麻豆约拍

From Rev鈥檇 Richard Coles, cleric and broadcaster:

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Jesus wept鈥� 听not a Vicar taking the Lord鈥檚 name in vain, but a quote, the shortest verse in the Bible: John chapter eleven, verse thirty-five.

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What can be said about two little words? Quite a lot, if you look it up, but I鈥檒l spare you the church history lesson.

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Of course, it鈥檚 content, not length, that determines the importance of what we say. The Gettysburg Address, perhaps the most enduring thing ever said by an American President (apart from 鈥淚 am not a crook鈥�), is only 272 words long, but it changed the world.

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The Bible, at 750,000 words, gives us plenty to be getting on with; but a passage from it that speaks to us as directly and as urgently as the Gettysburg Address is even shorter, running to only 170 words. It comes at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus speaks to his troops, fighting the war for souls. Blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek, blessed are the peacemakers, he insists, in spite of powerful evidence to the contrary.

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The Sermon on the Mount, any general will tell you, is rubbish as military strategy; and yet these words have resonated long through history 鈥� there鈥檚 something about them we want to preserve, and have done for two thousand years.

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Why? Could it be that in spite of everything, a part of us knows that to be generous when the world is mean, to yield when you know you could win, to look a chump rather than a champ, might point to a whole new way of living?

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Being good, for most of us, is not something we test on a battlefield, but on our commute, at the supermarket, over the garden fence. And if we let that driver out, bite our lip, give up our seat, we might just find ourselves living that new life.