Among the must-have fashion accessories today, the personal bodyguard ranks highly. They protect your space as you jog through a north London park, snatch cameras off curious bystanders at Heathrow airport, elbow autograph hunters in the face as you shop in Harrods. The irony is that several bodyguards joined together makes you a much more conspicuous target jogging in the park than simply dressing down, donning a baseball cap, tying your hair back, wearing sunglasses and keeping your head down. But then some people are just addicted to getting attention.
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the tell-tale wire |
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The biggest industry for bodyguards is in politics. The world changes for politicians nearly fifty years ago, with the assassination of President Kennedy and for celebrities thirty years ago, with the murder of John Lennon. When George W. Bush visited the UK on a State visit at the height of the Iraq war, he brought with him:
4 military transport planes, including 4 helicopters, 6 armour-plated vehicles and surgical unit staffed by doctors, 2 jumbo jets, 330 government officials, 8 marine guards, 2 doctors, 2 nurses, 5 chefs and 5 aides for the First Lady, 6 military aides, 250 armed US secret service agents, 15 sniffer dog teams, large stocks of the President’s blood type with 4 hospitals on stand-by and 5000 British police officers in support.
Contrast this with the lengths God went to, to protect his Son at birth: dingy, bug-ridden stable, perilous birth amid farm animals, no post-natal care. God could presumably have chosen any time or place for this birth, but he chose Herod’s time, the era of a paranoid and murderous man. If ever anyone were entitled to say the words: ‘I’m a celebrity, get me out of here’ it was the Son of God in the early hours and days of his birth. There were no bodyguards for Jesus as a child, or later when he encountered such hostility as an adult, because he was born to die a violent death to set us free from sin and the curse of death. The wonder of the incarnation is that the uncreated God would give his own life for us.
Clint Eastwood once starred in a film where he played bodyguard to the President, trying to protect him from a creepy and brilliant psychopath played by John Malkovich. In the film, someone asks the bodyguard whether he ever got close to the man he was protecting. In his characteristic whispered growl, Clint Eastwood said: ‘no, because if I find out too much about him, I might decide I don’t want to take the bullet for him’.
Jesus gave his life for us with deliberation, knowing the moment would come a long time before it did. And he did so knowing exactly what was inside the people he saved. What does that say about the nature of God’s love for us?
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