The Christian account of the birth of Jesus, and its celebration at Christmas, has to be one of its greatest contributions to the world.

Rather than being lofty and separate from humanity (or, conversely, so immanent as to be indistinguishable from us), the divine invades/embraces humanity in a historical event. God chains herself to us like a sit-in protester, identifying with us and refusing to let go. God becomes vulnerable, a baby boy born in relative poverty under the nose of a psychopathic autocrat. God transcends and unites class and culture – his arrival is announced to learned academics and blue-collar night shift workers. God sacralises the ornamental and the mundane; gold nestles in a jewelled casket inches from a steaming cowpat. God brings joy, hope, promises of peace and goodwill to all; she inspires gift-giving, well-wishing and inclusivity.

Despite all the degradation of the Christmas event, the core message has enough potency to call us into a season of goodwill; to reconcile, to welcome, to give and receive gifts material and spiritual. It hints at a more glorious possibility, that one day this season of goodwill will become a shared and permanent reality, a fully-orbed union between God and the universe.

Bono’s lyrical style is visually evocative and liberally sprinkled with biblical metaphor, and this song is no exception. The lyrics and pace build subtly towards the final stanza which begins:

I believe in the Kingdom Come
Then all the colours will bleed into one,
Bleed into one.
But yes, I’m still running.
You broke the bonds and loosed the chains
Carried the cross of my shame,
All my shame;
You know I believe it.

Here’s the thing. I felt as if I could only enjoy the song up to this point. This final verse made glorious sense, until Bono sings the finishing line ‘But I still haven’t found…’.
What? How can anyone sing about the cross, about a coming kingdom and still not have found what they’re looking for?

Nowadays the song fits perfectly for me. Bono wants to affirm the raw power of the historic event of the cross and the bright promise of a future consummation of all it contains; yet this very gospel message contributes to the problem. It can become a slogan, a shibboleth, a means of division, an excuse for inaction, an intellectual escape from the real, daily struggle to live peacefully, gracefully and justly.

The gospel presses us on to discover the gospel beyond itself, a gospel that really is good news, good for all, God in all. The Beatitudes are hopeful and yet deeply dissatisfying. Indeed they’re de-satisfying. They keep us running, crawling, climbing, falling, until we find what we’re really looking for.

It was the song Age of Not Believing from the 1971 film Bedknobs and Broomsticks. I vaguely remembered the song, but the lyrics hit me with immediate and poignant relevance:

When you rush around in hopeless circles
Searching everywhere for something true
You’re at the age of not believing
When all the “make believe” is through

When you set aside your childhood heroes
And your dreams are lost up on a shelf
You’re at the age of not believing
And worst of all you doubt yourself

You’re a castaway where no one hears you
On a barren isle in a lonely sea
Where did all the happy endings go?
Where can all the good times be?

You must face the age of not believing
Doubting everything you ever knew
Until at last you start believing
There’s something wonderful in you

I found myself oddly moved by this song, since it expresses so neatly some of my own doubts about my Christian faith – a rejection of anything ‘make-believe’, mixed with a longing for ‘happy endings’ and faith-filled companionship. But I was particularly struck by the last stanza. By this point in the song, I’d expected the wonderfully chipper Angela Lansbury to gently chide, ‘You must turn aside from not believing’. Instead, the song’s advice is that only by facing one’s doubts, and by allowing those doubts to truly run their course, can one find a sense of wonder in anything.

In charismatic Christian circles, an emphasis on ‘the Father heart of God’ has been trending for some years. I lose track of the ‘Father’s Heart’ conferences that have announced their way into my inbox. This emphasis is deeply experiential: encouraging believers to feel loved by their heavenly Father and to live in the light of this encounter.

I’m not sure what to make of it. I always found such events off-putting and now, struggling to find my footing on a new road, the last thing I think I want is a feelgood emotional experience. (Aside: Last week’s episode of the brilliant Rev, a sitcom centred on a London vicar, involved him accidentally swallowing Ecstasy and stumbling about the nave in such a loved-up trance). As in my last post, I’m hungry for truth and justice, not safe warm self-affirmation.

But I realised this week that my moments of unadulterated bliss with Harry this week are transcendent and (almost) divine. If God as Greatest Good exists, surely this is one of our best metaphors for the kind of uplifting encounter humanity could experience. Fatherhood is frequently routine, tiring and ordinary; it is also sacred and mysterious.

Today I listened to a heartbreaking piece on BBC Radio 4′s PM news programme in which the presenter Eddie Mair discussed bereavement and honesty in the face of terminal cancer with Barbara Want, the widow of former radio colleague Nick Clarke. She said that, despite the apparent evidence that Nick was fading before her eyes, they had never been given an ‘X months to live’ prognosis and she was in profound denial, clinging stubbornly to hope until, at last, she was told to ensure he’d put his affairs in order. Two days later, Nick died.

In the midst of this moving interview, Barbara said something that made me sit bolt upright in the car. She had been surviving on hope, but it had been a ‘false friend’. When she finally confronted the truth, the despair was ‘easier to bear’ than the delusion hope had presented.

Barbara’s experience mirrors, in a sense, my own move from a (delusional?) hope about the Christian life to a hunger for truth even if it brings despair. I don’t want false comfort; I don’t want to be told that God knows best, or that he looks after us, or that things will be set right in the afterlife. I want the brutal truth at all costs. For instance: If the truth is that no-one survives when their heart and brain fail, or that thousands more will die in war- and famine-torn Africa whether or not they confess Christ, or that our deepest experiences of God’s love are merely conditioned neurochemical responses to our environment, filtered through Freudian impulses, then I want the courage to face this and still follow Jesus and live in a way that changes the world. Delusion cannot be better than truth.

I’m sure the bloggers I referred to above would take issue with the assertion that their profuse positivity springs from a fantasy, a deluded hope. And here’s the thing: they may be right. All we have said about God, salvation, heaven and the kingdom may be real and I’m just going through a tricky numb patch (note to self: ‘cloud of unknowing’ sounds much more poetic). But faith that’s valuable must wrestle with the unknowable until daybreak, and may thereafter have to put up with limping through the rest of its journey.

Here’s a great example:

The interesting thing …is not that [scriptural] conflicts exist but that we know they exist. In other words, the writers and editors of the text did not see any reason to try and iron out these inconsistencies – inconsistencies that make any systematic attempt to master the text both violent and irredeemably impossible. Unlike the modern ideal of systematization in definition, these people celebrated the fact that, as Meister Eckhart once claimed, the unnameable is omni-nameable. Evidently such conflicts were not judged to be problematic but were accepted. Indeed such fissures help to prevent us from forming an idolatrous image of God, ensuring that none of us can legitimately claim to understand God as God really is. Consequently the text bars any attempt at colonization by individuals or groups who claim to possess an insight into its true meaning. The biblical text resists such idolatrous readings precisely because it contains so many ideological voices, held together in creative tension, ensuring the impossibility of any final resolution. The result is not an account that is hopelessly ideological, but rather a text that shows the extent to which no one ideology or group of ideologies can lay hold of the divine. The text is not only full of fractures, tensions and contradictions, but informs us that fractures, tensions and contradictions are all we can hope for.

This is a postmodern hermeneutic at work: not denying Truth, but deeply suspicious about truth claims; not defending the harmonious authority of the text, nor ripping it apart or discarding it as a meaningless jumble of disconnected threads. The competing images of God promise, for Rollins (and many of us), both a rich depth of interplay in the ‘fissures’ of the text and a reminder that the omni-nameable God is also beyond-name, beyond-grasp. Faith is not alabaster-smooth; it has wrinkles; it smiles, it frowns, it gasps and shouts. Truth is fluid, slippery, solid and radiant. God is hidden in cloud and obvious to all.

As well as an evolving biblical hermeneutic, my journey away from traditional evangelicalism is a reanalysis of the gospel of Jesus and in particular, the relative weight of his life and death. While an oversimplified caricature, it’s commonly argued that evangelicals fixate on the significance of Jesus’ death (and resurrection) and minimise the content of his life. Liberals do the opposite, lauding Jesus’ moral teaching while diminishing his death (beyond being an ultimate demonstration of his moral character) and caring less about resurrection.

I am more liberal than ever before in this limited contrast; I am drawn to Jesus’ teaching and moral restraint in the face of vicious opposition. I’m also much less able to jump to a simple evangelical model of the gospel message (Jesus died for your sins, to placate the Father and save you from His wrath – but only if you repent and believe, otherwise you’ll face judgement and hell) since this seems so divorced from Jesus’ message of loving enemies, forgiveness and reconciliation.

But I’m uncomfortable with the way in which such liberalism seems to sidestep Jesus’ stated motivation in the face of death. In my mind is the tense encounter between Jesus and Pilate, in which the latter demands to know about Jesus’ alleged kingship. Jesus admits that he is king of a kingdom ‘not of this world’. He doesn’t face his death with Socratic dignity because it’s morally right to do so; he does it as an otherworldly king wielding power even as he is condemned to a tortuous death. Furthermore, in his speech to the Sanhedrin Jesus anticipates a future heavenly denouement in which his enemies will see him enthroned.

I don’t see how one can adopt Jesus’ message (of loving enemies etc) while stripping away the future-oriented otherworldliness of his motivation. Albert Schweitzer’s conclusion that Jesus was a radical eschatological revolutionary rather than a soft-tongued moral teacher rings in my ears at this point.

What gripped me as I awoke was that this is a real-world issue, not just a matter for arid debate. I want to live out the teachings of Jesus. I want to care about the suffering on my TV. I want to reach out to the undeserving around me, even as I realise my own undeservingness. But I feel acutely the profound lack of moral firepower to lift me from self-centredness. I hunger for the inner transformation promised by evangelicalism even as I drift away from its moorings.

Ramble over. Time for a good cup of tea.

Sheen plays an uptight Californian ophthalmologist, Tom Avery, whose PhD-dropout son Daniel dies in the Pyrenees while attempting to walk the medieval Camino de Santiago, an 800km pilgrim route. The grief-stricken Tom flies out to repatriate Daniel’s body and on an impulse decides instead to have him cremated. Stuffing the tin box of ashes in Daniel’s rucksack, Tom resolves to walk the Camino in his stead.

The film is slow and gentle, on occasion a little awkward, but invites the viewer to reflect on mortality, grief, unfulfilled ambition, addiction and cure, camaraderie and redemption. Tom is a lapsed Catholic, and encounters both believers and sceptics on his journey. One companion simply wants to lose weight, another to quit smoking. Yet all are drawn into Tom’s story and, in the end, share a spiritual experience that transforms them.

It’s easy to criticise Hollywood for pandering to our emotions with superficial pop psychology. But films like this mediate a deeper sense of the infinite than a couple of mediocre worship songs and a badly-exegeted sermon. They haunt our dreams, stir our conversation, allow us to leave ourselves and enter another’s life. A better God channel, in other words.

A few nights ago, I succumbed to this urge and jumped midstream into a ‘prophetic conference’ (side note: do they need to advertise the venue and times of these to their faithful in advance?) and a sermon based around Gen 1-3. The speaker used this passage to advance a number of points, including (a) that eating steak helps to bring animals into covenant relationship – to cheers and whoops from the crowd, (b) that humans and apes share such similar DNA because we were all formed from dust, (c) that the word ‘woman’ derives from ‘curse’, (d) that children not born to parents in committed, loving relationship were likely to be worse off and (e) that the greatest crisis facing the church was a ‘Judas spirit’ that desired intimacy with God without commitment.

What was most profoundly distressing about this sermon was its familiarity; for years, I have been to conferences and services packed with similarly banal exposition. If I thought this were unusual – if the audience had been left feeling strained and awkward, for instance, or if the channel had quickly changed tack – that would have been better. But I had the sense that the assembled crowd were satisfied and supportive.

There’s nothing like God TV to make me feel that I’ve lived at least partly in a bubble of insanity for the whole of my adult life. I sat in silence, staring at the now-blank TV screen, filled with a mixture of regret and disappointment in myself for wasting so much of my life in crazy meetings listening to well-off white middle-aged men spout a rambling mixture of biblical thoughts, obvious moral platitudes and narrow-minded opinion. My tactic has worked again. I am angry, seething with this godforsaken channel, with those on either side of the plexiglass pulpit, but mostly with myself.

So what is the parable? The first episode (Jonah’s flight, the storm, his eventual confession to the crew and his plea to be thrown to the waves, whereupon a giant fish swallows him whole) raises disturbing questions. Why would Jonah refuse God? How could he hope to escape, given his theological views? More surprisingly, why does the story cast the Gentiles (foreign idol-worshippers) as spiritually sensitive, compassionate men while Jonah is self-absorbed and oblivious to his shipmates’ fate? This is decidedly odd, given most prophetic books’ round condemnation of other nations.

The fish both saves and humbles Jonah. He composes a rousing hymn of praise and repentance (which is nonetheless tinged with nationalistic and religious pride). Finally he is deposited on land and once again commanded to go to Nineveh. This time, Jonah obeys. Journeying for a day into the vast city’s interior, he appears to intone his given message before turning on his heel and marching back out of the city to await its fate. Instead, the city crumples to its knees in full-blown sackcloth-and-ashes penitence. God relents and spares Nineveh from its fate.

This act of divine mercy unleashes the inner struggle in Jonah that finally uncovers the reason for his initial flight. “How dare you!” Jonah rants at God. “I just knew you’d decide to forgive them. That’s why I ran away in the first place! I am angry enough to die”. God offers a mild rebuke; “What right do you have to be angry?” What is God saying? This is Nineveh – symbol of Israel’s doom. For most of the prophets, God may stretch to using a foreign invader to teach Israel a lesson – but eventually his just anger at these superpowers will be avenged. And here God is taking their side, against his prophet! How utterly unexpected.

To prove his point, God causes a plant to spring up overnight, providing shade for Jonah as he sits waiting for Nineveh’s destruction. Then, just as Jonah has become attached to this newfound parasol, God sends a worm to destroy it and leave Jonah exposed. This further enrages him. God challenges him over his attachment to the plant – why should he, God, not feel greater affection for such a mass of humanity who are helpless and ignorant?

And there the story ends. Right there. No final repentance on Jonah’s part; no tearful apology or restoration. God’s challenge to Jonah is left hanging, echoing into the silence as if to say, “And what about you, dear listener? Do you wish to challenge God’s capacity for mercy?”

And it is this aspect of the story that I find most astonishing. How did this satire get past the censors? In the middle of a series of profoundly Israelite-centric prophetic writings, the book of Jonah shows its Gentile characters to be sensitive, penitent, compassionate and the object of God’s affection, while his prophet is moody, vindictive, self-pitying and at the last, unrepentant. In his proud, self-righteous Jewishness, Jonah cannot recognise God’s generous embrace.

The book of Job explores the eternal dilemma: How can God allow misfortune to occur to good people? By contrast, the book of Jonah reveals a God desperate to show kindness to undeserving people; rough, idol-worshipping sailors; fearless and invincible invaders. The book compels us to laugh at the ridiculous spectacle of this, the least holy and most successful of prophets, and then to inhale sharply as we feel the force of the satire. For we are Jonah.