Sins both great and small

Martin Bashir has, understandably, taking a hammering in the media for his use of forged documents to get a foot in the door with Earl Spencer; this with a view to obtaining an introduction to Diana, Princess of Wales.

The investigative journalist is from a Pakistani Christian background. He believes that religion must stand up to rigorous questioning and this has made him something of a hawk ready to swoop and expose prominent, religious people and practices. This made him a good choice for the BBC and he was appointed as their religious affairs correspondent in 2016. Elsewhere, Bashir has been quoted as being a committed Christian himself.

Now, I think we can all learn something here. I’m not going to join in with the bash Bashir brigade. My personal opinion is that the deceit and lies he used to get to Earl Spencer had no obvious bearing on Diana’s death two years later. She sadly died as the result of a traffic accident.

What of Martin Bashir? With his upbringing and chosen career, it is shameful that he hadn’t taken on board a warning from God found in the Bible, i.e. ‘…and you may be sure that your sin will find you out’.

Lest we feel superior, however, we should recognise that all wrong-doings, whether they be great or small in our own eyes, will ultimately find us out too. We read in the New Testament, ‘The sins of some men are obvious, reaching the place of judgment ahead of them; the sins of others trail behind them.’ One of Bashir’s sins is obvious and maybe ours are less so but each of us must ask what can we do about getting this sorted with God prior to that ‘place of judgment’ mentioned above?

This is where the Christian message gives a resounding answer. The early church leader, Peter, explains that God appointed Jesus as judge of the living and the dead and everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins.

Yes Jesus, who is both judge and jury, offers to clear us of all our sins, including presenting forged documents! Will we take up his offer personally and trust him?

Escaping death

It's 80 years ago since the almost one-year-long blitz on Birmingham came to a temporary halt. Brummies then had another year of respite before it resumed. A German bomber crashed near Earlswood Lakes in May 1941. Of the four German aircrew, only one, named Rudolf Budde, escaped the flaming wreckage. Being injured, he was taken to Solihull Hospital and later recovered.

Jesus also told a story where only one in four made it. A man sowed seed. He did it with abandon, scattering it here, there and everywhere. Some landed on the pathway, some where the soil was only shallow, other seed fell on ground where weeds and thistles flourished. Lastly, some seed fell on fertile soil. It was only the last of the four different soils which produced a good crop.

Jesus likened the story to how it works when God makes freely available his invitation of friendship. This word of invitation, says Jesus, is like the seed being scattered by the sower in the story. God scatters His invitations freely, in other words, without discrimination: men and women, rich and poor, religious or not and amongst all cultures. This call towards God is summed up in the words of Jesus, 'Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me... and you will find rest for your souls.

Our hearts are like the soil in the story. It is where Jesus' invitation to us lands. With some people, the seed of invitation finds stony ground; others take a superficial interest or are so distracted by the thistles of life and the entanglements of cares that they lose out. Lastly, a number are ready to grasp the opportunity that being in friendship with God offers and the new horizons that this opens up. It is this last group which we can say is like the fertile soil that went on to produce a good crop.

If your heart is receptive to the invitation of Jesus, then I encourage you to ask a Christian friend about how that seed of faith might grow, or you could read one of the four Gospels in the New Testament.

But for the grace of God, Rudolf Budde should have died in the wreckage of that bomber. He must have felt that a new life had been given to him. When we take up the invitation of Jesus, it's like that: we have emerged from a spiritual death into a new life.

The problem of being an ass

People often think that being a Christian means keeping lots of rules.

It is true, that through Moses, God gave the Jewish people lots of laws. Many were, however, to be temporary. These temporary laws taught the people about the purity of God by calling some things ‘clean’ and others ‘unclean’. It got the idea across that God was holy and that he required his people to be holy also.

In order that the people understood that everything they had, children, animals, fields of crops etc actually, in the final analysis, belonged to God, he got them to give up the first born and firstfruits of all that they had. Giving a portion of crops to the priests (tithe) was straightforward enough. When it came to your goat or sheep, well you just gave up the firstborn. When it was your firstborn baby, you were told to substitute a living creature(s) in its place; the value of the creature depended on your ability to pay - the parents of Jesus were poor and so they had to offer a pair of doves or young pigeons.

Some animals were, however, deemed ‘unclean’. You probably know that pigs fall into this category but so did the donkey. Jews didn’t keep pigs but they did have donkeys. When your donkey had a young foal for the first time, it couldn’t be sacrificed to God because it was unclean; God is not to be sullied. You were given a choice: you could either break the neck of the foal or you could substitute a lamb in its place and consequently the unclean foal lived.

It sounds like irrelevant paraphernalia to us but it was part of life for the Jews. When Jesus arrived on the scene, his relative John the Baptist said of him, ‘Look, take note, the Lamb of God that takes away the uncleanness of people from all over the world.’

Yes, like the lamb being sacrificed for the donkey, so Jesus was sacrificed on Good Friday. He did this for all who will acknowledge that they are not as holy or clean as God wants them to be and who will also trust Jesus to be their personal substitute.

As the foal would live to become a donkey because a lamb was sacrificed instead, so we can receive a new life with God now and for always, because Jesus was sacrificed for people like you and me.

‘But what’, you may ask, ‘about that good living Christians are supposed to do?’ Well, that flows out of the new life Jesus gives. Right living follows faith in Jesus and not the other way round.