Two serious-minded unbelievers are walking home together, trying to make sense of the contemporary world. The dream of progress and enlightenment has run out of them. The consumerism and mass communication of the late twentieth century has blown a whistle on the world as they knew it. The post-industrial society provided no solution for, or even comfort to, the world in its current state, beset as it is with fanatic extremism, with a widening gap of rich and poor, with myths of a secular utopia (“if only we could get religion out of the public sphere!”), and with domination escalating and initiatives being manipulative.
Our two unbelievers walk along the road to a beach where the sea of faith is emptied. They are discussing, animatedly, how these things can be. How can the stories by which so many have lived come to let us down? How shall we replace our deeply uncertain cultural identities? What should we be doing in our world now that every dream of progress is stamped with the word “Babel”?
Into this conversation comes Jesus, incognito. “What are you talking about?” he asks. They stand there, looking sad. Then one of them says, “You must be about the only person in town who doesn’t know what a traumatic time the twenty-first century has become. The great intellectuals of the twentieth century were quite right: life is empty. We thought we’d brought peace to the middle east through war, and we’ve had nothing but more wars ever since. We had a sexual revolution, and now have an epidemic of sexual harassment and more lonely, confused people than ever before. We are so connected with one another through social media that we ignore the people sitting in front of us. We pursued wealth, but we had the global financial crisis and ended up with half the world in crippling debt. We can do what we like, but we’ve all forgotten why we liked it. Our dreams have gone sour, and we don’t even know who ‘we’ are anymore. And now even the church has let us down, corrupting its spiritual message by assuming worldwide liberty could be achieved by political persuasion and legislation.”
“Foolish one,” replies Jesus, “How slow of heart you are to believe all that the creator God has said! Did you never hear that he created the world wisely? And that he has now acted within his world to create a truly human people? And that from within these people he came to live as a truly human person? And that in his own death he dealt with evil once and for all? And that he is even now at work, by his own spirit, to create a new human family in which repentance and forgiveness of sins are the order of the day, and so challenge and overturn the rule of war, sex, money, and power?” And, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, and also the gospel evangelists and apostles of the New Testament, he interprets to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.
They arrive at the shore of the sea of faith. The waters, having retreated with the outgoing tide of the past century’s thoughts and beliefs, is full again, as the incoming tide of the present century’s theories and values proves the truth that when people stop believing in God, they do not believe in nothing, they believe in anything. On the shore, there stands a great hungry crowd—people who had cast their bread on the retreating waters of past ideas only to discover that the incoming tide of current ideals had brought them bricks and centipedes instead. The two travelers wearily begin to get out a small picnic basket, totally inadequate for the task. Jesus gently takes it from them, and within what seems like moments he has gone to and fro on the beach until everyone is fed. Then the eyes of them all are opened, and they realize who he is, and he vanishes from their sight. And the two say to each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us on the road, as he told us the story of the creator and his world, and his victory over evil?” And they rush back to tell their friends of what happened on the road and how he had been made known in the breaking of the bread.
This is not a story; it is a real-life drama. And the part of Jesus is played by you and me. This is the mission of Christ-followers in this self-illusioned world. The resurrected Jesus is still revealing himself through the men and women who walk among the unbelieving world in resurrection power, sharing his message of victory and hope.
This is the church’s assignment: To give the world the means to overcome disillusionment and despair. Give them a chance—they need it!
Go tell them, “He is risen!” He is risen, indeed.
The Garden Tomb – Jerusalem, Israel
