The Scarlet Letter
By: Nathaniel Hawthorne Modernised and edited by Jim McGuiggan (2004)
By: Nathaniel Hawthorne Modernised and edited by Jim McGuiggan (2004)
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A single point: The Message depends on messengers.
I believe in writers and books and other such forms of communication but very few people come to God in Jesus Christ apart from actual contact with an actual person or persons in whom the Message is embodied.
Certainly that’s how it was in the early days when faith in Jesus raced through
A man with a message about Jesus that he himself has no intention of taking seriously is something of a hypocrite. A fine man with no gospel to tell is sub-Christian. A fine man with merely moral advice and right values is sub-Christian. A compassionate and generous person with no message about Jesus Christ is sub-Christian. The gospel that raced through
The ancient Jewish council members had moral values as real as Peter’s and they could quote the OT texts as well as the Galileans but it was when Peter and John stood up, proclaiming an astonishing Message about the recently crucified but now very much alive Jesus of Nazareth that the fire broke out. There they stood, formerly fear-filled and now defying the Supreme Court of the Israelite people. Two months earlier the apostolic group had scattered to save their lives and now they thanked God for the privilege of suffering for the name of Jesus and telling the distressed jurists (Acts 4:19-20), “We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard!”
It’s true there must be objective truth (“out-there-independent-of-me truth”) but the parts of the world affected by the truth about Jesus could make arguments as well as the Christians—arguments are good things in their place and certainly truth is indispensable, whatever the packaging in which it comes. But one day non-believers met up with actual persons in whose lives they saw a moral and spiritual dynamic that turned slave girls and ditch-diggers, farm-hands and tax-collectors, water-vendors and shop-keepers into assured people of integrity and kindness and patience. In those days there were no books to put in the hands of the non-believers so they could study for themselves and come to faith! Where faith triumphed it triumphed because Demetrius or Helen or Jacob, now alive with new life, credited a living Jesus with the change.
Ignatius, almost sprinting his way to
What brought the pagan religions down in ruins? The truth about Jesus, of course; but it was the truth of Jesus embodied in living messengers; fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, friends, slaves, free, Jews, Greeks, Romans, soldiers, sailors and the like.
Look, I know “all things are of God,” particularly where salvation and life is concerned but somewhere in this grand enterprise of his there is a place for the messenger who embodies the Message.
