celebrities

There was a comment on Facebook the other day about the Olympic athletes who were winning medals – can we have more heroes like these for our children instead of all these reality TV stars whose only claim to fame is often their own sad disfunction.

For many people the idea of celebrity has become a huge influence on their lives – the comment on Facebook made me glad that, as a society, there is still a place for people who fulfil ambition through hard work and determination – it is not a perfect idiom, of course.

Today sees Jesus in trouble for having disciples who eat without washing their hands. This is probably not the story to tell a Sunday School class if you do not want a hoard of angry parents whose children now refuse to wash with the excuse that “Jesus did it”.

Jesus is not saying that personal hygiene is a bad idea – what he criticises is those around him who are looking for every little drop of the law which Jesus or his disciples commit. Remember the disciples also get in trouble for picking ears of corn on the Sabbath to eat them – no harvesting says the chorus of criticism and for those stories which are recorded there must have been a lot more nagging going on.

Just as the olympics might be causing some people to question their aims in terms of celebrity so Jesus is saying that the pharisees and teachers of the law really need to shift their focus from this rather self-serving parochialism to the mission and life to which God is inviting them,

Purity, he says, comes not from a set of rituals but from an experience of and a life lived in God.

Yesterday was the Feast of the Transfiguration and as I was out of the parish at a meeting in London I went to a lunchtime communion there. I had no collar on and so was just another worshipper in a bustling city and this gave me time to really reflect on what Transfiguration might mean and just how big God's glory is.

What really struck me is that we often see glory as something which is coming, something which we have to wait for, but the Transfiguration whilst a taste of what is to come is also the here and now. The Transfiguration makes clear that this Jesus who we see and experience is truly God and human, right here, right now and that God's glory seeps into all of creation – if only we would notice it.

With the hugeness of what he comes to bring it is no wonder that Jesus gets frustrated with those who want to bit, bridle and blinker God's offer of relationship so that it is under their control. Perhaps this takes us back to our ideas of who is and who is not famous. There is a certain control in being good at being bad – you can always get worse, offend people even more but you never really run the risk of failing – well except of failing yourself – but self often gets lost in celebrity. The athlete runs a much greater risk as they chase excellence – that as good as they are, they might never be quite good enough.

Christianity is not a call to a box ticking, risk free living. It is not a call to constant failure either. It is a call to try as hard as we can, to really run the race to our full ability. Jesus does not tell us to eat with dirty hands but Jesus does tell us that what comes out of us shows what has really gone into us. Christianity is a call to strive for self but a self found in the light and life of Christ not in blind control of all eventualities. Whilst there is little celebrity in this sort of living – people do notice and that is our invitation, lives lived from God's table and reflecting God's true glory.