(Capitolul face part dintr-o cărțulie intitulată ,,Discuții la o cafea“ de Fincher Dale și Jonalyn Fincher)

Last summer, I (Dale) went on a Jeeping trip with my friend Ted through a difficult mountain pass. After braving rock obstacles and high mountain tundra, we stopped for lunch alongside a lake. We relived the trek to the top, play by play, swapping stories. Our conversation moved to the quietness of the outdoors, special places that remove us from the day-to-day craziness in the world. Then we happened upon the future and suffering, and I shared about my mother’s cancer.

“My mother used to joke, ‘I’m not in the mood to have cancer today!’”

Ted laughed, “I don’t think any day would be a good day for cancer, or for any other kind of suffering.”

“My mom talked a lot about pain in her last few years. I don’t know why we have so much of it. When I read the Bible I find some explanations in there, but pain still seems to be everywhere, and more than we need.”

“Yes!” Ted said as he bit into his energy bar. “My frustration with most religion is that nobody understands pain. Everyone tries to get rid of it, just like I do. But it’s there.”

“What do you do with the pain in your life?”

“Meditation works pretty well. I don’t have to blame God, because he might not even exist or be in control. So I work it out on my own.”

“How is that working for you?” I asked, fiddling my fingers over some pine needles.

“Pretty good—like yesterday, my day was upside down. My boss blamed me for things, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. So I took my lunch break to slow down and refocus. I realized that my boss could blame me, but I didn’t have to take it. I could let it go without being angry. If I didn’t return blame to him, I keep protecting myself. That gave me a positive outlook.”

“Totally!” I said. “My mom used to say, ‘If it doesn’t apply, let it fly.’ Not always easy, especially when your job is on the line. Looks like you found a way to manage.” I paused, and then asked, “Does meditation help you cope with large suffering, like terminal suffering, or even answer the problem of death, like in my mother’s situation?”

“I take it a day at a time. Once death comes, either I’ll just disappear or my spirit will become one with the universe. I’ll find out when it happens. Your mom had to find her own way, you know?”

“I guess so. But wouldn’t it be great if we knew someone who did know? When I was a kid, I regretted that I didn’t tell my great-grandmother to try to contact me after she died, so she could tell me what it was like. She was almost 102. And for a while, I was upset at myself for not asking her that favor.”

“Well, even if you had asked her, I don’t know if she could have. You don’t hear of the deceased talking to the living. It’s kinda hokey,” Ted said.

“Yeah. Then I stumbled on something that I’d heard people talk a lot about, but I hadn’t considered in a while.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you know the Bible talks about Jesus, who went to the other side and came back to tell us about it?”

“But that’s what every religion says,” Ted protested. “Buddha shows up in others to help people reach nirvana. And the old mystical religions have dying and rising gods. Besides Jesus is in the same book as stories like Jonah and the whale. How on earth could that happen?”

Just because a religion says it’s true, doesn’t mean it’s true.

“Good question. Actually Jonah is in another book from Jesus’ story. They’re hundreds of years apart, so that’s not too big a problem to me. And I’m glad you brought up Buddha. Something I’ve never been able to understand about him is if he comes as different people, how would we know it’s the same person back from the hereafter? But Jesus showed up again as the same guy who died just a few days earlier.”

“Okay, I see that. But you’re still getting your facts from the Bible. It’s so old and it’s been corrupted or at least changed.

“I’ve got some ideas about that; it’s a question I’ve had. But just a sec, do you think it’s even possible for a religion to be more true than another?”

“Maybe. But how would you know? Because a priest just told you so?”

“If I was going to invent a story as a power-move to dupe the world, I wouldn’t include parts that were embarrassing to me.”

“I’m with you. Just because a religion says it’s true, doesn’t mean it’s true. We could both write all sorts of maxims and practices for others to follow, but that doesn’t mean it’s true, like God isn’t happy with you if you don’t like Jeeping!” We both laughed. “Do you mind if I share something I find interesting?”

“Sure,” Ted said.

“If I was going to invent a story as a power-move to dupe the world, I wouldn’t include parts that were embarrassing to me. For example, if I wrote a book on how cool I am and why everyone should follow my example, I probably wouldn’t include the story of when I stayed at a friend’s house, as an adult, and accidentally wet the bed.

“You wet the bed? Ha! Sorry, dude, that’s pretty bad.”

“For sure!” I laughed. “I couldn’t figure out a way to hide it, so I just ‘fessed up boldly at the breakfast table. I felt like a five-year-old. But you know, I’m sure I’m not the only one.” I glanced at Ted with a smirk to see if he’d admit it.

“Well, I haven’t done it. Man, I hope I never do.”

“Yeah, but if you do, just know you’re not alone in the bed-wetting club!” I said. Ted laughed.

“Okay, back to my point. If I were to write the bed-wetting story in a book next to a bunch of stories about how cool I am, which stories would you think were most true.” “The bed-wetting story.”

“Why?”

“Why would you put that in there? It kills your story!”

“Yeah, I think so too! Okay, now let’s look at Jesus for a minute.”

“Does it say Jesus wet the bed?” Ted joked.

“Ha! Not exactly. But the same principle applies. Some people say the church just made up this story to have power over people. But what if there are embarrassing things in the story that keep people from taking the church seriously?”

“Like what?”

“Like the point man. The leading speaker for the church in the Bible is Peter. That’s why the Catholic Church, for example, says Peter was the first pope.

“Oh, yeah, I’ve heard that,” Ted said.

“But Peter isn’t a very good example of an upstanding leader in the time of Jesus.”

“Isn’t he the guy who tried to walk on water?”

“Yeah! But he failed after he took a few steps. He kept slipping in. He also refused three times to be called Jesus’ friend when Jesus was being tortured.”

“He was probably scared out of his mind. I would have done the same thing.”

“Me too. But that’s not a good reputation for Peter. At one point he corrected Jesus’ plans, and Jesus said to him, ‘Get behind me, Satan.’” I paused and smiled, “If you’re going to dupe the world with your holy book, you don’t call your leading spokesman ‘Satan.’”

Ted smiled but was listening intently. “Yep, that’s embarrassing and interesting. And the Popes are all proud of Peter.”

“And if the Bible were invented, we see some strange details that you would never put into a book designed to deceive people. The stories of Peter tell us that maybe the Bible wasn’t invented after all. But there’s a more important moment to look at, to see if it is embarrassing.”

“Like what?”

“Like what happened three days after Jesus died. We want to ask whether Jesus knows anything about death and what is on the other side of death? Has he seen it?”

“Okay, right, how would we know he has seen it? Has he sent us signs from heaven, writing it on the sky?”

Ted chuckled. “Even better. He rose from the dead. If the story about his rising from the dead was embarrassing, would you at least consider that maybe it wasn’t invented?

“It depends.”

“Here’s something embarrassing: Look at how people treated women in the ancient world. They were considered to be property—gullible, untrustworthy, subhuman types. Women weren’t even allowed to testify in a court of law because their words were considered as useless as a thief’s.”

Ted chuckled, as I continued: “Now, if you’re going to trick the world into thinking Jesus rose from the dead, you’d be better off writing in some male professor on a morning stroll who found the tomb, documented it, and told all his colleagues about it at the University of Jerusalem. That’s what I would expect from an invented document.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.” Ted said. “Did they have universities back then?”

“Well, sort of. They could have made up someone from the Jewish court of law. You’d want someone credible discovering the empty tomb, right?”

“I get it. But who found the empty tomb?”

“Women,” I said.

“Are you serious?”

“Totally serious. Isn’t that peculiar? In all four stories about Jesus rising from the dead, every one of them says that women discovered the empty tomb first.

“And that’s embarrassing too. Hmmm, very interesting. I’ve never heard that before,” Ted said.

“Yeah, I hadn’t heard of it until recently either,” I said. “It helped me because I’m naturally pretty skeptical about miracles. It gave me some interesting evidence that the story might be true.”

“So what if it is true? Did Jesus talk about the afterlife?”

The average conversation can’t possibly contain everything we could say, so it makes sense to focus on the key Christian event.

“He did. He told us before he died and after he died. He must have known what he was talking about, because he didn’t change his teaching about the Scripture, about what God was like. Since he rose from the dead, he must be onto something.”

“I need to think about this. I’ve never thought religious stuff could make sense. I thought you just needed faith,” Ted said.

We gathered up our trash and hopped in our driver’s seats. The trail home was as fun as the trail up the mountain. Ted didn’t bring up Jesus again on the trip. Neither did I. But there’s always another mountain to climb.

The Central Fact of our Faith

As we’ve explained (“Mountains That Are Molehills,” page 161), we’re easily tempted to follow a red herring and derail from the main point in discussions about God. Archaeology and Jonah and the whale are great topics on their own, but often they keep us away from introducing Jesus. The average conversation can’t possibly contain everything we could say, so it makes sense to focus on the key Christian event.

When an opportunity arises to be specific about our faith, once we have earned a hearing from our audience, we point directly at the resurrection of Jesus. Out of this story flows our faith for loving and following Jesus. The resurrection comforts us when we lay alone with our thoughts of pain and death. The resurrection speaks to our friends’ (and our own) deepest questions.

Paul tells us our faith is meaningless without the Messiah’s resurrection.a And though many features of the Scriptures can be shown to be accurate through historical data, the resurrection helps listeners see Jesus’ life, death, and miracles as something that might have actually happened.

The resurrection lets us introduce our friends to Jesus, perhaps for the first time.

Why Talk about the Resurrection?

For anyone we speak with, regardless of age, the resurrection stands out in bold relief, framing Jesus as a one-of-a-kind religious founder. For us, the resurrection means more than heaven. The resurrection of Jesus is the core of our theology, the reason we believe Jesus has the power to make us appropriately human and restore the whole world. The resurrection shows that Jesus knew what he was talking about.

The resurrection shows that Jesus knew what he was talking about.

He is an expert on both heaven and earth, the only spokesman we know who has literally lived on both sides of reality, the physical world and the spiritual world, and was able to tell us about it. He not only came from heaven to earth, but after he died, he confirmed it, traveling into the spiritual world and undoing death unlike anyone else. Unlike reincarnation, Jesus returned as the same person, with the same voice, with his personal history intact.

The resurrection verifies Scripture. Since Jesus rose from the dead it shows us that he knows what he’s talking about. Therefore, we want to know and follow his views of life and God. Jesus quoted from the Hebrew Scriptures. Because he treated these books as reliable, inspired words from the God of Israel, we do, too. Jesus affirmed that the God of Israel is indeed the true God of the universe. Jesus’ resurrection validated his other promise that the Spirit of God would be among his people to help them remember what he had taught them and record this in what we now know as the New Testament.b His resurrection proves that God was pleased with him, therefore we count on Jesus as a reliable source of truth as to which holy book to trust.

The resurrection validates human life. God isn’t looking to give us an escape from planet earth, but to set things right. Human life seems very good; this is what the God of Israel made humans to enjoy. This earth belongs to the Lord and exists for us to relish the work of our hands.c

The God of Israel plans to redeem every square inch of our planet that currently groans for renewal, not through systems of government or military might, but through the power of Jesus, who will cure injustice, hunger, painful tears; undo global pollution; and bring peace on the good earth.

Jesus’ resurrection removes the sting and fear of death. Jesus defeats the ultimate enemy of human life. Paul talked about the resurrection as the linchpin, affirming every doctrine of our faith, giving us hope that we will never die.d Jesus said to Martha, “Anyone who believes in me will live, even though they die.”e Death frightens us, and understandably so, but we do not need to fear what existence will look like beyond the grave. C. S. Lewis said that when we look into the face of God, we will find ourselves recognizing all we have loved on this earth. He will be as familiar to us as our dearest friend and lover.1

Where’s the Hope?

My (Dale’s) mother passed away a few years ago. She battled cancer for many years and was blasted with nearly a dozen chemotherapies. On her last visit to our home, plugged into an oxygen machine, she sat at the coffee table with us. She discussed doctors and drugs and next steps. Her body was thin, her skin older than her sixty years. Nothing she conveyed about the doctor’s remedies sounded promising. Expecting some new therapy, I asked, “Where’s the hope, Mom?”

“The hope?” She put down her coffee cup and looked at me. “The hope, son, is in the resurrection.”2

Now she is gone. Her body buried in a cemetery in eastern Ohio. But her soul is with God, awaiting a new body to walk out of that cemetery.

The deeper the significance of the resurrection penetrates our souls, the more naturally the steady hope of its light will shine in our daily lives.

We will all die, no matter how expensive or extensive our medical treatments. Our best efforts only prolong life a little. Even poor Lazarus, who experienced a temporary resurrection, had to go through the ugly process of death all over again later. But the God of Israel offers a permanent resurrection to anyone who longs to be with him. This promise is the ultimate validation of our humanity. If you are a Christian, own this truth. The deeper the significance of the resurrection penetrates our souls, the more naturally the steady hope of its light will shine in our daily lives.3

a 1 Corinthians 15:14.
b John 16:13.
c Isaiah 65:22.
d 1 Corinthians 15.
e John 11:25.

Fincher, Dale; Jonalyn Fincher  Coffee Shop Conversations: Making the Most of Spiritual Small Talk . Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

Categories: Teologice