False expectations

Jesus said, “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? Mark 8:36-37

Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope… Romans 5:3-4

I don’t know if this is a virtue or a vice, but I must admit to a bit of an addiction to my morning paper; it keeps me in touch with the big wide world outside my own little world, and I experience sort-of withdrawal symptoms if for any reason I don’t get it.

But sometimes it annoys me intensely. On Saturdays, for example, it’s twice or three times its usual size, with various supplements, and a lot of it is about well-being or fulfilment… You know the sort of thing: you can be healthy if you eat a sensible diet, with plenty of fruit and veg and not too much salt and fat, if you get plenty of exercise (photos provided of people with extremely unlikely-looking bodies contorted into extremely unlikely-looking postures), if you get plenty of sleep and rest. It’s pretty much variations on the same theme week after week.

And then there are the psychologists and other experts telling us how to sort out our damaged relationships and how to have a perfect sex-life. Not to mention the adverts for wildly expensive holidays in all sorts of wonderful-looking places, and the luxury of having a car that most of us can’t so much as dream of ever owning.

It’s not just the constant repetition that niggles; it’s the unspoken assumption that all this is what life is really about. It smuggles into our minds the belief that we’re missing out on what is somehow our right, our entitlement, if we don’t have them; it stirs up discontent and envy in us. (Little do we realise that that person we know who seems to “have it all” is in fact deeply miserable and unfulfilled.)

Dickens wrote his novel Great Expectations about the prospects (the expectations) of his central character, the orphaned boy Pip. I sometimes feel that across the front of all these newspaper supplements should be written “Unreal Expectations” or even “Lying Expectations”. I keep wanting to shout out “This is nonsense! Life just isn’t like this!”

Not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with people being happy, healthy and fulfilled – may it be more and more so! But feeding into our minds the idea that this should be – can be - our constant situation is simply a lie. As somebody has wisely said, It’s OK not to be OK. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that for the great majority of human beings life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. A bit cynical? Perhaps. Yet he wasn’t far wrong.

Jesus promised his disciples the gift of “life in all its fulness” (John 10:10). But think what life must have been like for the majority of Jesus-followers in those earliest days. Many, of course, were slaves. Not much health, wealth and happiness there! – even if you were fortunate enough to have a kind master.

We hear talk about “job-fulfilment”, as if it’s every person’s right. And in a perfect world it no doubt would be. It’s certainly the responsibility of all of us who have inherited (probably through no merit of our own) many of the good things of life to do all we can to ensure that they are spread as far and wide as possible. But the expression job-fulfilment would very likely evoke a hollow and even bitter laugh from untold millions of people: who would want to be an ordinary person in Ukraine today? a woman in Afghanistan? a child in North Korea? a Uighur Muslim in China? or…? Job-fulfilment must seem like a bad joke.

Jesus’ great words in Mark 8:36-37 are worth pondering: what indeed is the good of having everything this world offers – everything those Saturday newspaper supplements try to convince us can be ours – but lose our souls? Yes, we aren’t only bodies, minds and emotions; we are “souls” too; we have a spiritual dimension which relates us to God himself and in which, through faith in Christ, we find true fulfilment.

And with his help we can learn that that fulfilment comes from doing good things, even tiny, insignificant-seeming good things, that God has prepared for us: as Paul puts it in Ephesians 2, we are “created in Christ Jesus to do good works”.

Every day of our lives – even dark, cold, miserable, rainy days in November – there are good, Christ-like things waiting to be done. Forget those tantalising enticements in the weekend papers and grab hold of every opportunity to do those things. That’s the “full” life of which Jesus spoke!

Or perhaps I should say it’s the start of the full life. For he also told us that he is going ahead of us to “his Father’s house” where he will “prepare a place for us”. And Paul (who knew what he was talking about when it came to suffering) could boldly assert that our sufferings “are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). The best is yet to be; oh yes, the best is yet to be!

The message can be summed up like this: Look for happiness, and you won’t find it; look for holiness, and you will get happiness as a by-product.

Father, Jesus teaches us to seek first your kingdom and your righteousness, and promises that all other good things will be ours as well. Please help me truly to believe that – and then to live by it day by day. Amen.