Ghost Train
Written by: Bishop Ken Clarke
[Viewings: 137]
When the Ghost Train broke down, Jesus could help me. I was sure of that. I will never forget my childhood experience of the Ghost Train breaking down in the darkness in Barry’s Amusement Park, in Portrush, on the north Antrim coast. From waves of fear and from the very depth of my heart I cried out for Divine help with utter sincerity and compelling urgency. One of the first lessons I had learned about Jesus was that he helps us and that he is with us wherever we are. Such convictions did not flow from extensive reading of the Bible because I was too young to read. They flowed from the teaching of my parents. The first song I ever remember singing was one they had taught me. Unknown to me I had been learning theology from hymns and in this situation of stress and distress it rapidly became applied theology!
‘Jesus loves me this I know. For the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong. They are weak but he is strong. Yes Jesus loves me …’
A child’s mind can understand this and some of the greatest minds in the world are humbled by this same simple truth. He loves us, and he helps us because he loves us.
The Jesus I still know 50 years later is the same Jesus I knew then. Of course I no longer visualize him in long pristine white robes, immaculate flowing hair and surrounded by perfectly behaved children as he was in my first Children’s Book of Bible Stories. But I now have a lifelong experience of his unique kind of love. The Jesus who walked on earth and the Jesus I know, is a Jesus whose love is a selfless muscular love. His love is not a wishy-washy, wimpish kind of love. His love is surprising in its expression, disturbing in its extent and profoundly overwhelming in my personal experience and the experience of millions of others across the nations and generations.
The Jesus I know is a trailblazer, courageous in his actions, astonishing in his attitudes, a breaker of moulds but always in line with his Father’s will. He profoundly disturbs religious people. He constantly engages with needy people. He, a Jew, spoke with a Samaritan woman. When I was younger I had no idea of the revolutionary nature of this unusual encounter. In this meeting with the Samaritan woman he was crossing national, cultural, social and religious boundaries. He was walking where the strict religious Jews would not walk. He was building friendship where others would not. St. John wrote that Jesus was, ‘… full of grace and truth.’ Amazing, overflowing and never ending grace, which is loving, and showing favour to those who do not deserve to be loved, marked his whole life. If we need anything in the twenty-first century, we need to discover the Jesus of the Gospels who reached out to all in his society and who forgave even his enemies. From the cross he prayed, ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’ This is the Jesus who loved ‘the other side,’ the despised, the outcast, the misunderstood, the last, the least and the lost. This is the Jesus I am getting to know – and he disturbs me.
He challenges my prejudices. He calls me to be radical. He confronts my hypocrisy. He sees my secret struggles. He is hurt by my sin. Yet I still see the moisture of grace in his eyes and I still know the depth of his mercy in my heart. I have said sorry many times for my rebellion and folly. I recognise the reality of his forgiveness in my life. I hear him whisper in my ear, ‘Your sins are forgiven. Go and sin no more.’ They are, but I don’t. The Jesus I have come to know forgives and forgives and forgives again. Like the apostle Paul, I cannot get over the fact that he loves me and gave himself for me. It is an incredible thought but such a releasing truth. I know that the truth, his truth, sets people free.
To some this may seem strange, but the Jesus I know has enabled me to know a sense of rest and an ongoing restlessness. I have known peace but I can never settle. He constantly calls me to new adventures in my mind and life. He stretches me, and repeatedly in my inner being I hear his words, ‘Follow me.’ Following means change. Obedience is sometimes painful. He takes me where I am not sure I want to go. He leads me in the known and in the unknown. Yet the alternative is to miss out on what it means to be a disciple. In bereavement, disappointment and in those personal and family pains, which you are not sure you want anyone else to know about, I have known Jesus Christ. He is the Jesus of the cross and of suffering. He is the Jesus of resurrection and hope. The two are inseparable. The longer I know him the more convinced I am that his call to follow him is a call to suffering and glory. Heaven will be all glory. But that is yet to be.
The Jesus I know is the Jesus who knows me. I’m back where I started. I am still overwhelmed by his love as I travel on a different train, the train of mid-life. For this I have Jesus! The words of the following hymn have meant much to me in recent years;
For the joys and for the sorrows, the best and worst of times For this moment for tomorrow, for what lies behind. Fears that crowd around me, for the failure of my plans For the dreams of all I hope to be, the truth of what I am. For this I have Jesus.
For the tears that flow in secret, in the broken times For the moments of elation or the troubled mind. For all the disappointments, the sting of old regrets All my prayers and longings that seem unanswered yet. For this I have Jesus.
THE JESUS I KNOW by Bishop Ken Clarke, Southern Ireland
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