Caiaphas

THE HIGH PRIEST Caiaphas was essentially a mathematician. When the Jews started worrying that they might all get into hot water with the Romans because of the way Jesus was carrying on, Caiaphas said that in that case they should dump him like a hot potato. His argument ran that it is better for one man to get it in the neck for the sake of many than for many to get it in the neck for the sake of one man. His grim arithmetic proved unassailable. 

The arithmetic of Jesus, on the other hand, was atrocious. He said that Heaven gets a bigger kick out of one sinner who repents than out of ninety-nine saints who don't need to. He said that God pays as much for one hour's work as for one day's. He said that the more you give away, the more you have.  

It is curious that in the matter of deciding his own fate, he reached the same conclusion as Caiaphas and took it in the neck for the sake of many, Caiaphas included. It was not, however, the laws of mathematics that he was following.  

- Originally published in Peculiar Treasures

Who Jesus Is

While he was at Wheaton, Buechner went often to what someone described as "an evangelical high Episcopal church," St. Barnabas in Glen Ellyn. He found the rector, the Rev. Robert MacFarlane, a rewarding preacher. 

ONE PARTICULAR SERMON I will always remember though I cannot be sure that it is exactly the sermon he preached because of course it is the sermons we preach to ourselves around the preacher's sermons that are the ones that we hear most powerfully. He was talking about Saint Peter in any case, how Peter was sitting outside in the high priest's courtyard while Jesus was inside being interrogated. A maidservant came up and asked him if it wasn't true that he was a follower of this man who was at the root of all the trouble. Then Peter said, "I do not know the man." It was Peter's denial, of course, MacFarlane said: I do not even know who he is. It was the denial that Jesus himself had predicted, and the cock raised his beak into the air and crowed just as Jesus had foretold. But it was something else too, MacFarlane said. It was a denial, but it was also the truth. Peter really did not know who Jesus was, did not really know, and neither do any of us really know who Jesus is either. Beyond all we can find to say about him and believe about him, he remains always beyond our grasp, except maybe once in a while the hem of his garment. We should never forget that. We can love him, we can learn from him, but we can come to know him only by following him—by searching for him in his church, in his Gospels, in each other.  

- Originally published in Telling Secrets

I Had Been Starving

ONE DAY I WAS having lunch with two Wheaton students who were talking about whatever they were talking about—the weather, the movies—when without warning one of them asked the other as naturally as he would have asked the time of day what God was doing in his life. If there is anything in this world I believe, it is that God is indeed doing all kinds of things in the lives of all of us including those who do not believe in God and would have nothing to do with him if they did, but in the part of the East where I live, if anybody were to ask a question like that, even among religious people, the sky would fall, the walls would cave in, the grass would wither. I think the very air would stop my mouth if I opened it to speak such words among just about any group of people I can think of in the East because their faith itself, if they happen to have any, is one of the secrets that they have kept so long that it might almost as well not exist. The result was that to find myself at Wheaton among people who, although they spoke about it in different words from mine and expressed it in their lives differently, not only believed in Christ and his Kingdom more or less as I did but were also not ashamed or embarrassed to say so was like finding something which, only when I tasted it, I realized I had been starving for years.  

- Originally published in Telling Secrets

"For Christ and His Kingdom"

Buechner accepted an invitation to teach at Wheaton College (Illinois) during the Fall semester, 1985.  

I KNEW WHEATON was Billy Graham's alma mater. I knew it was evangelical though without any clear idea as to what that meant. I knew that, although as only a visiting professor I would myself be exempt from it, everyone had to sign a pledge not to smoke or drink for as long as they either taught or studied there. If I had known that they had to pledge also not to dance, of all things, I think that I would probably have been horrified enough to turn down the invitation on principle. The irony is that if I had done so, my life would have been immeasurably impoverished. 

The famous pledge sends out highly misleading signals not only as to what Christianity is all about but also as to what Wheaton College is all about. Because of those signals I was apprehensive about having my students read The Brothers Karamazov as I had planned. I was afraid that Ivan's devastating attack on belief in a loving God might constitute a heresy that the administration would not tolerate, and then I discovered that it was one of the standard texts used in the English Department. Whatever evangelical meant, in other words, it did not mean closed-minded. On the contrary I found the college as open to what was going on in the world and as generally sophisticated as any I have known. What made it different from any I have known can perhaps best be suggested by the college motto, which is more in evidence there than such mottos usually are. It is not in Latin like most of the other mottos I can think of but in English plain enough for anybody to read and understand. "For Christ and his Kingdom" is the way it goes—as plain as that.  

- Originally published in Telling Secrets

A Secret Understood

A LARGE PART of the truth that Godric had for me was the truth that although death ended my father, it has never ended my relationship with my father—a secret that I had never so clearly understood before. So forty-four years after the last time I saw him, it was to my father that I dedicated the book—In memoriam patris mei. I wrote the dedication in Latin solely because at the time it seemed appropriate to the medieval nature of the tale, but I have come to suspect since that Latin was also my unconscious way of remaining obedient to the ancient family law that the secret of my father must be at all costs kept secret. 

- Originally published in Telling Secrets