Jesus didn’t come to show us the way to heaven; he came to bring heaven down to earth! That’s what he teaches us to pray: “May your will be done here on earth in exactly the same way as it is in heaven!” Following Jesus – discipleship – means living differently to make this world more and more “heavenly”. It’s what Jesus called “the Kingdom of God”. It meant prioritising the needs of the poorest, the religious outcasts and those on the margins. It also mean challenging the rich and powerful – the people who get to say how our world works and make sure it benefits them. That was what got Jesus crucified. It’s also how he expects us to live and why he says “The only way you can become my disciple is to put aside your own interests and priorities, take up your cross, and follow me!”

The Holy Spirit is God’s very Life and Presence. If Jesus is God’s bodily presence in the world, the Holy Spirit is God’s means of being present in non-bodily form. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Holy Spirt is supremely the inspirer of the prophets: when the priests fail to call out to the king, the rich and the powerful for corruption and injustice (usually because they are collaborating in order to get rich themselves, or to avoid angering the king), the Spirit calls and inspires to say, “Thus says the Lord…” At Jesus’ baptism, the Holy Spirit comes upon him and empowers him in his ministry and mission of healing, exorcising evil spirits and teaching. When Jesus is murdered on the cross, it is God who raises Jesus from the dead. And at Pentecost, 40 days later, the Holy Spirit descends on and remains with the disciples just as she did on Jesus. The Holy Spirit fills us with the Life of God and empowers us to minister, preach and share in God’s missiom of transforming the world into the Kingdom of God.

The church is a community of disciples of Jesus who follow in order to “see him more clearly, love him more dearly and follow him more nearly”. There are lots of ways of defining the church, but the way that Jesus defined it was by how faithfully and obediently we live, behave and act like him. Paul talks about the church as the Body of Christ – the walking presence of Jesus among us today. The church is most faithfully the church when it is most recognisably like Jesus. That’s challenging: it means that it is possible to be the church and yet behave in radically unchristlike ways – to be part of that from which the world needs saving, rather than a living example of what the Kingdom of God will be like. We are most recognisably like Jesus as we grow more and more like him and engage with him in his mission of transforming this world into the Kingdom of God.

Jesus was Jewish. He saw his own ministry as a prophetic renewal movement – he didn’t come to replace Judaism by starting a new religion (Christianity). He didn’t come to found a new religious institution (the Church). Nor did he come to teach us the “right things to believe”. He didn’t come to make us religious, or to teach us how to make sure we go to heaven when we die. He came to save us by transforming this world into the Kingdom of God – the place it will be when God is loved, worshipped and obeyed. What is distinctive about Jesus in relation to the Judaism of his day is the way he interprets what it means to “love God with heart, soul, mind and strength and love our neighbour as we do ourselves”. For Jesus, truly loving God (whom he called “Daddy” – a shockingly intimate term) meant seeing our neighbour as though we were looking in a mirror or at our own families. Very particularly, it meant prioritising the people who were always ignored, used and missed oit on any good thing going: the poorest, most marginalised people of his day. When God was in charge, he said, those were the people who would go to the front of the queue. Discipleship is the process of being formed to become more and more like Jesus in his relationship to God and the rest of creation. And mission means changing the way the world works: serving people by responding to their needs and difficulties; confronting injustice, oppression, absue of social, religious, political, economic and military power; inviting people to commit themselves to following Jesus and discovering the very Life of God; and all of this in the face of the climate catastrophe that threatens to annihilate our existence.