“My name is Lemony Snicket and I am on
the lam, a phrase which here means ‘conveying this information to you while
being relentlessly pursued by the law’. Being on the lam is a disheartening and
an uncomfortable way to live, not unlike being squeezed into a tight, dark box
tossed at high speed from a moving vehicle and abandoned on a dusty patch of
road, tormented by doubt and unsure of where you are, which, if you are on the
lam, is often the only way to travel. The Baudelaires, too, found themselves on
the lam, tormented by doubt and unsure of where they were going, especially
when their fire truck ran out of gas deep in the Hinterlands, a term which here
means ‘a desolate place unlikely to bring their troubles to an end’. But your
own troubles could be over this instant if you are sensible enough to halt this
dire programming by pressing any nearby button marked ‘stop’.”
A Series of
Unfortunate Events S2
E7, ‘The Hostile Hospital: Part One’ (2018)
So I have an idea for how to win Hunted.
I mean, of course I do; coming up with your own strategy is half the fun of
watching the programme. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s a sort of twist
on the reality genre where a number of ordinary civilians go on the run for
twenty-five days, while a team of elite military-intelligence types try to
track them down and accost them using a wealth of resources replicating certain
powers of the state: from access to CCTV recordings and vehicle number-plate
tracking, to phone tapping and interrogation of known associates, to
camera-equipped helicopters and drones. Successful evasion of the hunters earns
a share of a hundred thousand pounds. Aside from the irritating propensity it
shares with most Channel 4 documentaries for spending an excessive proportion
of the runtime reminding you of what happened before the last advertisement
break and previewing what’s going to happen after the next one, it’s a really
fun and engaging bit of televised entertainment. So call that a recommendation
if you have the time to spare; each of the four series released so far is a
perfectly manageable six episodes long.1
 |
| A CCTV camera. The UK has a lot of these that the hunters can exploit for their purposes. |
The contestants on Hunted are
usually a pretty varied bunch – in terms of where in the UK they hail from,
their manners of employment and areas of interest, and so forth – but despite
that, they almost always trip up and meet their downfall in very similar ways. Everyone
knows that the surest way of evading the hunters’ detection is going off grid:
get yourself out into the countryside somewhere, preferably in a bit of the UK
with which you have no prior connection, take your map and compass, plot a
course that avoids any heavily populated areas, and sleep wherever there’s
space to pitch the tent you’re hefting around on your back. But doing that for
twenty-five days straight just doesn’t work. For a start, you need some means
of transport with which to get to that remote bit of countryside from
your initial location, which the hunters are aware of, by the way. You also
need supplies – food and so forth. And the importance of keeping your morale up
shouldn’t be underestimated, either: for some reason, sitting alone in a little
tent in the middle of nowhere, while rain pelts down outside and you’re
uncomfortably aware of your desperate need for a shower, doesn’t seem to fill
most people with positive and motivated sentiments about the day ahead. And so,
one by one, the fugitives crack. They go back to familiar turf. They turn to
good friends and pre-established associates. They risk everything to arrange
meet-ups with close family members. And the hunters smell blood, move in, and
strike.
To summarise, then, you can’t survive on
Hunted without accessing any sort of network at all; and yet accessing
any sort of network at all immediately gifts the hunters a golden opportunity
to find you, because their powers allow them to find out all about the society
you keep – and then to bug their conversations, track their movements, steal
their digital data, personally question them, and do whatever else they need to
do to find out what your associates know about where you are. What you need is
a network that’s both too large to keep tabs on and fiercely loyal to its every
member; you need a network whose support you can reliably access even in
regions of the country totally unfamiliar to you; you need a network full of
people you’ve never met before who will nevertheless bend over backwards to
help you out.
Enter the Church.
I’m serious: wouldn’t it be a
fascinating experiment to run, to see whether the Church in this country would
be up to the challenge of concealing certain of its members from the eyes of a
hostile government? Because the thing is, we blooming well ought to be
up to such a challenge. We ought to be ready to bend over backwards to
help out fellow members of the body of Christ, even ones we’ve never met
before. A Christian fugitive ought to be able to disappear into the local
community of believers wherever she goes. She ought to be able among them both
to have her physical needs supplied – food and a shower and whatever else she
needs after a few days off grid – and to have her spirits lifted by the encouragement
of spending time in the company of the saints: reminding one another of the hope
we share, bringing our concerns before our common heavenly Father, pooling our
understanding of the scriptures which enable us to know him in his peerless
glory better and better. The Church ought to be the absolute best network to
have on your side if you’ve got no other connections to rely on. Check out the
following snippet of Acts 4:
And of the full number of those having
believed, there was one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things
belonging to him was his own, but everything was held in common for them. And
with great power the apostles were giving the testimony of the resurrection of
the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. For there wasn’t any needy
person among them; for as many as were owners of lands or of houses, selling
them, brought the value of the things sold, and laid it at the apostles’ feet,
and it was distributed to each, as any had need.2
For one thing, look at how that middle
sentence is so inextricably sandwiched between the stuff about the nascent Church’s
attitude towards property – and at that ‘for’ at the start of the third
sentence (Greek γὰρ isn’t a particularly forceful
conjunction, but I think it’s worth including in a translation). When his Church
behaves like this, God’s favour – grace – is on them. It glorifies him when we
don’t treat the material gifts he has granted us as if they were prizes we had
a right to, or as if they meant something in light of eternal life, but instead
use them to provide for our brothers and sisters in need; it glorifies him
because it reflects his own generous character, and because it brings into
effect his provision for his chosen people, and because it spits in the face of
the world’s tragically shortsighted ideas about what’s important, and because
it humbles the rich and lifts up the lowly. What’s more, the testimony of the
resurrection is put forward with great power when it’s backed up by this kind
of living, living that clearly has its hope set on something beyond what can be
obtained in this life – beyond, you know, a nice house and a nice car and a
nice wodge of savings to retire on. Living like this is part of how we show
that we believe our Lord when he tells us that if we leave behind worldly
things for him and the gospel, we shall, after the pattern of his own resurrection
as the firstfruits of the crop, have eternal life in the age to come. But if
you recognise the passage I’m alluding to there, you’ll know there’s another
bit in there too:
Jesus said: Truly
I say to you guys, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or
mother or father or children or fields, because of me and because of the
gospel, and will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and
brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and
in the coming age, eternal life.3
In this chunk of
Mark 10, the receipt of a hundredfold in various categories of family members, ‘now
in this time’, is explicable straightforwardly enough as referring to the
family of the Church: start following Jesus, and every Christian in the world
is suddenly your brother or mother or child. If you wanted to run with that all
the way, you could even make a not entirely implausible case that the mention
of ‘houses’ is better construed as ‘households’ and also refers to human
beings. But fields? A hundredfold recompense of agricultural land, now
in this time? How can we account for that in a way that doesn’t err towards
prosperity-gospel thinking? Well, in light of Acts 4, that’s how. Notice that
there it’s lands and houses that are mentioned as things people sold in
order to provide for fellow-believers in need, parallel to houses … and
fields in Mark 10. The way Jesus’ promise of a hundredfold in recompense is
fulfilled, is by the holding in common of property among the Church. If none of
us considers anything that belongs to us to be our own, then each of us has
access to everything that belongs to every other one of us, according as we
should have need of it.
 |
| Hey look, a field. |
This isn’t a
political standpoint, by the way. The Bible tells us how to run the Church; it
doesn’t tell us how to run a country, because that’s very clearly not what God
wants us to be doing. We’re to preach the coming of his kingdom, not
ally ourselves with earthly kingdoms inevitably built according to the model of
Babylon;4 and just as his kingdom is totally different from any
earthly institution of power, so are we to look totally different from any
earthly institution of power. And part of that is this business of holding
everything in common out of love for God and neighbour.
You see what I
mean, then, about my proposed Hunted strategy. Usually, physical needs
coupled with a longing for home and family grind down the fugitives’ resolve to
the point where they see no option but to reenter the geographical and societal
territory familiar to them, thereby walking straight into the hunters’ hands;
but for the Christian, the Church stands ready to fulfil those needs and
longings wherever she is in the world. That’s no accident, either. Jesus’
promise of recompense comes in the context that following him into eternal life
may require leaving behind all sorts of things you treasured in the life you
led before – just as Hunted’s fugitives have to cut themselves off from
the lives they led before they went on the run if they’re to evade capture. The
Church would be the perfect support network for a fugitive with nowhere else to
turn, because that is precisely the role it is designed to fill.
But would it fill
that role successfully? The Church in this country right now doesn’t look very
much like the one described in Acts 4, does it? And don’t we find all this talk
of everything in common and distributing to those in need a fraction uncomfortable?
Wouldn’t we rather tone it down a bit and content ourselves with a direct-debit
tithe and the odd bit of spontaneous charity, than stir ourselves to strive for
the ideal laid down in scripture? I know I would. And doesn’t that just prove that
I’m one of those rich who needs to humble myself for the sake of others, before
God runs out of patience and does it for me? There is great grace and great
power of testimony to be gained in getting this jazz right; what if we were to
try, small step by small step, to get closer to that?
So yes, I’d be
absolutely fascinated to see whether my suggested Hunted tactic would
actually work, or whether the Church as it currently is would fall short of the
challenge. That said, I have absolutely zero interest in applying as a
contestant for the next series of the programme: I am certain I’d make a
thoroughly useless fugitive, which would not only stress me out no end, but
also slightly ruin the experiment if I were to end up captured through my own
incompetence rather than the failures of my network. I don’t suppose any of you
reckons you might do all right at being on the run and fancies giving my
strategy a go?
Footnotes
1 You can get the full
boxset on All 4: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/hunted.
2 Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+4&version=ESVUK.
4 I will never
understand why English translations give the Hebrew בָּבֶל (bāvel)
as ‘Babel’ in Genesis 11, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+11&version=ESVUK,
and ‘Babylon’ in every instance thereafter. It’s the same word, guys. Now chase
the thing right through the scriptures all the way to Revelation 18, and you’ll
see what I mean about earthly kingdoms being irredeemable.
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