Columnists
Unholidays
Cole Moreton
Where would Jesus go? On holiday, I mean. Just to chill, kick back and relax. Is there any question more pressing for right-thinking people at this time of year?
Countless websites offer advice on what Our Lord would buy, wear, drive and eat. Some (more entertaining) ones ask questions like Who Would Jesus Punch? And What Would Jesus Smoke? (Kippers, surely.) But few seem willing to tackle the vital issue of Christly vacation.
It first occurred to me with burning intensity when I dropped a bag on to my foot, while unloading the bags in the driving rain and numbing cold of a family trip to Normandy. Verily, I thought (I'm paraphrasing) there must be a gospel way to justify supersizing it in the sun next year?
The good news, friends, is that there is. Let us first, though, dismiss the objection that it's foolish to compare the lifestyles of a thirtysomething, single, first century carpenter and - say - a fortyish, London-born father of four in 2008. Nonsense. Jesus never had a lovelorn heart, a manly uprising or even a snog, according to the sketchy gospel narrative. He never got married, gave birth or ate a Cheeseburger Deluxe. He never suffered getting old. And yet decent preachers remind us that the Lord understands the pain of all we go through, just because he was human too. Briefly. They can't all be in denial about the absurdies of that position. Can they?
You might think it's ridiculous to imagine Jesus in our own place and time, but people have always done it - look at all those blue-eyed blonde Christs in the stained glass windows. As a rabbi in his homeland, enjoying all the privileges of a Jewish Israeli, he'd have to wave his driver past the roadblocks and fly over the Palestinian camps on the way to Disneyland. Unimaginable. Luckily, as relatively blessed citizens of the Free World, we don't have to face these issues and can just go wherever we please.
Woolly pinko liberals will recommend an ethical tour company, ensuring local culture is respected and wealth is distributed fairly, but that still means having fun while the poor look on. No, the only way to have a full-on conscience-free Christian holiday somewhere exotic is to ignore the poverty altogether. You're having a break, for God's sake. You ignored the suffering on television - why worry when it's beyond the armed guards at a hotel compound?
How to get there though? The new orthodoxy suggests our greatest sin is to harm the planet, which means no flights. And don't think of carbon offsetting: Our Lord would surely see that for the miserable exercise in guilt avoidance that it is. But to ground us all is to ignore the clear evidence of the Bible. It's right there in Acts: ascension. Jesus flew! If it's good enough for him, it will do for us. Amen?
Some people will say that lavish holidays are an invention of the modern age, only possible or necessary after the Industrial Revolution. That's when we stopped working to the rhythms of the days and the seasons, with their natural periods of hard work and rest, and needed to escape the man-made oppression of the factories. Spoilsports say that when Jesus needed a break he went away to quiet places, to escape the demands of the crowd. The equivalents for us might be the TV, the email, the phone, the bills.
So he took time to sit and think and breathe and be still and human and contemplate the divine, alone or with friends. Okay. But those kinds of holidays are ones in which we come face to face with who we really are. A wife realises her husband is a boor. A son realises his Dad is a tyrant. A glutton surfaces from the buffet to realise how much he has, compared to others, and how little he can really afford it. Or is that too confessional?
Forced into such self-examination, you'd agree with George Bernard Shaw that a perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell. Who wants to stop, smell the flowers and be themselves? It hurts. Jesus wouldn't want us to suffer pain, would he? Not when we can play hard, eat well, drink like fish and fly home, leaving the mess for someone else to clear up. Hallelujah! Get me Virgin Atlantic!
Paul Vallely is ... on holiday.
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