Poverty - harshly, for real

I have been reading Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari. It’s a challenging read. It is sub-titled ‘understanding the anger of Britain’s underclass.’ McGarvey tells the painful story of his own (west of) Scottish upbringing, coloured by poverty and all the challenges it attracts. He is realistic and fair. Yes, the system puts people where they are – and it does. But he also recognises the challenges to which folk could rise, but don’t.

“It’s a bit rich to pretend it’s only racists and xenophobes who are unfairly dehumanising sections of the population. I grew up calling Conservatives ‘scum’ and genuinely believing it, oblivious to the broad spectrum of Conservative opinion that exists. Others in my community claim ‘all cops are bastards’ – even the ones who run towards knife-wielding terrorists to protect the public. From a very young age, we are all inculcated into the mores of a tribe and adopt those values often without thought, later mistaking them for our own.  ….  Belief in the virtue of our hypocrisy is one of the few things we have in common in this increasingly divided society.”

McGarvey’s book is an uncomfortable read, but I think it is an important one. My own upbringing, also in the west of Scotland, was very different, but, given his circumstances, it probably wouldn’t have been. We do need to understand something of what causes what goes on.

And we do need to play our part in addressing the issues that poverty provokes. We are too good at not giving them due attention. “Poverty is not a game and it’s going nowhere any time soon. Poverty is here to stay and things will get worse before they improve. That’s the truth our leaders know but don’t have the guts to tell us.”

Reflecting on the Passion

I have been reading Samuel Wells’ Hanging by a Thread, a moving, challenging and apt reflection on the events of the Passion, in which Wells looks to remind us of the sheer starkness of the events of the last week of Jesus’ earthly life. As he says quite bluntly, but accurately – the passion narrative is “horrifying reading”.

He points, among other things, to the fickleness of the crowd and the way in which they changed their tune in just five short days – “You can’t trust a crowd. You can’t place your faith in popularity. It blows with the wind.”

Wells readily admits that we are incapable of travelling through Holy Week without knowing that Easter Day is round the corner; but he stresses how different it was for the first disciples, and urges us to try and comprehend something of the despair and desolation.

Still, his title conveys a poignancy to which he keeps returning – that of our faith hanging by as thread. That is the wonder of the Gospel and allows us to experience that God is with us. “God didn’t just create us, didn’t just love us from afar, didn’t just work in history to rescue us and strengthen us and heal us. God’s real glory, God’s true nature, appears in the real, substantial, material, physical reality of Jesus among us, Jesus just like us, Jesus beside us. And beside us not just in joy and celebration, but beside in horror, in agony, in isolation, in abandonment.”

Start with your Feet

I have just re-read, after a very long gap, John Vincent’s Radical Jesus. In many ways it was just as I remembered it, a great read, really challenging us to think about how we relate to Jesus and how we engage in the task of following him.

“Jesus the radical walks my streets, creates my communities, freaks out my neighbours, judges my friends, calls my enemies, offends my fellow ministers, heals my sick neighbours, breaks into my world views, exposes it my betrayals, just as he does it in the Gospel story.”

I just feel that, if that is not how it is, it is how it ought to be!

I particularly like – because it challenges me – his chapter about Jesus as the ‘man of roots’. The roots he identifies are levelling, sonship and wilderness. Jesus makes things level. It is like that bit from Isaiah about the valleys being brought up and the mountains being brought down. Jesus makes everyone level. “Excesses are reduced, inadequacies are made good.” Then Jesus is identified as God’s Son at the moment of his baptism. We, too, are God’s children. Jesus also spent that time in the wilderness. Those moments are needed. We might want to avoid the wilderness, but we will miss out if that’s what we do.

Vincent’s emphasis is very much on discipleship, and meaningful discipleship at that. “Discipleship to Jesus provides ‘strait jackets’ whereby people could not do anything else but behave differently.” He sees discipleship as something to which we are surely compelled.

He offers a list of five things that will get us to a good place on the discipleship road.

First, we should start with our feet. Following is key.

Second, we should share meals. Parties are a big element in God’s Kingdom.

Third, we should leave some things behind. That can be challenging, but it’s important.

Fourth, we should have things in common. Community (and sharing) are important.

Fifth, we need to learn to share a common destiny. Our discipleship is about the way of the Cross.