A time came when Jesus began to say some hard things to the crowds who had come out from all the towns and villages to be with him. It had been all right while he was telling them wonderful stories, and healing the sick. But now many of them decided they had had enough, they could not stomach the kind of things he had started saying now. They turned away and went back home, back to their ordinary lives, back to living without Jesus.
Jesus turned to the twelve, his closest friends, and asked them, "Will you also go away?"
Peter answered on behalf of all of them. "To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God."
And that's how the real friends of Jesus still feel. No matter how unpopular religion becomes, no matter how absurd or irrational or un-cool Christianity appears in the eyes of the sophisticated opinion-makers of the media, the friends of Jesus will still say to him, "To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life."
But what does this really mean?
To me, 'words of eternal life' means among other things, that the words Jesus speaks are life-giving, and actually to live by them is the wisest of all courses of action, absolutely the best way to live. Take just one example, perhaps the easiest of all to grasp: the sentence which has come to be known as the Golden Rule, and which is not even unique to the teaching of Jesus, but has parallels in many of the great religious teachings of the world. "In everything," said Jesus, "do to others as you would have them do to you, for this is the law and the prophets." (Matthew 7.12) It practically sums up, in a nutshell, all the other teachings given in the Law of Moses, and in the prophets who had emerged in Israel throughout the centuries, trying to recall the people to obedience to God. Do to others as you would have them do to you.
Imagine for a moment, a world in which everyone lived by this simple teaching. John Lennon, famously, imagined a world where there was no belief in a heaven or hell to lure people, or terrify them, into right behaviour; a world with no countries, no religion, no possessions. That, he thought, would be a world that was truly one, in which people could live in peace. We ought to listen carefully to his vision, because there is no doubt that religions have been a cause of some of the most hideous cruelties and wars of human history. But any religion that causes such things isn't good religion, it isn't religion as it ought to be. It is bad religion. The remedy for it is not no religion at all, but religion the way it should be, the way that Jesus taught it. Religions, countries, possessions, a belief in a day of reckoning, would not be a problem if people lived by the teaching of Jesus. Nor would the absence of them be a solution, if they didn't. So just imagine, a world in which people did to others as they would have them do to them.
Instead, we see a world, especially since September 11th, which seems to be governed by a very different consideration. 'If I do it to him first, and hard enough, he won't be able to do it back, or he'll be too scared or weak or just plain dead.' But it doesn't work like that. Somehow there always remains someone who says, 'He did it to me, so I'll do it back to him - with knobs on.' And so the spiral of hatred and violence grows and grows. As the inimitable Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof says, when someone invokes the maxim 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth': "That way everyone ends up blind and toothless."
Is this the way the world must inevitably go? As we see it going in the Holy Land between Israelis and Palestinians, as it has been in Ireland between Catholics and Protestants, as it threatens to be between the Western democracies and the faceless terrorists we are at 'war' with. Or can we be brave enough to imagine a different way, in which someone takes the inconceivable step of thinking, "I would like someone to forgive me, if I had wronged them; so I will forgive this person who has wronged me."
If we can dream this, we can also pray: Let there be peace in our hearts, our world, our universe - and let it start with me.
Published in the Marston Times, January 2002