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Ravi Zacharias

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.

Ravi Zacharias

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.

Ravi Zacharias

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.

Ravi Zacharias

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.

Ravi Zacharias

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.

Ravi Zacharias

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.

 

 

 
Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Magnificent Obsession

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In a 1969 issue of Psychology Today, a group of scholars discussed the emergence of a generation of inward-moving, self-reflecting, young men and women. Most agreed the prospects of such a generation were both promising and ominous—promising because discovery of self can be a step toward honesty and authenticity, producing a society better equipped in matters of self and community. But prospects of the inward generation were also ominous in the eyes of these sociologists because of the present mood and form of this inwardness they were observing. It was an inward move toward self that seemed “unbridled by any social norm or tradition and almost void of notions for exercise of responsibility toward others.”(1) According to their data, the inwardness that was being embraced was leading more to a form of self-centered privatism than it was to depth and wholeness of self. Research portrayed men and women more interested in material comfort and the immediate gratification of personal interests than in new realities of a deeper self that could mold and transform society.

The pull toward self-reflection is clearly a trend still among us. Spirituality, self-help, and memoir are all categories that continue to reach bestseller lists, while the pursuit of self-expression continues to lure us into self-absorption. There is still reason to be concerned by the compulsion toward self and the privatizing of categories surrounding the individual. Likewise, there is still promise in a community of people willing to truly face themselves.

The current multi-generational tendency toward self-reflection can lead to multi-generational discoveries of the hope of authenticity and the reality of the unseen. But there is a great difference between knowing our bellies and their constant pangs of appetite and knowing our selves. Within the pursuit of knowing the self, there is a choice to tread water safely or to delve into hard questions and risk drowning in order to know what it means to be human, why we pursue and believe in self-fulfillment, what it means that we long to know the point of a lifetime and the reason we live it. Speaking of this uniquely human enterprise, James Loder writes, “In its bewildered, blundering, brilliance, [the human spirit] cries out for wisdom to an ‘unknown God.’ But it is the personal Author of the universe whose Spirit alone can set the human spirit free from its proclivity to self-inflation, self-doubt, self-absorption, and self-destruction, and free for its ‘magnificent obsession’… to know the mind of God.”(2)

In other words, authentic inwardness always moves the spirit outward.

But it is not easy. Truly delving inward into the human self is messy, unpredictable, and unsafe. We find ourselves as Paul explained with confusion: “I don’t understand myself at all, for I really want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15). But in plunging into the question of what it means to be human, what it means to actually live, and what it accurately looks like to fall short, we find something other than condemnation, someone other than the self for whom we were looking. For the brave human spirit in such a posture, the words of Carlo Carretto ring true, “My poor human personality has finally found the ‘Other’ with whom it may speak. The ‘Other’ is God in His being, His truth, His love. The passage to faith is radical, absolute; only God is capable of stating it, carrying it through, controlling it.”(3)

The pull of the human self inward can be the means with which the triune God shows us a greater image of life in divine community. In this journey, the words of Isaiah and the promise of God are our own: “I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the LORD, the God of Israel, who summons you by name” (Isaiah 45:3). Where we are driven to mine with integrity the dark caverns of self, Christ appears with light and reveals what it means to be human.

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

(1) As quoted by Henri Nouwen in The Wounded Healer (New York: Random House, 1979), 29.

(2) James E. Loder, The Logic of the Spirit (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 10.

(3) Carlo Carretto, Selected Writings (New York: Orbis Books, 1994), 45.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry –  Think Again – Light in the Darkness 

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The story is told of a cynic sitting under a nut tree, carrying on a jesting monologue with God. His grounds for complaint lay in what he considered to be an obvious failure on the part of God to go by the book on structural design. “Lord,” he said, “How is it that you made such a large and sturdy tree to hold such tiny, almost weightless nuts? And yet, you made small, tender plants to hold such large and weighty watermelons!”

As he chuckled at the folly of such disproportion in God’s mindless universe, a nut suddenly fell on his head. After a stunned pause, he muttered, “Thank God that wasn’t a watermelon!”

Even atheist Aldous Huxley acknowledged years ago, “Science has ‘explained’ nothing; the more we know, the more fantastic the world becomes, and the profounder the surrounding darkness.”

Justifiable worldviews must have explanatory power of the undeniable realities of life. As Christians who affirm the existence of a loving and all wise God, we long to push back the darkness in our world and to see the light of God’s Word soften the cynic and atheist alike. Yet if we are honest, sometimes we, too, struggle to come to terms with God’s world and his sovereign design; this is especially true in seasons of suffering and confusion.

Remember Job? He had become weary of his pain and sought a just answer for it. He built his argument to God on the fact that he needed to know what was going on, because only on the basis of that knowledge could his confusion and suffering be dissipated. But God then broke his silence, challenging Job’s very assumptions and reminding him that there was an awful lot he did not know but had just accepted and believed by inference. Notwithstanding the proverbial cynic under a nut tree, the argument from design is the very approach God used with Job. He reminded Job as a first step, and only that, that there were a thousand and one things he did not fully understand but had just taken for granted. In the light of God’s presence, Job was dumbfounded and confessed, “I am unworthy—how can I reply to you? … Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 40:4; 42:3).

Gaining a small glimpse of the majesty and holiness of God is light in a dark world. The prophet Isaiah described his awe-stricken state when God revealed Himself to him. Isaiah, a morally good man, nevertheless fell on his face and immediately sensed that he was unfit to be in God’s presence. He was not just in the presence of someone better than he was. He was in the presence of the One by whom and because of whom all purity finds its point of reference. That is why he was speechless.

God is not merely good. God is holy. He is the transcendent source of goodness: not merely “better” in a hierarchy of choices but rather the very basis from which all differences are made. He dwells in ineffable light. Moral categories, for us, often move in comparisons and hierarchies. We talk in terms of judging or feeling that one thing is better than another. Our culture is more advanced morally than someone else’s culture, at least so we may think. However, God’s existence changes those categories and moves us to recognize the very essence of what the word “goodness” is based upon.

This difference is what makes the argument almost impossible for a skeptic to grasp. Holiness is not merely goodness. “Why did God not create us to choose only good?” “Why do bad things happen to good people?” The reality is that the opposite of evil, in degree, may be goodness. But the opposite of absolute evil, in kind, is absolute holiness. In the biblical context, the idea of holiness is the tremendous “otherness” of God Himself. God does not just reveal Himself as good; He reveals Himself as holy.

There is no contradiction in Him. He can never self-destruct. He can never “not be.” He exists eternally and in a sublime purity that transcends a hierarchy of categories. As human beings we love the concept of holiness when we are in the right, but we are often reticent to apply it when we are wrong and brought under the stark scrutiny of its light. I recall talking to a very successful businessman who throughout our conversation repeatedly asked, “But what about all the evil in this world?” Finally, a friend sitting next to me said to him, “I hear you constantly expressing a desire to see a solution to the problem of evil around you. Are you as troubled by the problem of evil within you?” In the pin-drop silence that followed, the man’s face showed his duplicity.

The longer I have encountered this question about evil, the more convinced I am of the disingenuousness of many a questioner. The darkness of evil is more than an exterior reality that engenders suffering in our world; it is, at its core, an internal reality that systemically builds us for autonomy and destruction, blinds us, and from which only God is big enough to rescue us. You see, the problem of evil begins with me. The darkness is within.

Yet Jesus’s answer to the question of the blind man in John 9 brings us extraordinary power and hope. There is an illustration and explanation for us in his story. Here was a man living in physical darkness. There was no light that he could see. People wanted to know, why was he born this way? They were the ones who could see, so they asked about the one who could not. Jesus responded that the man’s blindness was due neither to the sin of the man nor of his parents, but so that the glory of God might be displayed. The lesson is drastic; the message profound.

Physical darkness has physical consequences and leaves a person bereft of seeing physical reality. It is a tragedy—but nowhere near the tragic devastation of spiritual blindness. The healing of that man’s blindness by Jesus was intended to draw those spiritually blind to seek his healing of their souls. When Beethoven, though deaf, could see the exhilarating response of the people to his composition, he outwardly resonated with what his inner being prompted. He could not hear his music but he sensed the harmony for which he longed in expression. So it is with us. We know on the inside how impoverished we are and for what we long. That ought to prompt us to the riches that only God in Christ is able to give to us.

Only when we surrender to the light of God’s truth in our own lives are we enabled to truly seeand then be a beacon of hope and healing in our dark world. Truthfulness in the heart, said Jesus, precedes truth in the objective realm. The problem of evil has ultimately one source: it is the resistance to God’s holiness that enshrouds all of creation. And there is ultimately only one hope for life: that is through the glorious display of God at work within a human soul, bringing about his work of pushing away the darkness. That transformation tenderizes the heart to become part of the solution and not part of the problem. Such a transformation begins at the Cross.

The day when Christ was crucified and darkness engulfed the scene was symbolic of the soul in rebellion. Then came the possibility of hope when the Son rose, with life made possible for all of us. The simple verse, John 3:16, says it all: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” “For God”: the starting point is filial. “So loved”: his reach is relational. “That he gave his only begotten Son”: sacrificial. “That whosoever believes in Him”: confessional. “Should not perish”: judicial. “But have everlasting life”: eternal.

There is a law unto death. The violation of law brings that within us. Our holy God deals with evil in us to transform us and draw us into his life and embrace. What a glorious gospel this is.

The songwriter Tim Hughes says it beautifully:

Light of the world, You stepped down into darkness

opened my eyes, let me see.

Beauty that made this heart adore you

hope of a life spent with you.

 

Here I am to worship, here I am to bow down,

here I am to say that you’re my God.

You’re altogether lovely, altogether worthy,

altogether wonderful to me.

 

In a unique way, seeing is believing. Believing in God is surrendering. Surrendering to God is worshiping. To worship opens up vistas to see even more. Darkness is then vanquished.

In a dark world, we have the offer of Light through Jesus Christ.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Living by Memory

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Mark Twain once said that faith is “believing what you know ain’t so.” The Christian story presents an altogether different definition. Faith is more than cognitive assent or blind acceptance of something. It is an informed surrender and trust that rests the whole person on the purposes and will of God. Faith involves belief, obedience, ethics, and lifestyle; it involves living with vision and memory.

The prophet Habakkuk lived in a time of spiritual and moral decline, which led to the economic, social, and political tragedies of his people. Like the people to whom he preached, Habakkuk came from a storied nation. He was rooted in his God and all of the stories that accompanied Him—the Exodus, the tabernacle, the law, and the land. Habakkuk knew that all of Israel’s blessings were rooted in the covenantal faithfulness of a chosen people. They had come a long way since rejoicing over the miracle at the Red Sea or the completion of Solomon’s temple. Yet Israel was established with the necessity of living in the three dimensions of time—past, present, and future. They were commanded to remember God’s words and mighty actions of history. They were called to see life as a present blessing, with faith and justice as a response to the God who gave it. And they lived with hope in God’s good hands, such that neither death nor the future was a threat.

But Israel forgot. Neglecting their heritage, the people walked away. They pursued other loves and became enamored with the nations around them. Israel forgot their high calling, and the consequences were tragic. The prophet Habakkuk was understandably grieved. Unable to understand what was happening to his community, the prophet walked through stages of depression, anger, acceptance, and faith. His chapters move from asking “why?” to expressing hopelessness or exclaiming anger, and finally, to singing.

I believe there are times in life when we are on a similar journey. Though at times we may find ourselves stuck in one stage or another, we follow a similar sense of story and invitation to remember God’s involvement in our past, present, and future. Between the pages where Habakkuk cries out for God’s answer and where he ends in a mixture of fear and faith, we learn something of the ambiguity, tension, and struggle that is ours until the journey ends.

Through trial and uncertainty, the apostle Paul encourages us likewise. We are to cling to what we know along the way: “For in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. And I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:37-39).

Despite seeming triumphs of evil, the people of God continue to discover anew that the promises of God are sure. In the words of the prophet Habakkuk, “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea” (2:14). It is not easy. There are real dangers, costs to bear, and always a demand for perseverance. But ultimately and exclusively, our hope is in God alone. Through faith we live knowing that Christ is who he says he is, remembering that the assurance of his life and death is real,  that God enfolds our stories into his own, and Christ is making all things new. Until that day, we watch and wait, living by faith and memory.

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

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Beautiful Foolishness

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“I don’t believe in God,” begins Julian Barnes in his book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, “but I miss him.” Though he admits he never had any faith to lose (a “happy atheist” as an Oxford student, Barnes now considers himself an agnostic), he still finds himself dreading the gradual ebbing of Christianity. He misses the sense of purpose that the Christian narrative affords, the sense of wonder and belief that haunts Christian art and architecture.

“I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm.” Such are the thoughts that surface as Barnes attempts to confront his fears of death and dying in this memoir. He believes Christianity to be a foolish lie, but insists, “[I]t was a beautiful lie.”(1)

There is certainly room for beauty in the description the apostle Paul gave of the gospel. Like Julian, Paul saw its foolishness clearly as well: “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21). He also noted the weakness inherent in the Christian proclamation. At the heart of the Christian religion is one who “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, and being found in human form” (Philippians 2:7). On this much Paul and Julian agree: however beautiful, foolishness and weakness imbibe the Christian story.

But unlike Julian, Paul saw the foolishness of the gospel as a reason not to disbelieve, but to believe. “For God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:27-28). It is indeed difficult to explain why at the heart of the Christian narrative there is a child, why God would answer the dark silence of 400 years with the cry of a displaced and homeless infant, why God would take on the weakness of humanity in an attempt to reach humanity with power, dying as the Messiah. Most of us would know better than to create, or to perpetuate, a story so foolish. However beautiful, the story of Christ is difficult to explain; that is, unless it was not crafted with human wisdom at all.

The story of a Savior coming as an infant in Bethlehem is indeed astonishing, as astonishing an idea as the resurrection. That God chose to come into the world with flesh, flesh that would suffer, is strange and paradoxical, beautiful and foolish. Perhaps it is also wise beyond our comprehension. “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25).

Though the word incarn is now used infrequently, it was once used medically, describing the flesh that grows over a wound. Applied to healing, the word refers to the recovery of wounded flesh due to the presence of new flesh.(2) The Incarnation, the astonishing event at the center of Christianity, the story that has inspired music, architecture, and hope, is God’s way of doing exactly that: Christ comes in flesh to cover our mortal wound. God comes near in body and in weakness to bring healing to weak and wounded bodies. Indeed, God’s own body is mortally wounded only to rise again in flesh and blood. This may seem a foolish mission, but to the blind who receive their sight, the lame who now walk, the diseased who are cleansed, the deaf who hear, the dead who are raised, and the poor who have good news brought to them, it is the most beautiful foolishness ever known.

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

(1) Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).

(2) Encyclopaedia Perthensis; Or Universal Dictionary of the Arts, Sciences, Literature (Edinburgh: John Brown, 1816), 53.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry –   Power, Control, and Mystery

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One of the unique qualities of the Christian story is that the heart of it—the accounts of Jesus’s life and death—is presented in the voices of four different witnesses. During the season of Lent, it is compelling to look specifically at the different tellings of the events that led Jesus to the cross. The differences in each testimony offer an interesting glimpse of how personalities differ in their observing and experience of the world, as well as a potent reminder that the story of Jesus is not a flat and static conveying of information, but a story as alive as the one who was tortured at the hands of the powers of this world.

For instance, as one theologian observes, Matthew’s crucifixion narrative and greater gospel emphasizes “the way of the humiliated Christ.”(1) In my reading of Matthew, I am always struck by the interplay between power and control, an interesting dynamic on which the writer has chosen to focus. Over and above the motif shared with Mark, Matthew seems to add a dimension of inquiry about power itself, and along with it, the hint that all is not as it seems: Who wants control? Who thinks they’re in control? Who is really in control? Theologian Roy Harrisville compares it to the paradox and reversal at the heart of Jesus’s ministry, the passion of Christ itself enacting “truths earlier hidden in the predictions and parables.”(2)

Thus, where Mark’s decisive crowd before Pilate yells, “Crucify him” (15:13 and again in 14b) and Luke’s crowd similarly, if more emphatically in the Greek, yells, “Crucify, crucify him!” (23:21), Matthew’s crowd twice yells, “Let him be crucified” (27:22b and 23b). There is a hint of a distancing of responsibility. The crowds indeed want the crucifying done, but done to him by someone else. Luke seems to further draw the distinction of choice and control, adding of his crowd, “And they were urgent, demanding with loud cries that he should be crucified. And their voices prevailed” (23:23).

Matthew’s account seems at first passive in the “who” of the act of crucifying, a crowd calling for death at a distance. Later Pilate, too, wants to distance himself from this responsibility, adding a hand-washing scene unique to Matthew’s narrative. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” says Pilate, “see to it yourselves” (27:24). The people, preferring control over the risk of release, answer, “His blood be on us and on our children” (27:25).

Now phrased in terms of blood, Matthew’s interplay of power and control is made all the more potent. Like Jesus’s many parables with their jarring sense of mysterion (mystery that is not hidden, but revealed), Matthew seems to suggest there is one in control indeed, but it is not the one who seems to be holding the power. The image of Christ’s blood upon this blind—though professing to see—crowd and their children is chilling. For unknowingly, they have declared the very thing that the humiliated servant has set out to do: His blood be on us and on our children.

Harrisville illustrates this all the more profoundly in his analysis of Matthew’s narrating of the Last Supper and the curious words of Jesus about the “blood of the covenant,” now explained in this passion narrative before us:

“The statement about the ‘blood of the covenant’ (26:28) will have its explanation in subsequent events, in Judas’s confession (‘I have sinned by betraying innocent blood’ [27:24]), in Pilate’s avowal of innocence (‘I am innocent of this man’s blood’ [27:4]), and in the people’s accepting responsibility for Jesus’s death (‘his blood be on us and on our children!’ [27:25]). All these will be the ‘many’ for whose forgiveness the blood of the covenant is poured out.“(3)

The story of Jesus as he moves toward the cross, told through eyes that remind us he has come for a world of unique individuals, is a story of power and weakness that turns our common assumptions and experience on its head. Like the parables, the way of the humiliated Christ confounds those who consider it, approaching in power, though hidden in the unlikely gift of a servant.

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

(1) Roy Harrisville, Fracture: The Cross as Irreconcilable in the Language and Thought of the Biblical Writers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 147.

(2) Ibid., 158.

(3) Ibid., 159.

 

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Dust and Ashes

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The life and ministry of Jesus—his birth, his life and death, his resurrection and ascension—are all echoed in the celebrations and seasons of the church year. For the Christian, preparations are made for his coming during the season of Advent. Anticipation is garnered for the triumphant entry of God into the world in Jesus on Christmas Day, while the season of Epiphany unfolds further glimpses of his life and ministry. Each season of the church year is filled with expectation, discovery, and hope.

Ash Wednesday begins the season of Lent. And unlike Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, Lent is a solemn season for the Christian. As part of the Ash Wednesday worship service, ashes are imposed on one’s forehead in the pattern of a cross. The imposed ashes are from the previous year’s Palm Sunday fronds—fronds reminiscent of those waved triumphantly as Jesus entered Jerusalem on his way to Golgotha. The Jews believed he entered the city as the coming King; they did not yet understand he would reign through suffering and death.

These ashes remind us of our common destiny: “From dust you come and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). For the Christian, the Lenten season is also meant to remind us of our common mission to walk the path with Jesus toward death. It invites us to lose our lives in order to find them anew, resurrected with Jesus on Easter morning.

Whether or not one actively observes Lent, the season can serve as an invitation to evaluate our own lives and to examine the invitation of Jesus to die with him. We can enter this deathly contemplation with the anticipation of resurrection on Easter morning. But Christ’s path to resurrection is the path of laying down lives, the path of relinquishment, and the path of self-denial. This path feels entirely unnatural, for it takes us in the opposite direction of self-preservation.

Yet, Jesus said that if anyone wants to follow him, if anyone really wants the kind of life he offers, the kind of life he modeled for us in his own, then they must deny themselves, take up the cross and follow him. Following Jesus will lead us all to the cross, and will lead us all to the place of death. For the Christian, this is the downward journey of Lent. “From dust you have come, and to dust you shall return.” Of course, regardless of the gods we follow, we all share in this destiny; like Jesus, we, too, will die. The pressing question, in light of this common destiny, is how shall we now live? How shall my life today respond to the reality of death and the invitation of life?

The life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer provides an illustration of one answer to this question.(1) Bonhoeffer grew up in a home full of privilege and status. His father, a prominent psychiatrist, provided the best of what life had to offer. Bonhoeffer attended the finest university, and took a year before his ordination to study in the United States. His life was filled with promise and potential.

Yet, this life seemingly marked for success, would be marred by loss and suffering. He lost one brother in World War I and he would lose another in World War II. He eventually would be arrested by the Nazi regime for aiding Jews to safety. And while he embraced the risk of peace and dared to love in the face of one’s enemies, he would be implicated in a plot to assassinate Hitler and executed at the age of 38.

In fact, it was not until after his death that Bonhoeffer’s ministry and influence had its most potent force. Many are now familiar with his books The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together. He has been a theologian of immense influence, not just for students of theology, not simply for Christians yearning to grow in their understanding of discipleship, but for a watching a world full of questions about injustice and suffering. In his letters and papers published posthumously, Bonhoeffer argued that the will of God and the way of discipleship would not always lead to self-preservation or advancement. The will of God involves giving our lives for the sake of others (which Bonhoeffer believed would be the case for his action against Hitler). He wrote, “Christ’s vicarious deeds and particularly his death on our behalf, become in turn the principle and model of the self-sacrifice that makes community possible… [T]he church is the church only when it exists for others.”(2)

Following the downward path of Jesus can lead to a renewed, hopeful, and restored vision of life for anyone. For as we embrace our inevitable deaths and declines, as we embrace the downward path, we have the opportunity to let go of the false things we think make up our lives. We let go of thinking that the accumulation of wealth, power, and resources make up a good life; we let go of thinking that busyness makes us important; we let go of thinking that our personal safety and security are to be preserved at all cost. And as we let go, we can embrace those who make life fullest, we can put others’ interests before our own, and exist for the sake of others. And what is done on behalf of others for the sake of Christ will indeed endure beyond our deaths.

The season of Lent is the season of dust and ashes. It is the journey toward one man’s death on a cross and toward our own. Bonhoeffer understood this as he wrote from his prison cell, and Jesus understood this as he bore the weight of suffering, misunderstanding, shame, and death at Golgotha. The way to resurrection life is not by saving our lives, but in losing them. Whether one observes Lent or not, the call to “take up our crosses” is issued to all.

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

(1) Biographical information on Dietrich Bonhoeffer excerpted from Martin Doblmeier interviewed on Speaking of Faith, Feb. 2, 2006. Doblmeier produced the 2003 documentary, Bonhoeffer, broadcast on PBS.

(2) Dietrich Bonhoffer, A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, edited by Geffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 343.

 

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Only Human

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The recognition of one’s humanity can be an uncomfortable pill to swallow. Life’s fragility, life’s impermanence, life’s intertwinement with imperfection and disappointment—bitter medicines are easier to accept. The Romantic poets called it “the burden of full consciousness.” To look closely at humanity can indeed be a realization of dread and despair.

For poet Philip Larkin, to look closely at humanity was to peer into the absurdity of the human existence. Whatever frenetic, cosmic accident that brought about a species so endowed with consciousness, the sting of mortality, incessant fears of failure, and sieges of shame, doubt, and selfishness was, for Larkin, a bitter irony. In a poem titled “The Building,” he describes the human condition as it is revealed in the rooms of a hospital, where one finds “Humans, caught/On ground curiously neutral, homes and names/Suddenly in abeyance; some are young,/ Some old, but most at that vague age that claims/The end of choice, the last of hope; and all/ Here to confess that something has gone wrong./ It must be error of a serious sort,/ For see how many floors it needs, how tall…”

With or without Larkin’s sense of dread, the confession that “something has gone wrong” is often synonymous with the acknowledgment of humanity. “I’m only human,” is a phrase meant to evoke leniency with shortcoming, while “human” itself in Webster’s dictionary is an adjective for imperfection, weakness, and fragility. Nonetheless, there are some religions that stand diametrically opposed to this idea, seeing humanity with limitless potential, humans as pure, the human spirit as divine. In a vein not unlike Larkin’s agnostic dread, the self-deemed new atheists see the cruel realities of time and chance as reason in and of itself to dismiss the rose-colored lenses of God and religion. Yet quite unlike Larkin’s concluding outlook of meaninglessness and despair, they (inexplicably) suggest a rose-colored view of humanity. Still others emphasize the depravity of humanity to such a leveling degree that no person can stand up under the burden of guilt and disgust.

In deep contrast to such severe or optimistic readings, the Christian view of humanity adds a nuanced dimension to the conversation. Christianity admits that while there is indeed an error of a serious sort, the error is not in “humanness” itself. Rather, something has gone wrong. Thus, in our humanity we find the paradox of a deep and sacred honor at our humanity and a profound and shameful recognition that we cannot access it. Yet our inherent recognition of imperfection is simultaneously an inherent admission that there is indeed such a thing as perfection. The Christian’s advantage, then, is not that they find themselves less fallen and closer to said perfection than others, nor that they find in their religion a means of escaping the world of fragility, brokenness, guilt, and error; the Christian’s advantage is that they are aware of their own broken humanity in a fallen world because they are aware of the perfect human.

“[H]umanity’s mystery,” as one writer expounds, “can be explained only in the mystery of the God who became human. If people want to look into their own mystery—the meaning of their pain, of their work, of their suffering, of their hope—let them put themselves next to Christ. If they accomplish what Christ accomplished—doing the Father’s will, filling themselves with the life that Christ gives the world—they are fulfilling themselves as true human beings. If I find, on comparing myself with Christ, that my life is a contrast, the opposite of his, then my life is a disaster. I cannot explain that mystery except by returning to Christ, who gives authentic features to a person who wants to be genuinely human.”(1)

The author of these words was well acquainted with the mysterious paradox of humanness and the God who became human to call the world to authentic humanity. Oscar Romero was a Salvadoran priest who saw the very worst and the weakest of humanity in the corruption, violence, and suffering of a country at war within itself. A witness to ongoing violations of human rights, Romero spoke out on behalf of the poor and the victimized. In both the abused and the abusers, he saw the image of God, glimpses of Christ, and the dire need for his true humanity. Romero was assassinated in the middle of a church service; fittingly, he was holding up the broken bread of communion, the sign of Christ’s human body, when he died.

In a world with reason to be despairing of humanity, there is still the jarring image of the perfect human, whose only brokenness was at our own hands. Christ is more than someone who came to fix what was wrong. He is the image of all that is right.

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 – Father and Child

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To Fyodor Dostoevsky, the parable of the prodigal son was a lifeline. Though an outcast in a Siberian prison, he found himself within this radical story of homecoming and a father’s heart. C.S. Lewis similarly alluded to finding himself within the parable: “Who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape?” It is a parable that unveils each of us in some way, whether we find ourselves as the prodigal asking for mercy or the jealous older brother looking for credit for good behavior. In any case, it is the image of the father that convinces us to remove the veil. He is both the subject and the point of the story Jesus tells.

The parable begins with a man who has two sons. The first half of the story focuses on the younger son who boldly requests his inheritance before his father had even died. He then ends up squandering his father’s money on the throes of his own appetite. When he has nothing left and is desperate with hunger, he turns back for home with the expectation that he can work his way back into the father’s house.

The second half of the story introduces us to the older son who did not leave the father and smugly points this out when the younger son comes wandering back home. The older son is the one who stays, who looks after the father, who works in his fields, and is disturbed by the younger son’s blatant disregard for the life their father has given them. He is angered by the celebration of his brother’s return, jealous of the father’s attention and forgiveness, envious of the celebrated position his brother is receiving. The father he loves deserved more than his brother’s selfish squandering, and so does he, as the son who stayed.

In both sons, there is good and bad, conceit and humility, selfishness and acknowledgment of the father, even if self-serving. The younger son is full of foolishness, and yet he exhibits some degree of wisdom in turning around. The older son is loyal and more conscientious, and yet he exhibits a great degree of selfishness and disregard in his reaction to the father’s character. Neither son is a clear example of the kind of person most of us want to be. Yet, both sons, in all of their major failings and minor virtues, are clearly sought out by the father. In the estimation of one of my wise professors, this parable leaves us questioning what on earth a father is going to do with two boys like that? And more importantly, what on earth is God going to do with people like us?

Yet to this wayward child who stumbles toward home, the father runs to embrace him, immediately saying to his servants: “Quickly bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet; and bring the fatted calf, kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.”(1) With every symbol of restoration, the father who was waiting embraces the son who was lost. This lavish grace of the Father is ours as prodigal children. Though we neither expect it nor deserve it, the celebration is thrown in our honor, over the return of even one lost sheep.

To the older son who fumes outside the party and accuses his father of unfairness, the father responds with patience and care, calling him to an awareness of heritage over inheritance: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” When we are the smug older children of the Father, his grace is jarring and disruptive, even as God reminds us that all God has is our own. God’s invitation to the feast is both awkward and demanding, a call to overlook the harm that our flagrant siblings cause—and their potential to cause it again. But the Father stands beside us with this request and his grace, though we are equally undeserving.

Whether we find ourselves in the shoes of the prodigal or treading the ground of the older brother, there is good reason to celebrate the unveiling and unsounded love of this Father Jesus describes. His story overturns lesser narratives: God’s unfathomable grace and mercy shatters our sense of who is worthy and bids us to see that God alone is our rescue. The Father invites us to a celebration of the kingdom regardless of where we now stand.

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

(1) Luke 15:22-25.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Free Fall

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Amusement parks had always been destinations of choice for my family while I was growing up. It didn’t matter the vacation spot, we would, if there was an amusement park nearby, make it a priority visit. The reason for this priority was that we loved roller-coasters. The Matterhorn Bobsleds at Disney Land; Space Mountain at Disney World, and all the various roller-coasters at Six Flags theme parks called to us to ride them over and over again to our sheer delight.

There was one exception: The Free Fall ride. I do not know if it is still in existence, but when I knew it at my local Six Flags it was a ride like an elevator without a door. Only a seatbelt harness held us in. Up six stories it climbed while our stomachs fell. Climbing higher and higher, the expanse of the park and the surrounding communities became like miniature-versions of themselves. It seemed the ride would climb as high as the heights of heaven. Then suddenly, the ascent ended. The car would tilt forward ever so slightly, so that all you could see below was the drop back to earth. For maximum thrill or terror, the car wouldn’t plunge down immediately. Riders sat for what seemed to be an eternity of waiting; suddenly, the mechanical support drew back and the elevator-like car would make its free fall back down to the ground at speeds as high as 90 mph. I only ever went on the Free Fall once. I hated that ride.

“Sometimes suffering feels like a free fall,” writes J. Todd Billings in his book Rejoicing in Lament.(1) It is a free-fall away from all that was normal and routine in one’s life down into what seems to be a spiraling abyss of chaos and despair. After receiving the phone call in the early morning hours that my husband had suffered sudden cardiac arrest, I fell into my own free-fall. While sitting in the airport waiting for my flight home, I remember saying to my mother, “My life will never be the same again.” I would free-fall into another world never to return to the world I had inhabited for seventeen years with my husband. There would be no return to what was ‘normal.’ There would only be a steadying of my legs, like I had to do after the free-fall ride at the amusement park, landing in the strange new world of grief and loss that was mine.

Fortunately for me, I was not the first person to ever experience a loss like this, just as surely as I was not the first to ride the Free Fall, nor the last to experience its terror. There were many who reached out to me from similar experiences in person; and others who reached out to me through the pages of articles and books chronicling this shared journey. Of course, Christianity affirms a God who joins us in this journey, not as a fellow rider on a free-fall, but as the foundation on which we might find our footing again. For author and theologian Todd Billings, this foundation has been tested in his own journey of grief and suffering as a result of a terminal cancer diagnosis. Yet, he writes:

“In a deeply paradoxical way, full of a mystery that blinds by its brightness, Jesus Christ, the God-human, displays the love of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—by taking on our human suffering and terror. Christ, the God-human, takes on the path of human suffering so that we are not pioneers in the darkness, so that we are not in free-fall. Instead, even when our suffering seems senseless, even when we feel like we are in free-fall, we can look to Christ to see, hear, and taste that we are still in the ever-faithful, ever-loving hands of God.”(2)

The ‘Man of sorrows’ and the one ‘acquainted with grief’ is the reason why Christians can affirm that nothing is able to separate us from the love of God…not even death. Jesus Christ offers those who experience the free-fall of suffering a firm foundation on which to land. Becoming fully human, Jesus is made the “high priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses.” And it is here, Billings notes, in the mystery of the Incarnation “that in Christ, the impassible God becomes one with suffering flesh in order to heal it.”(3) God is not caught off-guard because of human suffering and misery, even as God in Christ identifies with all that it means to be human. “We hope because in Christ, God has taken on human suffering and death so that they are emptied of their ultimate sting.”(4)

But this is not a truth easily gained. In my own free-fall into grief, despair, and pain, I needed the space to fall; if only to see and to know that there was a foundation on which I could depend, and which could sustain the weightiness of my pain. I needed to scream all the way down as I fell—screams of desperation, abandonment, anger, and loss. And it was necessary for me to lose all those supports that were, in reality, flimsy and faulty. It was only then, after this long, hard fall that I could begin to feel steady again, strengthen my legs, and stand up.

In the psalms of lament, the anguished cries of the prophets, and in the life and ministry of Jesus, there are pioneers who have gone before all who grieve and suffer. They have experienced the terror of all the twists and turns, the drops and descents of human life. They gave voice to their lament. Perhaps like myself, Dr. Billings, and all those who would wish for a different way, who would wish they didn’t have to ride the free-fall of grief and loss, the paradox of the Incarnation—that God is in Christ enveloping human suffering—will yet invite sufferers to stand on this firm foundation.

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

(1) J. Todd Billings, Rejoicing In Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015), 151. For more information visit http://www.rejoicinginlament.com.

(2) Ibid., 157.

(3) Ibid., 163

(4) Ibid., 163.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – My Messy House

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Kathleen Norris tells a story of a little boy who wrote a poem called “The Monster Who Was Sorry.” The poem begins with a confession: he doesn’t like it when his father yells at him. The monster’s response is to throw his sister down the stairs, then to destroy his room, and finally to destroy the whole town. The poem concludes: “Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.’”(1)

The confession of Saint Paul bears a fine resemblance: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but I do what I hate.” Regret has a way of shining the floodlights on the mess we sense within. Norris further expounds the faithful candor of the child describing his own muddled story: “‘My messy house’ says it all: with more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance.”(2)

The journey of a Christian through the many rooms of faith posits countless opportunities to peer at the monster within. There are days in the life of faith when I question whether I am living up to the title of Christian or disciple—or even casual acquaintance. In certain rooms of awareness I find there is no question: I am not. Yet, as G.K. Chesterton wrote in his autobiography, I have only ever found one religion that “dared to go down with me into the depth of myself.”(3) This is assuredly the invitation of Christianity. Christ will leave no corner untouched. What we find are messy houses, filled with hidden staircases built of excuses, and idols of good deeds atop mantels of false security—in short, the home of Christ in disarray at our own hands.

If we were to remain shut up in this place alone, we might begin to wonder why we should ever hope for anything other than mess and wreckage. Paul’s confession marks the futility of our own efforts to clean the house. But we do not make any journey to the depths of ourselves alone. In fact, we should not have discovered the messes had they not been shown to us in the first place. We are guided to these places in our consciences, to images of ourselves unadorned, and finally to broken and contrite hearts. Life in Christ is the loving invitation to be drawn into a bigger story, to be remade by the Spirit of truth, enfolded into the vicarious humanity of the Son of God who maneuvers us through messy rooms and sin-stained walls and mercifully exposes monstrous ways for the sake of communion. It would indeed be a futile journey if we walked this path alone.

Instead, the very Spirit who shows us the monster in a messy house shows us the one who removes the masks, clears the wreckage, and brings us into his house to make us human again. In a scene from C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, Aslan the lion is seen tearing the costume off the child in front of him.(4) The child writhes in pain from the razor sharp claws that feel as though they pierce his very being. With mounting intensity, Aslan rips away layer after layer, until the child is absolutely certain he will die from the agony. But when it is all over and every last layer has been removed, the child delights in the new found freedom, having long forgotten the weight of the costume he carried.

The journey of a soul through its messiest rooms is not a drive-by glimpse of the depths of our sin and our need for repentance; it is not a journey for the sake of guilt or even right-living. It is true that we are shown the weight of our masks and the extent of our messes, that we are handed the great encumbrance of our own failures, but all so we can be shown again the one who asks to take them all from us—all so we can be made new by the one who remembers what it means to be fully human. “Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows… But he was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:4-5). Quite thankfully, it is through the dingy windows of a messy house that one has the clearest view of the cross.

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

(1) Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace (New York: Riverhead, 1998), 69.

(2) Ibid., 70.

(3) G.K. Chesterton, The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 334.

(4) Story told in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 115-117.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry –  Remedy for Control

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In the January 2, 2015 issue of Science magazine, I read a troubling article. Two researchers—one a cancer geneticist and the other a biostatistician—found that approximately two-thirds of all cancers are the result of “biological bad luck.”(1) The ‘bad luck’ they describe is simply the random genetic mutations that happen as a result of healthy cells dividing. Utilizing a statistical model to analyze historical literature on cancer, they examined the rates of cell division in 31 types of bodily tissue. Focusing specifically on stem cells—the specialized population of cells within each organ tissue that provide replacements when cells wear out—they found that the higher the rate of stem-cell division the more increased the risk of cancer. The reason why? Dividing cells must make copies of their DNA. The more they divide (over time), the higher the risk that errors in the copying process could set off the uncontrolled growth that leads to cancer.(2)

These findings are troubling because they create doubt as to whether preventative controls matter at all in the fight against cancer. They are troubling especially as I thought of all those who have come face to face with the ‘randomness’ of cancer. They are more than just statistics; they are family members, friends, and colleagues who struggle with this often deadly disease. Even more troubling is the way in which studies like this one erode confidence in any sense of control over life or destiny.

As I read studies like this, or simply look out on the world around me, it is sometimes difficult not to collapse under the weight of what appears to be random catastrophic events. Mistaken identity, for example, was the ‘reason’ a recent college graduate was murdered. He was a classmate, a dear friend of my brother, and not two-weeks into his new marriage when he was murdered at the front door of a home in which he was coming to share his Christian faith. Those inside mistook him for someone who had done harm to them in the past. In another seemingly random event, two wilderness experts/enthusiasts river-rafting in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge awoke in their campsite to find a grizzly bear. They were mauled and killed by the bear. Apparently, being in the wrong place at the wrong time can get one killed. But the ‘wrong’ place often seems to be as arbitrary as a roll of the die.

Part of the human strategy in the face of apparent random events such as these involves assigning meaning. Humans seek to find a purpose, a cause, someone or something to blame. Sometimes this strategy is a feeble grasping after control of all that seems chaotic and random in the human experience. Perhaps this strategy is what motivated those who inquired of Jesus about the collapse of the Tower of Siloam. The collapse of this tower killed eighteen people and stirred up all the same attempts to find meaning or assign blame. Jesus’s response likely left more questions than answers. “Do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate? I tell you no, but unless you repent you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:2).

In Jesus’s day, people were quick to assign a moral failure or sin as the cause of the tragedy, suffering or physical ailment. But Jesus does not affirm this assessment. Furthermore, Jesus does not conjecture as to the meaning of the event—in the sense they were asking—and he leaves its apparent randomness unexplained.

Of course, Jesus does affirm a God who is not far off even from apparently random events. “Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap, and they have no storeroom nor barn; and yet God feeds them; how much more valuable you are than the birds!” (Luke 12:24) Indeed, in Jesus’s own suffering and death the love of God is on full display. As author and theologian J. Todd Billings notes, the gospel on display in the cross of Jesus Christ “is big enough to incorporate and envelop our dying and deaths, even when death seems senseless.”(3) In the cross, God envelops all that seems random and senseless and seeks to overwhelm.

At the same time, the existential realities Jesus acknowledged as he lived his life should give pause to hurrying towards quick and easy comfort. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus wrestled in prayer over God’s will for his life. He did not face his suffering with a stoic, nerveless compliance in the face of God’s control. He begged God to take this cup from him. Jesus—the human Son of God wrestling with the Father in prayer and later crying out from the cross—shows that sometimes the only response to the seeming random suffering of life is to wonder if we have been forsaken, crying out in lament at a world that is not as it should be. Jesus also shows a God willing to be subjected to these chaotic forces of this world. This God is not aloof, but a God who was “willingly stripped…of all defenses to show us how humanity is ‘done.’”(4)

Jesus, while not answering the ‘why’ questions regarding the seemingly random fate of the eighteen Galileans, asks for a different response. He calls for change of heart for all who pondered the event at Siloam. He calls for a reorientation of the will towards repentance—perhaps even a repentance of longing to control life and meaning so tightly. Indeed, as Jesus himself wrestled with God over his own fate, he demonstrates a “willed acceptance….’Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet, not what I will, but what you will.’”(5)

In an age marked by fear of terror, chaos, and the seeming randomness of events, Jesus offers a heart at rest. It is a rest not found in stoic submission to a determined destiny, but a rest forged from listening for the whisperer in the whirlwind. Not a static surety, but a dynamic trust in the God who declares, “I AM WHAT I AM” and “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.”

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

(1) Jennifer Couzin-Frankle, “The Bad Luck of Cancer,” Science, January 2, 2015, 12.

(2) Denise Grady, “Cancer’s Random Assault,” New York Times, January 5, 2015.

(3) J. Todd Billings, Rejoicing In Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Books, 2015), 109.

(4) William J. O’Malley, Help My Unbelief (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,2008), 141.

(5) Ibid., 143. See Mark 14:36.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Lament and the Open Grave

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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,” he 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 and mind and society. An open grave is a gaping wound we seem to prefer buried.

Christian theologian J. Todd Billings notes something similar about the practice of lament, a discipline—maybe even a word—that has fallen out of use in modern times, buried or hidden 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) While this language might be fitting for certain worldviews, where death remains an enemy that puts an end to the celebration, 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, 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 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. The book is a remarkably honest account of his own lamenting, but it is equally clear that lament itself is a gift of the church to the world.

In one section, Billings describes his own congregation, filled with an array of people and stages of life, a church that baptizes and celebrates new life in Christ and holds funerals on a regular basis. This collective, human journey struck him as he led a Sunday school class after his diagnosis, compelling an honesty that moved him. “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 Psalms—with their 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. Writes Billings, “To mourn and to protest is to testify that the gifts of creation are truly wondrous, that the communion with God and others that we taste in Christ is truly the way things are supposed to be—thus alienation and death are not truly ‘natural’ but enemies of God and his kingdom.”(5)

The lections of the Christian season of Lent upon us are full of God’s care within multifaceted journeys: crossings from darkness into light, blindness to vision, the familiar to the unexpected, thirst to a place of provision. We find journeys beside still waters, through dark valleys and green pastures to a table prepared in the presence of enemies, pathways from the desert to the Sea of Galilee, a valley of dry bones and the tomb of a friend to a meal in an upper room and the crucifixion of the Lamb. There are no abstractions here. As Billings attests of the Christian story, it 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, and held by a storyteller who knows every part of the journey, 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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Ravi Zacharias Ministry –  Mystery and Prayer

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Even a casual reader of the Bible cannot help but notice many bold and staggering promises made concerning prayer. Perhaps none is more direct than Jesus’s statement in Mark’s gospel: All things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you. Matthew and Luke record similar promises. Those who seek after God knock and God will open the door. All things that are asked for in prayer, with belief, will be received. So strong are these promises about prayer that the Greek language in which they were originally translated indicates that what is asked for is already accomplished. The one praying simply needs to believe the answer has already been received.(1)

It was reading bold promises like these found in the Bible that troubled English author Somerset Maugham. In his novel, Of Human Bondage, he tells a fictionalized account of an incident with prayer from which his faith never recovered. The central character in the novel, Philip, is a young boy, full of faith, who has a clubfoot. When Philip reads this verse from Mark about prayer, he is overjoyed. Now he would be able to play football with the other boys. The relentless teasing would cease, and he wouldn’t have to hide his foot any longer when swimming with other children. Philip immediately “prayed with all the power in his soul. No doubts assailed him. He was confident in the Word of God. And the night before he was to go back to school he went up to bed tremulous with excitement….he remembered at once that this was the morning of the miracle. His heart was filled with joy and gratitude. His first instinct was to put down his hand and feel the foot which was whole now, but to do this seemed to doubt the goodness of God. He knew that his foot was well. But at last, he made up his mind, and with the toes of his right foot he just touched his left. Then he passed his hand over it. He limped downstairs just as Mary Ann was going into the dining room for prayers, and then he sat down to breakfast.”(2)

Unanswered prayers prayed with utter conviction are particularly difficult to understand. Maugham, who had a stutter, prayed fervently for healing, but like his character Philip, his prayer was answered with a resounding “no” and his faith was never the same. Jesus implies in his teaching on prayer that like our earthly fathers, God longs to give us what is good in response to the asking, seeking, and knocking of prayer. “What father, if asked by his son for a fish will give him a snake? Or if his daughter asked for an egg, he would not give her a scorpion, would he?” Yet for Maugham, or his alter-ego Philip, how could he see his stuttering, or that clubfoot as a good gift, when all it brought him was merciless teasing and misery?

Most people—religious or non-religious—have experienced the pain of unanswered prayer. Whether in the simple prayers of childhood, or in the fervent prayers of the deeply faithful, it is an all too common human experience that prayers seemingly go unanswered. Prayers for God’s protection, God’s healing, and God’s intervention are answered for some, but others suffer accidents, injuries, illnesses, or death despite fervent prayer. Sometimes when we are most desperate to hear God’s voice, there is only a vast silence in return. Perhaps, we are tempted to give up praying all together. Emily Dickinson wrote of this temptation to despair over unanswered prayer:

There comes an hour when begging stops,

When the long interceding lips

Perceive their prayer is vain.(3)

Even if the divine answer is “wait,” the months and years of waiting can stretch on interminably making the most patient intercessor wonder what “good” gift could come in the endless waiting. So what is the good gift promised by Jesus?

Matthew and Luke present parallel teachings on this promise of prayer except that what Matthew implies, Luke makes explicit. In Matthew’s account Jesus tells his disciples that the Father will give what is good to those who ask Him. In Luke’s account, Jesus defines what is good and tells us that God will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask. How might one understand the Holy Spirit as God’s abundant answer to prayer—even those prayers that go unanswered or receive an unwanted answer?

First, Christians believe that the promise of the Holy Spirit is the promise of God’s presence through all the circumstances of life. The Bible speaks of the Holy Spirit as the comforter, the one who comes alongside.(4) The promise of God’s presence is meant to sustain, even in the mystery of “no” to our specific requests. Moreover, prayer is more than simply receiving answers to requests. Prayer is about joining in with the Spirit who groans on behalf of the creation. Indeed, as theologian John Calvin claimed about the prayers of lament in the Psalms, they are “among the unutterable groanings of which Paul makes mention in Romans 8:26, ‘For the spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.’”(5)

In this way, Christians understand God’s good gift as the hope that God is present no matter what life brings. Hope that God is with us, and that God’s Spirit is groaning with us in our suffering offers reassurance that we too can rise from the ashes of the most crushing events and circumstances glimpsing what beauty remains and how God redeems.

Unanswered prayer will always be a mystery. For every person who prayers, there will be times when it seems the gift is a scorpion instead of an egg, or a snake instead of a fish. Yet perhaps as we wrestle with prayer, God’s bold promise to send the Holy Spirit is the only answer we could hope for: the good gift of God’s abiding presence, the power of redemption, and the promise of God’s creative work to make something beautiful from the chaos of our lives.

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

(1) See Matthew 7:7-11; Luke 11:9-13

(2) Cited in Philip Yancey, Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 216-217.

(3) Ibid., 213.

(4) John 14:16, 26.

(5) Cited in J. Todd Billings, Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer & Life in Christ (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2015), 156.