As a teenager, I was convinced that proof of Christianity was always just around the corner.

I was a very keen Christian, and I wanted to know that what I believed could stand up to scrutiny. So I read everything I could find. I followed philosophical arguments for the existence of God, devoured attempts to prove the resurrection, and disappeared down more than a few rabbit holes concerning the historical reliability of the stories surrounding Jesus.

Noah’s Ark was especially irresistible. Every so often, a photograph would appear of some strange boat-shaped object somewhere around Mount Ararat. There would be measurements, geological theories and calculations about how much water would have been required. I lapped it all up.

Part of me genuinely believed that sooner or later somebody would find the decisive piece of evidence. Perhaps archaeologists would uncover the Ark itself, or somebody would discover something connected with Jesus that nobody could explain away. Somewhere, I imagined, there was a fact waiting to be unearthed that would finally allow Christians to say,

There. Now you have to believe us.

Looking back, I can see why that appealed to me. Certainty felt safe. If Christianity could be proved, then faith would no longer feel quite so risky.

Then I began a theology degree, and I think it took about a week for the whole thing to become considerably more complicated.

One of the first subjects we studied was ancient Near Eastern flood traditions. Until then, I had largely encountered Noah’s flood as though Genesis existed in splendid isolation. Suddenly, we were reading about other ancient flood stories, including traditions preserved in Atrahasis and the Epic of Gilgamesh, with their own boats, survivors, animals, mountains and birds sent out to see whether the waters had receded.

I remember the uncomfortable realisation that this was much bigger than I had imagined. It did not destroy my faith, but it began to dismantle my expectation that faith would eventually become a collection of things I could prove.

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For most of my life, I have been reasonably good at solving problems; it’s my thing.

That does not mean I have always solved them all successfully, of course. There have been plenty of occasions when my attempts have probably made things considerably worse. But whenever something went wrong, my instinct was usually to do something. Make a plan. Have a conversation. Read a book. Work harder. Try another approach. If the first solution failed, there was normally another one waiting to be attempted.

Ministry encouraged that instinct. There was always another meeting to arrange, person to visit, sermon to prepare or problem to address. Parenting has often been similar. So has writing. If an article does not work, I can write another one. If something needs improving, I can change it. Even when progress is frustratingly slow, there is usually some action available.

Chronic illness introduced me to a very different kind of problem.

There are things I cannot solve by trying harder. In fact, trying harder can sometimes make them worse. I can manage my energy, adapt my routines and make sensible choices, but there are limits I cannot simply push through. I have had a good couple of days, but experience tells me that sooner or later, a reminder will arrive that the boundaries are still there.

I sometimes describe it as living inside a perspex box. I can see the world outside and participate in much of it, but there remains a barrier I did not choose and cannot remove by determination alone.

I find that incredibly difficult.

Not simply because of what illness prevents me from doing, but because it has forced me to confront something I spent much of my life avoiding.

There are times when there is simply nothing more I can do.

Perhaps that is why I recently found myself thinking differently about Noah.

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I have a confession to make. I had secretly been looking forward to Maisie leaving home.

Before you judge me too harshly, I should explain that Maisie is my daughter’s dog.

She came into our family as hers when she was younger, and I had always assumed that one day, when circumstances allowed, my daughter would probably take her on full-time. Until then, Maisie became part of our household alongside Hank, our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and somewhere along the way, I became one of the people responsible for feeding, walking, and generally negotiating with her.

I use the word negotiating deliberately.

Maisie is a wonderfully quirky, intelligent little dog. She is cheeky, stubborn and seems to regard most instructions as opening positions in a negotiation. Hank, meanwhile, absolutely adores her. His affection has always been considerably more enthusiastic than hers. He follows her around, wants to know where she is and seems genuinely delighted whenever she shows him the slightest attention. Maisie generally treats his devotion with the sort of gracious tolerance normally reserved for an overly enthusiastic admirer.

They have become quite a pair.

But two dogs also mean twice the feeding, twice the organising, two leads to untangle and two very different personalities requiring attention. These days, I spend a great deal of my time writing, usually with Hank next to me. He has become my unofficial writing companion, normally snoring beside me while I work and occasionally reminding me that there are more important things in life than finding exactly the right sentence.

So when my daughter moved to her own flat and eventually decided that the time had finally come for Maisie to live with her permanently, part of me thought this might actually make things easier.

One dog.

One lead.

One set of demands.

Hank and me carrying on with our familiar routine.

It all made perfect sense.

Then Maisie left. It’s been a couple of weeks now, and I have discovered something mildly irritating.

I miss her.

Not an idealised version of her, either. I miss the actual Maisie. The stubbornness. The cheekiness. The slightly unpredictable way she moves through the house as though she owns considerably more of it than the lease would suggest. I even miss the odd little relationship between her and Hank, where he adores her and she continues to behave as though she has not yet made up her mind about him.

Nothing tragic has happened. Maisie is very happy. She is living with the person whose dog she always really was, and I still see her. This is not a story about loss in any profound sense.

Yet the house feels different. It is easier, certainly, and it is also a little emptier. That has made me think about something I had never really considered before.

We spend an enormous amount of our lives trying to make things easier.

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Most of us are better at keeping score than we probably like to admit.

We may not actually write anything down, but somewhere in the back of our minds, a surprisingly detailed record can accumulate. We remember who apologised last time. We remember who cancelled the arrangement, who forgot the birthday, who made the insensitive comment, and who promised that something would never happen again, only to do exactly the same thing six months later.

Sometimes the entries on that invisible ledger are much more serious. A betrayal that damaged a relationship. Words that cannot easily be taken back. A pattern of behaviour that has exhausted our patience. Even when we genuinely want to forgive, there can come a moment when we find ourselves thinking, Surely I have done enough now.

I suspect that is something like the question Peter asks Jesus in Matthew 18.

He approaches Jesus and says:

“Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”

I have always imagined Peter asking the question with at least a little confidence. Seven sounds reasonably generous. He is not suggesting one chance, or even two. Whatever precise standard Peter has in mind, he clearly thinks seven represents a substantial amount of forgiveness.

I suspect he even expects Jesus to be impressed.

Instead, Jesus replies:

“I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”

Or possibly seventy times seven.

Different English translations give different numbers because the Greek can be understood in more than one way. Some Bibles say seventy-seven; others say 490. Scholars have discussed the arithmetic for centuries, which is slightly ironic because arithmetic seems to be precisely what Jesus wants Peter to stop doing.

For Jesus is not handing Peter a larger spreadsheet. Instead, he is telling him to put the calculator away.

Peter’s question assumes that forgiveness has an expiry date. Eventually, after enough offences, the obligation will surely be fulfilled. He simply wants Jesus to tell him where that boundary lies.

Jesus refuses.

There comes a point where counting forgiveness becomes absurd. If you are carefully recording offence number sixty-three so that you know exactly when you reach seventy-seven, you have almost certainly missed the point.

Jesus is describing something that cannot sensibly be measured, and there may be an even deeper reason why he chooses this particular number.

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Last week, somebody left a lengthy comment beneath one of my articles.

They had clearly given it some thought. Point by point, they explained why I was wrong, dismantling what they believed I had argued and highlighting the flaws in my reasoning. It was detailed, confident and, judging by its length, must have taken a considerable amount of time to write.

There was only one problem.

They were arguing against something I had never actually said.

Somewhere along the way, they misunderstood what I was trying to communicate and then constructed an elaborate response based on their own interpretation.

I suspect most writers know the experience. You spend hours trying to choose your words carefully, only to discover that somebody has read an entirely different article from the one you thought you had written. As a priest, I sometimes experienced the same thing after preaching. Somebody would latch onto a single word or phrase and construct an entire argument I had never actually made.

My first reaction was frustration. I wanted to explain where they had gone wrong, perhaps with an equally lengthy reply of my own. But after the irritation had subsided, another, considerably less comfortable thought occurred to me.

How often do I do exactly the same thing?

Not necessarily with articles, but with people. How often have I assumed I understood somebody’s motives without ever asking them? How often have I formed an opinion about a situation after hearing only part of the story? How many times have I confidently believed I could see what was happening, only to discover later that I had completely misunderstood it?

That question brought to mind one of Jesus’ most familiar sayings:

“If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”

We still use the expression today. Usually, it describes incompetent leadership: somebody who does not know what they are doing, guiding somebody else who knows even less.

But in the Gospel story, Jesus seems to be pointing towards something rather more troubling.

The people he describes as blind are convinced that they can see.

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There is something strangely anonymous about sitting in a waiting room.

It might be a doctor’s surgery, hospital clinic or somewhere else entirely. People arrive, take a seat, and silently wait for their name to be called. You may spend half an hour sitting only inches away from someone without knowing anything about them. You do not know what brought them there, what they are worried about, how long they have been waiting for answers, or what kind of news they are hoping to hear.

From the outside, everybody looks much the same. Another person in another chair, waiting their turn.

Yet every person in that room carries an entire story.

Someone may have been living with pain for years. Another may be waiting for test results they have barely dared to think about. Somebody else might be there for something completely routine and wondering why the appointment is already twenty minutes late. Unless a conversation begins, none of us knows.

I sometimes think about that when reading one of the most familiar healing stories in Mark’s Gospel. We usually call it the story of the woman with the issue of blood or the bleeding woman. Even after two thousand years, we still identify her by what was wrong with her because Mark never tells us her name.

Yet when Jesus eventually speaks to her, he calls her something completely different.

And I think that single word changes the story.

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The story actually begins with somebody else.

A man named Jairus approaches Jesus because his daughter is desperately ill. Mark tells us that Jairus is one of the synagogue leaders, which means he would have been a recognised and respected figure within the community. People knew who he was. He had a name, a position and, presumably, a certain amount of influence.

None of that matters much when your child is dying.

Jairus falls at Jesus’ feet and repeatedly begs him to come. His daughter, he says, is close to death. Whatever dignity normally accompanied his position has been swept aside by desperation. He is simply a father asking Jesus to save his little girl.

Jesus agrees to go with him, and immediately the story acquires a sense of urgency. A large crowd follows, pressing around Jesus as they make their way towards Jairus’ house.

We know where Jesus needs to be and why he needs to get there quickly.

Somewhere ahead of them is a child whose life is slipping away.

Then the journey stops.

Somewhere in the crowd is a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years.

Mark gives us remarkably little information about her beyond her suffering. We do not know her name, where she lived or whether she had family around her. What we are told is painful enough. She has endured this condition for twelve years, has been treated by numerous physicians, has spent everything she possesses trying to become well and, rather than improving, has become worse.

Her condition would undoubtedly have complicated ordinary life considerably, adding religious and social difficulties to the physical exhaustion and financial cost she was already carrying.

Twelve years is a very long time to live with anything.

Long enough for hope to be repeatedly raised and disappointed. Long enough for medical appointments and treatments to become part of the rhythm of life. Long enough, perhaps, to find that other people increasingly know you through the thing that has happened to you.

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The contrast between the woman and Jairus is difficult to miss.

Jairus is named. She is anonymous. Jairus occupies a recognised place within the religious community. Her condition places her in a much more complicated relationship with it. Jairus approaches Jesus openly, falls at his feet and tells him exactly what he needs. The woman approaches from behind, hoping to receive what she needs without attracting any attention at all.

She has heard about Jesus and believes that touching his clothing might be enough. So she moves through the crowd, reaches out and touches his cloak. Immediately, Mark tells us, the bleeding stops. She knows within herself that something has changed. After twelve years, the thing she hoped for has finally happened.

At this point, Jesus could simply keep walking.

In fact, from Jairus’ point of view, that would presumably have been the ideal outcome. The woman has been healed, nobody needs to know anything about it, and there is still a desperately ill child waiting at home.

Instead, Jesus stops. He turns around in the crowd and asks, “Who touched my clothes?”

The disciples are understandably baffled. People are pressing against Jesus from every direction. Everybody is touching him. Yet Jesus continues to look around until the woman eventually realises that she cannot remain hidden.

Mark tells us that she comes forward in fear and trembling, falls before him and tells him “the whole truth.”

That little phrase has always intrigued me.

We are not told exactly what she says or how long the conversation lasts. Perhaps she simply explains what she has done. Perhaps the whole truth means that she tells him something of the twelve years that brought her to that moment: the treatments, the expense, the disappointment and the final desperate decision to reach through a crowd and touch the edge of his clothing.

Whatever she tells him, Jesus listens.

Then he speaks.

“Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace.”

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That first word is extraordinary.

Daughter.

It appears to be the only occasion in the Gospels where Jesus directly addresses a woman as ‘daughter’. He does not call her woman, friend or simply congratulate her on being healed.

He calls her daughter.

Suddenly, Mark’s two stories become almost impossible to separate.

Jairus has come to Jesus because of his daughter. A few verses later, we discover that she is twelve years old. The woman standing before Jesus has been suffering for twelve years.

One daughter has spent twelve years growing into life, loved so fiercely that her father is now pushing through a crowd to find help for her. The other has spent those same twelve years living with an illness that has consumed her money, her strength and perhaps much of the life she once imagined for herself.

One daughter is known to everyone. The other does not even have a name in the story. Yet Jesus calls her daughter, too.

I find myself wondering what that word sounded like to Jairus.

His entire world must have been narrowing around his own child at that moment. Every second mattered. He had found the person he believed could help her, and now Jesus had stopped in the middle of the road to speak with somebody else.

Yet Jesus refuses to treat this woman as an interruption.

There are two daughters in the story.

The daughter Jairus came to save, and the daughter Jesus refuses to overlook.

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There is another detail here that I think makes the encounter even more moving.

The woman had already been healed before Jesus said a word to her. The physical miracle happened when she touched his clothing. Jesus could have carried on walking, and her body would still have been restored.

So why stop?

Perhaps because healing her body was not the only thing that mattered. Jesus draws her out of anonymity. He allows her to tell her story. Then, in front of the very crowd through which she had hoped to pass unnoticed, he addresses her with a word of belonging.

The healing happened privately, the restoration happens publicly.

For twelve years, her life has been shaped by what is wrong with her. Even we, as readers, have continued the habit. We call her the bleeding woman because that is almost all Mark tells us about her.

Jesus gives her another identity.

Daughter.

That seems profoundly important because human beings are remarkably good at allowing one part of a person’s story to swallow everything else.

We do it with illness and disability. We do it with failure, addiction, divorce, unemployment, grief and the mistakes people made years ago. Sometimes other people place the label upon us. Sometimes, after enough time has passed, we begin doing it to ourselves.

What happened becomes what defines us. Yet Jesus seems to see something larger.

He sees more than the problem. He sees the person.

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Then the news arrives that Jairus has been dreading.

His daughter has died.

The messengers tell him there is no longer any point in troubling Jesus. The delay now appears disastrous. If we were encountering this story for the first time, we might reasonably assume that Jesus had allowed one person’s need to get in the way of another.

But Mark is not telling two unrelated miracle stories that happen to collide.

He has deliberately woven them together. Scholars sometimes describe this kind of storytelling as a Markan sandwich: one story begins, another is inserted into the middle, and then the first resumes. The two stories are meant to interpret one another.

Jesus continues to Jairus’ house. He takes the dead girl by the hand and tells her to get up.

She does.

Both daughters are restored. One is restored to life, whilst the other is restored to health, peace and, perhaps just as importantly, visibility.

Neither daughter’s need diminishes the other’s.

That, for me, is where this becomes much more than a story about miraculous healing.

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Most of us know what it feels like to believe somebody else’s needs are more important than ours.

There will always be somebody whose situation seems more serious, whose problems are more obvious or whose voice carries further than ours. Sometimes that leads us to minimise what we ourselves are carrying.

We tell ourselves not to make a fuss. After all, other people have it worse. Other people need attention more urgently. Perhaps we should simply get on with it and manage.

The woman in Mark’s story appears to expect very little. She does not ask Jesus for a conversation or demand that he stop. She hopes merely to reach him unnoticed, take whatever healing she can and disappear again.

Jesus will not allow her to disappear, and perhaps that is the part of the story I need to remember most.

The crowd sees an interruption. Jairus may have seen an agonising delay. Mark’s readers might initially see an unnamed woman who has wandered into somebody else’s miracle.

Jesus sees a person.

There are many things in life that can make us feel invisible. Illness, age, grief and failure can do it. Sometimes simply living among louder, more confident or apparently more important people can do it. Yet again and again, the Gospels show Jesus noticing individuals in crowds.

The person everyone else is passing.

The person nobody expects him to stop for.

The person who has become accustomed to standing at the edge.

The woman reached through the crowd because she wanted to be healed without being noticed.

Instead, Jesus gave her something she had not even asked for.

He noticed her, heard her story and reminded her that she belonged. Before continuing towards the house of the daughter everybody knew about, Jesus stopped for the daughter nobody knew.

Perhaps sometimes being seen is part of the healing, too.

I have always been wary of the phrase “God told me.”

Not because I doubt that God can guide us, or because I think prayer is simply a matter of talking into the silence and hoping for the best. My faith would make very little sense if I did. But those three words can carry an enormous amount of certainty.

God told me to take this job. God told me to move. God told me this relationship was right. God told me what I need to do next.

Once we put it like that, there is not much room left for discussion. After all, if God has spoken, who are we to argue?

Yet my own experience of trying to discern God’s presence and direction has usually been considerably less straightforward. I have never heard an audible voice from heaven giving me instructions. More often, there has been prayer, Scripture, conversations with people I trust, circumstances that seem to point in a particular direction, thoughts that keep returning, and sometimes a growing sense that one path might be more faithful than another.

Even then, I think the most honest language is usually not “God told me.” It is something closer to, “I think this may be where God is leading.”

The difference may seem small, but I increasingly think it matters. One closes the conversation. The other leaves room for discernment, uncertainty and the possibility that I may have misunderstood. Recently, I found myself thinking about all of this while reading one of the most famous conversations with God in the Bible.

It takes place in Genesis 15 and eventually leads Abram beneath a sky full of stars. Yet the more I read the chapter, the more I wonder whether the stars are not actually the most interesting part.

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The encounter takes place when Abraham is still known as Abram.

God has already made him an extraordinary promise. He will become the father of a great nation, his descendants will inherit the land, and through him, others will somehow be blessed. The problem is that reality does not seem to be cooperating. Abram is getting older, and Sarai remains unable to have children. Years have passed, and the promise that once sounded remarkable must increasingly have sounded impossible.

Genesis 15 begins with the words, “The word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision.”

That is an important detail because Abram’s experience is not necessarily a model for how most of us experience God. The biblical writer presents this as a particular revelatory encounter. We should probably be cautious, therefore, about reading the story and imagining that hearing God normally means waiting until clearly identifiable sentences arrive in our minds.

Whatever exactly Abram experienced, the narrator wants us to understand that God initiates the encounter and begins with reassurance: “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward.”

If we were writing the tidier religious version of the story, we might expect Abram to respond with gratitude. Perhaps something about trusting God’s timing. Maybe even a suitably inspirational sentence that could eventually find its way onto a Christian bookmark. Instead, Abram effectively says, What good is that when I still don’t have a child? But his actual words are much more direct: “Sovereign LORD, what can you give me since I remain childless?” Then he reminds God of the obvious problem. No heir has appeared. If Abram dies as things stand, somebody from his household will inherit everything.

I love the honesty of that response because Abram does not pretend that the promise and his circumstances fit neatly together. He brings the contradiction straight into the conversation.

In effect, he places both things before God at once: the promise he has received and the life he is actually living, asking how the two can possibly belong together. And God responds. He tells Abram that his heir will be his own son, then takes him outside and tells him to look up at the sky and count the stars if he can. “So shall your offspring be.”

It is one of the great images of Scripture: an old man standing beneath an enormous night sky, confronted by more stars than he could ever hope to count. Then Genesis gives us the line that would echo through Christian theology for centuries:

“Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.”

It would be easy to assume that the conversation has now reached its conclusion. After all, Abram now believes, faith has won, and surely the questions are over.

Except the chapter keeps going.

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September has always felt a little like the beginning of a new year to me.

January may have the calendar on its side, but it arrives in the middle of winter when, if I am honest, I mostly want to stay indoors, keep warm and recover from Christmas. September feels different. There is something about it that carries a sense of expectation. The long days of summer begin to fade, normal routines return, and life seems to acquire a shape again.

Here in the UK, you can almost feel the change happening after what has been the hottest summer on record.

The mornings are becoming slightly crisper. When I left the house this morning, for the first time in months, I wondered whether I should have taken a jumper. Shops have now started displaying things that seem suspiciously autumnal, and somewhere in the distance, Christmas is already clearing its throat.

Then the schools go back.

My teenage children have spent the last six weeks telling me they had no homework, and are now panicking about how much they have to do. They have also apparently spent weeks forgetting that mornings exist, and now suddenly have alarms to set again. Uniforms to find and friends to be reunited with one another. Family life will once again settle back into patterns that disappeared almost completely during the summer holidays.

Yet there is something slightly strange about calling it a beginning. Because nature seems to be doing precisely the opposite.

The trees are beginning to change colour. Leaves that were bright green only a few weeks ago are gradually becoming yellow, orange and brown. Gardens that have been scorched by the sun are once again slowing down. The warmth of summer, however reluctant we may be to admit it, is disappearing.

Everything around us appears to be winding down. Yet somehow, September still feels full of possibility.

I have been thinking about that contradiction over the last few days, and it brought me back to an easily overlooked promise near the end of the story of Noah.

After the flood has finally receded, Noah leaves the ark and builds an altar. Then God makes a promise about the future of the earth:

“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”

It is one of those verses I have probably read many times without paying much attention to it.

Yet as we begin September, I keep being reminded of it.

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Most of us know what happened when Daniel was thrown into a den of lions.

God protects him through the night, and the king discovers him alive the following morning. It is one of those biblical stories that many of us first encountered as children, usually accompanied by pictures of a remarkably relaxed Daniel surrounded by lions that looked considerably friendlier than I suspect real lions would have been.

But the lions only appear because of something that happens earlier, and it has something to do with an open window.

Daniel has risen to a position of considerable influence within the new regime, and some of the other officials resent him for it. They search for evidence of corruption or negligence that could be used against him and find nothing. Eventually, they realise that the only reliable way to trap Daniel is through his faith.

So they persuade King Darius to issue an extraordinary decree. For thirty days, nobody is permitted to make a petition to any god or human being except the king. Anyone who disobeys will be thrown into a den of lions.

Daniel hears that the decree has been signed, and then he goes home.

The book tells us that he enters an upstairs room where the windows are open towards Jerusalem. Three times a day, he kneels there and prays to God.

That is the open window I had always misunderstood. In my imagination, it was always an act of magnificent defiance.

Daniel discovers that prayer has effectively been outlawed, marches upstairs, throws open the windows where everyone can see him and kneels down anyway. It is almost the biblical equivalent of saying, “Just try and stop me.”

It makes for a wonderful scene, but there is only one problem. The text does not actually say Daniel opened the windows in response to the decree. It says that the room had windows open towards Jerusalem. Then comes the detail that changes everything: Daniel knelt and prayed, “just as he had done before.”

The windows were not suddenly opened because somebody had forbidden him to pray; this was already his habit, and I think that changes the story.

Daniel is not staging a protest or deliberately trying to provoke the authorities by turning his prayer into a public demonstration. Nor does he appear interested in hiding what he is doing.

He simply carries on doing what he has always done.

There is something about that which I find far more challenging than the version I had imagined.

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Last weekend, a 41-year-old man died at the Big Church Festival in West Sussex after a large sign fell at the site. At least six other people were injured, the festival was brought to a close, and police and the Health and Safety Executive are now investigating what happened.

It is an awful, tragic story. A man went to a festival and did not come home. Somewhere there is a family trying to comprehend that, friends who were expecting to see him again, and people who witnessed what happened and will probably replay it in their minds for a long time.

Before anything else, there is simply a human tragedy.

And yet, as news of what had happened began appearing online, I noticed something else. Almost immediately, some people seemed to see not a dead man, but an opportunity. Because the event was a Christian festival, some of the comments turned into jokes about Christianity, prayer, God, or the supposed foolishness of those who had chosen to attend.

I probably should not have been surprised, but I was. There is something particularly upsetting about watching someone else’s tragedy being processed first through the question of which tribe they belonged to.

I have found myself wondering whether we are becoming increasingly good at doing this. Not simply disagreeing with one another, but seeing categories before we see people.

A Christian dies, and some people see Christianity. An immigrant commits a crime, and some people see immigration. A disabled person receives financial support, and some people see benefits. A Muslim does something terrible, and some people see Islam. A politician makes a mistake, and people who dislike the party sometimes seem almost pleased.

The individual disappears remarkably quickly.

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There is a verse in Matthew’s Gospel that I have heard quoted countless times in churches, usually when attendance has been slightly disappointing.

It is usually said when perhaps only a handful of people have turned up for the prayer meeting, the weather is terrible, half the congregation are away, or everyone else has apparently discovered something more exciting to do on a Tuesday evening. Eventually, somebody smiles reassuringly and says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

It is a lovely thought, and of course there is truth in it. Christians do not need a cathedral, a packed congregation or an impressive worship band for Christ to be present among them. Two people praying together matter just as much as two thousand. Yet recently, while reading the passage again, I noticed something I had somehow managed to overlook.

Jesus does not originally say these words during a conversation about worship.

He says them during a conversation about conflict.

That changes things rather dramatically.

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I have today got back from a family holiday, during which we were all under the same roof for a whole week. That is a rare occasion these days, and I relished almost every moment of it.

I wrote whilst we were away about how precious those moments spent together really are, and how ultimately they eclipse whatever activities we happen to fill the days with. As long as we are together, that is what matters most.

Making memories.

I say I enjoyed almost every moment because Hank developed an eye condition, which required an emergency trip to the vet whilst we were away. He is due for a follow-up tomorrow and is feeling very sorry for himself at the moment. That said, he is still snoring beside me as I write this, so things cannot be too bad.

Apart from holidays, though, what has Sacred & Secular been about this month?

Before I launch into that, I want to welcome all the new subscribers who have joined us over the summer. It is wonderful to have you here. If you would like to know more about our little community, you can find some details at the bottom of this post. I am constantly humbled that so many people choose to make Sacred & Secular part of their reading.

This month, I have obviously been in something of a philosophical mood.

Posts such as Can We Explain Wonder?, Do We Know Enough?, and The Days We Assume Are Ours are just a few examples. We have explored some of the bigger questions: our place in the universe, what gives life meaning, the limits of certainty and why some of the things we take for granted perhaps deserve another look.

It has also been a month of discovering hidden details in familiar Bible stories.

If you have been around for a while, or followed my writing on Medium, you will know that I love reading a passage slowly and seeing what previously overlooked words, phrases and details begin to emerge. August has taken us into familiar passages, including the Good Samaritan, the Lost Sheep and Mary’s song.

Very often, the detail that catches my attention is not the obvious one. It might be a word we normally skim over, a cultural detail that would have meant far more to the original audience, or a question that only appears when we stop assuming we already know the story.

Those are some of my favourite reflections to write.

I also continue to explore a Bible passage on Tuesdays, usually taken from the lectionary reading for the following Sunday, if you happen to follow that kind of thing. I enjoy that rhythm because it gives us an opportunity to pause over passages that thousands of churches may be hearing only a few days later and perhaps notice something that might otherwise be missed.

As August draws to a close, it feels as though that familiar shift is happening again. Summer is beginning to give way to autumn, bringing with it that strange sense of new beginnings, fresh plans and the beautiful crisp air we get in this part of England at this time of year.

I have plans of my own for the months ahead.

Alongside continuing to provide daily reflections here, I am hoping to finish the second Sacred & Secular book in time for Christmas. There is still plenty of work to do, but I am excited about bringing another collection together under the theme Hidden in Plain Sight.

More than anything, though, I want Sacred & Secular to remain what it has gradually become. A place for finding God in the ordinary parts of life. A place to slow down for a few minutes in the middle of our sometimes busy schedules. A place to think, wonder, question and reflect.

Some days that might mean looking at the night sky and wondering about our place in the universe. On others, it might mean noticing a single overlooked word in a familiar Bible story. Sometimes it may simply mean recognising that sitting around a table with the people we love matters far more than whatever happens to be on the itinerary.

Perhaps the sacred has always been hiding in places like those; we just need reminding sometimes.

Thank you once again for being part of this little community. It really is a constant joy, and the very act of writing these reflections continues to draw me closer to God.

I had better go and help with the post-holiday unpacking now.

From me and a slightly sorry-looking Hank at S&S HQ,

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There is a sentence printed in many modern Bibles that I suspect most of us barely notice.

It usually appears in tiny writing at the bottom of the page, where publishers apparently assume only the truly determined will venture. Sometimes it says that some manuscripts do not include these words. Elsewhere, it might tell us that other ancient authorities read something slightly different.

For years, I treated those little notes as interesting but largely irrelevant. I was far more interested in the words printed above them. Yet when you stop to think about what they are actually saying, they are rather extraordinary.

Your Bible is openly telling you that not every ancient copy of the Bible says exactly the same thing.

If you have grown up hearing Scripture described as the Word of God, that can initially feel slightly uncomfortable. We might imagine the Bible travelling through history like a perfectly preserved package, passed carefully from one generation to another without anything changing along the way.

The reality is more complicated.

The Bible was copied by human beings, and human beings make mistakes.

Strangely, though, the more I have learned about those mistakes, the less troubling I have found them. In fact, I have begun to think that those tiny footnotes at the bottom of the page reveal something rather reassuring.

They show us that nobody is pretending the mistakes did not happen.

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We often slow down and read Bible passages more slowly here at Sacred & Secular. That is because the more familiar they are, the less we tend to hear what they are saying.

If that is true with individual passages, it must also be true when we think about Jesus, one of the best-known figures in history.

Even people who have never opened a Bible usually know something about him. They know that Jesus taught people to love one another, forgive, care for the poor and treat others as they would like to be treated themselves. They know about the cross, perhaps a few miracles, and probably at least one parable.

For those of us who have spent years around churches, the familiarity goes even deeper. We have heard phrases such as “love your enemies,” “turn the other cheek,” and “the last will be first” so many times that they barely surprise us anymore.

That is remarkable when you stop to think about it, because some of those ideas were revolutionary.

Place Jesus back into the world in which he actually lived, surrounded by Roman power, strict social hierarchies, religious boundaries and cultures where honour mattered enormously, and many of his familiar sayings begin to sound rather different.

Jesus was compassionate, certainly. But safe and predictable?

I am not sure the Gospels allow us that version of him.

So, for our Sunday reflection, here are seven reasons why.

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1. He told people to love their enemies

Being kind to people we like is relatively straightforward. Loving our enemies is another matter entirely.

The world Jesus inhabited was intensely tribal. Your family, community, religion and people mattered enormously. Rome maintained its empire through force, while occupied peoples naturally resented those who controlled them. Hostility between different communities could run through generations.

Into that world came one of Jesus’ most famous instructions:

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

We have heard those words so often that they can sound almost gentle.

They are anything but.

Jesus was not simply telling people to avoid taking revenge. He was asking them to seek the good of people who had wronged them. To pray for those who mistreated them and refuse to allow hatred to determine how they responded.

It is much easier to admire enemy-love when the enemy remains theoretical.

It becomes considerably more difficult when we imagine the person who betrayed us, the neighbour we cannot stand, the politician who makes our blood boil or the person online who has just informed us that we are an idiot.

Suddenly, Jesus sounds radical again.

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2. He completely redefined greatness

The ancient world understood status.

People knew who mattered and who did not. Wealth, family background, political influence and social position all affected where someone stood. Those at the top were served by those beneath them.

Even Jesus’ disciples seem to have absorbed this way of thinking. At one point, they actually argued among themselves about which of them was the greatest.

Jesus responded by turning their assumptions upside down.

He placed a child among them. He told them that whoever wanted to become great must become a servant. Then, on the night before his death, he wrapped a towel around his waist and washed their feet, performing a task associated with servants.

We are so accustomed to phrases such as servant leadership that we can miss how strange this was. Jesus did not say that powerful people should occasionally remember to be humble. He redefined power itself.

Greatness was not about how many people served you. It was revealed by how willing you were to serve others.

The world said, climb higher.

Jesus kept pointing downwards.

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3. He crossed boundaries that other people defended

One of the things I find increasingly striking about the Gospels is the company Jesus kept.

He ate with tax collectors who were widely despised. He touched people others considered unclean. He allowed women to sit among his disciples. He spoke publicly with a Samaritan woman and made a Samaritan the hero of one of his most famous stories.

None of this happened accidentally.

Jesus repeatedly crossed lines that other people considered important. That did not mean he pretended differences did not exist. Jews and Samaritans really did have deep disagreements. Tax collectors really were part of a system that could exploit people.

Yet Jesus refused to allow those labels to become the final word about a person.

Perhaps the Good Samaritan captures this most clearly. The original question is essentially about where responsibility ends: Who is my neighbour?

Jesus turns it around.

Instead of asking who qualifies to receive our compassion, he asks what it means for us to become neighbours.

That remains an uncomfortable question in a world very skilled at dividing people into us and them.

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4. He made religion much harder to fake

It is sometimes suggested that Jesus rejected Judaism and replaced rules with a much easier religion based on love.

That does not really fit the Gospels.

The Hebrew Scriptures already spoke repeatedly about the heart, and Israel’s prophets had long criticised religious activity that was disconnected from justice, mercy and genuine devotion.

Jesus stood firmly within that tradition. If anything, he intensified it. It was not enough simply to avoid murder; Jesus asked what anger was doing inside us. It was not enough to remain technically faithful while treating another person as an object. Outward respectability could hide pride, greed, resentment and hypocrisy.

Suddenly, religion became much more difficult to perform for an audience. You could fool your neighbours, you could probably fool your religious community and you might even fool yourself. But Jesus kept returning to what was happening beneath the surface.

That creates an uncomfortable level playing field because it becomes much harder to divide humanity neatly into good people and bad people.

Jesus was not lowering the standard.

He was moving it somewhere nobody could hide from it.

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5. He turned society’s rankings upside down

Jesus had an irritating habit of noticing the wrong people. At least, they were the wrong people according to the normal social rankings of his day.

When children were brought to him, and the disciples tried to send them away, Jesus welcomed them. When wealthy people made impressive offerings, he drew attention to a poor widow giving a tiny amount. He repeatedly spent time with people whose presence damaged rather than improved his reputation.

Then he said things like:

“The last will be first, and the first will be last.”

We can spiritualise those words so quickly that they lose their force. Jesus was describing a kingdom in which the rankings human beings create simply do not carry the importance we give them.

Wealth does not make someone more valuable. Influence does not make someone more loved by God. Visibility does not equal significance.

Perhaps that is particularly challenging in our age because we have invented remarkably sophisticated ways of ranking ourselves. Followers, salaries, job titles, qualifications, houses, audiences and achievements all provide convenient little scoreboards.

Jesus seems remarkably uninterested in most of them.

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6. He rejected the usual way of gaining power

This may be one of the most surprising things about Jesus.

The world around him understood power largely in terms of control. Rome was very good at it. Armies, governors, taxation and the threat of violence kept the empire functioning. Many people hoped that Israel’s Messiah would finally defeat their oppressors and restore their nation.

Jesus chose a very different route.

He entered Jerusalem on a donkey rather than a warhorse. When Peter reached for a sword in Gethsemane, Jesus told him to put it away. He refused attempts to turn him into the kind of ruler people expected.

This does not mean Jesus lacked authority; quite the opposite. The Gospels repeatedly portray people astonished by his authority. What is unusual is how he used it. He invited rather than coerced. He served rather than dominated and, ultimately, instead of raising an army, he accepted a cross.

That is a deeply strange picture of power.

Christians have spent centuries proclaiming Jesus as king, yet it is worth remembering what kind of king the Gospels actually give us.

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7. He placed forgiveness above revenge

Most cultures understand revenge.

Something is done to us, so we want the balance restored. Someone hurts us, and part of us wants them to experience something of the hurt they caused.

The ancient Mediterranean world placed enormous importance on honour. An insult or injury could create an obligation to respond, and feuds could continue because every act of retaliation produced another reason for retaliation.

Jesus interrupted the cycle. Forgive, turn the other cheek, pray for your enemies, forgive not merely once, but repeatedly. None of that means wrongdoing does not matter. Forgiveness is not pretending that abuse, injustice or betrayal were acceptable.

It means refusing to allow the wrong done to us to determine what we become next.

That may be one reason forgiveness is so difficult. Revenge can feel powerful, but forgiveness often feels like surrender.

Jesus seems to suggest that sometimes the opposite is true.

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Perhaps the greatest irony is that many of Jesus’ most radical teachings no longer sound radical because they have become so familiar.

We put them on greetings cards, carve them onto church walls and quote them at weddings and funerals. We teach them to children, and familiarity gradually takes away their edge.

Yet perhaps one test of whether we are still really listening to Jesus is whether he ever makes us uncomfortable.

Because if Jesus always confirms what I already believe, approves of all my priorities, supports every group I support and dislikes precisely the same people I dislike, there is at least a possibility that I am no longer listening to Jesus at all. I may simply have created a version of him who looks remarkably like me.

The Jesus of the Gospels is harder to contain.

He tells us to love people we would rather dislike, serve when we would rather be recognised, cross boundaries we would rather defend, examine ourselves before judging others, notice people society overlooks, rethink what power looks like and forgive when retaliation feels far more satisfying.

Two thousand years later, I am not convinced those ideas have become any less radical. Perhaps we have simply become very good at hearing them without allowing them to surprise us.

And maybe that is the challenge. Not merely to ask whether we admire the teachings of Jesus.

But whether we are still prepared to let them disturb us.

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There is a phrase I have heard in various forms over the years whenever conversations turn towards religion, morality or some of the stranger things we human beings do.

“It’s the result of evolution.”

Why do people believe in God? Evolution.

Why are human beings drawn towards ritual, spirituality and transcendence? Evolution.

Why do we experience love, moral obligation, beauty, wonder or a sense that life ought to mean something? You guessed it, evolution.

I should probably make something clear at the beginning. I have no interest in arguing against evolution. I am perfectly comfortable with the idea that human beings developed through evolutionary processes, and I am fascinated by what science continues to discover about how those processes shaped us.

What interests me is what sometimes happens after the evolutionary explanation has been offered.

There can be an assumption that because we have explained where something came from, we have also explained what it means.

I am not sure we have.

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A reader recently shared a story with me that has had me thinking ever since.

It concerned an elderly Christian woman who found herself with new neighbours. They were gay, and this presented something of a challenge for her. She did not approve of their relationship, but she also believed that her faith required her to treat them well. So she decided that she would try to be a good neighbour. She would be polite, kind and welcoming, even though there were things about their lives she struggled to understand or accept.

Then something unexpected happened.

Her neighbours began looking out for her. They cleared leaves from her garden, shovelled snow from her path, checked that she was all right and helped whenever she needed something. Over time, the relationship she had imagined began to turn itself upside down. She had started out wondering how she could be a good neighbour to them, only to discover that they were the ones repeatedly behaving as good neighbours towards her.

Eventually, she found herself reflecting on the experience and came to a rather uncomfortable conclusion: “I wasn’t the one who was the good neighbour!”

I still think about that story because it reminds me of something about the parable of the Good Samaritan that we often overlook. Most of us hear the story and immediately imagine ourselves as the Samaritan. We ask ourselves whether we would stop, whether we would help and whether we would show compassion to somebody different from us.

I wrote about those questions earlier this month, and they remain important ones. Lately, though, I have found myself wondering whether Jesus is asking another question as well.

What if you are the person lying beside the road, and the person who stops is somebody you would never have chosen?

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For many years, the first thing I did every morning was pour myself a large cup of coffee and switch on the news. It became part of the rhythm of the day. Hank understood it too. Coffee first, news second, and the moment the mug was empty, it was time for walkies. Dogs are remarkably good at learning the parts of our routines that involve them.

Recently, though, I have confused him. The coffee remains, because I am not sure that particular habit is ever going anywhere, but the television stays off. It was not a dramatic decision; I simply realised that starting every morning with the news was beginning to affect me.

Recently, the relentless accumulation of bad news has begun to feel particularly heavy. Wars, fires, political turmoil and human suffering seem to arrive one headline after another, often before I have properly absorbed the previous one.

After a while, I noticed that I was beginning almost every day feeling jaded before the day had even begun. So I changed the routine. The coffee remained. Hank’s walk remained. But the news could wait.

Strangely, that small change has made me think about one of the strangest books in the Bible.

Revelation.

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There is an important difference between following somebody and telling them where to go.

That thought came to mind as I was reading one of the most dramatic exchanges between Jesus and Peter in Matthew’s Gospel, a passage that some churches will hear this Sunday.

It happens remarkably quickly.

Only a few verses earlier, Peter has given one of the greatest declarations of faith in the New Testament. Jesus asks his disciples who they believe he is, and Peter responds:

“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus praises him. He tells Peter that this insight has not simply come from human reasoning and speaks of him as the rock upon which he will build his church. It is difficult to imagine the conversation going much better for Peter.

Then, almost immediately, everything changes.

Jesus begins explaining what will happen next. He will go to Jerusalem. He will suffer. He will be killed. Then, on the third day, he will be raised.

Peter does not like this at all. Matthew tells us that he takes Jesus aside and begins to rebuke him.

“God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”

And Jesus responds with words that must have landed like a thunderclap.

“Get behind me, Satan!”

It is one of the strongest rebukes Jesus gives to anybody in the Gospels. Yet there is something within those words that I had never paid enough attention to.

Jesus does not simply say, “Go away.”

He says:

“Get behind me.”

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There is something remarkable about living in the modern world.

I can sit at my desk and instantly communicate with someone on the other side of the planet. A small device in my hand can tell me where I am, show me images of places I have never visited and give me access to more information than any previous generation could have imagined.

We have mapped the human genome, sent machines beyond our planet and can look back in time by studying light that has travelled across the universe for billions of years. We can see inside the human body, replace failing organs and treat diseases that previous generations could only fear.

In many ways, we are the most knowledgeable generation of humans who have ever lived.

That is truly worth celebrating.

But I sometimes wonder whether there is a danger hidden within that achievement. The danger is not knowledge itself, but the tendency to confuse knowing more with knowing everything.

Those are very different things.

The more we discover about the world around us, the more we often discover how much remains unknown.

We have explored only a fraction of our oceans. Beneath the sea's surface are ecosystems, creatures, and environments that continue to surprise us. The microscopic world is far stranger than earlier generations could have imagined. Quantum physics has revealed a reality at the smallest scales that challenges our everyday assumptions about how the universe works.

Even in medicine, where we have achieved extraordinary things, there are still illnesses we struggle to understand fully. We have conquered many diseases that once devastated humanity, yet we still live with conditions that remain stubbornly resistant to simple explanations.

The lesson is not that science has failed, quite the opposite. The lesson is that the universe is deeper and more complicated than we once imagined.

And perhaps sometimes that should make us more humble.

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