Follow your star or Jesus?

Who cares about speaking the truth to power if the real task is to escape? Why bother feeding the hungry and housing the homeless, why worry about global debt or global warming or the madness of global warfare, if the main thing to do is to follow your own star and discover your true spiritual identity? Why bother following the real Jesus and standing defenceless before the powers of the world if you can invent a fake Jesus who panders to your inner desires? Let's be quite clear: despite the sneers of so many who say that the New Testament was written, edited and then chosen out of a much larger collection of books in order to sustain the church's political power and prestige, the truth is that in the second and third century, long before anyone thought of the Constantinian settlement, it was the people who were reading Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Acts, Romans and the rest who were being thrown to the lions, burned at the stake, beaten and bullied and beheaded. Why would Caesar worry about 'Thomas', 'Judas' and the other pseudo-gospels? The rulers of this world are not bothered when yet another little group invents a new form of private spirituality. What makes Caesar shiver in his shoes is if people start to believe that whereas the Gentile rulers do it one way, God does it a different way, that there is a different way of power, a different form of rulership, and that Jesus has inaugurated and modelled it in his servanthood and suffering, and that the community that hails him as the only true Lord is going out into the world to live that way, and to celebrate it, as we do today, in sacrament and vocation and healing.

- Tom Wright