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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Strange and Imaginary Worlds

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The line between real and imagined is sometimes a little blurry. At least this is the conclusion of one report on the business of cyberspace, where thousands of people have imaginary lives and some are actually making a living at it. The creators of several popular online role-playing games completed a year-long study of the very real transactions that are taking place in their imaginary worlds. The results portray a flourishing economy that is rapidly grabbing advertisers’ attention. The sellers are role players who have taken the time to find marketable goods in their virtual worlds—and they are clearly putting in the time. In one popular game, a gnome is sold with a basic skill set for $214; in another, a virtual cherry dining set for a virtual home runs about 250 actual dollars. Between June 2005 and June 2006, 9,042 role players spent $1.87 million dollars on virtual goods from swords to special powers. According to analyst estimates this year, U.S. virtual goods revenue alone will top $1 billion and could even rake in over $2 billion.

It is entertainment I don’t claim to fully understand. But it is fascinating (and maybe frightening) to see how integrated the real and the virtual can become. Of course, this idea applies to far more than online games. What we imagine can become so enmeshed with what is real that we scarcely notice a difference. That is, until something real reminds us otherwise—like an outsider’s perspective or a credit card receipt.

Jonah was a prophet by profession. He knew the liturgy and worship of the people of Israel by heart. So it is not unreasonable that as his life was ebbing away in the depths of the sea, Jonah would cry out with the words of a psalm he had heard countless times before. And yet, the words no doubt had a depth of meaning for him unlike anything he had known before. As he was losing consciousness—literally in Hebrew, “in the feebleness of his person,”—Jonah not only remembered God by name, but in some ways was seeing God for the first time. Like one awoken to enmeshed worlds both real and imaginary, Jonah quickly clung to what was real.

Jonah’s behavior up until this point suggests a mentality that God was not entirely omnipresent, but present only in Israel, in the temple, and in the places of his own interest. As Jonah ran to Tarshish to avoid the call of God to go to Nineveh, he ran believing there was a place he could go where God could not find him. But as he sunk further into the depths of the sea, the prophet realized he was mercifully mistaken. His language evokes a play on words—As I was losing consciousness, I remembered the LORD. Or else, it was a sudden recognition of the Really Real in the imaginary world he had occupied. Losing consciousness, Jonah was actually gaining it.

Perhaps not wanting to consider the discomfort it would take to uproot our own embedded fallacies, tellers of Jonah’s story often minimize the distress that broke his silence with God. But the popular notion that Jonah went straight from the side of the ship and into the mouth of the fish is not supported by either the narrative as a whole or Jonah’s cry for help. H. L. Ellison suggests that “[Jonah] was half drowned before he was swallowed. If he was still conscious, sheer dread would have caused him to faint—notice that there is no mention of the fish in his prayer. He can hardly have known what caused the change from wet darkness to an even greater dry darkness. When he did regain consciousness, it would have taken some time to realize that the all-enveloping darkness was not that of Sheol but of a mysterious safety.”(1)

In that mysterious safety, Jonah shows us the strange world that unwound his imaginary one, and in it, the God who hears in both. Though the deep surrounded him and reeds were bound to his head, Jonah was heard—and his awareness of this was an essential turning point in his story. In prayer and darkness, Jonah admitted that the role of salvation cannot be in his hands. If only momentarily, the drowning prophet clung to a truth more hopeful than escapism and more able than idols: “Salvation belongs to the LORD.”

It is hard to believe that Jonah could have considered being swallowed alive a rescue, and yet it is precisely Jonah’s considerations from which he needed to be rescued. In truth, at times, the deliverance we need is that of deliverance from ourselves. Though our thoughts toward God be wound in self and seaweed, and the depths of our imagined autonomy threaten to drown us, rescue is a valid hope. What if God is far more real than we often imagine?

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

(1) H.L. Ellison, “Jonah,” The Expositors Bible Commentary, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1985), 374.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – By Its Cover

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In a study included in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine children were shown to overwhelmingly prefer the taste of food that comes in McDonald’s wrappers. The study had preschoolers sample identical foods in packaging fromMcDonald’s and in matched, but unbranded, packaging. The kids were then asked if the food tasted the same or if one tasted better. The unmarked foods lost the taste test every time. Even apple juice, carrots, and milk tasted better to the kids when taken from the familiar wrappings of the Golden Arches. “This study demonstrates simply and elegantly that advertising literally brainwashes young children into a baseless preference for certain food products,” said a physician from Yale’s School of Medicine. “Children, it seems, literally do judge a food by its cover. And they prefer the cover they know.”(1)

The science of advertising is often about convincing the world that books can and should be judged by their covers. These kids were not merely saying they preferred the taste of McDonald’s food. They actually believed the chicken nugget they thought was from McDonald’s tasted better than an identical nugget. From an early age and on through adulthood, branding is directive in telling us what we think and feel, who we are, and what matters.

But lest we blame television and marketing entirely for the wiles of brand recognition, we might recall that advertisers continue to have employment simply because advertising works. That is, long before marketers were encouraging customers to judge by image, wrapping, and cover, we were judging by these methods anyway. When the ancient Samuel was looking for the person God would ordain as king, he had a particular image in mind. In fact, when he first laid eyes on Eliab, Samuel thought confidently that this was the one God had chosen. But on the contrary, God said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”(2)

The study with the preschoolers is startling because adults can see clearly that a carrot in a McDonald’s bag is still inherently a carrot. Yet how often are we, too, blindsided by mere wrappings? Is the mistake of a child in believing the food tastes better in a yellow wrapper really any different than our own believing we are better people dressed with the right credentials, covered by the latest fashion, or wrapped in the right belief-systems? Covered in whatever comforts us or completely stripped of our many wrappings, we are the same people underneath.

According to the apostle Paul, there is one exception. Paul writes of a kind of clothing that changes the one inside them. “[F]or all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:27-28). Clothed in the righteousness of the man Jesus, a person is wrapped in the identity of one without sin. They are given new packaging, new life, new robes worn only by Christ, and thus, like him, they are fitted to approach the throne of God.

Unlike the catch and costliness of well-marketed wrappings, the robes Paul describes are free. Christ requires only that we come without costume or pretense. The many robes we collect, the covers with which we judge the world, we must be willing to release. He takes from tired shoulders robes of self-importance and false security. He tears from determined grasps those garments of self-pity and shame. And then he clothes the needful soul with garments of salvation, arrays us in robes of righteousness, and reminds us that we wear his holy name from the inside out.

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

(1) “Foods Tastes Better With McDonald’s Logo, Kids Say,” Forbes, August 6, 2007.

(2) 1 Samuel 16:7.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Unseen Substance

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At any given moment during any time of the year, were you to visit my home, you would find a stack of books on the nightstand beside my bed. Generally, these books represent my varied interests of study: gardening, theology, psychology, and current events. But recently, a new pile of books has sprung up on my nightstand. I’ve begun collecting books on physics.

Now, for those who love science, and particularly physics, this comes as no surprise. Why wouldn’t I have already accumulated a library full of physics books? But for those who, like me, didn’t graduate beyond basic biology, you might think me crazy, or masochistic, or both.

Whatever the case, my interest in physics began by considering this particular statement from Hebrews 11:1: “Faith is…the conviction of things not seen.” What a complex and seemingly paradoxical statement about the nature of faith! How can we have a conviction in things that are beyond our senses, beyond our perception and understanding? Moreover, how do we maintain the conviction of faith in the absence of concrete evidence? Can we really sustain conviction in that which is beyond our conscious experience of the world?

Physics in its simplest definition is the study of matter and how it works.(1) Physicists are concerned with the material and the energy makes up the universe. As such, the discipline of physics deals with elements so small that they cannot be seen even with the aid of the most powerful microscope. John Polkinghorne, physicist and Anglican priest, explains, “We now know that atoms themselves are made out of still smaller constituents (quarks, gluons, and electrons….we do not see quarks directly, but their existence is indirectly inferred).”  While physicists can only see, as it were, an indirect inference to these tiny realities of matter, they point to and indeed make up matter and energy all around us. I cannot see them, nor do I contemplate their existence on a day to day basis; but I trust they are there and at work when I sit down on my office chair each day!

In the same way, the Christian scriptures affirm that faith discerns the substance behind the often murky shadows of our reality. Indeed, the discipline of faith is to train one to have a different kind of sight. The apostle Paul wrote that “what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot is eternal…for we walk by faith not by sight” (2 Corinthians 4:18, 5:7). The conviction of faith, therefore, is the ability to see through our circumstances to the spiritual realities behind them. The grace and strength promised in weakness, for example, the wisdom that is found in the foolishness of the cross and in the suffering Christ, or the blessing and joy that is found among those who weep, all bind us to a concrete reality in God even while we “see through a mirror dimly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). It is an eternal reality experienced in the midst of our temporal lives.

In this sense, then, the conviction of faith calls us to go beyond certainty to wisdom.  As Scottish author George MacDonald once noted; “Men [sic] accept a thousand things without proof everyday, and a thousand things may be perfectly true and have no proof.  But if a man [sic] cannot be sure of a thing, does that automatically mean it is false?” (3) Indeed, all kinds of assumptions are made each and every day—that my chair won’t fail, or my car will get me from one place to another without injury, or I will see my loved ones again at the end of the day—without any certainty or proof.

Perhaps the conviction of faith seems more tenuous when suffering comes. The writer of Hebrews names ancient men and women who endured in faith.  They endured even when the promise was not received or seen, even when they were “tortured, mocked, scourged, stoned, imprisoned, sawn in two, killed with the sword, impoverished afflicted and ill-treated” (Hebrews 11:35-38). These were the ones of whom the world was not worthy, the writer tells us. They saw beyond their circumstances to that eternal reality.  They saw there is something greater than comfort or ease in this world, and they held on—however tenuously—to faith.

The “conviction of things not seen” is the substance of faith. It is the attention to those seemingly immaterial realities that are the true substance behind the circumstances of our daily lives. The conviction of faith is the ability to see in the disparate threads of our lives a beautiful garment, a useful quilt, or a magnificent tapestry. The conviction of faith is the ability to see beyond the finite to the infinite—in much the same way as physicists have discovered the infinite world of sub-atomic particles. Those invisible particles form an intricate tapestry of essential structure for everything that we see around us.

In the classic story of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery writes of a little fox who promises to reveal the secret of life to the young boy in the story. When the secret is finally revealed it is this: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”(4) In a similar manner, faith sees what cannot be ascertained by chasing after certainty.  Rather, faith offers the conviction of what is yet unseen as the substance of reality.

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

(1) From physics.org

(2) John Polkinghorne, Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion (London: SPCK, 2005), 3.

(3) George MacDonald cited in Michael R. Phillips, Knowing the Heart of God (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 1990), 9.

(4) Antoine de Saint-Exupery as cited by Thomas Long, Interpretation: Hebrews (Philadelphia: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997), 114.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – In Office

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The word “pardon” finds its roots in the Latin “perdonare,” which means to give wholeheartedly. In countries all over the world each year, such pardons are given by sovereign powers to accused persons, conveying the forgiveness of crimes and their associated penalties. In the United States, the authority for granting pardons for federal crimes lies with the president. It was on his final day in office that George Washington granted the first high-profile federal pardon. Today, U.S. presidents receive upwards of six hundred petitions for forgiveness a year. The percentage granted varies from president to president.

But regardless of the president or the crime, the granting of any pardon is only valid so long as that president is in office at the time of the pardoning. This may seem to most a simple enough point, but to the one being forgiven it is the most crucial detail. Like George Washington, many presidents wait until their final moments in office to grant exoneration. Had any of them chosen to wait one more day or in some cases a few more hours, when the responsibility of office had been handed to the next administration, their pardoning would be completely invalid. For the one who is being forgiven, that the pardoner is the current holder of the right office is of utmost importance.

The book of Hebrews carefully describes what it means that Jesus is present and permanently serving in the office of high priest. The writer outlines the history of sacrifice, the role of the priest in the life of Israel, and the office Christ now fills: “Now there have been many of those priests, since death prevented them from continuing in office; but because Jesus lives forever, he has a permanent priesthood. Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them” (Hebrews 7:23-25).

Christ is the current holder of the exact office needed for the crimes of a fallen humanity. Thus, for the one who is in need of pardoning, she can rest assured that there is someone in office to hear her plea, someone who is able to save her completely. And for the one who has been pardoned, he can rest assured that it is a lasting pardon. For our high priest is permanently in office, living to intercede between the guilty and the judge.

For the writer of Hebrews, the office of priest is one with a storied depth. In his role as high priest, like the priests of ancient Israel, Christ has become the one who administers the sacrifice on our behalf. But more than this, Christ has also become the sacrifice himself. Thus, we have in office not only the priest who is our mediator before God, but the very blood that makes us clean and able to stand in God’s presence. It is the good news of Christian story. Our pardon is complete, our crimes fully erased because it is Christ who pardons.

Religions ancient and modern alike amply demonstrate that human beings are in some way aware of their guilt and a need for its removal. Humanity on some level seems to understand that there is a need for something drastic, for deep and real change, for sacrifice or for blood. And what humans have known instinctively—namely, that there is an approach of some sort that is necessary in the removal of guilt—God has fulfilled on our behalf. Rather than waiting for us to approach, God has approached us. Understanding this initiative of God, this substitution of Christ’s blood for a lifetime of sacrifice, invites our participation in the story of salvation and moves us to worship. Well beyond the pardon of a president, our crimes have been erased.  The last verse of the hymn Arise My Soul captures this drastic exoneration and its implications for worship.

My God is reconciled;

His pard’ning voice I hear;

He owns me for his child,

I can no longer fear.

With confidence I now draw nigh,

And Father, Abba, Father, cry

Christ has died on our behalf, in our place, and he has ascended to his right place in office and power. In this radical reversal of centuries of sacrifice and blood that never seemed to cover, the blood of Christ is enough for all who seek to be pardoned. For Christ is now in office! And in the pardoning that takes place before the Cross is a new invitation to sonship and daughtership, a call to holiness, a call to humanity, a call to the world.

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

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Ravi Zacharias International Ministries – Why Do You Look Up?

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It is likely that the day slipped by without much recognition. Not all holidays—a contraction for the phrase “holy days”—are regarded with the care the word itself necessitates. Sometimes the holiest moments come not with fanfare but like a thief in the night.

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

Even to Christians, the ascension of Christ may not seem as momentous as the resurrection or as rousing as the image of Jesus on the Cross. It may seem like just one more detail tied up in the claims of Jesus Christ, a detail not worth professing on its own. But no action of Christ is without weight, and this, his last action on earth, is one of the great Christian hopes. The ascension was a living and public declaration of the dying words of Christ on the Cross: It is finished. The work God sent him to accomplish was finally completed. Ascending to heaven, Jesus only furthered the victory of Easter. Thus, Ascension Day, a holy day falling inconspicuously on a Thursday in May, is the remembrance that Christ, who went to the depths to reach us, is rightfully lifted on high.

But there are other reasons why the day merits our remembering of its mystery and import, and none is as simple as the fact that Jesus himself told us it was important. “It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.”(2) Curiously, mysteriously, Jesus describes his own departure as a gift to the world. As Jesus returns to the Father, a greater Comforter is sent, the Holy Spirit, the Counselor given in his name, who guides us into all truth, and testifies of all that is to come. Rising to life and then to the heavens, Jesus sends forth the one who leads us further into the kingdom, until he comes once again to take us home.

So, we are first reminded in the ascending of Jesus that the work he came to accomplish is finished; we are given in the ascending of Jesus the gift of the Spirit; and third, within his parting, we are given the assurance of his return. As the disciples were watching and Jesus was taken up before their very eyes, a cloud hid him from their sight. The text then refers to them “looking intently up into the sky as he was going” when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them: “‘Men of Galilee,’ they said, ‘why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go.’”(3) In his resurrected body, Christ ascended to heaven, fully human, fully divine, and entirely glorified. We therefore carry in our own flesh a guarantee that Christ will bring us to himself. Which is to say, we are not left as orphans! Jesus ascended with a body and is coming back for those in bodies. He is preparing a room for us, which we know is real because he is real. The Christian profession is indeed uniquely, mysteriously full of what it means to be fully human: Christ will come again.

But until this day, the ascension of Jesus Christ means furthermore that we have in heaven today our advocate before the Father. Jesus is enthroned in glory and seated at the right hand of the Father as our righteousness today. That is to say, the work of Christ on the Cross is not only finished, it has been declared by the Father entirely effective, and the presence of Jesus in heaven is our guarantee. As John writes, “My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One.”(4) Thus, the ascension of Christ is a fitting reminder of all that God has declared and all of creation will one day profess: “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the Name that is above every name, that at the Name of Jesus every knee should bow in Heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”(5)

Though it may have escaped attention, yesterday was a holy day indeed. As is their custom, the congregation of the Gloucestershire Cathedral celebrated Ascension Day by scaling the 269 steps of the cathedral and looking to the heavens. The choir sang from the top of the tower, looking up as they sang, singing to Christ the ascended, the name above every name. A worthy celebration.

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

(1) Luke 24:49-53.

(2) John 16:7.

(3) Acts 1:9-11.

(4) 1 John 2:1.

(5) Philippians 2:9-11.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Saintly Shooting Stars

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The observation that God moves in mysterious ways has become such a hackneyed cliché that even restating it in less familiar terms is bound to produce more yawns than any hint of endorsement. But as with other such simple truths, it is worthwhile to examine the weight of evidence that gave rise to the maxim in the first place. The Christmas event gives us the best opportunity to do so, not only due to the humble circumstances surrounding the birth of Mary’s child but also in light of the roles played by the cast of characters in the story. Like shooting stars, many of the characters enter and leave the stage without much fanfare, shining their lights for brief moments before fizzling out of the scene.

Take, for instance, John the Baptist. From his miraculous conception to his father’s nine-month muteness, the Scriptures leave no doubt that he was a unique child. All who knew about him could not wait to see what he would become (Luke 1:66). Jesus would say later that John was greater than any prophet who had existed up to that point. But John’s role in the life of Jesus lay many years in the future, with the intervening period being largely uneventful. Like the person who introduces a prominent speaker in a major conference, the whole purpose of his existence was reduced to the occasion of announcing the arrival of the long-awaited Messiah. Like a shooting star, John’s light fizzled out when the Messiah entered the scene. Isn’t it curious how a carousing band of petty potentates succeeded in ending John’s life in such seemingly tragic and frivolous circumstances while the King of Kings walked about the same neighborhood?

Well, they may have succeeded in ending his life, but they never defeated his purpose. John had already calmly reassured his disciples that it was alright to take down the props. His job was done, his joy was complete, and he was prepared to become less so that the Messiah could become greater (John 3:27-30). Unlike a permanent star planted in the sky as part of the very fabric of the universe, John’s role on the stage was quite short-lived, though he still carried it out in style—both in dress and diet.

Another such character was Simeon to whom God had given the promise that he would live to see the birth of the Lord’s Christ. Taking the child in his arms, Simeon could not help but offer praise to the director of the entire production for dismissing him in peace.(1) One could also mention Anna, an eighty-four year-old woman who had prayed and fasted in the temple ever since her seven-year marriage came to an end with the death of her husband. She too had a role to play in the drama of the birth of Jesus: her shining moment was the solitary event of holding Baby Jesus in her arms and saying something about him!

By focusing our attention on seemingly menial tasks performed by people whose lives were otherwise mundane and uneventful, the stories of the church conspire to teach us that though the world is indeed a stage on which human beings make their entrances and exits, as Shakespeare claimed, God takes special interest in the every role. The sheer number of names in the very pages of the Bible and the countless ordinary, unnamed individuals through whom God has accomplished his purposes in the world testify to that. Thus though my role may not seem as glamorous as the roles played by others, it is an indispensable piece of the larger puzzle in the mind of God. The hymn, God Moves in Mysterious Ways, contains a warning that is really worth heeding, especially in light of the apprehensive mood in which many enter the Christmas season and the coming New Year:

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,

But trust him for his grace;

Behind a frowning providence,

He hides a smiling face.(1)

And, oh, one more thing! “Shooting stars” are not stars at all. They are broken pieces of rock or metal that burn up once they come into contact with the earth’s atmosphere, eventually landing upon the earth as dust. Just like the moon, the light they reflect is not their own, but unlike the moon, they are used up in the process of lighting up the sky. What a fitting metaphor for the myriad of individuals, like John the Baptist, Simeon, Anna, and countless others throughout history, who have been content to be used up for the sake of the Kingdom of God! Of such the world is not worthy. Even though they do return to the earth as dust, the earth itself will eventually have to give up even their bodies, for the Babe of Bethlehem clothed himself with dust so that the person of dust may be eternally clothed with glory.

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

(1) See Luke 1:25-32.

(2) Written by William Cowper in 1774.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Voyage and Return

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

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

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

My story of faith and belief, like many others, cannot be told without some admittance of wandering to and from that faith, in and out of God’s presence, walking with and without Father, Son, or Spirit. When I think of my place among the spiritually vibrant, I am immediately aware of my drifting soul and less than perfect role in the story. Prone to wander, Lord I feel it; prone to leave the God I love, sings the hymnist. I imagine my place in the assembly of the faithful as I might image entering a grand ballroom of crowned guests and beautiful robes only to realize I am wearing a t-shirt and old jeans. The world of beautiful souls—with its ardent disciples from early centuries and saints from today—does not seem a place in which some of us feel we belong. Sometimes I feel more like humorist Groucho Marx, who once declined the offer of membership into an organization with the reply: “I don’t care to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member.” If I myself am the main character in my story of faith, this is the story I must tell.

But thankfully, I am not. In the Christian religion, the spiritual “journeying” is God’s. Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son is one more compelling reminder of this. The parable of the prodigal son is only a “voyage and return” narrative in the way Booker describes it if the son is the subject of the story. But any study of the father in this story makes that an altogether unlikely theory. Even our titling of the story as that of “the prodigal son” is misleading. Jesus tells us that it was while the son was still “a long way off” that the father saw him and “was filled with compassion for him” (Luke 15:20). Literally, this father was moved by his compassion. The Greek word conveys an inward movement of concern and mercy, but this man was also clearly moved outwardly. The father runs to the son, embraces him (literally, “falls upon his neck”), and kisses him.

Jesus describes a scene that is far more abrupt and shocking than the story we often remember of a son who wanders away and returns home again. It is not the wayward son who runs to the father but the father who runs to his wayward son, and at that, without any assurance of his son’s repentance whatsoever. In fact, the father runs without any promise that the son is even home to stay. What sort of a spiritual voyage and return journey would omit such a vital detail? Moreover, it is not the son who we find kneeling in the story Jesus tells, but the father. It is as if Christ is reminding us once again that all have indeed fallen short of the hope and promise and beauty of God, but that God has fallen to pick us up again and again, and to bring us home. Jesus tells a story whose merciful ending has far more to do with the actions of the father than any action of the child.

So it is with our own journeys. Our own voyage and return stories, our place in the story God tells, will never be valid because of our steps, but because of Christ’s. If we must use Booker’s headings to describe the journey of faith, the voyage was Christ’s, so that we might forever return to the Father.

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 – Holding On and Letting Go

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

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

To be sure, remembering is a very important discipline of heart and mind. The ancients called the people to remember the past as a way of connecting them to an aspect crucial to the formation of their present identity. Remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt. Ancient writings also bear witness to a God who remembers; You have remembered all of my wanderings; put my tears in a bottle, are they not in your book? But remembering is very different from making one’s home in the past, or seeing the past as the place of refuge, or the sum total of one’s identity in the present. To remember is to draw forward into the present what has been learned from the past. It is not the clinging to the past as one does with nostalgia; it is, as one ancient writer put it “letting go of what lies behind and looking forward to what lies ahead.”

Perhaps Mary Magdalene was lost in the past when she entered the garden where her beloved Jesus had been entombed. Perhaps she was lost in the grief and the pain that had overwhelmed her with his death. Whatever the case, she is so blind to the present that she doesn’t recognize Jesus when he first speaks to her. Rather than seeing into a future in which resurrection could be the last word, she immediately assumes that someone has stolen his body. “Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’”

When Jesus calls Mary by name, she recognizes him as ‘Rabboni’ (my teacher) and lunges towards him to embrace him. But, in a strange response, Jesus says to her, “Do not hold onto me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father…” Do not hold onto me. How could she not hold on to the dearest, purest and most wonderful love of her life? Yet, in trying to hold on and not let go, might it be that she too was afraid to go with Jesus into all that was new, and all that laid ahead. For in his resurrection, the new creation had begun, and now Jesus was going on to be with God. For Mary a new mission is begun as well. She is to go to the disciples and to tell them that Jesus is raised from the dead and will ascend to the Father. She goes and tells them, “I have seen the Lord.” No longer was he simply Rabboni, Mary’s teacher, but now he is the Lord of life.

Like Mary, it is so easy to want to hold on to what has gone, to dwell in the past, to want things back the way they were. If she had done so, what might have been lost of the future? In her willingness to let go of the Lord, she leaves the past behind and moves into a whole new world. But she does so with a new vision of what is to come, and what in many ways already now is, for she has seen the Lord…the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Mary Unedited

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Mary Magdalene has been given a lot of publicity since her time, and like the tabloids, not much of it is true. Allegations that she was married to Jesus or founded a community steeped in Gnostic belief are unfounded historical claims when looking at the earliest sources. They have no basis in the New Testament and do not seem to have any foundation in traditions before the second century.

What we do know about Mary is that she was possessed by evil spirits—seven to be exact—before she met Jesus. Much speculation has been assigned to what this possession meant. Some have argued that she was a prostitute and thus was deemed filled with unclean spirits, though this is never stated. Regardless of whatever life she had come from, it is clear that everything changed when she met the one who healed her. Mary joined the ranks as a follower of Jesus, and she never left him, even to the end.

Scholars remind us that this says a great deal about Mary, but even more so about the one she followed. “The most striking thing about the role of women in the life and teaching of Jesus is the simple fact that they are there.”(1) Jesus stepped into a world that largely discriminated against women. Women were forbidden to go beyond a certain point in the Temple; they were excluded from conversations in public and restricted to roles as spectators. Jesus not only rejected this practice, he radically acted in opposition to it. He shocked his disciples by talking to those who typically were rejected—a hemorrhaging woman on the road, a Samaritan drawing water at the well. He brushed aside every discrimination and injustice, and received the courageous women who were a part of every event outlined in the New Testament.

Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, which is an unfathomable statement to make about oneself. But it is not the only inconceivable statement he made. To study him, as one might a loose cannon in the crowd, we find one who is entirely countercultural, who affirms those who are rejected and overlooked, who gives women a voice and safe place to be heard, and who calls everyone to transparency, speaking toward a broken world with all its pain and shortfall, sickness and sin. If this is indeed the Son of God, he is a God who not only can handle our unedited stories—but demands them—because he himself did not hold back from standing in the midst of it all.

Mary Magdalene’s is one such story. She left behind the life she knew to follow the one who knew her. To this day, her story of faith and discipleship remains the one God has deemed worth retelling:

On the morning after the Sabbath, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb, according to the gospel writers. Mary was bent over with grief. She had followed Jesus and his disciples from city to city, watched him heal the sick and free the captives, turn ashes to beauty and mourning to gladness. She looked on as Jesus was taken and beaten and bound to a cross, and she watched as they buried him in a tomb, death having silenced the very life that changed her own. Like many women in Scripture, Mary’s tears were perhaps the last desperate words to the God she hoped was listening. The body she had come to anoint and care for was now missing, and she thought the gardener had something to do with it. In devastated affection, she pled for the body of the one she loved: “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him” (John 20:15b).

It was the sound of her own name that opened her eyes. Jesus said to her, “Mary.” And she turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means teacher). Jesus later appeared to all of his disciples, but it was Mary—a life once filled with hopelessness turned around by a compelling love and the courage to follow—to whom Jesus chose first to appear. She who loved much was given a place in his story, not as a testimony to her sins or in rebellion to a cultural norm or as tabloid scandal, but as yet another fully human reflection of the profound story of the Son of God.

Jill Carattini is managing editor at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) James Hurley, Man and Woman in Biblical Perspective (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1981), 82.

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Ravi’s Special Message about the Boston Tragedy…

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Dear Friend,

It has been a little over two weeks since the atrocity was committed in Boston by the murderous intent of two young men. University students supposedly on scholarships, family on welfare payments, and all the benefits of receiving, with no moral obligation. How sad it is to see the face of that little eight-year-old boy who had just come to have a fun day with his family only to become a part of the death list and a victim of a cold blooded and calculated act. What parent can ever get over that? What country can afford to not stop and ask “why” until we know the truth?

How does one make judgments on such matters? How do we examine our own beliefs so as to deny such people with violent intent their murderous goals?

I travel an awful lot. I visit countries that do not like Americans. With that prejudice in many a country, I am quizzed as to why I am there. In the Middle East on more than one occasion I have been asked to come and meet the Chief of Intelligence and quizzed. This is the way my last quizzing went in Syria about three years ago:

“Mr. Zacharias, we know you are visiting here. We just want to caution you not to get engaged in any political activity or make any comments on politics.”

I assured them I would honor that. Then he went on to say, “But you are very welcome here. We need people like you.”

It was astounding to hear that. Why would he make such a comment when the prevailing religion there was not my faith, nor what I came to preach?  For one, he knew the Christians there posed no threat to the regime but were a peaceable minority. The rest of the conversation made it clear. But there was obviously more to why he said that. I asked, “Can you tell me what you think of the situation in this part of the world?”

With beads in his hand as he compulsively scrolled through them out of sheer habit, he quietly said, “I don’t give this part of the world more than five years, and this whole place will blow up.” Rather taken aback by such a drastic pronouncement, I asked him what he meant. It was clear that they knew of rebellious forces working to topple the government and spread turmoil in that area. Ironically, when it all happened, including his own assassination, our media naively branded it “The Arab Spring.” Really? Is that what we are witnessing in Libya, in Egypt, in Iran after the Shah? Is that what spring looks like politically?

This ignorance or deliberately distorted way of thinking, supporting bloody and ruthless acts to supposedly topple dictators, is precisely what that part of the world is now experiencing. Suddenly, revolutions are the “in” thing and any establishment is at risk, as forces that destabilize are gleefully supported by the media elite, the intellectual elite, and the entertainment elite. We pontificate without the slightest understanding of history, religion, or of cultural distinctives. The average citizen is once again sacrificed at the altar of demagogic factions each seeking the power to enforce and dictate.

This abysmal failure in the media elite, to understand history and worldview, now puts America facing possible extinction herself. Those are not overstated words.

When one gets on to a plane, you hear, “Your safety is our first priority.” Evidently, in the journey of life itself, our power brokers don’t feel the same for their citizens. A visitor’s rights seem to be the first priority; those who seek our destruction are given greater privileges than our children who enjoy and love this land.

Something is wrong. Dreadfully wrong. Our definitions are at an all-time confusion, our values at an all-time low, our fiscal policies at an all-time danger, our beliefs at an all-time peril, and yet we want to tell our young people that we are building for their future.

Do our leaders ever sit down and read the primary sources to understand what lies beneath these worldviews to which we are pandering? We brand a religion “peaceful” or “great” without even reading its text. Only an uninformed person can make such sweeping statements. This does not assure us that our safety is a priority.

There is so much one can say on what needs to be done to provide for our safety. I simply resist the temptation and will not go into all of that, but rather respond in two ways. First, we must ask our political representatives to convene a formal study on this particular worldview of millions who have explicitly or implicitly screamed for our destruction. Adolf Hitler told the world what he was planning to do. The naïve of that time did not take him seriously. It took one of the bloodiest and most senseless wars in history to stop that genocide orchestrated by him. What will it take for us to wake up to the avowed threat of our time?

Second, I suggest that the rights we give our immigrants must be granted only by strict means of scrutiny. I went through that when I first moved to the west. My brother and I were quizzed thoroughly. I respected that. But that was over four decades ago. We are now politically correct and politically endangered at the same time. As I write this, I am about to depart for one particular country. I will be there for five days. To get a visa, I had to list all the countries I have visited in the last ten years. That was a task and a half. Did I object?  No. They are protecting their political system and they have a right to demand of me disclosure that they feel is necessary to keep their values intact. Anyone without subversive intent will not be afraid of such scrutiny.

But in our homeland we have become so all-encompassing that the only thing we don’t have any more is “values.” Interestingly, that was a term coined by the nihilists and existentialists to replace absolutes. When absolutes went, values came. When counter values came, our own values went. When our own values went, we watch a little eight-year-old boy blown to bits and the ones doing it tweet to their friends “LOL.” Such subversives do not fear our legal system. They know the perverse way in which their defenders can use it.

When hate can laugh, decency is crying and America stands at the crossroads of choosing the path of Right or else to bury what is right in the ever-shifting quicksand of so called “rights.”

This is a sad day as we mourn the decimation in Boston. But sadder days are ahead unless we understand what we are dealing with here. What happened in Boston was a deadly atrocity. Our failure to stem the rot will be a suicidal tragedy. We have confused what is lawful with what is legal.

Chesterton said it well: “For under the smooth legal surface of our society there are already moving very lawless things. We are always near the breaking-point when we care only for what is legal and nothing for what is lawful. Unless we have a moral principle about such delicate matters as marriage and murder, the whole world will become a welter of exceptions with no rules. There will be so many hard cases that everything will go soft.”

This is America today. We do not know the essential difference between what is lawful and what is legal. Our moral reasoning is dying before our eyes. Nobody knows this better than the lawless.

 

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Life, Death, and Incarnation – Ravi Zacharias

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The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is one of the world’s largest maximum-security prisons, an eighteen-thousand acre habitat to people who have committed horrible crimes. It houses roughly five thousand inmates, more than half of which are serving life sentences. Death looms large at Angola; ninety-four percent of inmates who enter are expected to die while incarcerated. The fear of dying alone in prison, coupled with the reality that for many inmates their first encounter with death was committing murder, makes death a weighted subject, often locked up in anger, guilt, and dread.

For a few inmates, however, the Angola Hospice volunteer program has drastically changed this. In 1998, equipped with a variety of staff trustees and inmate volunteers, the LSP hospice opened its doors to its first terminally ill inmate. Today it is recognized as one of the best programs of its kind. Giving inmate volunteers a role in the creation of the hospice and the primary care during the dying process, inmates find themselves in the position to tangibly affect the lives of others for good. Reckoning with death as a fate that awaits all of humanity as they care for dying friends and strangers, prisoners gradually let go of hardened demeanors. One inmate notes, “I’ve seen guys that used to run around Angola, and want to fight and drug up, actually cry and be heartbroken over the patient.”(1) Another describes being present in the lives of the dying and how much this takes from the living. “But it puts a lot in you,” he adds. A third inmate describes how caring for strangers on the brink of death has put an end to his lifelong anger and helped him to confront his guilt with honesty.

It may seem for some an odd story as a means of examining the story of Christmas, but in some ways it is the only story to ever truly introduce the story of Christmas: broken, guilty souls longing for someone to be present. As martyred archbishop Oscar Romero once said, it is only the poor and hungry, those most aware they need someone to come on their behalf, who can celebrate Christmas. For the prisoners at Angola who stare death in the eyes and realize the tender importance of presence, for the child whose mother left and whose father was never there, for the melancholic soul that laments the evils of a fallen world, the Incarnation is the only story that touches every pain, every lost hope, every ounce of our guilt, every joy that ever matters. Where other creeds fail, Christmas, in essence, is about coming poor and weary, guilty and famished to the very scene in history where God reached down and touched the world by stepping into it.

The Incarnation is hard to dismiss out of hand because it so radically comes near our needs. Into the world of lives and deaths, the arrival of Christ as a child turns fears of isolation, weakness, and condemnation on their heads. C.S. Lewis describes the doctrine of the Incarnation as a story that gets under our skin unlike any other creed, religion, or theory. “[The Incarnation] digs beneath the surface, works through the rest of our knowledge by unexpected channels, harmonises best with our deepest apprehensions… and undermines our superficial opinions. It has little to say to the man who is still certain that everything is going to the dogs, or that everything is getting better and better, or that everything is God, or that everything is electricity. Its hour comes when these wholesale creeds have begun to fail us.”(2) Standing over the precipices of the things that matter, nothing matters more than that there is a loving, forgiving, eager God who draws near.

The great hope of the Incarnation is that God comes for us. God is present and Christ is aware, and it changes everything. “[I]f accepted,” writes Lewis, “[the Incarnation] illuminates and orders all other phenomena, explains both our laughter and our logic, our fear of the dead and our knowledge that it is somehow good to die,…[and] covers what multitudes of separate theories will hardly cover for us if this is rejected.”(3) The coming of Christ as an infant in Bethlehem puts flesh on humanity’s worth and puts God in humanity’s weakness. To the captive, there is no other freedom.

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

(1) Stephen Kiernan, Last Rights (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2006), 274.

(2) C.S. Lewis, The Complete C.S. Lewis (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 282.

(3) Ibid.