The earliest creeds of the Christian church confess that Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.” It is then confessed, “On the third day, he rose again.”(1) While modern presuppositions may tempt us to interpret the death and resurrection of Jesus as symbolic or spiritual in nature, there was nothing abstract about the events and details confessed by those who first beheld them. Jesus’s suffering was an actual, datable event in history, his crucifixion a sentence inflicted on an actual body; the proclamation of both was the remembrance of a cold reality, something akin to remembering the Holocaust or the Trail of Tears. Likewise, “the third day” was a tangible, historical occasion—albeit an occasion of unfathomable proportions.

Yet the resurrection of Jesus was not viewed as merely a static fact on this particular third day, a fixed event to remain in this history alone. “We believe that Jesus died and rose again” wrote the apostle Paul, “and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.”(2) For those who first beheld it, the resurrection was an event with inherent consequences for everything—for order and purpose, for what it means to be human itself. The earliest confessions of Christ’s death, burial, and third day rising from the dead are immediately followed by certain understood implications. As the Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s short story observes of this resurrected one, Jesus went and “thrown everything off balance.” The unlikely prophet reasons, “If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can.”

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Thrown Off Balance →

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to travel across the country from Massachusetts to Montana. While I had often traveled across the country on family vacations, I had never driven through South Dakota. But on this trip I was able to see quite a bit of the state that makes up part of the Great Plains in the United States. Having lived near the city, I remember being struck by the vast expanses of what appeared to be uninhabited land. Rolling grasslands, without many trees, offered a view of the landscape that was as far as it was wide. I remember wondering why anyone would make a home in such a desolate place.

Several years after this trip, I read Kathleen Norris’s book Dakota and marveled at her poignant description of this land. Her memoir both enticed me and made me wary of life in the Dakotas. The opening paragraphs of her book explain why:

“The high plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act like a crucible for those who inhabit them. Like Jacob’s angel, the region requires that you wrestle with it, before it bestows a blessing… This book is an invitation to a land of little rain and few trees, dry summer winds and harsh winters, a land rich in grass, and sky and surprises.”(1)

She concludes by saying that “the land and the sky of the West often fill what Thoreau termed our ‘need to witness our limits transgressed.’ Nature, in Dakota, can indeed be an experience of the holy.”(2)

It is here that Norris intricately connects a geographical place with the possibility for spiritual revelation, a phenomenon often termed “spiritual geography.” A spiritual geography is recognition of the intersection of one’s physical geography with an internal or spiritual geography. Norris describes, for example, the fierce independence of those who reside in the Dakotas and their fortitude in response to the harsh conditions of climate and terrain.

A sense of place, land, and geography also fills the pages of the Bible. There is hardly a description given of persons and events without also discussing the physical landscape. Particularly in the narrative of the Exodus from Egypt and the subsequent sabbatical in the wilderness, one is struck by how much the geography functions as a character in the grand story of the redemption of Israel. It is the wilderness, this wild place of drought and barrenness that God chooses as a place for revelation. In fact, throughout the spiritual geography of Scripture, God consistently shows up in arid regions—in the brutality of loss, the determination of suffering, and the thirst for healing.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Spiritual Geography →

It is not very difficult for me to spend significant amounts of time dwelling on the past. Sometimes it is a rehearsal of prior conversations replaying in my mind; what should have been said and what could have been said. Or I ruminate on past regrets of what might have been had I chosen another path, or taken a different turn in the road of my life. Often I sift through memories of individuals who are long gone—either through death or some other forced absence from my life—wishing for more time with them or another opportunity to commune together. Regrets, nostalgic remembering, and wearying analytical thoughts collude to keep me bound in a place to which I can never return in real-time.

Dwelling in the past, as if one could take up residence there permanently, is a strategy I often employ when I find the present or the future daunting. Rather than face what it is I need to face, I retreat into my past searching for comfort or numbness. Part of the reason I do this lies in the simple fact that to move forward is to leave behind that which has become dear—whether that is a cherished memory or a cherished grudge. More important, however, to leave something of our past behind is to actually let go of part of our identity. It is the call into the wild and into becoming something—and someone—currently unknown to us. For most, it is a call too frightening and too challenging to heed. For some, however, it is a call that woos us to consider what more we are capable of doing and who we are capable of being, both now in the present and as we journey into an unknown future.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Past, Present, Future →

I had no idea why tears so abruptly filled my eyes. I was crying before I understood why I might be crying. But the sense that the reaction meant something was as real to me as the tears.

I was seated alone in a packed crowd at Duke University’s stunning neo-gothic chapel, listening very intently as Scottish composer James MacMillan conducted his St. Luke Passion for choir and orchestra. The core text of the piece is taken word for word from Luke’s Gospel. The narrative begins as Jesus and his disciples prepare for their last meal together and ends with the last breath of Christ on the cross, the centurion exclaiming what the angry crowd moments earlier would not: “Certainly this man was innocent.” At any point, for any number of reasons, tears were certainly explicable, appropriate even. But there was something very particular about this moment which gave me pause months, even years, thereafter. My body seemed to rush ahead of any sort of conscious thinking. This was not a slow climb of emotion welling up as tears that eventually fell. I was not reckoning with a particular thought or concept that suddenly clicked. Rather, my eyes seemed to confess that my brain and body were up to something, caught up in an activity that the conceptual part of me hadn’t yet realized.

Neurologists and therapists experienced with the power of music wouldn’t find in my description anything much out of the ordinary. “Listening to music is not just auditory,” writes the late neurologist Oliver Sacks, “it is motoric as well: ‘We listen to music with our muscles,’ as Nietzsche wrote. We keep time to music, involuntarily, even if we are not consciously attending to it, and our faces and postures mirror the ‘narrative’ of the melody, and the thoughts and feelings it produces.”(1) The use of music in a wide range of therapies has long been known effective, helping patients who have difficulty with language, cognition, or motor control, even as the processes involved remain somewhat mysterious. Recent advancements in the field of neurology and brain-imaging offer much insight into the brain’s activity in the midst of music-making and music-hearing. With increasing light being shed on the brain’s plasticity (its ability to change) and music’s ability to activate and engage entire regions and networks within the brain, music is increasingly being engaged as an effective component of rehabilitative care.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Do Not Be Afraid →

On February 14th this year, as most young people worldwide were celebrating Valentine’s Day, the day of love, a young man rammed an explosive-laden vehicle into a convoy of security forces in the northern part of India leaving many soldiers dead, several more wounded, and scores of broken lives and broken hearts in the wake of the tragedy. Angered by the unprovoked attack, the nation retaliated. A month later, the world watched in shocked horror as another young man coolly entered a place of worship and calmly gunned to death fifty people and injuring many more, while recording the event live with no qualms, whatsoever. In his 74-page hate manifesto, one statement starkly reads: “Violence over meekness.”

These are but a few vignettes of the narrative of hate, revenge, destruction, and death that dominate the world’s headlines with increasing and disturbing regularity. In a world of such gruesome realities, what is the message of Good Friday? What is the implication of Easter?

Good Friday is a powerful reminder of God’s forgiveness and Easter is the declaration that we can access it. In an “eye for an eye” world where the ideology of hate, revenge, and retaliation rules, Christ’s words on the cross, as his life excruciatingly ebbs away, stand in sharp contrast. “Father forgive them,” he says of his executioners, “for they know not what they do.” And the wonder is that these words still resonate in the life and experience of those who worship him and choose to model their lives after him.

The recently released movie, “The Least of These,” features the story of late Australian missionary Graham Staines who, along with his two young sons were cruelly killed by a rabid and frenzied mob in Manoharpur, Orissa on January 23, 1999. Their crime? They dared to live out the love of Christ among the needy, sick, and neglected ones in this corner of the world. At the funeral of her husband and two boys, Gladys Staines, his widow, spoke and said, “I am not bitter. Neither am I angry. I can forgive their deeds. Only Jesus can forgive their sins… let us burn hatred and spread the flame of Christ’s love.” Powerful words coming from a life that has experienced God’s love and forgiveness in fullness.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Forgiveness →

The glory of God is the human person fully alive. I first read this quote by Irenaeus of Lyons while still a graduate student. In my early rendering of this evocative statement, I imagined people at play in a field of flowers, the sun shining brightly. Everyone is happy and smiling, laughing even, as they dance and play in the fields of the Lord. As I pictured it in my mind’s eye, the human person fully alive was a person alive to possibility, never-ending opportunities, and always happy. How could it be otherwise with God’s glory as the enlivening force?

One author suggests the same in his commentary on Irenaeus’ statement:

“God’s intentions towards me might be better than I’d thought. His happiness and my happiness are tied together? My coming fully alive is what He’s committed to? That’s the offer of Christianity? Wow! I mean, it would make no small difference if we knew–and I mean really knew–that down-deep-in-your-toes kind of knowing that no one and nothing can talk you out of–if we knew that our lives and God’s glory were bound together. Things would start looking up. It would feel promising…the offer is life.”(1)

Despite my romantic imagination and the author’s exuberant interpretation, I am often perplexed as to just what “fully alive” looks like for many people in our world. How would this read to women in the Congo, for example, whose lives are torn apart by tribal war and violence against their own bodies? What would this mean to an acquaintance of mine who is a young father recently diagnosed with lymphoma? What about those who are depressed or those who live with profound disabilities?

If feeling alive is only that God is happy when we are happy, then perhaps God is quite sad. Surely God’s glory is much larger than human happiness, isn’t it? Certainly, happiness is a gift and a blessing of the human experience, and for many it is there in abundance. Yet, are those who have reason for sorrow—those who do not find themselves amidst fields of flowers or bounty, those who have to work to find goodness—are they beyond the reflection of God’s glory?

The reality is that Irenaeus’ oft-used and oft-interpreted statement had a specific, apologetic context that was not really about human happiness. Irenaeus lived during a time when gnostic sects were trying to deny the real flesh and blood reality of Jesus. In their alternative view, only the spirit was redeemed, and the body should be ignored at best, or indulged at worst, since nothing regarding the body mattered. As a result, they denied the full humanity of Jesus. He could not have died a physical death on the cross, since he was merely an enlightened spirit, or some form of lesser deity. And he was certainly not one who would enter into the created world to take on the messy nature of life.(2)

When Irenaeus describes the glory of God as the human being fully alive he is correcting this aberrant and heretical notion that Jesus was not fully human. Irenaeus countered that in fact, the glory of God so inhabited this man from Nazareth that he was fully alive to all of what it meant to be human. Jesus experienced hunger, thirst, weariness, frustration, sorrow, and despair—and he experienced the joy and beauty that came from complete dependence on God. To be fully alive, as one sees in the life of Jesus, includes all human experience—the joys as well as the sorrows.

Irenaeus’ continues his thought by saying: “[T]he life of man is the vision of God. If the revelation of God through creation already brings life to all living beings on the earth, how much more will the manifestation of the Father by the Word bring life to those who see God.”(3) Human beings are fully alive as they find life in this one who in his human life reveals both the eternal God and the vision of God for fully alive human beings. Certainly, our lives include events and seasons that we wish were not part of the fully alive human experience. But perhaps those who seek true life might recognize these appointments with beginnings and endings, joys and sorrows, death and resurrection as an entryway into a deeper understanding of the human experience. And as that door is opened, we can be ushered into the deep and abiding fellowship of the Divine Community—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—not phantom spirits, not distant deities, but intimates to all that it means to be human.

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

(1) John Eldridge, Waking the Dead (Nashville: Thomas-Nelson Publishers, 2003), 12.
(2) Cyril Richardson ed., Early Christian Fathers (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 345.
(3) Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, (IV, 20, 7).

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It was a cold February at Christ of the Desert monastery, high in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Behind the chapel, author William Bryant Logan noticed an open grave, the disturbed red soil waiting in a tall mound beside it.

“Has a brother died?” he asked a monk.

“No,” the monk answered, “but we cannot dig in winter, so we opened this grave ahead of time, just in case.”

To many of us, an open grave is unnerving, the thought of soil disturbed and waiting entirely unwelcome. “An open grave is an open mouth,” writes Logan. “It exhales all the suggestion of the dark.”(1) In the Western world in particular, we have a complicated relationship with death, dismissing as much of it as we can manage from sight, mind, and society. An open grave is a gaping wound we prefer to turn our eyes away from.

Christian theologian J. Todd Billings notes something similar about the presence of lament at the grave. Lament is an expression of grief, a practice—maybe even a word—that has fallen out of use in modern times, a discipline often avoided, even buried in Christian liturgies. “[I]n a growing trend,” writes Billings, “many funerals completely avoid the language of dying and death as well as the appearance of the dead body—turning it all into a one-sided ‘celebration’ of the life of the one who has died.”(1) Such language might be fitting for certain worldviews, particularly those worldviews where death remains an enemy that puts an end to the life we are celebrating. But the biblical paradox about death attends to far more of the human experience.

The Christian worldview affords the hopeful (and far more multivalent) language of celebration to be sure—Christ has indeed conquered death—but likewise, we are afforded the equally hopeful language of lament. We are given permission to groan as mortals who do not yet taste the fullness of the victory Christ has won, as creatures who confess with their Creator that death is an enemy of God. Where we fail to face this fuller vision of our own mortality, writes Billings, “we attend to one side of the biblical paradox about death, forgetting that even the death of a very elderly person is not ‘altogether sweet and beautiful’… [At the grave of Lazarus], Jesus still wept—even for one who would be raised again. And so should we.”(2)

For Billings, the signs of death’s current reign and the dire need for the language of lament are not the mere theological abstractions of a theology professor. In a book he never fathomed he would write at the midpoint of his life, Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ, his need for the language of lament is voiced in personal terms. It is equally clear that lament itself is a gift of the church to the world.

In one section, Billings describes his own congregation, with its array of people and stages of life, a church that on a regular basis baptizes people into new life and holds funerals marking death. This collective, human journey struck him as he led a Sunday school class shortly after his diagnosis. “In this room are cancer survivors who have gone through chemo; and there are others who have lost spouses and other loved ones to cancer and other disease and tragedy. The congregation is the only place in Western culture where we develop relationships, celebrate our faith and life together, and also extend those same relationships all the way through death and dying… That is a gift of the church. I would go so far as to say that a top recommended question from me for ‘church shoppers’ might be this: who would you like to bury you?”(3)

For any death-denying culture, the church sits as a striking counterpoint, empowered by the crucified Jesus to tell a vastly different story. But the whole story needs to be told. The Bible’s “laments, petitions, and praises—have been a staple of Christian worship for centuries. They, along with the sacraments of Christ’s dying and new life, have incorporated death into the story of Christian worship.”(4) The Christian imagination is not one that has to bury its head in the sand, taking its cues from our culture’s qualms about death. To lament is not to undermine that we are a people who live in hope. On the contrary, it is a gift of God for the people of God, who discover in the vicarious humanity of the crucified Lord both a more profound rejoicing and a more honest lament. Whereas other worldviews have no basis for the practice of lamentation (to whom would we lament?), for the Christian it is a part of the journey, a testimony to our identity in Christ. “To mourn and to protest is to testify that the gifts of creation are truly wondrous,” writes Billings, “that the communion with God and others that we taste in Christ is truly the way things are supposed to be—and thus alienation and death are not truly ‘natural’ but enemies of God and his kingdom.”(5)

For days marked by loss, it is a weighty thought, full of God’s care for multifaceted journeys: for crossings from birth to death, for journeys marked by both celebration and suffering, for moments of thirst and for places of provision. Because of Christ, the Christian is given a language and a leader through all of it: beside still waters, through dark valleys and green pastures to a table prepared in the presence of enemies, with tears to shed at the tomb of a friend and suffering carried on a personal cross. There are no abstractions here. The Christian story is mercifully not one that asks us to deny the dark and painful realities of life. Death is not pushed away in denial, but incorporated into God’s redemptive story, held by a storyteller who knows every part of the journey to resurrection, even the open grave.

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

(1) William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 48.
(2) J. Todd Billings, Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker,2015), 108.
(3) Ibid., 101.
(4) Ibid., 109.
(5) Ibid., 100.

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On Holy Saturday, my colleague Jill Carattini tweeted poignantly and truly, “Friends, we have much to grieve in this world, much to lament, individually and collectively. Let’s not rush to Easter yet. Good Friday gives us permission to lament profoundly together.”

Easter Sunday has come and gone. But the day felt more like Good Friday. Somehow it feels like we need to extend our stay at Good Friday—stay a little longer, mourn a little more.

Not unlike the disciples themselves.

In Luke 24:13–49, the episode on the road to Emmaus is set, not in the dusking shadows of the crucifixion, but in the dawning light of the resurrection. But it is a poignant narrative set in the shadows cast under the light of Easter.

The two disciples on the road to Emmaus “stood still, looking sad” (v.17). Even though we live on the other side of Easter, there are those times when we feel as if there isn’t much of a point and purpose to life. These are those moments when life comes to a standstill, especially in times of deep sorrow. We feel like the last person in an evacuated world.

The disciples had expected Jesus to manifestly and unmistakably defeat their oppressors and fulfil their dreams: “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (v.21). But the exact opposite appears to have happened. Not unlike the disciples, we also place our hopes on certain things and expect things to turn out in a certain way. But in life, things don’t always happen the way we want, hope, pray, or expect. The road to Emmaus is littered with shattered hopes and broken dreams.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Road from Emmaus →

An important manuscript long thought lost was rediscovered hiding in a Pennsylvania seminary on a forgotten archival shelf. The recovered manuscript was a working score for a piano version of Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” which means “grand fugue.” Apparently, grand is an understatement. The work is known as a monument of classical music and described by historians as a “symphonic poem” or a “leviathan”—an achievement on the scale of the finale of his Ninth Symphony. The work is one of the last pieces Beethoven composed, during the period when he was completely deaf. The markings throughout the manuscript are in the composer’s own hand.

In fact, such markings are a particular trademark of Beethoven, who was known for his near obsessive editing. Unlike Mozart, who typically produced large scores in nearly finished form, Beethoven’s mind was so full of ideas that it was never made up. Never satisfied, he honed his ideas brutally.

A look at the recovered score portrays exactly that. Groups of measures throughout the 80-page manuscript are furiously canceled out with cross-marks. Remnants of red sealing wax, used to adhere long corrections to an already scuffed up page, remain like scars. There are smudges where he rubbed away ink while it was still wet and abrasions where he erased notes with a needle. Dated changes and omissions are scattered throughout the score, many of these markings dating to the final months before his death in 1827.

I think there is something encouraging about the labored work of an artist chasing after genius. Beethoven wrestled notes onto the page. For him composing music was a messy, physical process. Ink was splattered, wax burned, erasers wore holes in the paper. What started as a clean page became a muddled, textured mess of a masterpiece ever unfinished.

Maybe it is the artist in me that understands work that never quite feels finished, but I am jarred by the finality of certain sentences on the ancient lips of those who evoke the mystery of faith: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”(1) The Greek wording here carries with it the force of an expletive. Translators use the word “behold” to convey the finality that Paul speaks with force, but something is most certainly lost. Set in motion by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the effect of these events on human lives is nothing short of the abrupt creative work of God at the very beginning, when God speaks chaos into order.  If this were a statement given as a contemporary text it would have come in all caps: Therefore, if anyone is in Christ: NEW CREATION! Paul is emphatic in a way that cannot be escaped. The Christian in Christ has been made by the Spirit into something new. To use Christ’s own words from the cross: It is finished. Before she has even tried to live well, before she has even labored as a disciple, the marred and muddied scene of her heart has been made abruptly and finally clean and new. The Father has handed us the masterpiece of his Son and told us that when God looks at us God sees perfection.

Though I stand amazed at this mysterious, nearly violent grace, it is also easy for me to stumble at the thought of it. I imagine God handing me a clean paper and asking me to hold it in a world full of ink and dirt and choices. And I immediately wish I would have been more careful. I picture the white page given to me and think of all of the smudges and eraser marks I’ve added to it, some of them from lessons learned the hard way, others merely from bumping into life as I walked along.

Life is far more disheveled than we would like it to be. People get angry and depressed and sick. We struggle with remaining hopeful in the dark, seeing through bouts of self-deception, believing both the deceptive insecurities and the inflated depositions we hold on ourselves. Our lives don’t turn out how we planned them, and the roads we choose aren’t as straight as we would like them to be. Even so, Paul seems to say, the Christian’s vital truth is that God is kind and faithful through the mess because Christ himself has come into the very midst of it. “For we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”(2)

Someone has called Beethoven’s masterpieces works of “three-dimensional” art. There is a texture and a character to his manuscripts that display an artist who went beyond merely writing the notes, but stretched himself, and the page itself, to make a symphony. All the more mellifluous is the work of Christ. Life in Christ is fleshed out of us. But it is first his own flesh. Our scuffs and blotches are wrought with the work of human one who descends into the mess of life to shape us. Like a composer willing to labor over his pages, the potter’s hands have not been afraid to get dirty. Our lives, which may seem glued with corrections and shaped with notations, are finally marked with the signs of the master whose work in making NEW CREATION is quite beautifully decisive.

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

(1) 2 Corinthians 5:17.
(2) Romans 8:28.

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

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

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

While all of these are plausible, historical reasons, there is another strategic, indeed, apologetic reason why the women were the first witnesses. In the first century, the testimony of women was not counted as credible. In both Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, and the Talmud a woman’s testimony is considered unreliable at best. “But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex…since it is probable that they may not speak truth, either out of hope of gain, or fear of punishment.”(2) The Talmud states that “any evidence which a woman [gives] is not valid (to offer)….This is equivalent to saying that one who is Rabbinically accounted a robber is qualified to give the same evidence as a woman.”(3) No man in the first century would give credence to a woman’s testimony.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Easter Skeptics →

At a late night dinner in Colombo last month, my colleague and I were hosted by a loving young Sri Lankan couple and their cricket-loving lad. Conversation, calamari, caramel custard, and coffee was enjoyed well into midnight at the Cinnamon Grand—a delightful combo that’s etched forever into our memories.

My visits to Colombo have always been heart-warming. Lovely people, luscious land, and languid mood. But there’s so much more to this people and to this place that fascinates me. Thirty brutal years of sweat, blood, and tears. Thirty years of an ugly civil war. Thirty years of fear, hurt, and pain. Thirty years of despair that ended in 2009.

In my visits, I’ve had the privilege of interacting with young and old Sri Lankans: those who have been in the thick of all that transpired in those thirty ghastly years. I’ve also spoken to the ones born during that era, growing up in the midst of impending danger, in the very heart of chaos, in the hearing and sight of bomb blasts. And I have also been honoured to know the likes of our young cricket-loving host, born in an era of peace—or so we thought. The innocence in my little friend’s face, the aspirations in his heart to be a national cricketer in the Sri Lankan squad, and the light in his eyes at the dessert counter are all still fresh in my eyes. I was so happy that this little child didn’t have to go through what his parents did.

But all of this came crashing down when I learned that the tenure of peace was just a mere, ten years.

The Cinnamon Grand was one of the eight blast sites. Across this priceless jewel in the Indian Ocean, on Resurrection day, eight sites were chosen for destruction, the majority of which were churches. On the very day that the worldwide church celebrates the joyous triumph of life over death and good over evil, bomb blasts and killings, conspiracy and treachery, sorrow and pain, agony and mourning made a mockery of God’s gift of forgiveness and salvation to all of humankind. Almost three hundred were killed and about five hundred more injured.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Sting Of Death →

In the 70s and 80s when death squads were operating in countries of South and Central America, a liturgy emerged in the church by which Christians dramatically enacted faith amidst the pervasive fear perpetuated by the imagination of the nation state. Where death squads spread fear by “disappearing” those bodies that stood in their way, the church saw the resurrection of Christ and his own fatally wounded and “disappeared” body as a dramatic counter-narrative of resistance. Thus, at the liturgy, someone would read out the names of those killed or disappeared, and for each name someone would call out from within the congregation, presente, “Here!”

My work brings me face to face with many who would meet this liturgical act with a dismissal of some sort. It might be a hostile dismissal or simply one expressing doubt or dismay. Like words of comfort at a difficult funeral, while the sentiment might be needed, it will not undo what has been done. Here, the objection from a place of cynicism is not unlike the one from sorrow: The death squads were hardly deterred by this communal act of rallying around a consoling word. Bodies were—and are—still disappearing. These names were the names of people actually lost. On this, determined atheists, material humanists, and despairing Christians might agree: In a heartbreakingly real sense, the disappeared were most definitely not presente.

We might think similarly when we consider the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide or Easter church bombings—or any number of stories of the displaced or tragically lost that sadly do not make their way into our attention spans or news feeds. It is not hard to tend to the imagination that tells us that the “disappeared” belong to a group that will never stop growing. It is an imagination that seems sympathetic and human, and in some important ways it is. The nameless lives wasted, violently cut short, are buried and gone. But whether confessed in sorrow or cynicism, the assumption behind this imagination is that the dead can be buried once and for all and forgotten.

What the churches facing the death squads seemed to understand better than most of us is that Easter proclaims something entirely to the contrary. The violence and death that made Jesus “disappear” did not stand. He would not be buried once and for all and forgotten. In the aftermath of another bloody Easter Sunday, I suspect our Sri Lankan brothers and sisters hold the same conviction. The resurrected presence of the once disappeared Jesus proclaims many things to this wounded world, but this is perhaps the most shocking of all. The cultural notion that human value can be extinguished by death and violence was irreversibly shifted by Easter. The pervasive imagination that insists there are some lives that are expendable was upended by the shocking return of the one they tried to silence. The injustice and apathy that perpetuate this imagination stand vehemently convicted. The gospel of the resurrection proclaims that God holds on to the lives of all the departed, that injustice and apathy will not have the last word, and the dead and disappeared are never forgotten.

In my own liturgical tradition, during the season of Lent as the church prepares for the feast of Easter, there is a practice called “burying the hallelujahs.” We refrain from saying hallelujah during Lent, hallelujah being an ultimate expression of rejoicing that means “God be praised.” For the forty days of Lent we are invited instead to remember our deaths, to call to mind our need, our sin, our apathy, our complicit disinterest in the disappearance of others. During Lent, we fast as a means of preparing ourselves for the promise that hunger itself will one day be satisfied. We mourn with the world, with the church far and wide, and we challenge ourselves to sit with those struggling under silencing injustice and violence, with those we forget and treat as if expendable. Last Lent, as we learned of the deadly bombings that targeted Coptic Christian churches on Palm Sunday, I was thankful for the burying of our hallelujahs and a ready language to lament with brothers and sisters I will never meet but with whom I grieved. Lent reminds us that God was buried and that we, too, will be buried, that death comes before life, and that before there is rejoicing, Jesus grieves with those who grieve. We don’t bury the hallelujahs in cynicism or despair. We bury them because this is precisely where Easter itself begins: in grief and darkness with those easily overlooked, with those disappearing and those disappeared. For Jesus himself was one of them.

When Mary arrived at the tomb on Easter morning only to be told that the body of Jesus body was missing, she was distraught at his disappearance. She at first could not see resurrection; she saw emptiness. I imagine her grief was not unlike the mothers of missing sons during the reign of the death squads or the mothers and fathers of Alexandria and Tanta who lost children in worship on Palm Sunday last year. It was not enough that they violently killed him; they disappeared him.

But then the body of the resurrected Jesus was suddenly standing before her. The one who leaves no human soul in nameless and forgotten oblivion spoke Mary’s name aloud and she realized that he was there. Presente. In the midst of her devastating encounter with darkness, he is there in the midst of it. And his presence undoes the fixtures of fear and violence that continue to say there are some bodies that don’t matter, showing us not only how to die but how to rise and how to live. This darkness shall not overcome. Not in Golgotha. Not in South America. Not in Sri Lanka. Presente.

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

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For Christians, this week is the holiest of all weeks. And yet, it is holy in a most ironic way. In this week, Christians around the world seek to remember and commemorate the final days and hours of the life of Jesus. Beginning with Maundy Thursday and traversing through the horror of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, Christians seek to comprehend and remember the passion of Jesus in his suffering prior to celebrating his resurrection from the dead on Easter Sunday.

His final hours were spent in prayer. Yet the Gospel of Luke tells us that there was nothing unusual about him being in prayer: “And he came out and proceeded as was his custom to the Mount of Olives…and when he arrived at the place…he withdrew from them…and knelt down and began to pray.”(1) As was his custom, he would go to pray. We do not often hear the content of these prayer times, but in this case, in these final hours, we see him gripped with passion. Luke tells us that he was in such agony that his sweat “became like drops of blood.” Jesus had never been in this much distress before—even in his wilderness testing—we have no other portrait of such extreme duress in prayer.

“And being in agony he was praying very fervently,” Luke says. I’ve often wondered about the nature of these agonized prayers. Was Jesus in agony over the physical torture and death he was about to endure? Was he in agony over his disciples; one who would betray him and the others who would all abandon him in his time of need? Certainly, the latter is a real possibility as he exhorts his disciples at least twice to watch and pray that you might not enter into temptation (Luke 22:40; 46). I’m sure he prayed fervently because of both of these reasons.

Whatever the reason for his agony, Jesus’s humanity was on full display in his prayer. He did not want to walk the path that was unfolding before him, and he pleads with God to provide an alternative path, a “plan B” as it were. Matthew’s gospel reveals more of his struggle. He tells his disciples, “I am deeply grieved, to the point of death.” Then he prays to God, “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not as I will, but your will be done” (Matthew 26:38-39). The way of suffering unfolded before him and he would go to his death, despite his anguished prayers for another way.

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About twenty years ago, my dad felt a sharp pain in his leg and had to be rushed to the hospital. Dr. Frasco—a top-flight vascular surgeon—found my family in the hospital waiting room and told us that he needed to operate, and that although there wasn’t time to explain, due to the complexity of my dad’s condition, there was a good chance he would have to amputate my dad’s leg.

Despite Dr. Frasco’s qualifications, it was tempting in this situation to question him, to be suspicious of his prognosis and his chosen course of action. My dad looked perfectly healthy from the outside. Maybe this surgeon was taking the easy way out. Maybe he’d rather get an amputation over with now rather than have to battle operation after operation so my dad could keep his leg. These were understandable thoughts, and they were thoughts that my mom, my brother, and I had and that we discussed.

But suppose that Dr. Frasco had come to my family and said that during the operation, my dad was going to need a significant number of blood transfusions, and that they were having trouble finding a suitable donor. And suppose further that Dr. Frasco—out of compassion for my father and for my family—offered to donate his own blood. And suppose even further that Dr. Frasco did this at the risk of his own life, perhaps because such a large quantity of blood was needed.

Now, in this situation, my response to Dr. Frasco would change markedly. Maybe I couldn’t explain to you the reasons why Dr. Frasco might have to amputate my dad’s leg, and maybe initially I had reason to be suspicious of his prognosis. But if Dr. Frasco had offered my dad his own blood, I would have been convinced that he was for us, I would have been convinced that we could trust him, and I would have been rightly convinced of this. Even if Dr. Frasco’s reasoning remained opaque to me, he would have done something so indisputably loving and so inordinately costly that I could only rationally conclude that he was for my family.

There are two ways to defend the goodness of a person when he or she is accused of wrongdoing. The first way is to explain the good reasons the person had for acting as he or she did. This is the more traditional approach to responding to the problem of evil, to respond by telling a story about why God might create and sustain a world that turned out like this one. But there is also a second way to defend the goodness of God against objections from evil and suffering—not by explaining goodness but by displaying goodness.

The Christian claim is that this is precisely what God has done for each of us. When he saw us hurting and in need of healing, he provided his own blood. He chose to join us in our suffering and to take on himself whatever suffering was necessary for us to be healed. He displayed his love in such an extravagant way that we have strong reason to believe that we can trust him, even when we don’t fully understand his ways.

Ironically, the famous atheist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said it best: “The gods justified human life by living it themselves—the only satisfactory [response to the problem of suffering] ever invented.”(1) Remarkably, Nietzsche was writing of the ancient Greeks here and, in his bias, didn’t make the connection to Christianity. As a Christian, however, I am very pleased to agree with him and then point emphatically to the cross of Jesus Christ.

At the cross of Jesus, we see the absolute uniqueness of the Christian response to suffering. In some religious traditions, the idea of God suffering is unthinkable; it is thought to make God weak. In others, to reach divinity is precisely to move beyond the possibility of suffering, to give up your attachments to other people so that you will never have to suffer for anyone. Only in Christ do we have a God who loves us enough to suffer with us, by us, and—ultimately—for us.

Vince Vitale is director of the Zacharias Institute and a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 30.

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There is something comforting about the many characters in the Christian story of which we know very little. There was more to the story of the woman who knew that if she could just touch the fringe of Jesus’s robe she would be well. There was more to tell about the woman who anointed Jesus with a jar of perfume, or the thief who hung beside Jesus on the cross. Yet, we are told only that they will be remembered. And they are. However “insignificant” their lives were to society, they have been captured in the pages of history as people worth remembering, people who had a role in the story of the God man on earth, people remembered by God when multitudes actually wished them forgotten. It is to me a kind reminder that our own fleeting lives are remembered by God long before others notice and long after they have stopped noticing.

We know very little about the man named Simeon, but we know he was in the temple when he realized that God had remembered him. Reaching for the baby in the arms of a young girl, Simeon was moved to praise. As his wrinkled hands cradled the infant, Simeon sang to God: “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation.”(1)

Simeon actually uses the language of a slave who has been freed. There is a sense of immediacy and relief, as if a great iron door has been unlocked and he is now free to go through it. God had remembered his promise even as God remembered the aging Simeon. The Lord had promised Simeon that he would not die before he saw the Lord’s salvation. Now seeing and holding the child named Jesus, Simeon somehow knew that he was dismissed to death in peace.

Marveling at this bold reaction of a stranger, Mary and Joseph stood in awe—and possibly horror. Upon laying eyes on their baby, a man entirely unknown to them pronounced he could now die in peace. They were well aware of God’s hand upon Jesus; yet here they seemed to discover that the arm of God, which is not too short to save, extended far beyond anything they imagined.

Simeon’s subsequent blessing and words to the young mother only furthered this certainty: “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”(2) To these words as well, Mary and Joseph stood in awe and possibly horror.

In this Lenten season, followers of Jesus recall the horrific events of the cross, the sword that pierced this mother’s heart, and the passion of the one who continues to be spoken against. An old man in the temple hundreds of years ago, through a fraction of a scene in his life, reminds us still today that to look at Jesus is to see the suffering of the world and the salvation of God. As Father Farrar Capon notes, “[God] will not take our cluttered life, as we hold it, into eternity. He will take only the clean emptiness of our death in the power of Jesus’ resurrection.” Whether peering at the child in the manger or the man on the cross, the human heart is still revealed in its response to him. This is, in fact, our own most memorable feature.

Perhaps the small excerpts of the many fleeting lives we find throughout the Christian story were meant to capture this very sentiment. As the thief peered into the bruised eyes of Jesus on the cross beside him, like Simeon, he saw the salvation of God. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” he asked. And it was so.

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

(1) Luke 2:29-30.
(2) Luke 2:34-35.

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Perhaps in reaching middle age, one might expect one’s thoughts to turn toward thinking more about the end of life than the beginning. It certainly seems that each year passes by faster and faster, one season racing into another and before you can blink another year is gone. The 1998 film Meet Joe Black offers a poignant glimpse into this phenomenon. On his 65th birthday, William Parrish’s last night on earth, he gives a speech to those gathered to celebrate his life. With hesitation, he shares what will be some of his last words:

“Every face I see is a memory. It may not be a perfect memory. Sometimes we’ve had our ups and downs, but we’re all together, and you’re mine for a night. And I’m going to break precedence and tell you my one wish: that you would have a life as lucky as mine, where you can wake up one morning and say, ‘I don’t want anything more.’ Sixty-five years…don’t they go by in a blink?”

The years do go by in a blink. Ancient writers and poets often wrote about the transience of our lives, even invoking the Divine to help them remember the brevity of their days: My days are swifter than a weaver’s… Our days on earth are like a shadow… You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.(1) I was reminded of this during years of service with an aging congregation. There were more funerals than births, baptisms, or weddings. And having to bury those I had just recently befriended would take a great toll.

Despite the many emotional, physical, and spiritual challenges I faced during this time of ministry, I now see that I received incredible gifts. Journeying with someone you love through the dying process reminds you of your own mortality and finitude. The opportunity to deepen emotional reservoirs and to gain an appreciation for the preciousness of life is an invaluable gift.

In his earthly ministry, Jesus said a good deal about this dying journey. Often, he called his followers to self-sacrifice and to single-hearted allegiance by using the language of death. In Luke’s Gospel, he told the great multitudes following him that “if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”(2) What is often forgotten in a casual reading of the gospels is that the cross was the instrument of death and disgrace. It was an instrument reserved for the vilest offenders, and as such was an instrument of finality for the lowest of the low. Yet whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. There is no “if” in Jesus’s statement, only whether or not we will accept the invitation to death.

The fact that Jesus issued this kind of invitation to the “multitudes going along with him” should not be lost either. To hear that death is a part of life’s purpose, and that those who would want to follow Jesus should expect nothing less, is a very difficult invitation. Given the choice, most humans wouldn’t sign up for death. We cling to life as tenaciously as a wolf to her prey. I suspect the crowds dissipated after they heard Jesus speak these very difficult statements. Perhaps they were the very ones who later clamored for his death by crucifixion. It was easy to follow Jesus when he focused on the positives.

And yet, as sure as babies are born into this world and new life begins, death is inevitable. Not just physical death, but the “little deaths” we experience every day; the death of dreams, of life’s highest expectations, and the death of wanting more from life than it will offer. Is there any kind of gift given even in these moments of death? Can abundant life be found even as life marches quickly towards decline and decay? Can grace come even as we move towards Calvary with our cross?

In speaking of his own death and the gifts it would yield, Jesus said that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it; and he who hates his life in this world shall keep it to life eternal.”(3) In the face of a world that shouts to us to grab all we can now, to find self-fulfillment and be happy, Jesus extends to us the ironic invitation to embrace death in order to truly find our lives. This is both a promising and challenging invitation. Can we really find life out of death? And how is it to be experienced as abundant even in the everyday, ordinary living most of us experience? The challenge Jesus sets before those who would follow is the challenge to “die” to what we think makes for life; it is to choose—in this life that goes by as quickly as a vapor—what would make for life indeed.

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

(1) See Psalm 39:4, 1 Chronicles 29:15; James 4:14.
(2) Luke 14:26-27.
(3) John 12:24-25.

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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?

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Where Forgiveness Is Suffering

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.

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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Jesus once said that the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field. Again, Jesus added, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.

In the first scene, the picture is of a poor farmer who was in for a surprise. He was going about his regular duties, ploughing his field, when he stumbles on this treasure. In his unspeakable joy, he parts with everything that he has to buy that field because of the value of that treasure. In the second scenario, we have a sophisticated seeker. This merchant was looking for fine pearls. And when he found what he was looking for, he sold all he had and bought that priceless pearl.

The two stories remind me of incidents I have encountered. During a conversation with a skeptic, he shared that he once had an out-of-body experience and during those milliseconds, he heard the name Jesus (a name he had never heard before) calling him. In another encounter, a gentleman from another faith came over to discuss apologetics. He was a research scholar on humanities and had read some works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He was acquainted with the Bible as well. Although he was not a Christian, he said, “Society needs to be educated on the apologetic of Christ.” He eventually came all the way as he gave his life to Christ and is a joyful believer today.

God in his sovereign grace caters to each one of us. One discovers his treasure at the end of a studied search, while the other stumbles onto the joy of serendipitous discovery. Professor Alister McGrath explains: “In one sense, faith can be thought of as saying ‘Yes!’ to God and throwing open the portals of our souls to the refreshing, renewing and transforming presence of the living God.”(1)

When the rich young ruler came to Jesus inquiring about eternal life, Jesus asked him to give up everything he had and follow him. But the man walked away. The very next chapter is about another rich man, who like the characters in parables above, was willing to give away his hard-earned money—legitimately and otherwise—for something of far greater value. He announced, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”(2)

In the insightful words of C.S. Lewis, “When the author walks on to the stage the play is over… something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing; it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.”(3)

The judgments we make today are lasting. We reveal who we are by what we treasure. Let us treasure that of lasting value.

Neil Vimalkumar Boniface is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Chennai, India.

(1) Alister McGrath, Glimpsing the Face of God: The Search for Meaning in the Universe. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002.

(2) Luke 19:8.

(3) C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity pp. 64-5.

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Passing from the fourth grade to the fifth grade was not going to be as easy as I calculated. On the first day of fourth grade, our teacher stood at the board writing words most of us could not pronounce: castling, prophylaxis, solus rex, triangulation, and zugzwang, among others. When the board was full, he took a step toward us and pointed at his list. “By the end of the year,” he said resolutely, “you will know every one of these words because you will know the rules, the strategies, and the love of chess.” As if electricity and long division were not enough, learning the game of chess was a requirement for passing the fourth grade.

I don’t know that I learned to love the game, but I did learn how to play and the terminology that goes along with it. Triangulation, for instance, is a tactic used in chess endgames to put one’s opponent in zugzwang, a German word for “compulsion to move.” Triangulation occurs when one king can move between three adjoining squares (in the shape of a triangle) and maintain the position, while the opponent only has two squares on which to move. It is a strategic maneuver that forces one’s opponent to move.

Outside of the game of chess, triangulation still manages to be a maneuver meant to force a desired result. In social or family systems, the tactic is associated with people rather than pawns. In situations where two people are in conflict with one another, one or both often triangulate with a third person (or thing) in an attempt to curtail anxiety and garner support. So in the case of a feuding brother and sister, the sister might run to a sympathetic third sibling, while the brother might preoccupy his frustration with work. In each case, both triangles create a situation where two are on the inside and one is on the outside. But also in each case, while the anxiety may be reduced momentarily, the source of that anxiety is left unresolved.

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