Seeing a child become aware of humanity’s creative potential is one of the gifts of parenting people don’t talk about enough.

When my 10 year-old son and I watched Lawrence of Arabia for the first time we struggled to get past the first hour because we repeatedly paused it. My son kept stopping it to exclaim: “That’s so beautiful!” and “Look at that shot!”1

We had to absorb the composition of white sands, blue sky, and tiny camels crossing the plains on Jordan and Morocco. I witnessed something in my son that I also saw in my two older daughters: the realization of human-made beauty. Our oldest first found it in Taylor Swift’s writing (for which I’ll always thank the billionaire), but that opened her up to an entire world of music, words, and images that led her to Noah Kahan, U2, Tom Petty, and Kendrick Lamar. Our middle child found it quickest. In clothes, in shoes, in the rhythms of street musicians, and ultimately in Wicked, the Greatest Showman, and again, this generation’s great door opener for art, Taylor Swift.

Art gets into us. Art transfixes us. Art transcends us.

On a hot summer day, I sat in the Musée De L’Orangerie, engulfed in Monét’s 360 panoramic Water Lilies.

How did someone make something so beautiful?

In a sea of people in Zilker Park, I heard Chris Martin sing Fix You. It was more than a moment of entertainment. It was beauty experienced. Shared effervescence.

How did humans create moments like this?

I finished East of Eden for the first time while sitting in my garden in Los Angeles. I sat there struggling to breathe from joy blossoming within me.

How did someone write something so beautiful?

We live in an assumed reality that it’s possible to capture beauty in a bottle and pass it around. We can put it on film. We can pull it into a canvas. We can drag joy, sorrow, and awe into submission and transmit it on a stage, in a gallery, and on a page.

This is the bliss of art. In both creating and receiving.

I don’t know my first awareness of this. Probably while watching The Lion King in the theater or hearing my dad playing a John Denver album. I have a conscious memory of a jazz quartet playing on the streets of Avignon as a 13-year-old. Mesmerized not just by the tones but what was going on inside me.

Where does this feeling come from? How can I get it again?

I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

We’re not in awe enough that humans can connect so profoundly and share in collective wonder.

Somehow, a dead painter causes us to feel, know, and belong beyond words. How?

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MAYBE THIS PHENOMENON is some kind of biological requirement for survival? Perhaps every human needs beauty and creativity to keep going and stretch toward each day’s sunrise. Without the splendor of art we would shrink into the cave. It could be that my son’s amazement with David Lean’s cinematography isn’t mystery, but biology.

Anger, worries, and pleasure all have “centers” in the brain.2 These human emotions appear consistently in the same quadrants or areas of the brain. Analysis and planning create measurable patterns of brain activity. Sexual drive, hunger, and even romance are all explainable at the molecular level.

Oddly, using that same imaging technology while subjects experience art, neuroscientists have concluded it cannot be tracked so easily. Unlike worry, planning, and analysis, there isn’t a “beauty” center of the brain.3

Instead, when we encounter something beautiful attention, memory, emotion, meaning-making, evaluation, and reward are all interacting to produce an integrated experience of aesthetic appreciation. It’s as if the entire brain is firing.4

Researchers describe this phenomenon as a simultaneous and multi-layered event:

• Perception: I see/hear it.

• Cognition: I understand or recognize something about it.

• Emotion: It moves me.

• Evaluation: I experience it as beautiful/good/significant.

Unlike hunger that can be satisfied and the body moves on, when we experience beauty and creativity we crave more. The same portion of the brain that recognizes action and reward is activated.

Our brains want to hear it again, see it again, and feel it again. Like a child thrown up into the sky that yells, “Again! Again! Again!”

But that’s not all, after the music fades or you’ve long left the museum, your brain shifts into another gear: meaning making. You try to figure it out and explore the intent of the artist and designer.

Later, your experience of inspiration turns to imitation. My son is making his own World War I film using Lego and stop action. My oldest daughter is writing her own novel. Our middle child is playing with impressions, dance moves, and learning to cry on demand.

Cognitive psychology and neuroscience tell us what we already know and observe. They stop short of telling us why.

Oddly, unlike the pleasure of sex and chemical attraction that lead to procreation and the survival of the species, the euphoria of the creative experience seems existentially pointless. The fight-or-flight adrenaline rush of anxiety protects us from harm so we can live another day. Art, on the other hand, seems to mostly point to a reality beyond survival. It’s a reality of meaning, connection, awe, and wonder.5

There’s a hidden design to thrive within this world so much that we are able to use the material of this world to make something of it for no other reason than the experience of shared bliss.

This is how humans stand apart in the animal kingdom. Whales make incredible music, but it’s to communicate threats, food, and attract mates. Beavers and ants build things for dwelling.6 It is difficult to get in the heads of animals, but whatever they experience, humans appear uniquely capable of reflecting on beauty, preserving it, transmitting it symbolically, and creating it simply because we like it.

ARISTOTLE SAYS: “That’s right, Brad.”

In Poetics, he argued humans are creatures of imitation. When we encounter art and poetry, we’re looking at something someone made to mimic a reality we know or, more strangely, a reality we long for or expect. Though Aristotle never saw an MRI or met a neuroscientist, my hunch is, he would say the effervescent experience comes from art’s reflection of our existence. We recognize ourselves and our world through art.

Art cannot create the emotion, it can only imitate it back to the audience. History tells us what happened; poetry is concerned with what could happen.7

The artist isn’t necessarily giving us factual reality as we often think about it. Instead, the artist reveals something true about reality through an imagined story or lens.

For example, Homer (or Christopher Nolan) doesn’t have to give us a historically verifiable account of every event in The Odyssey for the story to reveal something true about:

• courage

• home

• temptation

• loyalty

• pride

• suffering

• love

• human limitation

• the desire to return home

The fictional story discloses a non-fictional pattern of human existence we recognize simultaneously as life we live and life we long for.

This is how my son, who’s never ridden a camel or been to the Arabian peninsula, can watch Lt. Lawrence ride across a desert and be amazed.

The beauty of the Water Lilies awake the senses to the vibrancy of color, motion, and peace. Les Mis calls us into an eternal hope of our world renewed.

WE ARE CRAFTED to seek art and create art. When we do, it feels like the blissful sense that we are alive to what we were made for. We’re crafted for beauty. When we see other humans making it, we see our humanity as it was meant to be. When we get to participate in it and mimic it, we’re awakened, perhaps, to our eternal existence. It envelops our entire nervous system. It starts the engine of desire. It ignites the bliss of a transcendent glory we were made to see and know.

The experience of art isn’t transcendent because it carries secrets of a divine reality. Created beauty carries the capacity of being genuinely beautiful because creation itself participates in a reality greater than itself.

The painting is beautiful. The song is beautiful. The desert is beautiful. The joy is not imaginary. But perhaps these are streams, and our experience of beauty is the strange realization that the water is coming from somewhere upstream.

Maybe the human experience of beauty feels like becoming more alive because, for a moment, we are encountering reality as it was meant to be encountered: with attention, delight, desire, and wonder in the Creator of beauty.

Thomas Aquinas believed beauty gives delight through our beholding.8 Sometimes the right response is simply to stop. To look. To receive.

SAINT JOHN FASCINATES ME. His life pivoted on his three-year experience with Jesus of Nazareth. Before knowing Jesus, he was a fisherman from a forgettable town in Judea. Afterwards, John spent his life writing poetry, well-crafted narratives dripping with imagery, and audacious apocalyptic paintings with words.

John watched Jesus sleep in boats, walk miles across Galilee, eat meals, sleep on the floor, and drink water from wells. He saw him bleed. He saw him argue. He saw him tell stories. Yet, he describes Jesus in extraordinary terms:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The Word [meaning the originator of reality, creativity, God, or truth] became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.9

What interests me most is that verb: “We saw his glory”. John describes the content of this entire essay in that line. John is pausing the movie to say, “Look at this extraordinary thing.”

John remains gripped by Jesus decades after his first meeting. Later, John describes Jesus, in a stroke of genius, as the first letter and the last letter: the Alpha and Omega. In descending cities, in stories about vines, and at a party where water was turned into wine, John says, “We saw him. We beheld his glory.”

As the writer of Hebrews says, “Jesus is the radiance of God’s glory, the exact imprint of his nature.”10

I’VE BEEN ASKED BY FRIENDS some version of this question: “What does it feel like to believe in Jesus?”

Once, I was meeting with a recovering cynic to talk about Christianity. For him Jesus was a lovely idea and ideal. Attracted by the cultural residue in Western society, he wondered if he ought to try it and decided to talk it over with an expert.

We talked for a while about my church and how he could become part of it and if it fit his schedule and hobbies. We had a long conversation about his sexuality. But at the end he asked the real question he came to ask: “What would it feel like to get into this Jesus stuff?”

I sat in that tiny coffee shop in Portland, two blocks from my house, already a bit awkward and hushed from all the discussion about sexual history in a public place.

I think I fumbled the answer. I remember saying, “It feels great! You should try it!” Like the samples people at Costco, regretfully I made “seeing glory” into a tiny sample instead of eternal majesty.

Today, when I’m asked that question, I say something like: “It feels like the joy of seeing something beautiful and knowing you’ve found the source.”

It’s like that emotion in the middle of a concert where you feel as if you’re one with the crowd and the musicians sharing in collective euphoria, except you’re aware that this adoration and excitement isn’t a one-off evening, but it’s somehow what you were supposed to do all along.

Believing in Jesus is the joy of taking in the radiance of glory, the exact imprint of compassion, love, justice, and forgiveness.11

Your first hallelujah sounds like my son’s exclamation: “Look at that!”

Your first confession echoes finishing of a great novel, “Oh, this is good. This is life.”

Your first communion is the sigh of a satisfied soul after an extraordinary meal, “I’m satisfied.”

Your first prayer is the repeated refrain: “Again!”

Every story that’s captured your imagination, every painting you’ve beheld, and every song that has woven itself into your life is training for the true story of God, the beholding of his glory, and the awe of adoration.

This is how a 1962 Oscar-winning film trains me and my son to believe.

No one says it clearer than Jesus himself. 90% of all New Testament reference to hell come from Jesus. All of them are judgement passages. Mill stones. Sheep and Goats. Hades. Gehenna. Forever Fire. Nearly 15% of all the recorded teachings of Jesus we have are about eternal judgement. In context, Jesus talks about hell as much as he talks about love! The Bible’s teaching on hell comes primarily through the voice of Jesus.

Jesus is Judgmental

In Matthew’s gospel there’s a story of a wedding party of 10 young girls who were to meet the groom on his arrival to the feast with lamps. Five brought extra oil for their lamps and the other five only brought was in the lamp. The groom was late and everyone fell asleep, but then the groom came and everyone got into place, except for the five whose lamps ran out of oil. They ask the others for a little extra, but they are denied. The groom arrives and everyone goes to the party while the five go out to buy more oil. When they return, they are shut out of the party. They knock, but the Master of the house says, “I don’t know you!”

Then, Jesus tells the story of a man who leaves his property to his servants and gives them each money to steward while he is away. When he comes back and finds that one of the servants had buried their coins and done nothing with it, he rebukes him. The master calls him lazy and kicks him outside the walls forever. Jesus concludes the story by addressing the audience and eternity:

“For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Then he jumps straight into the next most explicit explanation of what will happen at the end of all things:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

Jesus says, at the end of all things, he will sit on a throne of glory and all the people of the entire earth from every ethnicity, background, and place will be gathered together. And from there Jesus will separate people into two groups: one group will receive a blessing from the King and inherit the kingdom as their own that has been prepared from eternity past and eternity future. The other group will be cursed (opposite of blessed) and get an eternal fire that has also been prepared for eternity.

Jesus likens this to a shepherd who separates a herd into two pins: one for sheep and another for goats.

That’s just one chapter in Matthew’s gospel. In Mark there’s talk of unquenchable fire, never dying worms, and stones tied around the judged and thrown into the sea. Luke has a parable Jesus tells about two men in judgement where Jesus uses the Greek location of Hades, complete with fire and torture just as Homer and Greek mythology describe it. In John’s gospel, Jesus gives the analogy of a Gardner cutting off branches that aren’t fruitful and burning them in fire.

Who does Jesus Judge?

The indelible image of Jesus is that of a judge. The New Testament authors, those who followed him all the way to the cross and were the leaders of the burgeoning Christian religion in the first century took from all their interactions with Jesus that he was, in fact, the eternal authoritative judge. St. Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians this haunting reality: "For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad."

James, the younger brother of Jesus, and leader of the Church in Jerusalem, writes in his letter that we should be careful how we speak and how we judge primarily because Jesus is the judge:

“There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who is able to save and destroy.”

"Don’t grumble against one another, brothers and sisters, or you will be judged. The Judge is standing at the door!"

Jesus divides the world. He stands authoritatively judging. Everyone. He alone is able to save and destroy. All the people come to be split between sheep and goats. We all wait before him to receive what is due us.

Who Goes to Hell?

The Unprepared - The story Jesus tells about the five maidservants who come with just enough oil and nothing more for the bridegroom is the story of the unprepared, or those who expect everything to go according to plan. The one who isn’t ready for God and isn’t prepared for his coming.

The Unengaged - The story of the servant who hides his Masters gold is the story of someone who can’t trust and believe the kingdom of God is valuable enough to invest in. It’s just something to hide. Like the religiously whole person who hides in the remote village while the world longs to hear good news. The enclosed monastic building their private kingdom of security while the world billows in smoke. The Wakanda kingdom. The Sheltered. Jesus judges the one who will not risk and who will not trust in his goodness to protect, care, and be gracious. Christ doesn’t regard someone who wont even try.

The Uncaring and Selfish - The parable of the sheep and the goats is about Jesus separating those who say good stuff, behave really well, and yet don’t do the simple task of loving their neighbor and meeting the needs of the poor. The doctrinally sound are a clanging gong compared to the sincere love of the others. Jesus judges those who know all the answers about him and say lots of stuff about him but don’t live out his commands. Remember the story of the Good Samaritan? He is contrasted with the religious leaders who avoid the brutalized man. Those are the goats. The Samaritan is the sheep.

The Religious Teacher That Leads People Astray - Jesus says it’s better to have a stone tied across your neck and thrown into the sea than to receive the punishment he has for those who lead people astray in the name of religion. His harshest words. His most fiery condemnations are for the religious leader that leads people away from God and into their own schemes of control, comfort, legalism, and power.

Jesus doesn’t have patience for the people who use their religious leadership position to manipulate, harm, gaslight, and lead people to themselves and away from God. He has “woes” for them. They are a tangle of snakes. They’re going to be punished. It wont be good for them.

The Bad People — Then there’s the objectively bad people. The chronic liars, rapists, child abusers, war mongers, and human traffickers. They get a lake of fire.

We instinctively believe there should be a hell for people like that. We want a universe where evil doesn’t simply retire comfortably. We want Auschwitz answered. We want abused children vindicated. We want justice for women sold into slavery. We want the opioid dealer, the child predator, the genocidal warlord, and the man who beats his wife to stand before someone they cannot manipulate.

Jesus warns us. If you’re one of these types of people you can expect a whole lot of hell.

What About Good People?

But, I’m a good person, right? I’m one of the sheep?

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, a family is murdered one by one beside a Georgia road. The killer calls himself The Misfit. He is polite, thoughtful, almost gentle in conversation, even while orchestrating unimaginable evil.

The grandmother spends the story convinced she belongs among the good people. She judges everyone around her. She is respectable, religious, proper, Southern, and convinced these things make her righteous. By all accounts, she’s right. She is a good moral person.

But standing before death, all those identities evaporate. She’s exposed for her selfishness. Her manipulation of her family. Her control. Her lack of love. Her pride. She’s like steward who buries the coin. She’s like the hypocrite who talks of God but doesn’t love the poor. She’s the religious person who leads people away from God’s grace. She’s a liar.

Looking into the face of the man about to kill her, she suddenly sees another human being rather than a monster.

“Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children.”

For the first time in the story she loves someone without calculating whether they deserve it.

Then The Misfit shoots her and says:

“She would have been a good woman...if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

O’Connor exposes self-righteousness. Judgment strips away every illusion we’ve constructed about ourselves until all that remains is the question: Who are you when there is nowhere left to hide?

Perhaps Jesus talks so much about judgement because he can see right through us. Terrifying.

“Behold the Judge stands at the door and knocks!”

The Terrifying Judge

No modern novelist has captured the horror of judgment detached from mercy like Cormac McCarthy.

The Judge in Blood Meridian is one of literature’s most terrifying characters because he never simply kills. He justifies. Violence, for him, is not merely an action but a philosophy. Every creature must eventually stand before his verdict. Every person must either submit to his order or be destroyed by it.

The Judge believes that judgment belongs to whoever possesses enough strength to impose it. “Whatever exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” To know something is to own it. To own it is to judge it. To judge it is to decide whether it deserves to live.

His universe has no grace because it has no forgiveness. There is only domination.

That is why he dances through the novel untouched by remorse. Every murder becomes justice because he is the one defining justice. He becomes the measure of good and evil.

McCarthy understood human beings do not merely fear judgment. We desperately want to become the judge. We want the authority to divide the world into innocent and guilty. Worthy and unworthy. Us and them.

The Judge is terrifying because he wholly evil. He’s also humanity’s oldest temptation wearing human skin.

Jesus is the Judge of Mercy

Jesus gets to judge the world because it is his. The people and all that fill this world belong to him and are created out of joy, delight, and for his glory. The judgement comes for the breaking and the disregard of all that is his. His judgement comes for the likes of the characters of O’Connor and McCarthy that reflect human reality.

But, the great scandal of Christianity is the true Judge does not remain on the bench.

The same Jesus who separates sheep from goats allows himself to be separated from the Father.

The one who speaks of outer darkness walks into darkness itself.

The one who warns of the curse becomes the cursed.

The one who promises judgment invites judgment to fall on his own shoulders.

At the cross, God takes evil so seriously that he bears its full consequence.

Every image Jesus gives of judgment eventually circles back onto his own body.

The abandoned servant.

The cursed one.

The rejected son.

The one cast outside the city.

The darkness.

The cry of abandonment.

The sinking into the pit.

The disregard at the hill of the skull.

The Judge surrenders to the dock.

Mercy Triumphs Over Judgement

But judgment is not the last act of God. Resurrection is.

On Easter morning Jesus does not merely survive death. He defeats the entire kingdom that judgment exposes: sin, death, Satan, shame, accusation, and evil itself.

The resurrection announces that evil has exhausted itself. It threw everything it possessed at Jesus—the betrayal, the false witnesses, the nails, the grave—and still could not keep him.

Judgment has been rendered.

Evil has lost.

Death has been broken.

The Judge now offers mercy and compassion before he renders verdict.

This is why the gospel is called good news.

Christianity is not the announcement that one day there will be a Judge. Everyone already knows that and wants it.

Christianity is the announcement that the Judge has already stood in the place of the judged.

The throne of judgment passed first through a Roman cross.

Which means that every person who comes to Jesus does not meet condemnation first.

They meet mercy.

And mercy, not judgment, has the final word.

Christ took hell so you don’t have to.

This is my second essay on hell. Read the first one here and then “enjoy” this one.

I’ve had conversations with many friends who firmly do not believe in anything about Jesus. Except, they’re often, if not always, impressed by Jesus. They’re hopeful in the stories about him. He is attractive. Everywhere Jesus goes he seems to be reversing the conditions that make human existence unbearable. The blind see. The isolated are welcomed. The possessed are liberated. The hungry are fed. The guilty are forgiven. The dead rise. The storm stills.1

One friend, years ago in Portland said this: “I like Jesus; he goes around fixing everything.”

That’s the good news.

Hell to Pay Today

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
— William Shakespeare

In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy brings readers into one of the most terrifying depictions of hell ever written precisely because almost nothing supernatural happens in it. McCarthy presents a world where human violence becomes so normalized that the earth itself feels cursed. Landscapes of scorched deserts and endless coldly and empty night form the backdrop of every human encounter that descends into bloodshed, domination, or death. The novel follows men who scalp, murder, and terrorize their way across the borderlands with a kind of casual and even liturgical brutality.

In McCarthy’s world, evil reigns patiently, methodically, and horrifyingly intelligent. Judge Holden, the towering antagonist of the novel, speaks about war as though it is the truest revelation of human nature. For the Judge, violence is not a corruption of humanity but its highest expression. That is what makes the novel feel infernal. Hell is not presented as punishment descending from above but as humanity fully surrendered to its own appetite for power.

McCarthy’s genius is forcing readers to confront the possibility that the deepest horrors of existence are not fictional inventions but ordinary human impulses left unchecked. Blood Meridian forces us to reckon with the internal suspicion that maybe humanity has made this world hell. Hell is a world where grace, mercy, innocence, and love have been driven out leaving only conquest and consumption behind.

The good news about Jesus is it’s the story of God removing hell and restoring grace, mercy, love, and joy. It’s the divine comedy that ends with a feast, a parade, and a tree whose foliage heals every wound. The gospel is how God gets the hell out of earth.

Removing Hell

“The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.”
— 1 John 3:8

The gospels are physical. Jesus comes embodied. He confronts the actual horrors that plague humanity. He steps into funerals. He touches diseased skin. He sits at tables with traitors and prostitutes. He interrupts executions. He rebukes violent men intoxicated with power. He confronts spiritual evil as something active and parasitic within the world.

The ministry of Jesus comes to us as an invasion into the world. The gospels are a storming of the gates of hell.

Many of us have inherited a vision of Christianity where the mission of Jesus is primarily about helping people avoid punishment after they die. Salvation becomes evacuation. Earth is a doomed waiting room. Humanity is trapped in a cosmic sorting system where the objective is simply ending up on the right side of eternity.

The mission of Jesus cannot be diminished to eternal insurance policy. Jesus wills the removal of hell from creation itself. Christ arrives announcing that the kingdom of God has come near, which means heaven is invading earth and everything opposed to the goodness of God is being driven back.

You already know hell exists, even as you scoff at the concept. We know what it feels like when relationships collapse into bitterness and silence. We know the suffocating emptiness of shame. We know the grief of watching bodies decay under disease. We know what addiction does to families and what violence does to neighborhoods. We know the exhaustion of anxiety and the loneliness of modern life. The world often feels like exile.

Jesus came to rid the world, even your small part of it, from hell.

How Does Jesus Get Hell Out Of Earth?

Wrath. This awkward word sits in the center of Christian theology and our modern discomfort with Christianity itself. Many people can tolerate a therapeutic Jesus or an inspiring Jesus. They struggle with a Jesus who judges. Wrath sounds primitive, cruel, and emotionally unstable. We imagine a divine tyrant whose anger burns unpredictably against humanity.

Yet the Bible paints a far more profound picture than that caricature.

The Apostle Paul describes humanity as being “given over” to corruption, disordered desires, and self-destruction. That language is important because judgment in Scripture is often humanity collapsing inward upon itself. Sin is not merely rule-breaking. It is the unraveling of human life apart from God. Hell grows wherever selfishness, violence, greed, lust for power, and dehumanization are allowed to reign unchecked.

History proves this relentlessly. Human beings consistently turn progress into new mechanisms for destruction. Intelligence does not overcome our self-made hells. Often our intelligence magnifies hell. Wealth does not rid us of destruction. Politics does not save us. Technology brings good and bad, but it hasn’t succeeding in defeating death. We have extended life expectancy while perfecting warfare. We have become more connected digitally while becoming more isolated relationally. We have more entertainment than any civilization in history and yet despair continues to rise. Humanity keeps trying to manufacture heaven and repeatedly reproduces hell.

Throughout the Old Testament, especially with the prophets (like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah) used an image of the cup of wrath. Imagine a goblet, that with every murder, every betrayal, every account of fraud or injustice, essentially every time humanity sins, the cup is added to. The Sin from the very beginning and all ongoing sin that is the root cause for all that is wrong in the world is heaped into this cup. Everything pollutes, perverts, distorts, and divides thrown into this immense cup of wrath that will one day be poured onto humanity, receiving what humanity has stored up for itself.

The prophets say the cup is filling and it is growing heavier. Imagine the scope of this thing. Every wound! Every Sorrow! Every jealousy. In Isaiah 51, the prophet writes, “Woe to you who will drink this cup of wrath!”

John Steinbeck played with this image when he wrote: “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

If you want to deal will hell, you have to deal with this cup, this wrath. If justice is everyone gets what they deserve, what exactly does the collective humanity deserve for what we’ve done to ourselves, others, and this planet? What balances the scales after World War One?

The wrath of God is divine grace. It is divine opposition to everything destroying creation. A God who felt no anger toward abuse, exploitation, violence, or death would not be morally superior. He would be indifferent. The Christian claim is not that God delights in wrath, but that God refuses to make peace with evil.

You know that scandal. You’ve read about it. Or, you’ve experienced it yourself. The athletics department becomes aware of questions behavior of an assistant coach with athletes in showers. The school avoids it. Allows it to continue. Doesn’t investigate because it doesn’t want to know, it doesn’t want to see. Makes excuses for evil to escape reality. Hires lawyers to avoid punitive damages.

God doesn’t reason with evil. The Christian proclamation about wrath is Jesus enters as the one willing to absorb the full weight of human evil into himself. Willing to approach it. Willing to see. Willing to know it.

The cross is where the entire human story converges. Political corruption, mob violence, religious hypocrisy, betrayal, abandonment, injustice, humiliation, and death all gather around Christ at Calvary. The powers of hell throw themselves fully against the Son of God. Rome exercises its violence. Religious leaders protect their systems. Friends scatter in fear. Crowds mock suffering as entertainment. Humanity exposes itself for what it is.

Christ’s abandonment, shame, injustice, torture, grief, and death is a descent into hell. The one through whom all things were made, submits himself to the full horror of what humanity has become.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Is not the cry of a child lost at magic kingdom, but a child bogged in the swamp of a haunted house.

Jesus descended into the deepest regions of human anguish and beyond. Jesus entered fully into godforsakenness. At the cross hell does everything it can to God incarnate.

Violence normally reproduces itself. Hatred creates hatred. Humiliation creates humiliation. Human beings absorb evil and then pass it along to others. The next act, if Cormac McCarthy were writing it, would be the bloody return of justice.

But Jesus interrupts the cycle. While mocked, he forgives. While suffering, he loves. While dying, he promises paradise to a deserving criminal.2

The next act is resurrection. Death itself has been invaded. Jesus overcomes the depths. He breaks the gates of hell and brings a host of captives with him.

The resurrection is the beginning of a world made new. Earth purged of hades. The entire story of Scripture from Genesis 3 onward is God’s mission to get hell out of earth.

The kingdom of God arrives in Christ as the beginning of heaven invading earth, confronting the powers of sin, death, decay, and violence that have enslaved humanity. Biblical hope, then, is not the destruction of creation but its liberation. The resurrection is God’s declaration that death, violence, and hell do not possess ultimate authority over creation. Jesus is in charge. He bends creation toward life.3

A Miniature Gospel isn’t Good News

You might have been given an unintentionally shrunk gospel. We often speak as though the climax of salvation is escaping earth and going somewhere else forever. But the Bible ends, not with the abandonment of creation, but with its restoration. Scripture closes with the imagery of heaven and earth reunited, God dwelling with humanity, death defeated, mourning ended, and creation healed.

The final chapter is certain hope of eternal renewal.

Jesus isn’t a cosmic prison warden, he is the eternal king who broke through hell, releases the chains, and leads a host of captives to freedom.

God’s defeat of hell and the restoration of creation to what it was always intended to be. Humanity was made for communion with God, for joy without corruption, for life untouched by death. The ache we feel for peace, belonging, beauty, and permanence is not childish fantasy. It is homesickness.

This is why the gospel resonates so deeply even among people who struggle with religion itself. We want resurrection. We want reconciliation. We want evil judged and sorrow undone. We want graves emptied and wars ended. We want tears wiped away. We want the caged birds set free.

The Christian claim is that God wants those things too. The Apostles Creed is the signpost for what Christians believe. It mentions hell. But not about you going there. Or me going there. The core statement of faith is about Jesus.

[Jesus] was crucified, dead, buried. He descending into Hell.4

On the third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into Heaven.

In Jesus Christ, God enters the hell we have made in order to lead creation out of it. The cross is God stepping willingly into the furnace of human ruin. The resurrection is the first light of the world remade.

The mission of Jesus is not the preservation of hell but its destruction. Christ came to put it out of business.

But Jesus is Judgy

Any astute Anglican will quickly point out the next line of the Apostles Creed: “And [Jesus] sits at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty, and [Jesus] will come again to judge the living and the dead.”

This is directly pulled from 2 Timothy when the Apostle Paul writes: “In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom.”

No one says it clearer than Jesus himself. 90% of all New Testament reference to hell are from Jesus. All of them are judgement passages. Mill stones. Sheep and Goats. Hades. Gehenna. Nearly 15% of all the recorded teachings of Jesus we have are about eternal judgement.

What’s that about? That’s my next essay.

This is part one of at least four essays on hell, heaven, and how the entire conversations taps into the reality of life today and the enduring hope available in the truth about Jesus.

“Through me you pass into the city of woe:

Through me you pass into eternal pain:

Through me among the people lost for aye.

Justice the founder of my fabric moved:

To rear me was the task of power divine,

Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.

Before me things create were none, save things

Eternal, and eternal I shall endure.

All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

— Dante Alighieri

“Where are you with hell? Is it real? Is it literal?” This question rises out of the ashes of quiet pauses around fire-pits when confused neighbors look at me and wonder, “Is this guy really a religious nut? After all he’s a priest, but he’s also kind of nice.” (I’m not a priest, but it’s okay…I do wear lots of black).

“How could God create hell?” The anguishing perplexity of a soul coming to find hope and joy in Jesus while simultaneously terrified of the possibility of a jail boss God. After all, the bad guy in every prison movies is the warden. No one watches Shawshank redemption and roots for Samuel Norton.1 If there’s a hell, what happened to the Jesus we love?

The captives are the heroes. Jesus came to set them free. How could eternity have a prison guard Jesus?

People hate hell and I’m glad.

Not because it makes “evangelism” easier (it doesn’t in the way people think; in fact, the use of hell to motivate people to do evangelism and to believe makes me nauseous you can read my rant in the footnotes).2 Not because I’m a universalist trying to gain followers. I’m not a universalist, but I would love the likes and subscribes. I’m happy people hate hell, because that’s how its supposed to be.

The repulsion of Dante’s hell fills me with comfort. My friends know something deep about how the world is supposed to work. The instinct toward a shared eternal bliss over eternal torture is, I believe, hard-wired into our psyche. The rejection of an image of God as eternal prison guard is, in fact, correct.

I like the questions about hell. The questioner is nearer to the heart of God and the true story of the world than they know.

What you think and feel about hell tells you more about your belief in God and your journey towards God than almost any other topic. And why we hate the concept of hell drives us towards the the greatest truth in cosmos.

Your disdain for the idea of hell proves how close you are to understanding the goodness of Jesus that has captured centuries of imaginations.

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Your Living Hell

Hell seems incredibly cruel. The horror of an eternal life of doom terrifies because, if true, it means this existence doesn’t get better, just worse. If hell is a place of horrific sights, wicked people, dehumanization, and darkness, then I’m quite prepared for it.

A world of abuse, neglect, pride, anguish, hatred, and cruelty isn’t futuristic fantasy but lived reality.

We all know: life shouldn’t end with more horror. It should end in paradise or Nothing at all.

Our primary repulsion, dread, or anguish about the concept of hell comes from the circumstances of the reality we are experiencing now.

“You’re telling me that after toiling through this meager existence of labor without flourishing, parenting without rewards, chaos at the hands of the powerful, injustice around every corner, and agony…there will be even more suffering? Haven’t we had more than enough hell already?”

What can be worse than:

• The rejection of a mother?

• The betrayal of a friend?

• The abandonment of a father?

• The futility of financial peace?

• The sting of suicide of a sibling?

• The starvation of the soul?

• The defeat of life to death?

• What can be worse than this reality we already feel?

This list doesn’t even include share of human carnage most humans have experience through the history of the world: drought, famine, starvation, war, assault, slavery, and physical abuse.

Hell is human.

Franz Kafka states this dynamic well:

“We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?”

Our objection to hell is the natural instinctual hope that life surely wasn’t intended to be this broken and it can’t possibly be this bad after death either.

There are two primary responses to this instinct:

Acceptance

This is just how it is. Life is terrible, then you die and that’s probably terrible as well. What else could we expect? The best thing you can do is gain resignation to the fact that this is all there is and what comes will be more of the same. This is what we mean through the emotion when we yell, “I’ll see you in hell.”

Sartre leads us down this path: “I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.” Many others would simply say, grow up and make your life as fun as you can. Stoics will tell you, get over it and live. Sartre’s friend Albert Camus added to this line of thinking: “Where there is no hope, we must invent it.”

Nothingness

The other response is to have hope in the nothingness. That death is a freedom from this present reality and into a void. We go to sleep and there’s nothing. No more pain, sorrow, grief, angst, or anxiety. The great jailbreak of our existence is the grave. Take comfort, we tell ourselves on death beads, we’re close to the end of agony and eternal nothingness is about to start.

Those are the two intentional or accidental choices most of us fall into. Life is terrible and after you die it probably keeps being terrible. Or, life is bad but then its over. Hope in the end.

Humans are curious beings. We can’t bring ourselves to settle for Sartre, Freud, or Nietzsche. We’re grievously idealistic. We dream of the healing of every scab, wound, and heartache. We demand a future deposit of joy. Our appetite for dipping our toes into a peace that flows like a river over parched human soul cannot be quenched.

Humans want utopia, not only because we already live dystopia, but because deep within our genetic code and lineage is the conviction we belong to paradise. Ask a child what happens after death and they will say: “something good somewhere good.”

Our rejection of hell is the embrace of a hope for good life.

Maya Angelou captures this internal experience in her poem, “I Know why the Caged Bird Sings”:

“The caged bird sings with a fearful trill,

of things unknown, but longed for still,

and his tune is heard on the distant hill,

for the caged bird sings of freedom.”

Your Living Heaven

The intent of your existence is paradise. That dream is destined to come. The caged bird is supposed to be set free.

You’re right. You, your friends, your loved ones, and even that stranger sneezing next to you at the coffee shop shop, were made for heaven.

How Do We Get Out of Hell and Into Heaven?

How can humans get heaven and beat hell? How is it supposed to work? How is heaven made? What are we supposed to do? Lets take a quick survey of religious, spiritual, and philosophical ideas:

Nirvana

Some people say, we get lots of tries at this life until we get it right. When we do, we will nirvana, blessed, eternal existence. This is the plot of Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day, the prevalent notion of reincarnation, and the technocrat’s vision for human maximization. Heaven is formed by our lessons learned, forged virtue, and applied schemes. Heaven is made through life-hacks. It is precisely through this progressive refinement we become the type of people who are heaven bound and, as a bi-product, create heaven. Right here and now, or later, when we get it right.

Only, our progressive advances seem to advance greater mechanisms for pain than for peace. The split atom didn’t bring eternal peace but horror. History repeats itself. Lessons seemed to never be learned. Life-hacks, as brilliant as they seem on TikTok, fail within the real world. It’s hard to imagine a human-made utopia.

Jannah

Others will say this paradise we long for comes through the cost of rigidly following the steps. There’s a series of activities to form the path or way to an eternal peace. For example, Islam teaches a few daily, yearly, and life-time practices that must be done to gain access to Jannah, paradise. Like Pokemon, all you need to do is collect them all. Do the prayers, do the fast, and do the pilgrimage. In fact, and perhaps most interestingly, Islam is not an internal faith but an external one. It’s not about what’s going on within you, but what you’re doing outside of you.

You might not be a Muslim, but you might subscribe to this paradise path. The steps are go to college, get a job, find a spouse, get a mortgage, have a child or two, build an investment portfolio, get your kids into college, see them have a spouse, get a grand child or two, pay off your mortgage, retire, die. Then, heaven is offered to you: you did all the steps!

Except, your internal life wasn’t great. Your bitterness swelled as you did the steps. Your career was replaced by a machine. You spouse became a roommate. Your children became heirs to stuff. But, banks made a good return on your life through interest and the government got its taxes. Even if you do it all well, how can it guarantee paradise?

A Road Back to You

Heaven is for those who have done the internal work on themselves. We must pursue a path of healing within and rid ourselves of the burdens of shame, guilt, and disfunction by discovering our authentic goodness buried deep within. We would be good and the world would be good if each person dug deep they could find the good and pure version of themselves and bring it to the surface. Through therapy, self-discovery, and the establishment of boundaries against toxicity we can be set free to be good. Once we get there, heaven calls to us; either in this life or the next. The path to glory runs through your soul. You’re on a quest to uncover the real you.

I wonder if that’s enough and if that road back to you ever ends. I love therapy but it also feels like a bottomless pit. What if, after all the digging, the soul collapses in on itself. What if you can’t unlock the real you? If you get to the end of the journey and there you are, the guiltless and shameless, version of you in chains locked with a key you don’t possess. That’s what the inward journey has been for me and many others. There’s an ultimate moment where and individual cannot set themselves free. The caged bird remains caged.

Transhumanism3

What if we make ourselves eternal? Death is obviously the problem. Death creates scarcity, jealousy, and lusts for power. If we eliminate death, we make paradise. This seems more possible than ever. Soon we could be able to uploaded our memory into mainframe computer to be later downloaded in the operating system of a humanoid. Micro robotics could be injected into our bloodstream and, with the help of AI and regular updates, eradicate viruses, cancerous cells, and diseases before they even start. Through supplements, isolation, and avoiding the sun a human body could escape environmental harm. With the advancements of prosthetics, synthetic organs, and cloning, we might be able to, overtime, replace each organ, bone, and limb as they decay with age. In fact, the replacements might be better than the original. A human could become eternal through science. Paradise gained! For anyone who can afford it. Only for a world without war, violence, jealousy, and rage that steals even the healthiest human. While the technology is new, the philosophy isn’t. Doubling the global life expectancy over the last 100 years hasn’t made the world less violent, just more efficient in it. Generating the wealthiest planet hasn’t generated prosperity and peace. Trans-humanism traps us in hell more than it leads us to heaven.

These are creative solutions. They have obvious merit and appeal. But also, collateral damage in their wake. Our attempted liberation from hell creates more hell. Our forging of heaven falls flat. Not from a lack of effort, but from our resist to the obvious. Something outside the system must make heaven. The mortal might improve their surroundings but cannot muster an eternal bliss. An outside force has to dictate the terms.

We need a benefactor from the great beyond, someone to hold, make possible, and usher humanity out of the hell we have realized and into heaven we’re born for. The author of the desired delight must initiate the consummated delight.

Like Charles Dickinson’s Great Expectations, we need a wealthy outsider to pluck us out of obscure subsistence to give us in the endowment of eternal joy.4

If you hate the idea of hell and have a desire, even if it’s as faint as a whisper, you believe in God. You’re walking proof of God.

What does God do with heaven and hell? In Jesus, God’s mission gets hell out of earth and brings the kingdom of heaven into a world made new. That’s another essay, but it’s coming soon. For now, you’re left with this phenomenal truth: the only Benefactor who could get you out of both today’s and tomorrow’s hell is gracious, loving, and proactively restoring the paradise lost and the paradise dreamed for.

This is the third essay on the resurrection. The first two essays argued that the resurrection is not a side belief in Christianity, and that if Easter is false, the entire Christian faith collapses with it. Or conversely, if it is true, then all reality bends underneath it. But that raises the obvious question: is the resurrection reasonable to believe? This essay, much longer than the others, tries to answer that carefully, historically, and without shortcuts. You can also read a fuller explanation of these arguments in my book with Jonathan Dodson: Raised? Finding Jesus by Doubting the Resurrection.1

There are few claims in human history more difficult to believe than this one:

A man publicly executed by the Roman Empire came back to life three days later.

This is a historical claim about a dead body no longer being dead.

And because it is such an outrageous claim, many people assume that Christianity asks us to believe it in spite of evidence, or perhaps without evidence, or at the very least by means of a large and noble leap into irrationality.

That is often how the resurrection is framed: as the point where thoughtful people are supposed to stop asking questions and start squinting really hard in the direction of faith. But that is not actually how the earliest Christians presented it.

Nor, for that matter, is it how the New Testament itself presents it.

The earliest Christian claim was not merely:

“We have found resurrection spiritually meaningful.”

Their claim was much more concrete, and therefore much more dangerous to our status quo:

“Something happened.”

Something happened in Jerusalem in the first century that was so explosive, so disorienting, so category-breaking, that it rapidly altered the beliefs, practices, worship, moral imagination, and death-hope of thousands of people across the Roman world. Within 200 years everything people had previously assumed was insanity was accepted as fact.

That does not prove the resurrection by itself. However, it does mean this: something in history requires explanation.

And once you begin looking carefully at the evidence, the real issue is not whether the resurrection is easy to believe. The real issue is whether the alternatives you or others can come up with are more plausible than the claim of millions across centuries and continents.

Remember my last post. One of the mistakes Christians sometimes make is trying to prove the resurrection with a single “gotcha” fact, as if there were one dazzling silver bullet that should settle the whole thing for everyone.

There is not.2 But that is true of almost every serious historical claim.

That is not how historians, juries, journalists, or prosecutors normally work.

When a lawyer makes a case in court, they do not usually walk in with one magical exhibit and say, “Well, there it is.” They build a case. They gather witness testimony, motive, timelines, physical evidence, corroborating records, plausibility structures, contextual patterns, and the internal coherence of the story being told.

This is often called a cumulative case.

And that is the right way to think about the resurrection.

The question is not:

“Can I prove resurrection the way I can prove a geometry theorem?”

The question is:

“What best explains the historical data we actually have?”

That is a more honest question.

And once you ask it, you begin to see that the resurrection is not a conclusion reached by switching off the mind.

It is a conclusion many have reached because, after weighing the alternatives, it begins to look less absurd than the explanations offered in its place. In fact, it becomes reasonable and plausible.

FIRST, the resurrection was not a story people in the ancient world were primed to invent…or believe.

One of the most common assumptions in modern skepticism is that the resurrection story emerged because ancient people were simply more gullible than we are.

Ancient people were not modern secularists, of course. But that does not mean they were waiting around to believe that a crucified man had risen bodily from the dead.

In fact, the resurrection of Jesus was deeply implausible on its face to both Greeks and Jews, though for very different reasons.

If a movement suddenly emerges around a claim that neither side of its surrounding culture finds intuitive, attractive, or conceptually ready-made, that should at least slow down simplistic theories of invention.

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THE GREEKS would not have wanted this story. The broad Greek and Roman world did not generally have a category for “good news: a dead man has returned in bodily life and that is salvation.”

That was not the kind of hope they were waiting for. There were, of course, many schools of thought in the ancient world, and we shouldn’t flatten them too much. But broadly speaking, there were a few dominant instincts.

Some strands of Greco-Roman thought treated death as simply natural and final — something to be endured without illusion.

Others saw death as welcome precisely because the body itself was a burden, a confinement, even a kind of prison.

And still others, especially under Platonic influence, imagined hope in terms of the soul’s release from material embodiment.

What they did not tend to imagine was this:

“Salvation is that the body is restored, history is redeemed, and a human being comes out of death in a transformed but still embodied life.”

That was not a desirable climax in much of the ancient pagan imagination.

If anything, it sounded backwards.

To many Greeks, the body was not the thing you hoped to get back forever. It was the thing you hoped eventually to be free from.

So if someone came into the Roman world and announced:

“Good news! The Savior has risen bodily from the dead, and one day you will too!”

That would have sounded like bad news. Like if someone came into your office today and said, “Good News! We have another Pandemic!” or “Great news, the stock market has crashed and all your retirement is gone!” This is bad news, because it’s antithetical to your assumptions about a good life and your hope for the future.

To ancient Greeks, the gospel would have sounded bizarre. Or as Paul wrote, “Foolishness.”

Which is precisely what we see in the book of Acts, where people can tolerate Paul talking about God and ethics and judgment for a while, but once he starts talking about resurrection, things become embarrassing quickly.3

This message did not play well. It was not culturally intuitive.

It was not a savvy piece of religious marketing.

At minimum, it was a spectacularly awkward thing to proclaim in the ancient Mediterranean world. Most obviously: conmen don’t craft schemes no one wants, instead they play off their desires, dreams, and aspirations. The gospel message plays in the opposite direction.

ANCIENT JEWISH people wouldn’t want it either.

If the Greeks had no category for resurrection as good news, the Jews had a different problem. Many Jews in the first century did believe in resurrection.

For many (except for the Sadducees) in the period, resurrection referred to something that would happen at the end of history, not in the middle of it.

It would be:

• collective, not individual;

• final, not preliminary;

• cosmic, not isolated.

In other words, resurrection was associated with the day of the Lord, final judgment, the renewal of all things, the vindication of God’s people, and the end of the present evil age.

They were not expecting:

one man rises ahead of everyone else while the world keeps going.

That is not a standard Jewish category.

If a first-century Jew had heard, “The Messiah has risen,” the natural response would not be, “Wonderful, that makes perfect sense.”

The natural response would be: “Then where is everybody else?”

If resurrection has happened, then the age to come should be here in fullness. The dead should be raised. Israel should be restored. Evil should be judged. The world should be different than this.

And yet Rome was still in charge. Suffering remained. Graves remained occupied. History continued.

So the early Christian claim was not simply “the Jewish hope has come true” in a straightforward way. It was much stranger than that.

It was that the future had erupted early into the present.

That is a brilliant theological claim. But it is not an obvious one to invent. It is too weird for propaganda. Too discontinuous for convenience. Too costly to function as an easy religious adaptation.

Which means we are left with a serious historical question:

Why did so many Jews and Greeks begin believing something that neither worldview naturally wanted?

THE SPEED of change is remarkable. One of the things that deserves more attention in conversations about the resurrection is not merely what early Christians believed, but how quickly they came to believe it.

They changed:

• how they worshiped,

• how they understood death,

• how they understood the body,

• how they interpreted Israel’s story,

• and how they identified Jesus as Messiah

That is a civilizational-level shift and it happened astonishingly fast.

It is easy for us to underestimate this because we live in a time of ideological volatility, where people can seem to reinvent themselves every six months. But in the ancient world, deeply embedded metaphysical convictions did not typically dissolve overnight. Honestly, they don’t today either but that’s a different discussion.

These were not floating lifestyle preferences. Belief in the resurrection of Jesus was a total reshaping of reality, goodness, anthropology, history, and destiny.

To put it in modern terms: imagine the most politically committed person you know who is not just opinionated, but thoroughly catechized by their tribe. They know the platform, they know the talking points, they have the yard signs, the bumper stickers, the articles, the podcasts, the social media rants, the issue hierarchy, the enemies, the slogans, the emotional reflexes.

Now imagine that person waking up tomorrow and switching sides entirely. Today they operate with the same conviction, same energy, same public confidence, and same willingness to suffer for it. You would not say, “That’s normal.”

You would ask: what happened to them?

That is the historical question facing resurrection.

What happened to produce a movement of Jews and Greeks who were willing to reorder their entire vision of reality around the claim that Jesus had risen from the dead?

The most logical explanation is a lot of people saw Jesus raised from the dead or knew someone who did. That the disciples experienced the physical Jesus before their eyes and proclaimed that truth to others. The data points there.

THE EARLIEST EXTERNAL ROMAN SOURCES offer significant evidence because they’re opposed to Christianity. They are hostile witnesses who are trying to destroy Christianity. And yet, they make the case for it.

At this point, it is important to say something clearly: the case for the resurrection is not built only from the Bible. The New Testament obviously matters. It matters a great deal. But it is not the only body of evidence we have.

One of the more useful things for questioning claims is to look at what hostile or unsympathetic outsiders say about early Christianity. They establish that resurrection belief was:

• early — it wasn’t made up later.

• widespread — it wasn’t just believed in a sub-sect that become dominant later.

• costly — people were persecuted for this belief

• and not a legendary development that grew over time.

Two of the most important non-Christian witnesses are Tacitus and Pliny the Younger. And it is worth quoting them at length.

The Roman historian Tacitus, writing in the early second century, records Nero’s persecution of Christians after the fire of Rome in AD 64. In Annals 15.44, he writes:

“Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.”

Tacitus despises Christianity. Yet, he confirms several things that matter historically:

• Jesus (Christus) was a real historical figure.

• He was executed under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius.

• Christianity did not fade away with Jesus’ death.

• It spread rapidly from Judea to Rome.

• It was growing in popularity, even outside jewish communities.

• By the mid-60s AD, there were enough Christians in Rome to be targeted publicly by Nero.

That is astonishingly early.

We are not talking about a legend that gradually evolved centuries later in some distant corner of Constantine’s inner circle.

We are talking about a movement already visible in the capital of the Roman world within a generation of Jesus’ death. Whatever Tacitus means by “a most mischievous superstition,” he is describing a movement whose explosive spread demands explanation.

A few decades later, the Roman governor Pliny the Younger writes to the emperor Trajan about what to do with Christians in Bithynia-Pontus (modern-day northwest Turkey). This is usually dated to around AD 111–113.

Pliny was trying to figure out whether Christians are politically dangerous, socially subversive, or simply stubborn. And in the process, he gives us one of the earliest outside descriptions of Christian belief, worship, and practice.

Here is the key section from Letters 10.96:

“They affirmed, however, that the whole of their guilt, or their error, was, that they had been accustomed to meet on a stated day before it was light, and to recite a hymn among themselves to Christ, as though he were a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not for the commission of any crime, but to abstain from theft, robbery, adultery, and breach of faith, and not to deny a deposit when called upon to restore it. When this ceremony was concluded, it had been their custom to depart and meet again to take food, but it was of no special character and quite harmless… I thought it the more necessary, therefore, to find out what truth there was in these statements by submitting two women, who were called deaconesses, to the torture, but I found nothing but a debased superstition carried to great lengths.”

Again, this is not Christian propaganda. This is a Roman official trying to investigate what on earth these people are doing. And what he discovers is remarkable.

These Christians:

• gathered before dawn,

• sang hymns to Christ “as though he were a god,”

• made ethical vows,

• shared ordinary meals,

• and included women serving as deaconesses in their communities.

In other words, within living memory of the apostles, across the empire, there already existed communities publicly structured around the worship of Jesus.

In another writing in this correspondence, Pliny the Younger says the practice of gathering was wiped out by an edict he wrote but nevertheless wanted to know the real truth so… “with the assistance of torture from two female slaves, who were called deaconesses: but I could discover nothing more than depraved and excessive superstition [resurrection].” Epistles 10.69

Emperor Trajan, the uncle of Pliny, writes back saying he’s recommended the same course of torture, edicts, and property acquisition throughout the empire.

The evidence is robust that Trajan wasn’t exaggerating. At this time mass edicts, restrictions, and demotions happened in North Africa, Gaul, the Middle East, and in Rome itself. The geographic scope is unbelievable.

This tells us that resurrection faith was not a fourth-century invention, nor a late doctrinal exaggeration, nor the product of centuries of theological drift.

By 100AD, the faith was practiced in a large geographic spread while also theologically consistent across the empire. The only plausible explanation would be that the message: Christ’s death and life for sins and for salvation was from the very beginning. And remarkably it spread through a culture that denied a desire for resurrection.

THE EYEWITNESSES are a problem for doubters, too. At some point, skeptical readers often retreat to a different explanation:

“Fine. Maybe resurrection belief was early. But maybe it was still made up.”

That is a fair objection.

But if that is the explanation, one still has to answer a series of harder questions.

Why would people make this up when:

• it did not fit Greek expectations,

• it did not fit Jewish expectations,

• it made them vulnerable to social exclusion,

• and it often brought persecution rather than power?

That does not make fabrication impossible. People can lie for many reasons. But it does make the “they just made it up” theory thinner than many people assume especially when the earliest Christian sources do not merely say, “We have a religious feeling that Jesus lives on in our hearts.” They make claims about appearances.

About witnesses.

About public proclamation.

About people who could, in principle, be asked.

That is one of the most striking features of 1 Corinthians 15. Paul does not merely say “Christ is risen.” He anchors the claim in a chain of named and collective witnesses, many of whom he says were still alive at the time.

This is not airtight proof in the modern forensic sense. But everyone agrees, eyewitnesses, testimony, and first hand experience matters. It’s finally time to turn to the gospels and their witness.

This might cause some of us to squirm. The objections seem plain and obvious to us:

• Aren’t the gospels just tradition? The stories were passed down like campfire story telling from one person to the next. There’s no way to know what was really said and really done. Aren’t they just made up years later?

• We can’t rely on the gospels, because they’re written by “true believers”. They are biased by definition. We can’t believe what they said because they’re twisting and spinning history for their own purposes.

These objections are about the difference between “oral tradition” and “oral history” and the reliability of the gospels as witnesses or collections of witnesses.

Yes, the stories and narratives in the gospels were discussed in houses, courtyards, and marketplaces. Jesus said things, did things, and made the rounds through conversations across the Middle East. For three short years he was a meteor of news, rumor, and gossip. There was an oral tradition about him. Richard Bauckham helps us understand what that means:

Oral tradition is typically collective: The corpus is more than what a single person remembers because the information is a memory. That is, it does not go only from one person to another, it goes from one generation to another. Performances are held for audiences, not for single auditors, and historical gossip gets around as any other gossip does.

The gospels, however, are not a collective memory of a people shaped and formed over time. They are a robust oral history. Oral histories are the verbal tellings of what many people remembered and experienced being fashioned and formed into one story by one curator.

Imagine an earthquake or hurricane happens in your city. Thousands of people get online to share how they experienced it through social media. If you wanted to know what happened and what it meant, you would work diligently to talk with each of these witnesses about their memories. The collective stories form the history of the event. First century writers of the gospels did this work. Luke tells us so in his opening lines:

“Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.”

The gospels are not putting in order a collective myth, but a collection of verified memories—a history. Perhaps you object to this. But I ask you, would the collective memories of the witnesses of George Floyd’s murder have been enough for you? In that trial, the prosecution called eyewitness after eyewitness. Each shared, from their perspective, not only what happened but what it meant. They gave an oral history as testimony.

In the same way, the gospel writers are putting eye witnesses in front of us to provide a collective testimony about what happened at the beginning of the first century in Palestine and how it changed the world.

One of the fascinating techniques the gospel writers use to provide evidence is the naming of people in places and in moments. These writers aren’t novelists attempting to capture our modern imaginations with ancient sounding names. Instead, and this is important, they were writing to friends, loved ones, and peers who were alive at the time of these events. Why the names and places? To say: you can go to Jericho and find Bartimaeus, ask him about his sight. You can go to Nazareth and find Jesus’ brother James and the rest of his family. Talk to Simon of Cyrene or his son about the day he carried Jesus’ cross. Travel to Bethany and find the siblings, Lazarus, Mary, and Martha. Did Jesus rise from the dead? Ask Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Salome, and Joana.

The writers named names because they were reliable and verifiable eye witnesses to the historic Jesus. When the gospels were first read in churches across the Roman Empire in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, there were people in the room who would hear their names called out and could testify to the accuracy of what was shared. We too often forget these documents were written first to and for people who trusted them not because they were ignorant, but trusted them because they had seen the reality for themselves.

Eusebius, a second century historian, helps us understand this reality:

“The works of our Savior were always present, for they were true: those who were healed, those who rose from the dead, those who were not only seen in the act of being healed or raised, but were also always present, not merely when the Savior was living on earth, but also for a considerable time after his departure, so that some of them survived even to our own times.”

There’s so much more to offer about the reliability of the gospels. The accuracy of locations, descriptions, directions, and layouts of buildings described are all found through archeology to be accurate. The jewish customs, practices, and language are accurate to the time. The names, types of names, and spelling of those names are also accurate to the time.4

All this to say: the gospels are expert witnesses. Their accounts can be trusted.5

EVEN MANY SKEPTICS ADMIT: Something happened.6 One of the more interesting developments in modern historical discussion is that many scholars who do not confess Christian faith still grant several major facts.

They may dispute the interpretation, but non-Christian scholars often concede and affirm these things:

• Jesus was crucified.

• His followers sincerely believed he appeared to them afterward.

• Resurrection belief arose very early, as in day 1.

• The Christian movement cannot be explained adequately by saying the disciples just “moved made it up.”

The real debate is no longer whether there is anything to explain. The real debate is what best explains what happened.

And that matters a great deal. Because once you get there, you are no longer dealing with a cartoon version of Christianity versus “science and reason.”

You are dealing with competing explanations of historical data. Those explanations are not equally persuasive.

• Jesus really did remarkable things (though not miracles), and he said the things the said, and taught with the insights he taught with. However, in the grief of his gruesome death, there was a mass hallucination, somewhere between 60-500 people.

• Jesus somehow wasn’t fully dead. Think of Princess Bride, “Mostly dead isn’t all dead.” The Romans, for the first and only time, messed up the killing. They rushed it and botched it. Of course, then what happened to him?

• Jesus rose from the dead. He is God. His forgiveness, redemption, and restoration are truly available to all. Death is defeated. Evil is vanquished. We don’t believe in vain.

This is where resurrection debates become strangely revealing. Because most skeptics end up saying, “I cannot believe in resurrection because miracles do not happen.” In other words, because I know resurrection cannot happen, the resurrection of Jesus didn’t happen.

Which is understandable as an instinct. However, that instinct can sometimes function less like an argument and more like a gatekeeper. If one rules out resurrection before examining the evidence, then one is not really asking what happened. You’re only asking which non-resurrection theory can be made to survive.

But historically, they often require just as much, or way more, explanatory strain than the resurrection itself. How many mass hallucinations that birth a radical shift in belief have you ever heard of? How many philosophical shifts have you heard of that happen over one singular generation without an external experiential driver? How many movements are started by lies that no one wants to believe?

LET’S BE HONEST about where the conflict truly lies. At some point, skepticism can become less a refusal of gullibility and more a refusal to follow the evidence because it leads us to uncomfortable destinations.

Historical plausibility is not the same thing as discipleship.

You can grant that the bodily resurrection of Jesus is the most coherent explanation and still resist what it would mean.

In fact, I suspect many people do exactly that.

Because if Jesus rose from the dead, then Christianity is not merely an interesting worldview among many. It is a claim upon reality.

It means:

• Jesus is not safely dead,

• history is not spiritually sealed shut,

• death is not final,

• and your life is not your own in the way you imagined.

This is an existential challenge.

I do not think the resurrection is finally rejected because it is irrational.

I think it is often rejected because it is too consequential.

So let us be honest.

No one should pretend that the resurrection is a tame idea.

It is not.

It is scandalous.
It is disruptive.
It is intellectually demanding.
It is metaphysically offensive in a closed universe.

But once the historical evidence is taken seriously, the real question becomes less:

“Is resurrection a strange claim?”

Of course it is.

The real question becomes:

“What best explains the rise of resurrection faith in the first place?”

Why did this movement emerge here, then, and in this form?
Why did it spread so quickly?
Why did it take root across groups that were not predisposed to want it?
Why did it remain so stubbornly tied to public claims, named witnesses, and embodied hope?

At minimum, these are not the marks of a lazy legend. They are the marks of an event that shattered the categories of the people who first encountered it.

This is the second essay in a four-part series on the resurrection. What is the story, what does the resurrection mean? What is at stake?

There’s a great novel titled Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayiri

He says this about stories. Nayiri writes, “Every story is a story of loss, but not every story is a story of finding. Every story is a story of loss, but not every story is a story of finding.”

Nayiri is observing an obvious reality we miss: every narrative that we’ve ever heard has, at some point, a breaking, a grief, a grievance. Something bad happens. Every story has loss. But not every story includes an end of restoration where the things that were lost are being brought back and you have it yet again. The lost thing is found. Nayiri, through his nine-year-old protagonist says not all stories get that kind of ending.

The claim of Christ’s resurrection is that now and for all time, the story of the world ends with finding: In Jesus, the deepest lost thing has been found and made available to us again.

That death itself has been disrupted. The hero did not stay dead. The story did not end where all stories normally end. It’s a lovely story.

TOLKIEN AND LEWIS WERE RIGHT: Christianity must be a “true myth”. This is why C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien loved myth, fairy tales, legends, and the great old stories of the world. They understood that human beings are storytelling creatures, and that sometimes fiction can tell the truth more deeply than argument can. But both of them also insisted that Christianity cannot merely be admired as one more lovely myth among many.

It has to be what Lewis eventually came to call the “true myth.”

Not myth in the sense of “falsehood.”

Myth in the deeper sense: the kind of story human beings have always longed for.

The dying god.
The returning king.
The eucatastrophe.
The impossible happy ending.

Christianity contains all of that. What makes it different is not merely that it is the best version of the story. Harry Potter mirrors the Christian story, but people aren’t worshipping Harry Potter or traveling to Hogwarts, because we all know it is fantasy and so does its author.

Christians claim the story of Jesus happened and is happening in history.

Under Pontius Pilate.
In a real empire.
In a real grave.
In a real body.

That is what makes Christianity either insane or glorious.

If it is only a myth, then it may still move us. But if it is a true myth, then it does not merely move us, it remakes the world.

THE BIBLE IS BRUTALLY HONEST ABOUT THIS. St. Paul’s list of implications in 1 Corinthians 15 is challenging.

He says if Jesus did not rise, then your faith is futile.

Meaning: all your trust, all your obedience, all your prayers, all your hope are aimed at nothing at all. That is a terrifying thought.

He says if Jesus did not rise, then we are false witnesses.

Meaning: Christians are not brave truth-tellers. We are people passing along a lie. Wrong about everything.

He says if Jesus did not rise, then you are still in your sins.

That means the cross did not actually accomplish what Christians say it did.

Jesus would then be a martyr, maybe even a noble martyr, but not a victorious Savior.

And that distinction matters. The Christian faith is not built on the idea that Jesus died for a cause. It is built on the claim that Jesus died for us, and that his resurrection raises us to life alongside him.

If he stayed dead, then evil still owns the place.

Guilt still has legal right to your inner life.
Shame still tells the truest story about you.
Death still gets the final word.

And Paul says if Jesus did not rise, then those who have died in Christ are just dead.

That is one of the saddest lines in the New Testament. It means the Christian hope is not merely weakened without the empty tomb, it is gone.

And then Paul lands the hardest line of all:

“If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Many people today speak as if Christianity would still be worth keeping even if it were not true. They say, “Well, it gives people meaning. It helps them cope. It provides community. It gives moral structure.” “It shapes our culture.”

Paul says: if Christ is not raised, then Christians are not admirable.

They are pitiable.

That is how high the stakes are.

Christianity cannot be reduced to inspiration, a coping mechanism, or a moral support system.

It is either the announcement that something has happened in history that changes everything…or it is nothing at all.

If Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is not empty, it’s the fullness of existence.

Then forgiveness is available.
Then grace is a given.
Then death is defeated.
Then hope is not sentimental.
Then faith is not futile.
Then the story of the world has cracked open in the middle.

Then the deepest thing is not loss.

It is finding.

And that is exactly where Paul goes next.

“Christ has indeed been raised from the dead.”

And once that sentence becomes believable, everything changes. So leaves us needing to know.

IT’S NOT QUITE THE LEAP YOU MIGHT THINK. Most of us think, well, there’s really no way of knowing if Jesus rose from the dead.

We might assume all those who believe have taken a big leap of faith, or a Kant-esque leap into faith.

There are two things I love about the Bible. One is that the Bible tells you how the world really is and you read it and you’re like, yep, those are messed up families. I know what that’s like.

Yes, the world is really broken. I like that. So I like that part of it. It’s like a Western, like a Cormac McCarthy novel.

I love that the Bible specifically is it tells you to wonder, question, and engage all these things. The faith it asks of us is less about leaping and more about knowing and believing with confidence. It tells you to wrestle.

And I love that. No other religion has that baked in. No other belief system urges its believers to abandon it if it isn’t true. The leap is into hope and confident faith.

HOW CAN WE BE SO CONFIDENT? The question that you have to ask—hopefully you’re asking—is, did Jesus rise from the dead then?

The resurrection claim is everything, and that is the tension that needs to be solved.

How would you know if Jesus rose from the dead? Is that even a thing to know? Or to come to a plausible, reasonable expectation that Jesus rose from the dead?

I like to do this thing called a cumulative case. A cumulative case is like a lawyer who is trying to defend a client. What they do is they gather up lots of evidence to show to the jury. There’s no silver bullet in court.

What you do is present them with a variety and volume: here are the bank statements. Here are the documents. Here’s what was written. Here are these people, they’re eyewitnesses. Here’s the rationale. Here’s the holes in the story. Here’s how to make sense of the data. That’s what a lawyer would do, is they’d bring a bunch of evidence.

In the same way as if I came and I told you, “This morning an elephant ran through my backyard.”

You would say, “I don’t think that’s true, Brad. Because I know elephants don’t run through people’s backyards, right?”

But then if I said, “Mp, no, look at the tracks in my back yard. These must belong to an elephant.”

You’d respond, “Well, that’s interesting. But maybe Brad made it up and he got up in the middle of the night and he put these footprints out there, right?”

But then if I also said, “No, but look at the news. The Austin Zoo, has reported an elephant got loose last night.”

And then suddenly you’re starting to get a little bit more plausible.

And then I said, “Yeah, and my neighbors were awake at the time and they heard all of this crazy noise and they saw these massive shadowy figures. “

And then if I also told you, “Look at my insurance policy, it doesn’t cover elephant damage. I have no reason to make this up!”

There still might be people, because every group of friends has this person that says, “I don’t know, I didn’t see it, so it didn’t happen, right?”

But the cumulative case would be: look at the poop, look at the footprints, look at the zoo outbreak and the elephant that escaped..”

And you would say, “It’s pretty reasonable to believe this claim that an elephant ran through the backyard.”

And the same can be done with the resurrection. Only more so. There are three bits of evidence I find most compelling in this question: the validity of the eyewitnesses, the radical shift in belief about resurrection among Greeks and Jews, and the non-Christian writings about the early church which correlate to the experiences of millions of people over the last 2,000 years. I’ll get to those three things in the next posts in this series.

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This is the first essay in a four-part series on the resurrection. Before we ask whether the resurrection is believable, we have to understand what is actually being claimed. Christianity does not merely rise or fall on the teachings of Jesus, or even on the death of Jesus, but on the claim that he is alive right now.

THERE ARE A LOT OF IMPORTANT QUESTIONS hanging around the edges of the Christian faith.

How did the universe come into existence?
What does it mean to be human?
How should we think about sex, suffering, justice, politics, or power?
What should the church even be?

Those are real questions. Worthwhile questions. Some of them are life-altering questions.

But they are not the center.

The center of Christianity is not a moral vision. It is not a lifestyle. It is not a political instinct. It is not a spiritual vibe. It is not even a philosophy of meaning.

The center of Christianity is the claim that Jesus Christ died and rose again.

And not as a sub-point.

Not as one doctrine among many.
Not as a symbolic way of saying “love wins.”
Not as a seasonal thing we drag out once a year with lilies and pastel colors and then quietly put back in the closet until next spring.

The resurrection is the bullet point of Christianity.

That can be hard for modern people to understand.

Even many Christians functionally live as though Christianity is mainly about the cross, or mainly about forgiveness, or mainly about becoming a better person, or mainly about church participation. Of course, all of those things matter in some way.

But the New Testament simply will not let us make the resurrection optional.

Christianity is a faith about a crucified savior because it is a faith about an empty tomb.

That means the foundational Christian confession is not that Christ was alive, but that Christ is alive.

And that changes the whole thing.

If Jesus rose from the dead, then Christianity is not just one religious option among many. It is not a private coping mechanism for spiritually sensitive people. It is not inherited ritual for the emotionally nostalgic. It is not a nice framework for becoming a slightly less selfish version of yourself.

If Jesus rose from the dead, then the world is not what we thought it was.

And if the world is not what we thought it was, then all our other questions have to be re-asked in light of that one event.

That doesn’t mean every other question becomes insignificant. It means every other question gets rearranged.

Questions about science don’t disappear.
Questions about church hurt don’t disappear.
Questions about hypocrisy, politics, sexuality, suffering, or abuse don’t disappear.

Because Jesus rose from the dead, those are no longer reasons to dismiss Christianity from a distance. They become questions to wrestle through inside the reality that Christ is Lord.

That’s why the resurrection is so disruptive. Resurrection is a claim so large that if it is true, every other belief has to move around it.

And that is exactly why the resurrection feels threatening.

A raised Christ cannot remain one voice among many in your life. He cannot be one wise teacher among your therapists, your podcasts, your favorite authors, your political instincts, and your personal preferences. He cannot simply become one of your yoga instructors.

Christ becomes the center.

THIS CLAIM is often intensely destabilizing to all our assumptions because dead things do not come back to life.

We all know that.

We know it when we bury people we love.
We know it when we stand beside graves.
We know it when we sit in hospital rooms and hear the words we hoped we would not hear.
We know it when something in our life is over and no amount of wanting can bring it back.

Death feels final because it is.

Which is why the Christian claim is so outrageous. And I love that about Christianity.

THE CLAIM OF EASTER is that on a Friday afternoon, Jesus was confirmed dead under Roman execution. He was buried. His body was laid in a tomb. And on Sunday morning, he was not there.

That is either the most absurd thing Christians have ever believed, or it is the truest thing in the world.

There really is no middle option.

And the Apostle Paul knew that.

That is why, in 1 Corinthians 15, he reminds the church of what he calls “first importance”: that Christ died for our sins, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day, and that he appeared to many witnesses.

That is the center.

Not “be nice.”
Not “be spiritual.”
Not “go to church.”
Not “believe in something bigger than yourself.”

The center is this:

Jesus died.
Jesus was buried.
Jesus was raised.
Jesus was seen.

And if that is true, then Christianity is not merely good advice.

It is news.

Something has happened, and now everything is different.

And that is why the resurrection is not a side belief.

It is Christianity.

BEFORE YOU ASK whether Christianity is useful, comforting, ethical, or relevant, you have to ask whether Easter happened. Because if it did, then Jesus is not merely interesting.

He is alive. More on how I’m confident about that tomorrow.

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I have nothing clever, insightful, or original to say on Good Friday. I’ve tried many times before when tasked with speaking at a service on this grand day. I’ve written about it, too. (It’s below if you want more than these few thoughts)

THE TREASURE OF THIS DAY is it reckons sorrow with joy. For Christ, the Via Delarosa is a path of expectant joy. The author of Hebrews says that Jesus, who would be called king or Christ by those who worship him and those who curse in his name, is the sacrifice of redemption, he is the faith made perfect, he is the path to the holiest of relational locations, and he accomplished it all through death by joy.

Jesus’ close friend who now has cathedrals dedicated in his name all over the world, St. Peter, wrote that every prophet and every angel in heaven looked on this moment with delight, anxiously awaiting the mystery of God’s love poured out in death.

As life begins to retreat from him, Jesus uses his finally moments like someone who is finishing their magnum opus. He forgives, he invites someone to paradise later that day, and he declares, “It is finished.”

I know many will try to make this day incredibly somber and a funeral. There are too many dark crosses for my liking. I get it, that is our shared tradition, and it is fine. I will be wearing black, it’s what I always wear, but what makes passion week or Holy Week so unique and other, is the entire narrative is a celebration of the convergence of brutality and hope. Good Friday gathers for us the phenomenon of greatest glory and saddest circumstance into one singular moment.

WE LOOK ON WITH HORROR. Preserved into the entire Western story, is the core image of a good, innocent, intelligent, and gifted man brutally killed at the hands of an empire, of oppressors. It shapes our cultural beyond our comprehension. Historian, Tom Holland tried to put it into perspective in his book, Dominion.

“The idea that a crucified man could be praised as God would seem to any Roman a grotesque obscenity…”1

Our ideals of justice, mercy, dignity, and love are all shaped, or rather solidified, in the crucified Jesus. But it begins, for us, with terror. How could humanity do such a thing? How could this be God’s love displayed?

But it is. What ought to be a curse is actually victory. Tom Holland goes on to write on that same page I quoted above, this historic fact:

“What Christianity does... is to turn [the] value system [of Rome] on its head…to say that the person who is crucified triumphs over the person who has crucified him”

JESUS WINS ON THE CROSS. The mystery of human history is how God wins through losing. Every time. Evil transfigures into good. Sorrow is superseded by joy. The great English poet, Hannah More, put it this way:

Here Christ for sinners suffer'd, groan'd, and bled,
But there he reigns the great triumphant head:
Here mock'd and scourged, he wore a crown of thorns,
A crown of glory there his brow adorns.

Jesus also wins in the Tomb. It’s a doubt victory for him. God’s love lavished on history in a double portion. Christ is champion twice over.

I guess I’m trying to say the most simplest thing and I’ve already taken too many words to say it.

GOOD FRIDAY IS GOOD. The Christian’s task is not to work yourself into a fit mourning as if it was your grandfather who died and resist the urge to celebrate, laugh, and sing with glee. Because that’s not what has happened and that’s not what’s happening.

I can only imagine the raucous chorus of cheers among the heavenly hosts when Christ yelled, “It is finished!” For the Christian, join in that joyful song. The cross means eternal joy is held in the same heart that holds sorrow.

For the those who struggle to believe any of this. Your task is to wonder and marvel at the juxtaposition this day brings. If Jesus doesn’t deal with sin, death, and evil, what does? Are those things working? What are you supposed to do with the internal desire that all the wrongs will be righted?

Perhaps, you ought to give more thought to the joyful king, who is lead to the slaughter filled with love for you and grief for sin’s havoc on you and his world.

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LIFE IS REALLY HARD. A 2023 mental health study reported that over half of all Americans have a moment of uncontrollable worry at least once a day.1 Half also said they feel depressed, discouraged, and hopeless several days a week. There’s another study of relational betrayal, loss, and isolation.

But these stats aren’t just out there, they’re inside. They describe much of our experience, too.

Life is hard and it feels like it’s always been hard. Earnest Hemingway wrote in the 1920s on the most depressing page of the most depressing end to any novel: “The World Breaks Everyone…the very good, and the very gentle, and the very brave impartially.”

Pain isn’t just an idea in the world or a depressing quote, it’s our experience in this world.

Everyone suffers.

And perhaps the worst part of suffering is when we feel like we are alone in it. Even We stand and sing in these spaces and quietly wonder, “Am I the only one?”

Does all of this God stuff do anything for me when I’m in agony? Where is God? Where is he amidst the ominous beeps of a hospital room? Where is he in the anguish of my marriage?

Is God doing anything at all? Is God interested? Is he concerned?

The answers, for me, are found in the Thursday night of Holy Week on the grounds Gethsemane.2 It’s not with theological prose, not with poetry, but within the humanity of Jesus lying on the ground in both pain and prayer.

They went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” He took Peter, James and Johnalong with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” he said to them. “Stay here and keep watch.”

Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him. “Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”

Mark 14

THIS GARDEN MOMENT comes in the midst of a frantic week. On Sunday Jesus was celebrated as he entered the city, on Monday he cursed the fig tree and overturned tables in the temple. On Tuesday Jesus was publicly questioned and cross-examined by religious leaders, on Wednesday they had a dinner party that was interrupted by a woman and her perfume which Jesus says is for his burial.

Finally on Thursday night Jesus shared the Passover meal with his disciples – they ate lamb, wine, and bread, where on the final round of toasts, Jesus declared that the cup was his blood, the bread was his body. That he was making a new covenant. His body would be broken, his blood would be shed.

Leaving the meal, they sang some hymns as they walked to the garden of gethsemane which is a hilly olive grove outside the city. It’s then, as they walk, Jesus tells his disciples they’re all going to abandon him, ominously quoting an old prophet: “They’re going to strike the shepherd, the sheep will scatter.” Peter swears his allegiance to Jesus and says he will never abandon him…Jesus says, of course you will, you’ll do it three times before the sun even rises. Peter doubles down and swears on his life: “I will never disown you.”

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ALL ALONG, THROUGH EVERY DAY AND HOUR, all along, through every day and hour, the tension is building. In the shadows of every moment of this week, the religious ruling class are plotting his demise. The angst of the city is billowing. The time is finally arriving, this passage is like the ending of Act 3 in a Shakespearean play, we’ve now reached the point of no return.

As they arrive at the garden Jesus asks his disciples to wait while he prays. He takes his three closest disciples, the same that went with him to the mount of transfiguration, a little deeper he goes with them and he began to be greatly “distressed and troubled”.

Other translations say, “deeply distraught and afflicted”.

The words used are: “seized with horror.”

“STRICKEN WITH GRIEF”. Christ in anguish. Several years ago, I got text, and then a call, a family in our church who was on vacation, rushing their child to the hospital who wasn’t breathing and wasn’t conscious. The flood of emotions, fear, and dismay came like a tidal wave as I waited and prayed.

This is the kind of moment Jesus finds himself in.

In this moment, we see the humanity of Jesus, perhaps more clearly than any other moment in the gospels. He does not hide what he is feeling. He tells his closest friends exactly what is going on in verse 34: “I am overwhelmed with sorrow, even to the point of death.”

“Overwhelmed with sorrow” echoes of Isaiah 53: “a man of sorrows…acquainted with grief.” It’s as if his heart is saturated with sadness and grief. His soul is overflowing within him. It’s suffocating. He feels like he might die from the emotion.

Taking a few steps further he collapses on the ground in prayer. This is not a neat and tidy bending of the knees in well-choreographed worship. No, the text says, “he fell to the ground.” This is a face-plant of distress. The sorrow is so much he’s lost the ability to stand.

His prayer is a relational plea. A crying out. Overwhelmed. Consumed with agony.

And in this moment of intense stress, his closest friends let him down.

Jesus has already told them: “I’m overwhelmed with sorrow, I feel like I’m going to die from it all.” And they can’t stay awake to watch for him. He’s told them for weeks that he’s going to be betrayed, even told them that night it’s going to start happening. He’s in danger, he’s in need, he needs them to be close to him in his moment of incredible sorrow and they respond…by taking a nap.

We’ve all had those times when you’re staying up late with friends and your buddy falls asleep mid conversation. Or you’re chatting with your spouse having pillow talk, and they start to snore. That stuff is funny. What is happening to Jesus is more like going into war and those who’ve committed to being by your side through thick and thin bailing on you entirely. It’s like a spouse who said, “for richer or poorer, sickness and in health…” and then suddenly leaves in the night.

In the garden of gethsemane Jesus is let down over and over again. Three times he asks his disciples to stay up and keep watch, and be with him. Three times he finds them asleep.

Ultimately, he’s not only abandoned, he’s betrayed, too. Someone he’s be close to for over three years betrays him. Through the entire evening, one thing becomes clear, Jesus is utterly and totally alone. Alone in his sorrow. Abandoned to be overwhelmed on his own.

If you want to see the humanity of Jesus, this is it. It’s like Hemingway said: “The world breaks everyone, the strong and the weak alike.”

Jesus does not observe the pain of humanity from a distance, analyzing it in a lab, looking into it with curiosity, but experiences suffering himself.

Early church father St. Ambrose argued “the divine reality of Jesus doesn’t shield him from pain…he feels wounds. The suffering hurts...within his soul and in his body.”

His divinity doesn’t come with a numbing agent, his life, suffering, and death are not symbolic, they’re real in his humanity.

While he might not have been in your exact situation, our maker, our creator, the God of heaven made flesh. He walked among us into the abandonment, loneliness, and distress that we all experience.

This is what that means. There isn’t a pain. There isn’t a grief. There isn’t a burden, or agony, or wound you will experience in this life in which Jesus doesn’t meet you and say, “I know that kind of pain. I have tasted that terror, I have seen that sorrow, I have felt it, and I have walked through it.”

When you cry out to God, it is not to an unaffected void, but to the God of this garden, to Christ who collapses in sorrow. So, cry out to Jesus. Suffering solved, right?

JESUS IDENTIFIED HIMSELF WITH THE AGONY OF OUR LIVES. In him we have true empathy—he feels what we feel—he knows what we know…What a good thing.

But, we need more than that in our suffering. It’s lovely to have someone look you in the eye and say, “I’ve been there.” We need the empathy, but we also need more than that. You can’t use empathy to remove sorrow.

Have you ever shared with a close friend what is going on in your life and they shake their head, offer an empathetic sigh and say. “Oh man, that’s crazy. That’s so hard…I’ve had that happen to me, too…” but then doesn’t do anything about it?

Your suffering remains. They go home to their nice life, you’re still in the pain. It falls flat because what we ultimately need more than empathy. We need someone who is actually willing to step into our situation.

We need someone who will confront what’s broken. Who will stand up to injustice, who can heal the illness, who can set straight what is crooked. We need someone to fight for us.

It’s great that Jesus feels what we feel, but we need more. Is he willing to do something?

JESUS SURRENDERS BEFORE HE IS BETRAYED. “Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” This simple prayer is the center of Mark’s brief account of this scene. It’s the moment of Christ’s surrender.

He prays the same way he always prays, to his Father in heaven. He cries out to God and affirms his power: “All things are possible for you!” Jesus says, I know you can do anything!

Then he makes his request: ”Remove this cup from me.”

What is that all about?

Throughout the Old Testament, especially with the prophets (like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah) used an image of the cup of wrath. Imagine a goblet, that with every murder, every betrayal, every account of fraud or injustice, essentially every time humanity sins, the cup is added to…The Sin from the very beginning and all ongoing sin that is the root cause for all that is wrong in the world is heaped into this Cup. Everything pollutes, perverts, distorts, and divides thrown in..

And all along, the prophets say, the Cup is filling and it is growing heavier…It’s being stored up…Imagine the scope of this thing. Every wound! Every Sorrow! Every jealousy.

And then, one day, one ominous hour…God will pour that cup out back onto humanity…It’s an hour of judgement and an hour of wrath. In Isaiah 51, the prophet writes, “Woe to you who will drink this cup of wrath!” If you want to deal with sorrow, you have to deal with this cup…

So, When Jesus prays in the garden of gethsemane for this cup to be removed, it becomes clear, maybe for the first time, Jesus is going to drink the cup of wrath. He didn’t add to it. He didn’t make it so. Yet, he is going to take it all on himself. He is going to endure the wrath…

I had a friend with teenage sons who came up with this great idea. His sons fought with each other and disrespected him and his wife. His sons were selfish. My friend decided their punishment would be that each time they talked harshly they would have to go into their yard and grab a stone and put it in their pile. He told them at the end of the month they would have to carry the stones to the top of the hill behind their house. Each day, they added to the pile. Unable to stop themselves they yelled, screamed, judged, and cruelly put each other down, what started as a small lump of pebbles became a large pile of burdens. Then came the day of reckoning when the Dad told them they had to carry the pile up the hill. The sons filled their bags with rocks and lifted them onto their shoulders. The literal weight of all their guilt pressed into their bodies while they looked up the path to rid themselves of it. It was in this moment my friend took their stone filled bags from them and hiked up the hill in their place.

Like I said, we’re in need of someone who will not only empathize with our sorrow, but will willingly step into it. We’re in need of this kind of exchange.

We need someone willing to face the burden and gravity of a world saturated with sin.

Jesus finishes his prayer: “Not my will but yours!” Jesus surrenders…he yields…he’s willing to drink the cup.

In verse 41 he tells his disciples, “The hour has come…The son of man is delivered Into the hands of sinners” And there he is, getting taken away by guards to “Drink the cup”. It’s As Isaiah prophesied: he is like a lamb led to slaughter…

This is his moment of no return. He’s now committed to obedience to the point of death on the cross.

This is so unlike any narrative norm. The transcendent warrior is supposed to who takes up arms and resists to the very end. Like Achilles and Paris in Troy or Odysseus as he returns home. The hero is supposed to fight through strength. Jesus doesn’t put up a fight. He goes willingly.

Jesus could snap his fingers and make it all stop. After all, as Jesus prayed: All things are possible. Throughout the gospels they make it clear anything is possible: Blind can see, demons can be exercised, food can be multiplied, water can be walked on, storms can be calmed, lepers can be healed. It’s all possible! And God the Father could have responded, “You know what Jesus, you’re right, they aren’t worth it! They can’t even stay awake!”

But that is not what God does. The Father’s will is for the Son to give his life, to drink the cup.

Jesus does not fight for us through strength, but through surrender.

The good news is not just that Jesus identifies with your sorrow in his life but that he willingly surrenders his life to end all sorrow.

He is delivered into the Hands of sinners so that he might save sinners.

He takes the cup of wrath and the judgement for all that is wrong in the world and endures the cross willingly. That is so good. A willing exchange. He steps into the suffering with us and for us.

BUT WE STILL NEED MORE. Not just identifying with us, not just willing to do something for us, we are in desperate need for all of it to change…We need his willingness to actually fix this world…

Several years ago, our sewer line collapsed in the middle of the night. I didn’t just need someone to answer my call and say, “Yeah, I’ve seen this before”, I didn’t just need that person to say, “I’m willing to come out,” What I actually needed someone to come out and fix it.”

We need the sin and death behind each distress to be defeated. Jesus’ suffering needs to work.

LOTS OF PEOPLE SUFFER AND DIE FOR OTHERS. There’s a story about the Spanish civil war called For Whom the Bell Tolls. Where, at the end, the main character is wounded, and tells all his fellow soldiers to leave him behind so he can save them by blowing up a bridge to save their lives. At the bitter end, he’s shot and with his dying breath he blows up the bridge and completes his mission. But the enemy has already crossed over. The novel ends with the defeat. He laid down his life but it didn’t save.

What makes Jesus remarkable is, his suffering saves. Not for a moment but forever.

But here is a truth and the foundation of every aspect of human existence from the point of the garden of gethsemane forward: God in Jesus has suffered and died for you and it actually saves the world.

Scholars are quick to point out: Only after the resurrection does this moment become clear, which Mark anticipates the reader to see very shortly, mere moments after reading this passage and the intensifying suffering or passion of Christ. Mark expects an audience “aha” moment on the next page when the women go to the tomb expecting to weep over his dead body, but instead find the tomb rolled open and Jesus to be raised to life.

The solutions for all our sorrow, is resurrection. In the empty tomb his sacrifice is vindicated.

He wasn’t merely taking one for the team, He was defeating death itself. His suffering isn’t the end. He Rises. He is victorious. His mission wasn’t just to live obediently, His purposes wasn’t only to die. His mission and purpose was to rise from the dead.

Jesus drinks the cup of wrath and pours out on us the cup of Salvation…

His Will…Is for the resurrection

His hour…Is for the suffering but is also for new life

His Cup…is of wrath that swallows up death.

His surrender…is all the way to resurrection

It’s not that he identifies with our pain, It’s not that he is willing to lay down his life, it’s not even that he suffered. It’s that his suffering results in victory. Death no longer has sting. Hell has no victory. It is Christ alone…Jesus, no longer collapsed in the garden.

The cup of salvation exceeds the cup of wrath. his delivery onto the cross is for hours, his tomb was for mere days, But eternity is abundant life.

THE GOOD NEWS is not that he was betrayed and buried—the greatest news is his death breaks the chains of all affliction. His sacrifice works. It’s the only thing that does

It’s because of this, the writer of Hebrews says, “that is was for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God”… It’s a joy, he willingly dies, he enters the suffering because he knows…the outcome of the cross is salvation and glory which we all get to partake in.”

This means, there isn’t a single suffering that won’t be redeemed. A tear that won’t be wiped away. There isn’t an evil, a sin, or darkness that isn’t overcome… or an injustice that has not been dealt with. the scope of the gospel.

What happened in the Garden of Eden, when sin and sorrow entered the world, Jesus redeems in the Garden of Gethsemane.…

This is all good news to all who suffer. It is great news to all who believe.

It’s a strange thing, being a pastor of people who do not believe.1

But I don’t know any different.

From my earliest days in ministry until now, I’ve been surrounded by disciples who sincerely struggle to believe in the goodness of God. Many of them could ace a theology exam—sometimes those are the least hopeful. Others are connoisseurs of sermon podcasts and Christian books. Most know the basics. Most understand the truths about God.

And yet, many move through life like sticks thrown into a moving river. They are carried along through the current until they hit rocks.

For a while, they appear to be doing fine. They hold a set of beliefs they outwardly profess, and they move through life much like everyone else until their world catches on something: financial strain, health issues, election cycles, relationship fractures, disappointment, or simply the deadening boredom of ordinary life. Then the deeper crisis reveals itself.

That’s when a disciple becomes aware of their unbelief.

But usually, they’ve been in that crisis for years.

They have simply arrived at the painful intersection of intellectual assent and functional faith.

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We Live in Two Stories

I’ve come to believe that many Christians live in two stories at once.

One story is the treasured story of Jesus. We love this story. We keep it sacred. It matters to us deeply. But often, it functions much like Christmas decorations or family heirlooms. We wrap it up carefully and store it in the attic. Every now and then, we bring it down into the realm of daily life—during Holy Week, a hard season, a funeral, a moment of fear—before placing it back where it belongs.

If there were a fire, it might be one of the first things we would try to save. But in the ordinary architecture of daily life, it remains mostly put away.

The other story makes sense of our daily lives.

This is the story we use in the “real world.” It helps us navigate our plans, problems, anxieties, ambitions, and dreams. It is the story that submits to budgets, medical data, corporate culture, school schedules, social pressure, and career development. It is the lower story: the one furnished for everyday living.

And like the furniture in a living room, this story reflects our tastes and meets our immediate needs. It can be rearranged, replaced, upgraded, or rebranded whenever necessary.

For a long time, I thought this meant I was a hypocrite pastoring a church full of hypocrites. But I’ve come to think the problem is both more ordinary and more tragic.

We are not hypocrites. We are often functional unbelievers. We are dualists and don’t know it.

We would never describe ourselves as atheists or agnostics, but functionally, many of us live as though God is either distant, optional, or secondary. As Miroslav Volf writes, “The main temptation is not to reject God outright, but to embrace God as something secondary.”

That is the danger.

Not deconversion in one dramatic collapse, but a thousand small concessions that slowly relocate God from the center of reality to the upper shelf of private meaning.

Jesus Meets Our Hidden Unbelief

Jesus’ final week in Jerusalem confronts this exact dilemma. In fact, he spends nearly his entire Tuesday debating those who would make God an afterthought in their plans to make the most of the chaotic world. Jesus, however, intends to make the world new.

In Mark 12, thinkers, leaders, and religious professionals question him. It is a theological and legal forum. On Tuesday of Holy Week, he stands trial for the first time. They approach him with questions they don’t want answers to.

That is still true of us.

The objections they bring to Jesus are not foreign to modern people. Their assumptions are not as ancient as we imagine. Their questions, motivations, and evasions remain within us, too.

And Jesus does not merely answer their questions. He exposes the story beneath them.

The Pharisees: God Is Real, But It’s Up to Us

The Pharisees are often flattened into cartoon villains, but they were more complicated than that. They were not just religious tyrants trying to ruin everyone’s life. They were serious people trying to keep Israel from repeating its own destruction.

They read the Scriptures and concluded that the exile came because former generations had rejected God, neglected his commands, and forsaken his ways. So they devoted themselves to reform. If God’s people could become holy enough, obedient enough, disciplined enough, maybe blessing would return. Maybe God would restore them.

Their error was not that they didn’t believe in God.

Their error was that they functionally believed God had left the room.

God was real, yes. Holy, yes. But in practice, he was no longer present and active. So now the burden was on them. They had to build the structures, create the pressure, establish the standards, and keep everyone in line.

In their zeal to make people obey God, they ceased trusting God.

And in the process, they missed Jesus entirely.

This is still a live temptation.

Functional deism is what happens when we believe in God’s existence but quietly assume that the world will only be healed through our plans, our pressure, our systems, our activism, our discipleship models, our parenting strategies, or our moral clarity.

It says:

God is good and has a wonderful plan.
And now it is our job to execute it for him.

I’ve seen this in churches. I’ve seen it in leaders. I’ve seen it in myself.

It is possible to spend years doing ministry for Jesus while functionally operating as though Jesus is not actually present, not actually active, and not actually able to do much unless we organize ourselves well enough.

That is not faith.

That is sanctified anxiety.

The Herodians: God Is Real, But This World Is What Matters

The Herodians had a different instinct.

If the Pharisees tried to reform the world, the Herodians simply made peace with it. They aligned themselves with Herod and the machinery of Rome. They were pragmatists. Realists. Opportunists.

They concluded that if no power was coming to save them, then the wise thing to do was survive and, if possible, thrive. Carve out your little kingdom. Protect your comfort. Gather your pleasures. Attach yourself to the powers that be.

This is functional atheism.

Not always the loud philosophical kind. More often the practical kind.

It is entirely possible to confess belief in God while structuring your actual life around the assumption that no one is coming to rescue you.

Functional atheism believes in control.

If control prevents pain, then control everything you can: your schedule, your house, your image, your children, your future, your money, your emotional exposure, your little territory of sovereignty.

It also believes in pleasure.

Eat, drink, scroll, buy, curate, distract, soothe, indulge. Gather enough comforts and maybe you can survive the ache of being alive.

This is not usually framed as rebellion.

It is usually framed as realism.

But it is still unbelief.

The functional atheist has two stories as well:

God is real and we worship him.
But in the real world, we are on our own.

Jesus and the Coin

The Pharisees and Herodians come to Jesus together and ask: Should we pay taxes to Caesar?

It sounds like a political question. A practical question. A lower-story question.

But Jesus, as he so often does, answers beneath the surface.

He asks for a denarius and says:

“Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”

“Caesar’s,” they reply.

Then Jesus says:

“Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”

The point is not merely civic responsibility.

The coin bears Caesar’s image, so Caesar can have his coin.

But you bear God’s image.

Your life, your body, your soul, your fear, your ambition, your future, your ordinary Tuesday afternoon—all of it belongs to God.

This is where Jesus confronts both the Pharisee and the Herodian in us.

To the one trying to save the world through better plans, Jesus says: You are not the messiah.

To the one trying to survive through self-protection and power, Jesus says: You do not belong to Caesar. You belong to God.

All of life belongs to him.

Not the sacred part.
Not the church part.
Not the “spiritual” part.

All of it.

The Sadducees: God Is a Good Idea

Then the Sadducees come.

They ask Jesus a question about resurrection, marriage, and the afterlife. But like so many of our questions, the surface issue is not the real issue.

Their real problem is that they do not believe God raises the dead.

The Sadducees were educated, respectable, and religious. They kept the rhythms, maintained the traditions, and participated in worship. But they had quietly lost confidence in the living reality of God.

They were not hostile to religion. They simply no longer believed that God was present, knowable, or meaningfully involved.

This is functional agnosticism.

It says:

God is a good idea.
And I get to explore that idea.

It keeps the forms of faith while evacuating its substance.

It likes spiritual practices, meaningful rituals, inherited tradition, ethical frameworks, and a little transcendence around the holidays. But it does not expect God to actually speak, act, intervene, command, or raise the dead.

That posture is everywhere now.

People still want spirituality. They still want peace, grounding, wholeness, and awe. They just do not want the burden of a living God.

They want prayer without response.
Redemption without resurrection.
Wholeness without surrender.

And honestly, I understand the appeal.

Belief seems easier when God is reduced to a concept instead of a king.

“You Don’t Know?”

Jesus answers the Sadducees with a sentence that should sober every serious doubter:

“Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?”

That is Jesus’ diagnosis.

Their unbelief is not just intellectual sophistication. It is a failure to know two things:

1. What God has said

2. What God can do

That still gets at the center of so much modern doubt.

Some of our questions are honest and necessary. But many of the questions we most urgently insist on are not actually attempts to know Jesus. They are often ways of barricading ourselves from him.

We ask questions about ethics, suffering, politics, sexuality, hell, justice, science, identity, and history—and some of those questions matter deeply. But beneath all of them is the deeper question:

Is Jesus the God of the living?

That is the question under the question.

Because if he is, then he is not merely a topic for debate, a source of inspiration, or an inherited symbol of meaning.

He is reality.

The God of the Living

Jesus says to the Sadducees:

“He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

That title is the answer to all our lower-story unbelief.

God is not merely a force, a theory, a first cause, or a moral backdrop to the universe. He is the God of the living.

He is the God who raises the dead.

And he is the God who is present, involved, and reigning in ordinary life right now.

In your grief.
In your boredom.
In your anxiety.
In your work.
In your body.
In your home.
In your actual life.

That is what so many of us have lost. We have lost the nearness of God.

We have tucked Jesus into the attic of cherished belief while living downstairs in a world governed by fear, control, performance, and self-preservation.

But Jesus envelops all of life. He invades our existence.

He comes to us as more than a teacher of spiritual truths. He comes as the God of the living.

To the functional deist, he says: You do not need to build the kingdom for me.

To the functional atheist, he says: You do not need to save yourself.

To the functional agnostic, he says: I am not hiding from you.

And to all of us, he says the same thing in the end:

Give to God what belongs to God.

Which is another way of saying:

Give him your life.

Not the polished version.
Not the Sunday version.
Not the version that already feels spiritual.

Your real one.

Because the beginning of faith is not the absence of doubt.

It is the surrender of the life that already belonged to him all along.

Holy Week is Here. Does it feel like it? Target and the American retail machine has started to tell us it’s time for Easter, pastels, and baskets. It’s time for the vibe of happiness and optimism. I got an email today telling me it’s time to buy my Easter outfit.

Emails told me it was Christmas, they shouted about Valentines, and then St. Patrick’s day. Now that those things have faded, it’s time for the ham, eggs, and chocolates.

Isn’t funny, how regardless of the season, Snickers, Reece’s and M&M’s remain faithful to tell us what to celebrate and it’s apparently always with their products and cheaply made trinkets and banners we gather to put in storage and one day throw away. Candy calls us to celebration.

Does all of that translate to daily reality of a life with Christ? How do the vibes of Easter fit into a life of medical appointments, anxieties, relational breakdowns, hurt feelings and painful memories?

It’s Holy Week. Yet, it feels like every other week consumed with errands, headaches, and moments of fleeting happiness. That’s the point. Holy Week is about redeeming and restoring your ordinary week.

Target wants us to feel like Easter. Christ wants to be our Easter.

Holy Week is the hinge of all history!

Don’t get me wrong, I will eat a snickers egg and a peanut butter cup egg and I believe Easter M&Ms are only second best to Christmas M&Ms, but truly…this week cannot be trivialized and sentimentalized…

Holy Week transforms the world, and yet…it also pops up on our calendar and feels like a chore? How do we muster the emotion, and the feelings, of Easter?

The answers to those questions are very nerdy. They’re rooted in the first day of Holy Week, Palm Sunday.

The Summons

Holy Week starts with Jesus and his disciples coming into Jerusalem in a makeshift royal procession…like Prince Ali Aliabi Aliabobua. There are crowds, there are organic decorations, there are shouts, there are songs, there are call backs to prophecy’s.

Here’s the word that starts Holy Week: Hosanna. Translated as Lord, Save Us!

The crowds sing a song that is one of the anthems of Sukkot. Sukkot is the festival of the tents, rest, and relaxation. This ancient festival goes all the way back to their time in the desert. It’s traditionally a week of getting out of the normal rhythms and remembering how God cared for the people by making his dwelling place with them through the tabernacle.

During that time they would read Psalms 113-118. And they would get to Psalm 118, and would sing and read this all together at the climatic moment of celebration. The confetti conclusion.

The stone the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
the Lord has done this,
and it is marvelous in our eyes.
The Lord has done it this very day;
let us rejoice today and be glad.

Lord, save us!
Lord, grant us success!

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
From the house of the Lord we bless you.
The Lord is God,
and he has made his light shine on us.
With boughs in hand, join in the festal procession
up to the horns of the altar.

You are my God, and I will praise you;
you are my God, and I will exalt you.

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
his love endures forever.

This phrase, “Lord, save us” or hosanna, would be declared as the people marched around the temple, carrying citrus fruits and palm branches these organic symbols were call the Hoshanot of Sukkot. I promised nerdy.

The idea of this moment was a celebration of what God had already done. It joyfully sings of the salvation he had already brought out of Egypt, the path into freedom through the Red Sea, and the rejected people becoming the people of God in the desert.

I harkens back to the moment the armies of Egypt surround them on the shores of the sea. Moses turns to the people and says, “wait on the lord.” What follows, is God’s answer. He makes a path of safety. He defeats the oppressors. They walk to through the sea to a new life of freedom: a life with God dwelling with them.

So every year, they gathered in tents to remember that time and sing:

“The Lord has done it this very day! Rejoice and be Glad!”

But it wasn’t just looking back. It was also looking forward. The crescendo of the festival was about a coming king who would restore and redeem the people once more. Who’s coming would bring a culmination of God’s mission to make all things new, put the law of God in their hearts, and cleanse them from their sin and rebellion against God. So they sang, with lemons still on the stem and palm branches:

“Blessed is the one who comes! Blessed is the one coming to save! Why will he come? Because Yahweh loves us always.”

Then, Jesus comes riding into town on a donkey, and the crowds of Jerusalem fill the street and sing this anthem. They shout hosannah, because they see God’s love does indeed endure forever. Why? because Jesus is the embodiment of God’s love toward them. He is salvation breaking into their world. Jesus personifies the song they’ve sung since childhood.

Perhaps, one way to “get into” Holy Week, is to come to it with the anticipation of salvation, worship, and joy that you have been saved, are being saved and will be saved because Jesus loves you and his love endures forever.

This most basic truths of life in Christ is not something to get bored with it. You stood on the edge of a horrific life with sin, death, and evil surrounding you, and yet Christ made the way to salvation. You walked through the waters of life and were given a new identity. He put the Spirit within you. His dwelling place is with you. You can be confident. Why? God loves you always.

Lovely!

But there’s also something really odd about the singings of hosannah as Jesus rides the donkey through the streets. It’s the wrong time.

Sukkot, the festival of palms, citrus, and camping is for the fall not the spring. Jesus, and everyone in the crowds, is there to celebrate the feast of passover or redemption, not the festival of the tabernacle or God’s dwelling. That party isn’t for another six months!

It’s all out of sync. This is why they aren’t waving lemons and clementines in the air and only palm branches: they didn’t have citrus because it was out of season. They’re doing the celebrations all wrong. The wrong season.

I think that’s how Jesus likes to do things. It is in fact, his primary point in the first two days of Holy Week. The next day, Monday of passion week, Jesus passes a fig tree on the way into town. He gets angry with it. He’s hungry and frustrated because the fig tree doesn’t have any fruit. The disciples, it seems, try to calm him down saying: “This isn’t the season for figs”. Yet, Jesus expects fruit out of a season. He curses the fig tree and goes to the temple.

Jesus doesn’t care what season it is. He isn’t concerned with the calendar or the logic of agricultural practices. For him, all time belongs to him. All festivals are about him. He expects fruit out of desolation. Why? Because the events of Holy Week, make it all possible. God’s death for his creation. Life out of tombs. God’s dwelling at the time of passover. In the resurrection, all things get wrapped into one moment. Jesus doesn’t care what time it is, it’s time for redemption and restoration.

Can you be surprised to find Jesus saving you in this season?

Maybe you’re depressed, not feeling it, discouraged, distraught, or busy. This isn’t the right time. Not the right vibe. You’ve settled into doubt. You’ve gotten cozy with you skepticism. You’re not ready for this Jesus to break in and shift things around.

You’re not feeling up to rejoicing. You’re not feeling overwhelmed with the love. You’re not ready to wave palm branches because that’s for another time.

The same was true for Israel. They were mostly tired of looking for salvation. Most had given up, or resigned to reality as they experienced it. They were in a time of nation-wide house arrest. Exile at home. Yet, Jesus came anyway. In that moment. In the season. Out of season. On the right day in the calendar and off the right day.

He’s coming. He’s saving. He will break in whether it’s the right time or not.

Jesus transforms ordinary Mondays into the arena of resurrection.

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I’VE WRITTEN previously that for any hope worthy of our commitment, it must be enduring. It must be able to live not only in seasons of abundant strength but also through the long winters of waiting. A fragile hope—one that depends on outcomes, emotions, or success—can’t sustain a soul. If hope collapses every time life does, it was never hope in the first place. It was merely wishful thinking. A blissful blip in an otherwise meager meandering of existence.

Polar plunges didn’t cure our crippling insecurity only mythical brown fat. Gluten wasn’t holding us back from an stress-free existence, just a bloated one. Our self-talk doesn’t overcome shame. That last election wasn’t the biggest one of lives.

Some, or maybe most, of our constant hurried life and waffling from one trend to the next comes from the agonizing epiphany our plans and efforts have failed. Our scheme of changing the world—or just changing ourselves—was woefully impotent.

My fear, though, is that most of us have abandoned the possibility of another way. Is there are long-term dream to hold onto through sickness and health?

Perhaps there was a time people truly believed something could change us and our world. But our cynicism denies it.

We don’t believe our careers can save us. We don’t believe families can give joy. We don’t expect pleasure to fulfill us. We’re cold to any appeal to place trust in these things.1

This is me, and nothing works. I cannot change. A better get on with affirming the mess I already am. At least then I can bury the shameful sense that I’m going nowhere.

At the seven year mark of my marriage, I was exhausted. Not from work, busy calendars, or strenuous activity. Fatigue from the droning hum of a soul unmoved, unshifted, unaltered. ‘What if I am who I am?’ was my haunting internal echo of doubt.

I’ve taken slow walks around rehab centers, spoken on the phone with friends just out of jail after a night of regret. I’ve wept with people over their battles with anger, anxiety, and loneliness. We live in a time of great pain.

The greatest pain is the sense that it is all inevitable.

There’s no freedom from guilt. No way out from shame. No path forward except to put our efforts into career, mitigate familial disasters, and carve an identity into our ethos we know is pseudo at best and completely false at worst.

Psychologist and holocaust survivor, Victor Frankel, correctly raises the stakes of our hope dilemma in his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning.” In it he articulates the power of an enduring hope and the price of not having one when observing his fellow prisoners:

“They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for.”

St. Paul puts it bluntly in Romans 8:20: creation itself has been “subjected to futility.” Which means even the best things in life will eventually break under the weight of our expectations, the natural effects of erosion, and the eternal weight of glory.

Our hope must be expectation proof. Erosion proof. Eternally weighty.

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Is the Hope of Jesus Enduring?

I believe the greatest hindrance to holistically embracing the hope of Jesus is our belief there’s nothing that can transform us. Nothing works. Jesus is no different.

The stuff of Jesus sounds good. But we’ve learned to resist such appeals. As John Lennon sang: “Nothing’s going to change my world.”

Is Jesus’ hope enduring? This is the question both within and outside the confines of church.

Within the Church, I wonder how much we trust the power of Jesus to transform. Not the idea of Jesus, or the philosophy of Jesus, or the historicity of Jesus, or even the pragmatics of Jesus.

This, perhaps, is our fundamental struggle today, because we’re happy to define life by the accomplishments, objectives, and to-do’s for the kingdom. Everything is defined by what talented men and women can accomplish and not what the power of resurrection accomplishes.

Why aren’t we seeing our souls transformed and our world made right? Why don’t we see a massive generosity and exodus from church doors on Sunday into a radical life of loving neighbors with zeal, confidence, and faithfulness? Why do we fundamentally struggle to gain local and global peace? We don’t understand, don’t care, or don’t believe Jesus is who he says he is or has done what he says he does.

Outside the church, Jesus feels unnecessary to consider. He isn’t a live option for hope for a variety of reasons. For one, his time seems to have come and gone. After all, we put that faith thing to rest a century ago.

Second, it seems that we can take all the good bits of his teaching and mobilize them for our more enlightened agendas. We take the loving others parts and jettison the authority and miracles. We like the acceptance, inclusion, encouragement, and even the quote: “the truth shall set you free.” We just like to redefine them for our own aims. For example, we add that quote to brochures on college loans. But we don’t need Jesus for any of that.

Lastly, Jesus seems unnecessary to seriously consider because he doesn’t seem to make a radical difference in the lives of those who are on his team.

How do we get enduring hope?

If you’re going to cross the divide of cynicism to belief you will need a resolution to these questions:

1. Does Jesus transform people, particularly me?

2. What can the message of Jesus do within my bones?

Jesus cannot simply be good talk, or even good action on the cross. We need to see and know Jesus himself changes us. If he doesn’t and if he can’t, what’s the point?

Jesus Does Transforms People. People Like You.

The gospel does not merely announce that God forgives sinners or that history is headed somewhere good. It announces that through Jesus Christ, God makes human beings new. Not polished. Not merely improved. New. Of course, Christians have always pointed to stories of transformation: the addict made sober, the bitter made soft, the proud made gentle, the ashamed made free. Those stories matter, they are my story, too. But the deeper assurance of Christianity is not that some people have inspiring turnarounds; it is that God, by his Spirit, causes dead hearts to live.

That’s St. Peter’s language. We have been “born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”2 Exceedingly more potent than a moral pep talk or a spiritual rebrand, the enduring claim of centuries of Christian faith and story is resurrection today. Regeneration. New birth. The risen Christ does not merely advise us; he recreates us. Jesus remakes life where there was once only fear, vanity, lust, resentment, and self-protection. In its place if faith, hope, and love.

Ivan Karamazov’s cold resistance feels familiar. He can diagnose the horrors of the world, but he cannot imagine redemption reaching deeply enough to heal them, or even himself. That remains our problem too. We believe in critique more easily than resurrection. But the gospel insists that grace is not only pardon; it is power.

Aquinas put it, “Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” The gospel enters a real human life—its grief, shame, habits, wounds, and desires—and begins, patiently and powerfully, to make that person alive to God. That is the doctrine of regeneration.

Hope Gets in Your Bones and Permeates Your Life

Gospel power becomes part of you. Christ joins himself to you. You become united to the hopeful presence of God.

Kafka famously said in an interview, “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe … but not for us.” This is bleak, clever, and exactly the sort of line people put in a notebook when they want to feel profound at a coffee shop. It’s only plausible in a fixed world without an origin story from and sustained by God.

If there is a God, if he is gracious and powerful to which we have plentiful evidence there is, then the hope is for us and from that creator. There is infinite hope in the universe precisely because God has come for us. Hope took on flesh. Hope has walked roads, touched lepers, wept at graves, bled on wood, and rose from the dead. It endures because it has already pierced death. That raised life is the substance of hope.

This is union with Christ. The Spirit of God takes the life of Jesus and presses it down into the marrow of your existence. All of your habits, instincts, fears, griefs, loves, and longings. Over time, his presence becomes not just something you believe in, but something you live from. Christ before you, Christ behind you, Christ within you. That old prayer of St. Patrick gets it exactly right: the Christian life is not merely trying to think about Jesus more often, but awakening to the fact that you are surrounded and inhabited by him.

Christ changes a person. Slowly, deeply, really. The gospel gets inside your reflexes. Your anger softens. Your despair loosens. Your loneliness is interrupted. Your courage grows roots. You become, in fits and starts, a person animated by resurrection. Why? Because your life has become inseparable from Christ.

That is an enduring hope, even when the world looks crazy.

Lament in the Practice of Enduring Hope

Enduring hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism floats on circumstance; it’s bright when things are bright. Christian hope shines bright when things are dark. It survives both drought and storm because it’s anchored in something deeper than weather.

This kind of hope has been tested. It’s been burned, stretched, and buried—and still it breathes. It has wept by hospital beds, waited through silence, and sung in minor keys. Enduring hope knows that the same God who stood beside us in joy will not abandon us in the dark.

The endurance of hope means it must be livable: a way of inhabiting the world.

Hope must be able to walk through ordinary Tuesdays, through unpaid bills and unanswered prayers, through laughter that feels guilty. It must be able to breathe in both celebration and sorrow. If our hope cannot live through the ups and downs of actual life—then it is still theory.

That’s why lament is not a threat to hope but its proving ground. Lament tests whether our hope can last. It stretches faith across the rough terrain of pain and asks, Will it hold?

When the Bible speaks of endurance, it’s not stoicism—it’s participation. The language is active not passive. Endure. Remain. Hold on. Walk on. This is the distinction.

It’s choosing to stay present with God in all season. The psalmists understood this. Their laments come from a stubborn resolve: “Yet I will praise you.” Hope endures because it has learned to worship with tears in its eyes.

Enduring hope refuses to be seasonal. It’s the quiet flame that still burns after the wildfire. It’s the rhythm that continues beneath chaos. It’s the prayer that survives disillusionment.

AND SO, the question for us is not whether we have hope when life is good, but whether our hope can be lived through the ebb and flow of being human. Is it strong enough to hold joy and sorrow together? Can it live in both abundance and loss, both certainty and doubt?

Christian hope answers yes. Because it’s built on Christ Himself—the One who endures. Christ victoriously stands, this very hour, in fact, at the end of time when every darkness becomes a distant memory.

He is the same in light and shadow.
And therefore, our hope can be too.

Not long before his death, Matthew Perry reflected on the height of his fame during Friends. He wrote in his memoir: “Nobody wanted to be more famous than me. I was convinced it was the answer… I needed it. It was the only thing that would fix me.” He concluded, “I was 25, it was the second year of Friends, and eight months into it, I realized the American Dream isn’t making me happy, not filling the holes in my life.”

His confession isn’t extraordinary. It’s what most of us suspect. Fame will not save us. Career will not save us. Family, pleasure, success. None of these can carry the weight of redemption. But beneath our assumption lies something even more dangerous: the suspicion that nothing can. We are not merely disillusioned with particular saviors; we are disillusioned with the very possibility of salvation.

I’ve taken slow walks around rehab centers. I’ve spoken on the phone with friends just out of jail after a night of regret. I’ve wept with people over their battles with anger, anxiety, and loneliness. We live in a time of great pain. The greatest anguish is the sense that pain is inevitable. This is what it is.

That suspicion is becoming our greatest hindrance to receiving the gospel (in church and outside of it). It is not that Jesus sounds implausible compared to other options; it is that we have grown cold to the hope of transformation altogether. Nothing works. So why would Jesus?

What can the good news of Jesus do within my bones?

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

The gospel claims to not only change the world but also to change you. It’s good news for you in your life. In your soul.

Christianity is not merely a belief to transformation but an experience of ongoing transformation. It’s not an answer on a sheet of paper. It’s the answer in life!

St. Paul’s writing in Philippians 3:12–16 sounds like an alien language. St. Paul dares to speak of change. Not cosmetic adjustment, not behavioral modification, but an experiential participation in resurrection life. Christianity, in this vision and all visions actually, is beyond an agreement to certain doctrines about Christ. It’s beyond notions of a historic Jesus of Nazareth who taught, lived, died, and something remarkable happened three days later. The claim of Christianity is he engulfs us in his life. We’re raised also.

Doctrine is not a static explanation of a cosmic mechanism; it is the grammar of experience: forgiveness, freedom, belonging, growth, healing. Hope.

Paul asks us through these ancient words: Are you willing to strain toward that prize? Are you aligning your life to pursue the experiential doctrine of Christ’s resurrection? Is it holding you?

The Experience of Perseverence

St. Paul’s words are urgent and embodied: “Not that I have already obtained this… but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”

That last phrase is everything.

He essentially says: I haven’t gotten to my goal. I’m not a finished product. I haven’t got it made. I don’t have all of this together! But I’m trying to hold onto it…Or I’m trying…I’m trying to grasp it.

Jesus cannot simply be good talk, or even good action on the cross. We need to see and know Jesus himself change us. If he doesn’t and if he can’t, what’s the point? What if I am who I am? This is me, and nothing works. I cannot change. Not from work, busy calendars, or strenuous activity. Fatigue from the droning hum of a soul unmoved, unshifted, unaltered. I wasn’t the partner I needed to be…

‘What if I am who I am?’ is the haunting echo of internal doubt.

Paul says, “Jesus Christ has made me his own.” He gripped me first.

The biblical language for transformation is becoming. Jesus, indwelling the lives of those who experience his good news proclamation, causes us to become. He makes us. It’s not an upgrade to an existence, it’s a bringing us into true existence.

He molds. He shifts. He heals. Become what? His Own. His.

Paul says, what we all can say: I can’t hold on to Christ, but he’s holding on to me! Are you overwhelmed with doubts? Are you in a rut of stumbling along!? Losing your grip on the faith that is so rich to you. Failing to keep your head on straight and sinning. Welcome to God’s grip on you.

But notice the order. Paul presses on because Christ Jesus has made him his own.

The ground and soil of transformation is not Paul’s grip on Christ but Christ’s grip on Paul.

This is what theologians historically called the perseverance of the saints. Or, put in other language: enduring union with Christ. Not your perseverance to God, But his enduring perseverance towards you. You cannot be dropped. Your place with God is firmly held. Union with Christ means that the believer’s security rests not in psychological stability, moral consistency, or spiritual intensity, but in Christ’s unwavering claim.

“Christ Jesus has made me his own.”

Paul’s answer is not self-assertion. It is belonging.

The indwelling Christ does not merely improve; he reconstitutes. He brings us into true existence. The self is not erased but restored. We’re reshaped by union with the Son.

Even in doubt.
Even in relapse.
Even in seasons where faith feels threadbare.

The believer may feel their grip weakening. But the decisive reality is this: Christ’s does not.

To experience this doctrine, not merely to recite it, is to discover a freedom deeper than circumstance. One can say, with Paul: I am not perfect. But I belong to Jesus. And he is not letting me go. So, I press on!

Let’s hold onto that identity as the treasure of life and God gives us freedom, frees us from guilt, overcomes our shame, and brings us into the center of his kingdom

The Experience of Forgiveness

But who can move on when our past is riddled with disaster? How can we move toward anything when our lives are littered with horrors?

Early in this letter, Paul recounts his past transformation. He lived under not just the weight of legalism but lived under the burden of successfully doing it! Pride, arrogance, and vengeance reigned in his life. He literally harmed the people he now loves. He had, in his memory, the first person perspective of pridefully standing over slain Christians with hate burning in his soul. That’s a core haunted memory.

He remembers, the internal drive to burden people with the law, or rather his version of it. He can recount pouring it on them over and over again, leading them away while Jesus preached kingdom of God, grace, mercy, peace, and renewal.

Oh the regret! The guilt! Right? Paul must have been haunted. Tormented. Slain in his dreams.

In Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Everything is Illuminated, he describes a character who cowardly betrayed his people during the rampage of war. He betrayed his lover. His town. Now, that character must live. Foer’s describes haunting regret so well:

“He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone.

By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad.

Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.”

This is the kind of regret we might assume Paul has. Except he writes: “Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.”

This is image is of a runner reaching for the end of a race. How can he do this?

Is it great motivational mentality? A Ted Lasso style “Be-a-goldfish” fresh start?

Maybe he’s paid his debt to society, and now he’s moving on. But with what? How did Paul pay his debt?

Forgetting? Is he in a state of psychological repression.

No, it is theological truth manifested in real-time. Paul can leave what’s behind because of the reality of Jesus’s power. Paul’s describing the raucous opportunity of the doctrine of forgiveness when it is experienced.

Forgiveness, if it is real, must involve removal. I’ve written a whole essay on this idea of forgiveness. It’s probably worth a read.

In the gospel, guilt is not minimized; it is transferred. The logic of substitution runs through the New Testament: Christ takes what is ours and gives what is his. The burden is not dissolved into abstraction; it is placed upon a person.

Your addiction — taken.
Your rage — taken.
Your pride — taken.
Your nights of regret — taken.

The cross is not a metaphor for catharsis; it is the site of exchange.

Only because guilt has been borne can Paul forget what lies behind.

His trajectory changes because his standing changes. Forgiveness does not merely soothe the conscience; it redirects the future.

“God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

The experiential doctrine of forgiveness means this: the believer’s past no longer dictates their direction. Memory remains, but condemnation does not. Even nightmares from the past are territories of victorious incursions.

The Experience of Sanctification

But, can we take hold of this life? Can we taste a better life than Matthew Perry?

“All of us, then, who are mature should take such a view of things. And if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you. Only let us live up to what we have already attained.”

But notice Paul’s phrasing: live up to what you have already attained.

Growth is not a frantic attempt to earn what we lack. It is the slow inhabiting of what has already been given. If you know God’s love in part, live faithfully within that knowledge. If you have tasted forgiveness, act from that forgiven ground. If grace has reached you, let generosity follow.

Nerdy theologians call this sanctification, or becoming in daily life what you are in name: In Christ.

It is the progressive process of learning to hold onto that which is holding onto you. And to travel deeper and deeper into the heart and mind of God. And to then live in this world with all the riches of the world to come.

C.S. Lewis once wrote:

“Dozens of people go to [God] to be cured of some one particular sin which they are ashamed of (like cowardice) or which is obviously spoiling daily life (like bad temper). Well, He will cure it all right: but He will not stop there. That may be all you asked; but if once you call Him in, He will give you the full treatment.”

God doesn’t offer a cure a single sin, he gives us the full treatment. Sanctification is not selective improvement; it is comprehensive renovation. The Spirit does not patch; it rebuilds.

And yet, Paul remains honest: “I have not already obtained this.” The Christian life is marked by humility and hope simultaneously. We are unfinished and secure. In process and possessed.

The trajectory is heavenward. Not escapist, but teleological. Resurrection is not merely future destiny; it is present direction.

The Unopened Gift

Imagine being handed an enormous gift. It’s beautifully wrapped, weighty, substantial. Imagine you respond to the gift giver: “Wow, what a lovely gift!” You take that gift put it on a shelf. You admire its wrapping. You tell your friends about it, “Did you hear, I was given a lovely gift! Must have cost a fortune.” You write a thank you note to the giver of the gift. “Thank you for such a lovely present!” In the middle of the night, robbers come to steal it. You beat them back. You protect it. You admire the wrapping so much, you begin writing songs about it. You love that present.

Then, the giver of the gift comes over and asks to see the gift. They’re excited to hear how you’ve been using it, enjoying it, and making it part of your life. You perk up with pride, and point to it on the shelf. Unopened, collecting dust, and, while it’s of incredible value, is useless.

The gospel is such a gift, but its richness often goes unopened. We affirm its truths intellectually while living untouched by their power.

Experience the grip of Christ. The doctrine of perseverance made personal.
Experience the renewal of forgiveness. Guilt removed and trajectory altered.
Experience the slow work of becoming. Sanctification as lived resurrection.

Christian doctrine, rightly understood, is not dust on library shelves. It is oxygen in the lungs. It is resurrection pressing into bone and sinew.

The question Paul leaves us with is searching: Are you pressing on? Are you straining toward that prize?

Not to earn Christ, but because he has already made you his own.

And that fact changes everything.

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IN THE LITERAL AND LITERARY center of Mark’s gospel, there is a father living the worst nightmare: the never-ending brokenness in his child (Read it in Mark 9:14-29).1 Time refused to heal, medicine fell short, and even his own vigilance and care couldn’t prevented his son from nearly dying through burning and drowning. He likely laid awake at night staring at his son in terror at what the next day or hour might bring for his precious child. He correctly describes his son’s state as evil and beyond this world’s knowledge and intention. The father knows his son is not supposed to be this way. He wasn’t made for this kind of torture. This is the agony of having a certain knowledge that something is broken without the conviction of knowing anything can make it whole.

Often, the greatest challenges of doubt come not from my own direct pain, but the indirect pain of those I love. The friend in addiction, the mentor battling cancer, and the internal demons that repeatedly steal life from those I truly love.

In Shusako Endo’s novel, Silence, a priest is psychologically tortured while others are physically tortured. Day after day, he cries out in anguish until one day he speaks words we believe but often don’t have:

“I did pray. I kept on praying. But prayer did nothing to alleviate their suffering…Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent...?”2

In the macro, we live with the same knowledge the father has in this story: nations torn apart, racism that doesn’t quit, climate deteriorating, and pandemics that seemingly don’t cease. It’s not supposed to be like this. We pray. We always pray.

Nothing I do helps them, nothing I hope in comes through, and there, in that quiet internal chaos, I resign myself to a phrase like this father’s:

“I believe something could change, but I also don’t believe.”

Do we suffer from cognitive multiple-belief disorder? Shouldn’t we land on one side or the other? If this father didn’t believe, why would he ask Jesus to help? If this man did believe, why did he say, “If you can…help us”?

In a world of binary knowledge or belief, facts or faith, how do we land so awkwardly in this other place: “I believe, help my unbelief.” This feels fraudulent, but it’s essentially essential humanity as it rests in relationship with an imminent but transcendent God.3

And yet, with our gaps in knowledge, we’re awkwardly left with this truth: “I believe, and I also don’t believe.”

Does that work? Is that okay?

THE INTELLECTUAL ENVIRONMENT of our post-enlightenment culture rejects this dilemma. Increasingly, we’re confronted with the unsustainable and inapplicable reality of modern thought.

In the enlightenment culture separated belief from knowledge. In this period we divided things we know from things we believe as if they are not interwoven into one reality. Philosopher John Locke famously defined belief for future generations as “a persuasion which falls short of knowledge”.

Facts amount to knowledge. Beliefs account for religion. Facts are rivaled by fiction. Belief is where fiction finds internal and relative value. Belief fills the gaps knowledge can’t fill yet. If we are to grow in a knowledge based on facts, we must approach each doubt with robust skepticism. Doubt alone leads to knowledge. Descartes shaped us deeply in this area: Doubt is to be applied to all beliefs, however ancient and venerable, and only those that prove to be indubitable can be accepted. If a claim cannot sustain that, it’s mere whimsy.

In our collective cultural mind, vanquishing doubt and ridding ourselves from the need to believe is the goal.

For Jesus, knowledge runs through belief. Doubt is entrusted with faith. The gap is our confidence. Belief is made whole through crying out in the gap.

THE GREEK WORD USED in the gospels for doubt is properly defined as the absence of full confidence and reliance. It’s not used a lot but this is the word chosen by the writers. It isn’t cynicism, it isn’t skepticism, and it isn’t a crisis of faith. It’s wavering.

In Matthew, Peter famously walks on the water to Jesus. While Jesus strolls on waves toward his friends, Peter jumps in. Or, rather, Peter jumps onto of the water, too. It is unequivocally a moment of trust and adoration in Jesus. It’s childlike in every sense.

As the two walk toward each other on the water Peter he loses his full confidence. He questions, he falters, he sinks. Matthew says: Peter doubted. He loved Jesus. He trusted Jesus. He walked toward him on the Sea of Galilee. Mixed in alongside that ruthless trust was another reality: he didn’t trust him, he wasn’t sure of his love, and he wasn’t confident in his walking. Matthew narrates the inner workings of his friend’s mind: Peter was afraid. Finding himself beyond his physical and emotional capacity, he cries out: “Jesus, save me!”

Perhaps it’s only fascinating to me, but it was on the shore of the Sea of Galilee that Jesus walked toward Peter and told him to drop his nets and follow him. Only a hundred yards or so away was the dry sand Peter traversed toward Jesus at the very first calling. Now, Peter is walking on the sea, the same sea he’s spent his life sailing, toward Jesus yet again.

It makes me consider this thought: perhaps this wasn’t the first moment Peter lost full confidence and perhaps this was truly Peter? After leaving everything, he both trusted and faltered. In fact, much of this is played out in the end of Jesus’ life when Peter robustly says he would never abandon Jesus, but later does just that.

Peter is all of us. He sinks into the water. He cries out. Jesus pulls him into the boat.

Jesus rebuffs our inclination to chastise someone who failed so miserably.4 Instead, Jesus lifts Peter up and out of the water. Jesus rescues him from drowning. He has a question for him: “Why did you doubt?”

Jesus answers his own question: “You are of little faith.”

WE WANT TO HAVE LOTS OF EVERYTHING, but Jesus says we only need a little bit of one thing to change everything: faith.

Jesus said, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to the mountain, ‘move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”5 He wants us to have a little, mess, honest faith.

Could it be Jesus isn’t looking for perfect, buttoned up, tightly packaged, and unwavering conviction but instead has become that perfect unwavering conviction for us? Could it be he’s not only asking us to trust him, but asking us to let him trust for us?

Jesus isn’t confused about his moment. He isn’t wavering in his conviction to give himself for us. While we explore the measures of his claims, analyze historical evidence to decipher his existence and debate with friends; God is unmoved in his intention to move mountains.

While we sink and flail in the storm, he walks eagerly toward us responding to our anxious cry: “Lord, save me!”

While we hold our children, he asks us questions and draws out our hearts. Do we have the smallest of faiths that can say: “If you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.”

“I believe, Lord, but help me with my unbelief.”

Do we have enough, just a little faith, to cry out for salvation in a bleak world: “Jesus save me!”

ONE OF THE FOUNDATIONS of our justice system is the notion that a jury cannot convict a suspect unless they are certain of guilt “beyond a shadow of doubt”. Theoretically, if we’re going to send someone to jail it will happen because there is no reasonable doubt they are innocent. We will be certain because doubt will be vanquished and the lawyer’s job is to remove, through evidence, all avenues for confusion around the facts of the case. The burden of proof sits in the lap of those who make the claims. When the evidence becomes overwhelming, we’re ready to offer our verdict.

In this mindset, if doubt, however small, exists, we must throw out the claim as we would something 100% proven false, and in fact, it takes that status, too.6 This gets quite philosophical. But, what this mindset means is that something that has 10% certainty and something that has 90% certainty occupy the same space and status: uncertain or unknowable Why? Because only the claim that has vanquished doubt entirely can be knowledge, or truth.

It was through the influence of 7th century Europeans thinkers like Descartes, that doubt became the starting point for discovery of knowledge.

“Doubt, not faith, was to be the path to knowledge. By relentless skepticism, the famous “critical principles,” every claim to truth was to be put through the critical sieve in which only the indubitable would be retained. This was the body of knowledge. The rest was belief, faith, or probability.”

What works in a criminal trial as a safeguard against wrongfully accused serving a punishment doesn’t work outside it as we grapple with the complexity of doubt on the innermost arenas of life. Goodness, beauty, love and hope cannot be verified through a trial to extinguish doubt it can only be explored like an adventurer in an unknown territory.

The sieve of scientific critical theory is like Lennie Small of Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” who continually crushes mice in his palms accidentally. In an attempt to engage it, he kills it.

A hope we’ve put on trial cannot be hope. It can only be an element in the past in which we analyze its causes and effects. You cannot verify a future longing. Love cannot be cross examined, that kills it. Goodness, beauty, and wholeness are the stuff that makes life worthy. You can, however, doubt it.

You can look toward the horizon searching for the future and wonder if that future will come. You can look your lover in the eye and have questions about their resolve to love you back. Doubt in the arena of belief intensifies hope. Fyodor Dostoevsky through his marvelous Demetrius Karamazov character says, “It is not as a child that I believe and confess Christ. My hosanna has passed through an enormous furnace of doubt.”

Jesus is not looking for blind faith.

English theologian Lesslie Newbigin taught we must employ faith and doubt. In Proper Confidence he writes:

“Both faith and doubt are necessary elements in this adventure. One does not learn anything except by believing something, and - conversely - if one doubts everything thing one learns nothing. On the other hand, believing everything thing uncritically is the road to disaster. The faculty of doubt is essential.”7

DOUBT ISN’T A COCOON. Sometimes doubt, isn’t an altruistic adventurous ally. Often, doubt comes as the false protector. “I’m not sure what I believe about that” keeps us in control and creates distance between us and something that might reveal us to be foolish. If we can maintain a passive doubt of uncertainty, we don’t have to place ourselves under Jesus’ rule or anything else. Autonomy is the fruit of proclaimed uncertainty and unprocessed doubt.

Often, doubt shields us from being let down. “I don’t believe God can heal. Now, I won’t be disappointed when he doesn’t.”

In the end of the story in Mark 9, the father turns to Jesus with a mixture of doubt and faith and asks for help for his son and himself.

Jesus says, “Everything is possible for the one who believes.”

The father says, “I do believe, help my unbelief.”

Jesus doesn’t rebuke this feeble, wavering, uncommitted man. He doesn’t tell him, “come back when you have 100% belief.”

Instead, Jesus heals. “I believe, help my unbelief” is, apparently, mustard seed belief.

Perhaps belief humbly draws us into an awareness that we cannot do anything to save ourselves or others, and so, in belief we, cry out to Jesus to save. Living like a child, employing all our doubt and belief by placing ourselves at the mercy of a great claim.8

Perhaps, this is hope?

How do you step into belief, even with some doubt? Being like a child.

This is what Jesus says in Mark 10:13-34, just a few paragraphs after this story with the father and son:

“People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them.”

Children do not think they can save themselves, feed themselves, or care for themselves. They throw their needs on their parents and the adults around them. A child audaciously demands, expects, and believes.

Everyone who enters faith enters that way, too.

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A Small Beginning in a Very Broken World

The world feels darker than we like to admit. The problems feel older and deeper than any policy, post, or program can address. We see cruelty in the headlines and, if we’re honest, echoes of it deep within ourselves.

So, what do we do with that?

How do I solve problems in Minneapolis? How do I redeem what happened 500 years ago? How do I manage justice for the globe from my phone?

I have two cynicisms: 1) Some of the most callous, immature, and ignorant people I know post the most about injustice while sipping matcha lattés as they go from the drive through to their 5,000 square foot home. 2) Some of the most disingenuous, Bible people I know trivialize, abdicate, and perform selective Scripture gymnastics to rid themselves of any empathy or effort within the misson of God to restore whats broken. I think both responses, and most in between, are driven by the equal measures of access to chaos in our world and distance from being able to do anything about it.

So, what, if anything, do we do to see the justice and peace of God in our world?

Henry Drummond, in The City Without a Church, offered a simple idea: if you want to see the kingdom of God, don’t begin with the city. Begin with your home.

Not because the city doesn’t matter, or injustice somewhere doesn’t mean injustice everywhere. But because the home is where you cannot hide. In fact, it seems the only way you can hide from the mess of your house, is to be consumed with the mess in others’. Your home is the starting point.

It’s where impatience shows.
Where selfishness is easiest.
Where neglect is most tempting.
Where love is most costly and most meaningful.

We often imagine participating in the healing of the world as something large, visible, and public. But the kingdom of God, with all its flourishing peace and grace, almost always begins in places so small they feel insignificant.

A kitchen table.
A living room.
A phone call.
A shared meal.
A hard conversation.
An act of service no one else sees.

The most important contributions you will make within God’s mission of restoration will be small unseen acts done for a long time.

This is not glamorous work. It does not trend. But it is where self-giving love becomes analog.

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An Exercise in Seeing

Take a few minutes and consider these questions. I hope they don’t produce guilt, but produce clarity. That God might use them to give you the clarity.

1. Look at your immediate world

Who are the five people you see most often each week?

Beyond the people you follow online.
The actual humans in your daily orbit.

Family. Coworkers. Neighbors. Friends.

Write their names down.

Now ask: What is “the good” for each of them right now?

Not what they deserve.
Not what would impress them.
But what would genuinely bless them?

2. Notice where injustice shows up small

Injustice doesn’t only appear in courtrooms and battlefields. It appears when:

• Someone is consistently ignored

• Someone is spoken to harshly

• Someone carries a burden alone

• Someone is treated as an inconvenience

• Someone is dehumanized

Where do you see that in your normal week?

Where could you be stepping over opportunities to bring the good?

3. Choose one small act of self-giving love

Not something dramatic. Something repeatable.

• Invite someone into your home

• Offer help without being asked

• Sit with someone who is lonely

• Speak words of encouragement where you usually stay silent

• Apologize where you’ve grown comfortable being right

The goal is not to fix the world. It is to practice being the kind of person who belongs in the world as it ought to be.

4. Work outward slowly

Drummond’s wisdom was simple: start where you are, and let love ripple outward.

From home → to neighbors → to coworkers → to community.

The kingdom of God rarely arrives through sweeping gestures. It arrives through accumulated faithfulness.

One week at a time.
One person at a time.
One small act at a time.

You may not feel like you are doing anything significant. But this is how the world as it ought to be begins to appear—quietly, locally, personally.

Like yeast in dough. Seeds scattered on the ground.

The peace and justice of God comes through people who decide that, in a very broken world, they will begin by loving the one in front of them. The people who wont settle for virtual virtue signals, but instead work out the command to love in our physical world.

Not the version we curate.
Not the version we debate.
Not the version we soften with language like broken systems or unfortunate outcomes.

Sometimes we need fiction to reveal the depths of reality. For that, few writers are more unflinching than Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy.

They are not interested in polite moral lessons. They are not writing dystopian fantasy. They are holding up a mirror and saying, This is your neighborhood. This is your species. This is what we are capable of.

And it’s worse than we think.

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A Good Man Is Hard to Find

O’Connor’s famous story, A Good Man is Hard to Find, begins so ordinarily it feels almost forgettable. A family road trip. A chatty grandmother. Children in the back seat. A detour. A car accident.

Then The Misfit appears.

What makes the story so unsettling is not simply the violence. It’s how O’Connor exposes the grandmother’s heart before the gun is ever raised. Her racism. Her manipulation. Her shallow religiosity. Her obsession with appearances. Her constant performance of being a “lady” and a “good person.”

She talks about goodness constantly. She has no idea what it is.

And then, face to face with death, she reaches out to The Misfit and says,

“Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!”

It is the first genuine moment of grace in the story. A flash of almost self-giving love in a life otherwise marked by self-preservation.

And then she is shot.

O’Connor points to something terrifying: the line between “good people” and “bad people” is paper thin. It’s likely non-existent. Civility, manners, church language, and family life do not tame the violence in the human heart. They often hide it. We know this is true, too.

The Misfit is not a monster from another world. He is the logical conclusion of a world without grace. He says,

“There’s no pleasure but meanness.”

And we recoil because we know, if we’re honest, that meanness is not foreign to us. It’s familiar. It just usually wears better clothes.

Blood Meridian

If O’Connor peels back the mask, McCarthy removes the skin.

His Blood Meridian is almost unbearable to read. It’s relentless violence across a barren landscape follows the Glanton gang as they scalp, murder, and destroy their way across the American frontier.

At the center of it all stands Judge Holden, a towering, articulate, terrifying figure who seems less like a man and more like a philosophy embodied.

The Judge believes war is the ultimate reality. That violence is not a corruption of humanity, but its truest expression. That domination is the highest good.

And McCarthy offers almost no relief. No moral commentary. No redemptive arc. Just page after page of brutality that feels less like fiction and more like revelation.

Because the Judge is not fantasy.

He is what happens when we follow power, pride, and self-interest to their logical end. He is what history looks like when you read it without euphemism. He is what human beings have done—and still do—when unchecked by grace.

McCarthy is not depicting a strange other world.

He is depicting ours.

This Is the World as It Is

Both O’Connor and McCarthy force us to confront an uncomfortable truth: injustice is not merely out there in systems, structures, and governments. It runs through human hearts.

The grandmother and The Misfit belong to the same moral universe. The Judge and the gang are not anomalies. They are possibilities within humanity itself.

We prefer to talk about injustice in abstract terms. Policies. Systems. History. All important. But these writers drag us back to the source.

Something is deeply wrong with us.

Not just occasionally. Not just in extreme cases. But in the quiet, daily ways we manipulate, ignore, excuse, envy, dismiss, and dehumanize.

The world is not broken only because bad things happen. It is broken because broken people fill it.

Including us.

Honesty

If we are going to talk about the world as it ought to be, we have to be honest about the world as it is.

Because the Christian claim is not that injustice is surprising. It is that it is tragically predictable.

Genesis does not begin with a naïve view of humanity. It begins with beauty, then moves quickly to betrayal, shame, blame, and violence. The Bible is far more realistic about us than we are about ourselves.

O’Connor and McCarthy, in their own ways, agree.

They refuse to let us believe that the problem is only “out there.” They force us to see that the hunger for justice and the capacity for cruelty live in the same chest.

And Yet…

And yet, O’Connor gives us that final, strange moment of grace. A woman who has never truly loved, reaching out in self-giving recognition to a murderer.

And McCarthy, for all his darkness, leaves us haunted by the fact that we long for something better than what the Judge describes. We read Blood Meridian with revulsion, not admiration.

The revulsion signals a transcendent standard of good and bad.

It means we know this is not how things should be.

These stories remind us why we are desperate for a different world.

Not because we are better than this, but because we were made for more than this.

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No Justice, No Peace.

You’ve heard it chanted in streets, printed on signs, typed into captions, and shouted through megaphones. It’s a phrase that carries both grief and defiance. It assumes something: peace is impossible without justice.

But what do we mean by that?

I assume most of the sign holders and chanters are saying, “Until we get justice, we’re gonna cause conflict. We’re going to jam your streets. We’re going to be at war.”

We can all go back to normal once (fill in the blank) happens.

Is peace simply the absence of conflict? Is justice merely the correction of wrongs? When shout No justice, no peace, is shouted, what picture of the world are we holding in our minds? What kind of world is being demanded?

Because underneath the chant, underneath the anger, underneath the exhaustion of seeing the same headlines repeat themselves, there is something deeper than political frustration. There is an ache of recognition.

This is not how things should be.

We say it instinctively when we see war footage. When we hear of abuse. When we read about corruption. When we witness cruelty. The reaction is immediate and nearly universal: This shouldn’t be happening.

C.S. Lewis once wrote,

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

What if our outrage at injustice is not primarily political, cultural, or ideological—but existential? What if it reveals that we are comparing this world, constantly and involuntarily, to another one we somehow expect to exist?

Where did that expectation come from?

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The Worlds We Try to Imagine

When we try to describe “the world as it should be,” we usually reach for modern categories.

For some, it’s a world without war. No bombs, no armies, no bloodshed. Peace defined as the absence of violence.

For others, it’s a world of maximal freedom. A place where every individual can be and do whatever they want without restraint. Peace defined as autonomy.

For still others, it’s a world of equality understood as sameness. Everyone has the same resources, the same opportunities, the same outcomes. Peace defined as uniformity.

Each of these visions is compelling. Each captures something true. And yet, each feels incomplete. Or worse, creates more injustice.

A world without war can still be cold and loveless built on false peace of numbing society. See Orwell’s novels.
A world of total freedom can descend into chaos and selfishness. See Lord of the Flies.
A world of enforced equality can become suffocating and oppressive. See the entire 20th century.

Why can’t we fully articulate a lasting method of peace? Why do we still want peace so badly? How should the world be?

We’ve Been Asking This for a Long Time

The Greeks imagined a world ordered by reason and virtue. A society where people knew their place and lived according to that wisdom. In this world, people wouldn’t behave badly because they would have insight.

The Romans envisioned stability through law and power. A world held together by order and authority. In that world chaos and desctruction constrained by the force of an army. This is peace.

Jean-Paul Sartre, standing in the wreckage of modern disillusionment, argued that the only way forward was radical freedom. Humanity must invent its own meaning in a world without a given purpose. When we dont have constraints, we can be at peace.

Each, in their own way, was answering the same question:

How should things be?

Each gets close to something recognizable. None satisfy the whole hunger.

Because the hunger is not simply for order, or freedom, or equality, or stability. It is for the flourshing of humanity.

Remembering a World We’ve Never Seen

What if our anger is a form of homesickness?

What if when we say, “This isn’t right”, we are remembering something we’ve never actually experienced? To say something isn’t right is to have a vision of the the right. The whole, the at peace.

The Bible begins with an image of a garden. No shame. No fear. No exploitation. Humanity walking with God in the cool of the day. Work without frustration. Relationships without suspicion.

The Psalms sing of shalom—a world where justice and peace kiss, where righteousness flows like a river, where joy and safety fill ordinary life. Where the blessed life is the life lived under the care of God and in his presence. Peace is more than an absence of war in the same way goodness is more than the absence of evil.

Hell can do its best, but it will still slip into comical insignificance when weighted against glory of God’s peace.

Jesus speaks of the kingdom of God in images that feel strangely familiar: feasts where everyone is welcomed, rising dought into warm bread, enemies reconciled, wayward sons welcomed home, the sick healed, the poor lifted, tears wiped away, and lost things found.

When Jesus isn’t using images and stories, his trajectory of humanity gets described as captives set free, blind seeing, healed whole. Even more: stable foundations for life and all consuming purpose for existence. Eons of a world where compassion, mercy, and love are so central to all things, it’s all that’s known.

When you hear these descriptions, something inside you recognizes them.

Yes. That’s it. That’s the world I want.

Not just the absence of injustice, but the presence of goodness. Not merely safety—but belonging. Not merely fairness, but love.

Thomas Aquinas spoke of rightly ordered loves under the rule of God: a harmony between Creator, creation, and humanity.

Why Injustice Feels Personal

This is why injustice bothers us so deeply. Not only has something wrong happened. Something sacred has been violated. Injustice vandalises the world we were meant to inhabit.

We were not made to be indifferent observers. We were made for self-giving love that seeks the good of others. And when we see people deprived of that good, something in us revolts.

We don’t just want the bad to stop.
We want the good to flourish.

We don’t just want oppression removed.
We want people restored.

Our chants and protests, our essays and arguments, our debates and disagreements are all circling this deeper longing: the world as it ought to be.

The Mountaintop Vision

Martin Luther King Jr.’s words still resonate because it moved beyond civil wrongs being made right. He invoked the biblical vision of the world God made and is remaking through his death and resurrection.

“I have been to the mountaintop… I have seen the Promised Land.”

King was protesting injustice. But he was also describing a vision. A world where human dignity, love, and justice were not slogans but realities. His imagination was shaped, explicitly, by the biblical story of a world restored.

That vision did not originate in politics or created in opposotion to Jim Crow laws. It originated from the prophets, from Jesus, from the Scriptures’ insistence that history is moving somewhere and that the broken world we see is not the final version.

We are hungry.

Hungry for the world as it was meant to be.

If your vision of that world does not come through the cross of Christ, how does it come?

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I’ve been thinking a lot about moral outrage in the age of death videos on the same apps we use to watch videos of funny pranks, NBA highlights, and woodworking.

I’m fascinated by our shared drive to declare moral ultimatums reinforced by our emotional reservoirs.

In Minneapolis, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse fatally shot by a federal agent, and earlier the fatal shooting of Renée Good have catalyzed widespread unrest, protests, and violent clashes between demonstrators and federal authorities in the city.1

They were both recorded on multiple phones and uploaded across platforms. Millions watched them die. Thousands have made explainer videos on who is at fault.

Humanity is not okay. And humanity is not okay with it. Why?

It all makes me think of my first encounter with watching a person die on phone.

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On May 25, 2020, the world watched a man die.

George Floyd lay on a Minneapolis sidewalk with a police officer’s knee pressed into his neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. He called out for his mother. He said he couldn’t breathe. Bystanders pleaded. Cameras rolled. And something in us—across political lines, across nations, across languages—tightened in our chest. We observed an incident. We witnessed a violation of humanity. Most of us are not law enforcement experts, constitutional scholars, or have much lived experience in the chaotic environment on the intersection of drugs, mental health, fear, security, and police. But whatever we were witnessing. We knew. Humanity is not supposed to be like this.

For many, the moment was personal. For others, it was symbolic. For all, it was disturbing. Not simply because a man died, but because something about the way he died felt like a tearing of the moral fabric of the world. This was not just tragic. It was wrong. This shouldn’t happen.

Even if the shouldn’t in your mind lays at the hands of the observers, the cops, or even George Floyd. I haven’t met a person who shrugs their shoulders and says, “that kind of death is okay.’

And that word—wrong—is where my apologetic begins.

Not in an argument. Not in a syllogism. Not in a debate about policy. But in the shared human recognition that something happened that should not have happened. Even if you watched in dogged support of police, the entire situation was wrong.

Any shooting, any violence, and any lethal encounter between one man and another is not how we were designed. We can pontificate about reasons, justifications, histories, and policies. But honestly, are we supposed to live in a world where those justifications are so easily grasped?

What we watched on our phones violated a deeper order we all assume exists.

The viral trauma of death on a small square on our phones was not a one-time thing.

As I write this, we’ve already witnessed the brutal killing of Charlie Kirk, the shooting of Donald Trump, and this past month, two different citizens shot to death on the streets of Minneapolis. After I publish this, I will probably have to update repeatedly to keep up. Each of the stories are unique. Depending on your political assumptions, they each carry different levels of confusion, anger, and pain.2

And yet, all of it, regardless of degree, motive, or situation, makes us say a version of: “This is wrong and this isn’t who we should be…not as Americans but as people.”

Why do we feel that?

Why do these kinds of events produce outrage rather than resignation? Why do they create grief rather than indifference? Why do they ignite protests, debates, and soul-searching across an entire culture?

Because, whether we acknowledge it or not, we live as though the world is supposed to be different than this.

The Preeminent Question Beneath the Crisis

Human brutality, social unrest, and cycles of violence force us to confront questions we don’t usually articulate:

• Why does injustice feel intolerable?

• Why does violence feel like a violation of something sacred?

• Why do we expect institutions to protect dignity?

• Why does chaos make us anxious about meaning and safety?

These are not political questions. They are existential ones. They expose what we believe about humanity, justice, and the kind of world we think we inhabit.

We do not react to George Floyd’s or Charlie Kirks’s deaths as though they are a random collision of matter in motion. We react as though a moral boundary has been crossed. As though a human being—possessing inherent worth—has been treated as less than human.

But where does that idea come from?

When the World Is Exactly What We Should Expect

Naturalism struggles to define evil because, in a strictly natural universe, what happened on that sidewalk is not an aberration. It is an outcome.

Richard Dawkins puts it starkly:

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation… The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

If Dawkins is right, then what we see on the news is not a moral horror. It is a biological event. One organism overpowering another. A tragic but unsurprising expression of survival, power, fear, and impulse in a world without moral architecture.

In that universe, words like evil, injustice, and dignity are emotional reactions, not objective realities.

And yet, we do not live as though that is true.

We do not speak about Charlie Kirk or Alex Pretti as if either of them were simply a temporary collection of cells whose unfortunate demise evokes sadness but no moral claim. We speak as though something sacred was violated. As though a line written into the universe itself was crossed.

We feel this because, deep down, we do not believe the world is pitilessly indifferent. We believe it is broken.

This Is Not the Way Things Are Supposed to Be

For Christianity, this world is not okay.

Humans were not created for subsistence but for flourishing. Jesus describes life not as survival, but as abundance. Starvation, thirst, disease, war, violence, loneliness, jealousy, greed, and death are not expectations. They are aberrations.

The world was made for thriving. Humans were made to be united to God.

St. Augustine described evil not as a thing in itself but as a privation, or a void where goodness should be. As though someone pulled the plug on an ocean of goodness and we are left wandering a dry desert.

Evil is the darkest of nights taking up residence on earth. Tolkien called it a creeping blackness. The New York Times reports it daily. Instagram scrolls past it in stories and reels. Historians mark it as inflection points.

To the Christian, evil is the interconnected system of sin and death—the draining away of goodness from God’s world.

The Cultural Stories We Use to Make Sense of This

In moments like this, we reach for stories to interpret what happened.

Some tell a story of individual failure. Others tell a story of systemic oppression. Some tell a story of law and order breaking down. Others tell a story of institutional distrust. Others tell a story of mental health crisis. More tell stories of collateral damage in a society where law enforcement is simply chaotic. Social media amplifies outrage. News cycles fuel polarization. Identity hardens. Anger becomes a kind of moral performance.

These stories explain some things. But they do not heal us. They intensify division. They rarely provide hope.

Because none of them can explain why we feel what we feel without borrowing assumptions they cannot justify.

They cannot tell us why humans possess inherent dignity. They cannot explain why justice should be impartial. They cannot account for why violence feels like a violation of something sacred.

They describe the problem, but they cannot ground the moral outrage that gives the problem its weight.

Borrowed Christian Capital

Our outrage depends on Christian categories.

We demand justice because we assume a moral law above power.
We grieve because we assume life is sacred.
We protest because we assume humans have inherent worth.
We long for peace because we assume violence is not normal.

These are not self-evident truths in a naturalistic universe. They are inheritances from a Christian vision of reality. America’s constitution, and even history, doesn’t embody categories of transcendent claims on humanity it can justify on its own.

We are living off borrowed capital.

The Cross at the Center of the Conversation

Here is where Christianity does something no other story can do.

God is angry not indifferent. God detests evil.

God does not stand distant from injustice. Jesus was the victim of state violence and corrupt justice. Arrested unjustly. Tried falsely. Executed publicly. Innocent.

The cross is where human brutality and divine mercy meet. Frederick Buechner states the Christian notion of cosmic repair perfectly in one of my favorite quotes:

“A cross of all things—a guillotine, a gallows—but the cross at the same time as the crossroads of eternity and time, as the place where such a mighty heart was broken that the healing power of God himself could flow through it into a sick and broken world.”

The cross validates our outrage at injustice without turning us into people consumed by vengeance. It acknowledges the horror of evil without pretending it is normal. It names sin by saving humanity from it. Removing injustice to reinstate dignity.

On the cross, God says: This is not the way things are supposed to be. And He dies to make things the way he intended them to be.

The Church as the Argument

Arguments matter. But in moments like this, people are not asking for syllogisms. They are asking whether a different kind of world is possible.

This is where the church becomes the apologetic. Or ought to and is empowered to.

A community where dignity is practiced.
A people who pursue justice without hatred.
A place where enemies become brothers and sisters.
A lived alternative to chaos and polarization.

We learn the plausibility of the gospel not only by hearing it argued, but by seeing it embodied in a group of people who love neighbor, even enemies.

What Do You Want?

I have no intention of winning an argument about police brutality, guns, or ICE. I’ve got strong beliefs about all of those things and think I can argue my opinions quite well. My goal is to invite you into reflection that will outlive our current political millieu:

What kind of world do you wish this was?
What kind of justice would actually satisfy you?
What kind of community would make you feel safe?

What if the reason you long for those things is because you were made for them?

What if the gospel is the story where those hopes make sense?

Hope in a World That Holds Its Breath

When George Floyd died, the world held its breath.

That breathless moment revealed something about us. We are not indifferent. We are not resigned. We still believe, somewhere deep inside, that this is not how the world is meant to be.

Christianity agrees.

The hardened heart that witnesses violent deaths and belittles them is not proclaiming Christianity, even if they say they are. They’re operating out of a naive and diminutive kingdom of earthly power. The Kingdom of Heaven is the real power and authority and it is centered around an innocent death that breaks eternal chains.

The Christian believe the God who made the world for flourishing has entered into its violence, absorbed its evil, and begun the work of restoring what was lost.

Not through outrage.
Not through force.
But through a cross, an empty tomb, and a people learning to live a different story.

That is where my argument begins. And, perhaps, where hope does too.

As much as we would love to deep thinking existentialists, we’re idealists. We think that if we get the right plan, create the right tools, perfect our performance we’re going to fix the world—even if it’s just our own. Chaos happens to other people. We eat 100 grams of protein a day. We’re good. We’ve researched the right neighborhoods. We’re going to have a great life. We’ve perfected our LinkedIn profile, we’ll never be hungry.

We can’t help it. We want to muscle the laws of this world into submission. Somehow, we hope we’ve outgrown tragedy. We’ve learned our lesson. We’ve matured. We’ve acquired the right skills. Now, we’re ready to live a suffering avoidant life.

Except you know it’s coming for you. The world breaks everyone. One day you’ll get punched in the gut. It’s horrifying. That’s when you make your next plan.

I think there’s more to life than taking your knocks and perpetually optimizing your life for least suffering and greatest safety.

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The War Broke Everyone

The Great War didn’t see a world collapse into barbarism. It was the logical conclusion of modern confidence.

Europe marched into the trenches believing reason, progress, and civilization had outgrown catastrophe. Instead, it produced mechanized slaughter on an industrial scale. Young men crossed fields of mud into machine-gun fire for causes no one could clearly explain. Poison gas crept into lungs. Bodies disappeared into the earth without graves or glory.

Erich Maria Remarque wrote in “All Quiet on the Western Front”:

“We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”

War wounds. It isolates souls. Later Remarque wrote this devastating line:

“The war has ruined us for everything.”

The war killed illusions. It taught a generation that progress does not save us, intelligence does not restrain us, and optimism untethered from reality is a form of cruelty. When the guns fell silent, the world returned to parties, gossip, and frivolous friendships. See The Great Gatsby. But hope. Hope seemed lost for an entire generation.

The question that echoed through the modern world was not why bad things happen to bad people, but something far more unsettling: What do you hope in when everything collapses—even when you did everything right?

French philosophers wrote thousands of pages in response. But Mike Tyson said it better almost a century later:

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Pain interrupts strategy. Suffering exposes what we trust. That’s the scandal.

Whatever you do next, that’s what you hope in.

Christians are quick to say the answer is Jesus. That’s true. But it’s not obvious how. How is Jesus hope when health fails, futures disappear, friendships fracture, and inheritance perishes? How is Christ, as St. Peter writes, “a living hope” when everything living feels like it’s dying?

Jesus Had a Friend Die

This is a dark reality. Jesus loved people and those people suffered. In his lifetime. On his watch. That’s the story of Lazarus.

Jesus was teaching far away when word came to him that his good friend was sick and dying…

“Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer.”

This is not a story about things turning around just in time. This is not cinematic hope—the cavalry does not arrive over the hill. By the time Jesus shows up, Lazarus has been dead four days. The body has begun to decay. The finality is settled. Delay.

We love stories where suffering produces strength. Where trials forge character. Where the darkest hour leads to triumph. Winston Churchill’s speeches during the Blitz still stir us because the story bent toward victory. Dunkirk became a miracle. Fog rolled in. Tiny boats came. A generation was saved. The war turned.

But for every Dunkirk, history gives us Calais where entire regiments died holding the line with no rescue.

Sometimes suffering doesn’t make anything better. Sometimes it just ends things.

That’s where Lazarus is.

Jesus doesn’t arrive to transform the hardship into a lesson. He arrives after hardship turned into tragedy.

The End of the Line

By the time Jesus reaches Bethany, grief has done its work. The house is full. Mourners from Jerusalem have come out to the suburban town of Bethany. Mary and Martha are not speaking in abstractions. They say the sentence every grieving person eventually says:

“Lord, if you had been here…”

This is not a theological objection. It’s a relational one.

And Jesus doesn’t correct them. He doesn’t explain himself. He doesn’t offer a sermon on sovereignty. He weeps.

This is one of the most disruptive moments in the Gospels. The man who will raise the dead stands in front of a tomb and cries. John tells us he is deeply moved—the word carries anger, agitation, a visceral reaction to death itself.

Christian hope does not begin with answers. It begins with the presence of God.

Jesus meets humanity at the end of the line. Emotionally available, honest, unguarded. It’s more than “he grieves with those who grieve”. Jesus grieves what we grieve. He refuses to spiritualize loss.

“Lament,” Michael Card writes, “is telling the truth about the world without pretending it’s fine.”

This is the uniqueness of Christian hope. It never asks you to pretend everything is fine.

But God’s presence is not enough.

Someone in the crowd says what humanity has been saying ever since:

“Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

If Jesus has power, why didn’t he use it? If he can do something great for that person over there, why not me?

If he saved the lads at Dunkirk, why not on Normandy a few years later and a few miles further south?

That question doesn’t go away over time. It sharpens through the refinement of legions of wounds and would-be healings turned graveside grievances.

God With Us Isn’t Enough

If Christian hope stopped at divine empathy, it would be beautiful—but insufficient. A God who weeps with us but leaves death untouched is not hope. That’s just companionship. Which is lovely. But humanity can’t make it through life all God does in our sorrow is offer us a weighted blanket.

Martha, Lazarus’ sister, knows this. She emphatically believes in resurrection. But imagines it later. Someday far off. At the end of all things. To Martha, resurrection is a moment in time. An event. A plan. An explanation.

Jesus interrupts her theology with a claim:

“I am the resurrection and the life.”

Not I bring resurrection.
Not I enable resurrection.
I am.

This is where Christianity becomes for many offensive or absurd.

Jesus doesn’t offer an explanation for suffering. He offers himself as the answer to it. Resurrection is not a principle. It’s a person. Life is not an idea. It’s embodied.

Which means hope is not optimism. It’s not resilience. It’s not meaning-making. It’s not growth through pain.

Hope is death itself confronted and defeated.

Jesus does not stand at the tomb and say, “Everything happens for a reason.”

He shouts: “Lazarus, come out.”

This is not consolation. This is confrontation.

Scars remain. In cities, on families, on souls.

Christian hope does not pretend otherwise. It insists, instead, that resurrection is the focal point of reality. Evil is the aberration, not goodness. Death is delusional. Life is everlasting. Suffering is real but not final. Suffering is a pin drop. Christ is a symphony.

That belief is either madness or it is grounded in the resurrection of Jesus.

Which brings us back to the tomb.

Jesus does not avoid death. He walks into it. He absorbs its weight. And in doing so, he changes what comes out of the tomb.

Don’t Dress in Death

Jesus ends the story with a command that feels almost anticlimactic:

“Take off the grave clothes.”

Resurrection is not just something to believe—it’s something to live into.

Christian hope calls for belief, not as intellectual assent, but allegiance to a person who has already gone through death and come back. And then it calls for participation: stepping out of what no longer fits someone who has been given life.

Hope after the world cracks open does not mean pretending the cracks aren’t there. It means trusting that resurrection—not ruin—has the final word.

That’s what you do when you’ve been punched in the mouth.

You hear the voice of resurrection calling you by name.
You step forward.
And you take off the grave clothes.

Rest must explain itself, too. Vacations must achieve excellence. Meals must be epically photogenic.

If, we rest, it’s so we can work better. We don’t gather because we delight in one another. We network.

Friendship is increasingly evaluated by usefulness. If there’s no shared project, no spiritual payoff, no professional synergy, the relationship slowly dissolves.

The human soul was not designed for constant ambition. It was designed for presence. For shared time that has no point other than the joy of being alive together. For long meals, slow walks, bad jokes, and conversations that wander without conclusion.

We were made to create. We were made to make. We were made to build.

We were also made to hang out.

Leisure is Lost

Eugene Peterson once described Sabbath not as a religious obligation but as a rhythm of pray and play. That phrase matters. Prayer grounds us in reality. Play reminds us we are creatures, not machines.

Play is the activity that cannot be justified beyond itself. Children play instinctively, not because it improves outcomes, but because it expresses life. Adults, on the other hand, must rationalize play.

Peterson saw what we have forgotten: leisure is not escape from life—it is participation in it. Sabbath is not a break from meaning; it is a declaration that meaning does not come from productivity.

When leisure disappears, friendship becomes fragile. There is no time to linger. No margin for boredom. No space for relationships to deepen slowly and unevenly through silence. Everything must be efficient, scheduled, and purposeful.

Friendship cannot survive the pressures of maximization.

The Cost of Ambition

Miroslav Volf has written about the cost of ambition—not merely personal ambition, but cultural ambition.1 A world oriented toward achievement trains us to view time as a resource to be exploited and people as variables in our success.

Ambition promises fulfillment, but it quietly dismantles community. It teaches us to evaluate relationships by return on investment. We keep the connections that advance us and release the ones that slow us down.

The tragedy is that the relationships that slow us down are often the ones that save us.

Ambition compresses life. Friendship requires expansion. It takes time. It interrupts schedules. It wastes evenings. It pulls us into the lives of others without asking whether the investment makes sense.

We have chosen speed. And we are paying for it with our souls.

Jesus and the Refusal to Rush

One of the most striking features of Jesus’ life is how inefficient it is.

He walks when he could ride.
He stops when he could press on.
He eats when there is work to do.
He rests when people are waiting.

Even in moments of urgency, Jesus refuses to be rushed. Lazarus is dying, and Jesus delays. The crowds are pressing in, and Jesus withdraws. Children interrupt him, and he welcomes them.

Jesus’ life is a sustained protest against the tyranny of urgency.

And it is within this unhurried life that friendships form.

Jesus does not treat people as projects. He does not optimize relationships for outcomes. He shares meals. He attends weddings. He reclines at tables. He walks with friends long enough for conversation to unfold naturally.

He wastes time and, in doing so, redeems it.

Silence, Solitude, and the Return to Relationship

Henri Nouwen, in The Way of the Heart, writes about silence, solitude, and prayer not as spiritual techniques but as disciplines that restore our humanity. Silence teaches us to listen. Solitude reveals our compulsions. Prayer reorders our loves.

But Nouwen is careful: these practices aren’t an escape from relationship. They’re preparation for it.

Without silence, we use words to control.
Without solitude, we use people to distract.
Without prayer, we use relationships to fill a void only God can fill.

When we cannot be alone, we cannot truly be together.

This matters for friendship. Many of us want connection without presence, intimacy without attention, companionship without cost. We show up distracted, hurried, half-available. We sit with people while scanning phones, planning exits, calculating productivity.

Nouwen would say that our inability to be present with others is rooted in our inability to be present with ourselves.

Leisure creates the conditions for presence. It slows us down enough to notice another person. To listen without fixing. To sit without performing. To remain without escaping.

The Healing Power of Unproductive Togetherness

Some of the most formative moments of friendship are profoundly unremarkable.

Long drives.
Sitting on the couch after everyone else has gone to bed.
Walking the same neighborhood again and again.
Watching average sunsets.
Debating if you could in fact survive a battle to the death against an African Wild Dog.

Nothing is accomplished. And yet life abundantly flows. The shared leisure creates the platform for deepening moments of vulnerability that begin with phrases like: “I’ve been thinking about what I want…”

“I’m sick…”

“I don’t know what to do…”

“I’m stuck.”

“I’ve been dreaming about…”

Loneliness rarely finds a cure within advice. Proximity preempts depth by being with someone long enough that explanation becomes unnecessary. By being known without being impressive.

We often assume that healing requires intensity: deep conversations, breakthroughs, emotional honesty. Sometimes it does. But more often, healing happens sideways, through repetition and presence.

Friendship grows the way bodies heal: almost imperceptibly.

Church, Community, and the Pressure to Perform

Even our most sacred spaces have absorbed the logic of productivity.

Church gatherings are structured to deliver content. Small groups revolve around curriculum. Community is measured by attendance and outcomes.

There is nothing wrong with teaching or structure. But when everything has a point, relationships become instrumental. People show up as roles, not as selves.

We leave having learned something, but not having been known.

The early church, for all its devotion and mission, was marked by table fellowship. They broke bread together. They lingered. They shared life in ways that resisted efficiency. St. Paul’s biggest contribution to the church in Ephesus, it seems, was spending late nights in people’s homes.2

The modern church is often busy doing good while neglecting the ordinary work of friendship. If we’re super honest, we’re not even that busy doing good either.

A Small Act of Resistance

In a culture addicted to ambition, leisure is an act of resistance. So is friendship. So is hanging out.

To spend time with someone without a goal is to declare that their presence matters apart from their utility, humor, network, or contribution. To protect unstructured time is to confess that you are not what you produce.

This is not laziness. It is obedience to reality.

You are finite.
You are relational.
You are human.

And humans need time together that accomplishes nothing except the quiet miracle of shared existence.

Aspirational Free-Time

What if the most faithful thing you could do this week is not accomplish more, but linger longer?

What if friendship does not need to be justified?

What if play is not childish, but human?

What if hanging out—without agenda, without optimization, without spiritual varnish—is not a distraction from the good life, but one of its clearest signs?

Do we need another productivity hack? What are we doing with our save time? Is our efficiency making us whole?

We need to recover leisure.

We need to sit down.
We need to stay.
We need to waste time together.

And in doing so, we may discover that what the world calls wasted time is precisely where life begins to feel whole again.