| The Semana Santa, or Holy Week in Spain, is a week-long series of parades and festivities that culminate on Easter Sunday. Particularly notable in Sevilla, Spain (though held throughout the country and in many other parts of the world) the entire city converges. In fact, Semana Santa week is so vibrant and extraordinary in Sevilla that tourists from around the world often come to partake in these festival days.
One of the notable aspects of these celebrations is the parade floats of Jesus and his mother, Mary. Depicting the events of the last days of Jesus’s life, the statues are the main display of every float that traverses the parade route through the city. The statues themselves are from the seventeenth century, and are housed in area churches. I was able to see two of these statues in the historic Church of the Savior on a recent visit to Spain. Perhaps more notable than the floats themselves is the way in which they are carried through the city streets. Every afternoon during the week, these floats are paraded through the streets for hours and hours. The pace is slow and deliberate, sometimes barely moving inches at a time, even as they are gently moving to the sonorous and doleful tones of the accompanying music. The point of the slow pace, which for the uninitiated seems almost ridiculous, is out of reverence for this historic tradition and the events represented in the life of Jesus. I couldn’t help but parallel the slowness of these parade marches to the hurried pace of my own life. Always in a hurry to get to the “next event,” I am almost uncomfortable with any form of staying still. I remember when I was a child, I couldn’t wait to be a teenager. When I was a teenager, I couldn’t wait to be in college. When I was in college, I couldn’t wait to be a graduate student. When I was a graduate student, I couldn’t wait to be a professional. I look back on those hurried days now and lament that I rushed through them so quickly. Of course, a society that values efficiency above everything doesn’t help to slow us down. Ours is a world in which “instant” becomes more and more important. The increasing speed of technology only adds to our impatience when things are not achieved instantaneously. I recognize that my own propensity to hurry, coupled with a society that moves at ever-quickening speeds, can be very detrimental for any kind of intentional slowing or cultivation of a reflective life. The lives depicted in the Bible couldn’t be more different from our hurried lives. More importantly, and perhaps to our great frustration, the God revealed in the biblical stories is rarely in a hurry. Abraham and Sarah, for example, received the promise of an heir twenty-five years before they actually laid eyes on Isaac. Joseph had a dream as a teenager that his brothers would one day bow down to him. Yet it was countless years and many difficulties later that bring his brothers to kneel before him, asking for food. Moses was approximately eighty years old—long past his prime of life—when God appeared to him in the burning bush and called him to deliver the children of Israel. David was anointed king by Samuel as a young boy tending his father’s flocks, long before he finally ascended to the throne. And Jesus spent thirty years in relative obscurity, and only three years publicly announcing the kingdom and God’s rule that had come in his life and ministry. From a human perspective, it is difficult to understand why God wasn’t more in a hurry to accomplish the plans for these individual lives as a part of the larger narrative of redemption. The Messiah was prophesied hundreds of years before he actually arrived on the scene. We cannot help but ask why God seems to move so slowly? The long, slow, journey, marked by many Christians in the season of Lent towards Easter morning, can be arduous for those of us who find ourselves constantly racing towards what’s next—even rushing to get to the resurrection without stopping to ponder at Good Friday. These forty days can serve to remind all who hurry of God’s great forbearance and patience with us, even as they issue a call to slow-down and wait with Jesus. These days intentionally slow us and create space—what theologians call liminal space—making room for those of us with a tendency to rush—to wait and rest in the “in-between” and the “not yet.” Waiting for God in this liminal space gives more opportunity to be patient, “looking” as Peter says, at the “patience of our Lord to be salvation.” Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington. (1) 2 Peter 3:9, 14-15.
|
Tag Archives: Zacharias
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Magnificent Obsession
In a 1969 issue of Psychology Today, a group of scholars discussed the emergence of a generation of inward-moving, self-reflecting, young men and women. Most agreed the prospects of such a generation were both promising and ominous—promising because discovery of self can be a step toward honesty and authenticity, producing a society better equipped in matters of self and community. But prospects of the inward generation were also ominous in the eyes of these sociologists because of the present mood and form of this inwardness they were observing. It was an inward move toward self that seemed “unbridled by any social norm or tradition and almost void of notions for exercise of responsibility toward others.”(1) According to their data, the inwardness that was being embraced was leading more to a form of self-centered privatism than it was to depth and wholeness of self. Research portrayed men and women more interested in material comfort and the immediate gratification of personal interests than in new realities of a deeper self that could mold and transform society.
The pull toward self-reflection is clearly a trend still among us. Spirituality, self-help, and memoir are all categories that continue to reach bestseller lists, while the pursuit of self-expression continues to lure us into self-absorption. There is still reason to be concerned by the compulsion toward self and the privatizing of categories surrounding the individual. Likewise, there is still promise in a community of people willing to truly face themselves.
The current multi-generational tendency toward self-reflection can lead to multi-generational discoveries of the hope of authenticity and the reality of the unseen. But there is a great difference between knowing our bellies and their constant pangs of appetite and knowing our selves. Within the pursuit of knowing the self, there is a choice to tread water safely or to delve into hard questions and risk drowning in order to know what it means to be human, why we pursue and believe in self-fulfillment, what it means that we long to know the point of a lifetime and the reason we live it. Speaking of this uniquely human enterprise, James Loder writes, “In its bewildered, blundering, brilliance, [the human spirit] cries out for wisdom to an ‘unknown God.’ But it is the personal Author of the universe whose Spirit alone can set the human spirit free from its proclivity to self-inflation, self-doubt, self-absorption, and self-destruction, and free for its ‘magnificent obsession’… to know the mind of God.”(2)
In other words, authentic inwardness always moves the spirit outward.
But it is not easy. Truly delving inward into the human self is messy, unpredictable, and unsafe. We find ourselves as Paul explained with confusion: “I don’t understand myself at all, for I really want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15). But in plunging into the question of what it means to be human, what it means to actually live, and what it accurately looks like to fall short, we find something other than condemnation, someone other than the self for whom we were looking. For the brave human spirit in such a posture, the words of Carlo Carretto ring true, “My poor human personality has finally found the ‘Other’ with whom it may speak. The ‘Other’ is God in His being, His truth, His love. The passage to faith is radical, absolute; only God is capable of stating it, carrying it through, controlling it.”(3)
The pull of the human self inward can be the means with which the triune God shows us a greater image of life in divine community. In this journey, the words of Isaiah and the promise of God are our own: “I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the LORD, the God of Israel, who summons you by name” (Isaiah 45:3). Where we are driven to mine with integrity the dark caverns of self, Christ appears with light and reveals what it means to be human.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) As quoted by Henri Nouwen in The Wounded Healer (New York: Random House, 1979), 29.
(2) James E. Loder, The Logic of the Spirit (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 10.
(3) Carlo Carretto, Selected Writings (New York: Orbis Books, 1994), 45.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Think Again – Light in the Darkness
The story is told of a cynic sitting under a nut tree, carrying on a jesting monologue with God. His grounds for complaint lay in what he considered to be an obvious failure on the part of God to go by the book on structural design. “Lord,” he said, “How is it that you made such a large and sturdy tree to hold such tiny, almost weightless nuts? And yet, you made small, tender plants to hold such large and weighty watermelons!”
As he chuckled at the folly of such disproportion in God’s mindless universe, a nut suddenly fell on his head. After a stunned pause, he muttered, “Thank God that wasn’t a watermelon!”
Even atheist Aldous Huxley acknowledged years ago, “Science has ‘explained’ nothing; the more we know, the more fantastic the world becomes, and the profounder the surrounding darkness.”
Justifiable worldviews must have explanatory power of the undeniable realities of life. As Christians who affirm the existence of a loving and all wise God, we long to push back the darkness in our world and to see the light of God’s Word soften the cynic and atheist alike. Yet if we are honest, sometimes we, too, struggle to come to terms with God’s world and his sovereign design; this is especially true in seasons of suffering and confusion.
Remember Job? He had become weary of his pain and sought a just answer for it. He built his argument to God on the fact that he needed to know what was going on, because only on the basis of that knowledge could his confusion and suffering be dissipated. But God then broke his silence, challenging Job’s very assumptions and reminding him that there was an awful lot he did not know but had just accepted and believed by inference. Notwithstanding the proverbial cynic under a nut tree, the argument from design is the very approach God used with Job. He reminded Job as a first step, and only that, that there were a thousand and one things he did not fully understand but had just taken for granted. In the light of God’s presence, Job was dumbfounded and confessed, “I am unworthy—how can I reply to you? … Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 40:4; 42:3).
Gaining a small glimpse of the majesty and holiness of God is light in a dark world. The prophet Isaiah described his awe-stricken state when God revealed Himself to him. Isaiah, a morally good man, nevertheless fell on his face and immediately sensed that he was unfit to be in God’s presence. He was not just in the presence of someone better than he was. He was in the presence of the One by whom and because of whom all purity finds its point of reference. That is why he was speechless.
God is not merely good. God is holy. He is the transcendent source of goodness: not merely “better” in a hierarchy of choices but rather the very basis from which all differences are made. He dwells in ineffable light. Moral categories, for us, often move in comparisons and hierarchies. We talk in terms of judging or feeling that one thing is better than another. Our culture is more advanced morally than someone else’s culture, at least so we may think. However, God’s existence changes those categories and moves us to recognize the very essence of what the word “goodness” is based upon.
This difference is what makes the argument almost impossible for a skeptic to grasp. Holiness is not merely goodness. “Why did God not create us to choose only good?” “Why do bad things happen to good people?” The reality is that the opposite of evil, in degree, may be goodness. But the opposite of absolute evil, in kind, is absolute holiness. In the biblical context, the idea of holiness is the tremendous “otherness” of God Himself. God does not just reveal Himself as good; He reveals Himself as holy.
There is no contradiction in Him. He can never self-destruct. He can never “not be.” He exists eternally and in a sublime purity that transcends a hierarchy of categories. As human beings we love the concept of holiness when we are in the right, but we are often reticent to apply it when we are wrong and brought under the stark scrutiny of its light. I recall talking to a very successful businessman who throughout our conversation repeatedly asked, “But what about all the evil in this world?” Finally, a friend sitting next to me said to him, “I hear you constantly expressing a desire to see a solution to the problem of evil around you. Are you as troubled by the problem of evil within you?” In the pin-drop silence that followed, the man’s face showed his duplicity.
The longer I have encountered this question about evil, the more convinced I am of the disingenuousness of many a questioner. The darkness of evil is more than an exterior reality that engenders suffering in our world; it is, at its core, an internal reality that systemically builds us for autonomy and destruction, blinds us, and from which only God is big enough to rescue us. You see, the problem of evil begins with me. The darkness is within.
Yet Jesus’s answer to the question of the blind man in John 9 brings us extraordinary power and hope. There is an illustration and explanation for us in his story. Here was a man living in physical darkness. There was no light that he could see. People wanted to know, why was he born this way? They were the ones who could see, so they asked about the one who could not. Jesus responded that the man’s blindness was due neither to the sin of the man nor of his parents, but so that the glory of God might be displayed. The lesson is drastic; the message profound.
Physical darkness has physical consequences and leaves a person bereft of seeing physical reality. It is a tragedy—but nowhere near the tragic devastation of spiritual blindness. The healing of that man’s blindness by Jesus was intended to draw those spiritually blind to seek his healing of their souls. When Beethoven, though deaf, could see the exhilarating response of the people to his composition, he outwardly resonated with what his inner being prompted. He could not hear his music but he sensed the harmony for which he longed in expression. So it is with us. We know on the inside how impoverished we are and for what we long. That ought to prompt us to the riches that only God in Christ is able to give to us.
Only when we surrender to the light of God’s truth in our own lives are we enabled to truly seeand then be a beacon of hope and healing in our dark world. Truthfulness in the heart, said Jesus, precedes truth in the objective realm. The problem of evil has ultimately one source: it is the resistance to God’s holiness that enshrouds all of creation. And there is ultimately only one hope for life: that is through the glorious display of God at work within a human soul, bringing about his work of pushing away the darkness. That transformation tenderizes the heart to become part of the solution and not part of the problem. Such a transformation begins at the Cross.
The day when Christ was crucified and darkness engulfed the scene was symbolic of the soul in rebellion. Then came the possibility of hope when the Son rose, with life made possible for all of us. The simple verse, John 3:16, says it all: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” “For God”: the starting point is filial. “So loved”: his reach is relational. “That he gave his only begotten Son”: sacrificial. “That whosoever believes in Him”: confessional. “Should not perish”: judicial. “But have everlasting life”: eternal.
There is a law unto death. The violation of law brings that within us. Our holy God deals with evil in us to transform us and draw us into his life and embrace. What a glorious gospel this is.
The songwriter Tim Hughes says it beautifully:
Light of the world, You stepped down into darkness
opened my eyes, let me see.
Beauty that made this heart adore you
hope of a life spent with you.
Here I am to worship, here I am to bow down,
here I am to say that you’re my God.
You’re altogether lovely, altogether worthy,
altogether wonderful to me.
In a unique way, seeing is believing. Believing in God is surrendering. Surrendering to God is worshiping. To worship opens up vistas to see even more. Darkness is then vanquished.
In a dark world, we have the offer of Light through Jesus Christ.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Living by Memory
Mark Twain once said that faith is “believing what you know ain’t so.” The Christian story presents an altogether different definition. Faith is more than cognitive assent or blind acceptance of something. It is an informed surrender and trust that rests the whole person on the purposes and will of God. Faith involves belief, obedience, ethics, and lifestyle; it involves living with vision and memory.
The prophet Habakkuk lived in a time of spiritual and moral decline, which led to the economic, social, and political tragedies of his people. Like the people to whom he preached, Habakkuk came from a storied nation. He was rooted in his God and all of the stories that accompanied Him—the Exodus, the tabernacle, the law, and the land. Habakkuk knew that all of Israel’s blessings were rooted in the covenantal faithfulness of a chosen people. They had come a long way since rejoicing over the miracle at the Red Sea or the completion of Solomon’s temple. Yet Israel was established with the necessity of living in the three dimensions of time—past, present, and future. They were commanded to remember God’s words and mighty actions of history. They were called to see life as a present blessing, with faith and justice as a response to the God who gave it. And they lived with hope in God’s good hands, such that neither death nor the future was a threat.
But Israel forgot. Neglecting their heritage, the people walked away. They pursued other loves and became enamored with the nations around them. Israel forgot their high calling, and the consequences were tragic. The prophet Habakkuk was understandably grieved. Unable to understand what was happening to his community, the prophet walked through stages of depression, anger, acceptance, and faith. His chapters move from asking “why?” to expressing hopelessness or exclaiming anger, and finally, to singing.
I believe there are times in life when we are on a similar journey. Though at times we may find ourselves stuck in one stage or another, we follow a similar sense of story and invitation to remember God’s involvement in our past, present, and future. Between the pages where Habakkuk cries out for God’s answer and where he ends in a mixture of fear and faith, we learn something of the ambiguity, tension, and struggle that is ours until the journey ends.
Through trial and uncertainty, the apostle Paul encourages us likewise. We are to cling to what we know along the way: “For in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. And I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:37-39).
Despite seeming triumphs of evil, the people of God continue to discover anew that the promises of God are sure. In the words of the prophet Habakkuk, “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea” (2:14). It is not easy. There are real dangers, costs to bear, and always a demand for perseverance. But ultimately and exclusively, our hope is in God alone. Through faith we live knowing that Christ is who he says he is, remembering that the assurance of his life and death is real, that God enfolds our stories into his own, and Christ is making all things new. Until that day, we watch and wait, living by faith and memory.
Stuart McAllister is regional director of the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Beautiful Foolishness
“I don’t believe in God,” begins Julian Barnes in his book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, “but I miss him.” Though he admits he never had any faith to lose (a “happy atheist” as an Oxford student, Barnes now considers himself an agnostic), he still finds himself dreading the gradual ebbing of Christianity. He misses the sense of purpose that the Christian narrative affords, the sense of wonder and belief that haunts Christian art and architecture.
“I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm.” Such are the thoughts that surface as Barnes attempts to confront his fears of death and dying in this memoir. He believes Christianity to be a foolish lie, but insists, “[I]t was a beautiful lie.”(1)
There is certainly room for beauty in the description the apostle Paul gave of the gospel. Like Julian, Paul saw its foolishness clearly as well: “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21). He also noted the weakness inherent in the Christian proclamation. At the heart of the Christian religion is one who “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, and being found in human form” (Philippians 2:7). On this much Paul and Julian agree: however beautiful, foolishness and weakness imbibe the Christian story.
But unlike Julian, Paul saw the foolishness of the gospel as a reason not to disbelieve, but to believe. “For God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:27-28). It is indeed difficult to explain why at the heart of the Christian narrative there is a child, why God would answer the dark silence of 400 years with the cry of a displaced and homeless infant, why God would take on the weakness of humanity in an attempt to reach humanity with power, dying as the Messiah. Most of us would know better than to create, or to perpetuate, a story so foolish. However beautiful, the story of Christ is difficult to explain; that is, unless it was not crafted with human wisdom at all.
The story of a Savior coming as an infant in Bethlehem is indeed astonishing, as astonishing an idea as the resurrection. That God chose to come into the world with flesh, flesh that would suffer, is strange and paradoxical, beautiful and foolish. Perhaps it is also wise beyond our comprehension. “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25).
Though the word incarn is now used infrequently, it was once used medically, describing the flesh that grows over a wound. Applied to healing, the word refers to the recovery of wounded flesh due to the presence of new flesh.(2) The Incarnation, the astonishing event at the center of Christianity, the story that has inspired music, architecture, and hope, is God’s way of doing exactly that: Christ comes in flesh to cover our mortal wound. God comes near in body and in weakness to bring healing to weak and wounded bodies. Indeed, God’s own body is mortally wounded only to rise again in flesh and blood. This may seem a foolish mission, but to the blind who receive their sight, the lame who now walk, the diseased who are cleansed, the deaf who hear, the dead who are raised, and the poor who have good news brought to them, it is the most beautiful foolishness ever known.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).
(2) Encyclopaedia Perthensis; Or Universal Dictionary of the Arts, Sciences, Literature (Edinburgh: John Brown, 1816), 53.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Power, Control, and Mystery
One of the unique qualities of the Christian story is that the heart of it—the accounts of Jesus’s life and death—is presented in the voices of four different witnesses. During the season of Lent, it is compelling to look specifically at the different tellings of the events that led Jesus to the cross. The differences in each testimony offer an interesting glimpse of how personalities differ in their observing and experience of the world, as well as a potent reminder that the story of Jesus is not a flat and static conveying of information, but a story as alive as the one who was tortured at the hands of the powers of this world.
For instance, as one theologian observes, Matthew’s crucifixion narrative and greater gospel emphasizes “the way of the humiliated Christ.”(1) In my reading of Matthew, I am always struck by the interplay between power and control, an interesting dynamic on which the writer has chosen to focus. Over and above the motif shared with Mark, Matthew seems to add a dimension of inquiry about power itself, and along with it, the hint that all is not as it seems: Who wants control? Who thinks they’re in control? Who is really in control? Theologian Roy Harrisville compares it to the paradox and reversal at the heart of Jesus’s ministry, the passion of Christ itself enacting “truths earlier hidden in the predictions and parables.”(2)
Thus, where Mark’s decisive crowd before Pilate yells, “Crucify him” (15:13 and again in 14b) and Luke’s crowd similarly, if more emphatically in the Greek, yells, “Crucify, crucify him!” (23:21), Matthew’s crowd twice yells, “Let him be crucified” (27:22b and 23b). There is a hint of a distancing of responsibility. The crowds indeed want the crucifying done, but done to him by someone else. Luke seems to further draw the distinction of choice and control, adding of his crowd, “And they were urgent, demanding with loud cries that he should be crucified. And their voices prevailed” (23:23).
Matthew’s account seems at first passive in the “who” of the act of crucifying, a crowd calling for death at a distance. Later Pilate, too, wants to distance himself from this responsibility, adding a hand-washing scene unique to Matthew’s narrative. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” says Pilate, “see to it yourselves” (27:24). The people, preferring control over the risk of release, answer, “His blood be on us and on our children” (27:25).
Now phrased in terms of blood, Matthew’s interplay of power and control is made all the more potent. Like Jesus’s many parables with their jarring sense of mysterion (mystery that is not hidden, but revealed), Matthew seems to suggest there is one in control indeed, but it is not the one who seems to be holding the power. The image of Christ’s blood upon this blind—though professing to see—crowd and their children is chilling. For unknowingly, they have declared the very thing that the humiliated servant has set out to do: His blood be on us and on our children.
Harrisville illustrates this all the more profoundly in his analysis of Matthew’s narrating of the Last Supper and the curious words of Jesus about the “blood of the covenant,” now explained in this passion narrative before us:
“The statement about the ‘blood of the covenant’ (26:28) will have its explanation in subsequent events, in Judas’s confession (‘I have sinned by betraying innocent blood’ [27:24]), in Pilate’s avowal of innocence (‘I am innocent of this man’s blood’ [27:4]), and in the people’s accepting responsibility for Jesus’s death (‘his blood be on us and on our children!’ [27:25]). All these will be the ‘many’ for whose forgiveness the blood of the covenant is poured out.“(3)
The story of Jesus as he moves toward the cross, told through eyes that remind us he has come for a world of unique individuals, is a story of power and weakness that turns our common assumptions and experience on its head. Like the parables, the way of the humiliated Christ confounds those who consider it, approaching in power, though hidden in the unlikely gift of a servant.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) Roy Harrisville, Fracture: The Cross as Irreconcilable in the Language and Thought of the Biblical Writers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 147.
(2) Ibid., 158.
(3) Ibid., 159.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Dust and Ashes
The life and ministry of Jesus—his birth, his life and death, his resurrection and ascension—are all echoed in the celebrations and seasons of the church year. For the Christian, preparations are made for his coming during the season of Advent. Anticipation is garnered for the triumphant entry of God into the world in Jesus on Christmas Day, while the season of Epiphany unfolds further glimpses of his life and ministry. Each season of the church year is filled with expectation, discovery, and hope.
Ash Wednesday begins the season of Lent. And unlike Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, Lent is a solemn season for the Christian. As part of the Ash Wednesday worship service, ashes are imposed on one’s forehead in the pattern of a cross. The imposed ashes are from the previous year’s Palm Sunday fronds—fronds reminiscent of those waved triumphantly as Jesus entered Jerusalem on his way to Golgotha. The Jews believed he entered the city as the coming King; they did not yet understand he would reign through suffering and death.
These ashes remind us of our common destiny: “From dust you come and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). For the Christian, the Lenten season is also meant to remind us of our common mission to walk the path with Jesus toward death. It invites us to lose our lives in order to find them anew, resurrected with Jesus on Easter morning.
Whether or not one actively observes Lent, the season can serve as an invitation to evaluate our own lives and to examine the invitation of Jesus to die with him. We can enter this deathly contemplation with the anticipation of resurrection on Easter morning. But Christ’s path to resurrection is the path of laying down lives, the path of relinquishment, and the path of self-denial. This path feels entirely unnatural, for it takes us in the opposite direction of self-preservation.
Yet, Jesus said that if anyone wants to follow him, if anyone really wants the kind of life he offers, the kind of life he modeled for us in his own, then they must deny themselves, take up the cross and follow him. Following Jesus will lead us all to the cross, and will lead us all to the place of death. For the Christian, this is the downward journey of Lent. “From dust you have come, and to dust you shall return.” Of course, regardless of the gods we follow, we all share in this destiny; like Jesus, we, too, will die. The pressing question, in light of this common destiny, is how shall we now live? How shall my life today respond to the reality of death and the invitation of life?
The life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer provides an illustration of one answer to this question.(1) Bonhoeffer grew up in a home full of privilege and status. His father, a prominent psychiatrist, provided the best of what life had to offer. Bonhoeffer attended the finest university, and took a year before his ordination to study in the United States. His life was filled with promise and potential.
Yet, this life seemingly marked for success, would be marred by loss and suffering. He lost one brother in World War I and he would lose another in World War II. He eventually would be arrested by the Nazi regime for aiding Jews to safety. And while he embraced the risk of peace and dared to love in the face of one’s enemies, he would be implicated in a plot to assassinate Hitler and executed at the age of 38.
In fact, it was not until after his death that Bonhoeffer’s ministry and influence had its most potent force. Many are now familiar with his books The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together. He has been a theologian of immense influence, not just for students of theology, not simply for Christians yearning to grow in their understanding of discipleship, but for a watching a world full of questions about injustice and suffering. In his letters and papers published posthumously, Bonhoeffer argued that the will of God and the way of discipleship would not always lead to self-preservation or advancement. The will of God involves giving our lives for the sake of others (which Bonhoeffer believed would be the case for his action against Hitler). He wrote, “Christ’s vicarious deeds and particularly his death on our behalf, become in turn the principle and model of the self-sacrifice that makes community possible… [T]he church is the church only when it exists for others.”(2)
Following the downward path of Jesus can lead to a renewed, hopeful, and restored vision of life for anyone. For as we embrace our inevitable deaths and declines, as we embrace the downward path, we have the opportunity to let go of the false things we think make up our lives. We let go of thinking that the accumulation of wealth, power, and resources make up a good life; we let go of thinking that busyness makes us important; we let go of thinking that our personal safety and security are to be preserved at all cost. And as we let go, we can embrace those who make life fullest, we can put others’ interests before our own, and exist for the sake of others. And what is done on behalf of others for the sake of Christ will indeed endure beyond our deaths.
The season of Lent is the season of dust and ashes. It is the journey toward one man’s death on a cross and toward our own. Bonhoeffer understood this as he wrote from his prison cell, and Jesus understood this as he bore the weight of suffering, misunderstanding, shame, and death at Golgotha. The way to resurrection life is not by saving our lives, but in losing them. Whether one observes Lent or not, the call to “take up our crosses” is issued to all.
Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.
(1) Biographical information on Dietrich Bonhoeffer excerpted from Martin Doblmeier interviewed on Speaking of Faith, Feb. 2, 2006. Doblmeier produced the 2003 documentary, Bonhoeffer, broadcast on PBS.
(2) Dietrich Bonhoffer, A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, edited by Geffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 343.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Only Human
The recognition of one’s humanity can be an uncomfortable pill to swallow. Life’s fragility, life’s impermanence, life’s intertwinement with imperfection and disappointment—bitter medicines are easier to accept. The Romantic poets called it “the burden of full consciousness.” To look closely at humanity can indeed be a realization of dread and despair.
For poet Philip Larkin, to look closely at humanity was to peer into the absurdity of the human existence. Whatever frenetic, cosmic accident that brought about a species so endowed with consciousness, the sting of mortality, incessant fears of failure, and sieges of shame, doubt, and selfishness was, for Larkin, a bitter irony. In a poem titled “The Building,” he describes the human condition as it is revealed in the rooms of a hospital, where one finds “Humans, caught/On ground curiously neutral, homes and names/Suddenly in abeyance; some are young,/ Some old, but most at that vague age that claims/The end of choice, the last of hope; and all/ Here to confess that something has gone wrong./ It must be error of a serious sort,/ For see how many floors it needs, how tall…”
With or without Larkin’s sense of dread, the confession that “something has gone wrong” is often synonymous with the acknowledgment of humanity. “I’m only human,” is a phrase meant to evoke leniency with shortcoming, while “human” itself in Webster’s dictionary is an adjective for imperfection, weakness, and fragility. Nonetheless, there are some religions that stand diametrically opposed to this idea, seeing humanity with limitless potential, humans as pure, the human spirit as divine. In a vein not unlike Larkin’s agnostic dread, the self-deemed new atheists see the cruel realities of time and chance as reason in and of itself to dismiss the rose-colored lenses of God and religion. Yet quite unlike Larkin’s concluding outlook of meaninglessness and despair, they (inexplicably) suggest a rose-colored view of humanity. Still others emphasize the depravity of humanity to such a leveling degree that no person can stand up under the burden of guilt and disgust.
In deep contrast to such severe or optimistic readings, the Christian view of humanity adds a nuanced dimension to the conversation. Christianity admits that while there is indeed an error of a serious sort, the error is not in “humanness” itself. Rather, something has gone wrong. Thus, in our humanity we find the paradox of a deep and sacred honor at our humanity and a profound and shameful recognition that we cannot access it. Yet our inherent recognition of imperfection is simultaneously an inherent admission that there is indeed such a thing as perfection. The Christian’s advantage, then, is not that they find themselves less fallen and closer to said perfection than others, nor that they find in their religion a means of escaping the world of fragility, brokenness, guilt, and error; the Christian’s advantage is that they are aware of their own broken humanity in a fallen world because they are aware of the perfect human.
“[H]umanity’s mystery,” as one writer expounds, “can be explained only in the mystery of the God who became human. If people want to look into their own mystery—the meaning of their pain, of their work, of their suffering, of their hope—let them put themselves next to Christ. If they accomplish what Christ accomplished—doing the Father’s will, filling themselves with the life that Christ gives the world—they are fulfilling themselves as true human beings. If I find, on comparing myself with Christ, that my life is a contrast, the opposite of his, then my life is a disaster. I cannot explain that mystery except by returning to Christ, who gives authentic features to a person who wants to be genuinely human.”(1)
The author of these words was well acquainted with the mysterious paradox of humanness and the God who became human to call the world to authentic humanity. Oscar Romero was a Salvadoran priest who saw the very worst and the weakest of humanity in the corruption, violence, and suffering of a country at war within itself. A witness to ongoing violations of human rights, Romero spoke out on behalf of the poor and the victimized. In both the abused and the abusers, he saw the image of God, glimpses of Christ, and the dire need for his true humanity. Romero was assassinated in the middle of a church service; fittingly, he was holding up the broken bread of communion, the sign of Christ’s human body, when he died.
In a world with reason to be despairing of humanity, there is still the jarring image of the perfect human, whose only brokenness was at our own hands. Christ is more than someone who came to fix what was wrong. He is the image of all that is right.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Father and Child
To Fyodor Dostoevsky, the parable of the prodigal son was a lifeline. Though an outcast in a Siberian prison, he found himself within this radical story of homecoming and a father’s heart. C.S. Lewis similarly alluded to finding himself within the parable: “Who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape?” It is a parable that unveils each of us in some way, whether we find ourselves as the prodigal asking for mercy or the jealous older brother looking for credit for good behavior. In any case, it is the image of the father that convinces us to remove the veil. He is both the subject and the point of the story Jesus tells.
The parable begins with a man who has two sons. The first half of the story focuses on the younger son who boldly requests his inheritance before his father had even died. He then ends up squandering his father’s money on the throes of his own appetite. When he has nothing left and is desperate with hunger, he turns back for home with the expectation that he can work his way back into the father’s house.
The second half of the story introduces us to the older son who did not leave the father and smugly points this out when the younger son comes wandering back home. The older son is the one who stays, who looks after the father, who works in his fields, and is disturbed by the younger son’s blatant disregard for the life their father has given them. He is angered by the celebration of his brother’s return, jealous of the father’s attention and forgiveness, envious of the celebrated position his brother is receiving. The father he loves deserved more than his brother’s selfish squandering, and so does he, as the son who stayed.
In both sons, there is good and bad, conceit and humility, selfishness and acknowledgment of the father, even if self-serving. The younger son is full of foolishness, and yet he exhibits some degree of wisdom in turning around. The older son is loyal and more conscientious, and yet he exhibits a great degree of selfishness and disregard in his reaction to the father’s character. Neither son is a clear example of the kind of person most of us want to be. Yet, both sons, in all of their major failings and minor virtues, are clearly sought out by the father. In the estimation of one of my wise professors, this parable leaves us questioning what on earth a father is going to do with two boys like that? And more importantly, what on earth is God going to do with people like us?
Yet to this wayward child who stumbles toward home, the father runs to embrace him, immediately saying to his servants: “Quickly bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet; and bring the fatted calf, kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.”(1) With every symbol of restoration, the father who was waiting embraces the son who was lost. This lavish grace of the Father is ours as prodigal children. Though we neither expect it nor deserve it, the celebration is thrown in our honor, over the return of even one lost sheep.
To the older son who fumes outside the party and accuses his father of unfairness, the father responds with patience and care, calling him to an awareness of heritage over inheritance: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” When we are the smug older children of the Father, his grace is jarring and disruptive, even as God reminds us that all God has is our own. God’s invitation to the feast is both awkward and demanding, a call to overlook the harm that our flagrant siblings cause—and their potential to cause it again. But the Father stands beside us with this request and his grace, though we are equally undeserving.
Whether we find ourselves in the shoes of the prodigal or treading the ground of the older brother, there is good reason to celebrate the unveiling and unsounded love of this Father Jesus describes. His story overturns lesser narratives: God’s unfathomable grace and mercy shatters our sense of who is worthy and bids us to see that God alone is our rescue. The Father invites us to a celebration of the kingdom regardless of where we now stand.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) Luke 15:22-25.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Free Fall
Amusement parks had always been destinations of choice for my family while I was growing up. It didn’t matter the vacation spot, we would, if there was an amusement park nearby, make it a priority visit. The reason for this priority was that we loved roller-coasters. The Matterhorn Bobsleds at Disney Land; Space Mountain at Disney World, and all the various roller-coasters at Six Flags theme parks called to us to ride them over and over again to our sheer delight.
There was one exception: The Free Fall ride. I do not know if it is still in existence, but when I knew it at my local Six Flags it was a ride like an elevator without a door. Only a seatbelt harness held us in. Up six stories it climbed while our stomachs fell. Climbing higher and higher, the expanse of the park and the surrounding communities became like miniature-versions of themselves. It seemed the ride would climb as high as the heights of heaven. Then suddenly, the ascent ended. The car would tilt forward ever so slightly, so that all you could see below was the drop back to earth. For maximum thrill or terror, the car wouldn’t plunge down immediately. Riders sat for what seemed to be an eternity of waiting; suddenly, the mechanical support drew back and the elevator-like car would make its free fall back down to the ground at speeds as high as 90 mph. I only ever went on the Free Fall once. I hated that ride.
“Sometimes suffering feels like a free fall,” writes J. Todd Billings in his book Rejoicing in Lament.(1) It is a free-fall away from all that was normal and routine in one’s life down into what seems to be a spiraling abyss of chaos and despair. After receiving the phone call in the early morning hours that my husband had suffered sudden cardiac arrest, I fell into my own free-fall. While sitting in the airport waiting for my flight home, I remember saying to my mother, “My life will never be the same again.” I would free-fall into another world never to return to the world I had inhabited for seventeen years with my husband. There would be no return to what was ‘normal.’ There would only be a steadying of my legs, like I had to do after the free-fall ride at the amusement park, landing in the strange new world of grief and loss that was mine.
Fortunately for me, I was not the first person to ever experience a loss like this, just as surely as I was not the first to ride the Free Fall, nor the last to experience its terror. There were many who reached out to me from similar experiences in person; and others who reached out to me through the pages of articles and books chronicling this shared journey. Of course, Christianity affirms a God who joins us in this journey, not as a fellow rider on a free-fall, but as the foundation on which we might find our footing again. For author and theologian Todd Billings, this foundation has been tested in his own journey of grief and suffering as a result of a terminal cancer diagnosis. Yet, he writes:
“In a deeply paradoxical way, full of a mystery that blinds by its brightness, Jesus Christ, the God-human, displays the love of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—by taking on our human suffering and terror. Christ, the God-human, takes on the path of human suffering so that we are not pioneers in the darkness, so that we are not in free-fall. Instead, even when our suffering seems senseless, even when we feel like we are in free-fall, we can look to Christ to see, hear, and taste that we are still in the ever-faithful, ever-loving hands of God.”(2)
The ‘Man of sorrows’ and the one ‘acquainted with grief’ is the reason why Christians can affirm that nothing is able to separate us from the love of God…not even death. Jesus Christ offers those who experience the free-fall of suffering a firm foundation on which to land. Becoming fully human, Jesus is made the “high priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses.” And it is here, Billings notes, in the mystery of the Incarnation “that in Christ, the impassible God becomes one with suffering flesh in order to heal it.”(3) God is not caught off-guard because of human suffering and misery, even as God in Christ identifies with all that it means to be human. “We hope because in Christ, God has taken on human suffering and death so that they are emptied of their ultimate sting.”(4)
But this is not a truth easily gained. In my own free-fall into grief, despair, and pain, I needed the space to fall; if only to see and to know that there was a foundation on which I could depend, and which could sustain the weightiness of my pain. I needed to scream all the way down as I fell—screams of desperation, abandonment, anger, and loss. And it was necessary for me to lose all those supports that were, in reality, flimsy and faulty. It was only then, after this long, hard fall that I could begin to feel steady again, strengthen my legs, and stand up.
In the psalms of lament, the anguished cries of the prophets, and in the life and ministry of Jesus, there are pioneers who have gone before all who grieve and suffer. They have experienced the terror of all the twists and turns, the drops and descents of human life. They gave voice to their lament. Perhaps like myself, Dr. Billings, and all those who would wish for a different way, who would wish they didn’t have to ride the free-fall of grief and loss, the paradox of the Incarnation—that God is in Christ enveloping human suffering—will yet invite sufferers to stand on this firm foundation.
Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.
(1) J. Todd Billings, Rejoicing In Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015), 151. For more information visit http://www.rejoicinginlament.com.
(2) Ibid., 157.
(3) Ibid., 163
(4) Ibid., 163.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – My Messy House
Kathleen Norris tells a story of a little boy who wrote a poem called “The Monster Who Was Sorry.” The poem begins with a confession: he doesn’t like it when his father yells at him. The monster’s response is to throw his sister down the stairs, then to destroy his room, and finally to destroy the whole town. The poem concludes: “Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.’”(1)
The confession of Saint Paul bears a fine resemblance: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but I do what I hate.” Regret has a way of shining the floodlights on the mess we sense within. Norris further expounds the faithful candor of the child describing his own muddled story: “‘My messy house’ says it all: with more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance.”(2)
The journey of a Christian through the many rooms of faith posits countless opportunities to peer at the monster within. There are days in the life of faith when I question whether I am living up to the title of Christian or disciple—or even casual acquaintance. In certain rooms of awareness I find there is no question: I am not. Yet, as G.K. Chesterton wrote in his autobiography, I have only ever found one religion that “dared to go down with me into the depth of myself.”(3) This is assuredly the invitation of Christianity. Christ will leave no corner untouched. What we find are messy houses, filled with hidden staircases built of excuses, and idols of good deeds atop mantels of false security—in short, the home of Christ in disarray at our own hands.
If we were to remain shut up in this place alone, we might begin to wonder why we should ever hope for anything other than mess and wreckage. Paul’s confession marks the futility of our own efforts to clean the house. But we do not make any journey to the depths of ourselves alone. In fact, we should not have discovered the messes had they not been shown to us in the first place. We are guided to these places in our consciences, to images of ourselves unadorned, and finally to broken and contrite hearts. Life in Christ is the loving invitation to be drawn into a bigger story, to be remade by the Spirit of truth, enfolded into the vicarious humanity of the Son of God who maneuvers us through messy rooms and sin-stained walls and mercifully exposes monstrous ways for the sake of communion. It would indeed be a futile journey if we walked this path alone.
Instead, the very Spirit who shows us the monster in a messy house shows us the one who removes the masks, clears the wreckage, and brings us into his house to make us human again. In a scene from C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, Aslan the lion is seen tearing the costume off the child in front of him.(4) The child writhes in pain from the razor sharp claws that feel as though they pierce his very being. With mounting intensity, Aslan rips away layer after layer, until the child is absolutely certain he will die from the agony. But when it is all over and every last layer has been removed, the child delights in the new found freedom, having long forgotten the weight of the costume he carried.
The journey of a soul through its messiest rooms is not a drive-by glimpse of the depths of our sin and our need for repentance; it is not a journey for the sake of guilt or even right-living. It is true that we are shown the weight of our masks and the extent of our messes, that we are handed the great encumbrance of our own failures, but all so we can be shown again the one who asks to take them all from us—all so we can be made new by the one who remembers what it means to be fully human. “Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows… But he was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:4-5). Quite thankfully, it is through the dingy windows of a messy house that one has the clearest view of the cross.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace (New York: Riverhead, 1998), 69.
(2) Ibid., 70.
(3) G.K. Chesterton, The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 334.
(4) Story told in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 115-117.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Remedy for Control
In the January 2, 2015 issue of Science magazine, I read a troubling article. Two researchers—one a cancer geneticist and the other a biostatistician—found that approximately two-thirds of all cancers are the result of “biological bad luck.”(1) The ‘bad luck’ they describe is simply the random genetic mutations that happen as a result of healthy cells dividing. Utilizing a statistical model to analyze historical literature on cancer, they examined the rates of cell division in 31 types of bodily tissue. Focusing specifically on stem cells—the specialized population of cells within each organ tissue that provide replacements when cells wear out—they found that the higher the rate of stem-cell division the more increased the risk of cancer. The reason why? Dividing cells must make copies of their DNA. The more they divide (over time), the higher the risk that errors in the copying process could set off the uncontrolled growth that leads to cancer.(2)
These findings are troubling because they create doubt as to whether preventative controls matter at all in the fight against cancer. They are troubling especially as I thought of all those who have come face to face with the ‘randomness’ of cancer. They are more than just statistics; they are family members, friends, and colleagues who struggle with this often deadly disease. Even more troubling is the way in which studies like this one erode confidence in any sense of control over life or destiny.
As I read studies like this, or simply look out on the world around me, it is sometimes difficult not to collapse under the weight of what appears to be random catastrophic events. Mistaken identity, for example, was the ‘reason’ a recent college graduate was murdered. He was a classmate, a dear friend of my brother, and not two-weeks into his new marriage when he was murdered at the front door of a home in which he was coming to share his Christian faith. Those inside mistook him for someone who had done harm to them in the past. In another seemingly random event, two wilderness experts/enthusiasts river-rafting in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge awoke in their campsite to find a grizzly bear. They were mauled and killed by the bear. Apparently, being in the wrong place at the wrong time can get one killed. But the ‘wrong’ place often seems to be as arbitrary as a roll of the die.
Part of the human strategy in the face of apparent random events such as these involves assigning meaning. Humans seek to find a purpose, a cause, someone or something to blame. Sometimes this strategy is a feeble grasping after control of all that seems chaotic and random in the human experience. Perhaps this strategy is what motivated those who inquired of Jesus about the collapse of the Tower of Siloam. The collapse of this tower killed eighteen people and stirred up all the same attempts to find meaning or assign blame. Jesus’s response likely left more questions than answers. “Do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate? I tell you no, but unless you repent you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:2).
In Jesus’s day, people were quick to assign a moral failure or sin as the cause of the tragedy, suffering or physical ailment. But Jesus does not affirm this assessment. Furthermore, Jesus does not conjecture as to the meaning of the event—in the sense they were asking—and he leaves its apparent randomness unexplained.
Of course, Jesus does affirm a God who is not far off even from apparently random events. “Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap, and they have no storeroom nor barn; and yet God feeds them; how much more valuable you are than the birds!” (Luke 12:24) Indeed, in Jesus’s own suffering and death the love of God is on full display. As author and theologian J. Todd Billings notes, the gospel on display in the cross of Jesus Christ “is big enough to incorporate and envelop our dying and deaths, even when death seems senseless.”(3) In the cross, God envelops all that seems random and senseless and seeks to overwhelm.
At the same time, the existential realities Jesus acknowledged as he lived his life should give pause to hurrying towards quick and easy comfort. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus wrestled in prayer over God’s will for his life. He did not face his suffering with a stoic, nerveless compliance in the face of God’s control. He begged God to take this cup from him. Jesus—the human Son of God wrestling with the Father in prayer and later crying out from the cross—shows that sometimes the only response to the seeming random suffering of life is to wonder if we have been forsaken, crying out in lament at a world that is not as it should be. Jesus also shows a God willing to be subjected to these chaotic forces of this world. This God is not aloof, but a God who was “willingly stripped…of all defenses to show us how humanity is ‘done.’”(4)
Jesus, while not answering the ‘why’ questions regarding the seemingly random fate of the eighteen Galileans, asks for a different response. He calls for change of heart for all who pondered the event at Siloam. He calls for a reorientation of the will towards repentance—perhaps even a repentance of longing to control life and meaning so tightly. Indeed, as Jesus himself wrestled with God over his own fate, he demonstrates a “willed acceptance….’Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet, not what I will, but what you will.’”(5)
In an age marked by fear of terror, chaos, and the seeming randomness of events, Jesus offers a heart at rest. It is a rest not found in stoic submission to a determined destiny, but a rest forged from listening for the whisperer in the whirlwind. Not a static surety, but a dynamic trust in the God who declares, “I AM WHAT I AM” and “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.”
Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.
(1) Jennifer Couzin-Frankle, “The Bad Luck of Cancer,” Science, January 2, 2015, 12.
(2) Denise Grady, “Cancer’s Random Assault,” New York Times, January 5, 2015.
(3) J. Todd Billings, Rejoicing In Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Books, 2015), 109.
(4) William J. O’Malley, Help My Unbelief (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,2008), 141.
(5) Ibid., 143. See Mark 14:36.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Lament and the Open Grave
It was a cold February at Christ of the Desert monastery, high in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Behind the chapel, author William Bryant Logan noticed an open grave, the disturbed red soil waiting in a tall mound beside it.
“Has a brother died?” he asked a monk.
“No,” he answered, “but we cannot dig in winter, so we opened this grave ahead of time, just in case.”
To many of us, an open grave is unnerving, the thought of soil disturbed and waiting entirely unwelcome. “An open grave is an open mouth,” writes Logan. “It exhales all the suggestion of the dark.”(1) In the Western world in particular, we have a complicated relationship with death, dismissing as much of it as we can manage from sight and mind and society. An open grave is a gaping wound we seem to prefer buried.
Christian theologian J. Todd Billings notes something similar about the practice of lament, a discipline—maybe even a word—that has fallen out of use in modern times, buried or hidden in Christian liturgies. “[I]n a growing trend,” writes Billings, “many funerals completely avoid the language of dying and death as well as the appearance of the dead body—turning it all into a one-sided ‘celebration’ of the life of the one who has died.”(1) While this language might be fitting for certain worldviews, where death remains an enemy that puts an end to the celebration, the biblical paradox about death attends to far more of the human experience. The Christian worldview affords the hopeful (and far more multivalent) language of celebration to be sure—Christ has indeed conquered death—but likewise, we are afforded the equally hopeful language of lament, given permission to groan as mortals who do not yet taste the fullness of the victory Christ has won, as creatures who confess with their Creator that death is an enemy of God. Where we fail to face this fuller vision of our mortality, writes Billings, “we attend to one side of the biblical paradox about death, forgetting that even the death of a very elderly person is not ‘altogether sweet and beautiful’… [At the grave of Lazarus], Jesus still wept—even for one who would be raised again. And so should we.”(2)
For Billings, the signs of death’s current reign and the dire need for the language of lament are not the mere theological abstractions of a theology professor. In a book he never fathomed he would write at the midpoint of his life, Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ, his need for the language of lament is voiced in personal terms. The book is a remarkably honest account of his own lamenting, but it is equally clear that lament itself is a gift of the church to the world.
In one section, Billings describes his own congregation, filled with an array of people and stages of life, a church that baptizes and celebrates new life in Christ and holds funerals on a regular basis. This collective, human journey struck him as he led a Sunday school class after his diagnosis, compelling an honesty that moved him. “In this room are cancer survivors who have gone through chemo; and there are others who have lost spouses and other loved ones to cancer and other disease and tragedy. The congregation is the only place in Western culture where we develop relationships, celebrate our faith and life together, and also extend those same relationships all the way through death and dying… That is a gift of the church. I would go so far as to say that a top recommended question from me for ‘church shoppers’ might be this: who would you like to bury you?”(3)
For any death-denying culture, the church sits as a striking counterpoint, empowered by the crucified Jesus to tell a vastly different story. But the whole story needs to be told. “The Psalms—with their laments, petitions, and praises—have been a staple of Christian worship for centuries. They, along with the sacraments of Christ’s dying and new life, have incorporated death into the story of Christian worship.”(4) The Christian imagination is not one that has to bury its head in the sand, taking its cues from our culture’s qualms about death. To lament is not to undermine that we are a people who live in hope. On the contrary, it is a gift of God for the people of God, who discover in the vicarious humanity of the crucified Lord both a more profound rejoicing and a more honest lament. Whereas other worldviews have no basis for the practice of lamentation (to whom would we lament?), for the Christian it is a part of the journey, a testimony to our identity in Christ. Writes Billings, “To mourn and to protest is to testify that the gifts of creation are truly wondrous, that the communion with God and others that we taste in Christ is truly the way things are supposed to be—thus alienation and death are not truly ‘natural’ but enemies of God and his kingdom.”(5)
The lections of the Christian season of Lent upon us are full of God’s care within multifaceted journeys: crossings from darkness into light, blindness to vision, the familiar to the unexpected, thirst to a place of provision. We find journeys beside still waters, through dark valleys and green pastures to a table prepared in the presence of enemies, pathways from the desert to the Sea of Galilee, a valley of dry bones and the tomb of a friend to a meal in an upper room and the crucifixion of the Lamb. There are no abstractions here. As Billings attests of the Christian story, it is mercifully not one that asks us to deny the dark and painful realities of life. Death is not pushed away in denial, but incorporated into God’s redemptive story, and held by a storyteller who knows every part of the journey, even the open grave.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 48.
(2) J. Todd Billings, Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker,2015), 108.
(3) Ibid., 101.
(4) Ibid., 109.
(5) Ibid., 100.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Mystery and Prayer
Even a casual reader of the Bible cannot help but notice many bold and staggering promises made concerning prayer. Perhaps none is more direct than Jesus’s statement in Mark’s gospel: All things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you. Matthew and Luke record similar promises. Those who seek after God knock and God will open the door. All things that are asked for in prayer, with belief, will be received. So strong are these promises about prayer that the Greek language in which they were originally translated indicates that what is asked for is already accomplished. The one praying simply needs to believe the answer has already been received.(1)
It was reading bold promises like these found in the Bible that troubled English author Somerset Maugham. In his novel, Of Human Bondage, he tells a fictionalized account of an incident with prayer from which his faith never recovered. The central character in the novel, Philip, is a young boy, full of faith, who has a clubfoot. When Philip reads this verse from Mark about prayer, he is overjoyed. Now he would be able to play football with the other boys. The relentless teasing would cease, and he wouldn’t have to hide his foot any longer when swimming with other children. Philip immediately “prayed with all the power in his soul. No doubts assailed him. He was confident in the Word of God. And the night before he was to go back to school he went up to bed tremulous with excitement….he remembered at once that this was the morning of the miracle. His heart was filled with joy and gratitude. His first instinct was to put down his hand and feel the foot which was whole now, but to do this seemed to doubt the goodness of God. He knew that his foot was well. But at last, he made up his mind, and with the toes of his right foot he just touched his left. Then he passed his hand over it. He limped downstairs just as Mary Ann was going into the dining room for prayers, and then he sat down to breakfast.”(2)
Unanswered prayers prayed with utter conviction are particularly difficult to understand. Maugham, who had a stutter, prayed fervently for healing, but like his character Philip, his prayer was answered with a resounding “no” and his faith was never the same. Jesus implies in his teaching on prayer that like our earthly fathers, God longs to give us what is good in response to the asking, seeking, and knocking of prayer. “What father, if asked by his son for a fish will give him a snake? Or if his daughter asked for an egg, he would not give her a scorpion, would he?” Yet for Maugham, or his alter-ego Philip, how could he see his stuttering, or that clubfoot as a good gift, when all it brought him was merciless teasing and misery?
Most people—religious or non-religious—have experienced the pain of unanswered prayer. Whether in the simple prayers of childhood, or in the fervent prayers of the deeply faithful, it is an all too common human experience that prayers seemingly go unanswered. Prayers for God’s protection, God’s healing, and God’s intervention are answered for some, but others suffer accidents, injuries, illnesses, or death despite fervent prayer. Sometimes when we are most desperate to hear God’s voice, there is only a vast silence in return. Perhaps, we are tempted to give up praying all together. Emily Dickinson wrote of this temptation to despair over unanswered prayer:
There comes an hour when begging stops,
When the long interceding lips
Perceive their prayer is vain.(3)
Even if the divine answer is “wait,” the months and years of waiting can stretch on interminably making the most patient intercessor wonder what “good” gift could come in the endless waiting. So what is the good gift promised by Jesus?
Matthew and Luke present parallel teachings on this promise of prayer except that what Matthew implies, Luke makes explicit. In Matthew’s account Jesus tells his disciples that the Father will give what is good to those who ask Him. In Luke’s account, Jesus defines what is good and tells us that God will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask. How might one understand the Holy Spirit as God’s abundant answer to prayer—even those prayers that go unanswered or receive an unwanted answer?
First, Christians believe that the promise of the Holy Spirit is the promise of God’s presence through all the circumstances of life. The Bible speaks of the Holy Spirit as the comforter, the one who comes alongside.(4) The promise of God’s presence is meant to sustain, even in the mystery of “no” to our specific requests. Moreover, prayer is more than simply receiving answers to requests. Prayer is about joining in with the Spirit who groans on behalf of the creation. Indeed, as theologian John Calvin claimed about the prayers of lament in the Psalms, they are “among the unutterable groanings of which Paul makes mention in Romans 8:26, ‘For the spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.’”(5)
In this way, Christians understand God’s good gift as the hope that God is present no matter what life brings. Hope that God is with us, and that God’s Spirit is groaning with us in our suffering offers reassurance that we too can rise from the ashes of the most crushing events and circumstances glimpsing what beauty remains and how God redeems.
Unanswered prayer will always be a mystery. For every person who prayers, there will be times when it seems the gift is a scorpion instead of an egg, or a snake instead of a fish. Yet perhaps as we wrestle with prayer, God’s bold promise to send the Holy Spirit is the only answer we could hope for: the good gift of God’s abiding presence, the power of redemption, and the promise of God’s creative work to make something beautiful from the chaos of our lives.
Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.
(1) See Matthew 7:7-11; Luke 11:9-13
(2) Cited in Philip Yancey, Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 216-217.
(3) Ibid., 213.
(4) John 14:16, 26.
(5) Cited in J. Todd Billings, Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer & Life in Christ (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2015), 156.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Sharing Death, Sharing Life
Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.
They were words that controlled us, like an electric fence to wandering minds and quaking bodies. The pastor repeated them to us frequently—at each hospital visit and in every triumphant prayer for healing within an oncology ward that seemed only to delve out the certainty of loss and the overthrow of control. His confident battle cry was so certain, so instructive: We will not fathom defeat; we will not even think about death. In the name of Jesus, we will see the evidence of healing though it is yet unseen. Despite a theology that under normal circumstances would have been bold enough to voice some very serious objections, I so badly wanted my dad to be well… So badly that we never spoke of his wishes for the funeral we would plan only weeks later.
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. They are the words of the ancient writer of Hebrews, though the way we used them during those short weeks with an aggressive cancer never actually considered this. It was a verse we treated as if it pertained only to us, jarred loose from its story and author and community. Once loose, we used it as a tool to jar my dad from his own flesh, from his pained and embodied life as a creature in his final days. We were after a miracle that would erase life as it had become, a healing that would restore us back to life before cancer. We used the verse, distorted into an individualized half truth, to keep ourselves from considering anything more.
Sadly, the God these prayers envisioned was more like a slot machine than a sovereign, each prayer a spin that tried to muster hope against all odds, fearfully, as if dad’s life depended on the very quality of our mustering. While I don’t doubt the charitable intentions of those prayers—or the belief in a God who heals—I am saddened by the selfishness I didn’t want to see as I uttered them. The words we clung to were far more about the survivors than the dying one we loved or the abundant life we professed together in the crucified Christ—even in our own deaths. We clung to this creature-denying posture at the expense of one embodied by the vicariously human Christ himself, a posture that could have been both a sharing of my dad’s pain and a sharing of life and death with the one who holds both.
What might this shared experience in the body of Christ have actually looked like? Tragically and beautifully, it is coming into focus in the life of a friend. In October of 2012, at the age of 39, Christian theologian Todd Billings was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare and incurable blood cancer.(1) The sense of loss in his story is enough to send some us desperately after those confidently spoken, individualized half truths, like those we held in our own cancer story. Billings has not been a stranger to such prayers uttered on his behalf. But he wrenchingly embodies another way.
In the fog of days following his initial diagnosis, through a bone marrow transplant and quarantine to a drastically new ‘normal’ and a chemo regimen he will be on for the rest of his life, he realized he needed a language that didn’t dodge the hard theological and existential questions, a language that could bring all he is experiencing before God and to help him share it with others. He found himself sharing the language of lament with the writers of Scripture, who are honest and angry, grief-stricken and laid low by their own losses—and are yet able as creatures to bring these encounters before God in a way that does not “diminish the material, embodied nature of my life as a creature, my life as one who has been united to the resurrected Christ but is still groaning for the new creation.”(2)
For the Christian, this is the difficult, beautiful way of the cross: We die and live in and through the crucified Lord. We pray for Christ’s cross-shaped kingdom to come. We live in fellowship with a Triune God whose story of restoration incorporates brokenness, even and ultimately, his own. Alternative ways might be easier but they are not Christ’s. Writes Billings, “[C]onfidently spoken half truths can never reach beyond half truth because they are unwilling to face the biblical paradoxes inherent in orthodox Christianity. Such half truths have always been a temptation because they present a path that is less formidable than fully belonging ‘body and soul, in life and in death—to Jesus Christ.’”(3)
In dire contrast, this proclamation that “I am not my own, but I belong—body and soul, in life and death—to Jesus Christ,” is a shared confession and language that changes dramatically the space in which friends and family, students and colleagues, fellow Christians and even strangers are invited to stand as fellow creatures. Billings is honest about the loss, which gradually sets in and alters expectations of the future: the sudden sense of decades stolen, the new reality of life with an incurable illness. He is honest that the loss is not only his own: it is agonizingly a loss for his wife and their two young children. It is a loss for his friends and his community of faith. Admission of the loss itself may seem simple, but anyone who has ever experienced loss will recognize it as an invitation to break through the temptation for easy answers, to wrestle honestly with a fellow mortal in pain and the mystery of Christ crucified, who offers a truth big enough to hold us all.
Todd Billings sees his cancer story in a story bigger than his own, and in this bigger story, he has been able to invite his own communities to share more deeply the paradox of an adopted life in Christ and the reign of death around us as we wait for the fullness of that adoption. “God’s story does not annihilate my cancer story,” he writes, “but it does envelop and redefine it. Indeed, it asks for my story to be folded into the dying and rising of Christ as one who belongs to him.”(4) This is no pat-answer; it is neither a denial of the dark reality of cancer nor the God who heals. It is the hopeful way of life and death with the only one able to hold them both, the true sharing of which is perhaps more miraculous than even our most desperate prayers can imagine.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) J. Todd Billings shares his story in Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2015).
(2) Ibid., 118.
(3) Ibid., 171, quoting Heidelberg Catechism, Question and Answer 1.
(4) Ibid.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Through Wilderness
“The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him” (Mark 1:12-13).
Mark’s record of the Spirit’s compelling Jesus into the wilderness immediately following his baptism has always intrigued me. The original language is so forceful as to imply that the Spirit literally expelled Jesus into this land of wild beasts and satanic attack. It is even more striking when compared to Matthew and Luke’s gospels, which both suggest that Jesus was “led by the Spirit” into the wilderness.(1) Despite Matthew and Luke’s gentler version, the force is still the same—the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tested, nay, tormented. Why would the Spirit compel Jesus into the land of testing?
The history of Israel and particularly the Exodus from Egypt gives us some perspective on this question. After four hundred years of oppression and enslavement, God sent Moses to deliver the people and to lead them into the Promised Land. A great drama ensues between the “gods” of the Egyptians and the God of Israel. Ten plagues fall, the sea is parted, and the Egyptian army is swallowed up by the raging waters. And then we read, “Moses led Israel from the Red Sea, and they went out into the wilderness of Shur; and they went three days in the wilderness and found no water…. and the whole congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness.”(2) Israel would spend the next forty years, the text tells us, wandering in that wilderness of lament and bitterness. A great beginning stalls in the deserts of Sinai.
Like Israel before him, Jesus’s story as recorded by Mark begins with great drama. John the Baptist announces the Deliverer; Israel’s exile was over, for the Messiah had come. The Deliverer is baptized by John and in front of the crowds declared “the beloved Son” of God. What a tremendous beginning to his earthly ministry. And yet, like Israel, Jesus begins that earthly ministry not with healings and miracles, or with fanfare and great teachings, but by being “immediately cast out into the wilderness.”
Jesus, many commentators have suggested, was re-enacting the great history of Israel in his own life and ministry. He was Israel’s Messiah, their deliverer, just as Moses had been. Yet, like Israel, Jesus would be tested and his test had to precede entry into the Promised Land. But unlike Israel, Jesus would pass the test and his deliverance of his people would be his gift and offering to God for all eternity.
There are moments when I am particularly mindful that before we can enjoy the promised land of resurrection life, we too must journey with Jesus into the wilderness. I do not go through a single day without hearing many stories about the wilderness spaces people dwell in through suffering, disappointment, doubt, or sin. Often, we want to rush through the wilderness to get to the other side. But, like Jesus, we too must travel through wilderness places. Like Jesus, we will be compelled into that wilderness where there are deaths and deprivations. The wilderness is a place of testing. In the wilderness of unmet needs, what do we do? Who will we turn to? In what, or in whom, do we place our trust? When the Israelites faced their test in the wilderness they wanted to return to the enslavement of Egypt. At least, they fantasized, they had food and drink in that land. Jesus, on the other hand, took nothing with him into that desiccated place. He was hungry and enticed to turn stones into bread to meet his legitimate need. Yet in the face of hunger pangs and thirst, Jesus remembered that the source of his life was in the very word of God and his life would be sustained by “every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” Jesus trusted God to provide in God’s time and manner.
Often, we ask God “why” we are compelled into the wilderness. We grumble and complain in our lament and try to hurry our way into the Promised Land by forcing our own way or by seeking to return to Egypt to meet our needs in our time and through our own methods. The journey of all Christ-followers is a journey through the wilderness towards the cross. We cannot escape it, nor can we go around it. And yet, the wilderness, the cross, and the ultimate resurrection of Jesus all demonstrate that no matter the wilderness we find ourselves in, God will bring us through to life on the other side. We will not be delivered from the suffering of the wilderness, but with God’s help we can indeed be transformed by it.
Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.
(1) Matthew 4:1; Luke 4:1.
(2) Exodus 15:22; 16:2.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Face in the Crowd
I confess that I am often overwhelmed by the cacophony of good and honest causes that call out in dire need for supporters. Because of donations made in lieu of flowers at many funerals, it sometimes seems I am on every list of every drive that comes to our area. Similar donations in the names of deceased friends and relatives who requested a particular charity or ministry be remembered also keep me well-informed of need. Long after the donation is processed, I remain on these lists. I am inundated by causes that legitimately cry out for help, calling me to see the world through the eyes of a child, a recovering drug addict, victims of sex-trafficking, cancer, and earthquakes. Whatever your belief-system or creed, the haunting crescendo of heartfelt cries is never easily met with a deaf ear. There is so much need.
“When the foundations are being destroyed,” cried the psalmist, “what can the righteous do?” When need is deep and poverty unplumbed, when hopelessness seems one long, uninterrupted lament—from screams of natural disaster and tears of economic disaster to the silenced cries of injustice across the world—what can I do? When the decision to support one cause is a decision against supporting another, when money can only go so far and can hardly touch the depths of the issues around us, we can become not only paralyzed to make the decision, but inclined to take a large step away from all of it. And I, for one, often euphemize my mental retreat to the one asking for support: “Not at this time,” “I will think about it,” or even worse, “Let me pray about it.” For behind my words is too often a manifestation of indifference. “Wait” almost always means “never.”
In his letter from a Birmingham jail, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. responded to fellow American clergy who were asking him to wait for a better time to pursue the cause of justice in the South. “Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait,’” he wrote. “But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill with impunity your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society….when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”(1) To call for those suffering to wait is to institutionalize our apathy.
Though at times unconsciously taken, our steps away from the center of the world’s pain to a place where we can clear our heads and find perspective are invariably steps toward putting it out of our heads. Requesting time to think, we are requesting time itself to stop. We are asking those with urgent needs to pause for the sake of our own relief. We ask those affected by injustice and hunger, darkness and pain, racism and religious persecution to cover their faces in nobodiness while we step away from it all to that place where half-truths offer a less taxing way. But as Dr. King observed prophetically, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”
When Jesus said that we would always have the poor with us, he did not say it with the despair of one who looks around and sees how vast is the need and poverty of a hurting world. He did not say it with apathy or indifference, needing time to step away or find perspective. On the contrary, he said it knowing every face in the immense crowd of nobodiness, knowing every name we would try not to learn when the pain of others becomes unbearable. He said this living in time where tears are real, yet conscious of eternity when tears will be no more, showing us the mindset he longs for us to hold: a non-answer is very clearly an answer. “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me,” he said plainly.
The cries of the oppressed and brokenhearted, the sick and the mortal will continue to resound though many of us sit in comfortable apathy and languid affluence denying our own mortality. And the call of the vicariously human Christ can be heard in the midst of it all, urging us to set aside all that entangles and follow after him and into the heart of it. The poor and the downcast will indeed always be with us, and where we will allow ourselves to see, it will be overwhelming. They need justice, they need mercy, and they need our time—even as Jesus seems to tell us that it is we who are most in need of them. When Jesus told the crowds that the poor would always be near, he said it as if it were a promise that he, too, would be near. He made the comment knowing that throughout most of history the Son of God would not be with us in the flesh. But in the cup of cold water delivered to the thirsty, in reaching out to the one reeling in loss or leveled by illness, he is indeed there among us. He is both the hand extended to the one hurting and the eyes of the one in need—destroying the notion of nobodiness two faces at a time.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 292.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – To Gather and Embrace
There are moments in our lives that have embossed themselves into our memories. Attached to a strong emotion or event, these scenes remain understandably alive in our minds. Other memories remain tucked away less explicably. We cannot articulate why they have made the indelible imprint that they have. Nor can we explain why they return to the forefront of our minds when they do.
I recalled one such moment recently—a snippet of a conversation more than a decade ago. It is odd that I would recall the conversation at all. At the time, the exchange seemed casual, one of many countless exchanges that bounce out of the mind as quickly as they enter. It was one of many conversations with a trusted mentor and friend, but her words at the time seemed little more than a simple, obvious thought. Yet somehow I remembered presently the concern, unbeknownst to me then, with which she spoke those words. She looked at me and said, “Jill, God needs you to receive the things God places in front of you.” Like a sweater on a warm day, I took her words in their simplicity, and casually tossed them aside. But somewhere in the depths of my mind, they were apparently tucked away until I would stumble across them in another light.
“O Jerusalem, O Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would not have it.” This powerful lament of Christ, recorded in both Luke and Matthew’s Gospels, reminds us that the people of Jerusalem were not indifferent to God. They thought they knew God; in fact, they often thought they were acting on God’s behalf. In Matthew’s Gospel this lament is spoken on the heels of seven woes to the scribes and Pharisees—two other groups who genuinely believed they were fighting to protect the God and the religion they they knew. In Luke’s Gospel, significantly, Christ’s lament follows an invitation toward the narrow door of the kingdom of God.
A great majority of the world today reports some belief in the existence of a divine being. One study on faith and belief among America’s youth describes this often generic credence as belief in a God who wants us to be both good and happy, and who is available in case of emergencies. Sociologist Christian Smith describes this widespread outlook in American teenagers—even across different religious backgrounds—as “moralistic therapeutic deism.” “We have convinced ourselves that this is the gospel,” writes a commenter on these findings, “but in fact it is much closer to another mess of pottage, an unacknowledged but widely held religious outlook that is primarily dedicated, not to loving God, but to avoiding interpersonal friction.”(1)
Jesus’s potent lament and metaphor of a hen who longs to reach out to her chicks proclaims the often tragic nature of our professions and what we attempt to receive in the midst of them—whether denying God altogether, casually professing belief in a distant being, or holding firmly to religion and somehow missing love for God in the process. How oft I would have gathered you as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not have it. The story of humanity seems very often a story of people missing the point; people who don’t even know what we don’t know.
There are certainly many ways of receiving God and the promises of Christ, though we might find in the end that in our receiving we were more realistically trying to avoid something else. The word “receive” in the dictionary lists more than a dozen definitions ranging from “to hear or see,” and “to greet or welcome,” to more weighty definitions such as “to acknowledge formally and authoritatively” or “to bear the weight of.” Examples from human behavior are equally diverse.
At the time of my mentor’s words, I had thoroughly committed myself to the Christian story. The Christian God, I believed, provided the only answers that could really speak to the difficult questions of life. I had thoroughly accepted Christ and considered myself a part of the story of Christianity. Yet I was constantly questioning in my mind whether I knew God personally and often doubted my own identity as a child of God. I know now that my friend was saying that there is an intensely practical side to receiving God that I was missing. There is a point when we must be still and recognize just who we are receiving, just who has been reaching out to gather us all along.
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus proclaims, “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (10:15). The Greek word for “receive,” literally means to take with the hand, to take hold of, and to embrace. Much has been said in scholarship of this reference to coming to God as a little child. Jesus’s use of the word “receive” is equally picturesque. The image painted in the text is certainly worth many words, two figures meriting an impression on both mind and memory. To believe that the God of the scriptures exists is to believe that we as people now stand in the presence of God as a Person. To receive God is to reach out to the very arms that have been longing to gather us near all along.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Isms and Rabbit Trails
Among my toughest audiences in apologetics are undoubtedly my two little boys. From the time words started forming on their lips, questions of various kinds have been a staple around our home—the most formidable one being, “Why, daddy?” More than any other of our appetites, I strongly suspect that thirst for knowledge and the occasional thrill of discovery have played the greatest role in shaping history. From the vast machinery of the news media to the intricate systems of the educational enterprise, from specialized research institutions to the multifaceted world of religious devotion, human hunger for knowledge is the oil that greases the mill of civilization.
So pervasive is this drive for knowledge that it can become an end in itself, opening up a rudderless detour along even the journey to God. This is true in religious systems that claim knowledge for a select few, with secretly guarded rituals forever hidden from the uninitiated. Gnosticism, from the Greek word gnosis, which means knowledge, was built upon the premise that there exists a category of knowledge privileged to a select few. Most Eastern religions insist that the problem with humanity is not sin but ignorance; hence, their solution to the human predicament is enlightenment, not forgiveness. Similarly, scientific naturalism stakes its fortunes on the bare, cold facts of particles and quarks; to know them is to know ultimate reality—never mind the minor detail that, logically, there is a gaping missing link between knowing how something works and the conclusion that it was not made.
But according to the Bible, at the end of our incessant pursuit of knowledge lies a Person, not an ideology or impersonal reality. God is not only the beginner of all that is; God has also revealed Himself in the earthliest of terms. Jesus was born in circumstances accessible to the lowliest of the shepherds as well as to the most majestic of kings. He spoke to large crowds in public places and was crucified outside the city walls, thereby silencing forever the voices of self-appointed guardians of alleged esoteric knowledge. In biblical terms, no pursuit of knowledge is ever complete without the discovery of him who is the truth; to know him is to know not only ultimate reality but also ourselves.
For the Christian, then, it is a solemn thought to remember that reducing apologetics to a contest in the abstract can actually keep us from knowing God. Determined to demonstrate the consistency of our beliefs, we can easily find ourselves on endless rabbit trails—pursuing every form of ism, striving to tie each and every loose end in our belief system, finding comfort when we succeed and frustration when we fail—all the time unaware of the beckoning arms of our loving Father who is Himself the treasure we so diligently seek and hope to show others. Like Jewish leaders of old who diligently searched the scriptures but failed to recognize the one to whom they point when he stood before them in human flesh, we can perfect the art of dissecting biblical and philosophical truths with little progress in our knowledge of God—so enamored with the map that we never take a step towards the destination. As C.S. Lewis observes, “There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself…as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist!“(1)
The God we meet in apologetics is mostly a subject to be studied, a case to be argued, a conclusion to be drawn—a far cry from the God who has revealed Himself both in the scriptures and ultimately in the Person of Jesus Christ. When the pursuit of knowledge becomes an end in itself, the conclusions we accept are decidedly driven by our most cherished passions. Just as it is possible to pursue knowledge simply to satisfy our belief in God without much concern for God, it is also possible to seek it passionately precisely because we disbelieve in God. Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: In our thirst for knowledge, “intent is prior to content.”(2) Our finitude guarantees that there will always be gaps in our knowledge which only omniscience can fill, but God has put enough content in the world to satisfy any honest intent to find God.
Is it pointless then to pant for knowledge? Far be it from me to suggest such a thing! This very piece of writing is an attempt to convey knowledge! And, besides, “It is God’s privilege to conceal things and the king’s privilege to discover them” (Proverbs 25:2, NLT). Whenever I am tempted to disparage the passion for painstaking attention to the seemingly minutiae, I am reminded of the faithful souls who have labored for years to sift through ancient manuscripts and translate them into a language that I can read. We are all beneficiaries of the dedication of others in almost all areas of our lives. Worshiping at the altar of ignorance is no more pious than worshipping at the altar of mental abundance. But those whose pursuit of truth is infused with the purity of spirit discover that, all along, the Father has been seeking such to worship Him.(3)
J.M. Njoroge is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 71.
(2) Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1996), 98.
(3) See John 4:23.
Ravi Zacharias Ministry – To the End
Professor and theologian James Loder was on vacation with his family when they noticed a motorist off to the side of the road waving for help. In his book The Transforming Moment, he describes kneeling at the front fender of this broken-down car, his head bent to examine the flat tire, when he was startled by the abrupt sound of screeching brakes. A motorist who had fallen asleep at the wheel was jarred awake seconds before his vehicle crashed into the disabled car alongside the road—and the man who knelt beside it. Loder was immediately pinned between two vehicles. The car he kneeled to repair was now on his chest, his own vehicle underneath him.
Years after both the incident and the rehabilitation it required, Loder was compelled to describe the impact of that moment so marked by pain and tragedy, which was unexpectedly, something much more. Loder describes the incident: “At the hospital, it was not the medical staff, grateful as I was for them, but the crucifixes—in the lobby and in the patients’ rooms—that provided a total account of my condition. In that cruciform image of Christ, the combination of physical pain and the assurance of a life greater than death gave objective expression and meaning to the sense of promise and transcendence that lived within the midst of my suffering.”(1)
For the Christian, the crucifixion is the center of the whole, the event that gives voice to a broken, dark, and dying world, and the paradoxical suggestion of life somehow within it. The Christian marks steeples and graves in memory of the crucifixion. The death of Christ is the occasion that makes way for the last to be first, the guilty to be pardoned, the creature united again to its creator. The cross of Christ is the mysterious sign that stands in the center of the history of the world and changes everything. “I have been crucified with Christ,” said one of his transformed followers. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”
The suffering and death of Christ is indeed an image that gives expression to inexplicable tragedy, unnecessary suffering, and perplexing darkness. But the cross is also the event that jarringly marks that suffering, death, tragedy, and sorrow as qualities to which the vicariously human Son of God willingly submitted himself. It is thus that the broken and bleeding Loder could sense his condition understood in the image of a broken and bleeding Christ. “For surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases.” In the cruciform image of Christ on the cross, our own encounters of tragedy are not only affirmed, but held at God’s own volition. From the glory of heaven, Christ has come into the dark world where we stand.
It might be common to think of Christ’s death as a gift of forgiveness and assurance, a radical attempt of God to reach the world in person, a comforting depiction of the depth of divine mercy and hope. The cross is all these things for the Christian indeed, and on most days this vision is enough to quiet restless thoughts and ease unanswered questions. But like life itself, which can lay us low with tragedy, seize our hope and leave despair in its wake, the cross is also more. And Christ speaks into this darkness as only one who is acquainted with it can.
In his essay “Tragedy and Christian Faith,” Hans Urs von Balthasar describes Christ as answering the despair of humanity not by dissolving or disregarding it, “but by bearing that affirmation of the human condition as it is, through still deeper darknesses in finem, ‘to the end’ as love…”(2) That is to say, Christ’s is a love that bears our brokenness as his own, moving though still deeper darknesses, and bearing it to the end. At the center of the Christian faith is one who is not alien to tragedy, a savior not complacent in the face of suffering. Christ is neither blind to the pains of the world nor passive aggressive in the face of despair. On the contrary, the cross is a portrayal of passion, not passivity. Christ willingly carried defeat, thirst, and emptiness through the end of the darkness to the ends of himself and the ends of the world. For those who labor in circumstances that attest to the human condition of brokenness, this divine act makes sense of the struggle, brings meaning to our suffering, and makes further accessible the peace of the crucified one Paul described: “[T]hrough him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things by making peace through the blood of his cross.”
Christ does not refuse our sense of tragedy or awareness of pain. He bears it in love, affirming our condition, carrying our sorrows to the end, all the way to the heart of God.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard Publishing, 1989), 2.
(2) The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, Eds. Edward T. Oakes, David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 217.
DAILY DEVOTIONS, NEWS AND INFORMATION 