For Gregory, desire never leaves us, simply because there cannot be anything that finally satisfies us. We are so constituted that we are always in need of fulfilment, never attaining it in the sense of possessing what we most deeply need. If we are growing in spiritual maturity and discernment, what we desire is always to go on growing and to go on desiring. The mistake is to want to stop wanting – to desire to be satisfied so that I shall not have to desire any more, because I now have what before I lacked. I identify something, some object, which I believe will bring me a sense of greater completion: this will bring the fulfilment I lack, and when I have acquired it or mastered it, I don’t need any longer to orient myself towards it.

“Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

It was a long time before anyone spoke.

Out of the corner of his eye Phouchg could see the sea of tense expectant faces down in the square outside.

"We're going to get lynched aren't we?" he whispered.

"It was a tough assignment," said Deep Thought mildly.

"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"

if you asked most evangelical protestant christians the question, “what is the gospel?”, you’d hear something like “god loves the world, so he sent us his son jesus to save us. jesus did this by dying on the cross to atone for our sins. god raised him from the dead three days later to vindicate his victory over sin & death. if we believe these things, and repent from our sins, we will be saved, and therefore be rescued from an eternity in hell, and instead go to heaven when we die”. there’d be a few variations in there, but that would be the average understanding of the gospel.

in this model, salvation happens through believing a set of propositions. there is a certain degree of anxiety most christians have around making sure we have the right set of propositions to believe, so we don’t miss out. and in my experience most people hold a somewhat nervous confidence in these propositions because they’re not sure they actually understand what these propositions mean for real. and then it's even more complex to "share the gospel" because ... well, i think you know.

but when we turn to the gospels themselves, we do not find anything like that.

the crucial bundle of questions around our faith has always been “who is this jesus? what’s he all about? and what has that got to do with the complex realities of my life? of our lives together?” … and the entire christian life is simply an ongoing exploration of these issues.

as always, it is best to go back to the primary sources — the gospels — and try to pay close attention to jesus as they describe him. we're focusing on luke for now.

jesus — yeshua — simply means "yahweh saves". in a very simple sense, as the angel said to joseph, jesus has come to save us — all the world — from our sins.

...an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” (Matt 1:20-21 NRSVue)

what might this mean? to save us from our sins?