What is Christianity?

What is Christianity? Yes of course there is a religion called Christianity, with its own set of beliefs, a way of life, and the institutions that arise from those beliefs, but is that Christianity?

Let’s begin by saying what it is not. It is not a system of rewards and punishment. It is not about rewards for good behaviour and punishment for bad. That in a sense is the way the world or the culture thinks. Christianity is profoundly countercultural. Jesus told a story about two men going to pray. One of them thought of himself as better behaved than most people and certainly better than the other man standing in the house of prayer, a man he knew to be a great sinner. And it is not that the first man was not good, his way of life was indeed a good way of life. The other man, by comparison, knew that he was at the other end of the moral and religious spectrum. His life was ripe for negative criticism. He had many faults.

The prayer of the first man had been long, self congratulatory and judgmental about the other pointing out his faults.

The prayer of the second was short and simple;

‘‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

This is the man, according to Jesus, whom God declared righteous.

It would be easy to think of the first man as a self righteous hypocrite, someone pretending to be what he was not. He was not, he was everything he claimed to be and yet he was not perfect, witness his attitude to the other which showed that he overestimated his own righteousness.

By contrast the second man knew his failings, knew how he had fallen short. His cry is one for help, a cry to God to do for him what he could not do for himself, which is to put things right.

An admission that one needs help is the first step we take towards receiving that help.

The church is not a museum of the perfect; it is a therapeutic community, a place of healing in which the healer is Jesus the one who makes us whole.

I began by asking ‘What is Christianity’.

Perhaps the answer is that it is nothing more than Jesus Christ and the community that has gathered around him, for its own healing, and the healing of the world.