The Jesus I Never Knew by Phillip Yancey

Author:Phillip Yancey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: ~ REVELATION
Published: 2005-02-05T02:03:13+00:00

"Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed," Jesus said to doubting Thomas after silencing his doubts with tangible proof of the Easter miracle. Except for the five hundred or so people to whom the resurrected Jesus appeared, every Christian who has ever lived falls into the category of "blessed." I ask myself, Why do I believe?—I, who resemble Thomas more than any other disciple in my skepticism and slowness to accept what cannot be proved beyond doubt.

I have weighed the arguments in favor of the resurrection, and they are indeed impressive.

The English journalist Frank Morison dealt with most of these arguments in the classic Who Moved the Stone? Although Morison had set out to discount the resurrection as a myth, the evidence convinced him otherwise. Yet I also know that many intelligent people have looked at the same evidence and found it impossible to believe. Although much about the Resurrection invites belief, nothing compels it. Faith requires the possibility of rejection, or it is not faith. What, then, gives me Easter faith?

One reason I am open to belief, I admit, is that at a very deep level I want the Easter story to be true. Faith grows out of a subsoil of yearning, and something primal in human beings cries out against the reign of death. Whether hope takes the form of Egyptian pharaohs stashing their jewels and chariots in pyramids, or the modern American obsession with keeping bodies alive until the last possible nanosecond and then preserving them with embalming fluids in double-sealed caskets, we humans resist the idea of death having a final say. We want to believe otherwise.

I remember the year I lost my three friends. Above all else, I want Easter to be true because of its promise that someday I will get my friends back. I want to abolish that word irreversible forever.

I suppose you could say I want to believe in fairy tales. I am not alone. Has any age not produced fairy tales? We first hear them in our cribs from parents and grandparents, and repeat them to our children who will tell them to their children, and on it goes. Even in this scientific age, some of the highest-grossing movies are variations of fairy tales: Star Wars, Aladdin, The Lion King. Astonishingly in light of human history, most fairy tales have a happy ending. That old instinct, hope, billows up. Like life, fairy tales include much struggle and pain, yet even so they manage to resolve in a way that replaces tears with smiles. Easter does that too, and for this as well as many other reasons, it rings true. *

* J. R. R. Tolkien, perhaps this century's greatest creator of fairy tales, often faced the charge that fantasy is an

"escapist" way of shifting attention away from the pressures of the "real world." His reply was simple: Everything depends on that from which one is escaping. We view the flight of a deserter and the escape of a prisoner very differently.

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