mysterious errands and the root of peace

Tonight me and my mate Georgie went to watch some fireworks. And they were epic. And we got a toffee apple and some candy floss and that was thoroughly pleasant. And as we walked to and from the fireworks, and then for quite a while afterwards, we had some very deep chats. So deep, that they made me want to write a blog. So you know, cheers Georgie. And here goes.

As we followed the crowd of furry-hatted people to the park, Georgie was telling me that when I say, ‘God is real’, she thinks that’s definitely true for me. But she also thinks that for a person who believes God isn’t real, that’s also true for them. To be honest, it took me a while to understand what she meant, but we kept trying; and as we climbed up the big bridge to cross the train tracks on the way back to her house, I actually summarised what she was saying in a way that she agreed with. I said something like this:

“So what you believe is that what I’m referring to when I say something is “true” – the idea of it being fundamentally, universally true; true for everyone in the universe whether we believed it or not – that kind of truth doesn’t exist. Instead, you think the closest thing that does exist to the idea of ‘truth’ is the way that a person or a community perceives the world, makes sense of it, and lives in it. So in that sense, whatever a person (or a community) believes, which shapes how they perceive things and what they do – that is by definition ‘true’ for them. Not in the sense that they are actually right that there’s some fundamental reality which they’re accurately describing, but just in the sense that it’s how they understand things. So everyone has their own ‘truth’ – their own understanding of things and their own way of life – but there is no such thing as a fundamental reality that is actually True, regardless of whether anyone believes it.”

This is, I think, Georgie’s quite well articulated and thought through version of what is a pretty common belief in our current culture: ‘that’s true for you, this is true for me, we’re both ‘right’, sort of.’

Once we’d got out of the cold, Georgie started, amongst many other things (because you know, we’re really cool people who talk about many things at once…) to fill me in a bit more on why she believed this – why this idea had struck a chord with her, why she liked it. She said she liked that it enabled her to accept someone whose belief was different to hers. She liked that it meant that we should listen to each other because everyone has something to contribute, that no one was belittled or made less valuable because everyone was equally right. That made sense to me.

But this reminded me of something that I’d thought a while ago in a chat with a different friend, Elena. It had occurred to me then, that maybe our philosophical ideas about everyone having their own ‘truth’ are actually based on these things Georgie was talking about – these inter-personal, social, political things. The desire to respect people who are different to us, to listen to and accept people with different cultures and beliefs; the refusal to belittle someone because we disagree. I think these are great desires to have for our social and political life – this is definitely how we should be treating people. But I wondered whether it was really true that these social ideas could only exist if we had the philosophical version as well – I thought, what if we’re going for the philosophy because we like the social stuff, but they don’t actually need to come together?

So as far as I can see, and I couldn’t be quite sure but I think that Georgie sort of agrees, the way that the ‘everyone-has-their-own-truth’ philosophy allows us to be tolerant and respectful is this: by allowing us to agree with people, while meaning different things. So a religious person says, ‘I believe that [insert deity here] exists’, and we can say, ‘I think that’s true, [insert deity here] does exist.’ And of course we are showing them respect, and we are accepting them. But we’re doing it by changing the meaning of the word ‘true’, and the meaning of the word ‘exist’. Because the ‘everyone-has-their-own-truth’ philosophy starts with a sort of linguistic magic-trick, that whisks away the old meaning of the word ‘true’, and replaces it with something along the lines of ‘your perception of the world’. So we can say, “I think your understanding of the world is true,” and make the other person feel respected, and actually mean, “I think your understanding of the world is your understanding of the world.”

So my next thought was, what if there is a less slippery way to base these great social and political ideas on a belief system? What if there’s a philosophy that would make better sense of why we should act like that? And – horribly predictable as I am – I think there is. And I think it is believing in Jesus.

If you believe that Jesus really is God – universally, absolutely, for everyone – that God is the fundamental reality and that he has revealed himself to us in Jesus, then I reckon you should definitely desire to love and respect people who are different to you, to listen to and accept people with different cultures and beliefs; and you should absolutely refuse to belittle someone because you disagree. And here’s why.

John describes for us in detail Jesus’ last meal with his disciples before he was arrested and killed. John says Jesus loved his friends “to the end”. But the strange detail, almost ruining the picture, is, of course, that Judas is there. One of these friends, who he loves to the end, is the one who has betrayed his trust and is about to go, fetch the authorities and get him arrested and killed. And Jesus knows this, he tells the disciples that one of them will betray him, and he knows who it is. But John tells us that,

“he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel round his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped round him.”

He takes on the servant’s job, bends down, and wipes the dust and dirt and dung off their feet with his hands. And he goes round the whole table. No exceptions. Which means that he washes Judas’s feet. He bends down at the feet of the man who has decided to betray him, who is about to sell his life for silver, and takes his feet in his hands and washes them. I almost just want to type that sentence again and again until we all realise how incredible that is.

So if we believe in Jesus, we believe that the God of the whole universe was so humble that he washed the feet of his own betrayer. That God loved and respected people – people who were utterly different from him and ignored his truth – so intensely that he came into the world as a human being, lived with them and died for them, so that they could know him and love him. How can we not listen to and respect and serve people who disagree with us, when God himself is willing to wash their feet, even if they reject him? How could we possibly dare to belittle someone because they think differently to us, if we know that God considers them so significant, values them so outrageously highly, that he actually died for their sake. Of course we can disagree with them – we can try to persuade them of what we believe is true – it’s not like Jesus agreed with what Judas was doing! But we can disagree, and try to persuade, and not stop loving for a second. I believe in a God who seems to have decided that his enemies weren’t just worth his respect, they were worth his life. And I know it, because we were his enemies, and he loved us to death, and all the way out the other side.

So here’s the thing. Respect, and tolerance, and listening, and love, are utterly right. Peace is beautiful, and it is essential. And I think that we want more than a surface-level tolerance – we want a real, boundary-shattering, family-making kind of peace. We want something deep; and a deep peace needs deep roots. And for that, I think we need a God who takes off his outer clothes, wraps a towel around his waist, bends down in front of his enemies, and washes their feet.