Pilgrim’s Progress starts without a Pilgrim. Or better, it starts with the making of a Pilgrim. Pilgrims are made, not born. Or better, they are born again. And the process of birth is often a traumatic one.
Bunyan begins with ‘a man’. He does not yet have a name; he is dressed in rags (a reference to Is.64:6); with his face already turned away from his own house, with a book in his hand and a burden on his back (Ps.38:4). He is weeping and trembling, and he feels an anxiety that he cannot keep to himself. He is fearful of the coming judgment. ‘I am informed that our city shall be burned with fire from heaven … in which [we] shall come to ruin’.
Although he meets with scepticism from his family and friends (who fear he is becoming mentally unstable!) his state of spiritual concern becomes agonising, and his fear and confusion are palpable in these opening paragraphs. Only Evangelist is able to point him in the right direction, as we’ll see tomorrow…
It’s unfamiliar territory, and likely not where we would start the story. It all feels, well, very 17th Century-ish. We tend to think of Christianity in much more postive and constructive terms. We don’t start our story in a state of fear about our spiritual condition and our destiny of destruction. It’s all very quaint, but probably best left in the 1600s!!?
Which just goes to show, we weren’t listening to C.S. Lewis yesterday. Might not this be one of our blind spots? …one of the ‘characteristic mistakes’ of the 21st Century that old books like this one might alert us to?
Bunyan has his finger on the pulse of reality. He self-conciously presents our spiritual biography as shaped by ‘the book’. Our experience of our story might not start here, but it has to pass this milestone. The Spirit of Christ has many routes to bring us to this place of despair, but we all must pass it. I’d venture to suggest that until we have experienced something like this ‘man’s’ sense of helplessness before the judgement of God, we haven’t really begun to experience the Gospel at its deepest level. Or put another way, until we have experienced the trauma of our sin, we will struggle to enjoy the depth of his grace. As we’ll see on Saturday (at Romansfest) the Christian Gospel as laid out by the Apostles in ‘the book’ begins with the hopelessness of humanity. It begins with the desperation we must feel as we recognise that God’s holiness will not compromise with sin, only destroy it. The City of Destruction is well named. The burden is real. And as far as Bunyan is concerned, until we have recognised it, we haven’t yet started our pilgrimage.
Questions to consider:
In another work (Law and Grace) Bunyan wrote: Sometimes I have been so laiden with my sins, that I could not tell where to rest, nor what to do, yes, at such times I thought it would have taken away my senses’.
Do you have anything in your own experience that resonates with this?
Do you think this is an essential part of Christian experience?
