Skeptics believe there are two killer arguments against Christianity.
The first is the reality of pain. With so much suffering and evil in the world, how can there possibly be an all-powerful, utterly benevolent Deity?
That question gets plenty of attention, and we’ll give it some more attention in the near future.
The second “fatal blow” is Christianity’s checkered track record.
If Jesus is really ruling the cosmos, where is the evidence that his followers are transformed people who are transforming the world for good?
Critics cite the unholy triad of the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and witch hunts, not to mention the tragic overreach of European colonists who brought slaughter, enslavement, and smallpox to the New World, sometimes with the blessing of the Church. “I like your Christ, but not your Christianity,” opined Mahatma Gandhi, when asked about the West’s dominant religion.
About 20 years ago, the BBC presented a television series called Son of God. Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright noticed that something was missing – glaringly missing. Where was mention of the kingdom of God – Jesus’ primary message about the establishment of God’s reign here on earth?
When Wright mentioned this omission to the BBC, he received this note: “As there is clearly no trace of a new kingdom after 2,000 years, perhaps it is kinder to Jesus to leave it out.”
Wright, as expected, wasn’t having it. It all depends on what we’re looking for, he said.
God’s kingdom doesn’t have a mailing address. It doesn’t have a Main Street, a Parliament, or a passport stamp. In his parables, Jesus describes God’s reign as a reality that grows slowly, relentlessly, unstoppably – the way a tiny mustard seed gradually becomes the tallest plant in the garden.
Followers of Jesus, over the course of two millennia, have led the world in establishing schools, hospitals, and ministries of compassion. Christians (despite modernist claims to the contrary) paved the way for modern science, since they boldly believed in a God whose character and creation could be studied and known. Missionaries, times without number, have established orphanages, fed the hungry, educated the poor, and launched successful campaigns to end foot-binding in China and widow-burning in India.
Those are all signs, as Jesus might put it, that the kingdom of God is breaking out amongst us. No other movement in human history has left such a powerful legacy.
Nothing else is even close.
Consider a few examples from recent history. The final blow to Eastern European Communism was struck by a Polish pope who dared to stand up to authoritarianism, and by thousands of Romanians who stood in a square in Bucharest holding lighted candles, peacefully aligning themselves with a pastor who had done the same.
In his book Surprised by Hope, Wright remarks that, “granted [South African] apartheid could not last forever, it is highly significant that at the center of the movement for its peaceful dismantling…was a black African archbishop who spent the first three hours of every day, and repeated moments thereafter, in devout and fervent prayer.”
Who could ever have foreseen Desmond Tutu’s Commission of Truth and Reconciliation providing a forum where both agents and victims of racial injustice could face each other, tell the truth, and offer forgiveness?
Nevertheless, shouldn’t the world be changing more quickly?
According to the New Testament, Jesus is king of the cosmos.
He is ruling right now.
The problem is that his rule is invisible. He has entrusted the details of his governance to the members of his Body on earth. That would be you and me. We are the ones who, through our acts of love, compassion, courage, and grace are called to “make visible” things that can only be known – at least at this time in history – by faith.
The problem is that we routinely stumble and fall. We fail to live up to what we say we believe. We give outsiders grounds for believing that we’ve been badly misled.
In the first century, it must have seemed absurd to observers that someone named Paul was proclaiming someone named Jesus as the ruler of the universe.
After all, some of Paul’s strongest statements about that subject (like Philippians 2:5-11) were written from the inside of a prison. How could a crucified Jew be in charge of everything when he couldn’t even spring his chief spokesman from jail, and when it was perfectly obvious that no one was hindering Caesar from doing whatever he wanted?
Paul’s answer is the resurrection.
A new chapter in history began on that first day of the first week after the crucifixion. Paul urges us to wake up and realize that we’re living, every day, in an Easter-soaked reality.
As Wright puts it, our job is to “come alive to the real world, the world where Jesus is Lord, the world into which your baptism brings you, the world you claim to belong to when you say in the creed that Jesus is the Lord and that God raised him from the dead… Wake up and get a life!”
Who is the true King of all your hours and all your days?
The alarm clock is ringing.
It’s time to wake up.
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