Perhaps the most well-known passage about fruit-bearing in Scripture comes to us from the hand of Paul in Galatians 5, where he talks about the ‘fruit of the Spirit’:

²² But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. ²⁴ And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. ²⁵ If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. Galatians 5:13-25

What did Paul intend with this?

Galatians is a letter which Paul wrote primarily to defend the truth of the Gospel, and about how one of the primary consequences of the true Gospel is a transformed, unified community. Chapter 5 in particular is Paul giving practical instruction about how to love and serve one another in the church. This is the backdrop from which he proceeds to give us the list of viruses known as the fruit of the Spirit.

But what did he intend by giving us this list? What exactly are we to make of it? As I was researching for a teaching series on the fruit of the Spirit, and writing the introductory sermon, I found that articulating the following points really helped me get a clearer grasp than I’d had before on what exactly Paul was doing with this famous list of virtues.

The fruit is singular

It is important first to notice that Paul says “fruit” (singular), not “fruits.” This is deliberate. He is not giving us a menu of spiritual qualities to pick from. He is describing one integrated reality—the character of Christ expressed in multiple dimensions. A fruit tree does not produce different kinds of fruit, it only produces one kind. Why is this distinction important? Let’s think about. Some people are naturally joyful and loving, but perhaps struggle in the area of self-control. Others may be earnest, faithful and able to tame their impulses, but lacking in joyfulness or peaceableness. By seeing the fruit as one integrated reality (rather than a pick & choose list), we are all challenged to grow our areas of lack, that we might become more like Jesus who modelled all of these things - and more. Which leads us to the next important point about the fruit of the Spirit.

The list isn’t exhaustive

The list itself—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—is representative, not exhaustive. It is a sketch of what the life of Jesus looks like when it is reproduced in ordinary human beings. There are some important virtues – humility I think being the most obvious – that aren’t on this particular list, but which we can absolutely describe as part of the Christlike, fruitful life. Scholars disagree on whether Paul used each word on this list precisely and intentionally, or whether he listed nine that jumped out to him in the moment, or even whether he was using a pre-existing list of nine virtues he heard somewhere else. What is clear is that this list - although substantial - does not cover every aspect of a Christlike like.

It isn’t a to-do list

The fruit of the Spirit is not a list of arbitrary moral demands placed upon us from the outside. It is not a to-do list. It is more like a declaration of what God intends to grow within us. The list describe the kind of people the Gospel is forming, not the kind of people God is demanding we become in our own strength. Importantly, this does not mean that Paul intends passivity on our part (we’ll cover this in a subsequent post). But it is important for now that we don’t see this in legalistic terms. It is called the fruit of the Spirit, not the works of the Christian. Fruit is produced naturally by a tree in the right conditions. So it shall be with us, as we abide in Jesus and walk by the Spirit.

It’s about more than the life of the individual

Crucially, these are internal virtues with outward impact. They describe the transformation of the individual heart - but they inevitably overflow into the corporate life of the community. Remember the context of Galatians 5 – Paul is trying to show them how to serve one another in love. He’s calling them to unity and healthy relational living. A Spirit-formed person becomes a source of blessing to those around them. The fruit is not merely for our private spirituality; it is for the good of the community. The world is meant to experience something of Jesus through the way his people live. This becomes clear as one studies the various words on the list in more detail. For example, ‘peace’ on the list is eirēnē in Greek, and it conveys the idea of peace in a relational sense - harmony and reconciliation - more than freedom from personal anxiety / inner peace.

To be continued!

The single most helpful and concise idea I came across as I did a deep-dive on this topic is from the work of Gordon Fee: ‘The essential nature of the fruit is the reproduction of the life of Christ in the believer’. If you remember nothing else from this post, remember that!

In a future post, I will consider the question, ‘how is the fruit of the Spirit produced in our lives?’

Until then, thanks for reading!

I’ve become aware over the last few years of something happening within me. The long, gradual journey out of youth and into something else. It’s been happening for a long time now - I became a dad at 26 after all. The big questions of Who and Where have found answers, as I wake up each day amongst particular People in a particular Place.

Mostly, I am aware that my life is an embarrassment of riches. A happy childhood. Eleven years married to a woman whose love and joy know no end. Three beautiful little souls in our home to love and nurture, but whose mere existence actually loves and nurtures mine. I spend my working hours doing something I find meaningful and challenging and nourishing. I have friendships now that are richer than I could have ever imagined in my teenage years - another of God’s Great Gifts to me. I’ve lived for fifteen years in a town that I love, where I nearly always bump into someone I know when I walk up the High Street. I read widely, and then I write sermons and poems and such, and doing these things bring joy to my heart and shape to my life. For all of this and more, I am full of gratitude.

Yet, I am not unacquainted with grief and struggle. A miscarriage. Some messy situations to navigate. Being up close to death and divorce, illness and infertility. Becoming more aware of my own shortcomings and inclination to choose the Lesser Way. Learning that things are rarely as simple as you think they’ll be when you are first setting out. That being a real friend means you can’t look the other way when the going gets tough. It’s a privilege to shoulder the burdens of others, but it’s also painful. You have to work to keep your heart soft, your prayers frequent, and your joy undiminished.

But above all of this, what’s been forming in me - slowly but surely - is Trust. The unshakeable gut instinct that somehow, all shall be well. Learning, as the psalmist says, to trust not in chariots and horses (that is, the conventional ways of getting things done) but in the name of the Lord. Knowing that there is a merciful hand guiding our steps, ushering us gently forwards.

So if a birthday is a time to celebrate and survey, I want to say thank you to everyone who has encouraged me, prayed for me, challenged me, especially in the last few years. It has all landed in a grateful heart.

Now, a toast:

Why Pray the Psalms?

There are many compelling reasons to take seriously the ancient practice of praying the psalms. Here is a (really) brief overview of three of those reasons.

1. The Psalms are the prayer language of Jesus and the Church

It is clear that the Psalms were the normative prayer language of Jesus himself, and of those who followed him in the early centuries of the Church. The Psalms are by far the most quoted book of the Old Testament in the New Testament, with around 90 explicit quotations and many other more subtle echoes. In the life of Jesus, there are a few well-known examples of him drawing upon the psalms, particularly at intense moments.

I love how, in Acts 4, we can see the early believers weaving the words of Psalm 2 into a prayer relevant to the situation they were facing in Jerusalem at the time. Psalm 2 is every bit as appropriate for us as we pray through the situations in our world today.

2. The Psalms help you pray through every part of your life

Athanasius, in his Letter to Marcellinus, writes extensively about the use of psalms in prayer. He says that while most of Scripture speaks to us, the Psalms speak for us. And that they speak about almost every part of life. Athanasius says:

“I believe that a person can find nothing more glorious than these Psalms; for they embrace the whole life of man, the affections of his mind, and the motions of his soul. To praise and glorify God, he can select a psalm suited to every occasion, and thus will find that they were written for him.”

Over the course of your life you will experience seasons of joy and seasons of despair, seasons of excitement and newness, and seasons of mundanity and repetitiveness. You will know seasons of health and strength, of illness and weakness. Times when your heart is filled with trust, and times when your head is full of doubt. You will have moments when everything you touch turns to gold – and others when you encounter opposition at every turn. There will be times when you are surrounded by friends and family, and times when you feel desperately alone. There are psalms that will give you language to pray in all of these times -

3. The Psalms ensure your prayer life is expansive

The church throughout history has known that praying with the Psalms keeps our prayers from collapsing down into whatever we feel or like or want on a given day. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote that the richness of God’s Word should determine our prayer, not the poverty of our own hearts. The psalms bring structure to our prayer life, allowing it to grow & flourish.

I’ve noticed that my own prayer life can become a bit like a sweet pea plant – without structure or support, it stays small, it doesn’t grow appropriately. Left to our own devices, it is likely that the range of our prayer becomes small, narrow, and perhaps self-centred. Praying the Psalms ensures that our praying life stays wide, and open, and imaginatively rich to all that is going on around us.

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Yes but how?

A goal of the teaching series (that this sermon was from) was to ensure that we equipped people with clear, practical tools to bring into their own prayer lives. After all, it’s not that helpful to know lots about prayer - what matters is to do it! To that end, I worked to come up with an articulation of the ways in which I have come to use the psalms in my own prayer life, and I realised there are three primary methods I use. If you haven’t tried praying the Psalms much before, I’d encourage you to try these methods out. In the talk I do a demonstration of each, and if it’s helpful, here is an image you can save or screenshot to serve as a quick reminder of these three methods:

Ultimately, as I have written a little about in previous posts, and plan to again, I believe that memorising psalms is one of the richest practices we can do for our minds and our souls as we walk in the way of Jesus. Until next time!

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A very original man must shape his life, make a schedule that allows him
to reflect, and study, and create. Gary Wills

I could feel it. A dullness creeping in. Going through the motions. Secretly feeling bored even though I was doing exactly what I had dreamed of doing since I was twelve years old.

I used to create constantly - making music in endless ways, year after year. Whatever else was going on in my life, I had music as a ceaseless creative outlet. Then, almost before I knew it, that outlet dried up. The opportunity was still there; it was my desire for it that had changed. My soul was craving something different, and I could sense a shift in my passions. Making music receded into the background as I took up theological study, and began to teach in church rather than lead worship.

Two things are true: I am grateful for the years I spent making music, and I know that I’m in the right lane in this season. I’m running hard at it. But something which became clear over the last few years as I have stopped making music has been a need to reframe what creativity in my life looks like. I believe that we are all creative, and we all need ways of working that creative instinct out, bringing forth beauty. Not everyone is creative in the classic forms of music or visual art or writing perhaps, but we are all built with an ability and a desire to make things and to put our unique stamp on the world.

For you it may be a problem at work which requires novel thinking to solve, or it may be curating a beautiful space to host people in. It could be an innovative new business idea, or working to see a script that you’ve written come to life on stage or screen. I know people who do all these things. For me, for years, it was making music on stages or in studios with all kinds of brilliant and interesting people. And I loved it. So what was I to do now with such a big change - would I end up becoming frustrated or despairing without that obvious creative outlet?

In the season of music, all my creativity blurred into one. Whether I was being paid or not, whether it was for a fun side project or a serious project with record labels and contracts, I was honestly just having fun making music. But the season I am in now is quite different, and I’ve begun to distinguish between vocational creativity, and avocational creativity in a way that I hadn’t needed to before. Let me explain.

Vocational Creativity

Most jobs require a degree of creativity. I realised quickly into my preaching season that, whilst very different to making music, writing sermons can absolutely be a creative act. Reading, praying, pondering, making connections between ideas, getting it all on paper, rearranging it, editing it, delivering it. It is a messy, beautiful, hard, fulfilling process. It is now a big part of my work. And it is an act of creativity. However, precisely because it is part of my vocation, and because it is an inherently weighty thing, it can sometimes come with a pressure or a repetitiveness that can make it less free and playful than mindlessly jamming on a guitar (something I highly recommend doing).

This isn’t a bad thing - I think good preaching is more likely to come from a life being lived on the frontlines, from prayers forged in the everyday battles of pastoring and leading and serving, than it is from a life of excessive boredom or comfort.

But what it did help me realise is the need in my life for a creative outlet that was free of any restrictions or external pressures. Something which is truly free, unstructured, that comes with no pressure, that is an act of pure creativity. Something which happens around the margins of life.

Avocational Creativity

I’ve come to think that we probably all need an area or two of avocational creativity - in other words, that which happens separately from our main job or occupation, done purely for the love of it. There may be a better word for this than avocational - perhaps playful creativity, or personal creativity - but the idea is creating for the sake of creating because you want to, not because you have to. Gardening, writing, pottery, baking, and drawing are common examples of the kinds of things which I mean - there are thousands of other options of course. My grandfather worked in a tobacco factory most of his life, but he kept a small room at the top of his terraced house as a woodworking space, and in his spare time he created beautiful walking sticks, fishing rods and the like simply because he wanted to. I still remember the excitement of going up to that light-filled workshop as a young child to see what he was working on, experiencing the smell of sawdust and oil in my nostrils.

So we all need pressure-free creative projects in our lives. I think it’s a key part of being a whole, happy human. The main trouble with this idea is that it requires you to have some margin in your life - or at least this is the main problem I’ve encountered with it in recent years.

As I crossfaded from music-making into pastoring and preaching, my life circumstances also changed. We went from having one kid to having three, and my responsibilities expanded greatly. Windows of unstructured free time became rare. The luxury of time - and the energy - needed to creatively pursue something in the margins of my life simply wasn’t there. It often still isn’t. But I have slowly learned that without moments of free, joyful creativity, I feel diminished somehow.

The Poetic Imagination

In 2019, on a trip to Bath with my wife and our firstborn, I stopped in a wonderful little bookshop and picked up my first book of poetry, The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry (my wife happened to capture this moment - see above!). I had heard about him from people whose taste I admired. There was no great attraction to poetry for me at the time, I just thought I’d give it a go. Within the first few days of perusing through the poems in that book, I was hooked. The way he wrote about everyday things leaped off the page and sparked something within me. The title of this post is the opening line of a poem from that book:

‘I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.’

Wow! Before I knew it, I was amassing a collection of poetry, immersing myself into it as often as time allowed, memorising parts that struck me as particularly profound or beautiful. I found that the act of savouring a poem became a spiritual discipline, a doorway into stillness and contemplation.

A few years into discovering this love of poetry, I realised that I wanted to try and create some of my own. It has been an infrequent, largely hidden practice, but it has become very meaningful to me. Where I used to think of musical ideas or find new sounds on the guitar, I now begin to string words together, searching for the right ones to complete a phrase, rearranging them, finding fresh ways to articulate something, losing myself in the pursuit of the perfect line. I know very little about the technical side of poetry. There is no economic value to what I’m writing. I’m a hack! But I love doing it, it brings me joy, and it is the perfect creative outlet for me in this season.

This month, I decided to take Thursdays off. I have been so busy in recent months that I began to realise that I wasn’t living with a poetic imagination anymore. My head was full of each day’s tasks. It is good and fruitful work, but often demanding. I needed to claw back some space in my schedule and in my heart to recover my imagination. Painting a room in silence, just letting my mind wander. Going for a walk with no set finish time, and just luxuriating in the beauty of the Surrey Hills. Doing simple things like this has helped spark my instinct for poetry again after a busy season.

I realise this is a privilege not everyone can afford. Once this month is over, I will need to find a new way to carve out some margin for this modest but precious creative outlet. But the message - whether you are retired, in the busiest season of your life, or not someone who thinks of themself as creative - is to urge you to consider finding some time and space to create in whatever way you feel most drawn to, with no external pressure for results. Making for the sake of making. I bet that you will feel more fully alive for doing so, for this is my experience.

To finish, here is a poem I wove together over the course of an hour or so of walking yesterday, eventually pausing under the shade of a tree as per Wendell Berry’s advice to write it down. It won’t make me a famous poet, it won’t make me money, it may resonate with no one else in the world - but writing it was an act of pure, joyous creativity - and so to me it is of infinite worth.

I would rather inbreathe an abundance of trees
	than gorge myself on the electric feed.
I often forget this; today I do not.

Uncontained air is all I require,
	for with it comes sustenance and space.

The soul cannot long sustain disconnection
	from those things first spoken by the Voice:

Places and people,
	root, leaf, and seed,
		for of these are we all comprised.

Yes, today I do not forget I am dust,
	for in this I find my life.

I hope you enjoyed this post. I would love to hear how and what you create in the margins of your own life - drop a comment below. Until next time, friends.

1 I lift my eyes up to the mountains
From where does my help come?
2 My help comes from the LORD
The maker of heaven and earth.

3 He will not let your foot be moved
He who keeps you will not slumber;
4 Behold, he who keeps Israel
Will neither slumber nor sleep.

5 The LORD is your keeper
The LORD is your shade on your right hand
6 The sun shall not strike you by day
Nor the moon by night.

7 The LORD will keep you from all evil
He will keep your life
8 The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in
From this time forth and forevermore.

I recently taught a session on the Psalms as part of a theology day with my alma mater, WTC Theology. To conclude the session, I honed in on a single psalm to do a close reading (I find it’s less intimidating to call it that instead of calling it an exegesis!). I chose Psalm 121, on one hand because I love it, and on the other because it manages, in just eight verses, to cover a lot of ground that is helpful for someone getting to grips with Hebrew poetics. In this article, I’d love to help you see some of the things happening in this poem in a way that you perhaps haven’t before.

Overview & Theme

Psalm 121 is the second Song of Ascents (Psalms 120-134). This is a group of fifteen psalms used by pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem for festivals throughout the year.1 Knowing this becomes helpful as we try to understand the psalm’s original meaning, because we can quickly see that this is a poem written from the perspective of someone travelling (i.e. a pilgrim).

A second thing we notice as we read this psalm is that there is a very clear keyword - keeper (or keep/keeps). This word occurs a whopping six times in just eight verses. In Hebrew this word is shamar (שָׁמַר) and it means to guard or protect or watch over. It’s the word used when God asks Adam to keep the garden of Eden. Noticing this theme of watching over, plus getting a feel for the overall tone of this psalm, helps steer us toward another key piece of information - what kind of psalm this is.

Without going into a lengthy sidebar about psalm categorisation, it has been a common practice in scholarship to group psalms by genre, since the work of German biblical scholar Hermann Gunkel in the early 20th Century. There are some drawbacks to this approach, but certainly some benefits - perhaps that’s a future post for me to write! For now, one of the well-established categories is known as ‘songs of trust.’ These are psalms which typically declare trust in God, show an awareness of danger, describe God’s character, usually have a peaceful tone, and have little in the way of petition. Psalm 121 is a clear example of this style, and has been described as an ‘unqualified song of trust in the Lord’s help.’2 Other notable psalms of trust include Ps 23, Ps 27, and Ps 91.

Looking at the Language

The psalm begins in the first-person before switching in v3 onwards primarily to the third person. This sort of shift is common in the psalms. Here it seems to function as a move from personal testimony (‘my help comes from the Lord’) into assurance for another (‘he will not let your foot be moved’).

As well as the repetition of the keyword shamar noted above, ‘the LORD’ is repeated five times in just eight verses, and is referred to four further times with a pronoun. This makes God the subject of the psalm at almost every opportunity. This works to constantly remind the reader that no matter the danger, their security is grounded entirely in Yahweh’s character and action.

Metonymy is used in this psalm. This is where a concept is referred to by naming something closely associated to it:

• ‘he will not let your foot be moved’ is clearly a relevant image for an ancient pilgrimage - imagine travelling through rocky terrain in sandals and tripping or slipping on a loose rock! However this phrase can also be taken as referring to the overall stability of one’s life.

• ‘he will keep your life’ is a way of saying that Yahweh will watch over your whole person/everything about you.

We also see several uses of a literal device known as a merism, where two opposites are expressed to represent totality or completeness:

• ‘heaven and earth’ implies that God is the maker of heaven and earth and everything within them.

• ‘your going out and your coming in’ is a Hebrew idiom for all of your activities. Here it may literally imply your pilgrimage/journey and your returning home, but as a merism the implication is that God watches over all of your activities

The Dangers of the Road

Aside from the possibility of tripping on rocky terrain, there are other dangers mentioned in the psalm which require a bit more unpacking - the sun and the moon. They function simultaneously as a merism and a metaphor - representing two opposite kinds of danger and everything else in between them.

For a pilgrim travelling in the Ancient Near East, sunstroke would have been a prime concern - this isn’t difficult to imagine. However, in what way is the moon dangerous? Euegene Peterson suggests that if the sun is a danger to the pilgrim’s physical health on their long journey, then the moon represents the danger to their mental and emotional health. Long distance travel, fatigue, and anxiety over robbers would all take a toll on the emotional state of the traveller. Indeed, ‘moonstroke’ is an ancient term and it’s interesting to note that the word lunar in modern English is the root of lunacy!3

Although these are helpful details to unravel, the point for us as modern readers is to understand that Yahweh watches over us no matter the kind of dangers we face.

Open to Interpretation?

Something which has intrigued me about this psalm is that there are multiple ways in which we can interpret its opening lines, given that they are somewhat enigmatic:

I lift my eyes up to the mountains, from where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.

Here are the three ways I think these lines can be understood:

1. Perhaps the most common way someone might understand this is to see it as speaking about God’s creative power. There are few things which inspire wonder in us as much as mountains do, and they are used elsewhere in Scripture to convey power (e.g. Ps 46:1-3). Understanding the opening as being about God’s power in creation is reenforced by the way v2 finishes by declaring Him the ‘maker of heaven and earth.’ We could therefore read Ps 121:1-2 along the following lines: “When I look at the mountains, they remind me of God’s power and majesty, and that brings me comfort - the one who created everything is on my side!”

2. A second way one could interpret the opening of Ps 121 comes from an understanding of the specific topographical features which the pilgrims who first composed and sang these psalms would have seen as they journeyed closer towards Jerusalem. The city of Jerusalem is surrounded by a ring of mountains known as the Judaean Hills - some of which are 1000m high. Ancient pilgrims heading to Jerusalem for a festival would surely have felt relief as they saw these mountains coming into view. It meant their journey was coming to an end, the festival was at-hand, and they would soon be worshipping Yahweh together. So a second way to interpret the opening of the psalm might go like this: “I lift my eyes to the mountains, and know that I am getting close to God’s presence.”

3. A third way that these opening lines could be understood is to be found in a closer examination of the culture in which these ancient pilgrims lived. In the Ancient Near East, high places were often associated with pagan rituals and worship. The mountains referred to in Ps 121 therefore could be argued to represent fear to the pilgrims, given that an altar to Baal may be placed there, or a ritual may be being performed: “I lift my eyes to the mountains, and I am filled with fear at what I see - but my help comes from the Lord.”

I find all three of these possibilities interesting. I was discussing them with an Old Testament scholar recently, and he suggested that if the author wanted us to interpret these lines in only one way, he would have given us enough information to make that clear. More likely, he suggested, is that it has been left open to multiple interpretations intentionally. This is of course not unusual in good poetry, but in Scripture it also creates that sense of freshness which means we never tire of it, and allows for many different pathways for prayer from this psalm.

Theological Interpretation

A final matter to consider is how to read this poem theologically, to ask ‘what does this part of scripture teach us about God?’ With this psalm, reading it literally might make one think that nothing bad will ever happen to those who are ‘kept’ by the Lord - ‘…he will not let your foot be moved…the sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.’ That, however, would be at odds with everything we know about God’s people both in history and in our own experience today. Bad things happen to those who trust God just as with those who don’t. What are we to make of this?

Derek Kidner says this psalm ‘doesn’t imply a cushioned life but a well-armed one.’4 What this psalm is telling us about God is that throughout the journey, though we will experience setbacks and curveballs, he is watching over us. Once we begin to read this psalm canonically (that is, along with the rest of Scripture), we can see this theme crop up elsewhere. Psalm 23’s ‘even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me’ comes first to my mind. We also know that at times, God will intervene directly in situations to protect us and further his purposes (the Exodus perhaps being the most dramatic example of this!).

Theologically, Psalm 121 is an affirmation of trust from those ancient pilgrims to their God. For us modern pilgrims, this psalm gives us language to declare our certainty that no matter where our journeys lead, that same God will be with us.

1. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft - Stephen King

Stephen King is one of the most successful authors ever. Yet, I had never read a word that he has written because horror is not my thing, and he is often referred to as the ‘master of horror.’ However, after telling a friend about my dream of becoming a good writer, she got me a copy of this - his nonfiction work On Writing (thanks Sarah!). I loved reading this book. He has such an immediate and interesting voice as a writer. In the book he says that ‘writing is refined thinking’ and as I read it, I got the clear sense that this is someone who has read a lot, written a lot, and thought about both a lot.

The book follows an interesting structure, with the first section being autobiographical, outlining his childhood and formative experiences and how these shaped his writing. After that is a brief section (‘Toolbox’) where he gives some specific advice on the techniques of writing (my favourite takeaway was ‘adverbs are not your friend’). Then comes the main section (‘On Writing’) where he offers hard-won wisdom on what makes for a great story. Some of it is specific to fiction writing but his style is so engaging that I still enjoyed the bits which are less relevant to what I’m trying to learn. To finish, there is a section detailing the near-fatal road accident he was involved in during the writing of this book in 1999, which makes for compelling reading. Now convinced of his brilliance as a storyteller, I’m going to add one of his novels to my list for later this year - happily they aren’t all horror stories!

In brief: Enjoyable! I would recommend this to anyone with even a passing interest in the art of storytelling. I might read it again in the future.

2. The Mosaic of Atonement - Joshua McNall

Each Easter at church I host an evening of discussion on atonement theology, and for this year’s event I wanted to push my own understanding on a few things further than I had before. I intentionally read this book slowly over a few months and made extensive notes as I went (and I’ve written a bit about it already in a previous post).

McNall’s basic premise is to take key atonement models (he opts for recapitulation, penal substitution, christus victor and moral influence) and show how they are an interdependent ‘mosaic’ - each contributing something significant to how we understand Christ’s work on the cross. He argues that we must avoid both the temptation to overemphasise one model of the atonement at the expense of the others and the temptation to see the models as a disconnected plurality.

It’s a brilliantly written book, and I think McNall does an admirable job of making his case. There were some surprises along the way - for example I didn’t expect a whole chapter on the ontological status of Satan! Perhaps the biggest learning for me was a deeper understanding of recapitulation in the vein of Irenaeus - how Jesus could ‘re-act’ the human story behalf of all of humanity, how he could ‘do and be what Adam & Israel had failed to do and be.’

In brief: if you’re looking for a rigorous but not difficult to read work of theology, or you want to sharpen your atonement theology, I don’t think you could get much better than this.

3. The Art of Pastoring - David Hansen

The Art of Pastoring came to me via a recommendation from a friend of a friend who had asked the question, “what’s the single most important book on pastoring you’ve ever read?” This was one of the most enjoyable, relatable, and relevant books I’ve read in ages. I felt my heart leaping multiple times throughout as the author put words to parts of my own life and dreams that had so far been unarticulated.

Hansen is a wonderful writer, and he comes across as a humble, intelligent, and devoted pastor. It’s very much in the Eugene Peterson wheelhouse in terms of era, references, and tone, and he gives a lot of distilled wisdom on how to love a congregation, develop prayerful rhythms, maintain your interior life, and preach. I don’t think I’ve ever taken so many notes and quotes from a book as I did from this one. Here is one of my favourites:

“…so I stopped reading how-to books. Instead I read theology, biblical studies and church history. I alternated between the disciplines. These books from the classical disciplines of theology didn’t teach me how to do pastoral ministry, but they helped me immensely in my regular duties. I discovered that spending a day reading thirty pages of Karl Barth’s Dogmatics helped me more in my pastoral work than a hundred of pages of how-to literature.”

In brief: if, like me, you are a pastor who wants to love God, love others, serve the church and yet remain joyfully yourself, you must read this book! I plan to come back to it many times.

4. North - Seamus Heaney

I always have a book of poetry that I’m working through. This time I’d chosen Seamus Heaney’s fourth major collection of poems, North, published in 1975. This was right around the height of the Troubles and his work in North has this as its focus. I read several of these poems per day whilst away on holiday for a week and found them to be less resonant with me than much of Heaney’s other work which I’ve read. I grew up mere miles from where he did, and so I feel a deep familiarity when he speaks of places and characters and cultural eccentricities.

I found parts of this collection quite abstract; in part I think this is because he searches through Northern European history for images and symbols to try and relate them to what was happening in Northern Ireland at the time, and I found this blending of subjects difficult to follow at times. As you’d expect however, there are some moments of stunning poetry. Here is my favourite stanza in the collection, from the opening poem Sunlight, about a memory of his aunt churning butter in the kitchen:

And here is love
like a tinsmith’s scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.

In brief: moments of beauty, but often hard-going and difficult to discern. I’ll return to it one day as I suspect the difficulty lies more with me than with the poetry.

5. AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep - Sean O’Callaghan and Paul A. Hoffman

To prepare myself for hosting a conversation at church on artificial intelligence, I zipped through this book over the course of a few days and found it to be immensely helpful. I’ve read quite widely on AI, including works written from a faith-perspective. This one was the most engagingly written and clearly structured of the lot.

Over seven chapters the authors take us from ‘what is artificial intelligence?’ to ‘what does it mean to be human from a biblical perspective?’ through to ‘how should ministry leaders approach AI?’ with plenty of other stops along the way. The path they suggest Christians should choose is ‘selective engagement’ with AI - as opposed to wholesale rejection or embrace. They suggest that we must create boundaries and rules around how we use it, and ask the right sort of questions before we mindlessly race to use AI for any given task.

I appreciated the practical takeaways they suggest in order to be a flourishing human in the age of AI. These include a framework of ‘hearth-habits’ to ensure that we remain anchored in our bodies, in a place, in rhythms of time, and with one another. This part of their work in particular I will take forward as I do more thinking about our relationship to technology and AI - both at home and in the church.

In brief: although written specifically for Christian leaders, there is something for everyone here and it would serve as an admirable primer for any Christian wishing to understand AI and its implications better.

6. The Road to Character - David Brooks

I was late to the party on this one, but I am so glad to have finally read it. The book begins by contrasting ‘resumé virtues’ with ‘eulogy virtues.’ The former being those things which give you external success and job opportunities; the latter being those things which people will say about you when you are gone - whether you had kindness, bravery, honesty, or faithfulness for example. He argues that our world has become fixated on the resumé virtues rather than the deeper ones which build character. That’s a thesis I can get on board with.

The basic outline after that introduction is ten chapters each centred around a particular person. Frances Perkins, St Augustine, George Marshall, George Eliot, Samuel Johnson are amongst those chosen. Brooks gives a brief, selective biography of each, often focusing on the unique hardships they experienced, and then gleans particular lessons from their life pertaining to character. There is therefore a good mix of story and observation throughout. As an example, General George Marshall was raised to be highly disciplined, stoic, and willing to subjugate personal desires for the bigger picture. This made him an ideal military leader, although it took him a long time to ascend to the rank of general. He gained the trust of those on all sides of any given debate due to his reputation for immense integrity and ability to speak the truth without a political angle.

The structure of each chapter is somewhat formulaic, and by the end of the book I was a bit tired of this cyclical approach, but the quality of the stories remained high throughout - some of the people I’d now happily read a whole book about (like Dorothy Day!).

In brief: a book which anyone interested in character development and personal growth should read. I made extensive notes so probably won’t re-read the whole book again, but will consult my notes as needed!

Thanks for reading - if you have read any of these before, I’d love to know what you thought of them. Reading book reviews and getting recommendations from others is how I often choose what to add to my reading list - so do let me know if a periodical post like this is of interest to you. Until next time!

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on atonement theology recently, partly in preparation for the Lent and Easter season as a pastor, and partly because I just always like to be working through something meaty. I’ve been reading The Mosaic of Atonement by Joshua McNall for the last few months, and I also re-read C. Baxter Kruger’s Jesus and the Undoing of Adam for probably the fourth time (it’s wonderfully concise!). I think it was somewhere in the swirl of McNall’s articulate, academic exploration of atonement models and Kruger’s impassioned, highly trinitarian theology of the cross that I had my epiphany. Before I get to that, let me lay out some of the key ideas around what actually happened on the cross to orientate you into the discussion.

Starting with Substitution

Like many others, I grew up understanding that the primary issue which Jesus dealt with on the cross was my personal sinfulness and his substitutionary death in my place. ‘For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ (Rom 3:23). This is a framework for the crucifixion which emphasises the lawbreaking nature of each human’s sinfulness, and it’s well-evidenced in Scripture. I don’t believe this any less than I ever did - Jesus did take care of my own wrongdoing and rebellion on the cross. He literally took it and put it to death. As you might expect, this reality means even more to me now as an adult than when I first heard it in my childhood. What has changed for me over the years however is that I now see that there is more to Jesus’s death on the cross than this. I’ve come to believe that only focusing on this aspect of the cross - which is commonly done - risks diminishing our understanding of the full, glorious reality of all that Jesus accomplished on Good Friday.

So - what did Jesus accomplish on the cross other than pardoning you & I from our sin? Here’s a brief overview of three other ways to understand his work on the cross - and I would heartily point you to McNall’s book if you want to dive deeper on these. In essence, his thesis is that the following are all not only necessary and valid, but mutually reinforcing - along with the substitutionary one above.

Christus Victor

The early church put particular emphasis on the fact that, on the cross, Jesus defeated the powers of darkness - call it the devil, or the powers and principalities of this world, or death itself. Of course, this includes personal sin as well. The basic idea is that on the cross, Jesus won victory over all of these things which spoiled his good creation - he put death to death! Athanasius said it like this: ‘the death of all was completed in the lordly body, and also death and corruption were destroyed by the Word in it.’1 This particular emphasis is known as the Christus Victor model of atonement (Latin for ‘Christ the Victor’).

We find a scriptural basis for this idea in places such as Colossians 2: ‘…and having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.’ The strength of this approach is that it is cosmic in scope - it presents the cross as a decisive victory of God over the powers that enslave humanity- sin, death, and evil—not just as a solution to personal guilt.

Recapitulation

Another way of articulating what Jesus achieved on the cross is known as the recapitulation model of atonement. It’s an unusual word, but the basic idea here is that Jesus Christ came to do and be what Israel and Adam failed to do and be.2 Jesus is the true human, and he can therefore act on behalf of all humanity. In his earthly life and death he recreates and restores the human story. This answers the question some may have when they consider the crucifixion, namely, ‘how does Jesus’s death have any effect on me?’ The biblical basis for this is found particularly in Paul’s writing, in verses such as 1 Cor 15:22 - ‘For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.’

The strength of this approach is that it is deeply embedded in the wider biblical narrative and emphasises the importance of Christ’s incarnation (i.e. only a true human could represent humanity on the cross).

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Moral Influence

Finally, for now, there is a way of approaching the cross that foregrounds the impact which Jesus’s death has on the way we live our lives. This theme comes up several times in the New Testament, for example 1 John 3:16 which says that ‘this is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.’ The very definition of love, according to this verse, is Jesus dying on the cross - so this tells us a great deal about what real love should look like. 1 Peter 2 puts it this way: Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps (v21). This approach to thinking about the cross is known as the moral influence theory. To spell it out simply - Jesus is the example above all others who should influence our morality.

The big strength of this approach is that it reminds us that the cross isn’t solely about forgiveness (which is the emphasis of the legal model), it’s also about how we should live, imitating Jesus in self-sacrificial love. The cross becomes ethically transformative. McNall also writes about an inverse side to this moral influence - where we actively choose love, forgiveness and humility, we also abstain from the human norms of retribution and violence, again following Jesus’s example.

There are some other ways to articulate the atonement, but the above four are the main ones. Now that we’ve laid that groundwork - what was this epiphany which I mentioned earlier all about?

The Trinity & Good Friday

This is where Baxter Kruger’s writing comes in. He places all of the above - the various models of atonement, the ways we articulate what Jesus accomplished on the cross - as secondary to the glorious, underlying reality that from before our beginning, the Trinity desired to include us in the divine life. If we keep our discussions - or our sermons - about the cross entirely within the legal perspective (i.e. about personal sin), we risk masking this deeper reality - never mind the other ways to articulate the atonement. Kruger says ‘Before there was ever any law, there was the Trinity and the irrepressible life and fellowship and joy of the Triune God.’3 He argues that the Trinity’s eternal purpose to include humanity in the divine life is the proper framework within which we are to understand everything else - creation, the Fall, Israel, the Incarnation, and yes - the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is evidenced powerfully by Revelation 13:8:

‘The Lamb of God was slain before the foundation of the world.’

The cross is not an afterthought or a plan B in response to humanity’s failure. Rather, it is at the centre of God’s eternal purpose to include us fully in his glorious life. By ‘God’, I of course mean Father, Son and Spirit working together in perfect unity. This is a stunning truth. It wasn’t news to me in recent weeks. I’ve come across all of these ideas before. For some reason, this year, it’s all landed in my heart in a deeper way than before. It’s as though I haven’t lost sight of the forest for the trees. I hope, on this Good Friday, that this beautiful reality resonates with you too.

In this post, I’d love to offer some brief reflections on why what you think about is one of the most important things about you, and then suggest that memorising Scripture is an essential discipline in the Christian life. In a future post, I’ll share some practical tips on how to go about this potentially daunting practise!

Starting with Scripture

This idea about paying attention to what we think about comes up in different ways throughout the Bible – whether it’s the invitation to meditate upon God’s laws and God’s ways found several times in the Psalms, or Paul’s instruction at the end of Philippians: ‘whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable - think about such things.’ Another place where the idea is articulated with particular clarity again comes from Paul:

‘To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.’ Rom 8:6

According to Paul, what we set our minds on is literally the difference between life and death! We all have a constant internal dialogue going on. Our brains are incessantly thinking, mulling things over, preoccupied. Even when we are asleep, our brains are working away. Thanks to modern psychology, we know that our brains are malleable - they can be shaped and reshaped depending on how we use them. It follows that good inputs should lead to good outputs, and bad inputs will likely lead to bad outputs. For example, if you are harbouring resentment towards someone - rehearsing internally the reasons for your grievance - you will have a tough time trying not to let that spill out in front of them sooner or later. Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.1

If our desire is to become healthy people who bring life and encouragement to those around us, then what we dwell upon matters. If we want to be resilient people who are not blown around by every storm that life throws at us, then where our thoughts wander to when we have a moment of quiet matters. The stories and the images that we let in and allow to form our lives really matter. The ideas about God, ourselves and others that we entertain will have a profound impact on our lives.

This is scary on one hand, because our brains are exposed to an almost unbearable amount of stimulus every day, much of which, if not explicitly bad, is at best inane. With each passing reel on Instagram or short on Youtube, our attention spans are shrinking. This is reducing our capacity to engage with richer, more nourishing inputs. In a cruel irony, research suggests that a shortening attention span also increases stress levels and leads to increased error-making.2 I love this quote from Henry David Thoreau, eerily prescient for the digital age:

‘The mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things.’

The Good News

On the other hand, the good news is that we do have agency here. We have the power to select what we let our minds dwell upon. It’s one of the primary freedoms we can have as humans - or it would be if we embraced it. We can learn to identify the things which we shouldn’t allow into our minds and carefully choose the ones which we do.

It takes discipline, effort, and time. If you are currently in the habit of binging the news, social media or zipping through Netflix series in your spare time, you will find that your ability to sit in relative stillness and focus on something more demanding will be diminished compared to what it was five or ten years ago. I’ve certainly noticed this in my own life - I can’t sit and read classic literature for prolonged periods as I so easily could in my early twenties (in part, for me, I also now have three young children to provide constant interruptions - and joy!).

However, all is not lost! The very fact that your brain is malleable and new neural pathways can be formed is key. The question comes down to what you are going to do about it. As a marathon-runner must rigorously train their body or a musician must endlessly repeat the little motions that will eventually allow them to attain mastery – the one who desires to have an intentionally formed mind filled with good inputs must be prepared to put the effort in. And the single most important thing you can begin to do right away is to memorise Scripture.

I believe that the discipline of memorising scripture is not only beneficial in and of itself; it may also be the perfect, countercultural remedy for the increasing number of us feeling that sense of digital overload that leaves our minds whirring and unsettled, open to being shaped by whatever the algorithm dictates. I do not want my mind to be formed by the news cycle or the algorithm; I want it to be formed by something more ancient, something tried and tested, something proven to be truly good.

A Permanently Worthwhile Activity

I love what Dallas Willard said about memorising scripture and the formation of the mind, and it’s worth quoting at length:

‘The most obvious thing we can do is memorise and turn over in our minds key portions of Scripture. This is the primary discipline for the thought life. And not just odd verses, but longer passages. We need to know them like the back of our hand. And if you think this is impossible for you, think again. You can remember all sorts of things, and you can remember Scripture too. As you do, your mind will be filled with light, and your life will be reoriented around God because you are choosing to focus on him and are spending effort on this permanently worthwhile activity.’3

I read this quote often and it always leaves me feeling re-energised and encouraged to take seriously my efforts to memorise scripture. He says that memorising and reciting long passages of the scripture is a permanently worthwhile activity – indeed the primary discipline of the thought life! As I referenced at the start, I have been doing this for almost 10 years, and can honestly say that it has been more transformative for me than any other aspect of my faith. It’s a topic I plan to write a lot about, and something I want others to fall in love with too!

In a future post, I’ll share an outline of how to begin memorising longer passages of Scripture, which I’ve developed after much trial and error. Should you wish to join me on this permanently worthwhile venture, your homework for now is to sear Psalm 23 so deeply into your mind that you can recite it word for word for the rest of your life. My 7 year-old daughter can do it - so if you are reading this, you can too!

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies

The poem is called ‘September 1, 1939.’1 If you are at all interested in world history you will likely know that this is a very significant date – it’s the day that Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany, plunging huge parts of the globe into the deadliest conflict the world has ever known. Auden was an Englishman living in New York, observing from afar the grip of evil spreading across Europe. The poem opens like this:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

In 1939, people were reeling from the Great Depression of the past decade, and World War 1 was very much in living memory. Far and wide, families had empty chairs around their dinner tables that should still have been occupied by a son or a brother or a husband or a father. Auden’s poem captures the sense of foreboding that it was all about to happen again - the hopes of a quiet, normal decade were fading as the storms of war gathered. He names the fact that developments such as this ‘obsess’ the private lives of individuals as they consider the impact of world events on their families and communities. ‘Waves of anger and fear circulate’ as people come to terms with things far beyond their control.

As I read this poem a few weeks ago, I couldn’t believe how perfectly it encapsulates what many of us are feeling about our world in this moment. That one line in particular - ‘Defenceless under the night, our world in stupor lies’ - stuck out to me. There is a sense at the moment in which we feel a darkness like night is hanging over our world, and it’s so pervasive and uncertain that many of us feel a kind of despondency or stupor in the face of it.

Our World in 2026

It’s the beginning of March, and we are facing the prospect of full-scale war in the Middle East after the bombing of Iran by the US and Israel, and subsequent retaliation by Iran. The civil war in Sudan continues to be the biggest humanitarian crisis on the planet. Gaza has been flattened. Ukraine continues to have territory occupied by Russia. The Epstein files are shaking governments and institutions across the world. The ongoing rise of artificial intelligence poses both exciting opportunities and huge uncertainties for every aspect of our lives. One writer who I follow on Substack posted an article last week saying that ‘we are about to enter the acceleration decade. It will be one of the most destabilising decades in human history, particularly on the psyche. Change will be fast, personalised, and relentless.’2

These are just the most pressing issues right now - the full list of global challenges is of course much longer. And all of these things are way beyond any of our individual abilities to change or even influence. And thanks to our devices, we see every grim development in real-time. It’s easy to feel despondent, overwhelmed, hopeless in the face of all of this. Defenceless under the night, our world in stupor lies.

The Efficacy of Poetry

It might just be me, but I find it a great comfort to know that what I am feeling about our world right now is very similar to what Auden and his contemporaries felt 87 years ago as they stared Nazism in the face. The challenges we face are different of course, but the fact that there are big challenges facing each subsequent generation is itself not new. The way Auden’s poem connects me to people who lived long before me attests to what Abraham Joshua Heschel said about the power of words:

‘What else in the world is as capable of bringing man and man together over the distances in space and in time? Of all things on earth, words alone never die. They have so little matter and so much meaning.’

Words are amazing. I remember the first time I read Augustine’s Confessions (written in the 5th century), and my overwhelming feeling was, “this guy understands me!”

I was born and raised just a handful of miles from where Seamus Heaney was. Heaney’s career as a poet coincided with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and his work deals extensively with violence and with politics. In his essay The Government of the Tongue, he says the following:

‘Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense it is unlimited. It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed.’3

No lyric ever stopped a tank - yet the power of words to bring definition to our lives and give language to what we are seeing in the world is virtually limitless. Heaney suggests that words can renew us. For me, the power of words is most potent in the Scriptures. A third of the Bible is poetry. Jesus, in his parables and other teachings, was highly poetic. The ‘writing in the sand’ which Heaney refers to above comes from the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8.

In that story, religious leaders are attempting to trap Jesus into either straying from the Law of Moses or getting into trouble with the Roman authorities. Faced with a precarious situation, Jesus, pausing from whatever he was writing in the sand, stands up and says to them, “let him who is without sin be the first to cast a stone at her.” Silence. One by one, the accusers begin to peel away. An explosive situation defused with incisive words. It’s just possible that the trajectory of their lives was altered by that one sentence - Heaney seems to think so.

What You Can Do

If you are reading this it is unlikely that you can pick up your phone right now and call some important foreign policy official about what’s going on in the Middle East. It’s also unlikely that you have billions of dollars at hand to influence world affairs. I’ll bet that you can’t move the dial on A.I. regulation. What you can do, other than pray, is train yourself to become a voice of wisdom and peace in the part of the world over which you do have influence - perhaps it’s a classroom full of children, a small number of colleagues at your company, or a friend that you are carrying through a difficult season.

Plough recently published a set of new poems by Wendell Berry, whose writing first sparked my love of poetry. Among them was the following:

The empire of money, war, and fire
cuts across the land.

There are in the same country
shepherds watching their flocks.

You can’t do much about the empires for now - but you can tend to the little patch of creation that you have been given influence over. One response to chaotic times is to fill yourself with older, richer words - poems for some people, prayers or stories for others - and let them work on you slowly. At the right time they might come out, and they might just change someone’s life. At the very least, I bet they’ll change yours.

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.’ John 1:1,14

So begins the Gospel of John. The prologue to John contains many striking themes, but there is one which runs throughout the book that I only became aware of recently - and that little word full in 1:14 (pleres in Greek) marks the beginning of this theme. It is followed up in v16, where we read of Christ’s fullness. Later in that same verse it says that from his fullness we have received grace upon grace. This repetition indicates – you guessed it –more fullness!

I was first alerted to this idea by the work of David Ford who, as well as being a first-rate public theologian, is Irish – a commendable attribute indeed. He spent twenty years writing a commentary on John’s Gospel and describes it as ‘a book of abundant meaning and abundant love.’1 Elsewhere he says that John is the gospel of superabundance where we are introduced to the essentials about Jesus and then taken deeper and deeper into those essentials throughout the book.2

John’s Gospel is a book of abundant meaning and abundant love. David Ford

Fewer events and conversations occur in John’s Gospel than in the three synoptic gospels, but what is there tends to be longer and more in-depth, for example the dialogues in John are well-known to be more extended than in Matthew, Mark and Luke. Additionally, John includes just seven carefully selected miracles (or as he calls them, ‘signs’), whereas the other gospels all have somewhere around twenty recorded miracles each. This is a beautiful literary design feature – the author of John tells us less in order to lead us into more.

The Language of Abundance

This motif of abundance in John is borne out by some of the key language which the author uses. As well as the fullness language used in the prologue as detailed above, Jesus is recorded as saying that he has come to give us life and life to the full (10:10). In chapter 3 we read that the Father gives the Spirit without measure (3:34). Once you become aware of these more overt abundance-related words, you may begin to notice other language of plenty. A few such examples:

• all things were made through him (1:3)

• the true light, which gives light to everyone (1:9)

• the Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hands (3:35)

Twenty-five times in John’s Gospel, Jesus begins speaking by saying “truly, truly I say to you.” Now that I have become aware of the abundance motif, I cannot help but wonder if this phrase is part of it too – given that the repetition of truly functions a bit like an underline or exclamation point in the Greek. In other words, he is saying something along the lines of “what I’m saying to you is full of truth!”

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Stories of Abundance

There’s Plenty to Drink

Furthermore – it is not just this kind of language in the Gospel that points us toward the idea of abundance, we also find it in the details of the narrative. I recently gave a sermon on the first sign in John, where Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding in Cana (2:1-11). One of the details in that story is that there were six stone water jars, each of 20-30 gallons capacity, and that they were filled to the brim. This works out to at least 120 gallons of liquid, or at most 180 gallons. If we were to imagine this amount of wine using a standard modern wine bottle as our reference (750ml) – that makes the equivalent of between 725 to 1090 bottles of wine! I have known this story for most of my life, but I had never noticed before what an abundant quantity of wine Jesus created - arguably, an unnecessary quantity for a rural wedding in a 1st Century Palestinian village!

Secondly, the master of the feast, upon trying this water-become-wine, says to the bridegroom, “you have kept the good wine until now” (v10). Jesus did not create just any wine – he created a good wine. How might we explore that further? Well, the story of the wedding at Cana has its basis in Isaiah 25, where a messianic banquet is foretold, and we read of ‘a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well-refined’ (Is 25:6). Even people who are not that into wine will likely know that a good wine gets better with age.

“But you have kept the good wine until now!”

When he turned that water into wine, Jesus did not just intensify and accelerate the natural process by which water can becomes wine (i.e. rain nourishes the ground > grapes grow > wine is produced). He could have created a young wine - something that just about qualifies. Instead, he went far beyond that to create something mature, well-aged, refined. In other words - and I realise I am making a bit of an exegetical leap here - I think it would be fair to assume that the wine Jesus created was not only abundant in quantity, but abundant in quality as well! Given this wider theme of abundance in John that we are discussing, wouldn’t this make sense?

There’s Plenty to Eat

I want to keep this post relatively short, so I won’t say as much about this one, but think about the feeding of the five thousand for a moment (6:1-15). The author tells us that the people ate the fish – as much as they wanted. It then says that everyone ate their fill. Presumably, the majority of the thousands gathered there that day were rural peasants, living hand to mouth, and therefore hungry. They got to eat their fill that day! Yet, even after this, there are leftovers. Jesus didn’t create just enough to get by. It wasn’t a light snack for all – no, the people feasted until their stomachs were full, and the disciples gathered up leftovers. Jesus created abundantly!

The World Isn’t Big Enough

The Gospel finishes with another story of abundance. After the resurrection, Jesus calls out to the disciples from the shore near where they are fishing. They follow his instructions, and they cannot bring their nets in because of the quantity of fish they catch. It says that Simon Peter’s net was full (20:11) but that it did not break. I think this foreshadows the final verse of the book, which says: ‘Now there were also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written’ (20:25). This is clearly hyperbole, but the point is this: John followed Jesus closely, was loved by him, spent time around him and witnessed the things he did and said, and he sums up his experience by reflecting on the sheer abundance that flows from Jesus. Every book in the world - even if filled to the brim, like those stone water jars - could not do justice to the fullness and abundance that resides in Jesus Christ.

We live in the age of abundance, yet many people lack truly important things like quality relationships, self-worth, purpose, or hope - to name just a few. Think about where the places of lack might be in your life - go on, take a minute.

What might the abundance of Jesus – the fullness of life that is only available in Him – mean for you today?

“We bring nothing in, we take nothing with us when we leave.”

So screams Simon Neil, singer of Biffy Clyro, on their 2021 song Hunger In Your Haunt. The first time I heard it, this lyric (as well as the epic, angular guitar line that it is sung over!) stood out to me right away. I recognised on it the fingerprints of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, which contains the following:

‘As he came from his mother’s womb, he shall go again, naked as he came, and shall take nothing for his toil that he may carry away in his hand.’ Eccl 5:15

Heavy stuff. And yet, this idea – whether it be from a 21st Century rock-band or the mysterious poet-philosopher behind Ecclesiastes – perfectly expresses the occasional desperation that seizes thinking people of every generation in their more existential moments: ‘Is there any meaning behind all of this? Why is life so hard to understand?’

This is exactly the kind of fare that Ecclesiastes deals in. Over twelve short chapters of prose-poetry tucked in the middle of the Old Testament, topics such as the meaning - or meaninglessness - of life, the unstoppable march of time, the certainty of death, the mundanity of life, and the vital but often futile pursuit of joy, are explored by a great thinker known only to us as the Teacher.

Traces of the Teacher

That lyric from Biffy Clyro has become one of dozens of traces of Ecclesiastes that I’ve spotted over recent years, usually in music or poetry. Admittedly, there is nothing particularly unique about spotting the influence of the Bible in our art or our culture – given that it is likely the single biggest such influence that there is (fun fact: the phrase ‘eat, drink and be merry’ also comes from Ecclesiastes!).

However, what I find interesting about such traces of Ecclesiastes is that I think some of the artists don’t know that they are expressing something that also appears in the Bible. They may even be doing so from a worldview that sees Christianity, and therefore the Bible, as part of the problem. I think this is probably the case with Biffy Clyro.

Let me give you another such example. Here are some of the lyrics to Time by Pink Floyd:

‘And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.’

These words are on one of the most successful albums ever made, and yet they read to me like a meditation on the opening poem of Ecclesiastes:

‘The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises…what has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.’ Eccl 1:5,9

Again, it is unlikely that Roger Waters was intentionally paraphrasing the Bible when he wrote these lyrics in the 1970’s (he is an ardent atheist), and this is precisely why I find Ecclesiastes so interesting. It gives expression, within the Bible, to the very kinds of things that many people would be surprised to find in a sacred book.

The Bible is often caricatured as a dogmatic rulebook by people who don’t read it – and sadly, it is also treated this way by many who do. However the inclusion of Ecclesiastes in the witness of Scripture is a forceful challenge to this idea (there are many other reasons why the Bible shouldn’t be seen as a rulebook but let’s focus on Ecclesiastes for now!).

If the goal of writing, editing, preserving and translating the Bible was to provoke simplistic ‘do this, don’t do that’ behaviour in believers, why include a book which gives no mention of covenants or Yahweh or messianic hope for a better world? Why include a book which seems, at least in some ways, to rail against much of the rest of Scripture’s certainty in matters of faith?

The Embarrassing Stepchild?

Ecclesiastes has been referred to by the great biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann as the ‘embarrassing stepchild’ of the Old Testament.1 In another work, he justifies this slightly, by describing how Ecclesiastes stands as a ‘lively dissenter from what is generally the consensus of Old Testament faith.’2 Some of this dissension is set within strikingly beautiful poetry, including passages such as Eccl 3:1-8 (the inspiration for another great song - albeit this time intentionally – Pete Seeger’s anti-war classic ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’). One of my favourite such passages is this one:

‘Again I saw that under the sun
the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong,
nor bread to the wise,
nor riches to the intelligent,
nor favour to those with knowledge,
but time and chance happen to them all.’ Eccl 9:11

Against the backdrop of Proverbs, where the wise person flourishes and the foolish person perishes, Ecclesiastes creates space for the reality that life doesn’t always go the way we expect it to - or that we feel like it should. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do wicked people seem to flourish? There is plenty of room elsewhere in Scripture, and in Christian theology, for these kinds of questions to be addressed, but to me nowhere else acknowledges them with such disarming immediacy, and such literary beauty, as Ecclesiastes. It isn’t for nothing that Herman Melville called Ecclesiastes ‘the truest of all books.’