Well, if Jesus was really God, he wasn’t exactly going to stay dead, was he? If restoring, healing, renewing and, well, conquering death, is what God most enjoys doing, raising Jesus from the dead also makes perfect sense.

But how did it happen? How can God and Jesus be the same and yet distinct enough for one to raise the other from the dead? Did Jesus fold the grave clothes or get an angel housekeeper to do it for him? And most importantly of all, was it really sunny on the day it all happened?

We don’t know any of this. The thing is, if God was small enough for his created human beings to fully get their heads around, he wouldn’t be God at all. All we can do is trust him.

Even when it’s raining.

Holy Saturday. Possibly the weirdest day in the church calendar.

It’s not Good Friday, with its gruesome horror, justice and politics, earthquakes and thunderstorms, powerful love and ultimate sacrifice: the world-shattering story of God, as an innocent man, dying for the sins of his people so they could have new life.

But it isn’t Easter either. That begins tomorrow, and I won’t spoil the surprise just yet.

Holy Saturday is the day in between. A day when not a lot happened. A day of getting on with life, amid confusion and bewilderment and questions. A day when Jesus was just dead. A day when God was just silent. A day when evil seemed to have won, when hope seemed lost, and when no one could quite see what God was doing in it all.

A day, in short, like many days we experience now.

If you’ve ever seen a tragedy unfold but felt powerless to do anything about it, and a little guilty about carrying on with life afterwards, Holy Saturday is for you.

If you’ve prayed and prayed for someone and they still fell ill or died, and you wonder whether God was listening at all, Holy Saturday is for you.

If you look at the state of the world and find it hard to believe there really is a God of love, Holy Saturday is for you.

If your journey of faith is sometimes painful, frustrating, unclear or even mundane, and seems to continue by sheer determination alone, Holy Saturday is for you.

Holy Saturday is a day when God would like to put his arms around you and say, “Even though you can’t understand yet why all this is going on, trust me: I will always love you.”

What? I’m a day late? Really? Not according to the official Church calendar, I’m not. Christmas is 12 days long, and ends when Epiphany begins on 6 January. The whole idea of festivals being barely a day in length is really quite a modern one, birthed, no doubt, of our incessant drive to speed up our lives and cram more in. In most of history up to Jesus’ day and beyond, guests would rarely come round for just one meal, weddings would last a week or more and if they had celebrated Christmas (which they didn’t until Constantine in AD 300 of course) they would certainly not have confined it to a frantic morning of present-opening and a brief church service. Even if it is preceded by the most drawn-out shopping and partying period ever in the name of ‘preparation’!

I for one love the idea, once the frantic present buying part is over, of having a relaxed 12-day period of thanksgiving of one of the most significant events in history. After all, Christmas is about when God joined us, in arguably the biggest act of love and vulnerability we have ever witnessed. I’m going to keep celebrating and enjoying it until early January at least, and frankly even after that it’s worth remembering from time to time.

Happy Christmas, one and all!

So, I humbly suggest, would St. Paul’s.

Can they not see how ridiculous it is to close their doors when the protesters are hardly blocking the entrance? Can they really picture a Jesus who would take legal action to forcibly remove people because they were a bit unsightly or inconvenient? Can they not see how painfully ironic it is to trumpet their self-inflicted losses of £20,000 a day at the hands of a group whose very aim it is to expose that sort of capitalist mentality? Have they not noticed that this protest on their doorstep is an opportunity to engage with exactly the sort of people the Church should be upholding, by talking with them, working with them, helping to make their voice more effective?

Quite. But St. Paul’s are not the only ones with their eyes shut. Does this tent festival on the pavement really think that big business will change its ways because a group of people held up placards for a few weeks outside a church? That’s not the way business leaders think. It’s not the language they understand. The Fairtrade movement became massive and mainstream not because it appealed to managers’ guilty consciences, but because it formed and presented them with a solid business case for doing the right thing. People walked into boardrooms across the country with suits on, armed with facts, figures and strategies to prove that treating workers well would ultimately benefit business. Fairtrade spoke the CEOs’ language, and so it was heard. Take another example: the climate change movement who have been unsuccessfully hugging trees for decades finally gained ground in the last 10 years or so by showing how our actions really are affecting us all — and when they started speaking our language, we started to listen.

Jesus did the same thing with the religious leaders of his day when he saw how their laws were oppressing people instead of helping them worship God. He taught in their synagogues and used their own debating style. He told stories in terms both the people and the leaders could instantly relate to. He didn’t just tell them they were wrong; he spelled out the alternative, using both powerful stories and his own life to prove that it really worked, to show that it was a truer way to live and worship than their legalism. They didn’t like what he said, but at least they got it.

If we believe capitalism is doomed, we need to build and present a case for why it will fail, what the credible alternative is, and why it is in all our interests to change. We need to do that in the language of business, and the language of politicians. Only then do we stand a chance of succeeding.

Facebook, for the uninitiated, is a free social networking service. Users flocked to it as it became apparent just how good it was at connecting friends, how easy it was to share photos, how well presented the interface was compared to such awful rivals as MySpace, and how unintrusively and neatly advertising was inserted without detracting from the experience.

Then the creators of Facebook made a big mistake. They decided that the site shouldn’t just stay the same for ten years, but should actually improve. First they introduced the News Feed, which caused a storm of protest because it brought together already-shared content in a convenient way, which of course was a silly idea. Next came the ability to post photos as well as just text, and then the “Like” button, which everybody still hates to this day, the “Comment” feature, which frankly no one uses, and a move up to a wider layout. Why on earth they bothered to expand from the old 640-pixel width is beyond me, since most people today still use tiny goldfish-bowl-shaped monitors anyway. And then they had the gall to put photos of users on those users’ own profile pages. Each of these changes created entire protest movements with almost as much passion as the opposition to the Iraq war.

Latest in this flurry of outrageous improvements, of course, is the News Feed, where you now have more control than ever over what you want to see and what you don’t, where Facebook now learns from the user over time what they consider important, and where at last you can actually share different levels of things with different types of friend.

Stupid, isn’t it? Even more ridiculous is the way Facebook had the cheek to actually pop up little boxes explaining each change, with the reasoning behind it and help to use it, the first time the user encountered it. Disgusting.

Bring back the Facebook of 2004. We all liked it back then. If they are not careful, I will take my hard-earned cash elsewhere. Oh, wait.

Ah, nostalgia. It’s not what it used to be.

I have heard that Greenbelt is a bit like Reading, only Christian. It’s a bit like New Wine only liberal and with a different sort of hand-waving. It’s a bit like Spring Harvest but without chalets. It’s not very much like any of these things. Or maybe it is. Oh yes, and there is apparently tea. In tents. And cartoonists (at least one I know). I think there will be loud music and hilarious comedy and thoughtful discussion sessions. I know there will be some big names like Milton Jones there who will probably make me laugh (if I can get in the queue early enough). And Rob Bell, recently denounced heretic for his book Love Wins, who actually has something very important to say and will probably make me think. (I’m taking the book with me for intellectual ammunition — and I suppose since it’s hardback it could come in useful as physical ammunition in the vanishingly unlikely event that Rob Bell actually deserves stoning.)

But enough from me. It’s late (ish), and I have a train to catch at not long after 6.00 am tomorrow. I had better retire.

See you at Greenbelt, if you’re one of those thousands of people. If you are not, see you when I see you. If, indeed, I do.

Burglars’ note: I live in a shared house, so this announcement of my imminent departure doesn’t mean it’s any more available for looting than before. Many apologies if I got your hopes up.

Few could fault the rigour and breadth of the testing. But although the structural integrity of the Waitrose custard cream would probably make it ideal for the construction on the left of this diagram, what characteristic would lead to the “sheer criminality” we are clearly witnessing on the right, where even a Victoria sponge, older than the custard cream itself, and having survived two world wars, is wantonly de-creamed and set alight?

Have these rebel creams been abandoned by the establishment, forced into poverty and ignored by those in power for too long? Or are they just evil biscuits, thugs created as a result of poor discipline, bad parenting and their own wilful disobedience? Or is it a complex mix of both, and other factors as well?

All right, my biscuit allegory is crumbling a bit at this point.

Anyway, that’s not what we really care about, is it? Let’s be honest: when we’re busy denouncing the rioters in London, Manchester, Liverpool et al as “scum”, what we’re really doing is saying “we’re not like them”. We have realised pretty quickly that we don’t want people thinking we would ever steal (except downloaded music of course) or vandalise property (except homes destroyed by natural disasters caused indirectly by our own carbon emissions, naturally) or destroy livelihoods (except by the extortion, slave labour and corporate bludgeoning of communities that we are quite happy to support in our supermarkets, you understand). Hmm, I’m a bit worried actually at what could come out if God really started revealing the snowball effect of my actions. I could find myself guilty of some far bigger things than I will ever know.

I wrote on Facebook the other day that these rioters don’t make me ashamed of my country. They don’t. What they have done is wrong, plain and simple. There’s no denying that. But they are living, conscious human beings just like I am, and they remind me of something. That I do wrong too. I’m not separate from them, any more than I am somehow morally superior to “the bankers” or “the expenses-fiddling MPs”.

When Jesus was on earth he went around telling prostitutes and extortionists that their sins were forgiven, and reserving his harshest warnings for the religious leaders who went about labelling and condemning people. That’s not because he disagrees with justice. Far from it. It’s because if we really meted out proper justice with absolute fairness on everyone, we’d all be dead by now.

I suppose our society would break down if we didn’t draw the line somewhere and convict people of what we have agreed is wrong. But how do we choose who to punish and how, when we are all guilty of something? That’s a tricky one. I’m not sure of the answer. The Bible tells us to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). That’s a delicate balancing act, isn’t it? Justice, yes — but with generous helpings of mercy, and humility. If we start self-righteously baying for blood, we’ll find our calls echoing right back at us.

If I was a rioter in court now, I’d expect to be punished, but I guess I’d be hoping for compassion and understanding along with it — a sense that even though my actions were wrong, I was still a valued human being. Hoping, essentially, for a sort of forgiveness. Are we as a nation prepared to offer mercy and practice humility as well as just dispensing justice? I hope so!

Either you are a person of influence among those around you, someone who has both a deep and profound sense of the value and importance of the traditions of the years, and the boldness and courage to challenge entrenched behaviour and societal norms, gently leading others to an understanding of what is truer, richer and more satisfying than what they already know for themselves…

… or you are a bishop. Which of course is the same thing, only different.

[Note: Names have been chosen at random for this cartoon.]

One of the first things any virgin Facebooker has to do is add a beautiful picture of themselves to their profile page. It’s an easy first step. Any picture will do, really, as long as it helps potential friends to find you on the site, and old friends to see what you look like these days.

New girlfriend? Go on, put one of the two of you up so we can all see her.

Kid’s birthday? All right, one of you in a silly hat.

Turned into a French monument, mutated into a cat, or lost thirty years of age in a freak accident with Olay? Put a picture of that up too — now there is a supernatural marvel that we just have to see!

Of course, if he had lost the final, the world number 1 would have won Wimbledon. It’s a win-win for the papers, but what about me? I love to cheer on an underdog, and this match had no underdog. Yeah, they played good tennis, but when I watch sport, I don’t watch it in order to get a masterclass in playing that sport — I watch it in the hope of seeing something interesting happen. When I watch F1 I want to see a crash. When I watch the defending champions play their opening World Cup match I want to see them go out without a goal (like France did in 2002 to much merriment). I like to see unexpected people win, and the normal order of things turned on its head.

So I don’t think I’ll be talking about this final much. Maybe next year’s will be exciting enough to go and watch in glorious 3D. Andy Murray, I’m looking at you!