Brian Draper On The Wine

In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.’          1 Corinthians 11:25

When we drink to excess, we do so to forget. To drink the wine of Jesus’ blood, however, is to remember, vividly.

According to recent reports, there is a great discrepancy between the amount of alcohol sold in the UK and the amount we say we drink, when we’re asked in surveys.

The quantity sold is nearly double what we admit, as a nation, to drinking; experts believe the sales figures are more reliable than the story we’re telling the researchers, or the doctor, or – most worryingly – ourselves. Perhaps it’s not surprising. It’s always tempting to massage the figures – how much we eat/drink/smoke; how much we spend on x/y/z; how much time we spend with the kids/God/friends – to blur the picture into softer focus, and create for ourselves the illusion of who we think we should be. I know I do, anyway.

So it’s helpful to be positively disillusioned. In denial we get stuck trying to hide our weaknesses even from ourselves. But Lent, the period of the church’s calendar which ends this week, is about being stripped back – not so that we can judge ourselves, or analyse, or critique – but to become aware.

And when you know what you’re dealing with, you’re better placed to move beyond. Hence, the first step towards recovery at AA is to accept you’re an alcoholic. While James implores us to ‘confess your sins to each other’ (James 5:16).

The psalmist writes in that gloriously hopeful passage from Psalm 139:23-24 – ‘Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.’ The point is not to turn ourselves into ‘good Christians’ – which can be the best illusion of all. Instead, it is to start, as the psalmist does, with the truth: to ask the God-who-is-love to show us who he accepts us to be, and to lead us forward.

For such love does not seek first to change, but to embrace – at which point, the beloved is set free on the journey into the ‘way everlasting’; a journey along which, Paul says, we will be transformed, not into the unimaginatively poor illusions of who we think we should be, but into the likeness of Christ – and ‘with ever-increasing glory’ (2 Corinthians 3:18).