Bigger on the Inside - Parish Magazine December 2013
When I was a small child I can remember watching my first episode of Dr Who and hiding from the daleks. Since it was re-launched in 2005 it has been one of those programmes that we have all enjoyed as a family. So on Saturday night we all sat down together (minus our eldest who is away at university) to enjoy the 50th anniversary episode. It was classic Dr Who fun, with plenty of running away from aliens and charging in to save the day. If you are not a ‘Who’ fan, then looking in from the outside it might just seem like a load of rubbish, with cheap special effects and a script that is full of nonsense words and jargon (dimensional stabiliser, vector tracker, vortex loop, synchronic feedback, etc), but it is bigger on the inside. Don’t let the jargon mislead you, on the inside it is a classic story of good versus evil, of standing up for what is right, of courage and ingenuity overcoming impossible odds, and it is fun.
Jargon in any area of life creates a barrier to understanding and I know I tend to zone out when confronted by jargon that I don’t understand. Recently I was in a School Governors meeting at Kineton Primary School and realised that I had done just that. The popular technique I’ve learned to employ in these situations is to smile, nod and hope that all will become clear later. However, on this occasion I asked for it to be explained and, once I had understood, quickly found myself using the same jargon that had been Greek to me just a few minutes earlier.
Jargon can be defined as ‘the specialised or technical words or phrases of an occupational or social group’ and it pervades a wide rage human activity, including sport, politics, entertainment, science, military, education and (of course) religion. It provides verbal or written shorthand that can simplify communication between those that understand the terminology.
However, it does not always simplify things. Jargon can make it very difficult for someone outside of a group to understand what is being said. It can also cause confusion within the group if they have different understandings of the meaning of the terminology. This was certainly true of my experience in industry where those misunderstandings within teams were sometimes funny and sometimes expensive. It is also very true in my own experience of Christianity.
At different times in my life I have been an atheist and then an agnostic. From the perspective I had then, the many ‘jargon’ words that abound in the Bible and in the services of the Church of England (I went occasionally to keep my wife happy) were confusing (salvation, justification, ‘begotten not made’, etc.) When I heard them I would zone out as outlined above and very often start thinking about what we were going to have for lunch.
When I finally took the time to properly explore the Christian faith, prod and poke it to try to find fault and ask questions about the jargon then it became a lot clearer and it began to make sense. From the outside it seemed like nonsense and blind faith, but I found it stood up to investigation and was a lot bigger on the inside. From the outside the nativity is a just an implausible story about a young unmarried woman giving birth in difficult circumstances in an occupied country of the Middle East. From the inside it is the true story of God being born on earth as a human being; Jesus. The beginning of a story, where against impossible odds, good triumphs over evil; where Jesus, and the movement he starts, dramatically changes the world in which we live.
From the outside 2014 may seem like just another year approaching, but from the inside, as we all continue to learn, grow and understand more about life, I hope it will be a great year full of promise and new discoveries.
Rev Barry Jackson