Letter #113: True to Life

Living in light of the twist.

Klavan Major,

Your elevator pitch for Christianity was effective because it felt like the kind of thing that could really happen. The embodiment of love and goodness (33, M, ethnically ambiguous Middle Easterner) comes to earth. We tear him limb from limb for the sake of politics and purity. Everyone can recognize that story as true to the kind of world we live in.

At the same time, the resurrection isn’t something you could have predicted, exactly. At least not in its particulars. Some pagan visionaries did make out the shape of the cross on the horizon. It could be dimly seen that something like the incarnation would have to interrupt history if there was any hope for us. “The truly just man will have to endure whips, torture, chains, branding irons in his eyes, and after every extreme of suffering, crucifixion.” That’s not the Book of Isaiah. It's Plato’s Republic (2.361e-2a).

But even the prophets were dealing in what T.S. Eliot described as “hints and guesses, hints followed by guesses.” Jesus, I argued last week, gave a divine nod of assent to those guesses, lifting death’s veil for just an instant to reveal in sparkling detail what had until then been shrouded in myth. After that, “the darkness drops again.” The miracle has not been reiterated; God has not seen fit to repeat himself. Nothing has changed about our world of torment and violence. But one glimpse beyond it has cast the whole thing in a different light.

This is why I get a little ticked off when even well-meaning Christians ask how the pagans could have failed to accept Christ or the Jews could have missed their own savior. Anyone could have. The clarity we now find in scripture and philosophy is the clarity of hindsight. The best stories end in a way you never expected, and then you look back to realize the author was laying the groundwork from the very first page.

When (spoiler alert) Bruce Willis turns out to be dead at the end of The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan rewrites the entire movie without changing a word of the script. He just plays back key scenes and lets you appreciate the story afresh. Jesus didn’t get a screen credit, but he really should have, because he invented the technique: “He told them, ‘everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms.’ Then he opened their minds so they could understand the scriptures.”

Emphasis on the word “then.” Time only moves in one direction, which is also why we can’t recover our old pagan ways without looking ridiculous or savage. This seems important for our situation, when the question is how to push past the civilizational roadblocks we seem to be facing. If we begin from the twist ending, certain routes forward will be opened to us. Others will be forever shut.

Love,
Spencer