“Whatever you believe, that’s what’s true”

A few days ago, I had a long conversation with my Uber driver on philosophy and religion. As we pulled up to my dorm, he finished by giving me his take: whatever you believe, that’s what’s true. He doesn’t believe in religion, but he does think there is a God, and he follows Christian principles: judge not, be humble, the Golden Rule, etc.

As I climbed out of the car, I couldn’t help but feel we’d been having two different conversations. You see, Christianity, for me, is not a ‘religion,’ in the way people tend to use the word nowadays, something that you can ‘believe,’ making it ‘true,’ in some weird sense of those words that never gets used elsewhere.  Christianity, at its core, has nothing to do with the Golden Rule or church hierarchy. It is about the movements of one man during a weekend in April around 33 AD.

What happened that weekend? I would say we can’t know, except that we can; the evidence is pretty strong, if you’re willing to start with an open mind instead of ruling out the miraculous from the get-go. I’ll leave you to explore the evidence in the hyperlinks; I want to talk instead about why these particular events, if real, are so very, very crucial to our lives.

Christianity began as a religion of persecuted minorities, slaves, immigrants, and refugees. It spreads in areas with hardship and pain. Christianity centers around a specific instance of wrongful conviction at the hands of corrupt elites, followed by humiliation, torture, and death.  Christianity, at its almost-core, is about the question of suffering (which I discuss here), and that question takes the form of a cross.

When I was in fourth grade, we spent a day inventing recipes – and by recipes, I mean a bunch of fourth-graders sticking whatever they wanted into a bowl and stirring it. My result was – well, not that appetizing. But being a fourth grader, and not really understanding how cooking worked, I had the idea that if I just kept stirring my slimy mess, it would somehow turn into pudding. Sadly, it didn’t work.

I think this is how we feel about the world sometimes; it’s a mess, but we think if we just keep moving parts of it around, or arranging them in new ways, somehow, it’ll turn into a utopia. But we can’t fix it, precisely because we’re part of the problem. When we come face-to-face with willful, implacable evil, with the man who rapes and murders a child, or the prison guard who enjoys torturing his prisoners, we have no answer. Which is why we needed God to ask the question for us.

What happened that weekend in April? A man died, yes, but this wasn’t just a death; it was the death of God, the only thing dread enough to seal the breach that had been ripped in reality. Do we realize just how awe-full, how disgrace-full, how distaste-full this is? The sun hid; the earth shuddered; the barrier between men and holiness was ripped in two. The world could not be the same. A dying God, echoed in myths and intuitions, finally came down into history that April afternoon.

Worse than the death was the cry of abandonment. When Jesus cried out “my God, why have you forsaken me?” this Bond of all bonds, sealed in the Triunity of Godhead, the Love before all loves, the Unity before all unities, the Fellowship before all fellowships, was broken. The source of all life had died; the Word through which all was made, was silenced; the Light of all light was swallowed by shadow.

But here the story turns – the cross finds its answer in the empty tomb. Because when a shadow falls over a light source, the light is not dimmed; it is the shadow that is wiped from existence.  I have said that Christianity’s almost-core is suffering, but even deeper than that lies joy – undimmed, untainted, unadulterated joy, that overwhelms sorrow the way the noonday sun overwhelms a mist. Suffering has an answer because we are not alone. Something better is coming. This is why Christianity is so precious to those who are suffering – not because it ignores the suffering, but because it embraces it, and in embracing it overcomes it.

People tell me they just can’t get excited about religion. And if religion is just something you do one morning a week, like chess club, or just a list of axioms, like ‘do unto others,’ I agree. But that has nothing to do with Christianity. Christianity is about this story, and nothing else. That’s why people took to calling us “Christ-ians” – we couldn’t stop talking about this one man, during this one weekend in April, the one weekend when everything everywhere changed forever.