Conversion

THERE ARE A NUMBER OF CONVERSIONS described in the New Testament. You think of Paul seeing the light on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-19), or the Ethiopian eunuch getting Philip to baptize him on the way from Jerusalem to Gaza (Acts 8:28-40). There is also the apostle Thomas saying, "My Lord and my God!" when he is finally convinced that Jesus is alive and whole again (John 20:26-29), not to mention the Roman centurion who witnessed the crucifixion saying, "Truly this man was the Son of God" (Luke 23:47). All these scenes took place suddenly, dramatically, when they were least expected. They all involved pretty much of an about-face, which is what the word conversion means. We can only imagine that they all were accompanied by a good deal of emotion.

But in this same general connection there are other scenes that we should also remember. There is the young man who, when Jesus told him he should give everything he had to the poor if he really wanted to be perfect as he said he did, walked sorrowfully away because he was a very rich man. There is Nicodemus, who was sufficiently impressed with Jesus to go talk to him under cover of darkness and later to help prepare his body for burial, but who never seems to have actually joined forces with him. There is King Agrippa, who, after hearing Paul's impassioned defense of his faith, said, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian" (Acts 26:28, KJV). There is even Pontius Pilate, who asked, "What is truth?" (John 18:38) under such circumstances as might lead you to suspect that just possibly, half without knowing it, he really hoped Jesus would be able to give him the answer, maybe even become for him the answer.

Like the conversions, there was a certain amount of drama about these other episodes too and perhaps even a certain amount of emotion, though for the most part unexpressed. But of course in the case of none of them was there any about-face. Presumably all these people kept on facing more or less the same way they had been right along. King Agrippa, for instance, kept on being King Agrippa just as he always had. And yet you can't help wondering if somewhere inside himself, as somewhere also inside the rest of them, the "almost" continued to live on as at least a sidelong glance down a new road, the faintest itching of the feet for a new direction. 

We don't know much about what happened to any of them after their brief appearance in the pages of Scripture, let alone what happened inside them. We can only pray for them, not to mention also for ourselves, that in the absence of a sudden shattering event, there was a slow underground process that got them to the same place in the end.

-Originally published in Beyond Words

Confession

TO CONFESS YOUR SINS TO GOD is not to tell God anything God doesn't already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the Golden Gate Bridge.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Compassion

COMPASSION IS THE SOMETIMES FATAL CAPACITY for feeling what it's like to live inside somebody else's skin. 

It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too. 

 -Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Simon Magus

Simon Magus lived in Samaria and was the Houdini of his day. He made small boys climb ropes and disappear. He sawed pretty girls in half. He pulled rabbits out of hats and levitated volunteers from the audience. And he made a good thing of it too. He got top billing, drove a BMW convertible to work, and wore nothing but silk next to his skin.

Then one day Philip came to town on a preaching junket, and Simon Magus got religion in a big way. When the altar call was given, he was the first to come forward. He then got himself baptized, and Philip added him to the team.

After a while the apostle Peter came down from the head office in Jerusalem to see how things were going, and before he was through, he conferred the power of healing on some of them by laying his hands on their heads. The healings struck Simon Magus as the most spectacular trick he had ever seen in his life, and he offered Peter hard cash if he'd lay his hands on him.

God didn't belong to the magicians' union, Peter told him, and as for the hard cash, he knew what he could do with it. He said that maybe if Simon Magus repented, God would overlook what had happened, but he didn't make the prospects sound too hopeful. There might still be hell to pay.

Knowing when he'd been upstaged, Simon Magus begged Peter to use his influence with the Lord to get him off the hook and then steered clear of the old fisherman for the remainder of his visit.

Acts 8:5-24

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Comedy

"BLESSED ARE YOU that weep now, for you shall laugh," Jesus says (Luke 6:21). That means not just that you shall laugh when the time comes, but that you can laugh a little even now in the midst of the weeping because you know that the time is coming. All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the ending will be a happy ending. That is what the laughter is about. It is the laughter of faith. It is the divine comedy. 

In the meantime you weep, because if you have a heart to see it with, the world you see is in a thousand ways heartbreaking. Only the heartless can look at it unmoved, and that is presumably why Jesus says, "Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep," meaning a different sort of laughter altogether—the laughter of callousness, mockery, indifference (Luke 6:25). You can laugh like that only if you turn your back on the suffering and need of the world, and perhaps for you the time for weeping comes when you see the suffering and need too late to do anything about them, like the specters of the dead that Jacob Marley shows old Scrooge as they reach out their spectral hands to try to help the starving woman and her child, but are unable to do so now because they are only shadows. 

The happiness of the happy ending—what makes the comedy so rich—is the suggestion that ultimately even the callous and indifferent will take part in it. The fact that Jesus says they too will weep and mourn before they're done seems to mean that they too will grow hearts at last, the hard way, and once that happens, the sky is the limit.  

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words