In an interview with Mars Hill Review producer Ken Myers, historian John Lukacs spoke of what surprised him most when he first arrived in America to teach at the university. He noticed in the students he taught a total lack of curiosity—and he claims it has only gotten worse. Anything we learn, says Lukacs, is compelled by the curiosity which first caused us to pursue it, to follow a topic where it leads, and in so doing, find out how very little we know.(1) This principle is highlighted in the French 16th century term for an intellectual historian. Such a scholar was called a “curieux,” notes Lukacs. That is, one who is curious.

Sometimes I wonder if curiosity has been replaced by a fascination with the current scandal, gossip, or mystery plastered about the media. Television ratings remind us that there is always something fantastic about a new revelation, a long-lost document, or some controversial new evidence. We are quickly pulled in by the promise of a scandal. We are easily taken with a good mystery. And we are compelled to be up on the latest public frenzy. But I’m afraid such fascination shows not an attitude of curiosity towards knowledge, but an attitude of passivity that is always waiting to be shown the next new thing.

It is not surprising then to watch whatever latest media revelation become a public fascination. Such was the case with James Cameron’s documentary called “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” as he claimed there was new evidence that a tomb in Jerusalem held the remains of Jesus, his wife, and their son. “It doesn’t get bigger than this,” Cameron said at the press release. “We’ve done our homework; we’ve made the case; and now it’s time for the debate to begin.”(2) The foundations of Christianity were hardly devastated, as some of the headlines promised. But the heads of the masses were indeed turned, if only for a moment. Before the premiere of the documentary, the film’s companion book jumped to the top five best selling books online. The coming and going of May 21, 2011 and Harold Camping’s failed prediction of the end of the world presently holds a similar attention. Searches related to his false predictions have been top trends on both Google and Twitter since Saturday. Not surprising, many are using the story as further reason to laugh off religion in general.(3)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Curiosity and the Current Scandal →

We typically fill our parties with people similar to ourselves. We invite into our homes those we work with, play with, or otherwise have something in common with. We celebrate with fellow graduates, entertain people from our neighborhoods, and open our doors to four year-olds when our own is turning four. Psychologists concur: we socialize with those in our circles because we have some ring of similarity that connects us.

The man in the parable of the great banquet is no different. The story is told in Luke chapter 14 of an affluent master of ceremonies who had invited a great number of people like himself to a meal. The list was likely distinguished; the guests were no doubt as prosperous socially as they were financially. Jesus sets the story at a critical time for all involved. The invitations had long been sent out and accepted. Places were now set; the table was now prepared. All was ready. Accordingly, the owner of the house sent his servant to bring in the guests. But none would come.

Anthropologists characterize the culture of Jesus’s day as an “honor/shame” society, where one’s quality of life was directly affected by the amount of honor or shame socially attributed to him or her. The public eye was paramount; every interaction either furthered or diminished one’s standing, honor, and regard in the eyes of the world.

Thus, in this parable, the master of the banquet had just been deliberately and publicly shamed. He was pushed to the margins of society and treated with the force of contempt. Hearers of this parable would have been waiting with baited breath to hear how this man would attempt to reclaim his honor. But scandalously, in fact, the master of the feast did not attempt to reverse his public shame. Altogether curiously, he embraced it.

Turning to the slave, the owner of the house appointed the servant with a new task: “Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and the poor and maimed and lame and blind bring in here.”(1) Returning, the servant reported, “Lord it has all occurred as you ordered, and still there is room.” So the owner of the house responded again, “Go out into the waves and hedges and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.”

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Dining Scandalously →

I wrote one of the last sections of the book Why Suffering? on a plane flight from London to New York.(1) As I came through security at Heathrow Airport, I had about an hour until my departure, and I had it in mind to find a quiet spot and make a start on the writing I had planned.

As I began to walk toward the departure gates, a small sign for the “Multi-Faith Prayer Room” caught my eye, and instantaneously—though I have never before had an urge to visit an airport prayer room—I felt this conviction that there was someone in that room whom I was supposed to talk with. It was as if someone had just told me, “There is someone waiting to speak with you there,” even though I had not audibly heard those words.

I did an about-face and walked a good distance away from my departure gate to the arrivals terminal where the prayer room was located. When I walked in, there was one man in the room, sitting in a corner on the floor. He appeared to be about my age. When he saw me looking around the prayer room, he asked, “Are you religious?” We began speaking about what it means to be religious, and he soon shared with me that he was going through the worst suffering of his life.

Mohammed fought back tears as he shared about what no one would ever want to go through. He expressed that he never talks about such things with anyone, but that he just needed to get it out. He told me that he used to pray five times a day, but that now the suffering is too much; he opens his mouth to pray and nothing comes out. Finally, Mohammed challenged me, “If God exists, why is there so much suffering? And where is he amidst it all?”

Now I understood why we were supposed to meet. I told Mohammed that the one person of whom he finally asked “Why suffering?” was currently writing a book by that very title, and in fact was walking in the opposite direction toward the departure gates when God turned him around and led him to this specific room to share that God does care and that he is present.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – God at Terminal Five →

Losing things is a nuisance that seems forever mine. It’s the minor things I lose, things I seem to have given myself permission to be less attentive to keeping found. I am notorious for misplacing my car keys most of all, and my sunglasses are almost always missing. Most days I haphazardly place them somewhere near the first thing that was on my mind as I took them off or turned off the engine—which means that sometimes I find them in the laundry room and other times by the refrigerator.

Habitually missing keys are certainly a frustration, but finding them is usually as simple as retracing my steps—and there is always a spare set if they don’t turn up right away. To my husband, however, lost keys are a source of unnecessary frustration. He has worked patiently on the problem; we have a special place to put the keys when we walk through the door. Some days this works.

Other days I more resemble the woman in Jesus’s parable tearing apart the house to find the lost coin, lighting a lamp, sweeping the house, searching carefully until she finds it. And perhaps this contributes to my attitude with regard to lost keys—I know I will eventually find them. In fact, the only time I seem lose them is when I am comfortably in the confines of my own house. Sadly, sunglasses are another case entirely.

In two different parables, Jesus compares the sentiments that accompany the person who has lost something to the sentiments of the heavens over the one who is lost. When the woman in the parable has found the coin she was searching for, she calls her friends and neighbors together and asks them to celebrate with her: “I have found my lost coin!”

Jesus then concludes: “In the same way, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over even one sinner who repents.”(1)

My lost keys or pens or coins don’t typically evoke in me such sentiments. And I wonder how easy it is to carry a similar lightness about a world buried in injustice, lost in pain, distraction, or indulgence. How easy is it to give ourselves permission to be inattentive to so much around us, to see a world of need as something minor, to view our own wandering as a problem that will work itself out like lost keys? No doubt the heavens grieve over this sort of inattention even as they grieve over the lost daughter or missing son.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – What Is Lost →

I have always been mesmerized by ballet dancers. I remember our family’s annual visit to McCormick Place in Chicago to see the Nutcracker. The fluid movement, the spinning on toes, arms floating around as if in flight, their movement told the story. The dancers made the most difficult technical movements seem natural and easy. I remember one friend speaking of the dancers’ expertise as being filled with grace. These artists had taken complicated and physically demanding choreography and infused it with simple elegance and refinement.

The concept of grace has a long history within the Christian tradition. In theological terms, grace is described as God’s unmerited favor toward human beings and our not getting what we deserve—both in terms of our own failing, and in terms of the abundance of God’s blessing towards us. Grace is also understood as a way of life towards others. Since God gives grace freely, humans ought to extend grace towards one another. Like the experienced dancer, the grace extended toward others should be characterized with an elegance and refinement.

Easier said than done. For one like me, who is by nature clumsy and lacking in balance, extending grace to another can often feel like the most excruciating physical practice. What often results is not a refined and elegant performance, but the proverbial dancer with two left feet. So how does one, like the dancers in the Bolshoi Ballet, live in ways that are full of grace?

I asked this question to a friend as we conversed about living in ways that were permeated with graciousness. He shared a story with me about his children’s karate instructor. The instructor was a black-belt in karate and very skilled in his movements and technique. Like the dancers I saw in the Nutcracker, my friend marveled at both the fluidity and gracefulness of the instructor’s movements as he demonstrated karate. Afterwards, my friend asked the instructor if he always moved with such grace and ease—was that something that just came naturally and that one had to possess inherently in order to succeed at karate? The instructor laughed and took him into his office. He took out a video tape. The tape was recorded when the instructor was a student. My friend was amazed by what he saw: jerky, clumsy kicks and punches, falling down as he missed his target, defeat against one opponent after another. Was it really the same person he saw before him? Indeed, it was. So what was the instructor’s secret?

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Dance of Grace →

“God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life” was a slogan I heard over and over again as I grew up. As a young person, this slogan meant that all my plans would be wonderful because God loved me. Now that I am older, I understand that this slogan had more to do with the Christian Gospel’s understanding of salvation than it did with guiding me down the primrose path of life. Yet, it still reverberates in my head when I experience hardship, pain, and loss. For it is often difficult to square a belief in the love of God with a series of life experiences that run counter to the expectations for a wonderful plan.

The seeming contradictions between stated beliefs and life experience often make faith complicated. For me, many of the cherished beliefs I held imploded and what I once thought was an invincible fortress came crashing down as life experience smashed up against them like a battering ram. C.S. Lewis described his own spiritual dismantling after the death of his wife, Joy, this way: “God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.”(1) Yet having to dwell in the rubble of what is left of one’s faith doesn’t feel as if it is the work of a God who desires to smash all our false conceptions.

There is a “great cloud of witnesses” who have also experienced the difficult conflict between what was held to be the truth and reality. Knowing this can give comfort for all who experience the collapse of all they hold dear. I am reminded of the biblical narrative of Joseph, as one example. He was told by God through a sequence of dreams that he would be great one day—so great, in fact, that his own brothers would come and bow down out of reverence for him. He had been given a glimpse of his destiny as Jacob’s dearly loved child, and perhaps he believed his path to that destiny would be won with ease. Instead, his path took many unexpected turns. First, his own brothers attempted to murder him, he was enslaved, and he spent a large portion of his life in prison having been falsely accused of various crimes he did not commit. Surely, Joseph must have had days where he wondered if God’s plan for his life was a wonderful one.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Tearing Down the House of Cards →

A New York Times blog written by Nicholas Kristof recently 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 secular 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.  As recently as April 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.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Does Religion Oppress Women? →

In today’s world, it is often difficult to summon optimism. Bad news swirls around us blowing our hopes and dreams like leaves in the fall wind. In this gale, we often find it hard to cling to hope and to a sense that the future will be a bright one. In general, I see myself as an optimistic person. I try to find the bright side of bad situations, and I work hard to walk the extra mile to give others the benefit of the doubt in personal relationships. I am not a naïve optimist like the character Pangloss in Voltaire’s biting satire Candide. When it is clear the ship is sinking, I don’t believe everything will be alright nor do I believe, as Pangloss would, that the sinking ship is the best thing that could happen to me. I do all that I can to bail out the rising water, even as I wrestle against the fear and anxiety that accompanies impending disaster!

Yet despite my generally optimistic attitude and outlook, there are times when sadness overwhelms me. It may be a growing storm of weary longing or a tide of lonely isolation that sweeps over me, drowning me with a dolor that submerges my hope. Sometimes it occurs when I think about the aging process and our hopeless fight against it. Sometimes it occurs when I am in the grocery line, looking at the baggers and clerks who wonder if this is all they will ever do for work. Oftentimes, it occurs when I cannot see the good through all the violence and evil that oppresses the world and its people. I can easily become overwhelmed by the numbers of people who are forgotten by our society—the last, the least, and the lost among us—and wonder who is there to help and to save them from drowning.

It is in these times that I befriend lament. And I take great comfort in the loud cries and mourning that have echoed throughout time and history as captured in the poems, songs, and statements of lament. Indeed, a great portion of the Hebrew Scriptures comes in the form of lament, both individual and communal lament. The Psalms, as the hymnal of Israel, record the deepest cries of agony, anger, confusion, disorientation, sorrow, grief, and protest. In so doing, they express hope that the God who delivered them in the exodus from Egypt, would once again deliver by listening and responding to their lament.(1) The prophets of Israel, who cry out in times of exile, present some of the most heart-wrenching cries to God in times of deep sorrow and distress. One can hear the anguish in Jeremiah’s cry, “Why has my pain been perpetual and my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Will God indeed be to me like a deceptive stream with water that is unreliable?” (Jeremiah 15:18). In addition, Jeremiah cries out on behalf of the people of Judah: “Harvest is past, summer is ended, and we are not saved. For the brokenness of the daughter of my people I am broken; I mourn, dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has not the health of the daughter of my people been restored?” (Jeremiah 8:20-22).

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Bittersweet →

“Please—Mr. Lion—Aslan, Sir?” said Digory working up the courage to ask.  “Could you—may I—please, will you give me some magic fruit of this country to make my mother well?”

A child in one of the Narnia books, Digory, at this point in the story, had brought about much disaster for Aslan and his freshly created Narnia.  But he had to ask.  In fact, he thought for a second that he might attempt to make a deal with Aslan.  But quickly Digory realized the Lion was not the sort of person with which one could try to make bargains.

C.S. Lewis then recounts, “Up till then the child had been looking at the lion’s great front feet and the huge claws on them.  Now in his despair he looked up at his face.  And what he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life.  For the tawny face was bent down near his own and wonder of wonders great shining tears stood in the lion’s eyes.  They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory’s own that for a moment he felt as if the lion must really be sorrier about his mother than he was himself.”(1)

Charles Dickens often spoke of his characters as beloved and “real existences.”  I have often wondered if the “safe but never tame” Lion ministered to C.S. Lewis half as much as this Christ figure has comforted others.  Lewis was a boy about the age of Digory when his mother lay dying of cancer and he was helpless to save her.

“My son, my son,” said Aslan.  “I know.  Grief is great.  Only you and I in this land know that yet.  Let us be good to one another…”

The tremendous figure that fills the gospels towers above all attempts made to describe him.  Yet had you or I been in charge of writing the story of God becoming human, I doubt it would have been Christ either of us described: “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.  Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not,” reads the description of Isaiah.  He was not the stoic, man of nerves we might have imagined.  Nor was he the ever-at-peace teacher we often describe.  He was, among other things, a man of sorrows.

There is, for me, immense comfort in a Christ who was not always smiling.  As I picture his face set as flint toward Jerusalem, my fear is unfastened by his fortitude. As I imagine the urgency in his voice as he defended a guilty woman amidst a crowd holding rocks, my shame is freed by his mercy. And as I picture him weeping at the grave of Lazarus, crying out at injustice, sweating blood in the garden of Gethsemane, my tears are given depth by his own cries. We do not grieve alone.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Acquainted With Grief →

For years, I never used the word “sovereign” as a noun.  I knew it could be used in this way—”Like a sovereign,” writes Shakespeare “he radiates worth, his eyes lending a double majesty”—I just never did.  But trial and tragedy have a way of waking us to words and realities overlooked.  There was a time that whenever I closed my eyes to pray I was leveled by the image of the throne, and it was empty.  It was somewhere in the midst of this recurrent vision that I realized my neglect of the noun.  Was God indeed the Sovereign who spoke and listened?  I had often used the word as an adjective.  But adjectives, like good moods, seem to come and go.

The prophet Jeremiah depicts a Sovereign that cannot come and go, simply because He is. God’s sovereignty is not a coat that can be taken off when all is going well or when all is going poorly. God does not cease to be the Sovereign though the world refuses to bow or “distant” seems a better adjective. And God’s words are not stripped of their sovereignty though no one is listening or no one responds. The Sovereign of all creation is always sovereign, active, and near. It is we who are inconsistent.

Jeremiah chapter 6 begins with an image of the Sovereign speaking to a people unwilling to listen, an honorable Judge whose words are dishonored. “To whom shall I speak?” the LORD inquires. The question is a lonely one, reflecting both the prophet who speaks and the Sovereign whose words are ignored.  The inquiry also has the force of sarcasm:  Why bother speaking to a people who won’t hear? But the words are not a commentary on God’s behavior; God is not throwing his hands up and suggesting the route of silence. Rather, it is a commentary on God’s words themselves, which are weighted with the compulsion to be heard. Though our ears are closed and we scorn his warnings, the Sovereign speaks and his words go forth with power. “God is always coming,” says Carlo Carretto. “God is always coming because God is life, and life has the unbridled force of creation.  God comes because God is light and light cannot remain hidden.”(1)  God’s decrees from the throne create and sustain the world. There is a person enthroned in every word, bidding the world’s response to every call and every sound.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Nouns and Adjectives on the Throne →

I recently ran across three stories—and three individuals—in Mark 5 that surprised me.  Mark first introduces us to a demon-possessed man, who upon seeing Jesus on the shore at a distance, immediately runs to him and falls upon his knees before him.  Jesus heals him, sends him home to his family, and then gets back into a boat with his disciples.

Next Mark tells us, “When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake…one of the synagogue rulers, named Jairus, came there.  Seeing Jesus, he fell at his feet and pleaded earnestly with him, ‘My little daughter is dying.  Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.’”  And how does Jesus respond to this man?  Mark says simply, “So Jesus went with him.”

However, before Jesus can get to Jairus’s house, a large crowd presses upon him, including another desperate person seeking his help—this time a woman bleeding for twelve years.  Writes Mark, “She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, ‘If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.’  Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.  At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him.  He turned around in the crowd and asked, ‘Who touched my clothes?’”

Jesus’s question prompts his disciples to ask with urgency and impatience, “You see the people crowding against you…and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’”  Do you hear what they communicate?  “Jesus, we are trying to get to the home of this powerful synagogue ruler before its too late and his child dies, and you stop to ask who touched you in this throng of people?  What does it matter?  Why do you care?”  But Jesus kept looking around, Mark observes, to see who had done it.  “Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth.”

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Why Does It Matter? →

The massive Rembrandt measures over eight and a half feet tall and six and a half feet wide, compelling viewers with a larger than life scene. “The Return of the Prodigal Son” hangs on the walls of the St. Petersburg Hermitage Museum depicting Christian mercy, according to one curator, as if it were Rembrandt’s last “spiritual testament to the world.” Fittingly, it is one of the last paintings the artist ever completed and remains one of his most loved works.

The painting portrays the reunion of the wayward son and the waiting father as told in the Gospel of Luke. The elderly father is shown leaning in an embrace of his kneeling son in ragged shoes and torn clothes. With his back toward us, the son faces the father, his head bowed in regret. Clearly, it is the father Rembrandt wants us most to see. The aged man reaches out with both hands, his eyes on the son, his entire body inclining toward him.

It is understandable that viewers have spent hours looking at this solemn reflection of mercy and homecoming. The artist slows unstill minds to a scene where the parable’s characters are powerfully still. The kneeling son leans silently toward the father; the father calmly and tenderly leans toward the son. All is at rest. But in fact, this is far from the scene Jesus portrays in the parable itself.

The parable of the prodigal son is a long way from restful, and the father within it is anything but solemn and docile in his embrace of the wayward son. In the story Jesus tells, while the son was “still a long way off,” the father saw him and “was filled with compassion for him” (Luke 15:20). This father was literally moved by his compassion. The Greek word conveys an inward movement of concern and mercy, but this man was also clearly moved outwardly. The text is full of dramatic action. The father runs to the son, embraces him (literally, “falls upon his neck”), and kisses him. Unlike the depiction of Rembrandt, Jesus describes a scene far more abrupt and shocking. It is not the son who we find kneeling in this picture, but the father. The characters are not at rest but in radical motion. The father who runs to his wayward son runs without any assurance of repentance; he runs without any promise that the son is even home to stay.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Father Who Runs →

Jesus tells the story of a rich man who is content to live comfortably with the great chasm between his success and a poor man’s predicament. At his own gate each day, the man passes a beggar named Lazarus, who is covered in sores and waits with the hope that he might be satisfied with something that falls from the rich man’s table. But as Jesus describes the rich man, he sees neither Lazarus nor his plight. Ironically, when the rich man dies and is suffering in Hades with his own agony and aspirations, he still chooses to view Lazarus as inferior, worthy only of being a servant. “Father Abraham, have mercy on me,” he pleads, “and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony.”(1) Twice he makes it clear in his requests that he sees the man who sat at his gate as subordinate at best. Having refused all his days to see the waiting Lazarus as a fellow soul, a suffering neighbor, the chasms the rich man allowed in life had now grown fixed in death.

Another story that emerges from the life of Jesus came before he was old enough to tell stories of his own. The prophet Isaiah told of a child who would be born for the people, a son given to the world with authority resting on his shoulders. Hundreds of years later, in Mary and Joseph of Nazareth, this prophecy was being fulfilled: The angel had appeared. A child was born. The magi had come. The ancient story was taking shape in a field in Bethlehem. But when Herod learned from the magi that a king would be born, he gave orders to kill all the boys in and around Bethlehem who were two years old and under. At this murderous edict, another prophecy, this one spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, was sadly fulfilled: “A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping; Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”(2) While the escape of Mary and Joseph to Egypt allowed Jesus to tell the story of Lazarus years later, the cost, as Rachel and all the mothers’ who didn’t escape knew well, was wrenchingly great.

Of the many objections to Christianity, one that stands out in my mind as troubling is the argument that to be Christian is to withdraw from the world around us, to follow fairy tales with wishful hearts and myths that insist we stop thinking and believe that all will be right in the end because God says so. In such a vein, Karl Marx depicts Christianity as a kind of drug that anesthetizes people to the suffering in the world and the wretchedness of life. Likewise, in Sigmund Freud’s estimation, belief in God functions as an infantile dream that helps us evade the pain and helplessness we both feel and see around us. I don’t find these critiques and others like them troubling because I find them accurate of the kingdom Jesus described in any way. I find them troubling because so many Christians live as if Freud and Marx are quite right in their analyses.

In our impervious boxes and minimalist depictions of the Christian story, we can comfortably live as if in our own world, blind and unconcerned with the world of suffering around us, intent to tell our feel-good stories while withdrawing from the harder scenes of life. In fact, to pretend as if Christianity does not at times function as a wishful escape from the world is perhaps another kind of wishful thinking. There are some critiques of Christianity we ignore at our own peril.

But in reality the stories Jesus left us with reach unapologetically beyond wishful thinking; his proclamations of the kingdom among us are far from declarations of escapism. The story of Rachel weeping for her slaughtered children and Lazarus waiting in agony at the gate of someone who could make a difference are two stories among many that refuse to let us sweep the suffering of the world under the rug of unimportance. The fact that they are included in the gospel that brings us the hope of Christ is not only what makes that hope endurable, but what proves Freud and Marx entirely wrong. Jesus embodies the kind of hope that can reach even the most hopeless among us. He hasn’t overlooked the suffering of the world anymore than he has invited his followers to do so. It is a part of the very story he tells; it is a story written on his own scarred hands and feet.

Thus, precisely because the faith Christians proclaim is not a drug that anesthetizes or a dream that deludes, we must tell the whole story and not merely the parts that lessen our own pain. We must also live as people watchful and ready to be near those who weep and wait—the poor, the demoralized, and the suffering. There are far too many Rachels who are still weeping and Lazaruses who are still waiting, waiting for men and women of faith to inhabit the good news they proclaim, to live into the startlingly real identity of Christ himself.

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

(1) Luke 16:24.

(2) Jeremiah 31:15, Matthew 2:16-18.

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Robi Damelin knows it is all too alluring for the media to depict an extremist screaming at the top of a mountain about a greater nation or the mother of a suicide bomber saying she’s proud to have given her child; the alternative does not sell as well as the sensational. “But I can tell you of all these mothers who’ve lost children,” she says. “I don’t care what they say to the media. I know what happens to them at night when they go to bed. We all share the same pain.”(1)

Damelin is a mother who knows this pain well. Sitting beside her, Ali Abu Awwad, a soft-spoken young man thirty years her junior, knows a similar pain. Robi and Ali each tell stories of loved ones lost to violence, stories that happen to intersect at a place that puts them at painful odds with one another. Each grieves the loss of a family member caused at hands on opposite sides of the same violent conflict. For Ali, filled with the loss of his beloved younger brother, that place of intersection was once filled with thoughts familiar to many in his situation: How many from the other side need to die in order to make my pain feel better? Yet bravely, he began to notice something else at the crossroads of his side and theirs. For both Robi and Ali, it was the tears of the other side that would change the way they tell their stories.

Some stories, as Kafka prescribed, indeed provide the ax for the frozen sea inside us. Rather than crafting for themselves stories that add to the cold sea of hatred and despair which devastated them, Robi and Ali tell of the common grief that cracks the frozen wall between them. They are now a part of a growing network of survivors on both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict who share their sorrow, stories of loved ones, and ideas for lasting change. “It’s the shared pain that allows you to open to another place completely,” says Robi. “If you want to be right it’s very easy,” adds Ali. “But to be honest is very difficult. Being honest means to be human.”(2)

Their story brings something I have been thinking about personally into a much broader place. Namely, the stories we tell ourselves powerfully shape our worlds:  I am right. I am wounded. I am entitled. I am abandoned. I am in control. These simple narratives rest at the heart of the things we do and say, quietly but decidedly shaping our worldviews, our identities, our humanity. They at times act as self-fulfilling prophecies, narratives which keep us locked in worlds we may even claim we want to leave: I am devastated. I am betrayed. I am on my own. The tale of Ali and Robi shows two people willing to change the more common narratives of power and prerogative to the much less comfortable narratives of shared loss and weakness: We are human. We are grieving. We know the same pain. And as such, they are finding humanity where there was once only suspicion, relationship where a great divide often reigns, and a common story which chips away at a great frozen sea.

Unfortunately, ours is a world often suspicious with regards to common narratives. Even common stories of human existence can be seen as controlling attempts to manipulate or undermine the individual’s story, which is viewed as supreme. The master narrative is similarly dismissed, rejected on grounds of totalitarianism. According to Robert Royal in The New Religious Humanists, the current philosophy is one that favors “petites histoires, that is, personal stories as the only locus of rich meaning open to us.” In this view, he continues, “all the old grands recits—Christianity, Hegelianism, Marxism, even liberalism—are dangerous totalizing and potentially terroristic illusions.”(3) The pervasive postmodern mindset prefers an individual approach to seeing the world, speculating on our origins, perceiving our destinies—independently.

But without undermining the power of personal stories, can we be satisfied with them alone? If petites histoires are really the only locus of meaning open to us, are we content with the effects of being held within those walls? Is the world the better for it? Robi and Ali, for one, would remain enslaved and frozen in a bitter conflict without the commonality that opened their eyes to a deeper humanity. Moreover, without a grand narrative that can truly answer humanity’s grand questions, the individual story only axes away futilely at a frozen abyss it can never crack.

The most remarkable gift of the master narrative I have chosen to tell and retell is that the storytelling is not over. I am instead freed to hear and tell my petites histoires in light of the whole story, which is yet unfolding even as it proclaims a definitive end. Which means, that sometimes the stories I tell myself are mercifully corrected by far greater I am statements than my own. That is to say, the quiet narrative that insists I am alone is told beside, “I am the good shepherd who searches for even one that is lost.”(4) The subtle fable of personal control is confronted by a story of life, death, and resurrection; a remarkable beginning and a far more remarkable end. Stepping both into history and petites histoires, God as storyteller shows us what it means to be human: with one Word, breaking through every frozen barrier.

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

(1) Robi Damelin and Ali Abu Awwad with Krista Tippett “No More Taking Sides,” Speaking of Faith, February 18, 2010.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Gregory Wolfe Ed., The New Religious Humanists (New York: Free Press, 1997), 98.

(4) Cf. John 10:11-14, Luke 15:1-10

http://www.rzim.org/

Not long ago, I conducted an internet search on the tag “What is the good life?” and I was amazed at what came up as the top results of my search. Most of the top entries involved shopping or consumption of one variety or another. Some entries were on locations to live and still others involved self-help books or other media touting five easy steps to the good life. Other entries provided the names of stores selling goods to promote “the good life.”

“What is the good life?” is a question as old as philosophy itself. In fact, it is the question that birthed philosophy as we know it.(1) Posed by ancient Greek thinkers and incorporated into the thought of Socrates through Plato, and then Aristotle, this question gets at the heart of human meaning and purpose. Why are we here, and since we are here, what ought we to do? What is our meaning and purpose? As my internet search revealed, there were no immediate entries on Plato, Aristotle, or the philosophical quest that originated in that question. There were no results on wisdom or the quest for knowledge lived out in a virtuous life. Instead, the entries involved purely material pursuits and gains. Sadly, this search may reflect the substance of our modern definition of what is good.

Out of the early Greek quest for the answer to this question emerged two schools of thought. From Plato emerged rationalism: the good life consists of ascertaining unchanging ideals—justice, truth, goodness, beauty—those “forms” found in the ideal world. From Aristotle emerged empiricism: the good life consists of ascertaining knowledge through experience, what we can perceive of this world through our senses.(2) For both Aristotle and Plato, rational thought used in contemplation of ideas is the substance of the good life.

Despite the obvious emphasis by both on goodness emerging from the contemplative life of the mind (even though they disagreed on the source of rationality), both philosophers saw the quest for the good life as benefiting society. For Plato, the quest for the good life—that of justice, truth, goodness, and beauty—leads to the ideal society. For Aristotle, virtue lived out in society is the substance of the good life and well-being arises from well-doing.

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Hans Christian Andersen tells of the emperor who loved new clothes. This emperor so admired modeling his new robes that he spent all of his time in his dressing room. In fact, he had little concern for anything else in his kingdom.

One day two swindlers came to town announcing they were weavers of the finest clothes imaginable. Their royal colors and fabrics, they claimed, were exceptionally stunning. In fact, they were of such quality that they were only visible to the finest few! Those who were unfit for their office or were hopelessly stupid would not be able to see them at all.

The emperor was immediately taken by this description and provided the weavers with large amounts of money. He wanted to know those who were unfit for their posts; he also wanted to see the foolish and the clever within his empire. Yet when the emperor went to try on the garments, he was most distraught to realize that it was he who saw nothing at all. But the king would not admit his stupidity or incompetence; he would not let anyone think him a fool. He announced that the cloth was very beautiful, and all the courtiers rapidly agreed. In a great procession the next day, everyone spoke in admiration of the emperor’s new clothes. They loved the detail! The colors were beautiful! The garments were like no other, they said. But then from the back of the crowd a child spoke up, observing what the rest would not: The emperor was wearing nothing.

Imagine finding out that the one thing you have desperately attempted to keep veiled in secrecy was not actually veiled at all. The thought bears the unsettling sense of finding yourself unclothed before a crowded room. Would you feel foolish? Would you run and hide? Or would you insist the veil was still there? Andersen ends with a glimpse into the mind of the king: “[The words of the child] made a deep impression upon the emperor, for it seemed to him that they were right. But he thought to himself regardless, ‘Now I must bear up to the end.’” Idols are not easy to own up to; how much more so, when what we idolize is not really there in the first place.

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“Do you see this woman?” For some reason, the familiar question confronted me this time as if it were aimed as much at me as the guests around the table. Jesus was eating at the house of a religious man who had invited him to dinner. They were reclining at the table when a woman who is very easily remembered for her flaws came stumbling over the dinner guests, making her way to the feet of Jesus. Weeping over them, she broke a costly vial of perfume, wiping his feet dry with her hair. Who didn’t see her? Who didn’t notice her strange commotion? Who among them didn’t immediately recognize how out of place she really was? Yet he asks, “Do you see this woman?”(1) He was either speaking ironically or he saw something the rest did not.

The late seventeenth century poet George Herbert once described prayer in a detailed list of stirring metaphors.  Among the first lines, prayer is described as “the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage.” At those words I cannot help but picture this woman lying prostrate at Christ’s feet. As she poured out the perfume, so she poured out her soul. Her prayer was one without words, her worship spilled out as tears upon his feet. Onlookers saw a fallen and foolish woman, an extravagant waste. Jesus saw a heart in pilgrimage, a prayer understood.

I remember the first time I was unapologetically honest with God. My head was bowed but inwardly I was somewhat closer to pounding fists against a divine chest. In silent reflection, I shouted internally. Everyone around me seemed to be experiencing the still, small voice, the gentle touch of a Father’s hand, the assurance of God’s glory and power, the confirmation of a hope and a future, answered prayers, even dramatic miracles. But I couldn’t sense God’s presence, or hear God’s voice at all. I had more questions and uncertainty than answers and assurance. It seemed as though I was relating to an empty throne. Like an attention-starved child, I yelled at God for existing, for forgetting to love me, for failing to understand or care.

In Herbert’s list of words, my prayer this day was perhaps more fitting “reversed thunder” or “Christ-side-piercing spear.” My words pled for the presence of God, for the love and will of a good creator in my life, for complete access to the loving Father I believed was real but just not to me. But what I was asking for sharply (and probably quite irreverently) required the wedge that stood between us to be obliterated, the chasm crossed—indeed, the human death of the incarnate Son to show how deeply the Father longs to gather us up like a hen gathers her chicks, whether we are willing or not. I likely spoke in ignorance and in anger, making claims like Job without understanding. I was likely not as interested in hearing at that point as I was at shouting. But God heard. Responding to my interrogation, God revealed my true question. I was tired of being the stepchild, and yet I had been keeping the Father in my mind as something more like a distant uncle. Seeing me, God showed me what I did not.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Seen. Known. Understood. →