Perhaps the most common summary of the Christian message, and certainly the one most popular with Evangelicals, (using my unscientific analysis of the placards at NFL games) is John 3:16. For someone questioning Christianity who needs to experience what it is to be Christian, I prefer Mark 12:30 and 31, which in summary is, Love God… and love one another. These two seemingly separate clauses are actually the same thing: Every one of us can experience a mystical union with the divine by loving other people without constraint. How do we love without constraint? By loving and forgiving those that don’t merit our love and forgiveness. That’s it. That’s the Christian message in a few sentences. That’s the theory underpinning Grace, which is God’s unmerited love for us, the divine union of God and Man in a person, which is the conception of Christ, and the core message running through all of the Gospels, exemplified by Christ’s own actions, and his penultimate act of dying brutally while asking for forgiveness for us his killers. And by following those two related commands, and the altruistic example set for us, we can conquer sin and death. I know, I know this sounds like a bunch of superstitious baloney (I thought that too), but I’ll touch on the full experience of life, which is the negation of death, in a different post. But the reward isn’t the aim of selfless love or altruism, is it. If I’m forgiving others, doing charity work, loving the diseased and the outcast, giving to the poor for a reward, then it’s not selfless. Conversely, if I’m doing it to avoid a punishment, it’s not selfless either. But as I said, more on that one later.

“What’s all the emphasis on forgiveness and sin though? That’s a real downer,” you say. “I don’t want to feel like I’m a bad person all the time.” Well, we know there’s suffering in life and that the great part of it is caused by others. Imagine a world where, no matter what, we take it upon ourselves to love the person that has inflicted suffering upon us. This doesn’t necessarily mean turning a blind eye to transgressions, because sometimes loving someone does mean pointing out the pain that’s been inflicted and holding them to account, but doing so without malice and without thought to what I need and to what I want. It means loving firstly our neighbour and secondly, ourselves. And imagine a life where we let go of our anger… all the time. Where we have the strength to always be magnanimous. Now flip that on its head. Where does it start? It starts with each of us. We need to relentlessly self-improve, to fearlessly seek that strength, and to recognise our own shortcomings when we haven’t. This is where my sin comes in, and my forgiveness is warranted. I’m not very good at loving God and I’ve put myself ahead of the people I love the most, let alone complete strangers. I am a wretched sinner. But that’s OK. Because I’m going to keep trying to be better. That’s why even though there’s an undercurrent of self-criticism, it’s a healthy self-criticism: I acknowledge I’m not perfect (i.e. a sinner), I’m going to work to be a better version of me (i.e. resist sin), and I’m going to love and forgive those that hurt me personally (i.e. sin against me), with the strength and experience that comes from my personal relationship with the Holy Spirit. The how-to on fostering this personal relationship is at the end of this apology.

And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these. — Mark 12:30-31