It’s sometimes said that grief unites. Perhaps it can, but not always. I’ve been in enough funerals to know it can paper over the cracks but it’s tissue thin. An uneasy truce cannot finally hold because it cannot truly heal. Something far deeper is needed — a step of tentative faith, cautious and trembling; a hand extended in mercy, a heart open to seek it. But how hard it is to enter that kind of space on a day of deepest emotional discord, when disparate memories converge and unrelated conflicts merge into one unyielding whole?

And what if the final goodbye is not to a person but to a larger shared life? A whole family torn to shreds by a politics harder than steel and impervious to sanity’s balm. A church that can no longer connect as family, can no longer find its centre in the love so radical it endured a cross, clothing all in the priority of grace, in the unity of the Spirit? A whole society whose sense of place and shared history is contested, every stitch dropped and the garment unwound, offering no warmth, no covering.

We can’t pretend such scenes don’t come before our eyes. They cloud our vision and shroud our hearts in a grief whose web has been spun in the shadows.

In her song, Deal Breaker, offers hope through the lens of an Old Testament festival — the year of Jubilee. Her words no doubt emerged in a context both personal and cultural but the brushstrokes are laid on a broader canvas.

There is, she observes, “detritus and wreckage far and wide” and between the parties there is a no man’s land, the unmistakable portent of a war for the ages. The song’s protagonists are both deciding what they can abide, holding their tongues and yet speaking their minds, living out their daily liturgies and praying-in their different dreams.

So far, far apart. The voice of the singer acknowledges,

I always thought with you and me
Though it’s not on paper
There would never be
A deal breaker

And yet it seems that the deal has been broken. Sides have been taken. Hostilities hold.

And there’s grief like a blackbird
Ever present in the sky
And I can feel all our distance
And the hidden reasons why

Being honest, it feels completely hopeless. The lines that have been drawn have been laid down in indelible ink. Human hearts and even whole communities have been canyoned. And yet there remains a hope that the warring parties could one day be “soft and reconciled.” Where does that hope spring from?

Last night I dreamt we walked the riverbed
Listened closely for what’s not been said
Last night I dreamt of jubilee
New beginnings as far as the eye can see

Jubilee — debts being cancelled and people being set free. What had been lost through life’s terrors being restored, reconciliation embraced, life renewed.

The Bible’s picture of Jubilee, laid down in Leviticus 25, is ultimately fulfilled in and by Jesus of Nazareth. When he began his public ministry he read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah (what we know as chapter 61), ending the quotation with the climactic-sounding words, “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”1 The year of Jubilee.

And, he said, it was coming true, it was being enacted right there, right then. Through him. Now was and is the day of salvation. The lifting of the heaviest loads from shoulders that could never bear the weight of unrelieved, unforgiven sin and shame.2

Jubilee has nothing at all to do with human achievement or deliberation or agreement. It was simply set in God’s calendar, a gift given and waiting to be received. And yet its performance clearly is related to people being responsive to the grace that God has determined will reign.

The impetus for communal embrace of jubilee may well have lain with those who were the community leaders but at the very local level it was down to the individual to ensure they did so. Forgiveness and reconciliation cannot be demanded, cannot be legislated for. They have to be personally enacted. I’ll admit that is not easy, nor is it instantaneous. Yet it remains stubbornly possible.

And the onus for it remains on those who have tasted and seen that the Lord is good, who have been the recipients of the most wonderful grace. It is our calling to pray for and to attempt that reconciliation, in all humility and kindness, never forgetting that it is the kindness of the Lord that leads to repentance and that kindness is to be felt at the hands of his people. To make, wherever possible, the first move towards healing.

Is that not costly? Yes, for sure. In the book of Ruth the one who was unwilling to pay the price of redemption, because it endangered his hopes and plans for his own family, removed his sandal to signify that unwillingness and thereafter being known for that reluctance. The transfer put into the hands of the willing the opportunity and the responsibility for embracing the cost of redemption.3

Those who stand against all manner of evil, as followers of Jesus and as part of his one, united family, are called to be “sandalled with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.”4 Ready to kneel in prayer and to take the first steps towards the healing of Jubilee — new beginnings as far as the eye can see.

When Jesus approaches his cousin John at the waters of the Jordan to be baptised, John’s astonishment is far from mild: “Do you come to me? It is I who need to be baptized by you!” He was the older of the two and yet he’d known all along that “the one who comes after me is greater than me because he was before me.” He understood his role very clearly: ‘I’m the one who prepares the way for the Lord; I’m not the Lord himself. He must increase and I must decrease. I’m simply the friend and he’s the bridegroom to whom the bride belongs.’ We can understand his reluctance.

And not just comprehend it but share in it. Without going ‘the full Moses’ (‘There’s no way I can speak for you - I stutter! Please, send someone else.’) we can nevertheless feel deeply our inability, our weakness and unworthiness. Just like John. And yet, also just like John, we’re called to serve the living God, not because he can’t do the work better himself but because he gifts us the privilege of being caught up into his life and purposes.

So how does Jesus respond to John’s astonishment and reluctance? He says two things I think are worth pressing pause for:

Firstly, this is “to fulfil all righteousness.” By which he doesn’t mean there’s a law written down somewhere that we need to keep, make sure that box is ticked. Nor is he saying, ‘Well, actually John, there are aspects of my life and character that you’re not aware of, so this is perfectly proper for us to do. I’m just the same as everybody else.’ Neither of those is what is happening here. Neither of those is what Jesus means by righteousness being fulfilled.

This has far more to do with the Son of God coming as the representative of his people and identifying completely with them, in all their helpless need. This is the covenant keeping of God in glorious technicolour, sparkling in the waters of the Jordan. This is the righteousness that would be completely trashed if the promise to save was not kept, but being kept it was.

That’s why Jesus came and why he descends into the waters. God is unutterably faithful; he is completely righteous. And how grateful we can be for that. Without it, you and I would have no hope whatsoever. He submits so that we might be saved.

The second puzzle is Jesus’ words that open his statement intended to persuade the reluctant baptiser: “Let it be so now.”

Our Lord is not denying the tension John feels and expresses. He isn’t saying nothing of that matters. John’s instinct is not wrong. There is something deeply incongruous about the one who baptises with the Spirit submitting himself to a baptism of repentance. But that tension is not going to be prematurely resolved. What is happening on that day will only become clear in time’s rear view mirror. John, for now you need to hold your nerve and trust me.

These words speak to us more broadly, too, because there is much in the Christian life, and in the Bible itself, we have to sit with, accepting that resolution is not going to happen now.

That might relate to who and what we are in ourselves, the twists and turns inside our souls that resist all attempts at being straightened. It could relate to our circumstances that seem impervious to the forces of change or the healing of grace. It may well be to do with the structures of life we cannot understand the apparent need for.

Should we not work to change that which is wrong? Absolutely. But some things are not amenable to change (or so it seems) and are likely above our pay grade anyhow. Still others are held in the wise hands of God, who does not finally intend the present order to hold but permits it now for his own good and gracious purposes.

The ways of God can be deeply mysterious to us. As Deuteronomy 29:29 reminds us, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever.” The plain fact is not everything is revealed, at least not now — neither for John at the Jordan, nor for you or I as we stand barefoot in our own enigmatic rivers.1

Tough as it may be — and it can be really tough — our consolation is this: all the ways of God, seen and unseen, known or not fathomed, will finally declare and fulfil his righteous character as he makes good on all his promises. They are the promises of the one who not only went down into the Jordan but into the raging waters of judgement and death in our place. He will one day reveal and heal all things.

And so we ask him to take us by the hand and enable us to say now, in faith and with deep confidence:

[We] will proclaim the name of the LORD.
O, praise the greatness of our God!
He is the Rock, his works are perfect,
and all his ways are just.
A faithful God who does no wrong,
upright and just is he.2

May that be so now. Amen.

It’s a classic complaint from childhood: “Stop looking at me!” But from a man of faith to the God of his life? That’s disturbing. Yet it’s where we find David in the closing words of Psalm 39.

He begins by recounting having been “in the presence of the wicked”. In their company he remained silent, until he could do so no longer. He meditated, “the fire burned,” and he spoke. But far from being a speech of condemnation, he prays the Lord would show him his life’s end and the number of his days. This is distinctly Psalm 90 territory.

He follows the recognition of his transience with a plea to be rescued from his transgressions. They have been the source of his silence, as he has borne the Lord’s rebuke and discipline. He’s praying as one who feels himself to be “a foreigner, a stranger” with God, just as his ancestors were. There is a mismatch here and there always has been. But that burgeoning sense of dislocation finally goes to a place we scarcely expect a man like David to go:

Look away from me,
that I may enjoy life again
before I depart and am no more.

We’re so used to the voice in the psalms begging God for help, asking for his presence and intervention, that this plea is deeply troubling. Is this the dissolution of a decades-long dependence upon and delight in the LORD? Just what are we meant to do with these words?

One thing we might be glad to do is recognise the very next psalm speaks far more confidently. Much as the desolation of Psalm 88 is followed by the definitive confidence of Psalm 89, so Psalm 40 finds David speaking of being set upon a rock, safe and secure, with praise on his lips. His concluding prayer there is that far from turning from him, the Lord would “think of me.”

It’s good to know the end of Psalm 39 is not the end of the story. But in a sense that’s a move we might make too quickly, in our discomfort with disquieting emotions. And that would be a denial of the purpose for which the Lord has placed such psalms and such statements in the Bible.

You don’t need to be perverse to want to linger in the storm a little longer.1 Life with the Lord can at times be far from straightforward. There are depths in God and in the life of faith that may often feel deeply disturbing. We cannot say we know every inch of the ‘terrain’ that is the God of the covenant. He is, after all, the one who said to Moses, “I am that I am/I will be who I will be.”

Those for whom faith can only ever mean an untroubled life, if it’s to be genuine, can find these words an unwelcome surprise. And yet there is much to be gained from allowing the reality of David’s agony to address us. has recently explored the paradoxes inherent in relationship with the living God in his song, Sing Your Glory:

Years pass like flowers they’re fading
Dam breaks a river is raging
It’s a complicated story
But I sing your glory
I walk on the edge of a razor
In the hands of a complicated Saviour
Harmonise with the earth below me
I sing your glory

A complicated story and a complicated Saviour? Does that almost sound impious? Not from the last lines of Psalm 39 it doesn’t. The complications, of course, are not because he is mutable, changeable, irascible. They have their seat in who and what we are in sin, in our creaturely finitude, and in the unapproachable light we are nevertheless called to approach.

It’s in that fragile state David asks to be left alone, for the pressure to be lifted, for the gaze of the Lord to no longer search him. In this tattered condition, David wants a life less exposed, less examined by the one who is all-seeing.

Yet this dark-room negative of Psalm 139 isn’t treason, nor is it apostasy. It’s a plea for relief, for space. The warfare has been unending. The contradiction between the gloriously holy character of God and the sin and wickedness David sees around and feels within is almost too much to bear. He needs some R&R away from the field of battle and from under the gaze of his commanding officer.

If you know, you know.

And if you know, you won’t condemn David, nor any of your brothers or sisters who might feel just the same but are too frightened to acknowledge it, even to their best of friends. Some people can’t handle that level of vulnerability being shared with them; it feels like the abject failure of faith and they don’t know what to do with it.

Yet these statements are made from within the life of faith. David is not asking the Lord to go away but to look away. Those are very different in tone and in intent. The fact is, this level of disquiet tends to be companion to the most intense awareness of the beauty of God. The brighter the light, the denser the shadow.

Does David really believe his life will end in the oblivion of “no more”? Of course, it takes the whole Bible to parse the full reality of hope and we’re in the middle of that unfolding story in this psalm. Yet even for those who are privileged to live in the light of Jesus’ resurrection, these wounds are not to be treated lightly, nor healed superficially.

Far from trying to explain away in barely-disguised embarrassment David’s words, we ought to recognize he is doing something remarkably brave and generous: giving us a means to confront and to voice our own experience of the LORD’s gaze as a stressor and not only as solace and security. He is articulating, without false resolution, what may be unspoken for many.

And we can thankful he does so with an honesty so searing it can disarm our defences. Such honesty could only be finally destabilising and destructive if God were not God. Yet he is and ever will be. Our Lord Jesus went to the outer reaches of all darkness so we might not be terrified to express to him the confusions we carry, even as we stumble forward in the light of his life.

In Acts 3, Peter and John have a remarkable encounter with a beggar who was lame from birth. He sat every day at the gate called Beautiful, carried there by others, asking money from those passing by. Every day he was seen but not seen. Every day he lived in hope of a few pennies tossed in his direction, or perhaps the leftovers from someone’s lunch, who knows? On the periphery of society, he was a man whose hopes rose no higher than the depths of a passer-by’s pocket.

But this day would be different.

He’s aware of people passing, among whom are Peter and John on their way up to the temple, but he didn’t really see them for who they might be. To him these are just two more men who might possibly take pity on him and throw him a few coins. But these are men whose lives have been reclaimed by the grace of God in his Son, the one whom they know and follow as Jesus the Messiah. They have more to offer him than he could ever have imagined possible. And by the end of their encounter his account has been immeasurably enriched.

It’s a familiar story to many I’m sure. I’d like to pick up on one particular detail. When the man asked Peter and John for money, Luke tells us that “Peter said, ‘Look at us,’ so the man gave them his attention.” He imagined they were asking him to look at them because they had coins to toss in his direction, but this was to be far, far different.

So why did Peter call for the man’s attention?

This beggar is asking for impersonal help. He’s used to being treated by others as less than a fully human being — a problem to solve, a blemish to erase, a cause without celebrity. But he is about to discover that God never sees us through those lenses, not ever. We are people made in his likeness and, just as Peter and John looked straight at him, so the Lord looks on us without refraction or distortion, but with complete coherence and limitless compassion.

The eye-to-eye contact initiated by Peter is the truly beautiful gate through which mercy is going to be extended to this helpless man. It won’t come as an impersonal favour from someone who barely notices he is there, with a coin tossed in the vague direction of a pleading voice. The help he is going to receive will be deliberate and a disclosure of divine goodness, channelled through the direct line of sight.

The whole Bible being addressed to us demands our attention — that we would look and look until the tears dry and our eyes clear. When the LORD compels our gaze, it is not so he can tell us to depart in judgement but to be welcomed by the grace that arrives like the silence between waves, a moment of acute mercy within the movement and momentum of life. We look to him and find his gaze meets ours, his look silencing the clamour of our shame, answering the deepest longings of our hearts to be seen and known, to be held and healed.

John tells us the risen Jesus has eyes that blaze like fire, but those flames are not to consume our being but to purge the dross.1 Other times, his eyes were brim-full of tears, sharing our pain,2 as discovered in story by a boy named Digory:

Up till then he had been looking at the Lion’s great feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion’s eyes.3

This is the look that unites us to God in depths of love and kindness, the look that is like a beam along which travels the light of life, the healing for our despairing souls. He looks upon us and calls us to return his gaze. We need not fear doing so.

(For another reflection on the Lord’s gaze, see The Piercing Eyes of Mercy.)

A better you, every day. Isn’t that the standard to aim for? After all, doesn’t the apostle Paul say in 2 Corinthians 3:18 that “we all … are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory” — so how cool is that? A day-by-day, perhaps even moment-by-moment, growing into the likeness of Jesus. Every part of your personality and character being worked on and re-shaped, the ground progressively cleared and the tender shoots cultivated into luscious, fruit-bearing greenery.

But is that really how to read this verse? Many do so and then find what ought to be a thrill turns into a threat — a statement of acclaim morphs into accusation. Because an honest account of our lives reads so very differently. Things are far from straightforward. Which part of you is it that’s to be better than it was the day before? Is it to be true in every habit, every motivation, every relationship? Is there no possibility for regression in any of those areas — that we are once changed, always changed? Is Paul really suggesting the curve of the Christian life is only ever upwards? If he is — and it does get presented that way — then many of us are, quite simply, falling woefully short. Because that is not the path our pilgrimage has taken.

There’s clearly something wrong here, if so many could feel so silently defeated by what is designed to be a statement that declares truth to the glory of God. I think there are at least two things to say which might help set this on a sounder footing.

The first is to acknowledge the reality of what growth actually looks and feels like. You might remember those awkward days of adolescence, when growing pains felt like a permanent part of life. Your bones and muscles often felt sore and your body disproportionate and uncoordinated. Would you never outgrow being the gawky teenager? The growth was clear, but it often felt destabilising.

And yet, looking back, you can see that the pains you suffered were the signature of the process. There was no smooth upward curve into adulthood, into fuller physical or psychological formation, nor could there be. And yet we expect precisely that in relationship with the Lord?

So take a breath. Just as in your youth, you are becoming a different person — just not yet fully-formed. Sometimes it’s difficult to discern the precise shape it’s taking and how the finished article (you) will look. You have to hang on in there while the work continues. As with the adolescent, we’re growing towards the adulthood that is already within us — a final likeness to Jesus, superintended by “the Lord who is the Spirit.”

Then, secondly, we need to widen the narrative in order to take proper account of the picture Paul is actually painting in this verse. Fundamentally he isn’t delineating the individual Christian in these lines — this is about the church as a community, as a family. He is describing in these celebrated words a corporate growth and transformation that pulses with the glory of God.

Maybe you have an even harder time seeing the progression there than you do in your personal experience? You wouldn’t be alone in that.

Often there is friction born of misunderstandings, some of them apparently wilful. There is tension across and within the body. The church family is becoming more diverse and that can bring with it awkwardness and a sense of loss, as the body begins to shed the identity with which you were comfortable. So much change and so little ease.

But, as with the gangly teenager, struggling every time they look in the mirror, some of these tensions will be, in themselves, the evidence of genuine growth. If we can set down the progress chart for a moment, realising we’re intent on measuring the wrong things entirely, that our metric is not of the Lord, might we not see that the body is made up of people with vastly different backgrounds, life experiences and more — and yet the direction of travel is Christ-wards?

Yes, the individual trajectories are uneven and sometimes appear to be regressive, and that bleeds over into the corporate narrative. But learning to live together and cope with the vagaries is akin to our younger bodies somehow managing to navigate the awkward middle years towards physical maturity. And so the forgiving and being forgiven, the patience and the burden-bearing, shine with the glory of God far more compellingly because the context is one of confusion and clumsiness.

Some day (to switch metaphors), the whole house will be filled with the glory of God. At the moment, it can feel like a building site, with rubble everywhere, rooms unfinished and endless delays due to poor weather. It takes a lot of faith to imagine what it will be one day!

But isn’t that faith also a display of the glory of God? That we do not lose heart, not with ourselves nor with others, because our hope isn’t located in our own faltering efforts, nor our expectations governed by the passing fads of this mercurial world. Instead, standing shoulder to shoulder we turn our gaze and “with unveiled faces [we] contemplate the Lord’s glory”. And it is that sight which is the motive power for every movement towards the goal, the upward call of God in Christ.

So don’t lose heart. The change is happening and it will be completed. Let’s give him the glory for that.

In Psalm 139:18 we read these sumptuous words of David: “When I awake,” he says to the LORD, “I am still with you.” The close context for these words is the beautiful, filled-with-wonder and deeply-precious thoughts of God concerning David (and, as the representative king, of the people collectively). Those thoughts are staggeringly beyond number.

David has woken once more into the ongoing reality of the perceptions and plans which are higher by far than the best we could ever muster.1 He wakes in continuing amazement — the delight had not been a passing daydream.

It’s possible his words encompass all he has said thus far in the psalm, a kind of summative statement before the ‘sharp left’ of v.19ff. Each morning he wakens with the God of unfailing presence and limitless perception, even when those combine into momentary alarm.2 No matter how difficult the previous days, no matter how distressing the night that has now passed,3 David has securely woken once again in the company of the Creator who fashioned him in his mother’s womb.

And he ever will. Waking into God’s continuing presence is the texture of daily life for those whose being is oriented by faith in the living God, those asking to be both searched and known. Its nap may often be flattened by failure or fright, but its rich pile will not become matted or worn threadbare through trial, since it doesn’t depend upon our consciousness nor completed obedience. When we slip into sleep’s suspension, he remains fully awake and alert to all our need for mercy and protection.

Earlier in the psalms, David spoke of another waking with the LORD, one that takes us by the hand into a more intense light:

As for me, I will be vindicated and will see your face;
when I awake, I will be satisfied with seeing your likeness.
(Psalm 17:15)

A psalm that pleads for rescue from enemies and vindication before God closes with the most radical assurance. Whatever this world might hurl at us, the one whose hope is in Jesus can express the confident hope of seeing (and then being changed into4) the likeness of the Lord. That sight will completely satisfy, nothing left out and not a shred of discontent. An anti-climax it will not be!

This is a wonder beyond words and a sight no one is given this side of glory — even Moses, great servant that he was, was only able to see the back of God5. Perhaps the person who came closest to both wakings was Simeon. Having lived his life in daily communion with the Lord, waking with him each morning, he saw the face of embodied salvation and declared himself ready to slip peacefully into life’s final sleep. The earnest of the ultimate face-to-face in glory being woven into the warp and woof of his devoted soul, he was secure in knowing he would wake and be satisfied in seeing again, and in delighted fullness, the Saviour he now held in his aged arms.6

There will be a final waking into unending day, in the city where there is no more night.7 Those who now wake daily will then awake definitively. The God who has planned and ordered all our days, who has been ever-present, reading every anxious thought and knowing our hearts in their ocean depths, will finally be seen — his face not that of an unknown stranger but the LORD who has always loved us, coming now into clearest, fullest focus, a sight that will never dim nor distort, never pale nor fail. And we shall be satisfied, wholly and lastingly, in the One we awake to see.

The story of Moses in Exodus 2 begins in rather prosaic fashion: “Now a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son” — the son who will be raised by Pharaoh’s daughter and named Moses on account of his watery deliverance. We might wish to ask why his tribal heritage is significant, such that we’re told both his parents were from the tribe of Levi?

The answer likely lies in Jacob’s biting words in Genesis 49 where, in speaking of all his sons, he says of two that

Simeon and Levi are brothers—
their swords are weapons of violence.
Let me not enter their council,
let me not join their assembly,
for they have killed men in their anger
and hamstrung oxen as they pleased.
Cursed be their anger, so fierce,
and their fury, so cruel!
I will scatter them in Jacob
and disperse them in Israel.1

Within a few verses of being told of Moses’ birth to a Levite couple, we find him killing an Egyptian in his anger.2 It looks like the DNA is bearing its bitter fruit. History is repeating itself (it has to, wrote Steve Turner, no-one listens). Jacob knew how much trouble the violence of Simeon and Levi brought in its wake3 and we’re left wondering the same here — the self-appointed heir-apparent appears to be a hot-head, a violent man who will reckelessly expose his people to unsought trouble.

The instinct to defend his own people is arguably justified but the means is very much open to question. The devil was a murderer from the beginning, but the Lord’s deliverer? Is this how the kingdom of peace will be inaugurated?

Perhaps Moses is going to need extended time in exile to learn a different way…

And so it turns out. His absence in Midian, which no doubt felt open-ended, is noted as “that long period”.4 The LORD is not working in haste, because character formation takes time. Preparation for lengthy service is unlikely to be a brief affair. Genuine maturity isn’t like Jonah’s favourite plant that grew up overnight and was gone by the end of the day.

God’s purposes take time to ripen, sometimes over several generations. And that will inevitably include the need to work through some of the entailments of history, whether embedded within DNA or in the broader swells and currents of complex, sin-warped life-stories.

He feels under no compulsion to hurry. Israel was in great distress in Egypt — as the LORD knew. He saw and prepared to act, but did so over time. That’s hard for us to handle because we can’t ever see that far, our eyes are firmly fixed on the road in front of us, as we slouch towards our own Bethlehem.5 But the God who transcends time deals with people and peoples both over many years as well as within the space between seconds.

Where does all this meet us?

It speaks to our slow, slow growth into mature, fully-formed believers capable of bearing lasting fruit.6 It’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon. We need to be prepared for that and not become discouraged that some things seem to take so long. There are things about life — about us — that need more than surface treatment. The buried giants waiting to be brought into the light in order to be finally slain.

It’s right to be cautious about rapid growth, given our Lord’s parable of the soils. Often such increase doesn’t last or needs at the very least to be consolidated over a longer period of time, sometimes through extended trials — the suffering-perseverance-character-hope arc that Paul traces in Romans 5.

If we find such waiting difficult for ourselves we can also struggle with the idea of patiently holding on for change in the lives of others and for the flourishing of our churches. We often struggle to wait 40 minutes let alone 40 years for something to happen. Yet our Lord Jesus commends patience, steadfastness, endurance. So many of his kingdom parables point to that: seeds are planted and will ripen in time — his time, not ours. And there’s nothing we can do to hasten it.

But we can pray. Always. Not giving up but keeping faith with the God of the promise. He isn’t slow as some understand slowness; he isn’t unmindful of the weight of the burdens and requests we bring to his feet. He’s worthy of our trust, even through the longest delay.

Changes can and do come, through the grace that is in our Lord Jesus Christ. They came for Moses. They came for Jacob. They came for John-Mark. They came for John, the disciple who, along with his brother James, was called Boanerges — Sons of Thunder — yet is ultimately remembered not for his anger but as the apostle of love.

You are no longer captive to history, your own or others, when the love of God has set you free.

For your encouragement of the real change the Lord can work, here is Andrew Peterson singing The Power Of A Great Affection:

With the advent of Zoom, many of us became familiar with being told “You’re on mute!” Whoops. Not again. Once I had the experience of not being able to unmute — no combination of keystrokes would fix my foolishness. Perhaps I’d been speaking too much and it was a not-so-subtle hint from the admin! I quickly scrawled a message, held it to the screen and normal service was soon resumed and I was restored, somewhat abashed, into the ebb and flow of conversation.

But there is a muteness no admin or techie can solve. It’s a universal problem that only the gospel can cure.

We were born to know the God who made us (the very epitome of eternal life1), to love the Lord our God with heart, soul, mind and strength, and to praise our Maker while he gives us breath2 — and to be astonished to discover the truth of the scriptural principle that we grow increasingly like that to which we offer our service and trust.3 But sin has muted us. It has robbed us of speech worthy of God — so many of our words are idle, valueless — and causes the soul to stammer its way into silence. And the sin-silenced soul shrivels, calcifying in ignorance of the One whose love makes a person truly alive.

In Mark 7:31-37, our Lord Jesus encounters a man who is deaf and mute. Unable to hear others praising God, he is detached from all teaching of God’s Word and fully incapable of uttering his own nascent worship. He is without any means to make himself known and understood and to be part of the human family in its collective response to God and sharing in his abundant life.

This is not how it was meant to be. And it is not how it will remain, once the Saviour is on the scene.

There is something so moving in how the Lord meets the man in all his complex needs. He would not be able to understand the developing commotion and is likely to be distressed and confused by the crowds — so the Lord takes him aside, away from the throng. He isn’t going to make a show of him. Jesus then demonstrates without words what he is going to do for the man: puts his fingers in the man’s ears; spits and touches the man’s tongue (saliva was believed to have healing properties). Each ingredient necessary to communicate what was taking place.

The gravity of the man’s condition was such that as Jesus looks to heaven (to indicate the source of his power), he sighs deeply. Being deaf and mute was a profound tragedy. But the Lord of glory enters history to undo the misery — after the sigh, he speaks a word (Mark gives it in Aramaic — ‘Ephphatha!”) and “at this, the man’s ears were opened, his tongue loosed and he began to speak plainly.”4

This is not the work of a showman or a magician. This is God coming to set free and restore the helpless, those separated and silenced by the scourge of sin. It is a moment repeated in the experience of all who look to Jesus for mercy and saving grace.

This beautiful moment is recognised by the crowd and they cannot but speak in praise of Jesus: “He has done everything well — he even makes the dear hear and the mute speak.”5 Perhaps they instinctively felt and saw in this scene a clear and compelling fulfilment of Isaiah 35:6, where the coming of the Messiah will mean that “the mute tongue [will] shout for joy”. (The equivalent term in Greek for the one used in Isaiah only occurs once in the New Testament, right here in Mark 7.)

This is what our Lord Jesus came to do — to set us souls free and to unstop our hearts, now able to clearly hear in the depths of our being what God has said and to respond with gladdest shouts of praise. And then to use our tongues, not to curse others made in God’s likeness,6 but to bless with words of hope and healing, words of gospel grace and the kindness of the King.

We've been unmuted, praise God!

O for a thousand tongues to sing
My great Redeemer’s praise,
The glories of my God and King,
The triumphs of His grace.

My gracious Master and my God,
Assist me to proclaim,
To spread through all the earth abroad
The honours of Thy name.

Jesus! the name that charms our fears,
That bids our sorrows cease;
’Tis music in the sinner’s ears,
’Tis life, and health, and peace.

He breaks the power of cancelled sin,
He sets the prisoner free;
His blood can make the foulest clean;
His blood availed for me.

He speaks, and listening to His voice,
New life the dead receive,
The mournful, broken hearts rejoice,
The humble poor believe.

Hear Him, ye deaf, His praise, ye dumb,
Your loosened tongues employ;
Ye blind, behold your Saviour come,
And leap, ye lame, for joy.

Look unto Him, ye nations, own
Your God, ye fallen race;
Look, and be saved through faith alone,
Be justified by grace.

Charles Wesley, 1707-88

The churches in Galatia had been thrown into turmoil over how to secure their relationship with God. They were desperately looking to add into the mix whatever such security would need, other than faith alone in Christ alone.1 A security that would be gained at others’ expense, as spiritual oneupmanship became the new playbook.

So Paul unpacks the dimensions and implications of the gospel and urges them to see how its achievements extend to confronting the bitter, fractious relationships that are threatening to consume them. Carry on as you are, he says, and you’ll devour one another.2

In the course of candidly confronting their estrangement from grace, he pointedly reminds them, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free”.3 A lasting release from the penalty and power of sin? Most certainly and most wonderfully — to have such a load lifted off and away is priceless and joy-making. But gospel freedom is fuller and more expansive than our personal standing before God. It changes the whole direction and framing of our lives.

Being vindicated in Christ means no longer needing to constantly aim at self-justification on the basis of performance or privilege, of economic status or gender or social position.4 In the Messiah, visible differences no longer amount to value distinctions: there is now “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female,” for all are one through being in the Messiah, in his single-seed family, united by the love that saves.5

Walls of hostility and chasms of misunderstanding have been, respectively, taken down and crossed over, in order that loving service may expand, unconstrained by ethnic or social distinctions and demarcations. For we have been set free not for selfish indulgence (which would be ongoing slavery to the flesh) but to “serve one another humbly in love.”6

Here is the most unqualified expansion: we are to give to and serve each other no longer through the wounding refraction of social or ethnic merit (part of the “weak and miserable forces” that enslave7), but on the grace-defined basis of mutuality, of being “all one in Christ Jesus.”8

This is self-giving at its most honest and at its most vulnerable, since we serve without any expectation of reward, no hidden agenda staining the hand offered in kindness. The service for which Christ sets us free is the freedom in which we come to more closely resemble the One who came not to be served but to serve, laying down his life as a ransom for many.

This freedom will mean we increasingly resemble the God who in his own being continually gives in love — the Father to the Son, the Son to the Father, in the love of the Holy Spirit. We will enter more deeply into his life as we choose to love through serving and as we serve by love, with the humility that rejoices in distinctions being erased and voided, no longer part of the conversation nor subjected to calculation.

The bottom line for Paul? “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.”9 This is the life of the liberated, the freedom that comes from faith in the crucified Messiah, the release enjoyed by those who have received the promise of the Spirit by faith and in whom the Spirit’s fruit is being cultivated.

At root, it is a life open to others and for others — a life let loose into the liberty of love, the love that shapes and fashions into beauty the souls of those willing to be captives of its transforming power. This is our freedom.

We spent Monday cheering on members of our family as they ran a half-marathon (our son, Harold) and a marathon (our son-in-law, Josh). We were immensely proud of both for completing their races despite setbacks over the past weeks (illness and injury, respectively).

Cheering from the roadside, we saw the elite runners leading the way, looking for all the world like olympic sprinters. And sitting in the stadium, waiting for our galant runners to enter, we saw the not-so-elite, exhaustedly crossing the line, satisfied but utterly spent.

Ecclesiastes 9:11 announces that “The race is not to the swift.” But hadn’t the fleet of foot come in first? And didn’t the labouring lumber in last of all? It’s worth putting that statement into its larger context, because it faces us with something vital:

I have seen something else under the sun:

The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.

A clear-eyed look at life tells us (these verses maintain) that the fittest athletes don't necessarily cross the line first, nor are battles inevitably won by the best-prepared and most heavily-equipped armies. Wise people may not be regularly rewarded and applauded; bright young things don’t always make it rich and the most qualified aren’t forever exalted.

Once again in this most fascinating book, we receive a wake-up call, a literary slap-in-the-face. And it’s one we need. Because the bottom line that the writer wants us to grasp is this: time and chance happen to all. No one is exempt from those variables. It might offend our pride to accept it but the sooner we do so the better prepared we’ll be for life.

But you probably don’t need to be convinced by that. Time seems to run riot with our most carefully-crafted aims and chance scuppers the best-laid plans. Good motives are seemingly blocked at random. Love’s labours are lost when their freely-flowing waters are dammed to a trickle. None of this is linear and evenly-spaced — life comes crashing in and the ceiling crashes down too often for you to feel you’ve entered a safe season.

And so you live on your nerves, fearfully looking over your shoulder, keeping one eye on the sky for rain, so disappointed that your heart, as Sara Groves so perceptively sings, seems to be one of those that is built on a floodplain.

If everything, then, is subject to time and chance, and if even the most accomplished among us are subject to their vagaries, what hope do we have?

Ecclesiastes ends with a call to steady-hearted living — “Fear God and keep his commandments.” That call is built on the recognition that our hope is found in the God who is not subject to time and leaves nothing to chance. The God who, whilst not responsible for everything that happens to us, is responsible for us in everything that happens to us. The God whose mercy triumphs over judgement and whose love is stronger than death.

The chorus of a recent hymn puts it so clearly and so well:

None above Him, none before Him
All of time in His hands
For His throne it shall remain and ever stand
All the power, all the glory
I will trust in His name
For my God is the Ancient of Days.

I’m currently reading/listening to Eat, Drink and Be Merry: A Gospel Call to Bold Enjoyment by Ray Ortlund, which is a series of reflections on Ecclesiastes 11:9,10. I’m sure you’d find it really helpful.

In Galatians, without doubt the most uncompromising letter Paul ever wrote, he gives a truly striking warning:

Even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!1

Never one to mince his words, Paul is explicit from the off in this letter. He isn’t messing about, he isn’t gently opening a door to a round-table consultation on what matters and what doesn’t. We can be glad he didn't — the gospel is far too important to mess with. And he doesn’t flinch from recognising his own vulnerability, pressing others not to be blindsided by the esteem they hold him in: “even if we…”.

But why does he warn of “an angel from heaven”? Is this just a stylistic flourish? I think not. Paul’s warning is not arbitrary but draws a line back through scripture to a surprising incident in 1st Kings 13, where “a man of God from Judah” is sent by the Lord to speak judgement on King Jeroboam of Israel and the corrupted worship he promoted. In a move full of typical prophetic verve, the message was spoken to the altar Jeroboam had fashioned to pollute their worship.

The prophet’s message heralded the coming of a king from David’s line (Josiah), raised up by the Lord to restore true worship and judge the brazen sins of Jeroboam. As fulfilled in the Lord Jesus, this was the centre of Paul’s gospel.

The man of God was told to speak the LORD’s word of judgement and then return home by a different route. No staying to feast with the king or anyone else for that matter. But having played his part well and having set off for home, he was persuaded to remain longer by an old prophet. What was it that swayed him? The old man’s claim that “An angel said to me...bring him back.” Taken in by a lie, he fell under judgement, being mauled to death by a lion on his eventual way home.

The man of God had been resolute in refusing Jeroboam’s overtures yet stumbled at the claim to supernatural authority by the old prophet.2 Sometimes the clearer danger is surpassed by the nearer. Wolves in their natural dress are not difficult to spot, after all. But we can be tripped up by those who seem most like us, most agreed on theology, most aligned on the needs of the times. By a close friend or respected pastor or hero from church history. The dynamics of relationship can cloud rather than clarify our thinking and darken the disposition of our hearts.

But why would this old prophet deceive? When he realised he had caused such trouble he was grieved— “Alas, my brother!”3 He had clearly meant him no harm, and yet he recklessly enticed him to disobey the Lord. Lying about spiritual experience can be so disruptive, so damaging. Perhaps he wanted to indulge a sense of personal worth, relive his glory days and be able to name-drop (albeit no names are given for either man). Or maybe he just couldn’t bear to be left out of what God was doing? We can suffer from the same temptations. This sorry tale merits slow, prayerful reflection.

We can deceive and we can be deceived. We can’t turn back time and we may not be able to undo mistakes we’ve made — the old prophet does what he can to honour the dead, burying the man of God in his own tomb, but it’s sadly too little, too late. Yet we are not without gospel hope: “Grace and peace … from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins.”4 The Lord’s apparent severity is not the wild, jungle roar of nature but the fierce goodness of the holiness that ensures mercy triumphs over judgement.5

Depth of mercy! can there be
Mercy still reserved for me?
Can my God his wrath forbear?
Me, the chief of sinners spare?

I have long withstood His grace,
Long provoked Him to His face,
Would not hearken to His calls,
Grieved Him by a thousand falls.

Whence to me this waste of love?
Ask my Advocate above!
See the cause in Jesu’s face,
Now before the throne of grace.

There for me the Saviour stands;
Shows His wounds and spreads His hands.
God is love; I know, I feel;
Jesus lives, and loves me still.

Jesus, answer from above:
Is not all Thy nature love?
Wilt Thou not the wrong forget?
Suffer me to kiss Thy feet?

If I rightly read Thy heart,
If Thou all compassion art,
Bow Thine ear, in mercy bow;
Pardon and accept me now.

(Charles Wesley, 1707-88)

Does your life, and does this world, sometimes feel like the inverse of Psalm 46? The earth is giving way; mountains are falling into the heart of the sea — but you do fear. Cameras from the set of a disaster movie follow you in slow-mo; you try to outpace the nameless peril but endlessly fail, as your feet slip and slide in the squalor.

Where is hope grounded? On what basis can confidence stabilise and strengthen? I’d like to invite you to take to heart a couple of verses from the lengthy Psalm 119:

Your word, O LORD, is eternal;
it stands firm in the heavens.
Your faithfulness continues through all generations;
you established the earth, and it endures.1

This is far, far more — but certainly not less — than a divine, “I’ve got this.” Here are depths to match the profound pain and horror of our times and a structure sufficient to re-build the most shattered life.

In the brief compass of these two verses we move from the heavens to the earth, a deliberate glance to the very beginning of the Bible, signalling what is here offered has foundational significance. And what is held out here to wearied and troubled wanderers is God’s word and God’s faithfulness. How they relate is deeply meaningful.

The word that is eternal in the heavens is not the written word that is the Bible but, more properly, is God’s purposive utterance, his declared intention (beautifully expressed in Psalm 33 as “the purposes of his heart”). This is the word that brought all things into being and is active in sustaining and directing the creative power and wisdom of God, his word that makes and keeps covenant.

And the psalmist combines this word with the faithfulness of God, a pairing which is far from clichéd. These verses bind together word and faithfulness in mutual affirmation and actualisation: what he says is completely true to his faithful character and his faithfulness is itself inherently generative — it makes things happen, it brings his plans to pass. They are woven into each other indissolubly.

And the theatre where that is revealed is creation itself — the heavens and the earth — in their sheer permanence. The earth standing firm, established and enduring, is evidence of both the word of God and his unflagging faithfulness. The word that is eternal is not timeless and abstract but relational and historical, operative within creation. And faithfulness is perpetually testified to by that same creation; far from being abstract and distant it is gifted into actual human history, into real lives — our lives — from day to day, from era to era.

The fixed order of creation is the standing pledge that his covenant holds. It is his faithfulness made cosmic and visible. The rising sun daily declares his mercies have been renewed, whatever the confusion that appears to reign on earth. The sun will not stop shining while the creative word and loving loyalty of God endure.

Except it did, once.

Luke tells us how and when that happened:

It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining.2

God’s word cannot fall nor his faithful commitment fail, not while the sun continues to blaze. He himself said so. Which means something deeply mysterious and foundation-shaking was happening on that day of all days. The very thing that guaranteed the LORD’s covenant faithfulness — the fixed order of sun, moon and stars — was momentarily interrupted and ruptured. As the Son of God hung upon the cross, all the breakage, all the wreckage, of humanity in sin was laid on him and he carried it, for us, to an extremity beyond telling — the curse of a broken covenant borne by him.

But the desolation was defined and bounded: once the cup had been drained, once the blood had been shed and the life laid down, the darkness would lift and a new day begin to dawn. A new covenant was permanently and irrevocably sealed. The old framework — the sun and stars as guarantors of the covenant — was suspended precisely at the moment the new covenant superseded it, as testified to by the curtain of the temple torn asunder.3

The old guarantee failed because a new and deeper guarantee was put in place — not the fixed order of creation, but the shed blood of the one who is himself the creative Word and the embodied faithfulness of God. And so he becomes the permanent home of all our hopes, the Sun of Righteousness who rises with healing in his wings.

In days of war we fear,
our hearts are all dismay;
but God’s clear word the darkness lifts,
sustains us on our way.

²Though feeble and so frail,
our times are in his hand;
and should the mountains cease to be
we know our hope will stand.

³His call for ‘Peace!’ brings rest,
revives the wearied mind,
as those who hush and heed his voice
fresh grace and mercy find.

⁴There is a river deep
that flows from God’s own throne;
it brings the life, the love, of God,
to all who will him own.

⁵Then bow in awe before
the LORD who reigns above;
his throne secure in truth and grace
and heaven’s sacred love.

© Richard Myerscough 2026

(This hymn is in short metre and can be easily sung to the tune St Michael. I’ve shared it here before but have made a few minor alterations to it since.)

There are multiple references to ‘years’ in the story of Joseph.1 Years of plenty, years of loss. Years and years of futility, in prison or in a palace. Years away from home, years when God’s purpose seems hidden from view, tethered in a vacant lot. Seven years, seven years — good years, famine years. And so it goes.

Isn’t that just how life is? Days morph into weeks, into months, into years. Years that can be filled to the brim or hollowed-out. And then Joseph’s father, Jacob, arrives in Egypt. With his extended family, he’s escaping the famine, coming to Egypt for salvation. When the Pharaoh asks how old he is, he replies:

The days of the years of my pilgrimage have been few and evil…2

He has little good to say, seemingly only regret that he has failed to live up to those who came before him. His life has been less than theirs, curtailed and limited.

Who hasn’t been there? Death by comparison. Others blessed and you not. Their paths smooth, yours rougher than anything they have ever known (or so it seems). Here is Jacob, an old man, acutely aware his life hasn’t amounted to much, at least in his eyes. And there’s no time now to fix things, to make amends or start over. That door is firmly and forever bolted.

You might find it easy to identify with Jacob. Locked into regrets, the life that remains feels fragmentary. But Jacob has more to say of his life and of the LORD, despite his gloomy assessment. These words are from the same phase of his life and are a testimony of light from within the gathered gloom:

…the God who has been my shepherd
all my life to this day,
the Angel who has delivered me from all harm…3

Is he changing his tune, revising his opinion? Had he only been trying to gain Pharaoh’s sympathy when he spoke of hardships? He was a practised deceiver after all. Possibly. Yet that need not be our conclusion — nor the most charitable.

It is possible to do as Jacob does — to both own the pain and frustration of life and yet still testify sincerely to the goodness of God, the mercy that met us in barren places, the kindness determined to softly bless even when we were basely stubborn. This is the way of the God who has been our shepherd — his good hand laid firmly and lovingly upon us.

We have no other settled hope and no other abiding refuge.

And this reality meets us irrespective of the current length of our days. This isn’t a lesson to bookmark for later, when the years have caught up with us and taken their toll. Jacob compresses the whole arc of faith into a few verses of open-hearted honesty. Yes, few and evil. And, yes, delivered from all harm.

Part of remembering our Creator in the days of our youth is seeking wisdom for the fleeting years.4 The years will swiftly fly and the trials mount as tears go by. Their cumulative impact could become a crushing weight. Jacob’s avowal of the presence of both pain and the LORD his Shepherd, the latter ultimately healing all the former, is a voice that still rings clear, despite the cumulative years of its voyage through time to us.

God who is our shepherd will finally deliver from all harm — from every trial, from all decay. It may not be as we expect or even as we hope, but it will be genuine rescue — out of the deceitfulness of sin and this world’s unrelenting chaos and into the spacious realisation of his sheer goodness.

A goodness that will last throughout the days of the years of our pilgrimage.5

It’s a startling title for an article, I agree. It’s not clickbait (honest!) but an invitation to join Mary Magdalene in the garden with the Lord, in the early morning, on the day he rose from the dead.1

(Incidentally, I preached on this passage on Easter morning, albeit not dwelling on this aspect. If you’d like to read my preaching notes or listen to the audio then go here.)

In the first flowering of her indescribable joy at discovering her Lord is alive from the dead, Mary hears these words from the risen Saviour:

Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’2

“Do not hold on to me” — is there something unfinished or changed about his flesh in its resurrected state that makes it unsuited to human touch? And yet Thomas is invited to do just that and the Lord later eats a breakfast of fish with his disciples. So physical touch is likely not the issue here.

What does seem to be implied is that Mary is holding on with no intent of letting go, which is entirely understandable given the horrors she witnessed less than 48 hours earlier. If a loved one lost to death was brought back to us, now alive, would we not instinctively do the same? Yet she is gently told not to do so. Her grip needs to be loosened and her Lord released.

What seems to be at issue here is not the depth of her emotion but rather his story, his mission, is yet to be completed. Resurrection into continuing life on earth was not the goal. He will not be remaining but returning — ascending to his Father, and theirs; to his God, and theirs. This is why she must relax her hold.

Mary wants to hold onto the Jesus she knows, the Jesus of the earthly ministry, the Rabbi who called her name. And that is entirely understandable and entirely loving. But he has somewhere to go. The ascension has to happen. The Spirit has to come. The mission has to go outward to the whole world. Her clinging, however beautiful its motivation, is oriented backward and inward. His gentle refusal is oriented forward and outward.

There may have been many moments in our own following Jesus as Lord that we have wished to remain in a particular space, a special moment, for far longer, and even permanently. We wish him to remain the Jesus of a particular experience, a particular season of life, a particular form of encounter, but he wants to move us on, to lead us forward into deeper maturity and wiser service. Yet we tighten our hold and resist his call.

That can be the case for churches, too — holding to a ‘form’ of Jesus, a form of faith, of church life, that belongs to an earlier moment. A moment that was blessed and beautiful in its truth and reality, so much so we want to hold on to it with everything we have. Yet that clinging might, in its own way, be a refusal to follow where he's leading. Resurrection is not a return to what was, however cherished, but the beginning of what will be.3

There's something almost paradoxical about this scene — a devoted and loving follower, first to the tomb, who heard her name spoken — is also the one most in danger of making this mistake. Strangely, but tellingly, devotion itself can become a form of holding on that needs to be released. Devotion for its own sake can become something really dangerous, completely not what Mary would have wanted and not what we would want either. Even if latent, the danger remains.

Mary is a prime example of devotion in John’s gospel. She was at the cross. She came to the tomb before dawn. She stayed when the others left. She wept. And it is she — not someone with a more casual attachment — who is gently told to release her grip. Not to cool her devotion to the Lord Jesus but to allow him to direct its expression.

And that direction is given her: “Go and tell my brothers…”. Like Mary, we are not gruffly rebuffed when we wish to stay in the experience of intense joy but we are re-directed. We might need to learn, with Mary, the difference between devotion to Jesus and devotion to our experience of Jesus. They can feel identical from the inside but are subtly different things. Mary isn't clinging to a false Jesus; she's clinging to a real encounter with the real risen Lord. But even that, held too tightly, becomes an obstacle. The experience, however genuine, cannot be the destination.

The desire to possess or retain Jesus in a form we're comfortable with can actually work against the bigger thing he is doing. His work on the cross was definitively finished4 but his mission had to be allowed to reach its conclusion, for the blessing of a world held in darkness. Mary’s heart was filled with the light of resurrection joy but others needed to share that dawn. They still do.

Through the pride and curiosity of a young boy named Digory, Jadis (the future White Witch) came into Narnia, even on the day of its creation and innocence. He had messed up big time.

His mother was dying of cancer (as had been the experience of the author, CS Lewis). Digory would do anything to save her. And in the course of the story he has this encounter with the lion, Aslan:

Digory kept his mouth very tight shut. He had been growing more and more uncomfortable. He hoped that, whatever happened, he wouldn’t blub or do anything ridiculous.

“Son of Adam,” said Aslan. “Are you ready to undo the wrong that you have done to my sweet country of Narnia on the very day of its birth?”

“Well, I don’t see what I can do,” said Digory. “You see, the Queen ran away and—”

“I asked, are you ready?” said the Lion.

“Yes,” said Digory. He had had for a second some wild idea of saying, “I’ll try to help you if you’ll promise to help my Mother,” but he realised in time that the Lion was not at all the sort of person one could try to make bargains with. But when he had said “Yes”, he thought of his Mother, and he thought of the great hopes he had had, and how they were all dying away, and a lump came in his throat and tears in his eyes, and he blurted out:

“But please, please – won’t you – can’t you give me something that will cure Mother?” Up till then he had been looking at the Lion’s great feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion’s eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory’s own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself.

“My son, my son,” said Aslan. “I know. Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another.”1

This morning I would like us to be good to one another and to Mary Magdalene, who we find standing outside the tomb, weeping, on that glorious Easter morning.

Tears are not for souvenirs. We know many legitimate and pressing reasons for them. We suffer grief and loss. We suffer anguish and disappointment. We suffer hurt and shame. Tears may not be enough but we have them, in buckets.

And the Easter story meets us where we might often find ourselves — in a garden that houses a tomb, with Mary Magdalene in the depths of sorrow.

Her story doesn’t end there and ours need not either. The tears outside the tomb are the beginning of a resurrection encounter that changes everything. They are not an obstacle to it. So we can hope, in the mercy of God, we would know the same translation from tears to telling.

1 Outside the tomb

Let’s begin by noticing exactly where Mary is: outside the tomb. John is a very accomplished writer — every detail he includes has significance and is deeply suggestive. His words paint for us a scene that connects back to the beginning of time: we’re in a garden; it’s the first day of a new week. It’s early in the morning where darkness begins to give way to daylight. Just as he did in the opening phrase of his gospel, John has taken us back to the beginning in the book of Genesis.

But everything is no longer pristine, freshly-spoken into being by the Word of God. With Mary, we’re living in the aftermath of the dreadful collapse into sin and all the horrors it brought.

Mary Magdalene is not a major figure in John’s gospel, at least until now. She first appears in 19:25 as one of the women who stood near the cross. She’d had a wonderful experience of the grace of God in Jesus who delivered her from seven demons (it’s Luke who tells us that, not John, but John’s readers in all likelihood would know it).

But she now moves from the wings toward centre stage. Which is where John gives us this seemingly inconsequential detail: Mary is outside the tomb.

• In verse 5, the disciple Jesus loved reaches the tomb first but doesn’t go in; he bends over and looks at the strips of linen but remains outside.

• Peter arrives and, all in a hurry, goes straight into the tomb, sees it is empty yet without any apparent understanding of what he finds (or doesn’t find) in there.

• Mary, however, stands outside weeping. She is the least far forward of the three.

We’re seeing here different levels of engagement with the reality of the empty tomb. And Mary appears to be the most stuck. In a sense, she can’t enter because she doesn’t yet have a category for what an empty tomb means. For her it still contains a corpse; it’s just that the body is missing (“Tell me where he is and I’ll get him” - so she can put him back where he belongs, in the tomb).

All that’s in this scene for her is death and defeat. Her grief has locked her into a framework that the resurrection has already shattered but she doesn’t know it yet.

And that is so significant for us. Death and its dismay, the terrible disorderliness of sin, the wreckage that is evil — it can all leave us marooned outside the hope that is Easter truth. You might know all the details of this story and yet remain completely stuck. Not because you’re weaker than anyone else, but because death is the last enemy to be destroyed and, along with sin and evil, exerts a power we have no means to defeat.

Mary cannot yet enter the tomb in all its meaning because she’s not yet able to conceive the possibility the original Axis of Evil has been thrown down, never to rise. As she looks at the tomb she sees only unrelenting hopelessness. She was not naive in any sense about life and the horrors of death; she’d seen exactly what had happened to Jesus on the cross. And it held her fast, stuck in her grief, outside the tomb.

Maybe you’re also stuck — in the gloom, in the rising despair that threatens at any moment to overwhelm your battered and broken heart.

So, yes, let’s be good to Mary and to one another in all our sorrows.

2 Why the tears?

But in that goodness let’s see, along with Mary, that we can move forward because this account has forward momentum. She may be stuck but the story isn’t.

Tears in the face of death and loss are so far from being wrong that Jesus himself wept at the tomb of his friend Lazarus (even though he knew in a moment or two he would call him back to life). No doubt you heard the echo of that in that quotation from The Magician’s Nephew.

Grief is not wrong but sometimes it operates only within the categories of the old world: loss, absence, grief, finality. That can be the source of many of our struggles in the Christian life. We’re effectively standing outside the tomb and failing to embrace the reality that in Jesus all things are being made new, that we are made new in him — even though we carry so many sorrows, even though we struggle against temptation and sin.

But notice how the Easter story doesn’t slap us down, telling us our grief is mistaken and our tears a betrayal of your faith. It doesn’t mock or condemn us in the depths of our sorrows. We see that in how John doesn’t rush us past Mary’s tears.

They aren’t an embarrassment. The angels don’t tell Mary, “Stop crying, he’s risen!” Instead, they ask her “Why are you weeping?” They attend to her tears rather than dismissing them. And Jesus does exactly the same.

Mary is given two heavenly invitations to pause at the point of grief before being led through it. And we’re being offered the same. If you’re weeping in your heart right now or fighting back real tears, feeling nothing but helplessness and hopelessness, that you’re planted forever outside this tomb of tears, then you need to be assured that help and hope are at hand.

3 Called by Name into Resurrection Hope

What Mary has struggled to see, let alone grasp, is that a new world was being unveiled before her eyes, a world in which tears do not have the last word, where sorrow is not the ultimate destination. Her weeping is, in a sense, the last echo of the Lazarus grief, the last moment before the world changes permanently.

How does that change occur? She sees her Lord but fails to recognise him. She thinks he’s the gardener with a small g but in fact he’s the Gardener with a capital G. Back in chapter 1 John reported that though the world was made through the Jesus, the world didn’t recognise him and even though he came to his own, his own didn’t receive him, refused to do so. And here is Mary Magdalene, a disciple no less, and in her grief she doesn’t recognise him.

That emphasis is so significant, because it’s where we so often find ourselves, failing to recognize the Lord. Not because we’re culpable or unbelieving but because we’re stuck fast in the sorrows of this passing age.

So how she is moved into that new world of hope and victory? It isn’t by the bare reality of an empty tomb. Nor is it the sight and sound of angels asking about her tears. It isn’t even the sight of her Lord and his gentle tones. The turning point arrives simply (and wonderfully) when Jesus speaks her name: “Mary”.

Everything changes with that one small word. The one who spoke creation into being now speaks new creation into Mary’s heart and soul. With only one word — her name being spoken by the one who is the Resurrection and the Life.

His is the voice that cannot finally be mistaken, even though a few seconds earlier she hadn’t recognised it, when it comes with that connection. It has a power that pierces the gloom and a beauty that breathes new life into the hope that had been buried at the foot of the cross.

Earlier in John, Jesus had said that “He calls his own sheep by name... and his sheep follow him because they know his voice.” Mary is the first of those sheep to hear the risen shepherd’s voice and know it in the depths of her being.

Dear friend, he calls your name this morning. The Lord who is able to wipe all your tears away and give you a hope that will never put you to shame, wherever you are this morning, whatever your need, whatever the brokenness, whatever the sorrow, in all the shame. The Good Shepherd calls your name. Your name. To come to him, to see in his eyes big, bright tears, larger than your own, to hear his voice of triumph ringing clear and to follow him.

He knows your every grief, even those that don’t have a grave for you to go and visit. He is the risen one who went into death for us and emerged victorious.

There was no need for Mary to go into the tomb, to examine it in minute detail for clues, because it was gloriously empty. She didn’t realise that, of course, until the moment her name is spoken by the risen Saviour.

And in those words and in her experience is an invitation and a call to us too.

But it’s not a call that is simply for our own comfort and consolation. Yes, it’s full of that and how glad we are, but it sends us on our way with a whole new framing for life in this world.

The unnamed Samaritan woman in chapter 4 goes back into town and begs others to “come and see!”. Mary is commissioned by her Lord to “go and tell” the glorious good news to the other disciples that death has been defeated, once and for all. What a privilege we have to do the same.

There’s a particular disorientation that comes when you go back to somewhere you once knew well and find it changed, almost beyond recognition. Roads you once navigated without thinking have been rerouted. Streets you knew intimately are unrecognisable, some even wiped out. You stand there, certain you’d know where you are but discover you don’t. The landmarks are gone. The security of your memories is undermined. Are you really who you think you are? It’s all so disconcerting.

For those Peter wrote to in his second letter, that experience was not about bricks and mortar. Their landmarks were people. The apostles—those who had walked with Jesus, heard his voice, witnessed his transfiguration—they had been the fixed and trusted points of reference for an entire generation of Christians. And now they were going and soon to be all gone.

Peter himself accepted it was true of him. “I know that I will soon put this body aside,” he writes, just a few verses into the letter.1 An age was passing. The era of the apostles was drawing to a close. And those who remained would have to find their footing in a landscape that had shifted beneath their feet.

It’s not so very different from the experience of losing both parents. There may come a particular moment, after the second has gone, when you turn to ask a question and the stage is simply, silently empty. The generation above, the ones whose experiences shaped and sheltered yours, whose long knowledge of the Lord you quietly and unknowingly leaned on—are no longer there. Their voices have been hushed by death. You slowly but shockingly realise you’re now the ceiling in the lives of others. There is no living generation above you. It is, as Peter seems to know his readers will find, more than a little terrifying.

So how does he begin to help them? With a description. He tells them who they are. And what he says is remarkable. He is writing “to those who have received a faith as precious as ours.”2

In what sense is it remarkable? Well, Peter is an apostle. He was there. He knew the sound of the voice of Jesus, heard “truth in timbre”,3 felt the ground shake beneath him on the mount of transfiguration and the taste of their shared breakfast on the beach. But he is telling these scattered, anxious, landmark-bereft believers that the faith gifted to them was not in any sense a diminished version of his own. It wasn’t a consolation prize, handed to those who were sadly born too late. It wasn’t a second-class ticket. No; their faith was as precious, as honourable, as full of weight and worth as the faith of any apostle who ever lived.

The reason he can say so is very important. He’s not talking about the maturity of the one who holds the faith; he’s talking about its content—about who the faith is in. And that object of our faith—Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us—is not something any quirk of history, any vagary of circumstance, any amount of personal failure or frailty can hollow out or diminish. Truth is not being rewritten. It is not being unwound. The cross, where precious blood was shed, stands. The sacrifice was made once, for all. The tomb remains empty, the answer to every falling tear permanently potent.

And the faith that rests upon that foundation—upon him—is no less precious for resting there without apostolic fanfare, in an ordinary life full of everyday pressures.

We are perhaps more susceptible than we realise to an ‘if only’ mindset. If only I had their start in life. If only I’d been planted in better soil, in a more favourable age, in more fertile spiritual ground. We look at others—their apparent ease in faith, their resources, their history, their confidence—and quietly conclude we’re operating at a disadvantage that cannot be surmounted. We are, at bottom, second rate. That’s just how it is. That’s our accident of history. Well, Peter will not allow it. You have not, he insists, been sold a dud.

But he doesn’t simply assert it; he grounds it. Their faith has been gifted “through the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ.”4 It is a startling phrase, and the grammar will not let you read it as anything other than a direct declaration that Jesus is God. But beyond that, it is the term righteousness that does the heavy lifting. For Peter, this word has everything to do with faithfulness, with integrity, with the keeping of promises. To say that faith comes through Christ’s righteousness is to say that there are no favourites, no short-changing, no inconsistency.

He has covered our sins as completely as those of any others. He has sent the same Spirit into our hearts. He has prepared the same home, with the same access. He deals with each of us according to who we are, with a perfect and thorough knowledge of every trait, every foible, every vulnerability we carry — and never once moves to trim the limits of his promise to never leave nor forsake us. Righteousness means he cannot. The promise is not conditional on our conformity to someone else’s standard or pattern. It is simply, unbendably, his.

Which is exactly why Peter can pray with such unaffected confidence, “Grace and peace be yours in abundance.”5 Not a trickle but an ocean’s swell. To every believer, however exposed, however unmoored by the passing of those they had relied upon, grace and peace flow in full measure “through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.”6 Knowing him is the channel—not our achievements, our maturity, the year we were born, nor the generation whose apron-strings and coat-tails we were blessed to hold. Simply knowing him.

Whatever has changed, whatever landmarks have been eroded and lost, the faith you have been given is unspeakably, unchangingly precious. Because of the Lord who is at the heart of it.

In 1 Kings 10, the Queen of Sheba visits Solomon, King of Israel. She comes to confirm the reports she’s heard of his fame, his relationship with the LORD his God and the wisdom with which he has been blessed. She sees the incomparable riches of his kingdom, the lavish and generous provision at his table. She hears his answers to her deepest, toughest questions. She sees his palace, the temple and the offerings made there. And she is simply overwhelmed.

Her words in response are some of the most memorable in the portrayal of Solomon as a forerunner of God’s anointed King, our Lord Jesus Christ:

The report I heard in my own country about your achievements and your wisdom is true. But I did not believe these things until I came and saw with my own eyes. Indeed, not even half was told me; in wisdom and wealth you have far exceeded the report I heard. How happy your people must be! How happy your officials, who continually stand before you and hear your wisdom! Praise be to the LORD your God, who has delighted in you and placed you on the throne of Israel. Because of the LORD’s eternal love for Israel, he has made you king to maintain justice and righteousness. (vv.6-9)

The half had not been told her. And the same is true of us. Those who spoke of the Lord Jesus, who preached the gospel in our hearing, who simply told us their own story of grace, did not trim their accounts and yet were never able to finally and fully declare “the unsearchable riches of Christ.”1 How could they possibly do so? In him “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” and in him “all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.”2 They delighted to tell of him but would have to conclude with John that “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”3

• The half has not been told us of the compassion of Jesus. His deep feeling with and for his people; his full understanding of all the motions of a human soul, all the byways of consciousness and all the unfathomable depths of thought and feeling and motivation. Nothing is a surprise to him. His capacity to enter into our sufferings is greater than we can take hold of — he is truly and deeply touched with the feeling of our infirmities.

• The half has not been told us of his deep, deep love, however diligent and creative the attempt to do so. Love that reaches deeper than the depths of self-despair; love that is vast, unmeasured, boundless and free. The love that went to the cross for the totality of our sin and failure, our captivity to the powers of darkness, our despairing slavery to the fear of death. Love that renews and fills the heart. Love from which we cannot ever be severed. Love that never, ever fails.

• The half has not been told us of his wisdom — his understanding of life, of God, of humanity. Of the whole drama of redemption and all that it means for the life of God to flood the soul of people made in his image. The wisdom that directs our paths, through all the changing scenes of life, without deviation or compromise, filled to the brim with goodness. Wisdom that is breath-taking and life-giving.

• The half has not been told us of his beautiful and holy life. The purity of all his thoughts and motives, the justice that filled his heart and marked his every encounter with people as burdened as we often are. The lips anointed with grace that spoke truth, without a shred of artifice, to those as confused as we so often find ourselves. The uncreated holiness of God, radiating from within, blessing all who came into its light.

And if the half has not been told us then there is so much more we can and will discover. Depths of wonder that will move us to unending worship and joy. Discovering a thousand points of light studding the skies of our now earthly, and then heavenly, lives. It’s all there, freely given and patiently waiting its unfolding into the unending fruitfulness that comes from the living God.

The Queen of Sheba brought great tribute to Solomon but notice that she went home enriched by him — far, far more than she could have imagined possible. She was not impoverished by the encounter but made richer than ever. To bow and bless the sacred Name in reverent faith will not diminish us in any way but will be the means of our being raised to heights of unimaginable glory, as what was previously untold begins to be written onto our souls and into our lives by the Lord who is the Spirit.

‘Not even half’ doesn’t even begin to come close.

The Call (George Herbert)

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a Way as gives us breath,
Such a Truth as ends all strife,
Such a Life as killeth death.

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:
Such a Light as shows a feast,
Such a Feast as mends in length,
Such a Strength as makes his guest.

Come my Joy, my Love, my Heart:
Such a Joy as none can move,
Such a Love as none can part,
Such a Heart as joys in love.

It’s one of Jesus’ most impressive miracles: feeding the 5000. And that’s just the men who were present — there were women and children also. It was an enormous crowd! And from a few small loaves and fish they’re all fed, filled to the brim with plenty of leftovers. It’s quite astonishing.

If one of the disciples had a marketing bent he might have suggested to the Lord, ‘I tell you what, next time why not do it without any fish or bread at all? That’d take it up another level entirely!’ But the next time he does something similar — for the 4000 — a few loaves and fish remain the raw materials. Because this isn’t about the display of naked power. So what is it about?

Involvement.

How do we know? I think it’s plain in what Jesus said to his disciples:

They don’t need to go away. You give them something to eat.1

What were they meant to do with that? Is this Jesus simply saying to them, ‘I need you guys to understand that you are completely broken, hopeless, lost, and wanting. You simply cannot meet the needs of any other people. It all, always, comes down to me. If you forget that you’ll be of no use in my mission.’ Was his sole intent to lay bare their inability in the most visceral manner?

Well, of course that’s not entirely untrue and much of it is actually the case (even if he would never put it in those terms). But still I think not. Yes, it’s always good for us to remember that everything ultimately, finally, depends upon Jesus. “Apart from me, you can do nothing.”2 But there does seem to be more than that happening here.

Indeed, the text demands we see it differently. In Matthew’s gospel the feeding of the 5000 is followed immediately by the Lord Jesus walking on the lake and that account corroborates this theme of involvement. He walks on the water, treading down the waves, demonstrating who he is, the LORD who alone has mastery and authority over all powers of chaos and darkness. And he appears to be passing his terrified disciples by. But Peter speaks up and makes a confirmatory request, “Lord, if it’s you, tell me to come to you on the water.”3

Is he rebuffed — this is not territory for a mere man like you? No, not for a moment. In fact he’s bidden come join his Master on the water, walking upon the waves. The victory the Lord Jesus ultimately enacts at the cross is to be shared by all his people. Paul makes the same point when he takes up the statement about the Seed of the woman in Genesis 3 and applies it to the Christians in Rome — Satan will soon be crushed under their feet.4

And so Peter walks on the waves. In this demonstration of the power of the Lord Jesus, his victory over the watery powers of chaos and darkness is shared by his eager disciple. Peter doesn’t stand at a distance and observe; he is involved, even if he falters in the frailty of his faith.

Back to the 5,000. The disciples could say, ‘But we simply can’t feed such a crowd. You know it Lord. We’re not the Messiah; you are. We have so little. If anything good is going to happen to these people, it’s got to be you and you alone who does it. That’s the posture we often adopt in prayer and we’re none the for worse for that. But perhaps this is meant to play out a little differently, recognising he’s serious about what he’s saying. And so the response might be more along these lines:

We’ve got so little. Our resources are slight at best. And we feel our lack, deeply. Lord, we need you to take our little and do something with it. You clearly don’t need to involve us and yet you as clearly want to do so — so take our lives and let them be consecrated to you and to your great mission of grace. Use us as you will Lord, not as faceless, nameless materials but as those whose hearts have been flooded by your Spirit of love, as those who have seen in your face the mercy of our Maker.

It’s an immense privilege, to share in his victory, however small the ways in which we might do so.

Yet the invitation to involvement is not without a certain price, one we may find ourselves reluctant to pay, as it calls us out into places of pain and perplexity, something this poem tries to capture:

Not Healed

They said,
“Physician, heal thyself!”
And, of course,
he could
and, of course,
I can't.
And of course
he didn't, wouldn't
ever, because wounded
for others.
That choice is not
mine
to make,
because mine is not
that heart,
coming not to be served
but to serve in unhealed
agony.
I'd take the shorter route,
the path more trod,
that leads to a seed
not planted.

Yet however reluctant we find ourselves at times, and however confused in the process, his words remain potent with a plentitude of blessing: “if it dies, it produces many seeds.”5 Involvement may come at a cost but the privilege is beyond compare.

(This is an edited version of an earlier article)

When the Lord Jesus releases a man from destructive demonic oppression, Luke notes the spirit came out “without injuring him”.1 That he should think to mention it is worth thinking about. And that the evil spirit asks if the Lord has come “to destroy us” (perhaps meaning itself and the man, that once colonised he is indissolubly linked to the fate of the spirit) only adds to the intrigue.

Why should it be imagined that delivering someone from evil might cause them harm, such that it has to be noted when it doesn’t do so?

It’s been suggested we are so entwined in evil, its roots going so deep into our being and its vindictive power so pervasive, that any thought of trying to remove it immediately suggests it will cause us harm. That we will suffer intolerable pain as the tangled knots of our soul are combed through. That the tumour of evil has so annexed our being that no surgery is possible without the death of the patient.

And we can feel the force of that suggestion. In the blindness of indwelling sin it can seem the only joys left to us are the inverse of all that is good — the negative coming into focus in the devil’s dark room. And so we choose to cling to our anger and bitterness as validating our lives in this failed world. A malign voice whispers that giving them up, exchanging them for the sweetness of mercy, is a sham and a loss.

That voice can sound so persuasive.

Of course, deliverance from evil does at times resemble death. When the Lord Jesus answers the desperate cry of a father and casts out the unclean spirit from his son, “the boy looked so much like a corpse that many said, ‘He’s dead.’”2 But appearances can deceive. Jesus lifts him to his feet — and the boy is not harmed, he’s healed, and now lives in the scarcely-anticipated but nevertheless truly real freedom and power of the Spirit of God.3

Following Jesus as Lord is costly, something he is very keen for us to know.4 It is far more demanding than we ever expected. Daily choices to bend our will to his, to embrace a life of service and self-giving compassion — each moment of decision will exact a price. The reorienting of our lives will only ever come with a certain weight. The issues are not slight.

Submitting ourselves to the work of the Spirit, opening our hearts to his influence and the healing power of God’s love, can be harrowing. His word is, after all, sharper than a two-edged sword and can pierce between soul and spirit.5 There are places within us that remain wreathed in darkness and layered with shame; to have them exposed, brought into the light and cleansed, is not likely to be pain-free. It is not without significance that Paul prays for the Ephesians to be strengthened in order to grasp the dimensions of the Messiah’s love. To be rooted and established in love involves the most radical deliverance and transposition. As Eustace Scrubb discovered, shedding a dragon’s skin is profoundly painful.

But it is worth it — always. God in his Word encounters and changes us at the deepest level, but without injuring us. In fact, the reality is so far from harm that we can safely gather our courage and pray — pray to be met in all our need and for the Spirit of Jesus to begin and to continue his healing work within us and among us. He promises all his people a future and a hope, declaring he has no plans to harm us, none whatsoever.

Satan might suggest we will find ourselves damaged in the process, so much so that we ought not to take that road. Stay where you are and as you are. But he’s a liar — and a murderer. Sin and evil would be the death of us. The grace of Jesus finds and saves, purges and restores. The process is not without its own pain but we will not be finally harmed or injured by it — our God is the end of the journey6 and we shall be made complete in him, fully restored and blemish-free through the transfiguring love of our wonderful Saviour.

The Undragoning of Eustace Scrubb

“Then the lion said – but I don’t know if it spoke – ‘You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know – if you’ve ever picked the scab off a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said Edmund.

“Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off — just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt — and there it was, lying on the grass, only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me — I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on — and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again. You’d think me simply phoney if I told you how I felt about my own arms. I know they’ve no muscle and are pretty mouldy compared with Caspian’s, but I was so glad to see them.

After a bit the lion took me out and dressed me—”

“Dressed you? With his paws?”

“Well, I don’t exactly remember that bit. But he did somehow or other: in new clothes — the same I’ve got on now, as a matter of fact. And then suddenly I was back here. Which is what makes me think it must have been a dream.”

CS Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Psalm 70 is a short psalm, sandwiched between a number of larger ones,1 so it’s easy to bypass if you’re in a hurry. Which would be ironic because the psalm is an urgent plea for God to hurry, to take notice and respond. Not once but twice within a few breathless prayers he is urged to intervene:

Hasten, O God, to save me;
come quickly, LORD, to help me…
As for me, I am poor and needy;
come quickly to me, O God.
You are my help and my deliverer;
LORD, do not delay. (vv.1,5)

The need is urgent and it’s right to ask. But the picture in scripture is more complex — demanding, but richer.

You might be familiar with divine delays. The most famous is perhaps John 11, where Jesus chooses to wait before going to heal his friend Lazarus, and in the delay the need intensifies as Lazarus passes from sickness into death.2 The choice to wait, says the Lord, is for the glory of God; we can be sure it was also an immense blessing to Lazarus, Martha and Mary — to be taken into the depths of grief, and, for Lazarus, the depths of the tomb, only there to discover the even deeper compassions of God and his saving power.

The Lord’s delay did not finally endanger his friends — he would never be reckless with the lives of those so dear to him, not to this family nor to any whose hope is in him. When divine delays occur we can be sure it is always the expression of a wisdom that is purposeful and progressive. The clouds of dread will then be seen to have been “big with mercy” and will “break in blessings” on our heads.3

Without doubt those delays have so much to teach us, schooling us into a keener awareness of the ways of God, pursuing pathways we hadn’t expected to walk, until we feel able to say with Paul, “O the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgements and his paths beyond tracing out.”4 But we need to be careful we aren’t over-schooled by those accounts of delay, such that we diminish the place and the privilege of doing just as Psalm 70 does in good faith: pleading with God to please hurry.

Our need is vital and urgent and time is slipping away; the negatives are piling up and calamity feels like it’s beginning to get to its feet, ready to extend itself to its full and monstrous height. It feels like our resilience has slipped into almost terminal decline. So, Lord, please hurry. Things are getting really, really tough.

Do divine delays preclude or qualify into submission such prayers? No, and we must make sure they don’t. As children of God who have been gifted the Spirit of adoption we are to never outgrow the simple and sincere appeal for a speedy intervention. As time-bound creatures, subject to its fragility and its terrors, we have liberty to call upon the timeless Lord.

And often, when we do, another biblical beam breaks through the gloom:

“Before they call I will answer; while they are still speaking I will hear.” (Isaiah 65:24).
“Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” (Matthew 6:8).
“From the first day that you set your heart to understand and humbled yourself before your God, your words have been heard.” (Daniel 10:12)

Not only did you feel it was an emergency, says the Lord. So did I. You won’t need to wait. Trust me. Help is already on its way. This is part of why Psalm 70 is able to affirm that those who seek him can and will be joyful in him.5

The persistent widow of Luke 18, who is promised God will give justice and quickly, is an important benchmark in the life of faith. But do those words mean each and every time the need will be speedily solved and mercifully met? It seems the picture is larger than that, which is a huge blessing for us because it means there is space for us to grow into a deeper and “closer walk with Thee”. And within that space, on that larger canvas, is found the desperate plea for hurry and the honoured response of ‘It’s already being sorted’.

Another account of divine delay is found in Psalm 44. You might want to read this piece on its implications and resolution: