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THE GOSPELS



In our darker moments, we come face to face with the idea of our own failure. We’ll crash financially, we’ll arrive at a dead-end job, we’ll let down those we most care about and give them reason to despise us, we’ll be socially disgraced. We’re terribly alone with our fears; we hardly even dare share them with our closest friends or our families. We will not only be unloved — worse, we will be unworthy of love. The power of Gospels comes from the fact that it is addressed to these fears. Written at varying times during the 1st Century AD, when the Roman Empire was at its height, the Gospels consists of four different but convergent accounts of the life of Jesus — a carpenter turned wandering preacher who had lived and died a few decades earlier in the province of Judea,  When (in the image above) Rembrandt imagined Jesus talking to people, he placed him not in the Middle East in ancient times, but in the sordid back-streets of contemporary Amsterdam amongst people who have already failed. He was getting at the core point of the story: extending love precisely to those who are considered (and who consider themselves) unworthy of compassion or kindness.  We don't need to believe in the historical reality of the events — or in any kind of Christianity — to be moved by the ideas the book advances, which are so at odds with dominant values of the modern world.  In the Gospels there’s a huge emphasis on forgiveness: ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ or ‘Do not judge, lest ye be judged.’ In other words, it is our awareness of our own frailty that can power the economy of compassion. We forgive because we know that we need to be forgiven.  The main characters in the story are humble. Jesus is a modest artisan; his close friends are simple fishermen; he spends times with prostitutes and thieves. Wealth and high social status are presented as entirely unimportant in understanding a person’s true worth. Jesus praises meekness and gentleness; he’s more drawn to those who suffer than to those who are conspicuously successful.  The culminating point of all the stories is the absolute worldly defeat of Jesus. He is tried on trumped-up charges, and killed as a criminal. His pitiful small band of supporters deny they have had anything to do with him and go into hiding. The point of all this is reassurance: it is to say ‘however bad it gets for you, I know what it is like, I’ve been there. I’ve been utterly broken and defeated and outcast’. It’s an astonishing idea: that it’s when we’re at our lowest that we are most worthy of love. It’s no surprise that this is the book one reads in prison, in the asylum and as we toy with whether or not to jump off a bridge. It’s a book designed to keep us on the side of life.

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