Calendar Change
Some of us are old enough to take Elvis Presley seriously as a musical phenomenon but given a few more decades and he'll be barely remembered. Presidents, Prime Ministers, explorers, writers and film stars all lie in the dust of oblivion by and by. But the name Jesus Christ won't fade. I like what W.H. Fitchett said. "From the birth of a Jew, who was a peasant in an obscure province in a far-off age; who wrote no book, made no discover, invented no philosophy, built no temple; a peasant who died when, as men count years, he had scarcely reached his prime, and died the death of a criminal. And even before his death the little band of disciples he had succeeded in gathering, all forsook him and fled. This is a story written in all the characters of defeat. Yet civilized time is dated from the birth of this Jew! The centuries carry His signature, and the years of the modern world are labeled by universal consent the 'year of our Lord.'
"He goes on to insist that it's no mean achievement to write your signature on Time itself. Socrates, Plato, Shakespeare, Einstein, Homer, none of these managed it. They study Plato and the Socratic dialogues in universities but they don't date time from anyone but the peasant who spoke rude Aramaic and died at the hands of a lynch mob. How did such a thing happen? Why did it happen?
On its own this might be very interesting but just one of those wonders of human history. But what if there's more to it? What if a close look at Jesus of Nazareth shows there are good reasons why a sort of unconscious conspiracy led to putting his name on the ever-rolling stream we call Time? Maybe we'd understand better the confession of Jean Paul Richter. "Christ who, being the holiest among the mighty, the mightiest among the holy, lifted with His pierced hand empires off their hinges, turned the stream of centuries out of its channel, and still governs the ages." What if the fact that his name is written on Time is simply one of the many astonishing things about Jesus Christ? It might be easy enough to dodge a single tumbling rock on a mountainside but what if that rock is only one of a multitude of tumbling rocks heading your way? What if there is a mass of astonishing truths about Christ that join together and become an avalanche? Or to drop the metaphor, what if the story of Jesus has so many truths that when they're woven together it becomes the persuasive Story of the ages? And what if it satisfies our intellectual, emotional and social needs as nothing else? I think the Story is worth listening to. What do you have to lose?
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