Early in his ministry, according to Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus preached a very public sermon. This sermon, unlike any other, has not only been a great treasure of literature, but also stands as the foundation of Jesus’s teaching ministry. The introductory illustration of this famous sermon given on a mountainside is a collection of sayings by Jesus about who is blessed in the kingdom of God. They are called the “Beatitudes.”

These Beatitudes spoken by Jesus have been widely admired across religious, political, and social realms. Persons as diverse as Jimmy Carter, Ghandi, and the rock musician, Sting, have all quoted these sayings of Jesus. Indeed, Dallas Willard notes, “[A]long with the Ten Commandments, the Twenty-third psalm, and the Lord’s prayer…[the Beatitudes] are acknowledged by almost everyone to be among the highest expressions of religious insight and moral inspiration.”(1)

The exact nature of this religious insight and moral inspiration has been the subject of numerous biblical commentaries and writings. Biblical commentator, Craig Keener notes that there are more than 36 discrete views about the sermon’s message.(2) Perhaps the difficulties in interpretation lie with the implications of the Beatitudes themselves. As one author notes the Beatitudes are “a statement of the world turned upside down, where those who mourn are comforted rather than abandoned or merely pitied, where those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are satisfied, not ignored or shouted down, where the meek inherit the earth rather than being ground into dust.”(3) In other words, much is at stake. A world “turned upside down” serves as inspiration to some and bad news for others. Indeed, Luke’s account of the sermon adds a series of four-fold “woes” for those who have contributed to mourning, humiliation, and injustice (Luke 6:17-26).

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – World Upside Down →

On Memorial Day, we remember those who died serving their country and recall that while all gave some, some gave all. One year ago, I reflected on the death of my father and brother-in-arms months apart and how we anesthetize ourselves to such loss. Little did I know, as I penned those words, that I would experience another tough loss within months: My little brother—and only sibling.

Like my father and me, Scott was career military (US Coast Guard). Scott was the consummate servant: He was also a full-time firefighter with a knack for sniffing out fires even when he was off duty. He called in multiple fires, saving property and preventing injury before they grew beyond control. Our country lost a valuable servant when death took Scott.

Last year, I recalled how easy it is to lose hope, and I’ve met more than one person whose anger at God stems from the loss of a loved one. A fellow Marine once told me he was “not on speaking terms with God” since he’d lost his father. Death hits hard, and it hits close to home. But aside from first-hand pain, this time I learned how much pain can be amplified when we see the suffering of others. This time I could not negotiate death on my own terms, because this time others were closer to the loss: Scott left behind three little boys, each of whom needs their father.

I already loved these boys, but since Scott died my devotion to them grew in unexpected ways, comparable only to seeing the birth of your own child. I felt the death of my brother and the horror of my nephews’ loss almost simultaneously, and I’m still trying to figure out how to manage these two distinct losses (my nephews’ loss eclipses my own).

I’m normally comforted by verses like Psalm 34:18 and Romans 8:28. But seeing my nephews and sister-in-law in pain, I’ve turned to the call to bear one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2) and to weep with those who weep (Rom. 12:15) as more appropriate. Further, I’m reminded that, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction” (James 1:27). We need to be with those who live with the loss not just today but every day.

My nephews Zack, Ben, and Jake will never be the same without Scott, and neither will Caroline, his young wife. Today, as we honor those we lost, let’s pause to remember the ones left behind, the ones living in the pain.

Karl “KJ” Johnson retired from the Marine Corps as a lieutenant colonel after twenty years of active duty service. He is the Operations Director for RZIM’s US Ministries.

http://www.rzim.org/

A British journalist by the name of Christopher Booker argues that all of literature can be classified into seven basic narratives. Though many would deem the idea itself deficient, Booker exhaustively identifies each category in his book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. One such category he describes is the “Voyage and Return” plot. Here, Booker catalogs, among other works, Alice and Wonderland, Peter Rabbit, and Gone with the Wind, each of these stories chronicling a hero who travels away from the familiar and into the unfamiliar, only to return again with new perspective.

Among his list of “Voyage and Return” plots, Booker also identifies Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son. He describes the parable as many of us understand it. The younger son demands his inheritance, travels to another country, squanders his money until he has nothing left, and finally decides to come home again pleading for mercy. When told or heard like this, it is a story that indeed fits neatly into Booker’s category, and perhaps neatly into visions of the spiritual journey. Journeys to faith and to God are often stories of coming and going and returning again.

But is this an accurate understanding of the parable of Jesus? Is the story of the prodigal son really about the son? Is the spiritual journey about our coming and going or God’s?

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Telling Stories →

In one of the early scenes of The Matrix, the character Trinity meets Neo in a club and she tells him, “It’s the question that drives us.” Later Neo meets Morpheus, who describes this inherent curiosity as a “splinter in the mind.”

We are born into a world that is populated with stories, pregnant with multiple meanings. From our very entrance into the cosmos until death, the reality and presence of story envelops our lives. Like the deep-seated quest of Socrates to discover what, in fact, was the good life, we find ourselves asking questions and wanting answers. These questions are not mere curiosity, or intellectual pursuits; they carry enormous existential significance and importance. These questions haunt us.

Consider the following words from Lee Iacocca in Straight Talk: “Here I am in the twilight years of my life, still wondering what it’s all about… I can tell you this, fame and fortune is for the birds.” Our minds are splintered—or made numb—with pressing inquiry: What is the point of it all? What gives our lives meaning? Novelist William H. Gass expresses a similar nagging reality. “Life is itself exile,” he writes, “and its inevitability does not lessen our grief or alter the fact.” Journalist Malcolm Muggeridge notes further, “The first thing I remember about the world—and I pray it may be the last—is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling which everyone has in some degree, and which is at once the glory and desolation of homosapiens, provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.” Why are we here? Where are we going? Why do we at times find ourselves as strangers in our own home? Is there a greater story we are a part of, but ignoring?

In the Western world, we are progressively abandoning the metanarratives that for centuries served to define and give shape to our society and individual lives. Indeed, the very idea of a “defining story” is now considered offensive, imperialistic, sexist, or worse. The individual is left alone before a mind-boggling array of options and both the responsibility and the authority to reach a conclusion are totally rooted in the self. Yet, despite brave predictions of the demise of God or the eventual waning of belief under Modern conditions, the questions have not gone away. If anything, they are more at the forefront than we would have expected, given the nature and shape of progress.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Forgotten Stories →

To fully understand C.S. Lewis’ love for the imaginary—indeed, to understand the man himself—something must be said about the distinctively English world Faery. The world of Faery, which has its roots in Celtic culture, is not so easily categorized. It is not at all the land of delicate fairies that Walt Disney would have us imagine. Nor is it simply imaginary, a story altogether detached and unrelated to the world before us. Faery is, first, a place. It is lush and green like gentle British landscapes and ancient English forests, but forests untamed, willful, and enchanted—”a world, that sometimes overlaps with Britain but is fundamentally Other than it.”(1) Biographer Alan Jacobs hints at the importance of Faery on the imagination of Lewis, and in particular, this “old idea that Faery overlaps our world—that one can, unwillingly and unwittingly, pass from one into the other.”(2) Faery is both beautiful and dangerous, its boundaries unclear. The encounter with Faery and its tales, the “horns of Elfland faintly blowing,” was one that haunted Lewis throughout much of his life.(3)

For Lewis, “the horns of Elfland” were heard and followed and dear, like arrows of Joy shot at him from childhood—through the death of his mother at the fragile age of nine, through the horrid years at boarding school, through the doubt and dismissal of faith and God, through the metaphysical pessimism and the deep layers of secular ice, through a dejected and reluctant conversion, to Narnia, and to the Joy itself.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Whence Came the Wish →

I shut my eyes in order to see, said French painter, sculptor, and artist Paul Gauguin. As a little girl, though completely unaware of this insightful quote on imagination, I lived this maxim. Nothing was more exhilarating to me than closing my eyes in order to imagine far away exotic lands, a handsome prince, or climbing down a deep enough hole leading straight to China!

In fact, like many, imagination fueled my young heart and mind. After reading C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, I would walk into dark closets filled with warm winter coats fully expecting to be transported like the Pevensie children into strange and wonderful land. Charlotte’s Web took me to a farm where I could talk to my dog, like Fern talked to Wilbur, or to the spiders that hung from intricate webs in my garage. Pictures on the wall came to life and danced before me; ordinary objects became extraordinary tools enabling me to defeat all those imaginary giants and inspiring me toward powerful possibilities fueled by vivid imagination.

Sadly, as happens to many adults, my imagination has changed. I don’t often view my closet as a doorway to unseen worlds, nor do I pretend that my dogs understand one word of my verbalizing towards them. Pictures don’t come to life, and I no-longer pretend my garden rake or broom is a secret weapon against fantastical foes. Often, I feel that my imagination has become nothing more than wishful thinking. Rather than thinking creatively about the life I’ve been given, I day-dream about what my life might be like if… I lived in Holland, for example, or could back-pack across Europe, or lived on a kibbutz, or was a famous actress, or a world-renowned tennis player, or any number of alternative lives to the one I currently occupy.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Reordering the Imagination →

In the last few centuries the cacophony of voices suggesting Christianity (and religion in general) is a tale on par with the tooth fairy continues to deepen. The story may well have beautiful components, some add charitably, but the story functions as a psychological crutch to comfort us through the uglier realities of real life. Often couched in the objection is the notion that time has moved forward such that we have outgrown the superstition, and along with it, the need to explain life and comfort ourselves with archaic religious myth. And though by equating Christianity with “myth” critics mean to suggest that religion is fanciful and untrue, the comparison between Christianity and the genre of myth is absolutely fascinating. In fact, it is a comparison C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and G.K. Chesterton found altogether relevant and revelatory.

A scholar of ancient and medieval literature, Lewis came to recognize the great Greek, Roman, and Nordic myths as being a genre of narrative that wrestled as fiercely as the human heart can wrestle with its yearning to know the gods. In this, he reasoned that what we glean from the myth is not truth but reality, for myths concern themselves with questions of ultimate reality and theological inquiry. Through the story of Sisyphus, for instance, we ask profoundly, does life have meaning? As he endlessly rolls the great rock up the hill, only to have it tumble down the hill before he reaches the top, we ask: Do the gods hate us? Are they indifferent? Do they care? Is life worth living in acknowledgment of their presence? Is life worth living at all? The genre of myth has concerned itself with the great and impenetrable questions of life, questions that every worldview must answer. As G.K. Chesterton comments in Everlasting Man, “Myth has at least an imaginative outline of truth.”

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Myth and Fact →

Aldous Huxley likened a person’s memory to one’s own collection of private literature. Housed within the confines of memory are countless pages of our own stories, perspectives, and thoughts—vast libraries uniquely existing within our own heads. It is this personal nature of memory that no doubt feeds our dismay when minds begin to slip. Forgetfulness is a fearful quality particularly because it is a quality that seems to erase part of the very person it describes.

The implications of memory are made known in the earliest pages of God’s story as told in scripture. But added to the cultural adage of Aldous Huxley is the idea that this “private literature’”can be edited. In other words, what we choose to remember affects who we are. And at that, our private literature is not entirely private; there is a communal aspect to memory as well.

Surely we see this played out within the grumblings of the rescued Israelites. From the wilderness, the writer of Numbers reports:

“Now the rabble that was among them had a strong craving. And the people of Israel also wept again and said, ‘Oh that we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.’”(1)

Recollection, like resentment, is often contagious. In this moment of hunger, Israel together remembered Egypt as a place of produce instead of prison, and together they declared their longing to return to the very place from which they had been rescued. Together they wept; together they remembered; and together they remained lost in the wilderness. What we choose to remember indeed affects who we are—individually, collectively, boldly.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Storied Recollection →

Typically, people think science and miracles are at odds. That’s what I once thought. But in fact, it’s only within the regularity of science that God can reveal Himself to us mirac¬ulously. It is science that makes miracles possible. It’s only because scientifically virgins don’t get pregnant that God can reveal Him¬self in a virgin birth. It’s only because scientifically people don’t rise from the dead that God can reveal Himself through a resurrection. And likewise, God can reveal Himself in each of our lives.

The more I talk with people, the more convinced I am that the experience of miracles is universal. I like asking people, even the most scientific of people, “Have you ever had an experience that made you think there might be a God?” Usually there is an awkward lull and then some nervous laughter, but, if you wait long enough, almost without fail the person will say, “Well, there was this one time when…” And then they will tell you a remarkable story that has God’s signature all over it!

Most of the people I speak to have amazing stories, but they’re worried that they are the only one. They’re worried that others will think they’re weird. They start to wonder if maybe it’s all just in their heads. We need to share our stories, and we need to invite others to share their stories as well.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – God’s Two Poems →

The question at the time caught me off guard. As a student of theology and religion, I was used to being asked to defend and explain my theology, but this was something different. I had been talking to someone about some old fears, a battle with disordered eating and a hauntingly skewed image of body. I was explaining that what had helped me to move past some of these fears was a faith that gave me hope in a world far beyond them, where wounds would be healed and tears would be no more. His response pulled me down from my seemingly hopeful, ascended place: “What is your theology of the body?” he asked. “How does God speak to your physical existence right now?” I didn’t know how to respond. How had my body accompanied me in life and in faith? I wasn’t quite sure that it had.

The physical isn’t a matter the spiritual always consider. But for the Christian, they are severely and mercifully united, and there is a world of hope in considering this. What does it mean that Christ came in the flesh, with sinew and marrow? What does it mean that the Incarnation, the crucifixion, and the ascension were each historical events enacted in a body? Perhaps more importantly, what does it mean for us today that Jesus is vicariously human, the risen Son of God a corporal being who now sits at the right hand of the Father? What does Christ’s wounded body have to do with our own? These are the questions the church holds physically and attentively close, though the modern divorce of the spiritual and the physical, heaven and earth, what is now and what will be, has made them difficult questions to consider.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – God of Hope and Body →

In my part of the world, gardening season has begun in earnest. Seeds that were planted and buried underground are now beginning to arise, thin green shoots, tiny leaves and the promise that there will be a bountiful harvest.

The ancient feast of Pentecost celebrated by the nation of Israel was a celebration of harvest. The weeks of sowing were completed and now it was time to reap the gifts of the land. Pilgrims would come from all over to Jerusalem to worship at the Temple and celebrate their bounty.

For Christians, the season of Pentecost represents the movement of the Spirit out to the whole world. It is considered the birthday of the Christian community—a community that would begin with Jews and come to include Samaritans, Gentiles and all those from the remotest parts of the earth.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Beyond Borders →

I have little doubt that the single greatest obstacle to the impact of the Gospel has not been its inability to provide answers, but the failure on the part of Christians to live it out. I remember well in the early days of my Christian faith talking to a close Hindu friend. He was questioning the experience of conversion as being supernatural. He absolutely insisted that conversion was nothing more than a decision to lead a more ethical life and that, in most cases, it was not any different from other ethical religions. I had heard his argument before.

But then he said something I have never forgotten: “If this conversion is truly supernatural, why is it not more evident in the lives of so many Christians I know?” His question is a troublesome one. In fact, it is so deeply disturbing a question that I think of all the challenges to belief, this is the most difficult question of all. I have never struggled with my own personal faith as far as intellectual challenges to the Gospel are concerned. But I have often had struggles of the soul in trying to figure out why the Christian faith is not more visible.

After lecturing at a major American university, I was driven to the airport by the organizer of the event. I was quite jolted by what he told me. He said, “My wife brought our neighbor last night. She is a medical doctor and had not been to anything like this before. On their way home, my wife asked her what she thought of it all.” He paused and then continued, “Do you know what she said?” Rather reluctantly, I shook my head. “She said, ‘That was a very powerful evening. The arguments were very persuasive. I wonder what he is like in his private life.’”

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Apologist’s First Question →

Most of us likely missed it. Couched between Wednesday’s building crescendo of assignments and Friday’s promise of their demise, Thursday hardly seems more than a means to an end. Though the day is every bit as holy as Easter Sunday, most of the world moves through it unsuspectingly—even those who have confessed the momentous lines of the Apostles’ Creed: “On the third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.”

Yesterday was Ascension Day, the day that marks the ascension of Jesus Christ. Forty days after the celebration of Easter and the resurrection of Jesus, the church around the world holds in remembrance this eventful day. The gospel writer records: “Then [Jesus] said to his disciples…. ‘See, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.’ Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.”(1)

The ascension of Christ may not seem as momentous to the Christian story as the resurrection or as rousing as the image of Jesus on the cross. After the death and resurrection, in fact, the ascension might even seem somewhat anti-climatic. The resurrection and ascension statements of the Apostles’ Creed are essentially treated as one in the same: On the third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty. One might even think that the one miraculous act flowed immediately into the other: as if the death of the body of Jesus was answered in the resurrection, a presence who then floated onto heaven. Unfortunately, the result of this impression is that many think of the ascension as somehow casting off of Christ’s human nature, as if Jesus is a presence that only used to be human. Hence, Jesus seems one more fit to memorialize than one we might expect to actually see face-to-face one day.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – His Human Face →

French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre closes his play Huis Clos (“No Exit”) with the pronouncement, “Hell is other people.” The play offers a sardonic vision of hell as the place in which one must spend eternity with individuals one would barely seek to spend five minutes with in real life. As one writer notes, “The most terrible, exasperating torment, in Sartre’s eyes, is the agony of soul caused by having to live forever alongside someone who drives you up the wall. Their annoying habits, their pettiness or cynicism or stupidity, their disposition and tastes that so frustratingly conflict with yours and require, if you are to live in communion with them, some sort of accommodation or concession of your own likes and desires—that, says Sartre, is Hell.”(1) Living in a world in which tolerance is the highest value, most readers find Sartre’s vision highly narcissistic or the logical conclusion of an exclusively individualistic, existentialist philosophy.

For many others, however, Sartre’s sentiments are not so easily dismissed. Living, working and interacting with other people can indeed create a hellish existence for many. And most of us, if we are honest, can quickly think of the names of several individuals whose personal habits or grating personalities makes relating to them very difficult at best. Sartre’s honesty, albeit through a cynical lens, also exposes a truth about the realities of human tolerance. On the one hand, we generally base our capacity for tolerance on loving those who are easy to love or who are broadly similar to our own way of living and viewing the world. On the other hand, we are easily tolerant of external causes, ideals, and principles, which are quickly lost when we come into contact with individuals who shatter that ideal image.

I was reminded of Sartre’s insight while serving at my church’s hospitality ministry dinner. Homelessness and hunger for the working poor is a perennial issue where I live. While homelessness remains an abstract idea, it is easy for me to ‘love’ the broad category of people who are poor or homeless. Yet, every month at my church dinner for the homeless—the full-range of humanity on display right in front of me-I often see the ways in which my ‘love’ is merely a form of patronage. Eating with individuals who have not showered in weeks (or months), who suffer from mental illness or chemical dependency tests my love of humanity in ways that the abstract category of homelessness never will. A preference for categories makes it very hard for me to love the real people seated all around me.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Human Circumference →

My high school band director was adamant about many things, but none so much as what he called the obligatory rule of good musicianship. That is, the two most important notes in any musical composition are the first and the last. “The audience might forgive you for a bad note that comes in the middle,” he would say, “but they will forget neither your very first impression nor your final remark.”

The last word of the book of Acts in the Greek New Testament is the word akolutos. The word literally means “unhindered,” though many translations render it with multiple words because of its complexity. Others move the word from its final position for the sake of syntax. In both cases, I think something is lost in translation. Luke was intentionally making a statement with this last word of his two-volume testimony to the life of Jesus Christ. I think he intended readers to pause at the conclusion of his words, the very last note in his testimony the provocative thought of the gospel unhindered, the Spirit of God continually improvising with a tune that will not be shushed or silenced. After the stories of Jesus’s ministry were told, after recollections of his death and ruminations of his resurrection, after Jesus’s ascension and the church’s beginnings, after all the resistance, disappointment, and surprises along the way, Luke concludes: “Then Paul dwelt two whole years in his own rented house, and received all who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching the things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ with all confidence, unhindered.“(1)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Unhindered →

For many Jewish people living after the Holocaust, God’s absence is an ever-present reality. It is as tangible as the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Dachau, and as haunting as the empty chair at a table once occupied with a loved one long-silenced by the gas chambers. In his tragic account of the horror and loss in the camps at Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel intones the cries of many who likewise experienced God’s absence: “It is the end. God is no longer with us… I know that Man is too small, too humble, and inconsiderable to seek to understand the mysterious ways of God. But what can I do? Where is the divine Mercy? Where is God? How can I believe? How can anyone believe in this merciful God?”(1)

This experience of absence, dramatic in its implications for the victims of the Holocaust, has repeated itself over and over again in the ravaged stories of those who struggle to hold on to faith, or those who have lost faith altogether in the face of personal holocaust. In a world where tragedy and suffering are daily realities seemingly unchecked by divine government, the absence of God seems a cruel abdication.

The words of Job, ancient in origin, speak of this same kind of experience:

Behold, I go forward, but He is not there,

And backward, but I cannot perceive Him;

When He acts on the left, I cannot behold Him;

He turns on the right, I cannot see Him.(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Paradoxical Presence →

In a 2002 article in The Guardian, author Salman Rushdie, inspired by bouts of violence in his native India, articulated a now-common view on religion. The article was titled, “Religion, as ever, is the poison in India’s blood.” In it, Rushdie outlined the familiar stance of the vociferous new atheists, bidding the world to stop speaking of religion in the fashionable language of “respect” and skating around the obvious conclusions about both God and religion. He writes:

“What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion’s dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! […] India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.“(1)

Rushdie’s voice is merely one among many in the increasingly prevalent conversation about God, religion, and violence. Against Christianity, the critiques come quite specifically. Richard Dawkins describes the Christian story as vicious, sado-masochistic, and repellent, symptomatic of a violent God, a Bible full of violence, and followers willing to overlook that violence, or worse, to embrace it. For Dawkins and his conspirators, God is the problem that initiates the problem of violence: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, blood-thirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can be desensitized to their horror.”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Faith as Faith →

Flannery O’Connor could not explain her fascination with peacocks. But she loved them. In fact, the southern writer of short stories lived on a farm where she raised near a hundred of them. She adopted her first peacock at the age of twenty-five, around the time she was diagnosed with a debilitating disease, and she could not stop looking at him. It was for her a mysterious sign of life, and an image that silenced her. In an essay focusing on her fascination, she describes the bird’s transfiguration from fledgling to finery: “[T]he peacock starts life with an inauspicious appearance….the color of those large objectionable moths that flutter about light bulbs on summer nights.” But after two years, when the bird has fully attained its pattern, “for the rest of his life this chicken will act as if he designed it himself… With his tail spread, he inspires a range of emotions, but I have yet to hear laughter. The usual reaction is silence, at least for a time.”(1)

It is not without coincidence that O’Connor used the peacock as a symbol for the transfigured Christ in many of her stories. Often cited is her use of the bird in The Displaced Person. In this story, the peacock is a main character of sorts, functioning for everyone else in the story as something of a spiritual test. Some never notice him; another sees the bird only as “another mouth to feed.” Still another liked to have peacocks around simply to signify his wealth; another is altogether besieged by the peacock’s splendor. With eyes locked on the regal bird poised in color and majesty, he says, overwhelmed, “Christ will come like that.”(2)

I appreciate stories that remind me to keep my eyes opened for all that can be seen but can just as easily be missed. Encounters with the sacred can be like this. Because ancient Greeks held the belief that the peacock’s flesh did not decay after death, the peacock became a symbol of Christ and resurrection in the early church. Many early Christian paintings and mosaics used the peacock imagery as a means of depicting the resurrected Christ or resurrection itself—namely, this new category of creation, the new way of seeing the world that the death and resurrection of Jesus necessitates. The many-splendored disruption that the resurrection ushered into the world is as crucial to take in as the historical evidences of the event. The promise of the fully human resurrected Christ to our own humanity is almost too much to take into our daily moments of running to and fro. And yet, here resurrection stands poised in all its incomprehensible finery, bidding us to consider what it might mean for this very moment, for this afternoon, for this community, for this relationship, for this death. Silence isn’t the worst reaction. Surprise, humility, gratitude are others.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Many-Splendored Afternoon →

I think I might have been deflated at the word of no vacancy in the inn. Mary was told by the angel who called her favored that God was with her and that she was part of a plan that would be for all people. In labor in a city that was not home, without the simple comfort of a bed, I wonder if she felt God had let her down that night or that God had somehow forgotten her in the midst of darkness. The text makes it seems unlikely that Mary felt this way. Even with only a manger for a baby bed and shepherds as visitors, Mary is said to have “treasured up” all these things and pondered them in her heart.(1)

I doubt I would have been so forgiving. Time marked with unfavorable conditions often feels like time marked with God’s absence. The psalmist writes of one such experience: “I cried out to God for help; I cried out to God to hear me. When I was in distress, I sought the Lord; at night I stretched out untiring hands and my soul refused to be comforted. I remembered you, O God, and I groaned; I mused, and my spirit grew faint.”(2) It is hard to know what God is doing in the dark. The Incarnation boldly reminds us that God is near though we labor in darkness; but this doesn’t mean the night can’t still be lonely.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Songs for the Dark →

As it happens every Easter season, various scholars and skeptics weigh in on whether or not Jesus was actually raised from the dead. Bart Ehrman’s book How Jesus Became God is a case in point. Writing as a historian, he questions many of the gospel remembrances of the events surrounding the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. His conclusion is that the gospels are not reliable, historical witnesses. But is this really the case?

A careful reading of the four evangelists’ remembrances of the resurrection does indeed reveal many different emphases and details. The Gospel of Matthew, for example, tells us that a great earthquake occurred as an angel of the Lord descended and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it. The Gospel of Mark, on the other hand, tells us that a young man sitting at the right, wearing a white robe was inside the tomb to announce Jesus’s resurrection. The Gospel of Luke tells us that two men suddenly stood near the women in dazzling apparel and John’s Gospel reports the discovery of the linen wrappings abandoned in the empty tomb.(1)

There are many other differences in the retelling of the resurrection appearances of Jesus, and this should be expected from different testimonies. No two people report exactly the same details about any event or happening! But, there is one feature that is the same in all four gospel testimonies: the resurrection announcement is made first to the women who followed Jesus (Matthew 28:1; Mark 16:1; Luke 23:55-24:5; John 20:1). Many reasons have been offered as to why women serve as the immediate witnesses to the resurrection: the women stayed with him through the crucifixion, so he appeared first to those who stuck with him to the last; women traditionally carried out the burial rituals in first century Judaism, so they were witnesses by default. Others suggest that the first women witnesses represent Jesus’s elevation of the status for women of the first century and for women in general.

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