BBC Radio 4 2016-01-29

BBC Radio 4 2016-01-29

Good Morning,

There was once a house in a big city that fell to the ground with a great crash. Fortunately, no-one was hurt. The owner wasn’t home. And the builders working at the site escaped injury.

The collapsed house was a shocking sight: the front of the building had come away like a doll’s house, revealing the flimsy rooms inside. The people asked ‘How could something so well made just fall down?’ At first it was sad and disconcerting but when they heard the house had collapsed because the owner, a millionaire not even in the country, had been building a cinema in his basement, they no longer felt sympathy. Instead they said, ‘it serves them right.’

Eventually the fallen house had to be razed. The people who walked past it on their way to work looked upon the rubble as a sort of visual parable, a told-you-so of biblical proportions. Throughout the neighbourhood you could hear the smug hum of Schadenfreude.

Soon, the collapse of the rich person’s house became a symbol of what was wrong with the housing situation in the big city – a place where some struggled to afford a home at all, whilst others hollowed out their already burgeoning spaces in search of even more.

But while some went to bed at night, free of the need (or the means) to put a cinema in their basement, others felt unsettled. If this event had been an object lesson, what was it teaching them? Was it enough just to feel pleasure at a wealthy person’s come-uppance?

One night, a man who lived close to the fallen house, felt his own house vibrating as the train went past. It made him wonder: could his own house come tumbling down? How deep and secure were its foundations? To calm his nerves, he remembered an old story about one man who built his house on rock and another who built his on sand, and how the one built on rock survived the storms of life. He knew this story was not about architectural engineering and he wondered: What was that rock? And have I built my house on it?

Searching the scriptures he found the story and saw that it was a parable told by Jesus just after he had delivered his Sermon on the Mount. The man who built his house on the rock was anyone who heard the words of Jesus and put them into practice. But the man still wondered: which words did he mean? So he looked again and saw that the words were about healing the sick, feeding the hungry, loving people you didn’t like, and not judging anyone in case the thing you wanted to happen to them happened to you. And with that he closed the book and started to think again about the foundations upon which his house was built.