There’s someone we know who keeps having to deal with rather nasty people. I know this is a bold description, but from their behaviour they don’t seem to be terribly kind, thoughtful, generous, or other-centred. The nastiness involves things like bosses clearly exploiting their employees, rude clients, and ‘friends’ scavenging off and even stealing from mates. It makes me so frustrated to hear about it. Why? Obviously because it’s downright awful and we hate seeing our friend go through it, but also because our friend isn’t a Christian. He doesn’t get to experience the blessing of relating with people (other than family members) who consistently seek to do him good and not evil.

So in my upset-ness for him last night as I was pondering the situation again, I wished he could meet some great Christian men. I so much want for him to meet some genuine Christian guys – faithful, solid, loyal, true in word and character, generous, loving, sacrificial.

And then it hit me (silly me) – all this describes Jesus.

It’s so much easier for us mere mortals to look for exemplary behaviour in other mere mortals. It might be our lack of familiarity with the four gospels, it might be that we emphasise Jesus’ transcendence to the detriment of his imminence, or his divinity to the detriment of his humanity. It might be that I’m female so I’m not practised at looking to Jesus for an example of what (hu)manhood should look like. Whatever it is, I’m slow to see Jesus as the perfect man, the perfect human. It’s like (I suppose – haven’t seen it!) watching Avatar without the 3D glasses – we know Jesus was incarnated so he could die and rise for our sins, but we don’t fully appreciate or savour the added dimension of his earthy human-ness – in all its raw, full perfection.

So I still hope and pray that our friend meets some great Christian guys, but now I realise I’ve got to attach that description more solidly to the man Jesus. I hope those Christian guys are ‘great’ because they know and copy Jesus really well, and I hope that makes our friend want to get to know Jesus himself – so he can see what an incredible man Jesus was – and come to know that life can be lived better – not least because of his exemplary humanity.

After owning it for more than a year, I’ve just started reading Nineteen Minutes, one of Jodi Picoult’s many novels.   For me it’s the kind of book you have to be in a certain mood to read, simply because the issues dealt with can be so emotive and thought-provoking.  I haven’t been disappointed so far although I’m only a sixth of the way in.

As usual, Picoult weaves her plot and characters finely together in a realistic and engrossing way. It seems she will deliver what I hoped for – a detailed and ‘human’ examination of the background and motives behind a 17 year-old American boy’s school shooting.

Part 1, Section II opens with this:

Nobody wants to admit to this, but bad things will keep on happening.  Maybe that’s because it’s all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on.  You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someone’s ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end.

But then again, maybe bad things happen because it’s the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.

I’d posit that the first reason is the more accurate one, and it certainly gells with the Bible’s explanation for why bad things happen.  It bears itself out on both a macro (Adam and Eve’s fall into sin and the rest of humanity’s being infected by the same disease) and a micro (chain reactions of bad things  / behaviours / patterns being passed down from one person or generation to the next) level.

I’m looking forward to getting into the meat of the novel and seeing how the characters are further pictured and developed.  But I’m thankful that when I reach the end of it (as well as episodes of Criminal Minds for that matter) I don’t need to wallow in the hopelessness of all the ‘bad things’.  The Bible shows me both a convincing explanation for them and a convincing solution.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t say this tritely.  Bad things are awful – I can’t overstate that.  But Jesus Christ offers us his death on our behalf as the all-time solution for bad things – as God punishes Jesus in our place as if HE had been the perpetrator of all bad things ever done – so that none of us need to be punished for the bad things we actually have done.

And he doesn’t stop there, but gives everyone who trusts in his saving death ability and incentive to change – power to do fewer ‘bad things’ and desire to do good things instead.  This is definitely what Steve’s and my experience has been and what we pray more people in our community and city will come to know.  In Jesus our past ‘bad things’ (done by us or done to us) don’t need to govern our present and our future.  If anyone is in Christ, the old has gone and the new has come.