Day 6 of the manse tidy up finally saw the study tidy. Three black bags of rubbish, five bags of paper recycling and two bags of confidential waste all made there way out into the hall, and some is already at the tip.

The tidying has allowed time for thinking, and allowed me to return in my thoughts to a book that I had been reading through Lent an Easter and then almost to Pentecost. It has taken me a while to process what I really thought about the book, and has interested me how disturbed I have felt by it.

At Christmas I was given “The Gospel according to Jesus Christ” by Jose Saramago. It’s a story that attempts to fill in some of the gaps that don’t seem important in the Gospel. So the intervening years between Jesus’s teenage conversations in the temple and his baptism by John in his late 20s/early 30s are filled in. His father Joseph dies a gruesome death. Jesus’s time in the wilderness is spent with “Pastor” who later turns out to be the devil. Jesus’s relationship with Mary Magdalene was very definitely sexual, and she is cast as an older woman of experience.

In essence none of these details were offensive. A peruse of books on lost Scriptures would suggest that there was a different relationship between Jesus and Mary than traditional Christianity encounters in the Gospels of what we read. The history of the time would suggest that men may well have met gruesome deaths. In some ways what the story seems to demonstrate is the authors ability to have found some of the details that skirt the written texts we are used to encountering and expound them.

For me, it was the kind of book where you had to read a few pages and then put it down and think, try and work through what made you uncomfortable. Lying in those discomforts are the notion that “Pastor” turned out to be the devil, and that the devil/ satanic forces/ evil cannot exist without a knowledge of God/good.

Once I can read more than an OK magazine again I think there is a good opportunity to do some real exploration of the concept of good without evil. Are good and evil contrasts like light and dark that can only be explored in relationship? Or can we acknowledge them in isolation?

As a parent I know that they are relational as how else can a child be allowed to explore one concept if they do not know they other. Yet within my acknowledgement of God, I find that notion of a relationship with evil/bad/ devil very difficult.

I find it fascinating that this book has bothered me so much. Having read “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ” and been able to view it as a good exploration of the divinity and humanity of Christ, it is odd not to be able just to see Saramago’s book as just another story.

So now back to the packing to do more pondering. I’ve made it out of the study at last and completed a child’s bedroom. Hopefully all the important papers are now filed. Child number one’s room is in the hands of his father, while we’re part way through the dining room and family room. So that leaves a spare room (more confidential papers and books to sort through although fortunately 14 years of worship is already filed) and the real front room.