'Hunted' and a Hundredfold Houses

“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.

³ And again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+10&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.

Jesus, You’re Fired

Pete:     Now it’s my fault all this has happened.

Rose:    This is my fault.

Pete:     No, love. I’m your dad. It’s my job for it to be my fault.

Doctor Who S1 E8, ‘Father’s Day’, (2005)

Thanks to Ajmint on Wikipedia for this picture of Lord Sugar’s face.

If you’ve been making any effort to follow this year’s series of The Apprentice, it should come as no great news that the two candidates in the final were Joseph Valente – whom I was pleased to see doing so well if only because he grew up in the same city as me, and I tend to feel favourably towards anything that might increase Peterborough’s profile¹ – and Vana Koutsomitis, on whom I am going to focus in what follows.

Leaving aside Vana’s ultimate business plan for a dating app designed to match people according to their actions in scientifically-devised games and brainteasers, cast your minds, if you will, back to the buying task in Week Three.² There was, if you remember, a great and cringingly amusing palaver over the purchase of an expensive boat; the brief specified the size of dinghy required, but not its quality, and, while one team sourced their offering in a toy shop for ten pounds, the other spent two hundred and fifty on an impressively seaworthy-looking vessel. This same latter team also bought the wrong cheese – a quarter when the brief specified a whole. Unsurprisingly, they ended up losing the task.

Since both the boat and the cheese were actually bought by other members of her team, Project Manager Vana would surely have made things easiest for herself by offloading the blame in the direction of her subordinates Elle and Natalie, which is why it struck me that she didn’t. Instead, regarding the boat: “I take a hundred per cent responsibility.” Then, again, concerning the cheese: “That’s my fault, Lord Sugar.”

“That’s your fault,” echoed Lord Sugar.

“Yes,” confirmed Vana.

“Right, so the boat is your fault for telling her to buy it,” summarised Lord Sugar, “and you’ve got – the cheese is your fault.”

Later, discussing whom to fire with his aides, Lord Sugar mused, “Vana, everything I asked her – ‘Ah, yeah, that’s my fault, and oh yeah, that’s my fault also’ – well, it’s a complete and utter shambles as far as I’m concerned.” And although Vana of course survived the final boardroom that week, she was given a piece of advice before she returned to the house: “Vana, I think you’ve got to make sure that you look after number one in future, and stop telling me how you take the responsibility, if you’re going to survive any longer here.”

Considering that admissions of responsibility are usually so rare in the boardroom, having to be painfully extracted from candidates desperate to excuse themselves of all culpability, it was a refreshing change – and beyond that, something about the taking of blame clicked for me.

As soon as Vana declared that she took responsibility for the boat and for the cheese, any other apportioning of blame on those subjects became irrelevant. Elle may have actually bought the ludicrously expensive boat, and Natalie may have actually bought the incorrectly-sized cheese, but that was no longer the point. They were automatically bypassed as potential culprits for the failure of the task. There was no more blame left to be dealt out, because Vana had voluntarily taken it all upon herself. Elle and Natalie were completely absolved.

 

I wonder how ludicrously expensive these boats were.

Be sure to note, also, that it was indeed voluntary. I feel sure that, had she wished, Vana could have made a good case that she was not ultimately to blame for the mistakes that cost her team the task; indeed, Lord Sugar suggested as much when he advised her not to be so quick to declare herself at fault. It was Vana’s own decision – to her colleagues’ benefit and her own detriment – to compel Lord Sugar to treat her as culpable, regardless of whether he would otherwise have considered her so. For him to have blamed her for the failure of the task would consequently have been entirely fair and justified. There is here a slight spoiling of the analogy I have in mind, since he chose to fire Jenny rather than Vana, but the point was still made by his warning: continuing to take responsibility for every mistake made in her team would have been a sure-fire route to ending up fired.

At this point I probably ought to introduce the aforementioned analogy, though I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve already twigged.³

I always had trouble squaring the fact that God is perfectly fair and just with the doctrine of substitutionary atonement – that is, the idea that Jesus paid for and so erased (atoned for, one might say, hence ‘atonement’) the wrongdoing of others by dying in their place as a substitute (hence ‘substitutionary’).⁴ It just doesn’t seem fair for someone who never did anything wrong to be punished instead of a bunch of people who do wrong endlessly (hint: I mean us). If God really is just, why would he be satisfied for the axe to fall on the innocent while the guilty are left untouched? And the answer is, because Jesus voluntarily took all the blame, so that there was none left to be apportioned elsewhere. He made the choice to set himself up as culpable for everything wrong with the world and so caused his Father to treat him as such. I take a hundred per cent responsibility. That’s my fault, Lord God.

Picture the scene in the boardroom. You sit opposite God, who has the authority not just to kick you out of a reality TV show and a chance to win a few quid, but to decide the ultimate and everlasting destiny of your entire being. The task with which you were charged was simple enough – love God, and love other people⁵ – but you have failed it dismally. Time and time again you have put yourself and your own concerns first, in direct contradiction of the brief. Your actions have abused and corrupted the resources you were given to work with, and they have fallen apart. Knowing yourself to be without excuse, you await the final verdict. Someone has to be fired today, and you don’t fancy your chances.⁶

But that’s not the whole story. Jesus – who would have every right to be sitting in judgement opposite you right now, on his Father’s right-hand side (which I suppose, in this analogy, makes him the equivalent of Baroness Karren Brady) – is on your side of the table. He came with you on this task. He joined Team Humanity. He was assigned jobs and faced pressures and had abuse shouted at him by colleagues, just like everybody else. What’s more, he really got stuck in, he worked hard, he looked out for the other team members, he made all the right decisions, and you can’t think of any aspect of his performance that you’d fault. When it comes to loving God and loving other people, Jesus is clearly some kind of pro. So, when God asks whom he should blame for the failure of the task, you’re fully expecting Jesus to point the finger in your direction; he’d have every right to. Yet he doesn’t. Instead, he declares that he takes a hundred per cent responsibility.

It’s permissible; he’s a member of your team, after all. And suddenly it becomes irrelevant who made what wrong decision, because there’s no blame left to be apportioned; Jesus has voluntarily taken it all. You can no longer be held responsible for any mistakes. You are absolved.

And then come the words no-one was expecting to hear. More shocking than any event in Apprentice history – triple firing, immunity, pre-final-boardroom firing, candidate resignation, the lot – they leave you wide-eyed and gasping: “Jesus, you’re fired.” They are undeniably just; Jesus willingly claimed responsibility for everything that went wrong, and so it was right for his Father to treat him as responsible. But beyond that, what just happened wasn’t only fair, but also utterly, magnificently, astonishingly merciful: there was no reason why Jesus shouldn’t have blamed you for everything, yet he chose not to blame you for anything. And, as he leaves the boardroom, you can’t shake the feeling that Father and Son together planned this all some time ago.

Helpful as I find the boardroom metaphor, it does rather minimise and sanitise everything. What we’re really talking about here is nothing as bland and replaceable and earthbound as money, as fame, as the short-lived successes of this lifetime. What Jesus did in our place – what he chose to do in our place – was go through hell. And the reward we get in consequence is of infinitely more value than a quarter of a million pounds; we get a new life, an unseverable personal relationship with our Creator, and the promise of eternity with him in a new creation free of the flaws and problems that mar the current one.⁷ It’s mind-boggling. I can feel my mind start to boggle when my train of thought even passes near the idea, and I’m well aware I stand not the smallest chance of actually comprehending it in its whole glorious enormity. That’s why I bother with these daft analogies: none works perfectly, but they can help make tiny corners of God’s splendour a little more graspable.

It was our mistakes that caused the failure, but Jesus loves us with a love so pure and relentless that he willingly joined Team Humanity and took the blame, and consequent punishment, himself. And that, if you ask me, makes him a Project Manager worth having – by which I mean that I am proud to call him my Lord. Alan Sugar can keep his investment; I have treasure in heaven.

Footnotes

¹ Peterborough’s other alumni of note, as mentioned in this charming ode by Howard Read (as in Big Howard and Little Howard, as in CBBC’s Little Howard’s Big Question, if that means anything to you), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX_fN4gyff4, include Peter Boizot (co-founder of Pizza Express) and Aston Merrygold from JLS. You’ll gather it’s not an especially crowded hall of fame.

² Unfortunately, it’s no longer on iPlayer, but you can always re-watch the episode preview if you’d like a reminder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud-rq5rqz78&list=PL5A4nPQbUF8AAAKvzjcEvncns1okut-xE&index=24.

³ I’m not the first person to draw a spiritual analogy with The Apprentice, nor to suggest the concept of Jesus getting fired, but Justin Brierley was, I think, approaching the issue from rather a different angle when he wrote this article: https://www.premierchristianity.com/Blog/Five-reasons-Lord-Sugar-would-fire-Jesus. It’s well worth a read.

⁴ As expressed in passages like Isaiah 53 (especially verse 5) and 1 Peter 2:22-25. Look them up in context; I dare you. Here’s the Isaiah to get you started: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+53&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Often called ‘The Great Commandment’, this, according to Jesus, is the most important commandment, on which everything else depends, as recorded in Matthew 22:34-40 and Mark 12:28-31. And if you fancy checking that I’m not just making up any old reference, or taking the verses wildly out of context, here’s the Matthew chapter to start you off: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+22&version=ESVUK.

⁶ “It’s the boardroom part of the episode, / a blue and grey overload; / everyone’s in business mode, / thinking, “Oh no, who’s going to go home today?” as Brett Domino so eloquently describes it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skdrDNb8Wto. Do also check out the Alan Sugar song and the Nick and Karren song; there’s a whole range of other hilarious musical parodies to be found on the same channel as well.

⁷ Try 1 Peter 1:3-5, for instance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Peter+1&version=ESVUK.