The View from Monsal Head (What's the Bible about?)

Anyone who has started to read a Bible will know that Christianity is not simple. If you knew nothing about it you might suppose that the Bible would start with an introduction, a summing up of the main points and a guide to how they unfold in the rest of the book. If we were making up a religion we might write something that is set out in such an easy way, but Christianity is not made up and we have no choice but to try to understand it in the places that God has revealed it to us.

The Bible spans thousands of years, many different literary forms, different languages, different locations and sometimes it seems different ideas. Is it possible to look at the Bible and say ‘this is what it’s about’?

This question occurred to me again when I thought about the view from Monsal Head over Monsal Dale in the Peak District. It’s perhaps the most beautiful landscape that I have ever seen. As you stand at the top looking down over the Dale you will see a mixture of glades, trees, a field with sheep in it by a river, a farm house and a bridge to another field with Cows in it. The path down from Monsal head thick with trees and bracken giving way to smooth plush grass at the bottom. There’s a disused railway with beautiful big arches which emphasize the sheer depth of the view. And to your right there’s the muscular hillside with a severe, frightening angle bearing over the dale. All these things combine to make something truly breathtaking.

As I think of it now I see the view so clearly in my mind – but I haven’t yet taken a photograph that lives up to the impression I get when I stand it the car park at Monsal Head and look down on it all. Why is this? I’ve taken some fairly good photos when I’ve just concentrated on one bit of the view, the disused railway-bridge or the sheep in the field next to the river. But I look at the picture of the sheep and the river and it’s no good because it’s not got the bridge in it, or I focus on the path down and realise I’m missing out the hillside. They make some pretty pictures but none of them could be called Monsal Dale because that’s one big whole thing with nothing missing, the view I get from Monsal Head, that’s Monsal Dale. I want the whole picture.

So I don’t want my photograph to miss anything out, I want to get it all in the one photo. So I stand at Monsal Head, I look through my camera and step back until I’ve got a view that captures it all. Except it doesn’t. It looks lousy.

Everything’s in there, I’ve made sure of that. You can see the bridge, the field with the sheep, the river, the farmhouse, the path down, the hillside, it’s all there. But the photo looks lousy. No one looking at that photo would understand why I’ve been waxing lyrical about this place, it would seem completely average to them.

The challenge to the photographer here is considerable. How can you capture the majesty, the wonder of the whole view without leaving any of it out?

The answer is, as I understand it, all to do with focus. You must find your focus, find the spot, the area in the picture that is the focal point. If you get the focal point right you don’t need to leave anything out. The focal point somehow arranges and makes sense of everything else. The eye is drawn to the focal point and from there it takes in the whole scene, arranged in such a way as to deliver all its detail but as part of one whole view.

I’m sure you realise where this is going. What the metaphor is. Of course I’m talking about the Bible. How is it possible to get a proper view on something so vast, so intricate and varied without it looking dull, confusing, uninspiring?

Lets be clear, I don’t know my Bible even half as well as I should do. But some people know it inside out, without really knowing what it’s about. They can recite whole chapters from memory, they can tell you what the Hebrew or the Greek translation is; they can give you any number of historical facts about minor prophets or the type of wood used in Paul’s ship. Their knowledge is absolutely thorough – but it isn’t complete. They don’t have the whole picture.
Biblical scholarship is a wonderful thing, but it can sometimes be something that takes us far, far away from Jesus. It’s no good extending or deepening our knowledge of the parts if we don’t see the whole. A lifetime isn’t enough to discuss all the ins and outs, the intricacies and complexities of the Bible, but we ought to be to say what it’s about in a matter of seconds. That’s a challenge we dare not duck.

Advertisers, publishers, people in business, in all walks of life people realise that all their work is in vain if they can’t sum it up in one or two sentences. So we must ask ourselves: in one sentence, what is the Bible about? In one sentence what is Christianity about? What do we really believe? If we’re not able to say simply and easily what it is that we believe, might not people start to wonder if we really believe it ourselves?

To continue the metaphor of the photograph we can see that there is another danger. We can focus on one area in such a way that everything else gets lost. The nice photo of the bridge that absolutely isn’t a photograph of Monsal Dale. The wonderful saying of Jesus, that absolutely isn’t Christianity all on its own.

We need a point of focus in our Bible. Something that is simple and to the point, yet doesn’t do away with the full range of ideas and experiences that make up the Bible, that make up Christianity.

The obvious starting to point is to say Jesus. Jesus is the focal point of the Bible. No one’s going to argue with you about that. It gets us started in making sense of the whole. We then look at Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve and all the time we ask ourselves how does this relate to Jesus? How does this line of Old Testament scripture – maybe a saying of Zephannia, or a line in a particular Psalm – how does this relate to the bigger picture, which is Jesus?

At times the answer seems to be not at all. Or barely at all. Perhaps there are lots of bits of the Bible that we could do without. Of course it sounds heretical to suggest this, but we all know that there are parts of the Bible that are read all the time and others that we hardly look at if at all.
In the first few hundred years of the church this idea became quite popular, a man called Marcion put forward the view that the new testament meant that we had no need of the old testament. He compared the beauty of the Sermon on the Mount with the old laws about executing someone for the careless handling of an ox – I kid you not – and concluded that the Old Testament was crude, unsophisticated and sometimes savage, and that Christians should have nothing to do with it. If we’re honest I think we’ll admit that we still feel a bit like this sometimes. Our Bible falls open somewhere in the Old Testament and we don’t even try to convince ourselves that this is part of the whole picture.

But go back to the photographer, looking for the focal point. The right focal point brings the whole picture to life. Yes, some of it inevitably has to be in the background but nothing is ever lost. We need to be able to say simply what the Bible is about, but we mustn’t do it by leaving vast portions of it out.

What is critical for the photographer is, I think, critical for us. The focal point has to be right –
and it has to be exact. Saying it’s all about Jesus isn’t good enough – it isn’t clear enough. It doesn’t properly explain to those outside the church what we’re all about.

We are not a Jesus appreciation society. Many children in secondary schools think of Jesus as being a bit like Princess Diana – a bloke who cared and wore his heart on his sleeve. Others think of him like Nelson Mandela – a man who set a great example by standing up for what he believed in even when it cost him dearly. Others see that he was a holy man but they don’t really see how he is different from holy men – prophets or religiously inspired campaigners like Martin Luther King or Mahatma Ghandi. Does our way of speaking about Jesus make it clear to others that he is much much more than this, that he is absolutely different from anyone else that has ever lived? Is this reality clear to ourselves? We do no justice to the whole picture of Christianity if we simply say that Jesus is our focal point. It’s too vague, it allows too many misunderstandings, and it can even take us away from the true heart of our faith.

Where is the heart of our faith? Where is the centre, the focal point? What is the one point that sums up, arranges and illumines the whole picture of Christianity?

Let me first say where I don’t think it is. Each generation has in common that it focuses in the wrong part of our religion. I think we can look at each age and see how it has taken its own particular preoccupations and looked in the Bible for something to address those issues in a way it approves of. Then it presents a version of Christianity centred on those very issues.

If we go back a few decades Christianity was presented too often as being about rules of sexual morality, submission to husbands, kings and governments. About personal conduct, specific duties. Passages outlawing homosexuality, sex outside marriage, these were the plain truth of scripture. Whereas those passages advocating freedom in love and non-violence tended to get an awful lot of qualification and interpretation lest we took them too seriously. The morality of the time took those bits of the Bible that it liked and held them up continuously for all to see. It thought that the parts it was most comfortable with were the most important parts. And that obscured the whole picture.

We do exactly the same thing now but with a different morality. Now Christianity is presented in utterly vague terms except when it talks about prejudice. This summer I marked about five hundred GCSE Religious Studies papers, and you’d think that Christianity was a religion obsessed with opposing racism and promoting the rights of animals. Once again Christianity is being used. People with their own agenda are taking the bits of the bible that fits in with what concerns them most, and then they are distorting our religion to the world. Yes all Christians should, of course, oppose racism, but the Bible isn’t a book about racial tolerance, nor is it a book about animal rights or whatever else we are currently occupied with. Once again one age has taken what concerns it most, looked for the bible passages to back it up, and held them up above all others. Now the passages to do with sexual morality get very carefully interpreted and explained away, and those passages that fit the liberal agenda that is public morality nowadays are held aloft uncritically. Biblical statements that oppose prejudice are undoubtedly important but they are not the centre of our faith. Once again we’re missing the big picture.

So where do I think the centre is? What’s the focal point that makes the whole picture possible? In one word? Forgiveness. Or put another way in one word, Grace. The heart of our religion, its focal point is, I’m quite certain, forgiveness. Not the forgiveness that we might practice to one another, though that’s part of it. But the forgiveness that lies at the centre of the universe, at the centre of all reality, at the centre of the Bible and at the centre of our faith. The forgiveness that is revealed from God through Jesus Christ.

It’s not enough to say that Jesus is the focal point – because what are we really saying then? It’s not enough to say that Jesus is the most important thing because people won’t ask us why he is so important, they’ll just walk away confused. And lets be clear, Jesus said some very wise things and did some very brave things but that is not why he is so important. Jesus is what he is to us because he announces our forgiveness, because he enables our forgiveness, because he is our forgiveness and because of Him, and through Him we are in turn able to forgive.

The forgiveness of sins is a wonderful but incomprehensible fact. It means that in spite of our sinful nature God loves us and wants us. Because our sins are forgiven this world of death and disease will be transformed into eternal life and glory. In our world where God is so absent we are told that He is making Himself present to us in love. It’s a chain reaction, ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’

Why is it so hard for us to put forgiveness in its rightful place in the centre of our faith? One reason is that it confuses governments. In this world of armies, police, judges, prisons, terrorists, weapons of mass destruction, in a world like this no one’s too comfortable with talk of forgiveness. Better that Christians concentrate on those creditable and fine beliefs which happen to fit with the government’s aims.

But more than that, each one of us finds it so impossible to practice forgiveness. I know I do.
Whenever a terrible murder is committed the question is asked of the grieving parents – can you ever forgive the person responsible? Occasionally they do and we all applaud this, but when they say no they will never forgive we find this quite understandable. I certainly don’t want to judge someone for it when I find it so hard myself, but the Bible is clear on this. We must forgive, we have no choice, it goes hand in hand with God’s forgiveness of ourselves. Every generation has managed to qualify, to interpret, to explain away the Biblical teaching on forgiveness. Each one of us struggles to forgive. But if there’s one thing we should be fundementalist about it’s forgiveness. If there’s one thing where we should accept no compromise, where we should insist that this is the plain sense of scripture it’s forgiveness. It’s there in the Lord’s prayer. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Does the Lord’s prayer mean that we forgive others in return for God’s forgiveness of our own sins? As if we are able to strike any sort of deal with God. Is it saying that God will forgive those who forgive others? I don’t think so. God forgives us first, then we forgive others.

The gospel tells us that John was preaching the forgiveness of sins – before he ever meets Jesus. That’s crucially important. Isaiah anticipates the forgiveness of sins, John preaches that our sins are being forgiven, Jesus announces and pronounces the forgiveness of sins. Paul hammers home the message that through God’s grace, or forgiveness if you will, we are made whole in Christ. Do you see what is happening here? A thread is forming, a thread that runs from Genesis to Revelation, a thread that unites the old and the new testaments. A thread whose starting and ending point, its alpha and omega is Jesus Christ.