Jesus holds open the door. (Part 5)

Jesus holds open the door

Part 5: If we truly look, it is horrific; evil is set to win; yet still there is hope

A person on life’s journey confronts reality.

“Fear consumes me. Horror overwhelms me. Hatred has swallowed me – and hatred for those who harm me is harnessed with the self-hatred I constantly regurgitate and greedily gobble down again. The darkness closes in. Dread rises. Unimaginable torture, realised by the fiendish ingenuity of man, made incarnate for all to see, fills my mind even as I turn away my gaze. Hope has come and gone, and come again, only to be knocked down again, so casually, for this is the nature of evil, that what took a lifetime to build can be destroyed in a moment – and not even deliberately. Though the pain is even worse when it is, and so often it is”.

Yet this hateful human nature, a monster inadvertently set free, like a malignant virus, wonderfully, gloriously still dares to hope, to believe, to strive to reach out for goodness, to find truth, to be compassionate. But we cannot do it. We cannot reach our goal. We cannot overcome. We are beaten, and ultimately we will be beaten. Our weaknesses are too strong for us. And evil smirks with this self-knowledge that it discovered deep at our innermost depths.

But Jesus holds open a door. Ridiculous! Absurd! A fantasy! Impossible! A myth! Not a myth that a man called Jesus once walked the earth, but a myth that one person could possibly have universal significance. His followers call him God to express this truth, but this must be a lie. Perhaps it is a lie that God exists, but even if he does, it certainly cannot be true that a man can be God. He was just one man, living in one place, at one time; he cannot mean anything to me, to everyone. It is embarrassing to monotheists, and laughable to atheists. But it is this absurd claim that makes redemption possible. It is the genius of Christianity and why, taking all things into account as best I can, I declare Christian faith to be the supreme message of hope, and for now I will just lay the word “salvation” gently in our laps, and see what we have to say when we return to it.