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move. And he did. Despite my feeble, conditional and ungracious overture, my life changed. Looking back, I am deeply grateful that I encountered Jesus, largely unencumbered by the stuff of our traditions, or by different interpretations and claims. I met the man and liked him very much. The freshness of this meeting has stayed with me through the years and has never wilted, notwithstanding my theological studies and teaching. For me Jesus has never been a dogma. Through his life he showed me what it means to be a human being. He left no written testament. He left a life, a life personified in his words: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should love one another” (Jn 13:34). Okure makes the point by quoting Ignatius of Antioch (born c.35-50–died d.107): “Whenever they tell me ‘It is not written in the book’, I tell them, ‘Oh yes, it is written, because our book is a person, Jesus of Nazareth.’ ”

      In this book I want to reflect on the surprises I have encountered along the way as I struggle to keep my eyes on the man who borrowed a donkey. I have been surprised by how this struggle, that has been one of “the felt life of the mind”, has morphed into blessings. I am surprised because the richness of blessing is always unexpected; I remain astonished at how often a sense of blessedness happens in the most unlikely, mundane, daily occurrences. The man on the borrowed donkey has, in some mysterious way, given me new spectacles through which to view life, spectacles that I have to clean regularly when they become fogged up with the junk of “self”, yet spectacles that I can no longer live without. In other words, I am finding grace that is both ordinary and extraordinary, but more about this later.

      * * *

      Giving Jesus “a try” was the beginning of a bouquet of surprises. To begin with I was filled with wonder at just how very human the man on the borrowed donkey was. He taught, healed and suffered as a human being. He got tired, exasperated, hungry and thirsty. He probably had times of feeling unwell. He shed tears and he could get angry. I saw that to deny his full humanity would be to deny what his life, his teaching, his compassion and courage offer us. It is difficult to imagine what an impression he made in an age when conformity was the test of truth and virtue. The great learning of the scribes did not impress him. He did not hesitate to question tradition, and no authority was too important to be contradicted. He did not act like a person who rebelled for rebellion’s sake; he appeared to bear no grudges against the world, but he was not afraid to lose his reputation and even his life. I saw that to deprive this man of his humanity was to deprive him of his greatness.

      What struck me next were the kind of people who claimed Jesus’ attention: the poor, the hungry, the miserable, the oppressed and marginalised, lepers, cripples, the blind and the sick, children and those possessed, social outcasts, tax collectors, disreputable people and women from both inside and outside Jewish society. This ragtag band of people seldom allowed him time to be alone. These were people with no rights, people who lived at the bottom of the social structure with no remedies for their needs. It struck me too that the people Jesus chose to be with were, in fact, like the majority of people in my country. He himself came from the artisan classes, although by birth and upbringing he was not one of the very poor. He may, however, have suffered a slight disadvantage of coming from Galilee, since the Jews in Jerusalem tended to look down on Galileans.

      When I realised that Jesus was a radical, I loved his freedom to break conventional barriers in his relationships with a variety of women. He was courageous and unbowed by the powerful religious and political forces that opposed him: he enjoyed being with all kinds of people, and combined remarkable humility with true authority. He spoke for himself, and emerges as a man of extraordinary independence and unparalleled authenticity – a man whose insight defies explanation. I was surprised and then hooked. This was someone I wanted to know – understand, fathom, plumb – more closely.

      This longing to “know” led me to become aware of the grace of blessing. As I pursued my quest, Jesus’ promise of abundant life (Jn 10:10) became more real. I found a new intensity to my life. I felt blessed. I am aware that claiming to feel blessed has an overtly pious ring. As I wrote of the blessings that follow in this book, I struggled to find similar words that sounded less “religious”, words like “happy”, “privileged”, “favoured”, and so on. However, in the end I decided that “blessed” actually says it all, but does need decoding. To explore blessing is in essence to find out what it means to be a fully free human being. Feeling blessed is not an uninterrupted good feeling. It is not financial security, nor physical well-being. It is not lasting pleasure, nor happiness, nor an unendingly cheerful mood. Being blessed is not some abstract faith concept of spiritual well-being. Being blessed does not mean that life becomes an easy ride. A sense of blessedness is challenged by the exigencies of life. Can one feel blessed if one is in a wheelchair, if poverty or oppression are daily realities, or if one has known depression? I cannot speak for others, though I do know human beings who have risen above pretty awful circumstances and still felt blessed.

      The wonder is that by being blessed we are offered the possibility of being like Jesus. I am struck by the well-known words of Irenaeus of Lyon (late second century) that “[t]he glory of God is the human person fully alive”. I have found that when I keep my eyes on the man who borrowed a donkey, I taste something of being “fully alive”.

      Being blessed is not an abstract theological concept. It is a practice, a way of living, not an esoteric truth. There is nothing majestic or mysterious about being blessed. It is about living in a way that makes the promise of abundant life possible, even in daunting circumstances. Being blessed is expressed practically in prosaic matters such as affirming another with a loving word, feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger and caring for those in need as Jesus told us to do (Mt 25:34-46). Terry Eagleton, the Marxist Christian critic writes:

      Eternity is not in a grain of sand but in a glass of water. The cosmos revolves on comforting the sick. When you act in this way, you are sharing in the love which built the stars. To live in this way is not just to have life, but to have it in abundance.

      As we look to the man on the borrowed donkey, hear and obey his words, our prayers and our deeds dissolve into one another and we know blessing. There is nothing glamorous about this rock-solid sense of blessing; “Just go and do as I tell you,” Jesus says. The more I try to respond to this, the more I find new purpose, and discover a point of reference by which to measure my actions and desires. Stirred, sometimes fulfilled, sometimes failing, yet always invited to a new way of being truly human, I have found ways to deal with my persistent question: “What makes life worth living?” In the life and teaching of Jesus I am learning about love and finding the courage to hope. In this I am blessed.

      * * *

      I can think of nothing more appealing that Jesus’ promise of “abundant life”. The phrase itself is fulsome, affirming and redolent with promise. My understanding of abundant life comes from my experience of a relationship with Jesus and is encapsulated in three words – compassion, love and hope. Jesus lived out compassion because he loved and his acts of love gave hope to those whose lives he touched. Jesus then is Jesus now, offering this triad of compassion, love and hope to us today. This is cause for wonder.

      Why did Jesus spend his earthly ministry with those not of his class, and become an outcast by choice? The answer in the gospels is quite simple: compassion. Matthew 14:14 tells how Jesus tried to be by himself, but the crowds stuck by him “[…] and he had compassion for them and cured their sick”. He did not begrudge their intrusion on his need to be alone. He was moved by compassion for the plight of the widow of Nain. “Do not weep,” he said to her (Lk 7:13) He had compassion (“moved with pity”) for a leper desperate for healing (Mk 1:41). The word “compassion” comes from two Latin words, “suffer” and “with”. To show compassion means to suffer with someone, to enter into a person’s situation and become involved in that person’s suffering. But this is almost too tame an understanding of the feeling that moved Jesus. The Greek word for compassion describes an emotion that comes from the intestines, the bowels, the entrails or the heart. It is a word that describes a welling up from the gut – a gut reaction. Expressions like “he felt sorry” or “he was moved with pity” do not capture the deep physical and emotional flavour of the Greek word. Only the deepest compassion

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