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Creed
Sin
4 min read

No mercy on the Megabus

Why is sin such a sickly, sticky thing in the human heart?

Jennifer Lander

Jenny is training to be a priest in the Church of England. She holds a PhD in law and previously researched human rights issues in extractive industries.

An upset man holds his hands on his head as he misses a bus.
Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai

“I’m begging you, I’m begging you,” pleaded the passenger. His two large suitcases lying around him, the Nigerian man knelt on the pavement outside the Megabus station. The bus driver stood surly-faced, arms crossed. The passenger’s jacket was ripped where the driver had shoved him off the bus. The passenger had one too many bags; he had not read the Terms and Conditions on his ticket.  

The man groaned – “I must get to Heathrow, I have a flight to catch! I’m willing to do anything – to pay for an extra ticket, to pay the extra bag fee, I have money, see?” He showed the driver his wallet pleadingly, demonstrating his possession of several bank cards.  

A few concerned passengers stepped off the bus. “We don’t have a bag in the hold; we’re happy for this man to have our space.” Another person said, “I booked a ticket but my friend didn’t come – there’s a whole seat’s worth of luggage space available in the hold.” Yet the bus driver would not budge. Even though Megabus has an excess baggage policy, it was down to the driver’s discretion. The driver alone had the power of life and death, to say “yay” or “nay” – to restore a man’s dignity or completely ruin it, along with his jacket.  

As the minutes ticked on, other passengers began to get irate with the Nigerian man – “just buzz off mate, you’re making us late!” “You should have read the rules!” “You’re making the bairns on the bus cry!” Stony faces pressed against the window as the man knelt on the pavement. Even those who had tried to help him left him in the harsh hands of the bus driver and his colleagues, tiny kings in a kangaroo court. For the bus driver, there was no backing down – he was pacing, sweating and red-faced, repeating over and over again to himself his side of the story. And in the end, we left the Nigerian passenger in the heartless hands of bus bureaucracy, wiping our hands of the injury done to him – “we tried.”  

How mucky and murky the human heart can be. 

The whole experience on the Megabus that day left me feeling sick. We all like to think of ourselves as decent folks, as long as we do our “bit”. But on that bus I realized the difficulty: what is “my bit”? Who decides what is “enough”? How quickly a petty issue of baggage can descend into a power play. How quickly do ordinary nice people become a mob when they are outraged or inconvenienced. How mucky and murky the human heart can be. 

The only word that feels strong enough to me to describe this condition is “sin”. This word may sound like a relic of a bygone Britain, but I think it’s as relevant as ever. It’s a serious word, loaded with a sense that the things we do mean more than we know. Sin suggests that I am accountable for how I treat people – not just to my own perception but some higher standard that safeguards the dignity of all human beings. Christians believe that it is God who safeguards our humanity, who sets the standard for how we should and should not treat others. We are accountable “vertically” – to God – as well as “horizontally” to each other.  

It seems to me that “sin” is not a laundry-list of rules but more like a tangled knot of slippery threads – I can’t see where it begins and where it ends, in my own heart or in the world at large. The Christian Eastern Orthodox tradition often likens sin to sickness or a dis-ease of the soul; it infects our reasoning, our emotions and our actions. And that’s why the hurt and pain we cause each other is so “sticky” – no one is left untouched by the effects of the damage we cause each other.  

It was quite clear to me that there were some “sins of deliberate fault” on the Megabus that day – the bus driver’s behaviour was patently unfair and verging on abuse. But I would say sin also flourished in the self-defending logic of the passengers who just wanted to stay in their lane, and for the Nigerian chap to stay in his. Don’t bother me, with your problems. I look after me, you look after you. There were sins of ignorance too – I felt this sick sense in my stomach as the bus pulled out of the station that there was more I could have done, but I didn’t quite know what. All I know is that every person needed mercy on that Megabus, whether we knew it or not. Ironically, the Nigerian man was the most innocent of all.

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Easter
5 min read

What have Easter bunnies to do with the resurrection?

As we emerge from the Easter weekend, Graham Tomlin unpacks why Easter is more than an illustration of new life.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

the first signs of Spring breaking through

Bunnies, chocolate eggs, crocuses. It’s that time of year again. The dark bleakness of winter is giving way to life and colour as the soil warms. We finally feel sun on the skin, wake up to early dawns and longer days.

Across the world, festivals celebrate the coming of Spring. The Qingming Festival is a traditional Chinese carnival, also known as Tomb-Sweeping Day, observed by ethnic Chinese people across the world as a celebration of the new season. In the festival of Holi, Hindus across the world douse each other in brightly coloured powder or water, as a  celebration of burgeoning love, and a prayer for a good harvest from the new growth in the land. The turning of the year, bringing new life, seems one of the most elemental forces in the universe.

In 1890, the Scottish anthropologist James Frazer published a book that was to become famous: The Golden Bough. It was one of the first works of comparative religion in an age which was gradually becoming more knowledgeable about the religions of the world. In it, he identified a motif in many of the world’s religions: the concept of a dying-and-rising god. He saw the pattern repeated in fertility rites connected to the annual renewal of nature from the ‘death’ of winter. Gods like Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and Attis, Dionysus - and Jesus - were examples of the same pattern.

The turning of the year, bringing new life, seems to be one of the most elemental forces in the universe. 

These days, you often hear a similar version of this account. Christianity, we are told, is another form of the same story found in so many religions. Christians just took over and erased the earlier annual celebrations with their own version. Christmas was just a replacement for Yule, the ancient pagan winter festival. Easter recalls Eostre, a spring goddess from western Germanic lands, whose festival took place in April, connected to the spring equinox.

Today, we have lambs, daffodils, young rabbits and eggs. All of them emerge at this time of year and are, for us, signs of the rebirth of nature. It always seems miraculous, that from the deadness of winter, life is reborn. No wonder the ancient pagans, and religions all over the world, for that matter, found ways to celebrate new life, and to endue this season with mythical wonder.

It was tempting for James Frazer to bracket Jesus as just another of these myths of the death and rebirth of nature, the dying and rising god. Bunnies, eggs, Osiris and Jesus were all symbols, pointing to the same thing – the annually repeated miracle of new life in the Spring.

Yet this misses the point of what the early Christians said about the Resurrection. St Paul wrote: “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” His point was precisely not that this event was another illustration of the annual renewal of nature, the cycle of death & rebirth. It was something new altogether. It was the once and for all breaking of the cycle, spelling the end of death and its repeated power over us. Christ breaks through the dark wall of death so that millions of other can follow him through the breach into the light beyond it.

It was not another annual temporary suspension of the inevitability of death, it was the breaking of the power of death once and for all, pointing to its final defeat one day.

The Resurrection of Jesus was the ‘firstfruits’, like the very first crocus of spring, the first apple on the tree. It was like a man breaking the four minute mile, a human being walking on the moon. A barrier had been broken that had always seemed impregnable and nothing would ever be the same again. It was the beginning of an entirely new creation that will one day come into fullness. It was not another annual temporary suspension of the inevitability of death, it was the breaking of the power of death once and for all, pointing to its final defeat one day. The endless cycle of rebirth is suddenly folded out into a linear trajectory, pointing forward to the day when all shall be made new.

CS Lewis attributed his conversion at least in part to a conversation with JRR Tolkien which persuaded him that the story of Jesus – his incarnation, descent into death and resurrection to new life - was not just another example of the ancient myth of the renewal of the world, but was the thing towards which all the myths pointed – it was, as he called it in a famous essay, ‘myth become fact’. It’s worth quoting him to get the point:

 

Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate.

Of course, there will be echoes of resurrection in the other faiths of the world. Of course there will be pagan figures who look like Christ. Rabbits and eggs are to be enjoyed not frowned on as they point to the one great miracle. They are to be welcomed, not disowned. Lewis’ point is that the Resurrection is both myth and fact – myth become fact. The Resurrection doesn’t just point to the rebirth of the world. It is the rebirth of the world.

Now of course, Christians can’t prove it. They can, to be sure, point to evidence that the tomb was empty, that the profound, world-shattering effect on the disciples and even the rest of human history can only be explained by something truly extraordinary. But you can’t prove an event that by its very nature breaks the normal cycle of cause and event, death and rebirth, proof and disproof. You can only believe it and then re-build your whole view of the world around it. As theologian Lesslie Newbigin put it:

 

“At the heart of the Christian message was a new fact: God had acted in a way that, if believed, must henceforth determine all our ways of thinking. It could not merely fit into existing ways of understanding the world without fundamentally changing them. It provided a new arche, a new starting point for all human understanding of the world. It could not form part of any worldview except one of which it was the basis.”

 

So, no, we can’t prove it. But we can at least do the early Christians the justice of acknowledging what they were saying and what they weren’t.

Because this is the central Christian claim – that the Resurrection is not a metaphor for something else – for the rebirth of nature in the spring, or for the fertility of nature. In fact, it’s the other way round. The rebirth of nature is a metaphor for the Resurrection. The Resurrection of Jesus is not an illustration of something else. It is the one thing of which everything else is an illustration. In the light of the Resurrection, the renewal of nature in spring is not yet another round in the endlessly repeated cycle of death, rebirth and death again, but it points forward to the day when “the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will all be changed.”

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