A story told in the Hebrew scriptures offers a dramatic interplay of manipulation and honor, kings and kingdoms, power and powerlessness. It is the story more commonly known as “Daniel and the Lion’s Den.” But this title, accurate though it is in terms of the dramatic climax, actually misses the main actors entirely. Ultimately, the story is a depiction of power and weakness at play in two very different kingdoms and communities. On one side stands Darius, the mighty king and ruler of the people and nations, powerful sovereign of the powerful majority. On the other side is the God of Daniel, king of a community in exile, the ruler of a minority people whose city lies in ruins. The question of sovereignty seems as though it has already been answered quite definitively.

Most of us are not familiar with the devastating encounter of the powerlessness of exile and the forcible display of the powers that created it. Nonetheless, every aspect of our lives is touched by issues of power and weakness. The question of control and power is common to our relationships, communities, politics, business, education, and religion. Unfortunately, our common experience of the struggle is not to say we are well or healthily adjusted to it, far from it. Of course, it is easiest for those who actually hold any given power to be the most unaware of the dynamics of powerlessness upon others. For others, the struggle to be in control, to challenge authority, to make a name for ourselves, is largely thought of as a dynamic that is outgrown with adulthood. So in the face of authority issues, we say things like, “Teenagers will be teenagers!” Or we diagnose the battle to be in control as “middle child syndrome” or “terrible twos,” all the while failing to see our own struggle with similar dynamics. Still for others, questions of power involve wondering if they will ever have a voice, if anyone with power is listening, or if they have been forgotten and silenced indefinitely. Admittedly, to be conscious of the struggle is far better than being complacent about the question of power in general.

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Nothing quite grips us as much as a good novel or movie where some really sinister characters are finally confronted by a brave hero or heroine, who then rises up to face down tyranny, resist oppression, fight the bad guys, and establish justice.

During the 60s and 70s there was still enough residual optimism around that sci-fi movies brimmed with optimism about humanity and our future. We were explorers in search of brave new worlds. We were ambassadors seeking out strange new civilizations. We were friends seeking the harmony of all in a shared, friendly Galaxy. Yet, the writers needed to add adventure and flavor, so various enemies were encountered and often reasoned with into an eventual accommodation.

The mood shifted however. We believed we were more informed, less naïve, less gullible, and less willing and able to embrace ideals. They all seemed strangely utopian, inauthentic, and a denial of what life is really like. Enter sci-fi 2.0, the upgrade.

The writing is now more realistic, gritty, and dark, and the sheer hardships to be faced are more front and center. Our heroes are more human. Their flaws, their fears, and their unique temperaments are very much in vogue. Yet, they still have a mission, by and large, and that mission is to “save” us. Ironic, isn’t it? We see the continuous recycling of the theme of redemption or the struggle with good and evil, despite our antipathy to such things. It looks like an ingrained quest for some kind of answer, some kind of salvation, some hope that there is a better life, somewhere or some way.

I wonder if we are able to stop and think of Jesus in terms of the heroic. We hear that “he emptied himself” and “took on the form of a bond-servant.” Not only did he accept being made in the likeness of men, but “he humbled himself” even to the point of “death on a cross.”(1) As Dorothy Sayers put so well, the drama is the doctrine. In this story, we see a universe that descends into the grip of an evil power, humanity enslaved and targeted for death and misery, and the creeping control of dark passion as the powers invade, infect, subvert, and seek control.

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In his book The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky sets forth the bold assertion that “beauty will save the world.” The sheer number of ways in which this quote has been applied attests to the risk inherent in the idea, and perhaps inherent in beauty itself. Certainly the church during the Reformation recognized the risks involved in imaging God, using beauty to communicate an incommunicable mystery, the impersonal to describe a Person. For good reason, many are cautious when we hear a statement such as the one in this novel.

But Dostoevsky did not pronounce the idea with the naïveté with which it is often quoted. He did not have in mind the kind of beauty we worship in the fashion or beauty industries nor did he have in mind an impersonal object or a purely abstract notion, a distinct but distant ideal. On the contrary, Dostoevsky entertains the idea in a person, in Myshkin, who lives the quality of beauty as if an inescapable quality of his inmost being. For Myshkin’s inclination is to help rather than to harm, to give mercy rather than malice, forgiving again and again, though surrounded by people who do not. In fact, it is this group who tirelessly labels Myshkin the “idiot” because he refuses to participate in the disparaging and destructive ugliness of their own ways but instead takes what is cruel and repulsive in them and their culture and dispels it. They hate him for it; they believe him a fool. But it is a kind and beautiful foolishness.

I sometimes wonder if we have so stripped away the possibility of actual beauty in our encounters with the divine that we not only miss something real of God and others to behold in the world, but we miss opportunities to show the world the beauty of God—in hands and faces, in people who bestow crowns of beauty instead of ashes, in communities that repair ruined cities instead of causing further devastation.(1) Theologian William Dyrness laments the modern mentality that has somehow lost the sense of the “wholeness that beauty reflects.”(2) We are so mindful of beauty’s limitations; but isn’t it we who are the limited as the depicters of God’s beauty? “[When I look at] the moon and the stars that you have established,” sang David, “what are human beings that you are mindful of them?” (Psalm 8:3). Describing the very wholeness that beauty reflects, Dyrness continues, “Based on God’s continuing presence in the Spirit of Christ, God is somehow present in all beauty.”(3)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Kind, Beautiful, and Foolish →

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

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

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

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

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Taking Up and Laying Down →

The dictionary defines the word “vacation” as “a period of time devoted to pleasure, rest, or relaxation.” Though I imagine it happens less often than not, it seems the ideal vacation would come to an end just as the life we left behind begins to seem preferable. Yet even if it is with reluctance that we let go of our last vacation day, most of us can imagine why we must. By definition, a vacation is something that must come to an end. To vacate life as we know it on a permanent basis would be called something different entirely.

Though we know that the days of a vacation or holiday are short-lived, we nevertheless enjoy them. Even as they fade away into the calendar, they are remembered (and often nostalgically). That they were few does not hinder their impact. On the contrary, a few days devoted to relaxation are made valuable because of the many that are not.

And we know this to be true of life as well—that it is fleeting, makes it all the more momentous.

Art installation by Gianfranco Angelico Benvenuto in Milan on April, 23 2012, in honor of those who died working on Milan Piazza Duomo, photo by Eugenio Marongiu.

The artists among us often give voice to the things we seem collectively to work at putting out of our minds, sometimes simply stating something obvious. Musician Dave Matthews admits, “There are arbitrary lines between bad and good that often don’t make a lot of sense to me. I don’t want to die, obviously, but really, the wonder of life is amplified by the fact that it ends.”(1)

Like withering grass and dwindling summers, fading flowers and holidays, life cannot escape its end. Like the seasons we live through, generations spring forth and die away. Like the vacations we take, so our days pass away into the calendar. If we refuse to look at any of these endings we live foolishly; if we look only to their ends we miss something about living.

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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:

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The One She Followed →

“I like to listen,” said Ernest Hemingway. “I have learned a great deal from listening carefully.”

Hemingway speaks of a significant virtue, lamenting accurately, “Most people never listen.”

I wonder if he would feel differently if it were his books to which people were listening.

The popularity of audio books is redefining the notion of reading, and some authors—and readers—are unhappy about it. “Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear,” says literary critic Harold Bloom. “You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.” Others who doggedly defend the entire experience of reading—the feel of a book in their hands, the smell of its pages, the single-minded escape of delving into a story—find listening to a book something akin to cheating. “You didn’t read it,” they contest; “you only listened to it”—as if this somehow means they took in a different story.

For those who love the written word and printed page, for those who are elated at the sight of a bookstore, not only is listening to Hamlet or The Count of Monte Cristo something like picking up the cliff notes, e-books are almost equally offensive. There is no substitute for books, no surrogate for reading.

I mostly agree. I find myself responding to the question, “Have you read such and such?” with a similar admittance of guilt: “Well, I listened to it” (usually accompanied with a comment about Atlanta traffic). And yet, I am becoming more and more convinced that audio books definitely have their place in learning—with or without traffic. Auditory processing is vital to any learning. Hemingway is right; listening carefully is a vital skill to keep sharp.

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Why Won’t God Heal Amputees, a popular website and one-time viral You Tube video, puts forward the basic premise that God doesn’t answer prayer since God has never healed an amputee. By extension, they make the assertion that since God doesn’t heal every person of every infirmity, God does not exist.

While there are obvious false assumptions made about God, prayer, and healing (how does one know that in the whole world God has not healed an amputee, for starters) many interesting questions are raised for those who believe in both God and prayer. Those who do pray for healing often fail to experience it in the way they expect—healing rarely parallels a conventional or traditional sense of that word. Loved ones die of cancer, friends are killed in car accidents, economic catastrophe befalls even the most frugal, and people in much of the developing world die from diseases long cured in the West. Beyond the realm of physical healing, many experience emotional and psychological trauma that leave open and festering wounds. Or, there are those perpetual personality ticks and quirks that seem beyond the reach of the supernatural. Given all of this contrary experience, what does it mean to receive healing, and should one hold out hope that healing can come in this world? Specifically, for those who pray, and for those who believe that God does heal, how might the persistence of wounds—psychological, emotional and physical—be understood?

In a recent New York Times article, Marcia Mount Shoop writes of her horrific rape as a fifteen year old girl.(1) As the descendant of three generations of ministers she ran to the safest place she knew after suffering this horrific trauma—the church. Yet as she stood amid the congregants singing hymns and reciting creeds, she felt no relief. Even her favorite verse from Romans, ‘and we know that in all things God works for good with those who love him’ sounded hollow and brought little comfort. How could she ever be healed or experience ‘good’ after this horrific act of violence?

Once at home, alone with the secret of her rape, Marcia Shoop found something that enabled her to survive. “I felt Jesus so close,” she recalled in an interview. “It wasn’t the same Jesus I experienced at church. It was this tiny, audible whisper that said, ‘I know what happened. I understand.’ And it kept me alive, that frayed little thread.”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Wounds Honored →

The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus—a group in the “sacred music” category— have recently released a new album to widespread critical acclaim. Entitled Beauty Will Save the World, the album features, among other things, monastic chants, snatches of hymns, and surging choral arrangements. Most significantly, it concludes with St. Ambrose’s prayer, “Before the Ending of the Day.”

When asked about the inclusion of all these conspicuously Christian elements, the group replied, “We have always been concerned with the sacred or — perhaps more accurately — the loss of the sacred. We are searching for its echoes and traces which are scattered and hidden in surprising and forgotten places.”(1)

In many ways, this is an apt description of those canvassing the cultural landscape for signs of life. In the case of this particular track, the church is the “hidden and forgotten” place. Like many of today’s musicians, this group is drawing on sacred traditions to reach contemporary audiences. What distinguishes The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus is that they are doing so by honoring the original intent of those traditions, preserving their deep spiritual roots. In their own words, “Sometimes it feels as though our work is less about creation and more about investigation and excavation. We borrow, gather and unearth material from different sources — not all of them obviously sacred or spiritual — but we are looking for the connecting thread and evidence of what Thomas Merton called ‘the hidden wholeness.’ Beauty is there. It is not created, it is discovered and restored.”

Demurring from a pervasive assumption about the arts, the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff says, “A hymn is a good hymn if it serves its purpose effectively and then in addition proves good and satisfying to use for this purpose, that purpose being to enable a congregation to offer praise to God—not, be it noted, to give delight upon aesthetic contemplation.”(2) Wolterstorff approvingly notes the famed hymnist Isaac Watts’s scrupulous commitment “to sink every line to the level of a whole congregation and yet to keep it above contempt.”(3) In a very real sense, these sacred traditions cannot be understood apart from sincere participation. A hymn is fully realized only when you add your voice to the worshipping congregation. St. Ambrose’s prayer becomes a real prayer only when it is uttered with honest conviction. These practices are not made for patrons in a museum; they are made for pilgrims in search of paradise.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Searching for the Hidden Wholeness →

There are forces at work in our world that make basic communication more akin to communicating across cultures—even within our home countries. The continuously evolving world of technology offers just one example. With each new app or social media platform, a language and culture develops that for the uninitiated would seemingly require learning a new language. And most have had the experience of being in a conversation in which both parties speak the same language, but what is being heard and what is being communicated are worlds apart.

Sometimes, trying to talk about matters of faith can feel like walking across a broken bridge. And the one who professes to speak with clarity on issues of faith speaks into a world going deaf from a cacophony of spiritual and cultural languages. Is it any wonder, then, that blank stares are the all too often response to the particulars of a unique or particular vocabulary of faith?

Ironically, all those who speak what seems to them a clear message are also informed and shaped by their own cultures; for all language embodies a world of culture. Human vocabulary issues forth from experience, and ways of understanding that experience. In turn, the way in which individuals speak about faith is shaped both by a culture and by experience.

There are, therefore, particular difficulties inherent in translation from within one’s own culture. An ancient Chinese proverb highlights this difficult task: “If you want a definition of water, don’t ask a fish.”(1) In other words, on what platform does one stand in order to speak into one’s own culture? We are products of the very culture into which we seek to communicate, and we can never completely stand outside our own culture. We are, in the words of the proverb, like fish trying to define water.

Notably, Christians affirm that the heart of the gospel message transcends culture and language, just as surely as it was originally proclaimed within a particular culture and language. After all, the good news of the gospel is about “the Word made flesh.” Missiologist Lesslie Newbigin explains the dialogical nature of the gospel as a product of culture and yet as a trans-cultural communication when he suggests: “Every statement of the gospel in words is conditioned by the culture of which those words are part, and every style of life that claims to embody the truth of the gospel is a culturally conditioned style of life. There can never be a culture-free gospel. Yet the gospel, which is from the beginning to the end embodied in culturally conditioned forms, calls into question all cultures, including the one in which it was originally embodied.”(2)

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The 1748 essay “Of Miracles” by David Hume was influential in leading the charge against the miraculous, thoughts that were later sharpened (though also later recanted) by Antony Flew. Insisting the laws of a natural world incompatible with the supernatural, the new atheists continue to weigh in on the subject today. With them, many Christian philosophers and scientists, who are less willing to define miracle as something that must break the laws of nature, join the conversation with an opposing gusto. Physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne, for instance, suggests that miracles are not violations of the laws of nature but rather “exploration of a new regime of physical experience.”(1)

The possibility or impossibility of the miraculous fills books, debates, and lectures. What it does not fill is that moment when a person finds herself—rationally or otherwise—crying out for intervention, for help and assurance, indeed, for the miraculous. “For most of us” writes C.S. Lewis, “the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.”(2) To this I would simply add that often prayer is both: both the anguished cry of Gethsemane—”please, take this from me”—prayed at the foot of an impossible mountain.

Whether this moment comes beside a hospital bed, a dying marriage, a grave injustice, or debilitating fear, we seem almost naturally inclined in some way to cry out for an intervening factor, something or someone beyond the known laws of A + B that sit defiantly in front of us. For my own family that moment came with cancer, complicated by well-intentioned commands to believe without doubt that God was going to take it away. When death took it away instead, like many others in our situation, our faith in miracles—and the God who gives them—were equally defeated.

In the throes of that heart-wrenching scene, every time I closed my eyes to pray, the vision of an empty throne filled my mind. It was something like the vision of Isaiah in the temple, only there was no robe and no body filling anything.(3) My prayers seemed to be given not a resounding “no,” but a non-answer, a cold, agonizing silence, which was also very much an answer. It was only years after the scene of my failed prayers for the miraculous that I was physically startled, again like Isaiah, at the thought that the throne was empty because the one who fills it had stepped down to sit beside us as we cried.

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

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

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

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – What It Is →