Behold The Man*

Ending in Hope

This was my editorial in the final issue of Mustard Seed, a small magazine I once produced.

'Aggie was in no sense a canonisable saint, but she revealed God's warmth and kindness in her own heroic warmth and kindness. She gave me hope', wrote Jock Dalrymple in his book 'Costing not less than everything - notes on holiness today'. This was how this greatly loved Edinburgh priest described an 'old drunkard' whom she herself would have regarded as a hopeless sinner. Aggie's warm heart responded to human need in people others had no time for. In a strange way even her drunkeness was a product of her generosity, because it only occurred when she was in the company of an unsavory character, Paddy, a 'jailbird' and an incurable bed-wetter to whom only she would give a home.

'You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God,' says the old priest near the close of Graham Greene's novel, Brighton Rock. It is a theme that seems to run through all his writing. Perhaps this is why many Christians, not least among his fellow Catholics, find his novels disturbing. We like to have our faith neatly packaged and understandable, and Greene's characters, like Aggie also, challenge our too easy preconceptions; as do the following words of Jock Dalrymple: 'The call to holiness comes to all of us sooner or later in this form of being asked to reject the common sense good and opt for a mad best for the sake of God. It almost inevitably means taking a risk'.

The challenge to take a risk for God can come in very simple ways. For Ann Shields, now one of the leaders of a world-wide Catholic evangelical renewal movement, it came when she went to confession and the priest asked her, "Are you sorry for anything you just said?" The realization came to her that if she was truly sorry she would not be coming back time after time confessing the same sins. And God used that experience to break down her stubborn defences and bring her into a completely new experience of the power of his Spirit.

For Eric Liddell, Scottish Olympic Gold medal sprinter and the subject of the Oscar winning film 'Chariots of Fire', the challenge seems to have come through his regular morning period of Bible reading and prayer. As for Ann Shields, the risk was not so much in the practice itself as in his willingness to act on what he read and heard. "It is not willingness to know God's will that brings certainty," he wrote, "but willingness to do it." He died in a Japanese prison camp in China, and people there of all kinds spoke of the deep impression he had made by the way he lived out his Christian faith. Like Aggie, he gave people hope.

There is a profound paradox in the words of Eric Liddle, for how can we do God's will unless we know it? I think the answer to this is two fold. Firstly, much more frequently than we might think we already know the right thing in our hearts, but are reluctant to acknowledge and to do it. Secondly, our faith is finally neither in prayer nor in Scripture, but in the God of both and in his faithfulness. Perhaps only those who believe in an all- knowing providential God can dare to say with John Henry Newman, "One step enough for me"; and only such people can dare to believe that God can use even their weakness and misunderstanding for his purpose. And such belief is the substance of active, risk-taking faith; faith on which hope and the certainty beyond hope is based.

I intend this to be my last issue of Mustard Seed, and I want to end on this note of hope. World-wide thousands upon thousands of ordinary people, like those for whom Jock Dalrymple wrote his book, are finding a new power in their lives. Growth is the mark of the activity of God's Spirit, sometimes dramatically but more often step by step, little by little. How open are we to the challenge and the risk of allowing him to work in our lives?