Is the New Year really a time for resolutions and for beginnings-again, or will 2013 be no more than a retread of the year which has nearly ended?
Last weekend, BBC1 screened a two-part documentary fronted by actor David Suchet (best known in the role of Agatha Christie’s Belgium detective Poirot) on the life of St Paul, whose life highlights the fact that Christian faith holds out the offer of a new beginning.
St
Paul was a fanatical Jewish opponent of the first followers of Jesus, who went
to extreme lengths to stamp out this fledgling faith movement within Judaism.
However, while travelling to Damascus, he had a life-changing vision of the
living Jesus, after which the passion with which he had previously opposed
Christianity was harnessed to advocate faith in Christ.
Paul
wrote many of the documents in the New Testament and, seized by the vision that
Jesus was not simply for Jewish people but for the whole of humanity, he
travelled extensively in the Mediterranean area sharing his faith and
establishing churches.
Many
of us have stories to tell of Christian conversion. Stories of finding hope
when overcome by despair. Stories of discovering robust answers to questions
about the purpose and meaning of life. Stories of being arrested by the reality
of God’s presence in the middle of perfectly contented and untroubled lives.
Stories of realising for the first time the implications in everyday life of
long-held beliefs.
David
Suchet has his own story of conversion in which St Paul plays a part. Suchet’s
Damascus road moment came in 1986 when he was 40, in a hotel room in Seattle.
As he read the letter St Paul wrote to the Christians at Rome, the Apostle’s
teaching resonated with him. He was particularly arrested by Paul’s insight
that meaning, forgiveness, wholeness, access to God – everything involved in
the word ‘salvation’ - is available
through faith in Jesus Christ.
Though
Suchet’s father came from a Jewish, and his mother from a Christian background,
neither had a living faith, and religion was not part of the Suchet family’s
daily life. But like so many who came of age in the 1960s, David was asking
deep questions. He feels that he had been ‘searching for something’ all his
life, and that in opening St Paul’s letter to the Romans, he found himself
‘reading about a way of being and a way of life that I had been looking for all
those years.
Evidence
is as important to David Suchet as it is to Hercule Poirot, who solves crimes
by scrutinising the details, reading the evidence. ‘I just can’t have blind
faith,’ says the actor. ‘I have to find out for myself.’
In
the years following his Seattle moment, he tested the evidence, and was
eventually confirmed in the Church of England in 2009. ‘It took me that long to
say “I fully commit.”’
Comparing
St Paul and David Suchet’s conversions you notice both similarities and
differences. But that’s the point – we experience turning and re-turning to God
in many different ways. However the God we encounter and the redirection of our
values which accompanies that encounter are the same.
And
comparing St Paul and David Suchet’s lives reminds us that as Christians we are
each different too. The actor is not sure if he would have liked St Paul. ‘Such
was his zeal, if you like, that he never suffered fools gladly.’ ‘This was a
man who had a mission and anybody with a mission can be frightening.’
Unlike
Paul the pioneer missionary David Suchet, though a man of firm faith says ‘I
don’t try to convert anyone.’ Yet he acknowledges that there is in society a
great longing ‘for spiritual peace’ and his sharing of his experiences must
have pointed many to Christ, the well from whose waters of peace the actor has
drunk deeply.
When
he was preparing to play Hercule Poirot for the first time, Suchet read many of
Agatha Christie’s novels, studying the detective and his mannerisms and tried,
in recreating Poirot on the screen to get him just right.
In
one sense this is a picture of us as Christians as, having been converted to
Christ, we seek to reflect on Christ and represent him faithfully in our lives.
Yet in another sense Suchet playing
Poirot is nothing like us as Christians inviting Christ to embody himself in
us.
It
is true, as David Suchet says, that as a Christian ‘one must abandon oneself to
a higher good’. But that doesn’t mean losing our uniqueness. For we are not
Christian clones, each identical. Rather, the grace and love and sternness of
Jesus is to be seen in our personality and temperament, so that we are not
acting a part – we are real.
The
turning-points in our lives are not usually marked by significant calendar
events such as the turning of the year, but are the unpredicted moments of
clarity such as those which arrested St Paul and David Suchet. But the point is
that whatever situation we are in Christian faith offers hope if we will turn
to God for the first time or the ten thousandth time, and live life as a
journey of on-going conversion.
No comments:
Post a Comment