When you step away from a toilet with a motion sensor and it doesn't automatically flush, do you ever wonder if you are really there?
As if His gracious, loving, and all-sufficient Word was not enough! What a blessed joy it is to share in weekly communion! Can we have our wedding cake and eat it too? Yes. Eat up and drink up: the inconsumable Bread of Life, broken for us to have and to hold; the eternal well-spring of his vintage blood, poured out that we might taste and see that the Lord is good. One big corporate hug and kiss from Jesus. This hearty embrace his bride receives, not prudishly as with our arms down by our side, but as those who in fear and like devotion warmly return such affection with thanksgiving. And what better way to exchange our love before we depart for the week with his blessing!
I was talking to a friend at Starbucks a week ago Friday, and I found out that she had an infatuation with scary movies. "Why do you like watching scary movies?" I asked. "Because I want to be brave," she replied in her Russian accent. I recounted how I used to be afraid whenever I walked in the dark to get our mail from the mailbox across the dirt country road next to our house. "As I would return from the mailbox, I always had the irresistible feeling that someone was sneaking up behind me. So, I would start running, and they would start chasing me." She admitted having the same feeling. I continued, "But after I trusted Christ, I wasn't afraid of the darkness anymore. I could face it." She replied, "I come from a Muslim background, though I never observed the religious routines. Now I go to my host family's church. I'm confused."
I remember as a kid having an irresistible urge to draw pictures of Satan and evil things on a piece of paper during the sermon at church. My mom saw it and scolded me for it. Once, while my father was pumping gas at a station, I drew an angry face in the fogged up back seat window in our car. I soon found myself crying, curled up in fetal position in the seat opposite of the window, terrorized by the image I had created. My mother had to wipe it away for me. But what she could never help wipe away was the cacophony of voices through which I would dare myself to curse God whenever I thought about him as a teenager. Thus, I lived in a darkness of guilt and shame.
As I look back on my fear of darkness and the irresistible imagination to dare myself with things that might harm me, I think there is more to it than just my terrifying imagination. I was struggling with a spiritual reality. Behind the darkness was a spiritual darkness in which real spiritual powers exercise their dominion through seduction and terror. But these are only the surface of a deeper problem. In a sense, my imagination of wicked things was a means to hide from something more dreadful: the Holy and Righteous God Himself. He was really the only One that was always chasing me, confronting me the reality of our separation. My trust in Christ, then, is not merely the employment of an invincible bodyguard against cosmic bullies, but reconciliation with the One whose wrath is greater than all the power that Satan and his legion can conjure for themselves: they are not only agents of his wrath, but objects.
I have hope for my confused friend. Confusion is a necessary step towards conversion. She will never fully overcome fear of darkness by braving scary movies. You cannot overcome a desert by playing in a sandbox. God still chases. Confusion is evidence that His grace is catching up with her, as He caught me.
I've seen the movie The Body a number of times now in the context of discussion groups. How important is it to the Christian faith that Jesus was actually raised from the dead and that his tomb was actually empty? How should faith investigate evidence to the contrary? Secular Science says "Truth, even at the expense of faith." The Politics of Religion prophecies Christianity will survive despite (or worse, by suppressing) evidence to the contrary.
As the plot unfolds, the death of the god Jesus becomes more and more a reality to skeptic (Sharon) and faithful (Gutierrez) alike. Together, the dual competing 'truth' seekers suffer between the hands of dual competing political-recognition seekers: Israeli and Palestinean authorities seek political recognition from the Roman Catholic church. Thus, the Catholic church takes on a form of Antichrist, who gains power as the truth and power of Jesus' resurrection becomes more and more doubtful. Satan strikes with a double-edged sword: one edge seeks to destroy the hope of Christ by the pursuit of truth with a secular heart, the other seeks to preserve "Christ" by participating in a game of ransom with the body for political security.
Father Lavelle gives into the force of the former. Torn between his identity in the church as a priest, and his identity as a scientist to allow for the possibility that Christ was not raised, he finally yields to scientific evidence, loses all hope in Jesus, and takes his own life, Judas-like. Father Gutierrez, in comparison, resembles Peter, whose child-like faith seems strong up to the end, when his spirit, plagued by the evidence, turns to religious apathy and guilt, and his relationship with Sharon becomes questionably intimate.
In the end, Father Gutierrez receives "good news": The truthfulness of Jesus resurrection itself receives resurrection. This first proclamation of gospel, however, is unsatisfying. The dialog is brief, mysterious, and begs for further explanation and confirmation. The viewer is left with the strong need for concrete and conclusive evidence.
One major character is left unfilled by the movie's paid actors. In the end, viewers will realize that the movie has casted them for the role of Thomas: We are the ones shown the indisputable evidence that we really longed for. Yet such evidence does not come without an ironic final rebuke from Jesus himself: "Blessed are those who believe and yet have not seen."