Only Jesus can save us

An article for my local newspaper

Would it be controversial to say that this country is in a mess? Clergy aren't supposed to be controversial – oops – but we really do seem to have taken a severely wrong turn somewhere. What are we to do? Where are we to go? How shall we resist? And what has Jesus got to do with it?

Let's take the proposed redevelopments in Backwell. If reports are to be believed we are looking at doubling the population of Backwell in the coming years, which might be all well and good if everything that goes along with an increase in population was also addressed – like medical provision, or transport needs, or public space. My question, my invitation, is: why aren't these things also being addressed?

There is a story that could be told here about the way in which the human being has been reduced to the status of an economic unit, a changeable and replaceable widget in the great factory of a modern economy. We are just steel ball-bearings, mass produced, useful for a purpose but discarded if not smooth enough. At least, that is how it feels when I'm stuck in a phone call listening to the robotic voice intoning 'your call is important to us'. Yeah, right.

What is missing in our modern economy, and it applies so obviously when it comes to housing developments, is any idea that we human beings are soulful creatures. There is more to us than the contribution that we can make to GDP. It matters that we can do the things that human beings need to do, like meet together, like look after our vulnerable and sick, like play in the fresh air, like sing and dance and love. Most of this doesn't turn up on the GDP balance sheet or – worse – things that are actually terrible end up being a contribution to the size of the economy, so they get incentivised even when they make our human lives much worse.

What would it look like if we started to build Backwell as if people mattered? What would be the balance between new homes and new facilities, and how would we arrange for people to move around? I have no confidence that the metropolitan bubble-dwellers in Whitehall have any idea (once upon a time I was one..!)

At the risk of sounding like a bible-basher, we have been in similar messes before, and there are lots of relevant stories in the Bible that have something to say about the mess that we are in – I'm rather hoping that we're more in a Tower of Babel situation than a Noah's Ark situation, but I'm not confident of that. What I am confident about is that we will not get to answers for the problems that surround us unless we recognise that we need to treat each other – and be treated by others – as full human beings, with deep-rooted needs that cannot fit onto an accountant's spreadsheet (vital and useful though such things are in their proper context).

If we accept that we need to function on a human scale with these questions, we need to have some idea of what a fully human life looks like, what it would mean for each and every one of us to flourish and become the people, individually and communally, that we were created to be.

Which is why only Jesus can save us. If we want to know what being human looks like, and what that flourishing life looks like, and what we have to do in order to share in that life, each of us and Backwell as a whole as we ponder all these developments, then we would do well to contemplate the one 'in whom we live and move and have our being'. In the midst of our contemporary glooms and dooms he is the one surpassing light who can guide us.