Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.
God is awake.
Victor Hugo
I study metaphor. All language is metaphoric, you know. The map is not the territory, right? The word is not the thing. Some “maps” are productive because they efficiently lead you to your destination without a lot of baggage and detours. Others are lousy.
Metaphors, like maps, select, reflect, and deflect reality. They build our drama of life. Our story. Our metanarrative. The evangelical buzz word for that is “worldview” or Weltanschauung, but that word is generally too passive for the morĂ©s of most rhetoricians. We like to criticize even the metaphor for our metaphors. ;)
So as God continued to teach me about how much He loved me, after I had heard a contradictory sermon on grace and another eisegetic sermon of the Christian life, I turned to the tools I knew best to understand it all. I turned to rhetorical criticism. I looked at metaphor.
So. Put on your rhetorical critic’s hat for a second, and look at this collection of metaphors from Jim Berg’s Changed Into His Image and Created for His Glory. What’s the story here?
There can be little doubt that God sees our independent spirit–the very thing that the world considers a virtue–as the root problem of man. Our heart says, ‘I will make life work my own way!’ It raises a clenched fist toward the heavens and asserts, ‘I will do it my way!’ . . . Here then is the defiance of our flesh. . . . This fleshly nature is perpetually at war with God. It will not be subject. It will not be ruled. It is no wonder, then, that when we begin to submit to the Spirit of God as He works in our lives that our flesh rises up and resists that work of God. We possess within us a clone of Satan’s own nature, and it violently opposes God (Changed Into His Image 36).
Personal separation from those elements of the believer’s environment that feed his flesh is not option; it is critical! The more corrupt our culture becomes, the greater the need for personal separation from the world. Personal separation from the world does not mean isolating ourselves from the world but rather insulating ourselves from its toxic, fleshly effect upon our souls. Let me illustrate it this way.
Today physicians and health-care professionals are more careful about protecting themselves from the AIDS virus because the possibility of exposure to it in their line of work has increased enormously. As a result, they do not reuse needles, and they wear surgical gloves and sometimes masks. They are extremely careful about contact with bodily fluids. They are not less careful because “we live in a modern age.” They are more careful because we live in a “corrupted age.” In the same way, believers who are concerned about their spiritual health will be more careful in this increasingly corrupt culture. There are more dangers to their souls–not fewer. The pagan, sensual, materialistic environment around them is more contaminated with ungodliness. The need for circumspect living is greater today–not less.
When you seem to be susceptible to every fleshly ‘bug’ in the atmosphere, it is probably because your spiritual immune system isn’t functioning. You have been “quenching the Spirit” by indulging the flesh. You can never get “well” until you stop your contact with contaminating elements around you. That may mean your entertainment habits (movies, music, magazines, recreational habits, etc.) or personal friendships must change . Whatever is dragging you down must be ‘put off.’ In addition, your immune system must be built up. Our Lord is serious about our avoidance of fleshly indulgence (Changed Into His Image 103-04).
The best strategy for any cancer treatment is early detection and treatment. The same is true of the soul. Early detection of the flesh’s activity and early treatment are the surest remedy (Changed Into His Image 108).
When I think of my position as a servant of God, I think of how my service is so primitive when compared to His own capabilities. I can ‘fetch his paper,’ but I get saliva on the rolled-up newsprint and may even tear a portion of a page with my fangs in the process. When I come into the house, I track mud on His carpet before I know what I’m doing. Yet He still says, ‘well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ That amazes me! Somehow my eagerness to obey Him and my attempt to do His bidding to the best of my ‘canine’ ability is pleasing to Him, though my efforts are so flawed. When I think of these things, I can only look up at His face and say to Him, ‘What a wonderful Master You are! No one compares to You. I’m so delighted to be Your pet.’ When He hears that eager praise from me, He is particularly delighted because I see Him as He really is–first of all! in this small way, I glorify Him by finding my greatest delight in Him. . . . It is in this way that we were created for His glory. We can glorify Him as one of His ‘pets’–beings created for His pleasure–as we acknowledge and enjoy His ‘firstness’ (Created for His Glory 34-35).
Now, collect all those together. The redeemed are inhabited both by Satan’s clone and God’s Spirit, and these bitter enemies are at war inside us. “The world” joins the battle and attacks us with a sort of biochemical warfare where even casual and unprotected contact puts us at risk. Spiritual “surgical gloves” are necessary to protect our spiritual lives. Adding to the crisis, even in childhood the flesh/sin is a cancer eating away at our souls so that we need spiritual chemotherapy very early if God will use us at all. And if all goes well–if the clone gets resisted, the gloves are regularly used, and the chemotherapy works–ideally, we’ll become God’s submissive pet.
Now, in contrast, look at Paul’s metaphors:
God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in him. After God made that decision of what his children should be like, he followed it up by calling people by name. After he called them by name, he set them on a solid basis with himself. And then, after getting them established, he stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he had begun.
So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture:
They kill us in cold blood because they hate you.
We’re sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one.None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.
No ifs, ands, or buts. No “if you do this, then you get God’s grace.” The battle was over at the cross, and we’re just cleaning up the damage now. We’re through and through God’s children, not His pets! He doesn’t withhold His love waiting for us to act like we should. No father would! He loves us first just because He’s chosen to.
When I’ve talked with fundamentalists about Berg’s metaphors, every one of them has disagreed with them. Even Jim Berg himself has dismissed the “clone” metaphor to me as just “literary flourish.” The general consensus among his readers is, “Well, he goes too far.” And that’s fair enough. But that is the problem. That is the definition of a “Hedge around the Torah”–another metaphor used to describe the Pharisees’ fear of breaking the law and adding a protective “hedge” or barrier around it. And in constructing the “hedge” they were obscuring the fulfillment of the Torah–Christ.
I’m not questioning anyone’s sincerity or earnestness or salvation. But these metaphors are mistaken–gravely mistaken.
And I had to say something.
We make rules. We bend rules. Humanly speaking, there’s really no difference between ours and theirs except power. I know I sound like Nietzsche and Foucault. But those guys were right really. Without God, it’s all about power.
Recently I found a couple of ugly and public things said about me. Honestly, it hurt. I probably shouldn’t let it, but it did. In both cases, the commenters were imposing their rules of propriety on me. They were judge, jury, and executioner. In passing their judgment, they put me at arms length to improve their own standing with little empathy for me and mine.
And in my saying all that, I’m trying to understand how they came to those conclusions and to remember how often I do the same.
I’ve perceived a lot of rules lately. I’ve seen the irritation from people who were frustrated by my dear four-and-a-half-year-old when he dresses as Link and wears all his weapons at once. I’ve felt the disgust when I’ve taken my preschoolers for a walk where someone has deemed I shouldn’t. I’ve heard people complain about how ill-tempered those other children are. I’ve read Mommy bloggers who grouse about those horrible mothers who cut off the crusts from their PB&J sandwiches.
Even now, I’m sure some of you are constructing reasons I shouldn’t have a clip from Friends on my blog. “Dear me! Can you believe that? Doesn’t she know that that’s an anti-Christian show and that she’s promoting unholy living by posting it on her blog? ‘I will set no wicked thing before my eyes!’ I would never do that!”
Sigh. . . . We can so easily see the fleck of mascara on someone else’s face, but those rivers of black eye liner that are streaked down our cheeks? We’re oblivious to those. And I do the same thing.
Grant often repeats back to me, “S/he’s not evil, just mistaken.” When he does that, he’s reminding me of my own take on a Burkean principle and what I believe is a Christian ethic. He’s right — to nudge me and to bring me outside of myself. To steer me away from the fundamental attribution error. We all need that kind of help. That’s why God gave us each other because when one of us stumbles, we need our friends there to help us up.
Sanctification is a team sport after all.
So a toddler’s-lifetime-ago, my parents gave us my old Fisher Price Little People toys. I played with these things for weeks at a time. I later graduated to Barbies, of course, and then the Sims. It’s especially hilarious to turn off the “free-will” setting on The Sims.
Now, let me tell you about my toy-friends. My Raggedy Ann met her alopeciac fate when she went crossways with the washing machine. My Barbies had similar trouble. Well, first of all, they weren’t actually Barbies per se. They were Barbie’s younger groupies, Francie and Skipper (all from Malibu). My mother believed that these models were more realistically shaped (I do agree with her there!). Now, Francie was known in my little world as “Francie the Handicapped Barbie.” Through some unfortunate accident that none of us remember, Francie lost an arm. Now, the other Barbies still loved her — Dorothy Hamill (whose Bicentennial Olympic duds were soooo cool), Quick Curl Skipper (whose hair I genuinely coveted), Growing Up Skipper (whose quick-change gifts were intriguing and quite disturbing), Ballerina (whose sparkly head gear wouldn’t. come. off!), Supersize (whose gigantic proportions frightened all humanoids — both petroleum- and carbon-based. Clearly my dear mother had given up her goals of realistic feminine models by 1978). You see, I had my own little rules I enforced in my created world of little people, and that included a sort of plastic kindness to the armless and balding.
I’m sure you played with your people similarly. You had rules — rules that made perfect sense to you. No, the Little People lady in blue is not the postal carrier. She’s the police woman!! Can’t you tell?? The African-American man is the dentist, not the barber. We’re trying to quash sexual and racial stereotypes in this town!! No, the bed in the castle doesn’t go there. The throne goes there. Can’t you see that you’re blocking the passage to the trap door if you put it there? No, no, no, Francie can’t wear that dress! It only embarrasses her because it highlights her handicap!!
So as Isaac and I sit down to play with my vintage Little People or with his cars or pirates or “red coats and blue coats,” the same thing happens. I sit there thinking, “NO! The teacher’s desk has to go here. It’s the only place it fits!” While Isaac says, “Mommy, you can’t park the green car here. It always goes here.” “Always?” I think. “ALWAYS?? Are you kidding me? I was playing with these toys before you were even born. I certainly know where everything goes!!”
Well, I don’t say that. I am 35 years older than he, so I can refrain.
But I remember the War card game we had played just a few hours before. He negotiates over seemingly arbitrary but actually objective rules while rigidly enforcing his own. Well, pardon me. . . . We negotiate over seemingly arbitrary but actually objective rules while rigidly enforcing our own. I do it as much as he does. I just have more rules and more “weight.” I’m the Supersize Barbie to his Little Person Mail Carrier. Life’s taught me subtlety not righteousness, and it’s given me a few-more-than-I-need extra pounds to enforce it.
We’re both playing, then, in our Mythic-Literal developmental stage. Isaac’s jumping ahead briefly, and I’m regressing. In Stages of Faith, James W. Fowler describes this usually school-age developmental stage as follows:
Stage 2 Mythic-Literal faith is the stage in which the person begins to take on for him- or herself the stories, beliefs, and observances that symbolize belonging to his or her community. Beliefs are appropriated with literal interpretations, as are moral rules and attitudes. Symbols are taken as one-dimensional and literal in meaning. In this stage the rise of concrete operations leads to the curbing and ordering of the previous stage’s imaginative composing of the world. . . . The limitations and literalness and an excessive reliance upon reciprocity as a principle for constructing an ultimate environment can result in either an overcontrolling, stilted perfectionism or “works righteousness” or in their opposite, an abasing sense of badness embraced because of mistreatment, neglect, or the apparent disfavor of significant others (149-50).
A tad revealing, eh? Wiki puts it this way:
In psychology, hypocritical behavior is closely related to the fundamental attribution error: individuals are more likely to explain their own actions by their environment, yet they attribute the actions of others to ‘innate characteristics’, thus leading towards judging others while justifying ones’ own actions.
Also, some people genuinely fail to recognize that they have character faults which they condemn in others. This is called psychological projection. This is self-deception rather than deliberate deception of other people. In other words, “psychological hypocrisy” is usually interpreted by psychological theorists to be an unconscious defense mechanism rather than a conscious act of deception, as in the more classic connotation of hypocrisy. People understand vices which they are struggling to overcome or have overcome in the past. Efforts to get other people to overcome such vices may be sincere. There may be an element of hypocrisy as well if the actors do not readily admit to themselves or to others how far they are or have been subject to these vices.
In other words, each of us earnestly believes that our own rules are good and required and even biblical (or based on biblical principle). Others’ rules are arcane, irrelevant, illogical, juvenile, or just plain stupid. And we follow our own rules just perfectly while all those other scofflaws are dooming themselves to perdition. Sure, people call us hypocrites, but they just don’t know the Rules like we do! Tsk-tsk. Well, we all know that we will be rewarded, and they will be punished.
Right?
But the idling of our elders is called business; the idling of boys, though quite like it, is punished by those same elders, and no one pities either the boys or the men.
I loved board games and card games as a kid, and I still do. I’m always willing to play Settlers or Dominoes or Rage (an acceptable-to-Baptists version of the old stand-by face card game “Oh Hell.” I didn’t name it, remember!). My older brother wasn’t always available to play games with me when I really started to understand them, but we did play more than our share of Battleship and PayDay. My mom was always willing to play Uno or Go to the Head of the Class or Chutes and Ladders, but she couldn’t stomach the Game of Life. “Too realistic!” she claimed. And I quickly found out that playing Clue with the cat just wasn’t going to work.
Isaac has just taken to games. He likes “Goggle,” “Hippos,” and, just recently, War. I think it’s as much the soldiers on the cards as anything. And you know, there are some big lessons there — turn-taking, counting, comparing numeral values, and following the rules.
It’s that last one that trips us up. Isaac, the just newly minted 4.5 year old, rewrites the rules as we play. I lay down a nine and he lays down a four. “Mommy, didn’t you want to trade that one with me first?” “Mommy, but this one has a sword, and I reeeeeally like swords.” I just stare and sigh and then grin and remember, shaking my head more at myself than anything.
I did the same thing. Maybe that’s why the cat was the most willing to play with me because she didn’t care if I took a peek at her next card or traded my Scrabble tray of vowels for some of her consonants.
And Augustine’s reminder plunks me between the eyes every time Isaac revises the game play. It’s not the kids are any different than adults. Adults bend or make up the rules as we go. It’s just kids aren’t as skilled at hiding it.
Life teaches us to be sneaky, not to be good.
One may preach a covenant of grace more clearly than another. . . . But when they preach a covenant of works for salvation, that is not truth.
You have no power over my body, neither can you do me any harm. I fear none but the great Jehovah, which hath foretold me of these things, and I do verily believe that he will deliver me out of your hands.
Anne Hutchinson at Trial
Ever wonder how Wikipedia will document your life story in 300 years? I feel like I just read mine when I perused Anne Hutchinson’s.
I always just kind of dismissed her as a nut — you know, an outspoken crazy woman with a sad obstetric history that ticked off a powerful man who simply labeled her a heretic. Nothing of consequence there, right?
Oh, dear me.
Needless to say, I’m not going to be inviting in any group of wandering natives anytime soon.
If you caught my Ebenezer series (which ended with this final post), you’d be interested to know that the final chapter, removed from my book under threat of termination, is now published in this month’s Kenneth Burke Journal under the title, “Publish and Perish?: My Fundamentalist Education from the Inside Out.” It includes an explanation of those events leading up to that chapter’s expunging.
Awhile back I read Phil Yancey’s first chapter in Soul Survivor. I was floored. The world he described was so alien to me. I grew up in Detroit, and he grew up in Atlanta. Racism in Detroit is more unspoken — an undertow of white fear and flight keeps the civic tension just below a simmer. Racism in Atlanta in the middle of the last century was unashamedly overt and outspoken. Yancey was raised hearing that the “dark races” were the result of God’s curse. In his native Georgia the gas stations all had three bathrooms for white men, white women, and colored. The museums set aside one day a week for “coloreds” to attend. Yancey remembers buying a Lester Maddox “Junior” size souvenir pickax handle similar to the ones that policemen used on demonstrators. He witnessed the KKK parades.
I, of course, had read those descriptions before. My parents had even mentioned to me how startled they were by the segregation when they drove through Georgia on their honeymoon in the 50s. White Northerners really have no idea. We’re kind of dumb like that. And we can move easily between our white world in Detroit and South Carolina–even if we do have a ’ski’ at the end of our names–and the only culture shock we feel is the sweetness of the tea we’re served or the quaintness of the drawl we hear.
But that was a long time ago, I always reasoned. That kind of racism is for old people or stupid people, right? That’s for people who are absolutely not like me, right? . . . RIGHT??
That’s why Yancey’s account still sends chills down my spine. He grew up a “New Testament, Blood-bought, Born-again, Premillenial, Dispensational, fundamental” Protestant just like me. He attended some unnamed Bible college in South Carolina that forbid interracial dating and marriage. Scratching my head, I searched my employer’s records for Yancey’s name–without success. Was he talking about BJU?
Connecting the dots wasn’t that hard. Whether or not Yancey attended BJU wasn’t the point. This was the South and the so-called religion that created BJU. I couldn’t distance myself from it any further. This was the ideology that bore the system in which I lived, worked, ministered, and was raising my family.
Read Yancey for yourself.
When I visited Mendenhall in 1974, a sign welcomed me to town: “White people unite, defeat Jew/Communist race mixers.” I asked John Perkins [Yancey's African-American friend] to show me an example of racism in action. “When I write your story, people are going to tell me everything has changed,” I said. “The civil rights bill was ten years ago. Is there still overt discrimination?”
Perkins thought for a minute and suddenly his face brightened: “I know — let’s integrate the Revolving Table restaurant!” We drove to an elegant restaurant famous for its mechanized Lazy Susan, which slowly revolves in the center of a huge table, bearing platters of blackeyed peas, squash, cabbage, sweet potatoes, chicken and dumplings, and other Southern favorites. When we sat down, the white diners all glared at us and then, as if at a prearranged signal, got up and moved away to smaller tables. Except for Perkins and me, no one in the restaurant spoke for the next hour. I ate uneasily, glancing over my shoulder, expecting a nightstick. When I paid the bill and commented on the delicious food, the hostess took my money without responding or even looking me in the eye. I had the tiniest glimpse of the hostility Perkins had lived with all his life.
Two months later, when I published my article on John Perkins, the Mississippi branch of the Christian organization I worked for passed a resolution demanding that I be fired for stirring up bad memories. “Things have changed now,” they said. “Why dig up the past?”
Why indeed? Almost three decades have passed since my Missisisippi visit, and the great civil rights victories are nearing the half¬century milestone. We live in a new century now, a new millennium even, and much has indeed changed. Nowadays, black patrons in Mississippi can eat wherever they want, drink from any water fountain, sleep in any motel. The victories that Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evans, Bob Moses, John Perkins, and many others fought for were won — legally, at least — although they waited a full century after the Emancipation Proclamation. Progressive Southerners from Georgia, Arkansas, and Texas have served as president. Black visitors can attend white churches at will, though they seldom want to. All these dreams seemed unattainable to Martin Luther King, Jr., just four decades ago. As a token of the momentous changes, the nation now pauses each year to honor King himself, object of so much controversy during his lifetime, on a national holiday. He is the only African-American, the only minister, and indeed the only individual American so honored.
The victories did not come easily, and most did not come at all during his lifetime. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, an uneasy rival of Dr. King, kidded him in 1963 that his methods had not achieved a single victory for integration in Albany or Birmingham. “In fact, Martin, if you have desegregated anything by your efforts, kindly enlighten me.”
“Well,” King replied, “I guess about the only thing I’ve desegregated so far is a few human hearts.” He knew that the ultimate victory must be won there. Laws could prevent white people from lynching blacks, but no law could require races to forgive or love one another. The human heart, not the courtroom, was his supreme battleground. As one of those changed hearts, I would have to agree.
King had developed a sophisticated strategy of war fought with grace, not guns. He countered violence with nonviolence and hatred with love. King’s associate Andrew Young remembers those turbulent days as a time when they sought to save “black men’s bodies and white men’s souls.” Their real goal, King said, was not to defeat the white man but “to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority…. The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community.” And that is what Martin Luther King, Jr., finally set into motion, even in born racists like me.
Despite the moral and social fallout from racism, somehow the nation did stay together, and people of all colors eventually joined the democratic process in America, even in the South. For some years now, Atlanta has elected African-American mayors, including civil rights leader Andrew Young. Even Selma, Alabama, has a black mayor, who in the year 2000 defeated the mayor who had held office since the notorious march. And old “Segregation forever!” George Wallace appeared in his wheelchair before the black leadership of Alabama to apologize for his past behavior, an apology he repeated on statewide television. When Wallace went on to apologize to the Baptist church in Montgomery where King had launched the movement, the leaders who came to offer him forgiveness included Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson, and the brother of the murdered Medgar Evers.
In 1995 the Southern Baptist Convention, 150 years after forming over the issue of slavery, formally repented of their long-term support of racism. (A pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church responded, “Finally we have a response to Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham City jail’ in 1963. Too bad it’s thirty-two years too late.”)
Even the large Baptist church I attended in my childhood learned to repent. When I attended a service several years ago, I was shocked to find only a few hundred worshipers scattered in the large sanctuary that, in my childhood, used to be packed with 1,500. The church seemed cursed. Finally the pastor, a classmate of mine from childhood, took the unusual step of scheduling a service of repentance. In advance of the service he wrote to Tony Evans and to the shunned Bible professor, asking their forgiveness. Then publicly, painfully, with African-American leaders present. he recounted the sin of racism as it had been practiced by the church in the past. He repented, and received their forgiveness. Although a burden seemed to lift from the congregation after that service, it was not sufficient to save the church. A few years later the white congregation moved out to the suburbs, and today a rousing African-American Congregation, the Wings of Faith, fills the building and rattles its windows once more.
Observers of the South sometimes speak of it as “Christ-haunted.’ Perhaps they should speak of it as “race-haunted” as well. All of us, white or black, who grew up in those days bear scars. Some black people, like John Perkins and Bob Moses, bear physical scars. We whites bear spiritual scars. Although I have not lived in the South for thirty years, I live with its memories, like the medieval murderers who were forced to wear the corpses of their victims strapped to their backs. The entire nation bears scars. Who would suggest that we have achieved anything like “the beloved community” King longed for?
I have visited King’s old church in Atlanta, Ebenezer Baptist, and sat in tears as I saw through new eyes the moral center of the black community that gave them strength to fight against bigots like me. I was on the outside in those days, cracking jokes, spreading rumors, helping sustain a system of evil. Inside the church, and for a time only inside the church, the black Community stood tall. My eyes, blinded by bigotry, could not see the Kingdom of God at work.
A few years before his death, King was asked about mistakes he had made. He replied, “Well, the most pervasive mistake I have made was in believing that because our cause was just, we could be sure that the white ministers of the South, once their Christian consciences were challenged, would rise to our aid. I felt that white ministers would take our Cause to the white power structures. I ended up, of course, chastened and disillusioned. As our movement unfolded, and direct appeals were made to white ministers, most folded their hands–and some even took stands against us. . . .
Only one thing haunts me more than the sins of my past: What sins am I blind to today? It took the greatness of Martin Luther King, Jr., to awaken the conscience of a nation in the last century. What keeps us in this new century from realizing the beloved community of justice, peace, and love for which King fought and died? On the wrong side of what issues does the church stubbornly plant its feet today? As King used to say, the presence of injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Occasionally, grace and power descend on great and flawed leaders to convict and lead us on. In the end, it was not King’s humanitarianism that got through to me, nor his Ghandian example of nonviolent resistance, nor his personal sacrifices, inspiring as those may be. It was his grounding in the Christian gospel that finally made me conscious of the beam in my eye and forced me to attend to the message he was proclaiming. Because he kept quoting Jesus, eventually I had to listen. The church may not always get it right–and it may take centuries or even millennia for its eyes to open–but when it does, God’s own love and forgiveness flow down like a stream of living water.
The other women rushed home, but Mary stayed behind. How could it be true? Jesus was definitely dead — how could he be alive?
Just then Mary heard someone else in the garden. Perhaps it’s the gardener, she thought. He’ll know where Jesus’ body is.
“I don’t know where Jesus is!” Mary said urgently. “I can’t find him.”
But it was alright. Jesus knew where she was. And he had found her.
“Mary!”
Only one person said her name like that. She could feel hear heart thumping. She turned around. She could just make out a figure. She shaded her eyes to see . . . and thought she was dreaming.
But she wasn’t dreaming. She was seeing.
“Jesus!”
Mary fell to the ground. Sudden tears filled her eyes and great sobs shook her whole body, and all she wanted in that moment was to cling to Jesus and never let him go.
“You’ll be able to hold on to me later, Mary,” Jesus said gently, “and always be close to me. But now, go and tell the others that I’m alive!”
Mary ran and ran, all the way to the city. She had never run so fast or so far in all her life. She felt she could have run forever. She didn’t even feel like her feet touched the ground. The sun seemed to be dancing and gleaming and bounding across the sky, racing with her and shining brighter than she could ever remember in the clear, fresh air.
And it seemed to her that morning, as she ran, almost as if the whole world had been made anew, almost as if the whole world was singing for joy — the trees, tiny sounds in the grass, the birds . . . her heart.
Was God really making everything sad come untrue? Was he making even death come untrue?
She couldn’t wait to tell Jesus’ friends. “They won’t believe it!” she laughed.
She was right, of course.
Sally Lloyd-Jones, The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name