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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Faith and Mystery

May 14, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Long before Horatio Caine or Gil Grissom made crime scene investigating a primetime enterprise, the Bloodhound Gang was “there on the double” “wherever there’s trouble,” a doughty group of junior detectives who used science to solve crimes. Written by Newbery Medal-winning children’s author Sid Fleischman, the Bloodhound Gang was a beloved segment on the PBS television program 3-2-1 Contact, and my first encounter with the almost unbearable suspension, “To be continued.” Thankfully, with the help of their knowledge of science, no mystery remained unsolved for long.

What I did not realize at the time, or through years of absorbing Unsolved Mysteries, CSI, and my own scientific pursuits, was the hold that simple word “solve” would have on my understanding of mystery. For the Bloodhound Gang, as much as for the philosophers of science who have given rise to the notion, science is the invasion and defeat of mystery. That is to say, for many scientists (though certainly not for all historically), mysteries are there to be solved and put finally beyond us.

One can see how such a notion fuels the perception that science and faith are at odds with one another; science being the conquest of mystery and faith the act of making room for it. For Steven Pinker, Harvard Professor and cognitive scientist, certain aspects of religious belief can be thought of as “desperate measure[s] that people resort to when the stakes are high and they’ve exhausted the usual techniques for the causation of success.”(1) In other words, religion, like the story of the stork for parents not ready for their kids to know where babies come from, is simply a desperate attempt to explain away mystery, even if only by making space for it. And faith is thus seen as the grossly inferior CSI agent.

But what if mystery is less like a case for the Bloodhound Gang and more like the molecule of DNA they use to solve the crime? In so much of the culture in which we operate today, mystery is thought of in reductionistic terms. It is a momentary fascination that needs some higher reasoning, future information, or an hour of crime scene investigating to solve and explain. Everything we do technologically, medically, and scientifically is an attempt to put an end to mystery—to explain everything. But is that remotely possible? And would a reasonable explanation always dispel the mystery in the first place? As Thomas Huxley once put it, “[H]ow is it that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue?”(2) Is mystery always something to be solved?

In fact, the Greek word ‘mysterion,’ from which we get the word “mystery” does not necessarily mean something that is concealed (and hence, in need of our solution). It can also mean something that is revealed—as in a secret. In other words, mystery is not a problem in need of resolution, a concealed issue in need of an explanation. But mystery in this sense is something shown or given, albeit in a surprising, obscure way. It is in this sense of the word that early church father Tertullian spoke of the mystery of faith and ceremonial acts that join the believer to Christ—namely, our baptisms into his life, death, and resurrection, our celebration and consumption of his body and blood. It is a mystery, a gift, a fuller life revealed. Faith is not a theological solution to mystery in the CSI sense of the word; it is the celebration of this mystery—indeed, The mystery.

And at this, it is a mystery all the more captivating than those that can be solved in an hour or in a microscope. For it is a mystery that God has revealed to minds which don’t fully understand or yet fully see, a mystery worthy of a whole lifetime. It is mystery reminiscent of the words of Simone Weil: “God wears Himself out through the infinite thickness of time and space in order to reach the soul and to captivate it…it has in its turn, but gropingly, to cross the infinite thickness of time and space in search of Him whom it loves. It is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes the same journey that God made towards it. And that is the cross.”(3)

Every Sunday before holding the bread by which we remember all that has been revealed in Christ, all that has been given in the cross, whether seen in part or partly understood, Christians profess in unison the mystery of faith. It is a mystery that does not need my solution, a mystery that continues to surprise, to nourish, and to reveal itself in life and in death: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

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

(1) Steven Pinker, “The Evolutionary Psychology of Religion,” presented at the annual meeting of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Madison, Wisconsin, October 29, 2004.

(2) T.H. Huxley & W.J. Youmans, The Elements of Physiology and Hygiene: A Text-book for Educational Institutions (New York: Appleton & Co., 1868), 178.

(3) Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 140-141.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Art of Being Misunderstood

May 13, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Having a nearly 100 pound German shepherd dog creates both opportunities and challenges. Like most German shepherds, my dog has the intense gaze and keen alertness typical of the breed. He does not have an ‘inside bark’ but rather exerts the full capacity of his lungs whenever a visitor or stranger comes to the door. For the person on the other side, venturing into the house is filled with fear. For all they know, a barking-mad, wild beast of a dog awaits them! I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the wide-berth I am given or the anxious looks I receive as I traverse the sidewalks of my neighborhood with my dog. He looks and sounds absolutely ferocious.

Given this description, it might be hard to believe that I have ample opportunities to showcase my dog’s gentle, calm, and loving demeanor despite his apparent ferocity. Kaiser is quick to roll over on his side when he meets another dog. His ears flatten with joy and his tail wags a mile a minute as he greets children and adults alike. For those who give him the opportunity, he proves himself time and time again to be an affectionate, docile canine.

My dog Kaiser is often misunderstood. His size, the reputation of the breed, and past memories of fearful encounters with large dogs will forever preclude a wonderful encounter. While I know this intellectually, I cannot help but take it personally every time I see individuals cross over to the other side of the street. No matter how much convincing I do, or how well-behaved my dog, there will always be those who simply don’t believe me when I tell them how friendly he is and how much he loves to meet other dogs and people. I reluctantly conclude that there will always be some people who misunderstand my dog and his good intentions.

This is a trivial example of being misunderstood—which is a painful fact of life. Being misunderstood is never pleasant or easy, and can often feel like a personal rejection. Being misunderstood can also stir up feelings of self-righteous anger. How could this person believe that about me? Don’t they know me better? Why wouldn’t she give me the benefit of the doubt? The desire to justify oneself rises up like a wave. I am right, I am smart, my point is valid….

As I think about my own reaction to being misunderstood, I recognize how often it is rooted in pride. Like the Hollywood image-makers who craft perfect personas, I desire to be viewed in the best possible light—always. My fragile ego cannot hold up when I am not seen as ‘perfect’ by others. In this way, misunderstanding offers me the gift of being able to see the true nature of my shabbily built self-image; for any misunderstanding of my super-human status demolishes its self-righteous construction.

As a Christian, when I read the gospels I find that Jesus mastered the art of being misunderstood. He often asked questions rather than giving answers. Or he answered those who questioned him with parables or enigmatic exhortations that left his followers (and those on the outside) without even the smallest shred of understanding. Consider his remarks in the gospel of John as an example:

I am the living bread which comes down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread he shall live forever; and the bread also which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh. The Jews therefore began to argue with one another saying, ‘how can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ Truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life in yourselves.(1)

The gospel goes on to tell the reader that as a result of Jesus saying these things many of his followers withdrew and were not walking with him any longer. But Jesus doesn’t go on the offensive and try to explain what he was saying. He leaves the very hard things he has just said to stand. Mysteriously, he allows himself to be misunderstood. He leaves room for those who heard these strange sayings to wonder; he leaves room for wrestling, and even for many to walk away.

While there are many facets of Jesus’s art, his willingness to be misunderstood is a facet I cannot ignore. His conversations, his questions, his hard sayings all create an often uneasy space for those who want to justify themselves. He does not have the need to be understood, or to maintain a perfect persona. His was not a presence that clamored for attention nor did he strive to protect his image.

While there are many things I do to create misunderstanding that must be corrected and made right, there will always be times when what I say or do—even with the best of intentions—will be misunderstood. In these times, I have the opportunity to allow room for misunderstanding, or I can give way to my desire for self-protection, or worse, self-promotion. In remaining in that uneasy space, a certain kind of art can be created. It is the art of practicing a necessary discipline—like Jesus—to “have no stately form or majesty,” nor craft an appearance to which “anyone would be attracted.” Instead, as followers of the one who was despised and forsaken we too can practice the art of being misunderstood.

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

(1) See John 6:48-66.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Land of Likeness

May 12, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

There are some questions we ask over and over again even though we don’t really believe the answers. ”What do you want to be when you grow up” is one such question. My younger sister’s answers once ranged from “a chicken” to “a ballerina” to “an explorer in Africa” depending on her mood. Ironically, as one gets closer to initiating that choice with a first job, the question can seem more than a little misleading. There was a time when choosing an answer for the smiling questioner seemed much like choosing a point on a map with endless possibilities. And logically, it followed that the shortest distance between this point and our current locale was, as we learned in high school geometry, a straight line. Somewhere between geometry and job interviews, however, most of us discover that the choice is neither an end point nor the distance as direct as the crow flies. Winding roads and unlikely encounters later, we find ourselves with roles we might never have been able to articulate in the first place.

In the world of spiritual expression and character, similar assumptions are often made. We look at people like Gandhi or mother Theresa, Saint Augustine or Julian of Norwich, Oscar Romero or Martin Luther King—people who are remembered for their spirituality, uncompromising characters, or brave and bold faith in times of need—and we think of their faith as points on a map, distances that can be reached with certain steps—or conversely, locales not reached because the distance is just too far. Probably many of us imagine these steps as nearly impossible, far too lofty as goals for our own lives. But we see their spirituality nonetheless as a choice and a destination: missionary, martyr, saint, apostle. We see in their faith a location that is reached with standard steps and directions, a straight path to a determined place we may never reach.

There is a sense that this is true, that the greatest saints who lived the most beautiful lives for God indeed sought that faithfulness and followed a particular way to their rich spirituality. For the Christian, the one we follow is unapologetic about that particular way. ”I am the way,” he said causing both amazement and fury. His most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount, is full of direct and bold expressions of what following him would look like. He was entirely unambiguous about the qualities of a disciple that make him or her blessed: ”Blessed are the poor in spirit…Blessed are those who mourn… Blessed are the meek… Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness… Blessed are the merciful… Blessed are the pure in heart… Blessed are the peacemakers… Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake” (Matthew 5:3-10). The most notable Christians in history indeed share many of these qualities.

But there is something quite misguided about seeing these spiritual qualities as particular destinations with straight roads between you and an estimated time of arrival. In our world of instant access, easy connections, and ever present ten-steps-to-a-better-you, the danger is to think of spirituality as we might a career choice with childish eyes, to think of it as a destination in the first place, and at that, a destination with standard directions and a set path. What if, on the contrary, spirituality is less a destination to pursue than a life lived, a way embodied, a person joined? What if it is an awareness of the creator so deeply within us, a union with the one so vicariously human, that it actually puts flesh on what it means to be human? Thus, Jesus concludes his list of beatitudes with, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” (5:11). For the vicarious connection between the shape of our lives and his own is unmistakable.

For the Christian, sainthood is not a set destination to work toward, but a deepening of our own life with Christ as we become more like the one to which we are united. To be spiritual, then, is likely not to become “humble” or “joyful” or “pure in heart,” but to become like Christ, and subsequently, to become more like ourselves. United with him, we are creatures who are continually discovering the likeness of God in our lives, discovering ourselves as we once were. This is not to say we are never tempted to wander in what Saint Augustine and Saint Bernard called the “the Land of Unlikeness”—to wander away from the likeness of God within us and deeper into the places of unlikeness.(1) But this is no more binding than a child’s decision to be a astronaut even after he discovers a disdain for math. To make room in our lives for God is always an option at any stage in life, one that just might open us up to new depths of identity and personhood—both Christ’s and our own.

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

(1) As cited in Jon Sweeney, The Lure of Saints (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2006), 203.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Faces in the Light

May 9, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Master photographer Edward Steichen once remarked that the mission of photography is to explain human to human and each to him or herself—a mission he found at once both complicated and naïve, but worth fumbling toward. “Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper,” notes Steichen. “The photographer begins with the finished product.” It is a thought befitting of a scene from 2001, when the who’s who of the country’s finest photographers volunteered their time for such a mission. What they discovered is that when the “finished products” are the faces of children in foster care systems across the country, photography can offer the chance of new life.

Diane Granito is the founder of the Heart Gallery, a unique program that uses photography to help find homes for older foster children, sibling groups, and other children who are traditionally difficult to place with families.(1) The program started in New Mexico in 2001 at the suggestion of a local photographer. Space was then donated by a prominent gallery in the city, where more than 1,000 people came opening night. The photos on exhibit were the end result of the photographers’ attempts to coax out the unique personalities in hundreds of children—a great contrast to the typical photos attached to a child’s file. “They look like mug shots,” said one of the photographers of the typical case photos. “This is an opportunity to just portray them as kids in their environments,” said another involved. “We’re treating this as a living, breathing project.”

Since its inception, the Santa Fe project has inspired 120 more Heart Galleries across the United States. In some places, the adoption rate after an exhibit is more than double the nationwide rate of adoption from foster care. Such photography earns a description worthy of its roots: the word in Greek means “to write in light.”

Those who work to find foster children adoptive families are used to rubbing up against the public perception that most foster children have serious emotional and behavioral problems. Sometimes, though not always, it is an accurate perception. And a picture offered in a different light does not change the child it portrays. But an image of a troubled child at play does offer the accurate light of hope.

We all have many faces that could be portrayed to the world. If the pictures that represented us to the world were pictures that showed our worst sides, I wonder how different the circles of people around us would be. There are definitely certain faces I would prefer not to have captured in a photograph and placed in my file. While those close to me have by now seen me in many kinds of light, it is frightening to imagine my adoption being contingent on any one of them. And yet, for the Christian, this is precisely the story we tell. Our adoption as God’s own was completed as we stood in the worst of all possible lights. “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). That is to say, as Christ died for the sins of the world, he held dear even the pictures of us at our worst.

While imprisoned for his attempts to stand again Adolf Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer struggled with the many reflections of his own life. As a seminary instructor he was considered a saint and a giant. In America they made him feel like an escapist. In prison they made him feel like a criminal. There were days when he saw himself as all three and all the stages in between. It was in such a convolution of images that he asked:

“Who am I?

This or the other?

Am I one person today, and tomorrow another?

Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,

And before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?

Or is something within me still like a beaten army,

Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me,

these lonely questions of mine.

Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine.”(2)

In the Christian story, our adoption by God is our identity. It is the picture we hold as children until the day when there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, and God will wipe every tear from our eyes. And neither death nor life, nor anything else in all creation, can separate us from this love of God that is in Christ.

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

(1) See http://www.heartgalleryofamerica.org/.

(2) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Touchstone, 2001), 348.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Why Is God Not Obvious?

May 8, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Why is it that God does not seem to approach in a much more obvious way? One answer has been that God’s existence is not a matter of reality and facts. Isn’t it more of a faith position, anyway? Isn’t it more about a leap in the dark than an embrace of evidence?

I would agree that God isn’t “forcefully obvious,” but I don’t think that this confines God to being a “take-it-or-leave-it” matter of faith. I think it makes more sense to see God as clearly visible, whilst not being forcefully obvious.

Did you know that the Bible actually recognizes the validity of the question we are asking? First, we see passages that affirm the human perception that God seems hidden. In Job 23:8-9 we read, “But if I go to the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.”

Interestingly, there are also many examples of God appearing as if veiled in darkness, whilst still simultaneously offering his presence.(1) For instance we read that, “The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.” Jesus, too, invites people to trust in him and then leaves and hides himself. In John we find the story of a paralytic man who is healed, but then Jesus slips away into the crowd. Luke records that as news about Jesus spread, “he often withdrew to lonely places.” Later, Jesus tells the disciples that, “Before long, the world will not see me any more, but you will see me.” Interestingly in many of these cases, God provides a clear sense of presence, while at the same time veiling the fullness of that presence.

So perhaps an unavoidable part of the Bible’s answer to why God seems hidden is because it’s true. But why? And what about those times when we need a present God most, when God could offer us real hope in times of suffering?

Well, when Jesus resisted the crowd, he concealed his identity until exactly the right moment in time to explicitly disclose it. This was a wise decision as the consequences of more explicit or obvious disclosure led fairly quickly to a successful campaign to have him executed. Could it be that God isn’t unavoidably obvious, but clear in a more qualified sense? Crucially, there is also no reason why something of this nature might not require some learning to begin to perceive or see on our part.

For example, imagine that I said that it is obvious, but not forcefully so, that you will need your passport to fly internationally. Now, notice carefully that you have to learn this bit of information. It is certainly not like a forcefully obvious brick wall that you cannot avoid. But it would still perhaps be a case of a failure to grasp the obvious if you arrived at the airport with your bags packed but without your passport. It’s this second sense (of non-forceful obviousness or avoidable clarity) that the case for God can be confidently approached.

But might this idea of God hiding merely provide a clever way for Christians to cling onto God in a scientific and evidence demanding age? This has been argued. Yet Christians do not claim that God doesn’t show himself, but rather that God chooses the means of the showing. And hiddenness may well be necessary to bring focus to the way God declares his existence through Jesus Christ. In fact, divine hiding creates the possibility of a more obvious disclosure or uncovering.

Atheist Bertrand Russell famously quipped that if he were faced with God when he died, he would demand an explanation for why God made the evidence of his existence so insufficient. We might be tempted to think he was being entirely reasonable. But perhaps the evidence we demand for God is directly related to who we think God is and what we think God’s purposes are. Hiddenness would make no sense if God’s aim was simply to relate to us as an object of knowledge that offered no real relational connection or friendship. If this was the divine purpose—that we would simply acknowledge God’s existence—then I am sympathetic to Russell’s demand for more evidence.

But let us suppose that God was unwilling to make an approach to human life merely through the intellect. Instead, let us imagine that God is seeking a relationship that is based upon a deeper and more profound personal insight or perception. Have you ever asked what kind of a relationship God might want with you?

Moreover, God has indeed been revealed plainly in the reality of a redemptive plan and action. The gospel is described as a mystery now made known. Many Christians can recall moments, or even seasons spanning years, where God has been plainly and clearly at work and life has been saturated with the presence and grace of Father, Son, and Spirit. Faith isn’t a blind faith, but a response to the evidence. It is based on real events that can be investigated. A leap in the dark has never been the offer, as it is about stepping into the light.

So perhaps the evidence that we demand is a consequence of who we think God is and what we think God’s purposes are? If God loves you and wants you to freely choose to return that love then perhaps sending his Son for you is enough to catch your attention?

Tom Price is Academic Tutor at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Europe.

(1) Cf. Psalm 10:1; 22:1-2; 30:7; 44:23-24; 88:13-14; 89:46; Isaiah 45:15.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Other Side of Silence

May 7, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Middlemarch is the epic novel by Mary Anne Evans, better known by her male penname George Eliot. The work is considered one of the most significant novels of the Victorian period and a masterpiece of English fiction. Rather than following a grand hero, Eliot explores a number of themes in a series of interlocking narratives, telling the stories of ordinary characters intertwined in the intricate details of life and community. Eliot’s focus is the ordinary, and in fact her lament—in the form of 700 pages of detail—is that we not only so often fail to see it, but fail to see that there is really no such thing. There is neither ordinary human pain nor ordinary human living. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” she writes, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”(1)

The world Eliot saw around her is not unlike our own in its capacity to silence the dissonance of details, the frequency of pain, the roar of life in its most minute and yet extraordinary forms. We silence the wild roar of the ordinary and divert our attention to magnitudes more willing to fit into our control. The largest tasks and decisions are given more credence, the biggest lives and events of history most studied and admired, and the greatest powers and influences feared or revered most. And on the contrary, the ordinary acts we undermine, the most common and chronic angst we manage to mask, and the most simple and monotonous events we silence or stop seeing altogether. But have we judged correctly?

Artists often work at pulling back the curtain on these places we have wadded out of sight and sound, showing glimpses of life easily missed, pulling off the disguises that hide sad or mortal wounds, drawing our attention to all that is deemed mundane and obscure. Their subject is often the ordinary, but it is for the sake of the extraordinary, even the holy. Nowhere does Eliot articulate this more clearly than in her defense of the ordinary scenes depicted in early Dutch painting. “Do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish those old women scrapping carrots with their work-worn hands….It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and flame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes.”(2) For the artist, ordinary life, ordinary hardship, ordinary sorrow is precisely the scene of our need for God, and remarkably, the scene of God and miracle.

In this sense, the psalmist and prophets and ancient storytellers are indeed all struggling artists, closing the infinite distance between the grandeur of God and an ordinary humanity. What are human beings that You are mindful of them? Mortals that You care for them?

The parables Jesus told are also richly artistic, theological pauses upon the ordinary. Presented to people who often find themselves beyond the need for stories, whether puffed up with wealth and self-importance, or engorged with religion and knowledge, his stories stop us. He is acutely aware that the religious and the non-religious, the self-assured and the easily distracted often dance around idols of magnitude and abstraction, diverting eyes from the ordinary. And yet his very life proclaims the magnitude of the overlooked. The ordinary is precisely the place that God chose to visit—and not as a man of magnitude.

Whatever one’s broader philosophy, attention to the ordinary is worth considering. It is far too easy to miss the world as it really is, to hold a philosophy in hand and mind that cannot uphold the weight of ordinary life. While Jesus’s own disciples bickered over the most significant seats in the kingdom, they were put off by a unwanted woman at a well, they overlooked a sick woman reaching out for the fringe of Christ’s robe, and they tried to silence a suffering man making noise in an attempt to get Jesus’s attention—all ordinary scenes which became the very place of miracle. Even in a religion where the last are proclaimed first, where the servant, the suffering, and the crucified are lifted highest, the story of the widow’s coin is still easily forgotten, the obscure faces Jesus asked the world to remember easily overlooked. But the call to remember the great acts of God in history is equally a call to the many acts of life we mistakenly at times see as less great. For the ordinary is filled with a God who chooses to visit.

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

(1) George Eliot, Middlemarch, (London: Penguin, 1994), 194.

(2) George Eliot, Adam Bede (London, Penguin, 1980), 224.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Winsome Builders

May 6, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Many years ago, my late husband and I had the opportunity to travel to Greece and Turkey. While there, we marveled at the ancient ruins of the Greek temples and wondered at the beautiful mosaics of Christ covering the ceilings of every church—from a tiny chapel in the countryside to the great cathedral of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. During our tour, we often saw the ruins of the temples standing side by side with ancient Christian churches. Other times, our guide informed us that the Christian church was built upon the now decimated ruins of an ancient temple.

I remember feeling a bit disturbed over the loss of these ancient ruins which would never be seen again, now built over by largely abandoned Christian chapels. And yet I understood the sweeping movement of Christianity—overturning the pagan environment of Greece and Rome and building churches and chapels as signposts of that victory.

This scene replicated across the landscapes of Greece and Turkey served metaphorically as a picture of the uneasy tension between Christianity and its surrounding culture. On the one hand, church and pagan temple stood side by side, a living picture of the parable Jesus once told about allowing wheat and tares to grow up together until the judgment. On the other hand, churches built on the ruins of pagan temples presented the image of Christianity conquering the pagan religions of the day, standing in triumph and uprooting the tares in victory.

Christianity wrestles with this same tension today, vacillating between constructive engagement in culture on the one hand, and eschewing the culture on the other. The art world is often an arena for this battle. Should Christians engage in the arts? If so, how should we engage in the arts? Should we have Christian music, art, and literature? Or should we be Christians who make music, produce art, and write literature? In other words, do we build next to the pagan temple, or do we replace the pagan temple with a church?

While the answers to these questions are not easy, perhaps there are some insights from another picture of early Christian interaction using art from the prevailing culture. The catacombs under the streets of Rome are filled with art produced by the early Christians. Interestingly enough, however, the Christian scenes normally used non-Christian forms. Some of the portrayals of Jesus as the Good Shepherd are clearly modeled after pagan pictures in which Orpheus was the central figure.(1) It is not an accident that the early Christians chose to model their art after the pagan depictions of Orpheus, sometimes substituting a representation of Jesus for Orpheus. In Greek mythology, Orpheus was such a brilliant musician that “he moved everything animate and inanimate; his music enchanted the trees and rocks and tamed wild beasts, and even the rivers turned in their course to follow him.”(2) Clearly, the early Christians used this artistic rendering for apologetic reasons; like the myth of Orpheus, Jesus had a cataclysmic influence on all of creation.

In every generation, art has been used as a means to communicate the Christian faith, even as an uneasy tension exists with artistic engagement. Yet, without thoughtful engagement a vacuum is left, unfilled. Without a new Orpheus, all that is left to do is bemoan the binding of the arts to darker forces. And while the complaint rises, and can often be constructive, Christians are often blinded to the very ways in which they too are inextricably bound to culture.

C.S. Lewis once wrote about the value of Christian involvement in popular scholarship. When understood broadly, Lewis’s words are instructive for a truly Christian engagement in the arts. “I believe that any Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on any science may do much more by that than by any directly apologetic work….What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.”(3) Perhaps building such subtle cathedrals on the landscape of culture is indeed more winsome than making ruins.

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

(1) Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity: Beginnings to 1500, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1975), 251.

(2) Encarta, Orpheus.

(3) Cited in John Stackhouse, Humble Apologetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 215.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – More or Less Relgion?

May 5, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In a 2002 article in The Guardian, author Salman Rushdie, inspired by bouts of violence in his native India, articulated a now-common view on religion. The article was titled, “Religion, as ever, is the poison in India’s blood.” In it, Rushdie outlined the familiar stance of the vociferous new atheists, bidding the world to stop speaking of religion in the fashionable language of “respect” and skating around the obvious conclusions about both God and religion. He writes:

“What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion’s dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! […] India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.“(1)

Rushdie’s voice is merely one among many in the increasingly prevalent conversation about God, religion, and violence. Against Christianity, the critiques come quite specifically. Richard Dawkins describes the Christian story as vicious, sado-masochistic, and repellent, symptomatic of a violent God, a Bible full of violence, and followers willing to overlook that violence, or often worse, to embrace it. For Dawkins and his conspirators, God is the problem that initiates the problem of violence: ”The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, blood-thirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can be desensitized to their horror.”(2)

Unsatisfied by those who point to Jesus as fulfilling personally and particularly some of the more uncertain images of God, the new atheists see only continuity in the violence of Christian theology. In Dawkins’ words, “New Testament theology adds a new injustice, topped off by a new sadomasochism whose viciousness even the Old Testament barely succeeds. It is, when you think about it, remarkable that a religion should adopt an instrument of torture and execution as its sacred symbol… The theology and punishment-theory behind it is even worse.”(3)

The well-voiced objections to Christian violence are hardly unique to the new atheists, whose vitriolic rants are filled with inconsistencies of their own. For many, both in and outside the church, it is an issue deeply felt, a problem that needs a viable answer. Why is it that religion and violence often merge? And what is the solution? For the great majority of those who bravely vocalize such a question, the great “solution” of eradicating religion is simply unhelpful. And in fact some are suggesting the exact opposite, suggesting that the cure to religious violence does not rest in less religion or no religion (an argument that has been on the increase since the Enlightenment), but rather more religion.

In a carefully qualified sense, professor Miroslav Volf explains, “I don’t mean, of course, that the cure for violence lies in increased religious zeal… [rather] it lies in a stronger and more intelligent commitment to the faith as faith.” That is, commitment to the kind of faith that is itself good news, truth and beauty Incarnate, a story that reinterprets all others. He continues, “The more we reduce Christian faith to vague religiosity which serves primarily to energize, heal, and give meaning to the business of life whose content is shaped by factors other than faith (such as national or economic interests), the worse off we will be. Inversely, the more the Christian faith matters to its adherents as faith and the more they practice it as an ongoing tradition with strong ties to its origins and with clear cognitive and moral content, the better off we will be.”(4) In other words, Christ’s Incarnation properly understood as a peaceful invasion of a violent world by the God of peace hardly fosters violence!

On the contrary, his violent death at the hands of a life-taking world is entirely reversed at the hands of the life-giving Father and the resurrection of a murdered son. His proclamation of a different kingdom is embodied in a God who steps near enough to consume us, but offers instead a paradoxical alternative: ”Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him” (John 6:56). No, Christianity properly understood and entirely embodied cannot be used to incite violence. It instead takes the angry words of its staunchest critics and the vile abuse of misguided disciples, and, like its liberator, lives the radical alternative to the story they spout.

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

(1) Salman Rushdie, “Religion, as ever, is the poison in India’s blood,” The Guardian, March 9, 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/mar/09/society.salmanrushdie, accessed January 15, 2010.

(2) Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 51.

(3) Ibid., 285.

(4) Miroslav Volf, “Christianity and Violence,” Boardman Lectureship in Christian Ethics, March 6, 2002, http://repository.upenn.edu/boardman/2, accessed January 18, 2010.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The March of Easter

May 2, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

When I imagine the women who came to the tomb to see the body of Jesus the day after he was crucified, I understand their sickened panic. The body had been taken somewhere unbeknownst and unknown to them. It was out of their sight, out of their care. He was out of their sight—not an empty shell, not “just” a body, but the one they loved. Mary Magdalene was devastated. She ran to Peter in horror: “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”

There is something about the human spirit that inherently seems to understand the importance of caring for the dead, of moving them carefully from the place of death to a place of rest, finality, and farewell. What we have come to know commonly as the funeral is based on this fundamentally human behavior. It is understood that the dead cannot remain among the living, and yet their removal from society is never a task met with levity. Evidences of tender ceremony are noted in the oldest human burial sites ever found.(1) This movement of the dead from the place of the living to a place of parting is full of tremendous symbolic meaning.

For British statesman and avowed atheist Roy Hattersley, this meaning and symbolism has been a complicated part of his worldview. For years he has disapproved of the funeral service, finding it a paradoxical attempt to soften the blow of utter darkness, with clergy fulsome about the dead man’s virtues and discreet about his vices, and congregations gathered more as a matter of form than feeling. In the mind (or at the funeral) of one who remains stubbornly addicted to the unpleasant truth that life simply ends as haphazardly as it began, there is no room or reason for the promise of resurrection and the pomp of certain comfort.

And yet, Hattersley writes in The Guardian of an experience that almost converted him to the belief that funerals ought to be encouraged nonetheless. His conclusion was forged as he sang the hymns and studied the proclamations of a crowd that seemed sincere: “[T]he church is so much better at staging farewells than non-believers could ever be,” he writes. “‘Death where is thy sting, grave where is they victory?‘ are stupid questions. But even those of us who do not expect salvation find a note of triumph in the burial service. There could be a godless thanksgiving for and celebration of the life of [whomever]. The music might be much the same. But it would not have the uplifting effect without the magnificent, meaningless words.”(2)

Hattersley’s attempt to remain consistent from his views of life to his experience of death is admirable. For it is indeed peculiar that an uncompromising atheist can conclude there is something almost necessary in a distinctly Christian burial. If what makes for human existence is, in essence, the material, bodies without any facet of the sacred, then the act of moving a body to the place of farewell is far more a matter of mere disposal than hallowed journey. In other words, positions like Hattersley’s leave no room for a “decent send-off,” a beautiful, last farewell. And yet, he is far from alone in his need for it. As Thomas Long notes in his comprehensive study of funeral practice, “[D]eath and the sacred are inextricably entwined.”(3)

The Christian burial is moved by this understanding, taking its cue from no less than the death and resurrection of the incarnate Son. Human beings are seen neither as “just” bodies nor as souls in temporary shells, but as dust—as material—into which God has breathed life. We are embodied within a story that the Christian funeral tells again and again: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. Because Jesus traveled through death to God before us, Christians believe it possible to make the same journey. Because Christ has journeyed from birth to tomb to the Father, we take this journey again and again with those we love and let go. In this embodied gospel of death and resurrection, suffering and redemption, humanity’s instinctive need to accompany a body from here to there is strikingly met with the particulars of “here” and “there”—namely, life here among the Body of Christ to life resurrected in the presence of the Father. And so, we go the distance with the body, we accompany them to the grave, we weep at their tombs and we follow them with singing because it is a journey we do not want to miss.

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

(1) Thomas Long, Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 3.

(2) Roy Hattersley, “A Decent Send-off,” The Guardian, January 16, 2006, accessed March 20, 2010.

(3) Thomas Long, Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 4.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Wish Fulfillment

May 1, 2014 broboinhawaii 1 Comment

You may have heard it said that religion only survives because people desperately want it to be true, because they can’t come to terms with their own mortality (or that of loved ones). It was Sigmund Freud who helped to popularize this idea, as he suggested that the concept of a loving Creator was simply a psychological projection of a person’s innermost wishes:

“We tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there was a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is the very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”(1)

This kind of argument would seem to ring true, at least on a superficial level. You would expect it to be more likely for people to believe in something that they like than something that they don’t, and it is clear that Christianity is powerfully compelling. In fact, the argument itself is an admission of this, as it acknowledges the innate desire in us all that is fulfilled by God. Who wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with a loving deity who not only wants the best for those he has created, but who is offering eternity in a place that is more wonderful than can be imagined? Yet the Bible also contains some very hard-hitting passages, which would seem to contradict the notion that religious belief is simply a projection of our wishes. C. S. Lewis pointed out that scripture also teaches that believers should fear the Lord, but you would not then suggest that this meant faith was some kind of “fear fulfillment”!(2)

The problem with the argument is that it cuts both ways. If you suggest that people only believe because they want it to be true, then the counter-claim is that atheists are only non-believers because they don’t want it to be true. Some people have expressly stated this, such as Aldous Huxley who wrote:

“For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust.”(3)

As Czeslaw Milosz points out, this is a negative wish-fulfillment, because “A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.”(4)

The problem with this type of argument is that, as Manfred Lutz points out, Freud can provide an equally compelling reason for why someone might believe as to why they might disbelieve. Yet, crucially, when it comes to discerning the all-important matter of which position is actually true, he cannot help us.(5) As this suggests, just because you want to believe in something does not mean that it is true.

What is interesting about the Christian faith is that the intellectual arguments for God are backed up with a reality that can be personally experienced. There are countless examples of people who discover a life-changing faith even though they were once hostile to the idea of it. This may sound too good to be true, but this is something that is within everyone’s reach. The final word should perhaps go to the Victorian pastor William Haslam, whose conversion experience in 1851 has to rank as one of the best—not to mention funniest—examples of someone encountering God when they least expected it. The transformation was as dramatic as it was real, and it resulted in an outpouring of joy that he had never felt before:

“So I went up into the pulpit and gave out my text. I took it from the gospel of the day—’What think ye of Christ?’ As I went on to explain the passage, I saw that the Pharisees and scribes did not know that Christ was the Son of God, or that He was come to save them. They were looking for a king, the son of David, to reign over them as they were. Something was telling me, all the time, ‘You are no better than the Pharisees yourself—you do not believe that He is the Son of God, and that He is come to save you, any more than they did.’ I do not remember all I said, but I felt a wonderful light and joy coming into my soul, and I was beginning to see what the Pharisees did not. Whether it was something in my words, or my manner, or my look, I know not; but all of a sudden a local preacher, who happened to be in the congregation, stood up, and putting up his arms, shouted in a Cornish manner, ‘The parson is converted! The parson is converted! Hallelujah!’ and in another moment his voice was lost in the shouts and praises of three or four hundred of the congregation. Instead of rebuking this extraordinary ‘brawling,’ as I should have done in a former time, I joined in the outburst of praise, and to make it more orderly, I gave out the Doxology—’Praise God, from whom all blessings flow’—and the people sang it with heart and voice, over and over again. My Churchmen were dismayed, and many of them fled precipitately from the place. Still the voice of praise went on, and was swelled by numbers of passers-by, who came into the church, greatly surprised to hear and see what was going on. When this subsided, I found at least twenty people crying for mercy, whose voices had not been heard in the excitement and noise of thanksgiving. They all professed to find peace and joy in believing. Amongst this number there were three from my own house; and we returned home praising God. The news spread in all directions that ‘the parson was converted,’ and that by his own sermon, in his own pulpit too…. So clear and vivid was the conviction through which I passed, and so distinct was the light into which the Lord had brought me, that I knew and was sure that He had ‘brought me up out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a Rock, and put a new song into my mouth.’ He had ‘quickened’ me, who was before ‘dead in trespasses and sins.’… At the end of this great and eventful day of my life—my spiritual birthday, on which I passed from death to life by being “born from above”—I could scarcely sleep for joy.(6)

Simon Wenham is research coordinator at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Oxford, England.

(1) S. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York, 1962), 21, in A. McGrath, Mere Apologetics (Grand Rapids, 2012), 167.

(2) C. S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays (New York, 2022), 19.

(3) R. S. Baker and J. Sexton (eds.), Aldous Huxley Complete Essays, iv (Lanham, 2001), 369.

(4) C. Milosz, “The Discrete Charm of Nihilism”, in J. C. Lennox, Gunning for God (Oxford, 2011), 47.

(5) M. Lutz, God: A Brief History of the Greater One (Munich, 2007), in Lennox, Gunning, 46.

(6) W. Haslam, From Death Unto Life: Twenty Years of Ministry (Teddington, 2006), 42.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Telling Stories

April 30, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is in a predicament most of us will never face. His uncle has killed his father and then married his mother to become the king. The main conflict of the play is found within Hamlet’s long monologues debating whether or not he should murder his uncle and avenge his father’s death. It’s not a life story most can fully identify with.

But for a group of prisoners at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center, Hamlet, both the man and the play, hit disruptively home. Over the course of six months, a prison performing arts program gave a handful of criminals, who are living out the consequences of their violent crimes, the chance to delve into a story about a man pondering a violent crime and its consequences. The result was a startling encounter for both the players, most of whom were new to Shakespeare, and the instructors, who long thought they knew every angle to Shakespeare’s tale, but came to see how much they had missed.

One man, in order to play the character Laertes, found himself reckoning with the temptation to manipulate as a means of getting what you want, only to realize a kind of cowardice in such actions. In a moment of clarity through the life of another, he admits, “I can identify with that [struggle] and I can play that role very well—because I’ve been playing that role my whole life….To put a gun in somebody’s face—that’s an unfair advantage. That’s a cowardly act. And that’s what criminals are; we’re cowards.” He then admits with striking transparency, “I am Laertes. I am.”(1)

I was at a writers’ conference once that reminded an audience of aspiring artists of faith that in moments of moral crisis we do not pause to ask what Jane Erye would do. And yet there are inarguably characters and stories that become of immense moral significance, pulling us into worlds that call for attention, compassion, and consideration. As evidenced at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center, literature affords the unique and disarming possibility of placing oneself in another’s shoes, showing us sides of an individual we might otherwise miss, and depths of ourselves we might otherwise fail to consider. It is far harder to murder someone whose perspectives we have considered as imaginatively as our own. It is difficult to persist in self-deception when we find ourselves so jarringly laid out on the page. Such characters offer vessels of possibility beyond what is familiar, normal, and accepted—and often beyond what is even seen.

It is not accidental that Jesus used story as a vehicle to speak the truth in a way that was both disarming and inescapable.

“Simon, I have something to say to you,” Jesus said to a Pharisee who had invited him to dinner.

“Teacher,” he replied; “Speak.”

“A certain creditor had two debtors,” Jesus said; “one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he cancelled the debts for both of them. Now which of them will love him more?”

Simon answered, “I suppose the one for whom he cancelled the greater debt.”

Jesus said to him, “You have judged rightly.” Then turning towards the woman Simon had just flippantly dismissed as sinful and offensive, he said to Simon: “Do you see this woman?”

Simon had obviously seen her long before Jesus paused to tell him a story. With disgust, he had watched her enter his house, kneel at the feet of his guest, and proceed to weep so much that she could actually bathe his feet with her tears. Simon looked on as she dried his feet with her hair, kissing his feet incessantly, and anointing them with ointment. Seeing all of this clearly, he then questioned the sight of his guest. “If this man were a prophet,” Simon said to himself, “he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him—that she is a sinner.”(2)

Like Hamlet to a hardened criminal, the simple story into which Simon willingly entered forced him to take another look at one he had hitherto willed not to see. We are not told what he saw the second time around, but his own words undoubtedly probed his hardened heart: The one who sees that she has had a great debt cancelled loves more. In a story of two debtors, Simon is invited to reconsider an easily-judged woman, his righteous self, and the one who forgives.

Jesus places us beside images of a kingdom that turns things around, stories that shock and offend us, metaphors that wake us to the presence of a surprising God, to the mindsets and pieties that block us from seeing this God. His own story—the incarnate Son of God crucified, buried, and resurrected—is itself the abundance of divine grace that beckons us to look, and look again.

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

(1) As heard on This American Life with Ira Glass, 218: Act V, October 12, 2007.

(2) See Luke 7:36-50.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Easter Skeptics

April 29, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

As it happens every Easter season, various scholars and skeptics weigh in on whether or not Jesus was actually raised from the dead. Bart Ehrman’s latest book, How Jesus Became God, is a case in point. Writing as a historian, he questions many of the gospel remembrances of the events surrounding the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. His conclusion is that the gospels are not reliable, historical witnesses. But is this really the case?

A careful reading of the four evangelists’ remembrances of the resurrection does indeed reveal many different emphases and details. The Gospel of Matthew, for example, tells us that a great earthquake occurred as an angel of the Lord descended and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it. The Gospel of Mark, on the other hand, tells us that a young man sitting at the right, wearing a white robe was inside the tomb to announce Jesus’s resurrection. The Gospel of Luke tells us that two men suddenly stood near the women in dazzling apparel and John’s Gospel reports the discovery of the linen wrappings abandoned in the empty tomb.(1)

There are many other differences in the retelling of the resurrection appearances of Jesus, and this should be expected from different testimony. No two people report exactly the same details about any event or happening! But there is one feature that is the same in all four gospel testimonies: the resurrection announcement is made first to the women who followed Jesus (Matthew 28:1; Mark 16:1; Luke 23:55-24:5; John 20:1). Many reasons have been offered as to why women serve as the immediate witnesses to the resurrection: the women stayed with him through the crucifixion, so he appeared first to those who stuck with him to the last; women traditionally carried out the burial rituals in first century Judaism, so they were witnesses by default. Others suggest that the first women witnesses represent Jesus’s elevation of the status for women of the first century and for women in general.

While all of these are plausible, historical reasons, there is another strategic, indeed, apologetic reason why the women were the first witnesses. In the first century, the testimony of women was not counted as credible. In both Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, and the Talmud a woman’s testimony is considered unreliable at best. “But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex…since it is probable that they may not speak truth, either out of hope of gain, or fear of punishment.”(2) The Talmud states that “any evidence which a woman [gives] is not valid (to offer)….This is equivalent to saying that one who is Rabbinically accounted a robber is qualified to give the same evidence as a woman.”(3) No man in the first century would give credence to a woman’s testimony.

Given that a woman’s testimony was not credible, why would the gospel writers report them as witnesses; indeed, the first witnesses for the resurrection? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to offer some credible, male testimonial?

Anglican priest and physicist John Polkinghorne answers this question with a resounding “No!” He writes: “Perhaps the strongest reason of taking the stories of the empty tomb absolutely seriously lies in the fact that it is women who play the leading role. It would have been very unlikely for anyone in the ancient world who was concocting a story to assign the principal part to women since, in those times, they were not considered capable of being reliable witnesses in a court of law. It is surely much more probable that they appear in the gospel accounts precisely because they actually fulfilled the role that the stories assign to them, and in so doing, they make a startling discovery.”(4) In this sense, the women offer very strong historical evidence for the testimony that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.

Of course, the biblical narrative confirms the unexpected choice for chief witnesses to God’s great action in history. God chooses those whom we least expect in ways that are profoundly remarkable: Deborah, the first woman judge over Israel; Gideon, the least and the youngest in his tribe and family chosen to defeat the Midianites; David, a simple shepherd boy to be the king of Israel; Rahab and Jael, non-Israelite woman who help defeat Israel’s enemies; and finally, tax-collectors, fishermen, and women—Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, Martha, and Salome as key witnesses to the ministry of Jesus. In the biblical narrative, God chooses those we might be tempted to overlook or ignore—those who were the last and the least in their society—to bear witness to the great work of God.

While historians like Bart Ehrman may fail to see the forest through the trees, the unexpected witnesses documented throughout the Bible offer a compelling vision. Something remarkable happened in the life of Jesus and women were the first witnesses. Their testimony offers an unexpected apologetic for every generation of seeker.

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

(1) cf. Matthew 28:2; Mark 14:5; Luke 24:4; John 20:5.

(2) Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 4.8.15.

(3) Talmud, Rosh Hashannah 1.8.

(4) John Polkinghorne, Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 86-87.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Into the Mystery

April 28, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“A comprehended God is no god,” a great thinker once said. His words come to mind on days when I feel stuck somewhere wearily between a cynical world and a combative church. I am thankful for the reminder that the message I proclaim is the mystery of Christ.

But this preacher’s words were spoken in a world altogether different from my own. In the second half of the fourth century, a man named John emerged as a clairvoyant voice in the fog of shifting power and thought in the Roman Empire. One hundred years after his death, he was given the name by which he is now known: John Chrysostom, which means, “the golden-mouthed.”

In the first three hundred years of the Christian movement, Christians were actively persecuted, wholly viewed as enemies of the state. By the middle of the third century, this outlook was beginning to undergo dramatic changes. In 313 A.D., Christianity was legalized under Constantine as one of several viable religions. Within the span of a hundred years, Christianity went from a hated religion to the official religion of the Roman Empire. Though the influence of pagan culture was yet widespread, Christianity rapidly gained influence. Gaining status as the official religion, the Church itself increasingly became viewed as having certain responsibilities in accommodating the needs of the state.

It was in such an atmosphere that John Chrysostom came into a position of ministry. John was originally trained for a career in law. The renowned orator Libanius foresaw a brilliant future in his pupil and was wholly disheartened when John saw fit to alter it. It is said that Libanius was once asked who he saw as his ideal successor. “John,” he replied, “but the Christians have laid claim on him.”(1) In fact, John would say it was Christ who had laid claim on him.

After six years of monastic withdrawal, John returned to Antioch and took to preaching. The golden-mouthed orator was enthusiastically received, and his distinction was soon celebrated throughout the Greek-speaking church. In fact, his popularity in Antioch had become so widespread that when the prestigious position of bishop opened in the capitol city of Constantinople, he was given an “invitation” to speak in a chapel outside the city. Upon arriving, he was forcefully ordered into a carriage bound for the capitol. John’s refusal of the “offer” was accepted only at the riot feared among the people of Antioch.

But John Chrysostom’s bold words and influential presence would leave him not only with the respect of many, but also with many influential enemies (including the Emperor’s wife, Eudoxia). Nonetheless, as bishop of Constantinople, John passionately sought to reform both the life of clergy and the lives of those in power, seeing a widespread need for a clear and unwavering hearing of the Gospel of Christ—not as unfeeling doctrine or perpetual naysaying, but as life-giving mystery. As one biographer contends, “[F]or John Chrysostom the pulpit was not simply a podium from which to deliver brilliant pieces of oratory. It was rather the verbal expression of his entire life, his battlefield against the powers of evil, an unavoidable calling that eventually led to exile and to death itself.”(2)

Under the front of false accusations, John Chrysostom’s enemies eventually had him banished from the city. Many of his supporters were persecuted and his closest friends were tortured. Over a period of time and events, they him moved from city to city, unable to banish him far enough away from influence. From exile he turned to writing and moved the world with his pen. Yet in time, he grew weak from the extensive journeys further into exile. Pleading with his guards to stop at a small church, Chrysostom preached a final, abbreviated sermon in the presence of a few monks before he died: “In all things, glory to God.”

The Christian life is meant to be one that mirrors the surprising gift of the Christ we follow. In his lifetime, John Chrysostom was the cause of many riots and the target of much affliction. He remains a pillar of faith, pointing to the truth and mystery of Christ who made him who he was. In many churches around the world on Easter Sunday, John Chrysostom’s Easter homily still resounds powerfully from the pulpit:

“Let no one grieve at his poverty,

for the universal kingdom has been revealed.

Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again;

for forgiveness has risen from the grave.

Let no one fear death,

for the Death of our Savior has set us free.

He has destroyed it by enduring it.”(3)

This is the mystery the Christian proclaims, the Savior any can mirror, because God has laid hold their soul.

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

(1) Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: Vol. 1 (HarperSansFranciso, 1984), 194.

(2) Ibid., 194.

(3) John Chrysostom’s Easter homily can be found at http://www.ocf.org/features/EasterSermon.html

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – GOD AS GARDENER

April 25, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? …

When the morning stars sang in chorus, and all the sons of

God shouted for joy?

These are questions asked of the ancient character Job, finally breaking God’s silence and speaking into Job’s pain. I can read them as a harsh sting, as a silencing gavel to Job’s objections, akin to the response of an exasperated parent putting an end to a child’s endless questions with the trump card of sovereignty: Because I’m the parent, that’s why.

When I first watched Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life, which sets its opening frame with these same lines of God to Job, the familiar sting of God’s words greeted me. In fact, it shaped my entire understanding of the film and suspicion regarding Malick’s intentions behind it. In his Oscar nominated film, Malick juxtaposes grand images of the creation of the world beside the small story of a grieving family from Texas through flashbacks of their life together, glimpses of both the gentle and violent moments. With sweeping creation scenes of a massive and intricate universe interposed between these scenes of a small Texas town—a father’s rage at dinner, a son’s discovery of shame, a mother’s small gifts of grace—there seemed a great disconnect to me, so large that I saw a God who had to be removed and far off. The triviality of much of their lives—the triviality of my life—beside a God responsible for far greater deeds seemed so obvious in light of the massive work of creation, and God’s silencing gavel of authority merely seemed to confirm this. In these images it seemed preposterous to think that a God who could create the world and everything magnificent within it would simultaneously be concerned with details so inconsequential as a family fight, a society’s changing priorities, a brother’s complicated grief. I suspected Malick’s God was saying the very thing I left the theater dreading. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? And who are you to question me at all?

It struck me as odd, then, when a friend of mine in the midst of grief herself had a completely different take on the film, and in fact left the theater encouraged. I was puzzled. I even went to see the film a second time, wondering if I missed something.

About a month later I was sitting with a professor who was talking about the creation of the world through the landscape of gardening. He was simply reading from the creation story, but as he read and commented on the story it was as if I was hearing it again for the first time. Genesis chapter 2, the account of creation that Christians and Jews hold as sacred text, says that God planted a garden in Eden to the east. Professor Wirzba then simply asked if we had ever heard a sermon about God, the gardener.

In fact, I have not. Nor have I ever considered what such an identity of God might mean to me or to the world around me. Yet here is one of the first passages in the Bible where we are introduced to who God is—and God is not a warrior or a judge or a sovereign, but first a gardener, a nurturer of all life, protector and planter, a designer, keeper, and pruner concerned with life’s flourishing. My own experiences with gardening remind me of an entirely different set of emotions and dispositions than I typically consider God having—delight in dirty hands and my own investment into the life I’ve planted, the thrill of fruit, the gentle attention to life, the compilation and cooperation with so many different factors—wind and rain, sun and predators. Significantly, the language of God as gardener at creation’s beginning can be traced throughout the Old Testament, in the psalms and in the prophets. And stirringly, the place of the tomb and resurrection is also described as a garden, and Jesus himself is mistaken as the gardener on that creative morning.

I share these two seemingly unconnected encounters to suggest that our imagining of God is often a complicated collection of stories, images, memories, and emotions, some of which may well be more accurate—or heightened in our minds for whatever reason—than others. I have always read God’s response to Job’s pain and questions with the sting of an angry or weary parent. But what if it is a cry of a gardener wanting Job to see a far more creative process of care? What if these words aren’t said angrily, but with gentle lament for the created world in the life of even one wilting soul? What if these words respond to both the vast pain of creation where it’s gone awry and the vast beauty of creation where it remains a wonder of good? Such a reading of the world’s creation and the gardener behind it stirs, in me at least, a response more akin to that of the man after God’s own heart:

When I survey this vast world, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars and all that you have established, what are mortals that you are mindful of them, human beings in whatever state of despair or joy or smallness that you still care for them?

Magnificent and intimate, powerful and gentle, God as gardener, whose deepest concern is life’s flourishing, makes no clearer a case for this than in Easter’s undoing of death and the vicarious humanity of the resurrected Son.

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Of Life and Death

April 24, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

There is something deeply unsettling about biological threats. The very idea of unseen, undetectable, but deadly toxins or viruses is a modern nightmare. The sad thing is that we have too many actual examples to fuel our fears. For multitudes in the industrial town of Bhopal, India, a normal working day turned into a catastrophe of biblical proportions as people were poisoned and killed by gas leaking from a local factory. Similarly catastrophic, the events surrounding the reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine combined the worst of leftover Soviet era paranoia and secrecy with a calamity of truly mind-boggling proportions. Hundreds of young men were ushered in to fight a fire, knowing nothing of the deadly radiation saturating the area, and as a result, thousands died (though exact numbers are not clear).

The weight and power of these deadly issues grips us. We feel and understand it acutely. There are things in our universe that are invisible, but real and sometimes deadly. And there are few guaranteed fail-safe mechanisms to protect us, in all circumstances, from harm. This feeling of vulnerability, this sense that there are things beyond our control, this notion of risk is something the modern mind finds repulsive. We want security, we demand certainty, and we feel entitled to assurance. But what is it, and where is it to be found?

Ernest Becker, several decades ago, wrote a very challenging book called The Denial of Death. He shows how society works to create hero-systems and elaborate ways of suppressing or avoiding the reality of death. As Woody Allen once said, “It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Yet here is where the Christian faith speaks clearly to the human dilemma. In his first letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul writes, “As in Adam, all die.” There are no exceptions, no escape routes, and no exits. It is as inclusive as it gets. Death is the great leveler. It respects everyone.

However, the apostle does not stop here; he goes on to say that “so in Christ will all be made alive.” This is the great distinction. Death occurs on a hundred percent scale. Our link to Adam is inviolable; we are all descendents, and inheritors of all that this implies. Like those infected with a deadly virus, the issue is not morality or effort. We need a solution, an antidote, an answer beyond us. What Christ embodies is an answer that is a transfer.

What do I mean? As long as we are located “in Adam,” which means our natural state and line of descent, we are subject to the outworking of the brokenness, damage, and suffering that is now a part of the human condition. The invitation to a deeper humanity is the move to be “in Christ.” What does this mean? Several things. It means trusting the risen, human, incarnate Son to provide what we cannot provide for ourselves—namely, healing and help. It means surrendering our failings and seeking his face. It means receiving a new kind of life within and without, by means of the gift of the Holy Spirit (cf. John 1:4).

These two great antagonists, life and death, are powerful indicators in the human story. As I watch aging, decaying people, I recognize something sad and good at the same time. Death is unyielding, but the grave is not the end. With Christ, we pass through death to the resurrection. Joni Erickson Tada brought this home to me some years ago as she spoke from her wheel chair, testifying of a love for Jesus and her great expectations as a believer, despite her very real suffering and restrictions as a paraplegic. She announced to us all that when she sees Jesus face to face, she will dance. I believe it. This is resurrection hope and a sure foundation. There are many unseen but real threats, but there are also unseen but real promises, and he who makes them says, “Behold, I make all things new.”

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – On the Third Day

April 23, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The earliest creeds of the Christian church confess that Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.” It is then confessed, “On the third day, he rose again.”(1) While modern presuppositions may tempt us to interpret the death and resurrection of Jesus as symbolic or spiritual in nature, there was nothing abstract about the events and details confessed by those who first beheld them. Jesus’s suffering was an actual, datable event in history, his crucifixion a sentence inflicted on an actual body; the proclamation of both was the remembrance of a cold reality, something akin to remembering the Holocaust or the Trail of Tears. Likewise, “the third day” was a tangible, historical occasion—albeit an occasion of unfathomable proportions.

Yet the resurrection of Jesus was not viewed as merely a static fact on this particular third day, a fixed event to remain in this history alone. “We believe that Jesus died and rose again” wrote the apostle Paul, “and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.”(2) For those who first beheld it, the resurrection was an event with inherent consequences for everything—for order and purpose, for what it means to be human itself. The earliest confessions of Christ’s death, burial, and third day rising from the dead are immediately followed by certain understood implications. As the Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s short story observes of this resurrected one, Jesus went and “thrown everything off balance.”

In the eyes of Jesus’s contemporaries, the Misfit is exactly right. This rabbi who was accused of blasphemy for calling himself equal to God was immediately here shown by God to be speaking the truth. The resurrection verified Jesus’s ties with the Father and his claims to divine authority; the Sonship of Christ was visibly and unmistakably confirmed by the Father. “For God raised him from the dead” writes Paul in 1 Thessalonians 1:10. This connection was clear.

And therefore, the resurrection was recognized as being far more than an event. For if “God raised Jesus from the dead,” as Paul, the unlikely Jewish believer, testified, then history is a display of God’s movement among us, a glimpse of the profound and ongoing invitation of God. The resurrection provides ground for seeing Christ’s life in light of each and every prior act and Word of God, vindicating and verifying the ministry and person of Jesus and his vicarious humanity among us. The prophets’ words, like the whole of Scripture, take on new dimensions in light of this truly human one before us: “On the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence” (Hosea 6:2). “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. 5But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole” (Isaiah 53:4-5). Through the life of the risen Son, the resurrection directs us to the movement of the Father in all of history to nothing less than the uniting purpose of a redemptive God today.

For those who first confessed it, the identity of the risen Jesus was a pronouncement of divine authority, wisdom, messiahship, and humanity—in the present. As one New Testament scholar observes, “[F]or Paul and probably for most early Christians, it was precisely the resurrection of Jesus which declared that he was lord, saviour, and judge, and that Caesar was not.”(3) The risen Jesus is a pronouncement that it is God’s very Son who has come among us, bringing with him a very human means to the Father here and now. In the death and resurrection of the Son, humanity itself becomes the stuff of which God’s final assurance of life is once and for all established. The resurrection pours instant light on what it means to be fully human and what it means to truly live in the vicarious humanity of the Incarnate Son.

Thus, Paul is abundantly clear on the far-reaching, present significance of the third day. “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.”(4) With implications for both today and tomorrow—for bodies collective and individual, for lives and for deaths—the resurrected Christ has indeed “thrown it all off balance” in a world that may well prefer to “leave the dead lie,” as another O’Connor character suggests. In this mysterious space, Christians continue to discover what it means to live further into both the unfathomable and the real, the truly human and the gloriously divine:

We believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord. He was crucified, died, and was buried. And on the third day he rose again.

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

(1) Excerpts from the Apostles’ Creed. Similar wording is found in both the Nicene Creed and the Creed of Athanasius.

(2) 1 Thessalonians 4:14.

(3) N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 371.

(4) 1 Corinthians 15:19-20.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Easter Present

April 22, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

An empty tomb, abandoned linen burial wrappings, and the reversal of all that was expected and anticipated—heralds the dawning of a new day. The resurrection of Jesus was the reason, the impetus for a new age—a new way of living and being in the world as residents and heralds of God’s new creation begun. Without this event, there would be no Christian faith and on its significance, the apostle Paul was clear: “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain” (1 Corinthians 15:13-14).

As Christians emerge from worship services around the country, and indeed, the world, looking back on the historical significance of the resurrection, and looking forward to the promise of life after death for our eternal future, I wonder if we miss the significance of Easter present—and the significance of the resurrection of Jesus in our lives here and now. If we only associate the resurrection with life after death, something not for this age but for a spiritual age to come, we fail to see the resurrection as anything more than a symbolic promise for another time. But if the only significance of Easter is a spiritual metaphor for new life and re-birth in the future, this message is just as easily told through colored eggs rabbits, and spring flowers.(1) Similarly, if we only celebrate the resurrection as something that happened long ago, we fail to do the creative work of drawing conclusions about what resurrection means for the present day.

God’s raising of Jesus is the sign in history that God had begun the work of new creation—namely, what began in the bodily resurrection of Jesus could now, and would now, continue in the present day. Indeed, Paul tells us in Romans 8 that “the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the children of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but because of him who subjected it in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body” (8:19-23). God’s new creation has begun with the bodily resurrection of Jesus. As Paul writes in Colossians, Jesus is the first born of all creation. Thus even now our work in this world is the work of resurrection as we walk with Jesus into the consummation of God’s future.

N.T. Wright, who has written extensively on the central importance of Christ’s bodily resurrection for Christians, says it this way: “The resurrection of Jesus means that the present time is shot through with great significance. What is done to the glory of God in the present is genuinely building for God’s future. Acts of justice and mercy, the creation of beauty and the celebration of truth, deeds of love and the creation of communities of kindness and forgiveness—these all matter, and they matter forever. Take away the resurrection, and these things are important for the present but irrelevant for the future and hence not all that important after all even now. Enfolded in this vocation to build now, with gold, silver, and precious stones, the things that will last into God’s new age, is the vocation to holiness: to the fully human life, reflecting the image of God, that is made possible by Jesus’ victory on the cross and that is energized by the Spirit of the risen Jesus present within communities and persons.”(2)

Indeed, in Paul’s great exposition of the resurrection of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15, he ends by telling the Corinthians, “Therefore, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord” (15:58). The point of the resurrection, and why it must remain central to our entire Christian experience, is that entropy and death do not have the final word—either for humans or for God’s creation. God’s last word is resurrection.

And God declares it today. This final word gives great hope for our present existence with all its pains and struggles. In light of resurrection, our work, our toil, even our blood, sweat, and tears are far from in vain. For our present work brings the work of God in the past forward, as we live out of the power of the resurrection. Indeed, the historic event of the resurrection coupled with the hope of future resurrection fill our “today” with the fullest of human life.

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

(1) Eggs were often used as a sign for the resurrection, the yolk representing new life, hidden within the shell. In addition, rabbits are always associated with fecundity. For additional information see http://www.history.com.

(2) N.T. Wright and Marcus Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 126-127.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Hallelujah!

April 21, 2014 broboinhawaii 1 Comment

On February 23, 1685, the man whose music would forever inspire the world was born in Halle, Germany—ironically, to parents who would have seen him become a lawyer. But George Frideric Handel would quickly grow to be a famed composer and beloved musician.

By the time he reached his twenties, Handel was the talk of all England and Italy. Queen Anne had him commissioned as official composer of music for state occasions. Seats at his performances were often fought over, and his fame was quickly spreading throughout the world.

But the glory soon passed. Audiences dropped off; his popularity was eclipsed by newer talent. Financial ruin, failed productions, and festering stress took their toll on the musical giant. Weary from the strain of overwork and disappointment, Handel suffered an attack of a paralytic disorder that left his right arm crippled. At 52, the once famed musician was now seen as invalid and obsolete. “Handel’s great days are over,” wrote Frederick the Great, “his inspiration is exhausted.”

But sounds of the harpsichord soon reported otherwise. Not long after Handel withdrew to recuperate, his fingers were moved to play again and the artist set out to compose. Nonetheless, his next two operas were altogether unsuccessful. A charity concert he had promised to conduct in Dublin had become his only prospect for work. Yet, given a manuscript that included the opening lines from Isaiah 40, “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,” Handel was stirred to write.

On August 22, 1741, at the lowest ebb of his career, George Handel enclosed himself in a room and set to composing Messiah. The entire oratorio was sketched and scored within three weeks. And on April 13th, 1742, the first audience in history resounded in applause to the stirring music of Messiah, conducted by Handel himself.

The composition would become his best known, and most beloved work, unsurpassed as sacred music. Taken from both Old and New Testament Scriptures, the work considers the entire human experience. Listeners are moved from creation and hope, to suffering and death, to redemption and resurrection. The work portrays the full range of human response to God, from holiness and hope to resignation and repentance, faith and triumph.

Ironically, the beloved Messiah enjoyed only moderate success while Handel lived, though he performed it annually each Easter for his favorite charity. In fact, he continued to conduct oratorio performances and revise his scores throughout the rest of his life, even in blindness the last 7 years. Of his lasting effect on humanity, a British historian once commented, “[Handel’s] oratorios thrive abundantly—for my part, they give me an idea of heaven, where everybody is to sing whether they have voices or not.”(1) Perhaps it is for this reason that audiences everywhere continue to stand in reverence to the last lines of his inspired work, words of inexhaustible inspiration, words befitting of a resurrected king—indeed, bone of our bone who has conquered no less than death:

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

For the Lord God, Omnipotent reigneth.

Hallelujah!

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

(1) Horace Walpole in The Essential Canon of Classical Music, Ed. David Dubal (New York: North Point Press, 2001), 35.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Not an Empty Day

April 18, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

There was a body on the cross. This was the shocking revelation of a 12 year-old seeing a crucifix for the first time. I was not used to seeing Jesus there—or any body for that matter. The many crosses in my world were empty. But here, visiting a friend’s church, in a denomination different from my own, was a scene I had never fully considered.

In my own Protestant circles I remember hearing the rationale. Holy Week did not end with Jesus on the cross. Good Friday is not the end of the story. Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried. And on the third day, he rose again. The story ends in the victory of Easter. The cross is empty because Christ is risen.

In fact, it is true, and as Paul notes, essential, that Christians worship a risen Christ. “[For] if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Even walking through the events of Holy Week—the emotion of the Last Supper, the anguish in Gethsemane, the denials of the disciples, the interrogation of Pilate, and the lonely way to Golgotha—we are well aware that though the cross is coming, so is the empty tomb. The dark story of Good Friday will indeed be answered by the light of Easter morning.

And yet, there is scarcely a theologian I can imagine who would set aside the fathomless mystery of the crucifixion in the interest of a doctrine that “over-shadows” it. The resurrection follows the crucifixion; it does not erase it. Though the cross indeed holds the sting of death, and Christ has truly borne our pain, the burden of humanity is that we will follow him. Even Christ, who retained the scars of his own crucifixion, told his followers that they, too, would drink the cup from which he drank. The Christian, who considers himself “crucified with Christ,” will surely “take up his cross” and follow him. The good news is that Christ goes with us, even as he went before us, fully tasting humanity in a body like yours and mine.

Thus, far from being an act that undermines the victory of the resurrection, the remembrance of Jesus’s hour of suffering boldly unites us with Christ himself. For it was on the cross that Christ most intimately bound himself to humanity. It was “for this hour” that Christ himself declared that he came. Humanity is, in turn, united to him in his suffering and near him in our own. Had there not been an actual body on the cross, such mysteries would not be substantive enough to reach us.

Author and undertaker Thomas Lynch describes a related problem as well-meaning onlookers at funerals attempt to console the grief-stricken. Lynch describes how often he hears someone tell the weeping mother or father of the child who died of leukemia or a car accident, “It’s okay, that’s not her, it’s just a shell.”(1) But the suggestion that a dead body is “just” anything, particularly in the early stages of grief, he finds more than problematic. What if, he imagines, we were to use a similar wording to describe our hope in resurrection—namely, that Christ raised “just” a body from the dead. Lynch continues, “What if, rather than crucifixion, he’d opted for suffering low self-esteem for the remission of sins? What if, rather than ‘just a shell,’ he’d raised his personality say, or The Idea of Himself? Do you think they’d have changed the calendar for that? […] Easter was a body and blood thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half measures.”(2)

On the cross, we find the one whose self-offering transformed all suffering and forever lifted the finality of death. On the fifty holy days of Easter that follow a dark and Good Friday, we find the very figure of God with us, a body who cried out in a loud voice in the midst of anguish, on the brink of death, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Precisely because the cross was not empty, the coming resurrection is indeed profoundly full.

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

(1) Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (New York: Penguin, 1997), 21.

(2) Ibid.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Commanding Mystery

April 17, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Today the Queen of England will host the Royal Maundy Service at Blackburn Cathedral. She will be carrying out the annual tradition held each year on the Thursday before Easter, handing out 88 coins, to mark her age, to men and women in recognition of their service to their community and church.

For those who first experienced the events that would become the stuff of tradition, the day was indeed eventful.The word Maundy, derived from the Latin word “mandatum,” meaning commandment, hastens the words of Jesus Christ at the Last Supper:

“And now I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”(1)

It was the day the disciples received the command to love and had their feet washed by Jesus. Though perhaps in hindsight, it was the day they first saw the connection between the Passover sacrifice, their beloved teacher, and the Lamb of God. It was a day their eyes were particularly roused by the uniqueness of the humanity before them, their minds filled with history, prophecy, tradition—and mystery.

As author Annie Dillard once observed, “We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery.”(2)

In fact, Jesus is a mystery that has unarguably shaped all of history. A 1936 Life magazine article on the life of Jesus noted, “Jesus gave history a new beginning. In every land he is at home: everywhere people think his face is like their best face—and like God’s face. His birthday is kept across the world. His death-day has set a gallows across every city skyline. Who is he?”(3) The mystery of Christ, his life, death, and influence is both unmatched and unsearchable. Even Napoleon, in a conversation while imprisoned at St. Helena, acknowledged in Jesus “a mystery which subsists”: “He exhibited in himself the perfect example of his precepts… Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and myself founded empires, but upon what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ alone founded his empire upon love and at this hour millions of men would die for him.”(4)

But who is this vicariously human, divine mystery behind these concentrated words? I can think of no better question to ask on Maundy Thursday. And yet, as Ravi Zacharias states, the precursor to the answer is the intent of the questioner. Magazine articles and television programming and new books by popular antagonists may reflect curiosity in the man the world remembers this week, but do we want to know who Jesus was, who he is, beyond the philosophical exercise?

Perhaps that first Maundy Thursday, just before the Passover Feast, just a day before Jesus was betrayed, is a revealing scene for the honest inquirer of his identity. The story is recounted in the Gospel of John.(5) Jesus looks at his disciples, his friends, those who would soon deny even knowing him, those who even so, he would love to the end. And standing with those men, knowing the weight of the darkness before him, he took a towel and a basin and began to wash their feet.

It was a lowly job—and an oft-recurring job due to sandals and dusty streets. It was a job for a servant. But here, the menial task was instead performed by the master, their teacher, the Messiah they hoped would save them with force but instead would die on a Roman cross.

The mysterious truth of Christ’s identity is this jarring humanity of an Incarnate Son who still does what is analogous to washing soiled feet: with our deepest sorrows, our sorriest actions, our small attempts at being human. Might we wake again and again to the enormity of Christ, human and divine—royalty stooping down to serve.

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

(1) John 13:34.

(2) Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998), 4.

(3) George Buttrick, “The Life of Jesus Christ,” Life, December 28, 1936, 49.

(4) Napoleon I, “Napoleon’s Argument for the Divinity of Christ,” Evans & Cogswell, No. 3, Charleston, 1861.

(5) John 13:1-17.

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Tag Archives: Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Faith and Mystery

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Art of Being Misunderstood

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Land of Likeness

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Faces in the Light

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Why Is God Not Obvious?

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Other Side of Silence

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Winsome Builders

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – More or Less Relgion?

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The March of Easter

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Wish Fulfillment

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Telling Stories

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Easter Skeptics

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Into the Mystery

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – GOD AS GARDENER

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Of Life and Death

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – On the Third Day

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Easter Present

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Hallelujah!

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Not an Empty Day

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Commanding Mystery

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