Category Archives: Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – We Call This Friday Good

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Simon of Cyrene had every reason to be shocked. He was on his way in from the country, likely headed to Jerusalem for the Passover, when he was seized from the crowd and forced to join a procession heading toward Golgotha, the place of the Skull. They put a crossbeam on him, one to be used in the execution of a criminal, and made him carry it. The offense of this object and unchosen assignment would have been blatant to Simon and everyone around him. He had been recruited to play a role in a crucifixion; there was no more dishonorable form of judicial execution in the Roman Empire. Among Jews, anyone condemned to hang on a tree was thought accursed. Staggering in front of Simon, beaten and bloodied, was the shamed man to whom this cross belonged.

In many ways, it was a day of shocking and paradoxical darkness, akin to the sort of half-understood encounter T.S. Eliot so aptly describes:

You say I am repeating

Something I have said before. I shall say it again.

Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstacy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.(1)

For Simon, thrust in the middle of angry men and wailing women, the day held a burden he did not deserve, a shame he did not seek to bear for himself. He was on his way inside the holy city to celebrate the Passover, the release of his ancestors from the bondage of slavery—the central act of God in Israel’s history—and he found himself forced to carry the cross of a condemned man outside the city walls. It was the furthest he could be taken from the sense of place he wanted to possess.

The crowd pressed in behind them as they walked forward. Simon would hear Jesus turn to the women who were mourning and wailing and offer a curious response: “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children. For the time will come when you will say, ‘Blessed are the barren women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed! They will say to the mountains, “Fall on us!” and to the hills, “Cover us!”‘ For if men do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?”(2) Simon would have recognized these lines as words of the prophet Hosea, the prophet through whom God would show his heart, to demonstrate a love that would not quit.

When they made it to Golgotha, Simon’s task was finished. The beam was taken from him and the man he followed to the place of the Skull was stripped of his garment and nailed to the cross. Nothing further is mentioned about Simon the Cyrene in any of the gospel accounts of the crucifixion. But surely much is left to wonder. Did he stay after the burden had been lifted from his own shoulders? Did he hear Jesus cry out, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” or watch him extend the invitation of paradise to the broken criminal on the cross beside him? What went through Simon’s mind as he walked behind the weak and beaten Jesus, the events of Passover brutally interrupted by the events of the cross? Did he look on as they mocked the “King of the Jews” who remained silent through the insults? Was he filled with thoughts of the Passover he was missing, the life he needed to resume, as they challenged Jesus to come down from the cross? Or perhaps Simon was more deeply disturbed by the end of the journey than he was of its beginning. What we call the beginning is often the end, says Eliot.

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.(3)

Matthew reports the conclusion of the first Good Friday and the cross that would become a stumbling block for all of history: “When Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split… When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, ‘Surely this man was the Son of God!’”(4)

It is impossible to tell what became of Simon after he carried the burden of the one sentenced to die. But it is a vision terribly full, if half-understood: The memorial Simon had celebrated his entire life—the redemption of Israel from the yoke of slavery, the blood of the unblemished lamb, the Passover hope for the liberating Messiah—had emerged before him, the slaughter of the paschal lamb.

The dripping blood our only drink,

The bloody flesh our only food:

In spite of which we like to think

That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood-

Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.(5)

One thing is yet clear: Simon of Cyrene was on his way somewhere else and the cross was a shocking interruption. And so it remains.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets (Harcourt: New York, 1971), 28-29.

(2) Luke 23:28-31.

(3) Eliot, 58.

(4) Matthew 27:50-53.

(5) Eliot, 30.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Scars of New Creation

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One of the most terrifying and deeply troubling news stories for me of the past few years has been one that has escaped broad notice by the Western media. It is the story of extreme and widespread violence against women in Eastern Congo. Raped and tortured by warring factions in their country, women are the victims of the most horrific crimes. As one journalist reported, “Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.”(1) They bear their wounds in their own bodies, permanent scars of violence and oppression.

In this holiest week for Christians around the world, the broken and wounded body of Jesus is commemorated in services of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. The broken body and spilled blood of Jesus is remembered in the symbols of bread and wine on Maundy Thursday, and in the black draping of curtains and cloths on Good Friday. Jesus suffered violence in his own body, just as many do around the world today.

Even as Christian mourning turns to joy with Easter resurrection celebrations, it is important to note that Jesus bore the wounds of violence and oppression in his body—even after his resurrection. When he appeared to his disciples, according to John’s gospel, Jesus showed them “both his hands and his side” as a means by which to identify himself to them. Indeed, the text tells us that once the disciples took in these visible wounds “they rejoiced when they saw the Lord” (John 20:20).

The resurrection body of Jesus contained the scars from nail and sword, and these scars identified Jesus to his followers. And yet, the wounds of Jesus took on new significance in light of his resurrection. While still reminders of the violence of crucifixion his wound-marked resurrection body demonstrates God’s power over evil and death.

But his wounds reveal something else. God’s work of resurrection—indeed of new creation—begins in our wounded world. His resurrection is not a disembodied spiritual reality for life after the grave; it bears the marks of his wounded life here and now, yet with new significance.

N.T. Wright, who has written extensively on the central importance of Christ’s bodily resurrection for Christians, says it this way:

“The resurrection of Jesus means that the present time is shot through with great significance….Acts of justice and mercy, the creation of beauty and the celebration of truth, deeds of love and the creation of communities of kindness and forgiveness—these all matter, and they matter forever. Take away the resurrection, and these things are important for the present but irrelevant for the future and hence not all that important after all even now. Enfolded in this vocation to build now, with gold, silver, and precious stones, the things that will last into God’s new age, is the vocation to holiness: to the fully human life, reflecting the image of God, that is made possible by Jesus’ victory on the cross and that is energized by the Spirit of the risen Jesus present within communities and persons.”(3)

Indeed, Paul’s great exposition of the resurrection of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15 ends by reminding the Corinthians, “Therefore, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.” The point of the resurrection is to demonstrate that entropy and death do not have the final word—either for humans or for God’s creation. God’s last word is resurrection in the midst of our human, often-wounded lives now.

The reality of the resurrection marked by the wounds of Jesus can bring this kind of hope and this kind of joy of new creation even into the darkest places. The reality of the bodily resurrection also compels a response from those who live in its light. We work and we toil, and perhaps even pour out our blood, sweat, and tears to tend the wounds of others. The hope of the resurrection reminds us that our labor is far from in vain for Christ has gone ahead of us. We bear the scars of toil even as we bear the image of resurrection reality in this world. We bear them as new creation, remembering that Jesus continued to wear his scars as part of his resurrected life.

The visible wounds of Jesus after his resurrection also bring hope in the midst of our suffering. Even our suffering does not have to be in vain. Many women in the Congo, despite all their horrific suffering, seem to understand this. Behind the Panzi Hospital that treats the majority of these rape cases, a new center of refuge called “City of Joy” is being built. It will be a place of long-term healing and refuge for women who have been victimized and abused in Eastern Congo. Many of the women, who carry the cement for the building on their heads, were themselves victims of these crimes. Their wounds still visible on their bodies, they are building a city of joy.(4)

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Jeffrey Gettleman, “Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War,” New York Times, October 7, 2007.

(2) Artwork in this article is the work of Ben Roberts, http://www.benrobertsphoto.com, used by permission.

(3) N.T. Wright and Marcus Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 126-127.

(4) Nicholas D. Kristof, “What Are You Carrying?” New York Times video blog, March 8, 2010.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – No Abstraction

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There are many virtues that can be turned into abstractions by seeming necessity, though doing so is only damaging to what it means to be human: beauty, forgiveness, hope, peace. They are ideals we might be able to say indeed exist, even in the most complicated situations, but they seem to exist somewhere out there elusive and mocking, always out of reach.

In war-torn relationships of Northern Uganda, forgiveness would seem like this. Betty was a teenager when her village was raided by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel army known for its brutal tactics and widespread human rights violations. She was kidnapped as a sex slave for a commander and ordered to commit callous acts of violence as a child soldier, until gradually she was broken and became an active member of the LRA.

After six years of bloodshed, however, Betty managed to escape, running across the country to freedom. But coming home would not be a simple matter of returning. She had committed violence against the very people she hoped to rejoin. Her own guilt and shame was as palpable as the mistrust and anger of her village. In her absence, two of her own brothers had been killed by the same army Betty fought alongside.

In the midst of such loss, with so many permanent scars, forgiveness seems a foolish hope, at best a naïve ideal, at worst an offensive suggestion to everyone involved. Is reconciliation even to be desired when brokenness is so blatantly irreversible? Does forgiveness cease to be hopeful when neither party can ever be the same again? From where I stand, these are painful questions to even begin to answer. Forgiveness by necessity seems an abstraction.

But the people of Uganda have not settled for abstract. For hundreds and hundreds of children like Betty, terrorized by crimes they were forced to commit and returning home to terrorized villages, tribal elders have adapted a ceremony to make it possible for both. In a ceremony that includes the act of breaking and stepping on an egg and an opobo branch, the returnee is cleansed from the things he or she has done while away. The egg symbolizes innocent life, and by breaking and placing themselves in its broken substance, returnees declare before their village their desire to be restored. In a final step over a pole, the returnees are invited into new life. In many cases, women returnees come home with babies who were born in the bush, usually a result of rape. When they arrive at the broken egg, the child’s foot is also placed in the substance. The spirit of reconciliation, like warfare, must touch everyone. It cannot be abstracted without consequence to what it means to be human. Reconciliation must be as real as the bodies that have been affronted.

In a single week, Christians around the world remember the last moments of Jesus, the betrayals and predictions, the march to crucifixion, his burial on Good Friday, the silence of Holy Saturday, the terror and amazement of Easter Sunday. In a week, we remember the disciples who failed him miserably, falling asleep when he needed them most in prayer, denying ever knowing him while he was convicted for being himself, watching him die alone from a distance. In a single week, Christians move from recognizing ourselves in this list of failures to sensing the hopeful confusion of the disciples, the overwhelm of Thomas, and the timid longing of the women at the tomb. In a single week, we move from complete despair to shocking hope, total darkness to surprising light, the finality of death to the reordering of reality, from broken and sinful to restored and somehow new.

In this solitary week, Christians remember a story that should make the bold and carnal forgiveness of war-torn Ugandans seem natural, expected, and necessary, however shocking or complicated or slow-coming it might be.

After the egg-breaking ceremony with her village, Betty went from rebel to ex-rebel, from shamed to restored. “I feel cleansed,” she said of the ceremony. After a day of being welcomed and celebrated, she adds, “Some of the bad things in my heart: they are gone.”(2) Alex Boraine, deputy chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, notes of such radical forgiveness: “[With its] uncomfortable commitment to bringing the perpetrator back into the family, Africa has something to say to the world.”(3) Indeed it does.

And so does Christ. In one eventful, holy week, we remember the ugly depths of human sin and stare into the deep scars of the human servant of God who bore it away. This utter shift in our condition is as overwhelming as this coming Good Friday, as dumbfounding as Holy Saturday, and as inconceivable as Easter Sunday. But it is our ceremony. Christ is broken, we are covered in his blood, and we emerge as dead men and women walking. How beyond our knowing, how inexplicable is this gift. Yet because it was given, in a single week, we can claim again the mystery; we can claim the power of reconciliation; we can claim Christ, who is no abstraction, but who moves us from perpetrator to family.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Artwork in this article is the work of Ben Roberts, http://www.benrobertsphoto.com, used by permission.

(2) Abe McLaughlin, “Africa After War: Paths To Forgiveness—Ugandans Welcome ‘Terrorists’ Back” International Center for Transitional Justice, October 23, 2006.

(3) Ibid.

There are many virtues that can be turned into abstractions by seeming necessity, though doing so is only damaging to what it means to be human: beauty, forgiveness, hope, peace. They are ideals we might be able to say indeed exist, even in the most complicated situations, but they seem to exist somewhere out there elusive and mocking, always out of reach.

In war-torn relationships of Northern Uganda, forgiveness would seem like this. Betty was a teenager when her village was raided by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel army known for its brutal tactics and widespread human rights violations. She was kidnapped as a sex slave for a commander and ordered to commit callous acts of violence as a child soldier, until gradually she was broken and became an active member of the LRA.

After six years of bloodshed, however, Betty managed to escape, running across the country to freedom. But coming home would not be a simple matter of returning. She had committed violence against the very people she hoped to rejoin. Her own guilt and shame was as palpable as the mistrust and anger of her village. In her absence, two of her own brothers had been killed by the same army Betty fought alongside.

In the midst of such loss, with so many permanent scars, forgiveness seems a foolish hope, at best a naïve ideal, at worst an offensive suggestion to everyone involved. Is reconciliation even to be desired when brokenness is so blatantly irreversible? Does forgiveness cease to be hopeful when neither party can ever be the same again? From where I stand, these are painful questions to even begin to answer. Forgiveness by necessity seems an abstraction.

But the people of Uganda have not settled for abstract. For hundreds and hundreds of children like Betty, terrorized by crimes they were forced to commit and returning home to terrorized villages, tribal elders have adapted a ceremony to make it possible for both. In a ceremony that includes the act of breaking and stepping on an egg and an opobo branch, the returnee is cleansed from the things he or she has done while away. The egg symbolizes innocent life, and by breaking and placing themselves in its broken substance, returnees declare before their village their desire to be restored. In a final step over a pole, the returnees are invited into new life. In many cases, women returnees come home with babies who were born in the bush, usually a result of rape. When they arrive at the broken egg, the child’s foot is also placed in the substance. The spirit of reconciliation, like warfare, must touch everyone. It cannot be abstracted without consequence to what it means to be human. Reconciliation must be as real as the bodies that have been affronted.

In a single week, Christians around the world remember the last moments of Jesus, the betrayals and predictions, the march to crucifixion, his burial on Good Friday, the silence of Holy Saturday, the terror and amazement of Easter Sunday. In a week, we remember the disciples who failed him miserably, falling asleep when he needed them most in prayer, denying ever knowing him while he was convicted for being himself, watching him die alone from a distance. In a single week, Christians move from recognizing ourselves in this list of failures to sensing the hopeful confusion of the disciples, the overwhelm of Thomas, and the timid longing of the women at the tomb. In a single week, we move from complete despair to shocking hope, total darkness to surprising light, the finality of death to the reordering of reality, from broken and sinful to restored and somehow new.

In this solitary week, Christians remember a story that should make the bold and carnal forgiveness of war-torn Ugandans seem natural, expected, and necessary, however shocking or complicated or slow-coming it might be.

After the egg-breaking ceremony with her village, Betty went from rebel to ex-rebel, from shamed to restored. “I feel cleansed,” she said of the ceremony. After a day of being welcomed and celebrated, she adds, “Some of the bad things in my heart: they are gone.”(2) Alex Boraine, deputy chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, notes of such radical forgiveness: “[With its] uncomfortable commitment to bringing the perpetrator back into the family, Africa has something to say to the world.”(3) Indeed it does.

And so does Christ. In one eventful, holy week, we remember the ugly depths of human sin and stare into the deep scars of the human servant of God who bore it away. This utter shift in our condition is as overwhelming as this coming Good Friday, as dumbfounding as Holy Saturday, and as inconceivable as Easter Sunday. But it is our ceremony. Christ is broken, we are covered in his blood, and we emerge as dead men and women walking. How beyond our knowing, how inexplicable is this gift. Yet because it was given, in a single week, we can claim again the mystery; we can claim the power of reconciliation; we can claim Christ, who is no abstraction, but who moves us from perpetrator to family.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Artwork in this article is the work of Ben Roberts, http://www.benrobertsphoto.com, used by permission.

(2) Abe McLaughlin, “Africa After War: Paths To Forgiveness—Ugandans Welcome ‘Terrorists’ Back” International Center for Transitional Justice, October 23, 2006.

(3) Ibid.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – LOVE AND SORROW MEET

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Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself, alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

His hour had come. He had walked among them, taught them, performed miraculous signs, and he had loved and cared for them. But now, his hour had come and the cross lay ahead of him. The hour he faced would be filled with trial and suffering: Now, my soul has become troubled and what shall I say, Father, save me from this hour?(2)

Jesus would walk the long, lonely road to the cross. Rather than taking the way of self-preservation, he would offer his life, like a grain of wheat. He would die; he would be buried in the darkness of the earth, but as a result he would bear much fruit. Despite what lay ahead of him, and despite the trouble in his soul, he affirms: For this purpose I came to this hour. Father, glorify Thy Name.

Of what was transacted there on that cross, there are many theories.(3) In formal theology, these theories attempt to get at the very nature and the very essence of what Jesus accomplished through his death. For theologians, atonement studies are a fertile field of inquiry because the meaning and impact of the atonement are rich, complex, and paradoxical. One theory, for example, suggests that the atonement stands as the preeminent example of a sacrificial life—an example that followers of Jesus are called to model in their own lives. Other theories argue that the cross is the ultimate symbol of divine love, or that the cross demonstrates God’s divine justice against sin as the violation of his perfect law. Still other theories suggest the cross overcame the forces of sin and evil, restored God’s honor in relation to God’s holiness and righteousness, or served as a substitution for the death we all deserved because of sin.

While the nature of the atonement may include a portion of all of these theories, Jesus’s statements as recorded in John’s gospel indicate that his death would be a path to abundant life resulting in the production of much fruit. And in this case, Jesus doesn’t construct a theory of the atonement, but instead chooses an agrarian image to indicate what would be accomplished in the cross. The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified… unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Charles Spurgeon, the nineteenth century theologian and preacher, wrote that this passage of Scripture is rich with paradoxical statements describing the nature of atonement:

“[P]aradox is this—that his glory was to come to him through shame…[that] the greatest fulness of our Lord’s glory arises out of his emptying himself, and becoming obedient to death, even the death of the cross. It is his highest reputation that he made himself of no reputation. His crown derives new luster from his cross….We must never forget this, and if ever we are tempted to merge the crucified Saviour in the coming King we should feel rebuked by the fact that thus we should rob our Lord of his highest honour.”(4)

Spurgeon expands on the paradoxical nature of death bringing forth life. It is only through the cross, just as a kernel of wheat must die in order to produce a harvest, that new life in Christ and reconciliation with God are accomplished. Most powerfully, Spurgeon notes that this teaches us where the vital point of Christianity lies, Christ’s death is the life of his teaching. See here: if Christ’s preaching had been the essential point, or if his example had been the vital point, he could have brought forth fruit and multiplied Christians by his preaching, and by his example. But he declares that, except he shall die, he shall not bring forth fruit.(5)

We see this paradox borne out every spring. Dead bulbs ugly, brown, and buried in dark soil all winter burst from their earthen tomb green with life and bright with color. Their glory disguised in ugly packaging, and one bulb producing green leaves and flowers in abundance. So it is with our Lord’s passion and death: glory and abundance come out of sorrow, shame, death and suffering. Encased in the Cross of Golgotha is a beautiful, life giving seed.

Long before the beauty of Easter morning, a tiny kernel of wheat dies—it lays buried seemingly dead underground. This is a great paradox, but one in which we can come to glory, one in which we can find our lives.

See from his head, his hands, his feet

Sorrow and love flow mingled down

Did ere such love and sorrow meet

Or thorns compose so rich a crown?(6)

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the writing and speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Artwork in this article by Ben Roberts, http://www.benrobertsphoto.com, used by permission.

(2) John 12:24; John 12:27.

(3) The following theories of the atonement are based upon Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1983), 781-823.

(4) “The Corn of Wheat Dying to Bring Forth Fruit: John 12:23-25,” Charles H. Spurgeon, Farm Sermons (c 1875), from http://textweek.com, accessed April 2, 2009.

(5) Ibid.

(6) “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” written by Isaac Watts, 1707.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – God of Hope and Body

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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 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 terrible events of Holy Week upon us this week were 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 this week, 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.

But consider we must, for the promise of Christianity is union with none other than the human Christ himself. In faith and by the Spirit, we are united to the same body that was on the cross and was in the tomb, and which is now also in heaven. We are united with a body that was wounded and humiliated, dead and buried, a body that is very much a human and physical promise. “Since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:21-22). Among religions, it is a most unique hope: God in a body.

The biblical depiction of God’s recreating of all things is far more “earthy” than some entertain, whether its critics or lauders. No matter how privatized and irrelevant, or removed and other-worldly we might describe Christianity, it is unavoidably a faith that intends us to encounter and experience God in flesh redeeming in the here-and-now, everyday, hand-dirtying occurrences of life in bodies.

In an unapologetically corporeal account, the book of Acts describes the Jesus miraculously among his disciples after these harrowing events of Holy Week: “After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. 4While eating with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father… And when he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” When two men in white robes then appeared and interrupted the disciples’ stupor, their question was as pointed as the one that stumped me: “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you, will return in the same way as you saw him live and go forth.”(2)

It is no small promise that Christ came as a vicariously living body; he walked empathetically near the material world he came to recreate; he suffered and died in a body; and he remains a real and living body that will return to wipe every real tear from our real eyes. The body of Christ that church holds up to the world through Holy Week and beyond represents something more fully human, more real than ourselves, and it is this reality that he lifts us toward, transforms us into, and advocates on our behalf. Our union with Christ and communion with the Trinity add a certain and heavenly dimension to our lives to be sure, but to describe this as anything other than a dimension that profoundly orients us here and now, in real bodies to the world around us, is to profoundly misunderstand the gift.

Beyond a subject for another time or place, how might God speak to your physical existence now? How does your body accompany you in encounters with God? In these weeks from the physical shock of Easter to the corporal gift of the Spirit at Pentecost, consider Christ who walked among the world as a human body, who invited Thomas to physically put his hands in scars that still mark pain, who ascended as one fully human after sharing a meal with those he loved, and who sent the Holy Spirit to live powerfully among us. Consider the body of Christ, who walks through the torment of Holy Week and sits at the right hand of the Father as advocate, offering his body for the sake of yours, calling you to physically come further into the kingdom even now.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Artwork in this article by Ben Roberts, http://www.benrobertsphoto.com, used by permission.

(2) Story told in Acts 1:3-11, emphasis mine.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – ISIS, MURDER, AND MARTYRDOM: A REFLECTION FROM RZIM IN THE MIDDLE EAST

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by Maher Samuel / RZIM BLOG  March 23, 2015

Although the scenes of slaughter and murder are not new or alien to Christians in Egypt, the ISIS beheading of the 21 Coptic Christians (as seen in the video released in February) was one of the most devastating tragedies Egyptian Christians have ever witnessed.

Though several weeks have passed, our minds are still perplexed and our hearts broken. The old question of “where is God amidst all this evil?” emerges again to denote a great challenge for Christian leaders in this region and particularly for those of us here in RZIM Middle East.

The final words we heard on the ISIS beheading video were “Lord Jesus” as the 21 were butchered, only to remind us of what we read in the Word of God about Stephen, the first martyr.

Of the 21 murdered, only one was non-Egyptian. Of all the very encouraging stories is that of the non-Egyptian: he was originally a Muslim and accepted the Lord while living with the kidnapped Christians. When the murderers tried to persuade him to go back to Islam, to escape slaughter, he refused and was martyred with his brothers.

The difficult aspect of the story is the puzzlement of many believers, who were expecting God’s miraculous intervention. However, the bright part is that the blood of the martyrs was not shed in vain. The beheading shook many hearts and minds among Muslims, causing them to question their beliefs. It also emphasized the importance of the Egyptian President’s call for a religious revolution against all beliefs that call for killing people.

Two months prior to this painful incident, I gave a sermon at Kasr El Dobara Evangelical Church, titled “ISIS and Jesus–The Culture of Death and the Culture of Life.” Approximately 2,000 people attended this sermon and it was broadcasted live on SAT7 (a Christian satellite station), during which I mentioned ISIS is religiously, not politically, oriented.

The core of ISIS’s belief is to establish Allah’s rule, with death to all who refuse this rule. On the contrary, Jesus called for the kingdom of God by giving life. The kingdom of God is to be accepted, not imposed. This is the vast distinction between Jesus and ISIS.

In my sermon a few months ago, I challenged the audience with three significant truths. First, we are created in the image of God, however the image has been tarnished (though not erased). Second, God loves us and desires salvation for our souls, inviting us turn from falsehood to truth. Third, the Christian history teaches us that many who were similar to ISIS were saved and became servants of the Lord.

That day, when I preached these words, I had not known that a terrible death was right at the door and that ISIS would brutally slaughter loved ones, some of whom were known to us.

After the ISIS beheading, I reviewed these three truths and must admit it was difficult for me to accept that God loves the members of ISIS and that He yearns for their salvation. Nevertheless, this is what the Bible says and we must recognize that no one is beyond the grasp of God’s grace and redemption.

In light of this tragedy, we at RZIM Middle East are faced with two massive challenges: the first is how to deal with Christians’ broken hearts, and second, how to deliver the truth to those minds that are now open and thirsty for the truth in the aftermath of this massacre. We need your prayers for our team in the region, for our brothers and sisters in Iraq and Syria, and for all who have yet to turn from darkness to light.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Journey of the Cross

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In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Frodo, the young hobbit, has been given the burden of bearing the one ring of power. It is a ring that has the potential to put all of Middle Earth under terror and shadow, and the darkness is already spreading. With a fellowship of friends, Frodo determines he must start the long, dark journey to destroy the ring by throwing it into the volcano from which it was forged. It is a journey that will take him on fearful paths through enemy territory and overwhelming temptation to the ends of himself. Seeing the road ahead of him, he laments to Gandalf the Wise that the burden of the ring should have come to him in the first place.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”(1)

A fan of Tolkien’s epic fantasy once wrote the author to say that he preferred to read The Lord of the Rings particularly during the season of Lent. Though I don’t know all this reader had in mind with such a statement, Tolkien’s portrayal of a journey into darkness with the weight of a great burden and a motley fellowship of companions certainly holds similarities to the journey of the church toward the cross. The forty-day period that leads to Easter is both an invitation and a quest for any who would be willing, albeit a difficult one. The deliberate and wearisome journey with Christ to the cross is a crushing burden, even with the jarring recognition that we are not the one carrying it. On the path to Holy Week, the fellowship of the church far and wide is given time to focus in detail on what it means that Jesus came into this world that he might go the fearful way of the Cross. It is time set apart for pilgrimage and preparation, forty days with which we decide what to do with the time that is given us.

In fact, the Bible attaches special meaning to the forty-day journey. Considered the number of days marking a devout encounter with God, we find the occurrence of forty-day journeys throughout the stories of the prophets and the people of God. For forty days Noah and his family waited on the arc as God washed away and revived the earth. Moses spent forty days on Mount Sinai, where he received the Law of God to share with the Israelites. Later, he spent forty days on the mountain prostrate before the LORD after the sin of the golden calf. Elijah was given food in the wilderness, which gave him strength for the forty day journey to Horeb, the Mount of God. Jonah reluctantly accepted forty days in Nineveh where the people, heeding his warning, repented before God with fasting, sackcloths, and ashes. For forty days, the prophet Ezekiel laid on his right side to symbolize the forty years of Judah’s transgression. And finally, for forty days Jesus was tempted in the wilderness. As Mark reports: “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”

It is with this same Spirit that any are invited to take the forty day journey into the shadows and difficulties of Lent. In every forty day (or forty year) journey described in Scripture, the temptations are real, the waiting is difficult, and the call to listen or to look, to obey or deny is wearying. But there is something about the journey itself to which God moves us. Indeed, Christ himself was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness for forty days, while Moses, Ezekiel, Noah, and even Jonah were each instructed to set out on the journeys that brought them closer to the heart of God, whether they were able to accept it or not.

Similarly for us, the forty days that lead to Easter Sunday are not without burden or cost. “The Cross of Lent,” as Augustine referred to it, is one that we bear year round, but one we learn to bear all the more intensely along the way to the cross during Lent. Here, we remember that we are dust, we follow Jesus to his death, we recollect the acts of God to be near us, and we let go of the things that keep us from holding the Son who saves us. Of course, these are burdens we will never bear alone. But each day we are given is one we decide what to do with. Jesus has given us one option:

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.”(2)

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 51.

(2) Luke 9:23-24.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Scandal of the Cross

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There is a striking verse in the New Testament, in which the apostle Paul refers to the cross of Jesus Christ as foolishness to the Greek and a stumbling block to the Jew. One can readily understand why he would say that. After all, to the Greek mind, sophistication, philosophy, and learning were exalted pursuits. How could one crucified possibly spell knowledge?

To the Jewish mind, on the other hand, there was a cry and a longing to be free. In their history, they had been attacked by numerous powers and often humiliated by occupying forces. Whether it was the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the Romans, Jerusalem had been repeatedly plundered and its people left homeless. What would the Hebrew have wanted more than someone who could take up their cause and altogether repel the enemy? How could a Messiah who was crucified possibly be of any help?

To the Greek, the cross was foolishness. To the Jew, it was a stumbling block. What is it about the cross of Christ that so roundly defies everything that power relishes? Crucifixion was humiliating. It was so humiliating that the Romans who specialized in the art of torture assured their own citizenry that a Roman could never be crucified. But not only was it humiliating, it was excruciating. In fact, the very word “excruciating” comes from two Latin words: ex cruciatus, or out of the cross. Crucifixion was the defining word for pain.

Does that not give us pause in this season now before us? Think of it: humiliation and agony. This was the path Jesus chose with which to reach out for you and for me. You see, this thing we call sin, but which we so tragically minimize, breaks the grandeur for which we were created. It brings indignity to our essence and pain to our existence. It separates us from God.

On the way to the cross two thousand years ago, Jesus took the ultimate indignity and the ultimate pain to bring us back to the dignity of a relationship with God and the healing of our souls. Will you remember that this was done for you and receive his gift?

You will then discover that it is sin that is foolishness. Our greatest weakness is not an enemy from without but one from within. It is our own weak wills that cause us to stumble. But Jesus Christ frees us from the foolishness of sin and the weakness of our selves.

This is the very reason the apostle Paul went on to say that he preached Jesus Christ as one crucified, which was both the power of God and the wisdom of God. Come to the cross in these days given for our contemplation and find out his power and his wisdom.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Sheep Gate

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“Shepherd” is not a career choice you often hear children dreaming about. Tending sheep is not as adventurous as being an astronaut or as glamorous as being a movie star. But to one small child in a Sunday school classroom, “shepherd” seemed the most logical answer. What do you want to be when you grow up? She wanted to be a shepherd because “Jesus is good at it and it makes him happy.” This, I thought self-assuredly, was a child who was paying attention in my class.

Later, as I put the crayons back in the cupboard and turned to get the kids in line for church, my eyes caught the picture that hung on the wall behind me each week. It was one of Jesus, holding a lamb in his arms, smiling.

The Christian narrative is full of images of sheep and shepherding. The ancient prophet writes of God, “He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young.”(1) The gospel writer notes similarly of Christ, “When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”(2) Hearing such descriptions, perhaps you recollect images of a Good Shepherd similar to the painting in my Sunday school classroom: Jesus standing peacefully among his flock, keeping watch and taking care. It is an image not far from some of those carefully painted in well-told stories: The LORD is my shepherd I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul.

When Jesus stood among crowds and spoke of sheep, familiar images of fields and grazing sheep would have come to the minds of his hearers as well. For some, the biblical images of God gathering lambs into his arms would have crossed their minds. But these wouldn’t have been the only images that came to mind, particularly for those who heard Jesus in Jerusalem. “My sheep listen to my voice,” he said, “I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand.”(3)

Standing in the temple of Jerusalem, preaching to worshipers and religious leaders, these words of Jesus about sheep would have evoked a bold awareness of sounds and activities all around them. At tables nearby, bleating sheep were being sold and carried further into the temple, where they were led through a door to the place of sacrifice. Far from the peaceful setting of a pasture, Jesus spoke of sheep in the place where they were about to be slaughtered. Unlike the shepherd among passive lambs in many of our pictures, tending these sheep requires something more than a gentle hand and a watchful eye. These sheep needed to be saved.

So it is quite telling that Jesus first identifies himself, not as the Good Shepherd, but as the gate for the sheep. In the ancient walls of Jerusalem, there was a gate on the north of the city, by which animals were brought in from the countryside for sacrifice. It was called the Sheep Gate. Once inside the city and within the temple courts, there was only one door where the sheep went in, and no lamb ever came back out after entering the temple. They traveled in only one direction, and there they were sacrificed for the sins of men and women. For first-century hearers of Jesus’s words about sheep, such knowledge added to the shock of Christ’s words: “I tell you the truth, I am the gate for the sheep…. I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture.”(4)

In the temple filled with sheep on their way towards death, Jesus declared there was a way out: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. I am the Good Shepherd.”(5)

Like the child in my Sunday school class, I readily imagine the Good Shepherd delights in the task of caring for his flock. He goes willingly to search for the one that has gone astray. He gently holds us in his arms and guides us through valleys and beside still waters. He calls us by name and smiles at our recognition of his voice.

But he also breaks into courtyards where there is no longer hope. He refuses to cower through the course of our rescue, though he is accosted by our sin and humiliated by our denials. He provides a way, though it costs him everything. He is the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for his friends, so that even one lamb can get away.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Isaiah 40:11.

(2) Matthew 9:36.

(3) John 10:27-28.

(4) John 10:7,9.

(5) John 10:11.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Mountain and a Trench

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As a young girl, one of my favorite Bible stories was the epic encounter between the prophet Elijah and the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. With David-meets-Goliath odds, Elijah faces off against 450 prophets of Baal in a contest pitting the God of Israel against the Canaanite god Baal. Which deity would answer the prayers of the respective prophets to consume the altar sacrifice?

This is an incident filled with dramatic tension and awesome displays of power. The Lord answers Elijah with fire from heaven that not only consumes the sacrifice, but also licks up every last drop of water poured out from not one, but four pitchers of water. The story ends with the destruction of the prophets of Baal and the peoples’ declaration that the Lord is God.

Now, as a grownup, I still love this story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, but not for the reasons I loved it as a young girl. Instead, I love what seems to be an anti-climactic postscript to the story. Despite seeing the glory and power of God on display in such dramatic fashion, and winning a great victory, Elijah falls into what could likely be called depression. Threatened by Queen Jezebel, he runs for his life into the wilderness. There, under a lone broom tree, he prays to God to take his life, not once but two times. As one commentator notes, “Those who have suffered mental anguish in their lives know all too well the depths to which Elijah has descended. He (and they) has entered the deep spots in the psychological ocean, and then has found a narrow slit in the ocean floor, a Marianas Trench of the soul, where he descends further still into the inky abyss. All he can think of is his desire to die.”(2)

Anyone reading this story might find Elijah’s descent a surprising turn of events. How could Elijah feel this way? After all, didn’t he just see God mightily answer his prayer? One might expect a God who would reproach Elijah for feeling this way, for his lack of faith, for his despair and hopelessness. And yet, the narrative offers no exhortation or chastening. Instead, an angelic messenger is touching Elijah, urging him to eat bread and water prepared for him by a heavenly servant. Indeed, the angel comes again and feeds Elijah a second time urging him to “Arise, eat for the journey is too great for you.”

Given God’s fiery display from heaven in the encounter with the prophets of Baal, the reader might expect another dramatic display from God to rouse Elijah. And indeed, as Elijah waits on Mount Horeb, the Mountain of God, he experiences a strong wind, and a mighty earthquake, and then a consuming fire; but with each of these cataclysms the narrator repeats a refrain: The Lord was not in the wind, or the earthquake or the fire. Instead, the Lord comes to Elijah in a gentle blowing. God meets Elijah at the very place of his despair, not with correction or reprimand, not with a “buck up and get going” or a “keep your chin up” but with a grace as gentle as a soft breeze.

Like Elijah, there are days when I might feel at the height of heights, assured of answers, victorious in daily battles, maybe even confident of God’s saving activity all around. But there are also days when I know my own Marianas Trench of despair or disappointment or lament. It is deeply encouraging to see that even in this place, God draws near with gentleness.

The gentleness of God on display in Elijah’s dark depression is the same God sung about in one of Israel’s ancient psalms:

“Where can I go from your Spirit?

Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I make my bed in the nether world,

behold you are there.

If I take the wings of the dawn,

if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea,

even there your hand will lead me and your right hand will lay hold of me.

 

If I say, ‘surely the darkness will overwhelm me,

and the light around me will be night’

Even the darkness is not dark to you,

and the night is as bright as the day.

Darkness and light are alike to you.”

The comforting news of Christianity is that God is not only available to us when we feel good, but makes his dwelling with us even in the darkness of despair. We often feel in our distress that we simply have to avoid the problem, to “get out” of feeling any sort of sadness. But, in fact, what is happening is that even in sorrow, even in our despair, we have the hope that we are still being drawn by the gracious arms of God into closer communion. As one author notes, “What God wants is not so much our victories, but our life in the wilderness.”(3) As the story of Elijah bears witness, even in the wilderness of despair, God will prepare a meal, provide shelter, and speak gently into all our fears.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the writing and speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) See 1 Kings 18-19:18.

(2) Bill Long, “Man on the Run,” June 9, 2007, http://www.drbilllong.com/LectionaryII/IKi19.html, accessed October 10, 2011.

(3) Ibid.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The New Gospel

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Some of the earliest Christian writings that have survived from antiquity were written around 170 by a bishop in Asia Minor. Melito of Sardis was a prominent figure of second-century Christianity known for his prolific defense of Christ against the claims of Christian heresies and opposing worldviews. He was a man of brilliant mind and deep conviction, one who seems to have truly felt the horror of humanity’s rejection of God. Tertullian speaks of Melito as a man of eloquent genius. Eusebius makes note of many of his writings, quoting three of these works at length.

Until somewhat recently, much of Melito’s extensive work existed primarily in fragments or in quotations preserved by authors after him. In 1930 a discovery was made in a Coptic graveyard of a large number of papyri, and among these works was a Greek manuscript identified as a homily of Melito of Sardis. Known as “On Pascha” (On the Passover), it is a homily that recounts the history of Israel and the exodus from Egypt in light of the events of Jesus of Nazareth and the Cross of Christ. It is a stirring apologetic that gives reasons for the Incarnation and demonstrates Jesus Christ as the true Paschal lamb:

The sacrifice of the sheep, and the sending of the lamb to slaughter, and the writing of the law—each led to and issued in Christ, for whose sake everything happened in the ancient law, and even more so in the new gospel…. For the one who was born as Son, and led to slaughter as a lamb, and sacrificed as a sheep, and buried as a man, rose up from the dead as God, since he is by nature both God and man.

“On Pascha” is a poetic homily that has shed further light on second-century Christianity, and for this reason alone its discovery is celebrated. But the discovery of this early sermon also demonstrates the illuminative placement of a previously unknown document within a known context. Melito’s sermon further explicates the praises of Tertullian and Eusebius; as we read, we discover for ourselves the eloquence of a brilliant writer. Likewise, the sermon offers further evidence of the emerging recognition of “old” and “new” testaments in second-century Christianity, as well as further evidence of early belief in the divinity of Christ. Yet oddly, this text didn’t seem to make many headlines.

One of the things I find most troubling about the current fascination with “long lost” writings is that we seem to be looking for something new (and something disassociated from its historical context). There seems among us a desire to uncover a new secret, a hidden truth that changes everything. But is a lone document suddenly out of hiding and historically unrelated to anything else really a document to trust? The oft-fashionable suggestion that pre-Nicene Christianity (before 350) did not adhere to the divinity of Christ is not supported by any reliable historical document that wasn’t previously rejected for inconsistency in the tradition from which it arose. Likewise, the Gospel of Judas, another “new” text uncovered in recent times, was denounced by Irenaeus of Lyons in 180, when copies of the Gospel of Judas were still around. It seems there is nothing new under the sun however dramatically we attempt to abduct it from its context.

On the contrary, evidence of a belief in Jesus’s divinity can be traced throughout the writings of antiquity and into the very pages of the New Testament. Something clearly happened in Jerusalem, and the preservation of the story throughout history is compelling. The most logical explanation is that Jesus actually was the Son of God, the lamb foreseen on the altars of Israel and brought to fruition in Christ on the Cross. In the words of Melito of Sardis:

This one is the Passover of our salvation. This is the one who patiently endured many things in many people: This is the one who was murdered in Abel, and bound as a sacrifice in Isaac, and exiled in Jacob, and sold in Joseph, and exposed in Moses, and sacrificed in the lamb, and hunted down in David, and dishonored in the prophets. This is the one who became human in a virgin, who was hanged on the tree, who was buried in the earth, who was resurrected from among the dead, and who raised mankind up out of the grave below to the heights of heaven.

This is the lamb who was slain, and now stands. This is the ancient Christ of the new gospel, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Shaming the King

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The passion narrative of John, the writer’s witness to the events leading up to the cross, often seems like something of a game of push and shove. The push and pull of an honor and shame culture, where all behavior and interaction either furthers one’s vital position of shame or honor in society, is unquestionably at work here: both in the various characters of stories Jesus tells and in the minds of the audience John is addressing. John offers repeated scenes in his narrative that comparably seem to suggest the coming reversal of honor and shame, with Jesus hinting among the poor and the powerful that power may not be all they believe it to be.

Yet Jesus himself is still clearly shamed, and shamed profoundly. Shame in such a culture included public rejection, abandonment, humiliation, and victimization—all of which factor heavily in the passion narrative, and John doesn’t want us to miss it. Shaming also occurs when blood is intentionally spilled, when one is beaten, especially in public, there being no higher shame than being killed; and the shame of death on a Roman cross is the vilest of all. All of this is the passion of Jesus. While there are undoubtedly scenes where he seems to take himself out of these systems of honor and shame, suggesting a different system entirely, Jesus is just as often, and profoundly so, on the losing end when the theme is in play. In something of a parabolic push and shove of words, there always seems much going on under the surface of John’s passion narrative:

“Now it was the day of Preparation for the Passover; and it was about noon. And Pilate said to the Jews, ‘Here is your King!’”

To the pull and push of shame and honor, John adds the telling theme of insider and outsider. Insight of Jesus’s kingship is placed in the mouths of various players, portraying one further in or outside of the kingdom. John is intent throughout his gospel on the revelation of Jesus as king, clearly a title and position of honor. But it is also true that throughout his gospel this kingship is understood by some and completely missed by others, at times in the same instance. Kingship is seen ironically in thorned crowns and purple robes, and paradoxically in lowly but good shepherds. Even the phrase “King of the Jews” in the passion narrative itself is an example of how the same title can be used both with the thrust of honor and glory for some and the intent of shame and ridicule for others; with both an eschatological vision and with a vision clouded by human jockeying for power and position—simultaneously. Behind this common usage is the reality that there are all around Jesus those who see like the blind man in John 9 and those who do not see like the chief priests and Roman authorities, those who either do not know or falsely think they know.(1) Thus to outsiders, Jesus’s blood is shamefully spilled, and in his death there is neither hope of retribution nor satisfaction for this shameful king. But to those who see Jesus’s hour at hand in the passion, the blood spilled is done so as the kingly good shepherd who has just laid down his life for his friends—honorably, wrenchingly.

In the vile shame of death on a cross rests a peculiar beauty, an invitation even within our own dismissals: Here is your King.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Cf. John 3:8; 8:14; 9:29 and John 6:41-42; 7:27-28.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Facing Reality

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In the movie A Few Good Men, we get the iconic line from Colonel Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson) under cross examination in a trial by Lieutenant Lionel Kaffee (Tom Cruise): “You can’t handle the truth!” The phrase jars us even as it resonates. In John’s gospel, Jesus taught that we would know the truth and the truth would set us free. However, herein lies the challenge: Truth can set us free, but we can’t always handle the truth!

What does that mean? An old preacher used to say that God cleanses sin, not excuses. Yet as I study the human condition, I find that excuses are our specialty. When someone is caught in some wrong doing, when we are exposed in a hypocrisy, when facts speak for themselves, we often find elaborate (and contrived) rationalizations or denials: “You don’t understand…” “It was more complicated…” “They brought it on themselves…” Or, as we find in the first book of the Bible, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree.”

I have read many books on the Nazi period and those who seemed unable to come to terms with the evil to which they contributed. I have recently been reading a book by Jean Francois Revel exposing the intricate webs of truth avoidance by the French Socialists and Communists in regards to the evils by and under existing communism. Men and women of eminent credentials, from significant educational institutions, employ the most mind-bendingly silly arguments to justify evils committed under their preferred system, whilst simultaneously demonizing those of their clearly defined enemies. We don’t need to look to foreign countries or history for examples; continual scandals and shenanigans and the on-going denials are evidence that this is a human issue, and not a political, racial, historical, or geographical one.

It is not a pleasant thing to contemplate, but it is real: this self-justifying mechanism, this denial system, this hidden factor that makes me quick to judge others for infractions against me or my view of morality, but which equally quickly grants allowances, justifications, rationale for my own failings, errors, or wrong doings.

When Jesus said that we would know the truth, part of this truth is that we would know ourselves. That is, who and what we are, that something is indeed wrong, that something is wrong with us! We need help, we need healing, we need something to intervene in our lives to address the broken aspects. Sin is the biblical condition named to define this issue. The Greek word often used is hamartia, which means to miss the mark, as when an arrow misses the target. Something in space and time has happened that has disrupted and disordered reality. Though we often see the truth and maybe even at some level want the truth, we indeed cannot always handle it—at least, not without grace.

On the contrary, Jesus knew what was in men and women. He came as God’s means of renewal and redemption. He came as light, and he came as the door to another kingdom where light, life, and hearts are exposed. As the door, a way is opened to new life, and Jesus beckons, “Come unto me.” So, where are you today? Making excuses, justifying behavior, rationalizing attitudes, or seeking grace to be different? God loves us as we are, but loves us too much to leave us as we are. If we can handle it, the truth will set us free.

Stuart McAllister is regional director for the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – All Is Not Well

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Through winding, trash-strewn roads and poverty-lined streets we made our way to another world. Clotheslines hung from every imaginable protrusion, a symbol of the teeming life that fought to survive there, and a contrast to the empty, darkened world of night. The only light in otherwise pitch-black alleys came from the glow of cigarettes and drug pipes, which for split seconds illumined faces that lived here. It was late and I was sick, discovering after a long flight that I had not escaped the office stomach flu after all. Our van was full of tourists, their resort brochures a troubling, colorful contrast to the streets that would bring them there. Strangers who only moments before wore the expressions of anticipation of vacation now rode in expressionless silence. One man broke that silence, just as the taxi turned the corner seemingly into an entirely new realm and resort. With pain and poverty now literally behind him, he said quietly, “Well… It is what it is.”

These words rung in my ears all weekend, most of which was spent crumpled on the bathroom floor, unable to participate in the destination wedding we had come to “paradise” to enjoy. In the end, it seemed a metaphor for thoughts I wanted to remember physically and not in mere abstractions. You see, typically, when the drowsy, comfortable world I have come to expect is jarred awake by visions of the way the majority of the world actually lives, the upset that is caused is largely conceptual, immaterial, abstract. Sure, I am momentarily both deeply saddened and humbled by the wealth of resources and rights many of us take for granted in the West. I am aware again of the need to stay involved and vocal about emergency relief efforts and perpetual global injustices that take place daily right under our noses. But for the most part, my angst, my theology, my reactions are all abstract, observed mentally, not physically. That is, they remain deeply-felt issues, but not concrete matters of life.

Of course, I am not suggesting that abstract, philosophical ideas are the problem—clearly my vocation is dedicated to the notion that ideas carry consequences, that reflection on questions of truth, beauty, hope, and love are indeed matters vital to the development of fulfilled and finite human beings. What I am suggesting is that the abstract is both hopeless and of no use without the concrete (inasmuch as the concrete is a desert without the infinite).

This is made especially clear in the Christian story. Many of the most stirring theological pronouncements Jesus made were in fact not statements at all—but a life, a death, a meal shared, a daily, physical reality changed, a new possibility realized.

And this is precisely why those simple words “It is what it is” are a coping mechanism that should sicken us every bit as thoroughly as the scenes that make us want to utter them in the first place. Far from a mere collection of abstractions about another world, the Christian life is an active declaration that all is not as it appears. While other worldviews and religions offer an explanation for why and how this world “is what it is,” Christianity offers something different. With the prophets, with the Incarnate Christ, the God-Man among us, every story and parable and interaction declares: “This is not the way it’s supposed to be!”

Professor of theology William Cavanaugh notes that this vital difference in perspective takes form from the very beginning, starting with the way the book of Genesis tells the origins of the world. Instead of telling a creation story like the Babylonians, for instance, where the circumstances of creation are awry from the start, the Hebrews tell a story where all is inherently good from the beginning, but then something goes terribly wrong. What this tells every hearer of the story thereafter is that things are not the way they are supposed to be. As Cavanaugh notes, “There is a revolutionary principle right there in the Scriptures which allows us to unthink the inevitability of sin, to unthink the inevitability of violence, and so on.”(1) The very first story God tells provides a framework for walking through a world enslaved by poverty and violence, sin and deception—a framework that provides both profound meaning (this is not the way it’s supposed to be!) and a concrete call to live daily into other, redemptive possibilities—possibilities Christ himself embodied.

For anyone plagued by the signs of inevitably despairing world, the story Jesus embodies affords us a language far beyond impotent coping mechanisms or naïve delusions that we can save the world. Rather, we unite ourselves with one who has already set in motion the work of new creation. Here, it is an inherently Christian task to actively work at unthinking the inevitability of the way things are and to labor accordingly at changing them. Any reflection of truth and beauty, however abstract, if truly lived out by those who believe them, will ultimately address the concrete matters of life as well. For the Christian, this is a world where nothing merely unfortunately is what it is. Imagining other possibilities, working to unthink the divisions, deceptions, and frameworks that keep us bound to creation’s fall and not its redemption, we join the work of Father and Spirit. We join the Son who takes the abstractions of truth and beauty and declares concretely, “Behold, I make all things new.”

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) William Cavanaugh with Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 95, Jan/Feb 2009.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Does Religion Oppress Women?

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A New York Times article by Nicholas Kristof caught my attention. “Does Religion Oppress Women?” was the question and the title of the article. As someone who speaks and writes on behalf of the Christian faith, I have often heard this asserted as a reason against belief in the Christian faith—or any faith at all. But I am also a woman and I wondered how a journalist like Kristof might answer this question. Moreover, I wondered what in his travels and experience he had seen that made him write about this topic in particular.

Kristof has traveled extensively across the African continent and has spent time in some of Africa’s poorest communities. In his many essays documenting these experiences, he often talks about the role of faith, acknowledging both its positive role and its negative contribution in the life of African women specifically. He writes, “I’ve seen people kill in the name of religion… But I’ve also seen Catholic nuns showing unbelievable courage and compassion in corners of the world where no other aid workers are around, and mission clinics and church-financed schools too numerous to mention.”(1) So, is religion, and Christianity in particular, good for women? Kristof does not offer an easy answer to this question.

And of course, there are not easy answers. In 2010, as reported in Christianity Today magazine, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that Christians in some countries in Africa still practiced female genital mutilation.(2) For many, and particularly persons of faith, these findings are very troubling.

In fact, these findings take on doleful irony when one looks at the earliest Christian movement and its attraction for women in particular. The world of the Roman Empire, filled with a diverse array of religious options, could not compete with the growing Christian movement in its appeal to women. So many women were becoming Christians, in fact, that pagan religious leaders used its attraction to women as an argument against Christianity. In his treatise, On True Doctrine, the pagan leader Celsus wrote in alarming terms about the subversive nature of Christianity to the stability of the Empire and regarded the disproportionate number of women among the Christians as evidence of the inherent irrationality and vulgarity of the Christian faith. Historian David Bentley Hart writes of Celsus’s alarm: “It is unlikely that Celsus would have thought the Christians worth his notice had he not recognized something uniquely dangerous lurking in their gospel of love and peace… [A]nd his treatise contains a considerable quantity of contempt for the ridiculous rabble and pliable simpletons that Christianity attracted into its fold: the lowborn and uneducated, slaves, women and children.”(3) Indeed, Christianity attracted women and others deemed on the bottom rung of society because it elevated their status from an often oppressive Roman patriarchy.

Even a cursory survey of the historic evidence concerning women and early Christianity demonstrates an ineluctable pull. Rather than being another force for oppression, Christianity drew women into its fold.

Hart adds: “There is no doubt for any historian of early Christianity that this was a religion to which women were powerfully drawn, and one that would not have spread nearly so far or so swiftly but for the great number of women in its fold.”(4) In a world where women were largely viewed as household property or worse, how could they not be drawn to a figure who elevated their worth and status? Jesus, unlike many in his contemporary world, showed extraordinary kindness and care to women—even women of questionable character—with whom no pious Jew would relate. He was often criticized for this by the religious of his day. But he welcomed women into his community of disciples just the same.

At the heart of Christianity is Jesus. Jesus raised people up to the full-stature of their humanity. And the earliest followers of Jesus, as Hart concludes, “from the first, placed charity at the center of the spiritual life as no pagan cult ever had, and raised the care of widows, orphans, the sick, the imprisoned, and the poor to the level of the highest of religious obligations.”(5) Of the Messianic figure Isaiah prophesied, “A battered reed he will not break off, and a smoldering wick he will not put out.” Instead, in a world where women, among many others, are often battered reeds and smoldering wicks, this is liberating, good news.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Nicholas Kristof, “Does Religion Oppress Women?” The New York Times, December 15, 2009.

(2) Christianity Today, “Spotlight: What We Learned About Africa,” April 2010, vol. 54, no. 6, 11.

(3) David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 115. See also pp. 159-161.

(4) Ibid., 159-160.

(5) Ibid., 164.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Where Forgiveness Is Suffering

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In four horrific months in 1994, at the urging of the Rwandan government, the poorer Hutu majority took up bayonets and machetes and committed genocide against the wealthier Tutsi minority. In the wake of this unspeakable tragedy, nearly a million people had been murdered.

In August of 2003, driven by overcrowded prisons and backlogged court systems, 50,000 genocide criminals, people who had already confessed to killing their neighbors, were released again into society. Murderers were sent back to their homes, back to neighborhoods literally destroyed at their own hands, to live beside the few surviving relatives of the very men, women, and children they killed.

Now more than twenty years later, with eyes still bloodshot at visions of a genocide it failed to see, the world continues to watch Rwanda with a sense of foreboding, wondering what happens when a killer comes home; what happens when victims, widows, orphans, and murderers look each other in the eyes again; what happens when the neighbor who killed your family asks to be forgiven. For the people of Rwanda, the description of the Hebrew prophet is a reality with which they live: “And if anyone asks them, ‘What are these wounds on your chest?’ the answer will be, ‘The wounds I received in the house of my friends.’”(1)

How does a culture bear the wounds of genocide and the agony of forgiveness?

For Steven Gahigi, that question is answered in a valley of dry bones which cannot be forgotten. An Anglican clergyman who lost 142 members of his family in the Rwandan genocide, he thought he had lost the ability to forgive. Though his inability plagued him, he had no idea how to navigate through a forgiveness so costly. “I prayed until one night I saw an image of Jesus Christ on the cross…I thought of how he forgave, and I knew that I and others could also do it.”(2) Inspired by this vision, Gahigi somehow found the words to begin preaching forgiveness. He first did this in the prisons where Hutu perpetrators sat awaiting trial, and today he continues in neighborhoods where the victims of genocide live beside its perpetrators. For Gahigi, wounds received in the house of friends can only be soothed with truth-telling, restitution, interdependence, and reconciliation, all of which he finds accessible only because of Christ.

In some ways, the work of reconciliation that continues to take place in Rwanda in lives on every side of the genocide may be difficult to describe apart from the cross of Christ. While it is true that forgiveness can be explained in therapeutic terms, that the act of forgiving is beneficial to the forgiver, and forgiveness releases the victim from the one who has wronged them, from chains of the past and a cell of resentment; what Rwandans are facing today undoubtedly reaches something beyond this.

While forgiveness is certainly a form of healing in lives changed forever by genocide, it is also very much a form of suffering.

Miroslav Volf, himself familiar with horrendous violence in Croatia and Serbia, describes forgiveness as the exchange of one form of suffering for another, modeled to the world by the crucified Christ. He writes, “[I]n a world of irreversible deeds and partisan judgments redemption from the passive suffering of victimization cannot happen without the active suffering of forgiveness.”(3) For Rwandans, this is a reality well understood.

And for Christ, who extends to the world the possibility of reconciliation by embodying it, this suffering, this willingness to be broken by the very people with whom he is trying to reconcile, is the very road to healing and wholeness and humanity. “More than just the passive suffering of an innocent person,” writes Volf, “the passion of Christ is the agony of a tortured soul and a wrecked body offered as a prayer for the forgiveness of the torturers.”(3) There is no clearer picture of Zechariah’s depiction of wounds received at the house of friends than in a crucifixion ordered by an angry crowd that lauded Christ as king only hours before. And yet, it is this house of both murderous and weeping friends for which Jesus prays on the cross: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Far from the suggestion of a moralistic god watching a world of suffering and brokenness from a distance, the costly, unsentimental ministry of reconciliation comes to a world of violence and victims through arms that first bore the weight of the cross. For Steven Gahigi, who facilitates the difficult dialogues now taking place in Rwanda, who helps perpetrators of genocide to build homes for their victims’ families, forgiveness is indeed a active form of suffering, but one through which Christ has paved the hopeful, surprising way of redemption. Today, wherever forgiveness is a form of suffering, Christ accompanies the broken, leading both the guilty and the victimized through valleys of dry bones and signs of a coming resurrection.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Zechariah 13:6.

(2) Johann Christoph Arnold, Why Forgive? (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis books, 2010), 202.

(3) Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 125.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Right Circles

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I know what the Corinthians were thinking when they fought over theological allegiances. Paul describes the discordant sounds of the Christian community in Corinth: One was saying, “I follow Paul” and another, “I follow Apollos” and another, “I follow Cephas” and still another, “I follow Christ.” I remember a time when these words seemed so strange, and with Paul, I agreed the Corinthians were in need of reprimand. But I know how this happens; I have seen it happening in me.

The longer I study theology and its varying schools of thought, the more I realize how much I do not know. Mapping all of the types and categories, trends in thought and history, and the emerging theologies today seems nearly impossible. And even if it was possible to make sense of every school of thought, it would hardly mean that every theologian today and in history would fit neatly into one such school. The more I study theology, the more I fear being able to soundly navigate through the noisy choruses. I fear the blind spots that I likely have—and nurture. And so I find myself wanting to stand behind one or two trustworthy theologians in particular, drawing a line between us and all the rest, declaring myself a follower of his or her theological camp, and following my safe theological leader through the labyrinth of good and bad theologies.

The Corinthian mindset is not so different from my own.

During his tenure as a professor at Magdalen College in Oxford, C.S. Lewis delivered a memorial oration to the students of King’s College, the University of London. It was titled, “The Inner Ring.” Addressing his young audience as “the middle-aged moralist,” Lewis warned of the natural desire to find ourselves a part of the right inner circles, which exist endlessly and tauntingly throughout life. He cautioned about the consuming ambition to be an insider and not an outsider, on the right side of the right camp, though the lines that distinguish the camps are invisible, and the circle is never as perfect from within as it looks from without. Like the taunting mirage a weary traveler chases through the desert, noted Lewis, the quest for the Inner Ring will break your heart unless you break it.(1)

Of course, the desire to be seen inside the right camp is a desire that reaches well beyond the bounds of theology. The longing to belong and belong to the right group is an intense motivator of human behavior. It is how we make sense of the world around us; it is how we navigate through the recesses of conflicting thoughts, ideas, and worldviews. But it is also misleading. Membership can lead to blind allegiance, thoughtlessness, and persecution of those deemed outside. One only has to watch a group of kids to see how easily our desire to belong can be corrupted by our need to exclude. The inner circle is not inner if there are no outsiders. Choosing to follow Cephas is just as often about not choosing to follow Apollos or associate with his followers.

My choice of theological leaders bears similar qualities. Paul’s question rings in my ears the same way it did for the Corinthians: “Is Christ divided? Was Paul [or C.S. Lewis or your seminary professor] crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul [or John Calvin or your favorite preacher]?”

The kingdom in which Christ invites us to participate is in fact far greater than any one theologian pretends to describe, and it is not one of these, but Christ himself who reigns within it. “We go right on proclaiming Christ, the Crucified. Jews treat this like an anti-miracle—and Greeks pass it off as absurd. But to us who are personally called by God himself—both Jews and Greeks—Christ is God’s ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one. Human wisdom is so tiny, so impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. Human strength can’t begin to compete with God’s ‘weakness.’…But everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.”(2) The camp to which we want most to belong is his.

Following anyone other than Christ, we may find words of human wisdom, but we have emptied the cross of its power. Likewise, we find not the kingdom of God, but an inner circle with which we will eventually grow weary. Following Christ Jesus is something else entirely. Following Christ, we find a wisdom that is foolishness to many and a kingdom whose very description continues to crumble the walls we neatly build. Following Christ, we are repeatedly jarred awake to the realities of God’s reign, the inadequacy of our circles, and one far worthier of our boasting.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1980), 154.

(2) The Message, 1 Corinthians 1:22-31.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Sibling Rivalry

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One of the most humbling moments in my life happened during a soccer match. At a critical moment in the game, I had to decide whether to go it alone or let a better positioned teammate attempt an almost guaranteed goal; a rare treat in soccer. Sadly, the split seconds available for the decision were enough for my ego to override my better judgment. Unwilling to pass on the glory of scoring the winning goal, I made the wrong decision and lost the ball, costing the team an important game in the process.

Ironically, I am inclined to believe that the consequences for me would have been much worse if I had managed to score the goal. Though quite humiliating, that terrible mistake gave me a glimpse into my own soul in a way that might have been impossible if I had actually led the team to a win. While it is hard to assert our egos in the midst of failure and hardship, the ugliness of our self-centeredness can be easily camouflaged in the motives and methods of our success, leaving us blind to our own insuperable finitude. When our pursuit for success is severed from a healthy sense of our chronic indebtedness, achieving success can instill in us a measure of entitlement foreign to our true identity. Such a pitfall is even more consequential in our spiritual lives since it is harder to distinguish between self-serving motives and genuine zeal for God. Unlike the gaping sins of the prodigal son, the dutiful son’s alienation from the father comes neatly packaged in obedience and commitment, the very treasures some of us long to lay before our heavenly Father.

In spite of the fact that Jesus prayed fervently for unity among his followers, the visible church is often a conglomeration of competing factions, each equally convinced of its solitary possession of divine favor. Those who seek signs and wonders through the Holy Spirit are usually suspicious of those who emphasize exegetical approaches to the Scriptures. Christian scholars are sometimes content just to talk to each other, and the uncanny tendency of apologists to sniff out what they deem rotten doctrine is not always appreciated.

As a result, not only do we squander valuable benefits of dedicated teamwork within the household of faith, we also lose our edge in a broken world. Despite the monumental gains made in biblical research and translation, biblical illiteracy is still a high-ranking concern, and the frequent outbursts of oft-unfounded accusations from our detractors succeed in rattling the cage for not a few followers of Christ. While outcasts and sinners braved insults to seek refuge in Jesus, they bolt from the divided efforts of Christians and reject God because they mistake us for God.

When being right becomes an end in itself, we lose sight of our own need for God’s grace—a need that would be there even if we were faultless. Instead of recognizing that orthodoxy, though indispensable, is only the map of a journey which we must travel towards God, confidence in our knowledge of the truth becomes the missing link in our quest for self-sufficiency. We partition God’s comprehensive program for his people into various segments and guard our turfs with Herculean zeal. With a little practice, we become so adept at applying our preferred standards that we can accomplish the feat with our eyes closed. Having zeroed in on what we are certain to be God’s most vexing pet peeves, we stand poised not only to pronounce the verdict on those who offend but also to pound the gavel on God’s behalf. Before long, we, like Elijah, become convinced that we are the only ones who are faithful to God while all of his other children have lost their way.

Probably the best antidote to such spiritual calluses among loyal laborers in God’s vineyard is a healthy appreciation of the all-sufficiency of the Father and our exalted status as his humble children—a theological gem that is beautifully captured by C.S. Lewis in his book, Prince Caspian. When the children are reunited with Aslan after many years, Lucy expresses surprise that Aslan looks bigger. Aslan responds, “I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”(1) What a relief to remember that no amount of expertise on our part can ever diminish the glory of God or cause us to outlive God’s fatherly indulgence!

Pure, unadulterated motives may lie beyond the reach of even the most devout among us, but the intentional recognition of our humble place in deference to the majesty of our Maker is an indispensable ingredient in our service to God and others. It was neither out of false piety nor enslavement to sin that both Daniel and Nehemiah included themselves in their profound prayers of forgiveness on behalf of their sinful people (Daniel 9 and Nehemiah 1:6). While I do not subscribe to the relativistic “never judge anyone” maxim that greases the engine of the spirit of the age, I am also convinced that “The one aim of the call of God is the satisfaction of God, not a call to do something for Him.”(2)

J.M. Njoroge is member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) C. S. Lewis, The Complete Chronicles of Narnia (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 259.

(2) Oswald Chambers, as quoted by Os Guinness in The Call: Finding Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (Nashville: W Publishing Group, 2003), 41.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Considering Lilies

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Wendell Berry has written a poem that haunts me frequently. As a creative writer, the act of paying attention is both a spiritual and professional discipline. But far too often my aspirations for paying quality attention to everything dissolves into something more like attention deficit disorder. As it turns out, it is quite possible to see and not really see, to hear and not really hear. And this is all the more ironic when my very attempts to capture what I am seeing and hearing are the thing that prevent me from truly being present. Berry’s poem is about a man on holiday, who, trying to seize the sights and sounds of his vacation by video camera, manages to miss the entire thing.

…he stood with his camera

preserving his vacation even as he was having it

so that after he had had it he would still

have it. It would be there. With a flick

of a switch, there it would be. But he

would not be in it. He would never be in it.(1)

I sometimes wonder if one of the most quoted sayings of Jesus is not often employed with a similar irony. “Consider the lilies,” Jesus said, “how they grow; they neither toil nor spin. Yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field…will he not much more clothe you? Therefore, do not worry.“(2) Typically, Jesus is quoted here as giving a helpful word against worry. And he is. But worry is not the only command he articulates. Consider the lilies, he said. We hear the first instruction peripherally, hurriedly, as mere set up for the final instruction of the saying. And in so doing, we miss something great, perhaps even something vital, both in the means and in the end. With our rationalistic sensibilities, we gloss over consideration of the lilies; ironically, in an attempt to consider the real work Jesus is asking us to do.

But what if considering the lilies is the work, the antidote to anxious, preoccupied lives? What if attending to this short-lived beauty, to the fleeting details of a distracted world is a command Jesus wants us to take seriously in and of itself?

It is with such a conviction that artist Makoto Fujimura not only paints, but elsewhere comments on Mary and her costly pouring of perfume on the feet of Jesus. The anger of Judas and the disgust of the others are all given in rational terms, the cacophony of their reaction attempting to drown out her quiet act of attention: That bottle would have cost over a year’s wages. The poor could have used that money. This sinful woman clings to a holy man’s feet. Does he not see who it is who touches him? Their response to her and her act of beauty exposes their own inattention to a world beyond the one they see—to their own peril. As Fujimura writes, “Pragmatism, legalism, and greed cannot comprehend the power of ephemeral beauty. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness; the opposite of beauty is legalism. Legalism is hard determinism that slowly strangles the soul. Legalism injures by giving pragmatic answers to our suffering.”(3) The corollary, of course, is that beauty can offer healing; that paying attention, even to fleeting glimpses of the mere suggestion of new creation, is deeply restorative.

When Jesus asks the world to consider the lilies, to consider beauty in the midst of all the ashes around us, his request is full of promise, for he is both the Source of beauty and its Subject. His own history is one that takes so seriously the goodness of the created world that he joins us within it, taking even our profound wounds upon himself, and presenting in his body the hope of a creation made new. Paying attention to the ephemeral, being willing like Mary to risk and to recognize beauty, is in and of itself restorative because it is paying attention to him. Here, both the anxiety-addicted and the attention-overloaded can find solace in a different sort of kingdom: one in which there is room for the paradox of a fleeting world with eternity in its heart.

But perhaps Jesus also instructs the world to consider the lilies because it is the very characteristic of God’s concern for us. The daily liturgy of lilies comes with unceasing care and attention for all who will see it, the gift of a God who revels in the creation of yet another flower, the details of another sunset, the discovery of even one lost soul. Consider the lilies; how they grow. They neither toil, nor spin.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Wendell Berry, “The Vacation,” Selected Poems, (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1998), 157.

(2) Matthew 6:28-31.

(3) Makoto Fujimura, “The Beautiful Tears,” Tabletalk, September, 2010.

Restoration Arts Conference, April 17-18, 2015, Kansas City, Missouri:  Join Margaret Manning and Jill Carattini with artist Makoto Fujimura and other guest speakers for a weekend of art and conversation exploring the themes of beauty and terror, war and art.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Slow Semana Santa

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The Semana Santa, or Holy Week in Spain, is a week-long series of parades and festivities that culminate on Easter Sunday. Particularly notable in Sevilla, Spain (though held throughout the country and in many other parts of the world) the entire city converges. In fact, Semana Santa week is so vibrant and extraordinary in Sevilla that tourists from around the world often come to partake in these festival days.

One of the notable aspects of these celebrations is the parade floats of Jesus and his mother, Mary. Depicting the events of the last days of Jesus’s life, the statues are the main display of every float that traverses the parade route through the city. The statues themselves are from the seventeenth century, and are housed in area churches. I was able to see two of these statues in the historic Church of the Savior on a recent visit to Spain.

Perhaps more notable than the floats themselves is the way in which they are carried through the city streets. Every afternoon during the week, these floats are paraded through the streets for hours and hours. The pace is slow and deliberate, sometimes barely moving inches at a time, even as they are gently moving to the sonorous and doleful tones of the accompanying music. The point of the slow pace, which for the uninitiated seems almost ridiculous, is out of reverence for this historic tradition and the events represented in the life of Jesus.

I couldn’t help but parallel the slowness of these parade marches to the hurried pace of my own life. Always in a hurry to get to the “next event,” I am almost uncomfortable with any form of staying still. I remember when I was a child, I couldn’t wait to be a teenager. When I was a teenager, I couldn’t wait to be in college. When I was in college, I couldn’t wait to be a graduate student. When I was a graduate student, I couldn’t wait to be a professional. I look back on those hurried days now and lament that I rushed through them so quickly.

Of course, a society that values efficiency above everything doesn’t help to slow us down. Ours is a world in which “instant” becomes more and more important. The increasing speed of technology only adds to our impatience when things are not achieved instantaneously. I recognize that my own propensity to hurry, coupled with a society that moves at ever-quickening speeds, can be very detrimental for any kind of intentional slowing or cultivation of a reflective life.

The lives depicted in the Bible couldn’t be more different from our hurried lives. More importantly, and perhaps to our great frustration, the God revealed in the biblical stories is rarely in a hurry. Abraham and Sarah, for example, received the promise of an heir twenty-five years before they actually laid eyes on Isaac. Joseph had a dream as a teenager that his brothers would one day bow down to him. Yet it was countless years and many difficulties later that bring his brothers to kneel before him, asking for food. Moses was approximately eighty years old—long past his prime of life—when God appeared to him in the burning bush and called him to deliver the children of Israel. David was anointed king by Samuel as a young boy tending his father’s flocks, long before he finally ascended to the throne. And Jesus spent thirty years in relative obscurity, and only three years publicly announcing the kingdom and God’s rule that had come in his life and ministry.

From a human perspective, it is difficult to understand why God wasn’t more in a hurry to accomplish the plans for these individual lives as a part of the larger narrative of redemption. The Messiah was prophesied hundreds of years before he actually arrived on the scene. We cannot help but ask why God seems to move so slowly?
In Peter’s second letter, what is considered his last will and testament, he discusses the slowness of God in relation to the second coming of Christ. Many arose even in Peter’s time asking why God was so slow when it came to delivering on his promise of an eternal kingdom. They began to mock God assuming that “as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be.” Not so, Peter argues, for the slowness of God is in fact our salvation. “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance… Therefore, beloved, since you look for these things, be diligent to be found by him in peace, spotless and blameless, and regard the patience of our Lord to be salvation.”(1)

The long, slow, journey, marked by many Christians in the season of Lent towards Easter morning, can be arduous for those of us who find ourselves constantly racing towards what’s next—even rushing to get to the resurrection without stopping to ponder at Good Friday. These forty days can serve to remind all who hurry of God’s great forbearance and patience with us, even as they issue a call to slow-down and wait with Jesus. These days intentionally slow us and create space—what theologians call liminal space—making room for those of us with a tendency to rush—to wait and rest in the “in-between” and the “not yet.” Waiting for God in this liminal space gives more opportunity to be patient, “looking” as Peter says, at the “patience of our Lord to be salvation.”

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) 2 Peter 3:9, 14-15.