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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Quiet Act of Attention

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Wendell Berry has written a poem that haunts me frequently. As a creative writer, the act of paying attention is both a spiritual and professional discipline. But far too often my aspirations for paying quality attention to everything dissolves into something more like attention deficit disorder. As it turns out, it is quite possible to see and not really see, to hear and not really hear. And this is all the more ironic when my very attempts to capture what I am seeing and hearing are the thing that prevent me from truly being present. Berry’s poem is about a man on holiday, who, trying to seize the sights and sounds of his vacation by video camera, manages to miss the entire thing.

…he stood with his camera

preserving his vacation even as he was having it

so that after he had had it he would still

have it. It would be there. With a flick

of a switch, there it would be. But he

would not be in it. He would never be in it.(1)

I sometimes wonder if one of the most quoted sayings of Jesus is not often employed with a similar irony. “Consider the lilies,” Jesus said, “how they grow; they neither toil nor spin. Yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field…will he not much more clothe you? Therefore, do not worry” (Matthew 6:28-31). Typically, Jesus is quoted here as giving a helpful word against worry. And he is. But worry is not the only command he articulates here. Consider the lilies, he said. Many of us hear the first instruction peripherally, hurriedly, as mere set up for the final instruction of the saying. And in so doing, we miss something great, perhaps even something vital, both in the means and in the end. With our rationalistic sensibilities, we gloss over consideration of the lilies; ironically, in an attempt to consider the real work Jesus is describing.

But what if considering the lilies is the work, the antidote to anxious, preoccupied lives? What if attending to beauty, to the ephemeral, to the fleeting details of a distracted world is a command Jesus wants us to take seriously in and of itself?

It is with such a conviction that artist Makoto Fujimura not only paints, but elsewhere comments on Mary and her costly pouring of perfume on the feet of Jesus. The anger of Judas and the disgust of the others are all given in rational terms, the cacophony of their reactions (and likely ours) attempting to drown out her quiet act of attention:

That bottle would have cost over a year’s wages…

The poor could have used that money…

This sinful woman clings to a holy man’s feet…

Does he not see who it is who touches him?

Their responses to her and to her act of beauty exposes their own inattention to a world beyond the one they see—to their own peril. As Fujimura writes, “Pragmatism, legalism, and greed cannot comprehend the power of ephemeral beauty. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness; the opposite of beauty is legalism. Legalism is hard determinism that slowly strangles the soul. Legalism injures by giving pragmatic answers to our suffering.”(2) The corollary, of course, is that beauty can offer healing; that paying attention, even to fleeting glimpses of glory, is deeply restorative.

When Jesus asks the world quite counterculturally to consider the lilies, to consider beauty in the midst of all the ashes around us, his request is full of promise, for he is both the Source of beauty and its Subject. Paying attention to the ephemeral, being willing like Mary to risk and to recognize beauty, is in and of itself restorative because it is paying attention to him—to Christ—one easily dismissed, having no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him, one rationally rejected, having been struck down, afflicted, led like a lamb to slaughter.(3) Here, both the anxiety-addicted and the attention-overloaded can find solace in a different sort of kingdom: one in which there is room for the paradox of a fleeting world with eternity in its soul and in its soil, for death at a Roman cross to somehow be horrifically beautiful.

But perhaps Jesus also instructs the world to consider the lilies because it is characteristic of God’s concern for the world. The daily liturgy of lilies comes with unceasing care and attention for all who will see it, the gift of a God who revels in the creation of yet another flower, the details of another sunset, the discovery of even one lost soul. Consider the lilies; how they grow. They neither toil, nor spin.

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

(1) Wendell Berry, “The Vacation,” Selected Poems, (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1998), 157.

(2) Makoto Mujimura, “The Beautiful Tears,” Tabletalk, September, 2010.

(3) Isaiah 53:2.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – My Messy House

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Kathleen Norris tells a story of a little boy who wrote a poem called “The Monster Who Was Sorry.” The poem begins with a confession: he doesn’t like it when his father yells at him. The monster’s response is to throw his sister down the stairs, then to destroy his room, and finally to destroy the whole town. The poem concludes: “Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.’”(1)

The confession of Saint Paul bears a fine resemblance: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but I do what I hate.” Regret has a way of shining the flood lights on the mess within us. Norris further expounds the faithful candor of the child describing his own muddled story: “‘My messy house’ says it all: with more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance.”(2)

The journey of a Christian through the many rooms of faith posits countless opportunities to peer at the monster within. There are days in the life of faith when I question whether I am living up to the title of Christian or disciple—or even casual acquaintance. In certain rooms of awareness I find there is no question: I am not. Yet, as G.K. Chesterton wrote in his autobiography, I have only ever found one religion that “dared to go down with me into the depth of myself.”(3) This is precisely the invitation of Christianity. What we find are messy houses, filled with hidden staircases built of excuses, and idols of good deeds atop mantels of false security—in short, the home of Christ in disarray at our own hands.

If we were to remain shut up in this place alone, we might begin to wonder why we should ever hope for anything other than mess and wreckage. Paul’s confession marks the futility of our own efforts to clean the house. But we do not make the journeys to the depths of ourselves alone. In fact, we should not have discovered the messes had they not been shown to us in the first place. We are guided to these places in our consciences, to images of ourselves unadorned, and finally to broken and contrite hearts. Faith in Christ is the opportunity to be searched by the Spirit of Truth, the Breath of Holiness, the God who maneuvers us through messy rooms and sin-stained walls and mercifully exposes monstrous ways. It would indeed be a futile journey if we walked this path alone.

Instead, the very Spirit that shows us the monster in a messy house shows us the one who removes the masks, clears the wreckage, and makes us human again. In a scene from C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, Aslan the lion is seen tearing the costume off the child in front of him.(4) The child writhes in pain from the razor sharp claws that feel as though they pierce his very being. With mounting intensity, Aslan rips away layer after layer, until the child is absolutely certain he will die from the agony. But when it is all over and every last layer has been removed, the child delights in the newfound freedom, having long forgotten the weight of the costume he carried.

The journey of a soul through its messiest rooms is not merely a drive-by glimpse of the depths of our sin and our need for repentance; it is not a journey for the sake of guilt or even right-living. It is true that we are shown the weight of our masks and the extent of our messes; we are handed the great encumbrance of our own failures. But all so we can be shown again the one who asks to take them all from us. All so we can be fully human. “Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows… But he was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:4-5). Quite mercifully, it is through the dingy windows of a messy house that one has the clearest view of the cross.

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

(1) Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace (New York: Riverhead, 1998), 69.

(2) Ibid., 70.

(3) G.K. Chesterton, The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 334.

(4) Story told in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 115-117.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Scandal of the Cross

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There is a striking verse in the New Testament, in which the apostle Paul refers to the cross of Jesus Christ as foolishness to the Greek and a stumbling block to the Jew. One can readily understand why he would say that. After all, to the Greek mind, sophistication, philosophy, and learning were exalted pursuits. How could one crucified possibly spell knowledge?

To the Jewish mind, on the other hand, there was a cry and a longing to be free. In their history, they had been attacked by numerous powers and often humiliated by occupying forces. Whether it was the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the Romans, Jerusalem had been repeatedly plundered and its people left homeless. What would the Hebrew have wanted more than someone who could take up their cause and altogether repel the enemy? How could a Messiah who was crucified possibly be of any help?

To the Greek, the cross was foolishness. To the Jew, it was a stumbling block. What is it about the cross of Christ that so roundly defies everything that power relishes? Crucifixion was humiliating. It was so humiliating that the Romans who specialized in the art of torture assured their own citizenry that a Roman could never be crucified. But not only was it humiliating, it was excruciating. In fact, the very word “excruciating” comes from two Latin words: ex cruciatus, or out of the cross. Crucifixion was the defining word for pain.

Does that not give us pause in this season now before us? Think of it: humiliation and agony. This was the path Jesus chose with which to reach out for you and for me. You see, this thing we call sin, but which we so tragically minimize, breaks the grandeur for which we were created. It brings indignity to our essence and pain to our existence. It separates us from God.  On the way to the cross two thousand years ago, Jesus took the ultimate indignity and the ultimate pain to bring us back to the dignity of a relationship with God and the healing of our souls. Will you remember that this was done for you and receive his gift?

You will then discover that it is sin that is foolishness. Our greatest weakness is not an enemy from without but one from within. It is our own weak wills that cause us to stumble. But Jesus Christ frees us from the foolishness of sin and the weakness of our selves.

This is the very reason the apostle Paul went on to say that he preached Jesus Christ as one crucified, which was both the power of God and the wisdom of God. Come to the cross in these days given for our contemplation and find out his power and his wisdom.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Slaughtered and Standing

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In John’s telling of the life of Jesus, Jesus is described as the kingly shepherd who lays down his life for his friends, the gate who lets in the sheep, and the lamb of God himself. So it is not without significance that John dates Jesus’s death on the day of preparation of the Passover, the day a lamb is slaughtered in remembrance of God’s passing over the Israelites in Egypt. Whereas Matthew, Mark, and Luke each describe a final supper shared with the disciples in the upper room, John hints at the consumption of a meal in the mysterious space after Christ’s death. In other words, the bread of life and Lamb of God is first broken and slaughtered so that the Passover meal can be seen in its full significance in a greater upper room.

This mystery of the Lamb after the slaughter is extensively heightened in the Revelation of John. Envisioned is a heavenly scene with one seated on the throne holding a scroll, and John begins to weep because no one is worthy to open it. But then one of the elders points to “the Lion of the Tribe of Judah,” “the Root of David,” the one who “has conquered.” And John sees between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders “a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered,” one worthy to open the scroll. John doesn’t explain how a lamb can be standing after it has been slaughtered. What are we to do with such a creature?

For me it brings to mind the deliberately impossible demands presented by Jesus. How are we to be perfect? To live holy lives? To keep anger at bay lest we be guilty of murder in our hearts? It is a life we might succeed in trying for a time, but ultimately we cannot remotely achieve. In the words of one theologian, “[T]he summons to a holy life, far from assuming its achievement, assumes quite the opposite: that God has acted and nothing can be done in response. The structures of existence are incapable of change or alteration, whether empowered by grace or not.“(1) Which is perhaps to say, the lamb was slain. Irreversibly, Jesus was slaughtered, his life laid down for his friends. And now, in a seeming incapable structure of existence, this slaughtered Lamb stands.

Professor John Lennox notes that when Scripture speaks of Christ as the Lamb of God, it is easy to think of it as something like a symbolic code. We read of the lamb or the lion and the recognition is instantaneous: The lamb is Christ. The lion is Christ. But John’s description of the slain and standing lamb seems to say not only who it is, but what it is. This is Christ as the lamb—that is, beyond the statements he made about himself, beyond the parables, beyond the imagery and symbolism with which Jesus spoke truths and turned categories on their heads. In this picture, he is the overturned. John places Christ as the lamb before us, and he is slaughtered yet standing. For  John, literarily at least, the way of slaughter is the way of victory.

This is not to say, as some argue, that our own suffering is a similar way to the victorious life or that Christ is calling the world to suffer with him at the cross. The deliberately impossible marvel of the slain and standing lamb is blurred when we imagine ourselves in any way able to reproduce it. We can no more do so, than we can reenact the Incarnation.(2) While it is true that John’s audience was likely to suffer for their faith, the slaughtered lamb is not encouragement for of a brand of discipleship that recreates Christ’s suffering as victory; slaughter is not the goal. On the contrary, the slain and standing lamb is the one weapon capable of tearing violence and unjust suffering apart. This is not a symbol disciples are to learn to repeat and mimic; it is the very structure and feat of existence that allows them to be disciples. John’s description moves far beyond the slaughtered lamb as symbol. This is Christ as the lamb—the impossible structure of existence given not for the world of souls to mimic, but rather to take, eat, and drink. This is his body—a slaughtered and standing lamb—powerfully, mysteriously, impossibly broken and given for the world.

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

(1) Roy Harrisville, Fracture: The Cross as Irreconcilable in the Language and Thought of the Biblical Writers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 111.

(2) For more on this, see J. Todd Billings, Union With Christ, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011)

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Deus Absconditus

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The Olympic Mountains in Washington State form the “backbone” of the Olympic peninsula. Jagged peaks blanketed with snow for much of the year, they are a delight to behold. Living within walking distance of an overlook that affords a panoramic view of these majestic peaks often sounds a siren call beckoning me to come and to gaze at their beauty. I am not the only one who hears this call.  On sunny days, the overlook is filled with individuals coming to gaze at, or to photograph those mountains as the sun cascades down their spiny backs.

There are other times, however, when the Olympics are shrouded in a thick blanket of cloud. Grey and foreboding, this blanketing cloud-blockade obscures any hope of viewing their grandeur. Hidden from view, one can only see an impenetrable wall of cloud.

Our human experience of God can appear very much like the Olympic Mountains. There are many days when God’s grandeur and glory are on full display. And we are assured, like the ancient Hebrew poet that as we “lift up our eyes to the mountains” our “help comes from the Lord” (Psalm 131:1-2). At other times, God seems obscured by clouds—clouds of doubt, suffering, disappointment, or pervasive evil. Sometimes it seems that there are far more cloudy days, than clear ones.   The experience of God can seem like that of the biblical Job going “forward but he is not there, and backward, but I cannot perceive him” (Job 23:8-9).

Deus absconditus is the Latin phrase that describes this phenomenon—the hidden God. The hiddenness of God is a particularly painful experience for those who affirm faith in God. It is equally difficult for people who do not affirm any faith: Where is this hidden God believers want us to follow? Why doesn’t God show up? It is an apologetic conundrum experienced by many throughout history. Blaise Pascal, one of the greatest Christian apologists, described his own experience with deus absconditus as a pitiable mystery: “This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not a matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion, if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied.”(1) Pascal speaks poignantly of the pitiable state when the clouds of our human experience hide God away and leave us with an utterly obstructed view.

Surely this was the same experience of Jesus as he wept in the Garden of Gethsemane. Under so much duress, his sweat mingled with drops of blood, the likely result of broken capillaries under his skin. And from the cross, his recitation of Psalm 22 became his cry of abandonment: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34). Here, the cry of deus absconditus from his only, beloved son. These are the last words uttered by Jesus in Matthew and Mark’s Gospels. John doesn’t include them at all. Of the three synoptic gospels, only Luke ends his crucifixion narrative with Jesus quoting from another of Israel’s songs: “Into Thy hands, I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46; Psalm 31:5). Jesus affirms in a whisper of trust that seen or unseen, his life is in God’s hands.

Perhaps, like Jesus, there are times when the best we can do is to yield ourselves to the God who seems hidden behind the clouds—and perhaps to acknowledge that the journey of faith is not always the warm assurance of perpetually clear skies that we thought it might be. For those outside of faith, such admissions may well be a needed authenticity.

In this sense, as author Flannery O’Connor wrote, faith is not the guarantee for security or comfort. “I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened… What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is a cross… You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty.”(2)

 

In the experience of deus absconditus, God seems hidden from view just like my majestic Olympic Mountains. Yet even here, faith, not securing or comforting, but seeking and searching, still points towards the God who is there behind the clouds.

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

(1)Blaise Pascal, Pensees, as cited in Kelly James Clark, When Faith is Not Enough (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 38.

(2)Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979), 354.

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Why Suffering?

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One of my favorite scenes from the story of Jesus’s birth is of the far-seeing, elderly Simeon reaching for the child in Mary’s arms, content now to die for having seen the Messiah with his own eyes. His words to Mary, more eerie than most mothers could graciously accept, always seemed a cryptic little side note from a strange and saintly old man. But the prophecy never struck me as a pivotal introduction to Luke’s overarching motif of suffering throughout his telling of the story of Christ. Says Simeon:

“This child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.”(1)

Starting with Simeon, theologian Roy Harrisville draws out a side of Luke that surprised my reading of Luke’s Gospel and passion narrative—if only the surprise of seeing plainly something I had never noticed.(2) Again and again Luke points out the necessity of Jesus’s suffering, long before he is approaching the cross, long before he is sweating blood. It is necessary, confess Jesus and Luke repeatedly. I was nonetheless left with a plaguing question perhaps less for Harrisville than for God—or Jesus along the road to Emmaus. Why was it necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into glory, as he tells the men as they walk toward Emmaus? Why was Christ’s suffering a matter of “divine necessity”? Why was this the path that had to be taken?

Luke has long struck me as one of the more fascinating narrators of the life and death of Jesus, including details at a story level that make for more nuanced intrigue. “Day after day I was with you in the temple and you did not seize me,” says Jesus at his trial. “But all this has taken place, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled,” he explains in Matthew and similarly in Mark, “But let the scriptures be fulfilled.” Luke’s recollection of the scene is much less formulaic. Jesus replies with a far more layered vision of all that is at work. “But this is your hour, and the power of darkness,” hinting that there is another hour and the power of something else at hand.(3) Luke repeatedly includes hints of these disparate visions at work, blind and brute ignorance beside cryptic insight like Simeon’s, a contrast seen quite literally in the very criminals on either side of Jesus on the cross.

All of this I have cherished in the evangelist’s telling. And I can see, as Harrisville notes, that Luke’s relentless pointing to the necessity of Christ’s suffering lies at the heart of this dramatic narration; I can see that Luke describes the life of Jesus as the way of the suffering Christ, and the passion of the cross as the necessary event which marks the approaching kingdom. But why? Beyond the need to encourage suffering readers, beyond the musts of scripture, why was it necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things? If Luke’s telling is indeed a motif of human ignorance alongside that of the divine necessity, I am thankful for the grace that is shown on this side of unknowing. I am thankful that Jesus went willingly toward suffering for our own sakes even though we might not fully understand it.

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

(1) Luke 2:34-35.

(2) Roy Harrisville, Fracture: The Cross as Irreconcilable in the Language and Thought of the Biblical Writers (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2006).

(3) Parallel texts found in Matthew 26:56, Mark 14:49b, and Luke 22:53b.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Cross and the Cookie Jar

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As a young man growing up in Scotland, like many others, I was exposed to Christianity and the symbol of the cross. However, it was a point of confusion, a mystery at best, and at worst, an object of scorn and disgust. I did not know what it meant or why religious people thought it important, but I knew I wanted nothing to do with it.

Obviously, I have had a change of mind. Why? I’ll explain as we proceed, but first, some helpful voices. Alister McGrath, Professor of theology, ministry, and education at King’s College, London, writes: “Just as God has humbled himself in making himself known ‘in the humility and shame of the cross,’ we must humble ourselves if we are to encounter him. We must humble ourselves by being prepared to be told where to look to find God, rather than trusting in our own insights and speculative abilities. In effect, we are forced to turn our eyes from contemplation of where we would like to see God revealed, and to turn them instead upon a place which is not of our choosing, but which is given to us.”(1)

In other words, nothing in one’s history, experience, or knowledge can prepare us for God’s means of drawing near. At the cross, something we are not expecting is revealed, something scandalous unveiled, something we could never have articulated or asked for is given to us. Philip Yancey, the renowned author, offers more on this:  ”Here at the cross is the man who loves his enemies, the man whose righteousness is greater than that of the Pharisees, who being rich became poor, who gives his robe to those who take his cloak, who prays for those who deceitfully use him.  The cross is not a detour or a hurdle on the way to Kingdom, nor is it even the way to the Kingdom; it is the Kingdom come.”(2)

I have come to realize that wrong ideas and images are responsible for much misery and disaster in our lives. And I think many of us have significantly distorted ideas about the purpose and meaning of the cross. When many people think of “sin” or the human condition before God, what comes to mind is perhaps something like the image of a child caught with his hands in the cookie jar. Such an image might well be understood as disobedience or maybe even naughtiness, but is it really that important? It is certainly not bad enough to justify extreme reactions. As a result of such a metaphor, our moral reflections on sin tend to foster incredulity or disgust. The response seems totally out of proportion to the offense.

But let us shift the metaphor. Supposing one day you go for a routine medical examination, and they discover you have a deadly virus. You did not do anything. You were not necessarily responsible, but you were exposed, and infected. You feel the injustice of it all, you are afraid, you are angry, but most of all, you are seriously sick. You are dying and you need help.

Whatever the cross and the gospel are about, it is not a slap on the hands for kids refusing to heed the rules of the cookie jar. It is not mere advice to get you to clean up your life and morals. It is not mere ideas to inform you about what it takes to be nice. It is about treatment, a physician’s mediation; it is about providing a solution and discovering life.

The cross may seem an extreme and offensive measure to the problem of sin and death and sickness—but what if it is the very cure that is needed? McGrath describes our options at the cross of Christ. “Either God is not present at all in this situation, or else God is present in a remarkable and paradoxical way. To affirm that God is indeed present in this situation is to close the door to one way of thinking about God and to open the way to another—for the cross marks the end of a particular way of thinking about God.”(3) Shockingly, thoroughly, scandalously, the cross depicts a God who throws himself upon sin and sickness to bring the hope of rescue miraculously near.

Some find it shocking, some overwhelming, some almost too good to be true. It is, however, for all.

Stuart McAllister is vice president of training and special projects at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Alister McGrath, The Mystery of the Cross, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 104.

(2) Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew, (Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, 1995), 196.

(3) Alister McGrath, The Mystery of the Cross, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 103.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Court of Discord

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Seized from the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was taken to the courtyard. Peter followed from a distance and watched among the guards as a makeshift trial unraveled. Mark describes the unfolding scene: “The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death, but they did not find any. Many testified falsely against him, but their statements did not agree. Then some stood up and gave this false testimony against him: We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this man-made temple and in three days will build another, not made by man.’ Yet even then their testimony did not agree.“(1)

In this courtyard was a mob of witnesses. Priests, guards, and passersby—the whole Sanhedrin—made their ways to the scene. Testimonies were spouted from all angles, their statements contradicting one another, stories disproving other stories. We are not told whether Peter added anything vocally to this cacophony of dissenting and differing voices. Yet, to be sure, even choosing to stand in silence, he was still choosing a testimony of sorts. Later, he would offer that testimony in words: “I don’t know this man you’re talking about.”(2)

Two millennia after this scene of witnesses at odds, we live our lives, no matter what we believe, in a similar courtyard. Here, with or without evidence, testimonies are shouted all around. Most not only disagree but contradict one another; some void of anything more than preference are presented nonetheless as if standing before a grand jury. We hear closing statements as vitriolic as the chief priests and as evasive as the man who once told his friend, “Some people like white wine, others like red. You like Reformed Christianity, my brother Hans likes the Seventh Day Adventists, I like no religion at all…[E]ach individual should be free to choose whatever is his or her personal preference, and we will respect each other’s choice.”(3)

In these days of preference and pedigree, our own witness is worth bearing in mind. For whether we are shouting like the chief priests or hiding like Peter, we are all bearing witness to something. The man in the corner watching Jesus’s trial with disinterest is still giving an answer to the question of the court. Whether offended, awed, or indifferent, the question we answer is the same. “What kind of man is this that even the winds and the waves obey him?” “Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy,” asked others. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?”(4) The role of witness is as unavoidable today as it was in the courtyard hours before Jesus was sentenced to die. “We speak about God without opening our mouths,” says Albert Holtz. “What are the chances that by watching me a person can learn that God is love.”(5)

Voluntary or otherwise, at the heart of our role as witnesses is our answer to the very question Jesus embodies, “Who do you say that I am?” And while your answer is hopefully more than mere preference, it is worth realizing that we are answering with every ordinary moment of our lives. Some of the loudest testimonies are often spoken without words. Peter’s silence was equally a part of his three-time denial of ever knowing the man on trial.

Yet Peter also followed from a distance, his mind racing with both fear and love. We, too, are looking in on a great trial, sometimes participating, sometimes denying him, sometimes hearing our voices and with the shock of recognition, a rooster crowing in the distance. The courtyard is still full of witnesses at odds, sometimes at odds even with themselves. But you, too, stand a witness to something.

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

(1) Mark 14:55-59.

(2) Mark 14:71.

(3) Charles Van Engen, You Are My Witnesses (New York: Reformed Church Press, 1992), 4.

(4) See Matthew 8:27, Luke 5:21.

(5) Albert Holtz, Pilgrim Road: A Benedictine Journey Through Lent (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2006), 121.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Patience of Salvation

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More often than I’d care to admit, I find that I am in a hurry. Now, it’s not the typical kind of hurrying—rushing to get into the ten items or less lane at the grocery story, speeding through traffic, or running around juggling four or five tasks at a time. It’s more an inability to be present to my life as it is right now. So often I find that no matter the circumstances, I’m hurrying through them, wondering or worrying what is next.

This pattern of hurrying through life to the “next event” seems fairly typical and engrained from a young age. When I was a child, I couldn’t wait to be a teenager. When I was a teenager, I couldn’t wait to be in college. When I was in college, I couldn’t wait to be a graduate student. When I was a graduate student, I couldn’t wait to be a professional. I look back on those hurried days now and lament that I rushed through them so quickly.

Of course, our efficiency-driven society doesn’t help our propensity towards hurrying through life. We live in an “instant” society, and our increasingly rapid technological developments only add to our impatience when things are not achieved instantaneously. While technology has greatly improved many aspects of our lives, I recognize that my own propensity to hurry, coupled with a society that moves at ever-quickening speeds, can be very detrimental for making myself present to right now. If my focus is consistently on the next event or milestone and if I want to get there with increasing speed, I cannot focus on the space that is now, nor can I be content.

The lives depicted in the Bible couldn’t be more different from our hurried lives. More importantly, and perhaps to our great frustration, the God revealed in the biblical stories is rarely in a hurry. Abraham and Sarah, for example, received the promise of an heir twenty-five years before they actually laid eyes on Isaac. Joseph had a dream as a seventeen year-old that his brothers would one day bow down to him. Yet it was countless years and many difficulties later that his brothers would come and kneel before him, asking for food. Moses was eighty years old—long past his prime of life—when God appeared to him in the burning bush and called him to deliver the children of Israel. David was anointed king by Samuel as a young boy tending his father’s flocks, long before he finally ascended to the throne. And Jesus spent thirty years in relative obscurity, not involved in public ministry, and only three years announcing the kingdom and God’s rule in his life and ministry.

Perhaps both from a Christian perspective and a skeptical one, it is difficult to understand why God wouldn’t be more in a hurry rushing to accomplish divine plans and purposes, not only in these individuals’ lives, but also in the work of redemption. The Messiah was prophesied hundreds of years before he actually arrived on the scene. We cannot help but ask why God seems to move so slowly?

In Peter’s second letter, what is considered his last will and testament, he discusses the slowness of God in relation to the second coming of Christ. Many arose even in Peter’s time asking why God was so slow when it came to delivering on his promise of an eternal kingdom. They began to mock God assuming that “as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be.” Not so, Peter argues, for the slowness of God is in fact our salvation. “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance… Therefore, beloved, since you look for these things, be diligent to be found by him in peace, spotless and blameless, and regard the patience of our Lord to be salvation” (2 Peter 3:9, 14-15).

The long, slow, journey through the forty days prior to Easter morning can also seem an arduous time for those of us who find ourselves in a hurry, racing towards the empty tomb and resurrection life. But these forty days can serve to remind us of God’s great forbearance and patience with us, even as they hearken to us to enter the wild spaces of wilderness waiting with Jesus. These days intentionally slow us and create space—what theologians call liminal space—making room for those of us who rush to wait and rest in the “in-between” and the “not yet” for God to act. Waiting for God in this liminal space gives us more opportunity to be patient—learning to regard, as Peter says, the patience of our Lord to be salvation.

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Burying Our Illusions

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“[W]e are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.”(1)

The author of this comment did not have the dashed hopes of a person weary of contemporary political promises; nor the disappointment of a child after his once-adored Wii lost its thrill; nor the dispirited outlook of a modern youth disenchanted with rampant consumerism and the daunting purposelessness of life. No, long before video games existed, long before Generation Y was disillusioned with Generation X or X with the Baby Boomers before them, disillusionment reigned nonetheless. It was a social commentator in the late 1920′s who made this comment about his own disillusioned culture, words which in fact came more than a decade after a group of literary notables identified themselves as the “Lost Generation,” so-named because of their own general feeling of disillusionment.  In other words, disillusionment is epidemic.

As humans who tell and hear and live by stories, the possibility of taking in a story that is bigger than reality is quite likely. (Advertisers, in fact, count on it.) Subsequently, disillusionment is a quality that follows humanity and its stories around. Yet despite its common occurrence, disillusionment is a crushing blow, and the collateral damage of shattered expectations quite painful. With good reason, we speak of it in terms of the discomfort and disruption that it fosters; we frame the crushing of certain hope and images in terms of loss and difficulty. The disillusioned do not speak of their losses lightly, no more than victims of burglary move quickly past the feeling of loss and violation.

And yet, practically speaking, disillusionment is the loss of illusion. In terms of larceny, then, it is the equivalent of having one’s high cholesterol or a perpetually bad habit stolen. Disillusionment, while painful, is evidence which shows the myths that enchant us need not blind us forever, a sign that what is falsely believed can be shattered by what is genuine. In such terms, disillusion is far less an unwanted intrusion than it is a severe mercy, far more like a surgeon’s excising of a tumor than a cruel removal of hope.

The crucifixion of the Son of God is something like this. The death of God? There are no categories with which to understand it. For those who first held hope in the person of Jesus, it was the same. The death of the one thought to be the Messiah? It was an event that leveled them with disillusioned agony. New Testament scholar N.T. Wright describes the force of this dissonance:
”There were, to be sure, ways of coping with the death of a teacher, or even a leader. The picture of Socrates was available, in the wider world, as a model of unjust death nobly borne. The category of ‘martyr’ was available, within Judaism, for someone who stood up to pagans… The category of failed but still revered Messiah, however, did not exist. A Messiah who died at the hands of the pagans, instead of winning [God’s] battle against them, was a deceiver.”(2)

For those who loved Jesus most, it took time to see that it was not hope but their hopeful illusions that died with him on the cross. Everything they thought God was, every hope for a messiah wielding power and control, every image of God winning the battle and taking a stand against their oppressors, everything they thought they knew about religion, painfully, but mercifully died on a shameful, Roman cross. We, too, bury our illusions with the body of God. But it is no simple journey. The powerful words of poet W. H. Auden describe what is often the case in a world filled with sickly sweet illusion:

We would rather be ruined than changed;

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.(3)

Yet if we will allow it, this death can be far more than loss. While advertisers count on our moving from one dead illusion to another, the death of Christ tells a completely different kind of story, a demythologizing story, which cuts through the storied layers of illusion we continually create about ourselves, the world, and others. Within such a story, disillusionment is the precursor to nothing short of resurrection. And faith is the audacity to confront our illusions with a cross. In the words of author Parker Palmer, “[F]aith is the courage to face into our illusions and allow ourselves to be disillusioned about them, the courage to walk through our illusions and dispel them.  Faith…[is] a disillusioned view of reality…that lets the beauty behind the illusions shine through.”(4) Burying our illusions with the body of God, we mourn our losses and lament over the graves of dead dreams and expectations, hopes and visions. We stand in painful, faithful disillusionment. But so we stand aware that we may be equally startled by what emerges from the tomb.

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

(1) John Boynton Priestley, “The Disillusioned,” in The Balconinny and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1929), 30.

(2) N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 658.

(3) W.H. Auden, Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 2007), 530.

(4) Parker Palmer, “Faith or Frenzy: Living Contemplation in a World of Action,” The Clampit Lectures, 1972.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Mystery of Faith

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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 Main Thing

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Lee Iacocca once said, “The main thing in life is to keep the main thing, the main thing.” I don’t know about you, but I often find it hard to stay focused and to not get distracted by secondary (and often good) things.

As a follower of Jesus, my own distracted restlessness is challenged by words like John Piper’s statement, “God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in Him” or Augustine’s prayer, “You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” I am always learning to repose in God, always seeking to go further in the contemplative life by setting my focus on God alone.

Eugene Peterson speaks of a soul’s initial coming before God with the language of adoration and love, which unfortunately often falls into disuse or into limited use. The language we often develop is one less centered in adoration and more focused on the self. Conversely, the focus of the psalmist, while not denying personal needs and fears, is always on God, God’s character, qualities, attributes, and ways. The language is one of love, adoration, and appreciation—even in the midst of uncertainty or trouble, even after years of following God. God is the main thing.

For those in need of clarity amidst constant diversion, the psalmist lives a countercultural example of focus and priority. On any given day, the psalmist offers a challenge to thinking in terms of self-need, answered or unanswered prayer, and ongoing concerns. The psalmist introduces the peculiar notion of contemplating God for who God is.

In contrast to the very clear and pronounced weaknesses in some solutions to life’s needs and challenges, the kingdom Jesus came to proclaim is a glorious possibility and real presence. This kingdom is why we are here; its king can captivate our passions and our wills. During a recent trip, I was reminded of the amazing contrast of Christ’s enduring kingdom versus the short-term shelf life of many of the “utopian” movements in history. The Nazis, the Communists, and any and all pretentious systems inevitably crumble before the unshakeable kingdom of God. As a believer, I can remind myself that I pray today with the church across the ages and around the world: God’s Kingdom come. God’s will be done on earth—here and now—as it is in heaven.

This is one answer the Christian holds in a mind-numbing sea of distraction. As we gather physically or otherwise with believers in our time and across history, whether during the reflective season of Lent or the overwhelming events of Holy Week, we come as people in need, people with problems, wounds, issues, and concerns. And we are joined with other believers as people in process. We are all souls on a journey. The salvation and full redemption of our bodies is yet to come, and yet until then, we press on in these bodies in faith, hope, and love—by God’s grace, mercy, ongoing-forgiveness, and Spirit.

As we begin this day, the invitation to clarity is the same as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. Fix your minds and hearts on Christ, his glorious being, his dynamic kingdom, and his compassionate love.

Stuart McAllister is vice president of training and special projects at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Nature of Request

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I had always wanted to visit India. In the India of my imagination, a myriad of colors, smells, sounds, and people danced together. The air would always be saturated by an atmosphere of mystery. India would never be a place that could be categorized neatly or understood completely; comprehension would slip stealthily around a corner just as I thought I had gotten hold of it.

In reality, India was indeed a land of color, contrast, and mystery. Like a whirling dervish, India spins round and round in constant activity, rarely standing still. One cannot help but feel both overwhelmed and exhilarated by life there.

Despite all the complex, continual motion, one constant became apparent to me: Hospitality—gracious, open, generous and dignified—is a way of life. People are always around to serve, whether they are paid to do so or not. Someone is there to take your bags from the car, or someone is bringing you a cup of tea just the way you like it. Someone is enticing you to eat more, and someone is sweeping the city streets clean of leaves, dust, or debris with a broom made from a bundle of twigs. There are household servants, and those designated to serve as a result of their caste. Yet, regardless of why someone is serving, there is always someone to serve, someone who through class or training or culture inhabits an ethos of hospitable care. All one need do is ask and it will be done.

It was in India that I learned something about the nature of request. One morning, having spent a good portion of the previous night dealing with what I affectionately came to call my “spicy stomach,” I was languishing for plain, cold cereal and milk—my normal breakfast when at home. Having enjoyed too much fabulous Indian cuisine, I knew I simply couldn’t have any more or my stomach would rebel entirely. Not wanting to offend my hosts or their generous hospitality, I timidly expressed my desire for bland food. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “Why didn’t you ask?” “My husband and I normally eat eggs and toast or cereal for breakfast!”  Instantly, the phrase you do not have because you do not ask came to mind.

In the biblical letter of James, you do not have because you do not ask is used in quite a different context.(1)  The author issues a rebuke against the quarrels and conflicts that rage within human beings. We are jealous of others, we covet them, and so we get into conflicts with others because of our lust and our greed.

But, I had been thinking for quite some time about the nature of request as it relates to prayer. I was wrestling with the nature of prayer as request in the face of so many no’s as answers. The result was that I simply stopped asking. I began to wonder if God was not hospitable to me any longer and would not honor my requests with answers that accorded my needs. Even in my personal relationships, I had stopped asking for fear of rejection or disappointment. I would sit on my hands, as it were, and stew with resentment and anger at all of my unmet needs. And yet I became haunted by this phrase from James: You do not have because you do not ask.

What seemed a tangential connection between the service culture of India, and my own choice to withhold requests from God, actually revealed a powerful reality about the nature of request. Like household servants who are there at my beckon call, there are some things over which we have total control. If there are weeds in the garden, or if we have a broken faucet, we do not request that the weeds go away, we go out and pull the weeds, or fix the faucet.

There are many things, perhaps even most things, however, over which we exercise minimal, direct control. Instead, we have to make a request—a request that may or may not be granted. As one author notes, “The request, while powerful, does not always get us what we have in mind as we make it.  This is true when it is addressed to other human beings and true when it is addressed to God as prayer….It is a great advantage of requesting and prayer that it not be a fail-safe mechanism. For human finitude means that we are all limited in knowledge, in power, in love, and in powers of communication.”(2)

Nevertheless, requests are made and they are powerful because in making them our deepest selves are revealed. We can truly hear what we are asking for. We come to stare at our desires face to face. In so doing, we have the opportunity to see the often complex motivations behind our requests. Furthermore, as we make requests we do so with the knowledge that we cannot always fulfill all that is asked of us, or by us. As we make requests of God and of others, we make them with a tenacious trust in the power of love that grants or withholds.

Prayer is never just asking, nor is it merely a matter of asking for what I want—even as we cling to the hope that that the God of the universe cares for what concerns us. While there is no simple explanation to why some requests are granted and some are not, and while there is mystery surrounding the efficacy of request, there is always the power to ask. We may still not have even when we ask with what appears to be the purest intentions, but we always have the power of request. The way into the meaning of request is to start by making them, just as I learned in India. Perhaps as we do, “The circle of our interests will grow in the largeness of God’s love.”(3) Perhaps as we do, the admonition to ask, seek, and knock will not simply be a formula to get what we want, but an invitation to look into what we ask for, whom we seek, and upon which doors we are knocking.

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

(1) See James 4:1-3.

(2) Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God. (San Francisco: Harper Sa

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Ends, Means, Journey – Ravi Zacharias Ministry

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An essay from G.K. Chesterton begins, “In all the current controversies, people begin at the wrong end as readily as at the right end; never stopping to consider which is really the end.”(1) In a world very impressed with our ability to create and acquire our own high-tech “carts,” putting the cart before the horse comes very naturally. Even very thoughtful people can fail to think through the point of all their thinking. Chesterton continues, “One very common form of the blunder is to make modern conditions an absolute end and then try to fit human necessities to that end, as if they were only a means. Thus people say, ‘Home life is not suited to the business life of today.’ Which is as if they said, ‘Heads are not suited to the sort of hats now in fashion.’” His observations are akin to the experiment of Solomon. Cutting a child in two to meet the demand of two mothers is hardly fixing what we might call the “Child Problem.”

The reverse of the end and the means is hardly a modern problem, though some argue the trend is increasing. As C.S. Lewis observed many years ago, logic seems to be no longer valued as a subject in schools. Never having taken logic as a school subject, or even noticed its absence for that matter, I might agree the observation still rings with some truth. But any critique of illogic is perhaps startling when juxtaposed by how much we currently seem to value a constant surge of information. In the chorus of incessant infotainment, T.S. Eliot’s lament from “The Rock” seems almost a heretical voice:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries

Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

The inconsistency of information-dependence and logic-disinterest aside, the silent battle within our over-stimulated ethos of options and information seems to become one against indifference. Weary from pleasure and choice, apathy becomes a major obstacle. We get to the point where we do not even remotely care whether the horse or the cart comes first.

In the book recounting the lineage of Israel’s Kings, Elijah went before a people who had grown indifferent to the differences between Baal and Yahweh. “How long will you waver between two opinions?” Elijah asked them. “‘If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, then follow him.’ But the people said nothing” (1 Kings 18:21).

Cultural commentators note among us a similar indifference. While there is an increasing interest in spirituality and a desire to locate deeper meaning in life and experience, we waver between the gods and goods that seem to offer any answers. And while the need to pursue meaning is certainly a cultural insight we do well to cultivate, the danger is perhaps in allowing this desire to be the end in itself, the goal by which God or Buddha or nature might serve as a means to fill. Like the men and women before Elijah, our illogic is only compounded by our indifference. Should we attempt to fulfill our spiritual voids without first asking why they are there? Could not the desire itself exist because the God of creation, the beginning and the end, placed it within? If the LORD is God, why would I not want to follow?

When Elijah asked the prophets of Baal to call him to reveal himself, the test of truth was not avoided, but the ultimate decision was still before the people. “Then they called on the name of Baal from morning till noon. ‘O Baal, answer us!’ they shouted. But there was no response; no one answered. No one paid attention” (1 Kings 18:26). In a loud voice Elijah then called out, “Answer me, O LORD, answer me, so these people will know that you, O LORD, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again” (1 Kings 18:37). The fire of the LORD immediately fell upon the altar. And when the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, “The Lord indeed is God; the Lord indeed is God!”

In this season of Lent a similar invitation looms large before any who seek. We are invited both to see anew our motivations and the reasons of our own hearts. We are invited to examine the call of Christ to follow him to the Cross, wherever it might lead. At the end of that road, however tumultuous the means, we shall perhaps find that it was always Christ who carried us. Even now, he is among us, one worthy of being our end. If the LORD is God, why would we not want to follow?

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

(1) G.K. Chesterton, As I was Saying (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 63.

 

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The Humiliated Christ – Ravi Zacharias International Ministries

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One of the unique qualities of the Christian story is that it is presented in the voices of four different witnesses. During the season of Lent, I try to look specifically at the different tellings of the events that led Jesus to the cross. The differences in each testimony offer an interesting glimpse of how personalities differ in their observing and experience of the world, as well as a potent reminder that the story of Jesus is not a flat and static conveying of information but a story as alive as the one who was tortured at the hands of the powers of this world.

For instance, as one theologian observes, Matthew’s crucifixion narrative and greater gospel presents “the way of the humiliated Christ.”(1) In my reading of Matthew, I am struck by the interplay between power and control, an interesting dynamic on which the writer has chosen to focus. Over and above the motif shared with Mark, Matthew seems to add a dimension of inquiry about power, and along with it, the hint that all is not as it seems: Who wants control? Who thinks they’re in control? Who is really in control? Roy Harrisville compares it to the paradox and reversal at the heart of Jesus’s ministry, the passion of Christ itself enacting “truths earlier hidden in the predictions and parables.”(2)

Thus, where Mark’s decisive crowd before Pilate yells, “Crucify him” (15:13 and again in 14b) and Luke’s crowd similarly, if more emphatically in the Greek, yells, “Crucify, crucify him!” (23:21), Matthew’s crowd twice yells, “Let him be crucified” (27:22b and 23b). There is a hint of a distancing of responsibility. The crowds indeed want the crucifying done, but done to him by someone else. Luke seems to further draw the distinction of choice and control, adding of his crowd, “And they were urgent, demanding with loud cries that he should be crucified. And their voices prevailed” (23:23).

Matthew’s account seems at first passive in the “who” of the act of crucifying, a crowd calling for death at a distance. Later Pilate, too, wants to distance himself from this responsibility, adding a hand-washing scene unique to Matthew’s narrative. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” says Pilate, “see to it yourselves” (27:24). The people, preferring control over the risk of release, answer, “His blood be on us and on our children” (27:25).

Now phrased in terms of blood, Matthew’s interplay of power and control is made all the more potent. Like Jesus’s many parables with their jarring sense of mysterion (mystery that is not hidden, but revealed), Matthew seems to suggest there is one in control indeed, but it is not the one who seems to be holding the power. The image of Christ’s blood upon this blind—though professing to see—crowd and their children is chilling. For unknowingly, they have declared the very thing that the humiliated servant has set out to do: His blood be on us and on our children.

Harrisville illustrates this all the more profoundly in his analysis of Matthew’s narrating of the Last Supper and the curious words of Jesus about the “blood of the covenant,” now explained in this passion narrative before us:

“The statement about the ‘blood of the covenant’ (26:28) will have its explanation in subsequent events, in Judas’s confession (‘I have sinned by betraying innocent blood’ [27:24]), in Pilate’s avowal of innocence (‘I am innocent of this man’s blood’ [27:4]), and in the people’s accepting responsibility for Jesus’s death (‘his blood be on us and on our children!’ [27:25]). All these will be the ‘many’ for whose forgiveness the blood of the covenant is poured out.“(3)

The story of Jesus as he moves toward the cross, told through eyes that remind us he has come for a world of unique individuals, is a story of power and weakness that turns our common assumptions and experience on its head. Like the parables, the way of the humiliated Christ confounds us, approaching in power, though hidden in the unlikely gift of a servant.

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

(1) Roy Harrisville, Fracture: The Cross as Irreconcilable in the Language and Thought of the Biblical Writers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 147.

(2) Ibid., 158.

(3) Ibid., 159.

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Absurdity and the Cross – Ravi Zacharias Ministry

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Doubt everything, find your own light.(1) So recommends the Buddha in his last words. It sounds like good advice, but then the human heart invariably presses on to doubt itself! After all, what kind of assurance can we have that this light is real light or true? The hunger for meaning, the quest for understanding, the search for answers and solutions are central features of the human condition.

For instance, what is the nature of reality? What is existence all about? What is the purpose of life, if any, and what should we try to give answers to? A much-neglected resource for reflection in this area is the book of Ecclesiastes, from the preacher, or Qoheleth in Hebrew. It is a book that speaks profoundly to our times by asking questions, by setting out contradictions, and by forcing the reader to feel what absurdity as an outlook is really like.

As the book opens, we are confronted with its most famous words, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity and a striving after wind.” Or in another translation of Ecclesiastes 1:2: “‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher, ‘Utterly Meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’” Not a very inspiring start! He has devoted himself to explore life, to examine what is good for humanity to do under the sun, and his observations have yielded some depressing results:  Everything in life seems to be bound by inevitability. Human freedom appears to be constrained by overwhelming necessities, leading to a sense of helplessness. And the endless cycle of repetition leads to a sense of boredom, pointlessness, and despair.

Many a sage, philosopher, and guru have come to similar conclusions. What is unique to Ecclesiastes is how the author tackles the issues and what he leads us to see. By laying out the vanities of life, the propensities of youth, the all-encompassing reach of death, and the vast urgency of wisdom as a potential life-philosophy, he engages a chaotic world with some serious reflections. The writer takes us on a journey through life, and he deals with the questions and exasperations that we all inevitably encounter. His own desire was to try and figure things out so he could live well and be content, and encourage others to do the same. He likely hoped to discover the key or missing ingredient, the clues to true and lasting success and happiness.

Instead, the world he begins to see is one that displays both good and bad at the same time. He sees the superiority of wisdom, yet even the wise are reduced by death. He sees injustice being done and oppressors prevailing, yet he also notes there is a higher justice. He cites the sayings and actions of wise people but then goes on to point out how quickly they are forgotten! It is the tone that wears on us. We see ambiguity and fuzziness, a mixture of pain and problems, food, friends, wisdom, and a spiritual hunger. These things all dwell in the same world at the same time, and this is a difficult reality for many of us to digest. Like Qoheleth, we want better answers, tidier analysis, more comforting visions—and we have them, but not here, in doubt and darkness.

Qoheleth shows us the futility of life without God. He makes us feel what life is like from an honest look at how things truly are. He gives us a severe picture of reality and suggests that God is still worth seeking somewhere in the midst of it. Even prior to the coming of the Messiah, Qoheleth paints our stark need for the God who is there.

While the world as we know it is indeed disordered and damaged, and to find answers in the world itself is absurd, God does not abandon us to absurdity. Into this world, into its pain and confusion, God, too, became flesh and dwelt among us. And it ended for Jesus as tragically as anything we observe under the sun. He went to the cross with the full force of every ugly, honest reality of Ecclesiastes on his shoulders. And he stood with us in that darkness, giving us an equally severe image of a God worth seeking in the midst of it.

Stuart McAllister is vice president of training and special projects at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Terry Breverton, Immortal Words: History’s Most Memorable Quotations and the Stories Behind Them (London: Quercus Publishing Place, 2009), 13.

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Dying Gods – Ravi Zacharias Ministry

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“God is dead,” declares Nietzsche’s madman in his oft-quoted passage from The Gay Science. Though not the first to make the declaration, Nietzsche’s philosophical candor and desperate rhetoric unquestionably attribute to its familiarity. In graphic brushstrokes, the parable describes a crime scene:

“The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God,’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I! All of us are his murderers…Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder?…Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”(1)

Nietzsche’s atheism, unlike recent atheistic mantras, was not simply rhetoric and angry words. He recognized that the death of God, even if only the death of an idol, introduced a significant crisis. He understood the critical role of the Christian story to the very underpinnings of European philosophy, history, and culture, and so understood that God’s death meant that a total—and painful—transformation of reality must occur. If God has died, if God is dead in the sense that God is no longer of use to us, then ours is a world in peril, he reasoned, for everything must change. Our typical means of thought and life no longer make sense; the very structures for evaluating everything have become unhinged. For Nietzsche, a world that considers itself free from God is a world that must suffer the disruptive effects of that iconoclasm.

Herein, Nietzsche’s atheistic tale tells a story beneficial no matter the creed or conviction of those who hear it. Gods, too, decompose. Nietzsche’s bold atheism held the intellectual integrity that refused to make it sound easy to live with a dead God—a conclusion the self-deemed new atheists are determined to undermine. Moreover, his dogged exposure of idolatrous conceptions of God wherever they exist and honest articulation of the crises that comes in the crashing of such idols is universal in its bearing. Whether atheist or theist, Muslim or Christian, the death of the God we thought we knew is disruptive, excruciating, tragic—and quite often, as Nietzsche attests, necessary.

Yet for Nietzsche and the new atheists, the shattering of religious imagery and concepts is simply deconstruction for the sake of deconstruction. Their iconoclasm ultimately seeks to reveal towers of belief as houses of cards best left in piles at our feet. On the contrary, for the theist, iconoclasm remains the breaking of false and idolatrous conceptions of God, humanity, and the cosmos. But added to this is the exposing of counterfeit motivations for faith, when fear or self-interest lead a person deeper into religion as opposed to love or truth, or when the source of all knowledge becomes something finite rather than the eternal God. While this destruction certainly remains the painful event Nietzsche foretold, God’s death turns out to be one more sign of God’s presence. As C.S. Lewis observed through his own pain at the death of the God he knew:

“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not.”(2)

For Lewis, it was the death of his wife that brought about the decomposition of his God. For others, it is the prevalence of suffering or the haunt of God’s silence that begets the troubling sense that our God is dying. At some profound level, the season of Lent takes us to God’s death as well, perhaps for some in more ways than one. Like the Incarnation, the crucifixion leaves most of our ideas in ruins at the foot of the cross. The journey to death and Golgotha is an offensive journey to take with God. But blessed are those who take it. Blessed are those in pain over the death of their Gods. Blessed are those who mourn at the tombs and take in the sorrow of the crime scenes. For theirs is somehow the kingdom of heaven, a kingdom somehow able to hold Golgotha, a kingdom able to hold death itself.

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

(1) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage, 1974), 181-182.

(2) C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 66.

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Wonderful Life – Ravi Zacharias Ministry

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“I know what I’m going to do for the next year, and the next year, and the year after that…I’m going to shake the dust off of this crummy old town and I’m going to see the world.”(1)

Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” is the classic film of Christmas holiday fare. It’s ubiquity on the airwaves belies its dismal performance at the box office when it was first released just after World War II.(2) Capra’s film follows the life of George Bailey in his small town. And while the film has a happy ending, it exposes the creeping despair and bitterness that comes from the loss of George’s dreams. The film offers a powerful visual of the gap that forms between knowing what George will do “the next year and the year after that” and the reality of living that leaves him wondering whether his is a wonderful life.

Despite the film’s often saccharine sentimentality, it nevertheless presents a realistic picture of lost or abandoned dreams. Like the film’s main character, George Bailey, many of us had dreams of “seeing the world” and “kicking the dust off” of our ordinary lives and existence. Our ideal plans and goals called us out into an ever-expanding future of possibility and adventure.

In this sense, “It’s a Wonderful Life” offers all who enter into its narrative a chance to look into the chasm between many cherished ideals and the often sober reality of our lives. This glimpse into what is often a gaping chasm of lost hopes and abandoned dreams offers a frightening opportunity to let go. Indeed, facing the death of ones’ dreams head on forces a moment of decision. Will we become bitter by fixating on what has been lost, or will we walk forward in hope on a path of yet unseen possibility?

For Christians, the journey through Lent offers a visible and living reminder of the fact that life entails death; it cannot be circumnavigated or avoided. Those who follow the path of Lent are presented with a similar decision: will the giving up of aspects we believe essential to our vision of a wonderful life lead us to bitterness or to hope? The discipline of Lent often reveals hands grasped tightly and tenaciously around ideals that must give way to new realities. Author M. Craig Barnes suggests that the journey away from our own sense of what makes for a wonderful life is actually the process of conversion. “It is impossible to follow Jesus and not be led away from something. That journey away from the former places and toward the new place is what converts us. Conversion is not simply the acceptance of a theological formula for eternal salvation. Of course it is that, but it is so much more. It is the discovery of God’s painful, beautiful, ongoing creativity along the way in our lives.”(3)

Lent takes those who seek to follow Jesus on an unwanted journey to the cross, and it extends an invitation to follow his example of willing surrender. “For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it; but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s shall save it.”  As Jesus prophesied to Peter, this invitation is to a place “where you do not wish to go” (John 21:18). The journey away from “the former place” is hard because we don’t want to abandon the places we think make for wonderful lives.

Yet, if we want to follow Jesus, we will have to abandon many, perhaps even all, of these cherished notions for our lives. We can choose to follow Jesus in his painful, beautiful death march to Golgotha—to die so that we may live—or we can retreat into what appears to be safe and certain ways of life. Significantly, Barnes argues that a wonderful life on our own terms is not a realistic option. “In spite of all our carefulness and hard work, we probably will not achieve the life of our dreams. In fact, our dreams are precisely the things that have abandoned us. But it is then that we hear the invitation of Jesus Christ, ‘Now is the opportunity to step out, walk forward and give your life to God.’”(5) It is a frightening invitation, to be sure, but one indeed that offers the possibility of a wonderful life.

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

(1) Spoken by George Bailey in the film “It’s a Wonderful Life” by Frank Capra, RKO Productions 1946, 60th Anniversary Edition.

(2) “The Making of ‘It’s A Wonderful Life,’” narrated by Tom Bosley on “It’s A Wonderful Life: 60th Anniversary Edition,” Paramount Home Entertainment, 2006.

(3) M. Craig Barnes, When God Interrupts: Finding New Life Through Unwanted Change (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 21.

(4) See Mark 8:27-38.

(5) M. Craig Barnes, 28.

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As Sure as the Sun – Ravi Zacharias Ministry

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Although it might be less obvious in some parts of the U.S., spring is around the corner. The crocuses are ready to announce themselves; the trees are whispering of new life. Once clandestine signs of spring are beginning to defy the last attempts of winter to hang on. The seasonal underdog begins to suggest brazenly that it again will triumph. With such optimistic signs abounding, it is strange for some of us to admit we find the season of spring a sobering time of year. The once stoic world around us is about to be in full bloom; all traces of winter are about to fade. Like the thawing of a frozen Narnia, the promise of rebirth announces itself. And there is something about it that spurs reflection, maybe even dismay, every time.

Perhaps it is simply that spring is somewhat shocking after the dead contrast of winter. It comes suddenly and almost scandalously, proclaiming the definitive end of a season that once seemed to have the final word. No matter how accustomed to the dead of winter we may have become, the vigor of spring will not be stopped, and we just might not feel ready for the metaphor. When all has seemed dead or dormant for so long, the possibility of new life is almost too much of a promise to let in—like beams of sunlight unleashed on exhausted eyelids. When one’s spirit feels lifeless within them, the budding hope of a suddenly resurrected forest proclaims a story that we may not be ready to hear.

This is one reason why I am grateful as a Christian for the season of Lent. The time leading up to the promise of Easter and the hope of resurrection is something like the early signs of spring. Indications of new life spring forth all around us, each with the shocking call that we must prepare ourselves for what is coming, reflect on the place of hope via the road of suffering, and face the forces and temptations that come at us along the way. It is not always easy to prepare one’s heart for the Cross of Christ, but the changing of seasons is upon us, and in it God beckons us forward. Henri Nouwen describes the tension eloquently:

“The season of Lent, during which winter and spring struggle with each other for dominance, helps us in a special way to cry out for God’s mercy.”(1)

For forty contemplative days, the season of Lent calls followers of Jesus to the wakeful awareness that we are human, we are dust, and we are falling short, but that there is a story reaching beyond our lifetimes, beyond our deaths, and our shortcomings, speaking new life where death stings and tears flow.

On the scene of a people who had lived with God’s silence for 400 years, this Jesus suddenly and scandalously appeared like a crocus in still-thawing ground. There had not been a word from God since the prophet Malachi. The heavens were cold and silent, and hope remained dormant within time’s wintry grasp. But beneath the frozen ground of apathy, sin, and death, the Spirit of God was stirring.  Spring was on its way. Lent invites us to stay awake to the knowledge that this hope is still so: “Let us acknowledge the LORD; let us press on to acknowledge him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth” (Hosea 6:3). If God is the maker of all creation then every season has a purpose, and today we are waiting for spring.

Of course, the journey to the Cross may take the believer through bleak and despairing seasons that make sanctification seem an unending winter. But we are being drawn to the very Cross that held the harbinger of spring and the hope of resurrection. As surely as the sun rises he will appear—again.

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

(1) Henri Nouwen, A Cry for Mercy: Prayers from the Genesee (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 43.

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Remember Me – Ravi Zacharias Ministry

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There is something comforting about the many characters in the Christian story of which we know very little. There was more to the story of the woman who knew that if she could just touch the fringe of Jesus’s robe she would be well. There was more to tell about the woman who anointed Jesus with a jar of perfume, or the thief who hung beside Jesus on the cross. Yet, we are told only that they will be remembered. And they are. However insignificant their lives were to society, they have been captured in the pages of history as people worth remembering, people who had a role in the story of God on earth, people remembered by God when multitudes wished them forgotten. It is to me a kind reminder that our fleeting lives are remembered by God long before others notice and long after they have stopped.

We know very little about the man named Simeon, but we know he was in the temple when he realized that God had remembered him. Reaching for the baby in the arms of a young girl, Simeon was moved to praise. As his wrinkled hands cradled the infant, Simeon sang to God: “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation” (Luke 2:29-30).

Simeon uses the language of a slave that has been freed. There is a sense of immediacy and relief, as if a great iron door has been unlocked and he is now free to go through it. God had remembered his promise even as God remembered the aging Simeon. The Lord had promised he would not die before he saw the Lord’s salvation. Now seeing and holding the child named Jesus, Simeon knew he was dismissed to death in peace.

Marveling at the bold reaction of a stranger, Mary and Joseph stood in awe. Upon laying eyes on their child, a man unknown to them pronounced he could now die in peace. They were well aware of God’s hand upon Jesus; yet here they seem to discover that the arm of God, which is not too short to save, extends far beyond anything they imagined.

Simeon’s blessing and words to Mary only furthered this certainty: “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too” (Luke 2:34-35). To these words as well, Mary and Joseph stood in awe.

In this Lenten season, followers of Jesus recall the symbol of the cross, the sword that pierced a mother’s heart, and the passion of the one who will continue to be spoken against. An old man in the temple hundreds of years ago, through a fraction of a scene in his life, reminds us still today that to look at Jesus is to physically look at the salvation of God. Whether peering at the child in the manger or the man on the cross, the human heart is yet revealed in its response to him. This is, in fact, our most memorable feature.

Perhaps the small excerpts of the many fleeting lives we find throughout the Christian story were meant to capture this very sentiment. As the thief peered into the bruised eyes of Jesus, like Simeon, he saw the salvation of God. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:42). And it was so.

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