Taste and See . . .

When I first saw a Supermarket’s recent Easter advert with the strap line “what’s so great about Easter?” I confess that my first, knee-jerk (accent on the jerk) response was to think “I’ll tell you what’s so great about Easter, and its not cream eggs and chocolate bunnies - it’s Jesus!”

But then I began to engage brain, and 2 fairly obvious things occurred to me; firstly, why would the average person brought up in this post-Christian secular Western world be expected to know, or care, about the centrality of Jesus, not just to the Easter story, but to the potential of our lives and of the society in which we live? Secondly, perhaps people might be willing to learn more about Jesus if I and the rest of us who profess to follow him represented him in a way that reflected more adequately just how beautiful, captivating, loving and appealing he is.

In Jesus’ society, the go-to treat was honey. The Jewish New Year festival of Rosh Hashanah is still celebrated by drinking wine and eating apples dipped in honey. When Jesus was growing up the first day of Torah school was the day when each child was given a slate tablet on which they would record the words of the Hebrew Bible, but before they wrote a word on it the teacher would smother it with honey. As the children wrote the word of God on their slates they got honey all over their fingers and then, of course, they had to lick them off. The message was clear - the experience of God is sweeter than honey.

When I was eight years old I was dragged out of church by my ear for daring to lift my skirt to clean my glasses . . . God didn’t taste so sweet that day.

When I first began my journey of faith, after a tumultuous time during which amongst other things we had gone bankrupt and had lost everything including our home, I was told by members of my new church that I must praise God that we had gone bankrupt, as that was why we had come to know God. . . . God didn’t taste so sweet that day.

When years later I felt a deep prompting and longing to study at theological college, a course of action supported by others whom I loved and trusted, and the church where I had served and worshipped for more than ten years refused to support me in any way because I was a woman daring to defy their understanding of Biblical truth and step into a man’s world . . . God didn’t taste so sweet that day.

When I was at a training college after five years of full-time study and a call to pastoral ministry, and a fellow pastoral student shoved a Bible under my nose during a college debate and said he wouldn’t expect me, as a woman, to understand what was written in it . . . God didn’t taste so sweet that day.

There are many other examples of days like that, but alongside those are so many more days of experiencing love and laughter, forgiveness and friendship, the grace and wisdom of family and friends, days when God tastes oh so sweet; and then, when I think about it, there have equally been way too many days when my own thoughtless, insensitive, blinkered, crass attitudes towards others have hurt and left a sour taste in their mouths rather than helped them to experience the sweetness of God.

Maybe the clue to changing my own and other peoples’ understanding of God, from a tyrannical joy-sucking bully to the loving, generous, joyous, life-giving creator and sustainer of life that in my head I know he is, is to continually experience him - to take the time each day to TASTE and see that the Lord is good.

Reading Scripture is a part of that I know, but I also know that one can know the Bible from cover to cover and still be insensitive and mean-spirited; there is a big difference between head knowledge and what Dallas Willard beautifully describes as experience-based confidence in God’s loving care. Head knowledge too often puffs up but fails to transform, but if I look for him, not just in the words of Scripture, but in every moment, every sight of the wonder and beauty of creation, every good relationship, every act of compassion and generosity, I will be constantly changed by his love. As the Message version of Psalm 34:8 says “Open your mouth and taste, open your eyes and see - how good God is”.

Dallas Willard also writes “Jesus himself was, and is a joyous, creative person. He does not allow us to continue to think of our Father who fills and overflows space as a morose and miserable monarch, a frustrated and petty parent, or a policeman on the prowl"(Divine Conspiracy P.74)

Sadly so often the first experience we have when visiting church, of whatever denomination or grouping, is that we leave, not savouring the sweetness of God but rather trying to digest a smorgasbord of opinions, religious platitudes, judgemental attitudes, triumphalism, and sin-management programmes. To be harangued about the importance of right belief and right behaviour - which comes across as ‘Believe as I believe, live as I live, or you are heading for destruction’, is not a very appetising invitation.

Knowing Jesus doesn’t happen with one decision to give my life to him so that I ensure I make the cut when I die. Thomas Binney knew that, way back in 1869 when he wrote “There are some things, especially in the depths of the religious life, which can only be understood by being experienced, and which even then are incapable of being adequately embodied in words. O taste and see that the Lord is good”.

Peter Rollins wrote in his book 'How (Not) to speak of God', “one does not learn to be a Christian, but rather one engages in a process of becoming one” (p.73). When we share with others our experience of that process, “the goal is not that some people ‘out there’ are brought closer to God . . . but rather that we are all brought closer to God” ( p.54).

I need to take time to experience God’s goodness for myself . . .

I love the simplicity of David’s invitation - ‘just taste God and see what you think’. He was speaking from his recent personal experience of God’s goodness in rescuing him from certain death at the hands of Saul and his men, and describes himself as “this poor man” who “called, and the Lord heard him”. He was well aware of his own failings - at times devious, calculating, adulterous, murderous, arrogant . . . he knew God’s protection and deliverance wasn’t something he’d earned, or a consequence of his special anointing by God, but purely out of the goodness of God’s heart. Maybe that is why David is described in Scripture, despite his many failings, as a man after God’s own heart . . . there is hope for us all!

Taste and see that the Lord is good!

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