'dental' care...

Jesus wasn't a dentist. Nothing like.

Not that I have anything against dentists as such. My dentist is a very pleasant guy. And, what's more, he actually lives in the parish.

So, at least in theory, I suppose I have a sort of pastoral responsibility for him. We get on fine - thankfully - and I think (from memory, though it needs to be a long memory) he was once at a service of worship. A Christmas Eve service if I recollect aright.

But most of the time the 'ministry' is the other way: his exercising his dental care for me.

Today gave him another opportunity for that sort of ministry.

He was tending to the needs of a family when I came in, taking them one by one. A mother and her two young daughters.

And not long after I'd arrived he came into the waiting room laughing his head off. A slightly ominous sign, I felt. Dentists don't usually do that. Or, if they do, you get the sense they've maybe gone just a little bit 'trigger'-happy.

'Pliers'-happy is possibly more to the point. He'd just extracted one of the daughter's teeth, it transpired. And here he was, chuckling away and finding the whole thing hugely amusing!

I mean, that's a worrying start to another Monday morning, I must confess.

I thought about rapidly making some lame excuse for leaving there and then. Another pressing engagement which I was likely now to miss. Something like that.

But since we'd just been chatting about the ninth of God's commands last night (effectively, Don't lie) at the meeting we have for pupils in S4-S6, I thought I should try and practice what I preached.

Be brave. That sort of thing. Or at least be semi-responsible: and not tell lies.

So I stayed. Prepared to face the worst the dentist might decide to do.

Lying back on the dentist's chair, your mouth kept widely open, there's not a lot to do but think.

And it crossed my mind that most folk maybe view the Christian minister in much the way they also see the dentist. Which, of course, is by and large as little as possible!

I mean, we recognise that, at least from time to time, we actually need to see the dentist. We don't particularly like it, but it's probably good we go.

There's a kind of spiritual 'plaque' that bit by bit builds up in all our lives. And needs to be removed. And so we go and sit uncomfortably in that ecclesiastical version of the 'dentist's chair' (commonly called a 'pew').

And, again, it's pretty much a one-way sort of traffic that goes on. It simply happens to us and there's not a chance to speak. The dentist, of course, as I said at the start, he's a very pleasant man: jovial, smiling, and really very kind (all at a bit of a price, though).

But once I'm there and sitting in that seat, any sort of traffic that there is, it's very much one-way. He gets to speak and I'm his captive audience.

And it crossed my mind how frighteningly reminiscent that all is of being 'in church'.

Probably good for you. And the guy's very nice and all that. But it's hardly from choice that we (most of us) go - and it's not with an eagerness, relish or joy!

That's why I say that Jesus was hardly a dentist!

He puts a smile on our lips, for sure. He cleans up our act, removes all the 'plaque' of our foul-smelling sin, and equips us to speak in a way that's convincing and clear.

But he's not your average dentist, anything like.

For one thing we don't go to him. He comes to us. And then again he doesn't kind of throw us to the ground and then address a monologue in our direction to which there's not a hope of our addressing a reply.

He comes to us and sits with us and chats with us. Becomes a friend. And as a friend he kind of sits in the chair for us as well as with us. It's painless. Free. Exhilerating stuff.

The diametric opposite of what the dentist's like. And what the church is often like as well. And maybe, too, what I myself am often too much like.

I mean, they get good pay, these dentists do: and I've nothing against them really. But, please, I don't want to be a dentist in the way I live my life.

I want to be like Jesus.