat them up or whatever.All of that stuff is coming so you pick up, that’s what it means to be a priest to be honest, you stand as a representative, and people take it out on you. But that’s what God lets us do, isn’t it?It’s how I really began my Christian journey, finding out that God isn’t bothered, particularly, by our rage, our rejection, our hurt. We can take it out on him and he’s just so gracious.Another aspect of what St Luke’s does is Detling –- an annual summer event – that you and the church give a lot of time and money and resources to. Why do you put so much energy into Detling?I love big Christian gatherings, I just love them. I came from a little tiny backstreet Brethren chapel and my world was constricted to that, because we only ever met with the Brethren. I’ve had similar conversations with people brought up in Methodism, or Baptists, or Anglicans, you know, never the twain would meet.We thought the Baptists were probably saved. The Pentecostals were saved but terribly unstable, and God clearly couldn’t trust them, and the Methodists? Well, John Wesley was probably saved, but the rest of them looked as if they believed more in tea than anything else. The Congregationalists we never even considered to be Christians. Roman Catholics, of course, as far as we were concerned, were actually in a tube going down into hell, and Anglicans were grouped in the funnel leading into the tube. One or two Anglicans we thought might be saved. That’s the way we were brought up. Quite ridiculous, but there you go!So I came from this tiny little backstreet chapel, and in 1954, at the age of 12, I was taken to hear Billy Graham at Harringay. We’d never seen anything like that, ever. Billy focused everybody around the gospel. And that was the incredible power of what he did. It transformed my understanding of the church of God immensely. It gave me a reference point for understanding the descriptions in the book of Revelation of the huge assemblies of the Saints of God. It awakened in me a longing to be part of that heavenly gathering but to create a foretaste of it here on earth.This had a huge impact on you.Oh yeah. And Billy, preaching like he meant what he said, and he said what he meant. I sat there looking at all that and I said, ‘God, I would just love to do that.’ And it was like God said to me, ‘That’s because that’s what I want you to do.’So that’s part of why you’re so passionate about Detling?Yes, I was invited to speak at New Wine, and thought it was absolutely brilliant. I went to New Wine leaders, and asked, ‘Why can’t we have one in the south-east?’ They told me this was something I had to do.So in 1997 I went with my then worship director and looked at the Kent County Showground which was just three miles from our church and we said, ‘Right, we’re gonna do it.’ The first year was in 2000, so this year will be our ninth. And it’s been a miracle that it’s kept going to be honest. We’re only 20 minutes from the M25 so some come for the day, while others want to camp and they bring their caravans or their tents.What I love about it is that it’s a different socio-economic mix from either Spring Harvest or New Wine because it’s quite local, and we reflect the kind of situation that most of Kent is in. I love it because we’re touching the people of the community where I serve. And it’s brilliant. We’re giving them the best. We’ve got RT Kendall coming this year, John Paul Jackson, Jackie Pullinger. It’s gonna be great© 2009 Eric Delve. All Rights Reserved.
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Eric Delve, 19/10/2009 |
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Eric in Bolivia
 She stood on the packed mud floor of a mud and straw brick hovel. Her children clustered around, clutching at her skirts. Outside, the early summer temperature was already quite high. It could rise as high as 36 degrees Centigrade. At nights it would plummet to 0 degrees Centigrade. There was no fireplace in the single living room, and no electricity. Water had to be fetched from a hundred metres away. Her husband was sick, but walked several kilometres every day to a back-breaking job that paid just enough to keep the family alive.A single home-made ladder led to the upper room. The whole family slept up there on the floor. The daily meal would be cooked over a wood fire in the open-air hearth outside, or over the single gas ring linked by a tube to the Calor gas cylinder. There were five of us visiting. She had done her best to clean up, and the family’s best blanket had been spread along a single plank balanced on bricks to form a seat for her guests. The family’s entire wardrobe of clothes was bundled over two ropes, hanging across the corners. We learned that she was about 25. She looked 45. Her name was Concepcion. Her eastern Andean origins showed in her coppery colour and high cheek bones. But it was her eyes that got to you. There was so little hope there. Only when she talked about the two children who were sponsored by first-world Christians did the burden lift a little. When one of us asked gently ‘Is there anything special we can pray for, for you?’ her voice became strangled by the attempt to hold back her tears. Through the interpreter she said ‘I would like to be able to own this house and the land that goes with it – but I do not see how that could be.’ We learned that tenants who stay in a property for 10 years automatically gain the right to the land, so the landlord moves them on in the ninth year. When we asked how much it would cost to buy the property, we were told the princely sum of £2,000 would do it – just £2,000. I am a bloke. A bloke from a prosperous first-world country, where we worry about the stability of our banks, our mortgages and the prospects of the England football team ever winning anything. Suddenly my concerns seemed stupid, shallow, selfish. It was like God was saying ‘Open your eyes, Eric. This is the stuff that breaks my heart. When is it going to touch yours?’ I am a bloke. I have never had much time for the guilt-mongers: the bleeding hearts and their collecting tins. But now I was face to face with human need, with the poverty that blights the lives of little children and grinds the poor into the ground. Oh, they manage – they have to. It’s what they do. But don’t let’s excuse ourselves with the fondly maintained illusion that they are ‘happy with their lot’. It is breaking them down – human beings like you and me. Made in the image of God. I sponsored two more children. It really was the least I could do. I returned sobered. Ashamed of a Christianity that justifies us in our affluence and does not compel us to generosity. We have got so much . . .and we give so little. Fellows, it is time for us to get involved. We really can make a difference. Church is boring because it’s all words – we never do anything. It is time to change all that. Sponsor a child, go on a mission trip. Open your eyes and start to agitate for a church that makes a difference where it counts – among the poorest of the poor. Maybe there we will meet Jesus – the real, authentic, down-to-earth Son of God. After all, didn’t he say ‘When you did it to the least of these my brothers, you were doing it to me’.
Eric went to Bolivia with Compassion International.
To sponsor a child through them, go to www.compassionuk.org
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Eric Delve, 19/10/2009 |
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Delting 2007
So many people said it to me, and it was also my experience – this was the best Detling yet. Most of the time the weather was absolutely beautiful. The only rain that fell came in a period of one and a half hours, and was the most concentrated downpour I’ve ever experienced. It began as Andrew White was telling us about life under bombardment in Baghdad. His response to the astonishing sound of the rain falling was ‘Now I’m beginning to feel at home.’ It continued for an hour and a half and was so torrential that our stewards felt they could not allow people to leave the building, because it would be too dangerous. Our children were brought back in (soaking wet), and a kind of ‘Blitz’ mentality developed. Jonathan Veira did an amazing impromptu concert. Some, whose tents had been totally soaked, slept in the John Hendry building (normally a restaurant). Someone looking at Detling hill from across the valley said that it seemed to be crowned with lightning. All in all, it felt as though it was a prophetic sign. The following day, the water disappeared astonishingly quickly.I believe the teaching we received from Mike Murphy and also from preachers like Andrew White, Adrian Plass and Kyle Horner, was absolutely outstanding, as well as the nightly concerts from Jonathan Veira.For me personally, God did something regarding my expectation of his provision. We knew before the camp began that we needed to raise £100,000. We took an offering on the Sunday night and that was just under £4,000. £96,000 to go! We took another offering on the Wednesday - £48,000 came in, in pledges and gifts, plus promises of monthly giving amounting to about £5,000 for the coming year. It was a great response, but I knew that meant we still had at least £42,000 to go.Strangely, I felt at peace. I went to sleep, hardly consciously thinking about it. At 5 in the morning I sat up in bed in the horse box in which I was sleeping!, saying out loud ‘I know, that I know, that I know’. What did I know? I knew that God was going to enable us to meet the target. I saw myself standing on stage announcing ‘We made it!’ As I sat there, I felt that God gave me the concept of another offering entitled ‘Closing the Gap’. I wrote a response form ‘I believe in the Detling Conference. I want it to flourish. Here is my contribution towards Closing the Gap.’ The office did a magnificent job of getting the forms out on time. I invited people to contribute, and at the end of the day I was able to announce that the entire offerings over the course of the Conference had amounted to a total of £130,000, including Gift Aid.In the past, we have always come to the end of a Conference knowing that we had insufficient funds to get through the coming year. Our dedicated staff have sometimes not known when they would get paid. With this offering, God has lifted us onto a new level, and we can begin to plan for the future in a way that is really exciting.I want to say a huge thank you to everybody that responded and give testimony to the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, in moving people to respond. Halleluia!
Eric Delve chairs Revival Fire who host the Detling Conference
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Eric Delve, 19/10/2009 |
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But that was friday...
"Huddled in the swampy trenches of the Somme thousands of First World War soldiers, many still teenagers, waited for the dreaded command to ‘go over the top’. Hauling themselves onto the field of conflict they would face the full range of enemy’s weapons. Guns, tanks and inhumane gas bombs which, on explosion, would turn the dismal battlefield into an eerie yellow nightmare. If an unlucky soldier didn’t find his gas-mask in a matter of seconds he would die an excruciating death. Faced with this horrific anticipation of terror on the Western Front, some soldiers actually began to sweat blood in the trench. Once that had begun, none of themBefore Judas arrived in the Garden of Gethsemane to betray his master, the Lord Jesus Christ actually began to sweat blood. It wasn’t just the anticipation of the physical pain and suffering that was going to come. He also knew that God was going to take him, the one man who had never done anything wrong, and ‘make him sin for us’. I don’t understand what that means. All I know is that God was taking one human being - the finest, the best, the bravest, the hardest, the toughest, that ever was - and planned to plunge him into the mess, into the sinkhole of this world’s corruption and use him to soak it all up. Little wonder he ‘sweat great drops of blood’. But Jesus went on living for nearly 24 hours. And through that Thursday night and Friday morning, when he faced utter loneliness and all the rubbish this world could fling at him, he went on loving his killers. When Judas arrived in the Garden, Peter, the tough one of the outfit, leaped up and took out his sword hidden beneath his tunic. You see he was that kind of fellow. You can imagine him saying in his defiant Northern accent: ‘They’ll never get past me Lord. They’ll have to get past me if they’re going to get to you!’. The first thing he did was make for a man who wasn’t armed and chopped his ear off. That wasn’t very brave. The Lord Jesus said to him, ‘Put your sword away. If you live by the sword you die by it’. Suddenly all of Peter’s courage was gone. He dropped the sword and, along with the other disciples, ran and ran. Then some soldiers seized Christ and down through the streets they took him in the darkness.They brought him before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor. One of the cheapest and most effective tortures known to mankind is to blindfold the victim, standing him in front of a bunch of men and hit him from all quarters. The art of it is to prevent the man from falling down. The soldiers must have regarded this as a piece of sport. They taunted Jesus as they hit him and pushed him from person to person. And he went on loving them. And he never lost his temper. Then began the endless procession of encounters Christ had to contend with as he was pushed from authority to authority like a pinball trapped in a pinball machine. The High Priest, Pilate again.Then Herod. Herod, that drunken old man, one of the most wicked kings who ever sat on a throne anywhere, said: ‘I’m glad to see you. I’ve been wanting to for a long time. All we kings should get together, one king to another. I’ve been wanting to see a miracle for a long time. Show me a miracle and you can go free’. He just went on loving him. They sent him back to Pilate who didn’t know what to do. Maybe a flogging would satisfy the Jews. And well, it would be a shame of course, but some people had been known to actually die … it would be a terrible shame, of course, and flowers would be sent to the funeral, but it would save a lot of trouble …. So they strapped Jesus up and stretched him out. It may have been on a wooden frame but it is likely he was put round one of the great pillars in the basement of the Fortress Antonia.They then took a Roman scourge which was device of little lead balls embedded in leather thongs all the way down to the end, where there may have been a piece of copper or bone. He would be stretched out tight and his back would be like a drum skin. The first few strokes, as they began to flail it across a man’s back, would carve furrows in the skin. More strokes would pull off long strips of skin. Still more would sink deep into the muscle fibre, and flesh would be ripped off in lumps. Thirty-nine times. Still he went on loving them and never said a word. He was the hardest, toughest, bravest man there ever was. The gentlest and the funniest. The best. They wheeled him out in front of the crowds in a long red coat which it seems Herod had given him. By now somebody had found a crown. Somebody had probably said: ‘You can’t have a king without a crown - what a terrible shame ….’. The Romans were just like the British. It doesn’t matter what you do to somebody, you can be as cruel as you like, as long as it’s a joke. Somebody found some thorns, three or four inch long and hard as nails. He wound a crown out of these thorns and rammed it down on the head of Jesus. ‘Wouldn’t like you to lose your crown, O king. We couldn’t find a gold one so we knocked this one together for you. Hope you like it ….’ Thorns were rubbish. It was as if they were saying ‘if you are a king, Jesus, then you are the king of the rubbish heaps. That is our assessment of you’.So they wheeled him out in front of the crowds, wearing a purple robe, a crown of thorns on his head and with his face smashed. Pilate then, without realising it, said the wisest thing in his life. ‘Look at the man’. THE man. Because when God is in a man that is what you see. A beaten-up wreck ? No. Love, love, love. Love in human form. Love incarnate. The love of God, the most powerful force in all the universe. Loving those who would punish and beat and kick him. The crowd began baying like a pack of hounds, ‘Kill him, Kill him!’ Pilate knew he could do nothing. So like many of us would, and still do, he pulled out a bowl and washed his hands of the whole affair. They lead Jesus down through the streets of Jerusalem with his cross, through the baying mob, down into the valley and up the other side. And finally, that great heart and body gave up and collapsed. No wonder. They took him to the cross and nailed him to it. The Romans always nailed the right hand first. Then they dragged the left arm out and pulled that tight. A loop of rope would be tied round the legs. If you were going to die fast they didn’t give you seat for that would mean you died slowly, giving entertainment to the crowds for maybe a week. You would slowly waste away through gangrene and finally drown in your own juices. But the Jewish authorities, being terribly holy and sanctimonious said that there shouldn’t be any body hanging around the next day. It was a holy day and they didn’t want any nasty dead bodies reminding them.So they put a rope around him legs and tied it fast. Then they banged the spike home into the feet and dropped the cross into the socket in the ground. When that happened the joints at the top of the body would snap and what was once a man began to look quite obscene as it distended and stretched. But the terrible pain of it was on the heart, because the arteries began to stretch, pull and tear at the heart itself. While they were doing that he was saying ‘Father forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing ….’ When you begin to tear apart Jesus, who is God, all that comes out is love. Love towards the thieves on his right and left, and his own mother. Tender courteous love. Then the darkness came down, and in the darkness God was blaming him.The Bible says: ‘He bore our sins and iniquities in his body’. I don’t understand it but I do know this. Every time you do something wrong, it does something inside you, that is why we are all dying, because of the number of times we have done wrong things. Into the body of Christ God fed the corruption that you actually generated. Every lie you ever told he fed into Jesus, every time you stabbed a best friend in the back God fed it into him. Every time you punched a friend in real anger, every wound, every hurt you caused anyone God fed it into him. God blamed on Jesus everything that has ever gone wrong with the human race. If your mum got cancer, then blame him - but you’ll be too late because God has already done it. If your dad got killed in the war, or on the road, God has already blamed Jesus Christ for it. He has already felt all the pain that your mother felt, or your father, or your little brother who maybe died of leukaemia. God visited every sickness and pain that mankind ever felt anywhere and all the one that you don’t know about. All those nameless babies that died in Cambodia. All those little kids that got napalmed in Vietnam. All the Jewish kids that were burned in the ghetto in Warsaw and in the ovens in Belson and Buchenwald. All that they felt, God had already fed into Jesus Christ. He bore that sickness, disease and pain of the whole human race. I don’t know how, but I do know that healing is possible in the name of Jesus. This is the measure of God’s love. God vent all the terrible psychoses, like schizophrenia, that modern man has brought upon himself on Jesus. Because God loves people, and so does the Lord Jesus. There’s one more thing he blamed on him, all our guilt. The thing that makes man most miserable of all is his guilt. Christ dealt with that as well. As he hung there in the darkness, it all began to mount up inside him, until eventually there burst the most terrible cry: ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me ?’ And there was no answer for the first time since Jesus began to pray in public. No answer came from heaven. In the cold and in the dark it echoed around the hills. The cry of a man in hell. He said, ‘I thirst’ and they tried to give him anaesthetic in a sponge on the end of a stick, but he refused. If he was going to bear your guilt and mine he had to be conscious, aware of every single bit of it otherwise our sins could never be forgiven. God, in his own son, did not even allow himself as creator that little bit of comfort which crude anaesthetic could have given him. Finally he cried, ‘It is finished’, meaning ‘the account is fully settled and paid for’. Everything we have ever done wrong was paid for at that moment in the death of Jesus. Christ wasn’t only dying so we could be forgiven sinners, as powerless after believing as we were before, he died so we could die with him.But that wasn’t the end of the story although many people still believe it was. Scrawled up on a wall I noticed someone had recently written: ‘God is alive and well and working on a far less ambitious project’. Oh, but the writer was so wrong. Christ’s death wasn’t an heroic failure. His death paves the way into the kingdom because we were forgiven when Christ cried those glorious words: ‘It is finished’. So, many people believe the story ended there. But that was Friday ….
By Eric Delve and Tony Campolo
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Eric Delve and Tony Campolo, 19/10/2009 |
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