Hiding in Plain Sight

Imagine a magnificent painting that has been in your family for generations.

It’s a masterpiece. Everyone admires it. Its beauty and influence are taken for granted because it has always been there.

But then something changes. The family decide that they no longer like the artist. Perhaps his views have fallen out of fashion. Perhaps people have become embarrassed by him. Perhaps they simply don’t want to be associated with what he stood for.

So they scratch his signature from the bottom of the painting, remove his name from the frame, and stop telling their children who painted it. They find new ways to talk about the masterpiece without mentioning the artist at all.

But they keep the painting.

They still admire it. They still value it. They just want the masterpiece without acknowledging the man who created it.

Except scratching out the signature doesn’t change the identity of the Artist.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to Jesus Christ and the extraordinary lengths to which much of Western society has gone over the past half-century to remove Him from public life.

And yes, before somebody writes to tell me, I know that His correct name is ‘Yeshua’ – the name by which His family and contemporaries knew Him – and that the English name Jesus comes to us through the Greek and Latin forms of that name. But I’m using ‘Jesus’ here because it’s the name by which most of the world knows Him.

And what’s interesting is that, for many of you, the hackles would have immediately gone up at just seeing that name in print.

There might be perfectly legitimate reasons for that. Perhaps Christianity was forced on you as a child and you couldn’t wait to escape it. Perhaps you associate Jesus with rules and restrictions, or with somebody else telling you how you should live your life. Perhaps you see Him as old-fashioned, a figure from another age whose teachings seem inconvenient or out of step with the way you want to live now.

Or perhaps you’ve simply reached the conclusion that you don’t believe any of it and would rather get on with your life without having to think about Jesus at all.

Our institutions have certainly helped to make that easier. Christian teaching has disappeared from many schools. Public bodies which once openly acknowledged God have rewritten ceremonies and traditions. Christian language has steadily been removed from public life. Ideas which were once openly understood as part of a Christian inheritance are increasingly presented without any acknowledgement of where they came from.

All of which raises an interesting question. Occasionally somebody will ask me how they could ever be held accountable by Christ if they’d never really had the opportunity to encounter Him. How could God judge somebody who had never been properly taught who He was, what He said or what He claimed?

It’s a reasonable question, particularly in an age in which we’ve gone to considerable lengths to erase Christianity from many of the places in which previous generations would routinely have encountered it.

Except you do encounter Him. You encounter Him all the time, often without even realising it.

When you hear somebody described as a “Good Samaritan” for stopping to help a stranger, or hear references to a “prodigal son”, “the blind leading the blind”, or “going the extra mile” you’re hearing phrases that originated with Him. When we admire people who are “the salt of the earth”, warn against “wolves in sheep’s clothing”, speak of “casting the first stone”, throwing “pearls before swine” or knowing people “by their fruits” we’re using His words.

Most people use those expressions without thinking about where they came from, of course – but that’s the point. Stories told by Jesus two thousand years ago are still sitting right there in the everyday vocabulary of modern secular society.

But His influence is far more profound than that. He is at the heart of many / most of the great social Western reforms that that we now take for granted.

William Wilberforce’s Christian conversion transformed the direction of his life and became one of the central motivations behind his decades-long campaign which ended the slave trade in Britain and eventually everywhere in the Western world. Elizabeth Fry’s Christian faith drove her extraordinary work in prison reform. Lord Shaftesbury’s convictions inspired his campaigns for children, factory workers and the mentally ill. William and Catherine Booth created the Salvation Army around a determination to take Christ’s teaching into the streets and serve people whom respectable society had largely forgotten. Thomas Barnardo’s Christian convictions drove his work with destitute children.

Follow the story of organised charity, care for the poor, hospitals, hospices, orphanages and missions throughout the Western world and you repeatedly encounter men and women who weren’t simply trying to be nice people. They were consciously attempting to obey Jesus.

The same is true when we look at some of the assumptions we now make about human dignity. We instinctively recoil at the idea that the strong should simply crush the weak. We believe the vulnerable should be protected. We talk about the worth of the individual. We admire sacrifice. We understand forgiveness and redemption as virtues. We expect society to care about people who are poor, sick, elderly, disabled or excluded.

Those ideas have become so deeply embedded in our culture that we often treat them as self-evident. But that wasn’t always the case. For centuries men and women, preached, argued, and acted against the ruling powers – in obedience to Christ – until the idea that every human being mattered to God became central to our laws and institutions. All this because Jesus had commanded His followers to care for the least, the lost and the forgotten.

Then there’s art and music. You can walk through the great galleries of Europe trying to avoid Jesus, but you’re going to have a difficult afternoon. He’s everywhere. In paintings, sculpture, architecture and literature. In Bach. In Handel. In cathedrals that still dominate the skylines of cities which now regard themselves as thoroughly secular. In stories, symbols and images which have survived long after many people stopped believing the events they depict.

You can secularise the culture, but it’s remarkably difficult to secularise its memory.

Not that we haven’t tried. Christmas has been stripped of most of the things which commemorate Him and turned into one of the biggest commercial events on the planet. Likewise, Easter has become a nonsensical celebration of chocolate eggs and rabbits.

But both events are still based on Him. We’ve changed the packaging, dramatically, but they still exist because of the events of His life.

But there’s more.

Listen to ordinary conversation, television, films or social media and you’ll regularly hear people with no apparent Christian belief reach instinctively for one particular name when they want to convey anger, fright, shock or astonishment.

“Jesus!” Or, more often, “Jesus Christ!”

Think about how strange that actually is. Of all the names in human history, why that one? Why not “Allah” or “Buddha”? Why does the name of a first-century Jewish teacher from an obscure corner of the Roman Empire still carry such emotional force two thousand years later?

You may not worship Him. You may not believe in Him. You may even use His name precisely because you don’t regard it as sacred. But there He is, at the centre of contemporary life.

And then, of course, there is one final example which is bigger than all of the others. Put everything else aside. Forget the sayings, the holidays, the reformers, the art, the music, the charities, the hospitals and the cathedrals.

And just look at the date.

For centuries Western history – the very basis upon which we divide time – was divided into BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini – “in the year of our Lord”).

Sure, in recent years, there have been attempts to replace these terms with BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era) – but this only changes the names – not the meaning.

We changed the initials, but we left the dividing line exactly where it was.

Every morning when you wake up and look at the date on your phone, every time you sign a document, every time a historian tells you when Caesar crossed the Rubicon or when the First World War began, you’re using a system of chronology numbered around the traditional dating of the birth of Jesus Christ.

You can decide before breakfast that Jesus has nothing to do with your life, but the date in the corner of your phone has already reminded you that He does.

Now, at this point, you might tell me that your problem isn’t with Jesus – it’s with Christianity – and I completely understand that distinction.

Churches have failed. Christian leaders have failed. Christians themselves have sometimes behaved appallingly. Terrible things have been done by people and institutions carrying the Christian name. At times Christianity has been used to justify behaviour which bears almost no resemblance to the teaching of Christ.

Jesus even warned us that this would happen – that people would come ‘in His name’ and deceive others – so not everything which uses the tag ‘Christian’ is of Christ. History contains plenty of examples of people using His name while misrepresenting Him completely.

But that raises another question. If your experience has been of bad Christianity, have you ever actually encountered Jesus?

Should you hold Jesus accountable for the cruelty of Christians when He taught the opposite of cruelty? Should you hold Him responsible for Christian abuses of power when He taught His followers to forgo power?

Perhaps the fairest thing you can do is put the Christians aside for a moment and look only at Him. Read what He said. Look at the way He treated people. Consider what He claimed about Himself and the promises He made and ask yourself a much more confronting question.

What if He was telling the truth?

Because this is where the story becomes much more than an interesting exercise in cultural history.

You can explain the persistence of Jesus in Western civilisation as history, tradition and cultural inheritance and certainly some of it is exactly that. But what if the reason you keep encountering Him is because you’re supposed to? What if all of these reminders are more than the residue of a civilisation which once believed? What if the Man you’ve been avoiding is reaching out to you because He wants you to have the opportunity to know Him prior to a final meeting at which you will be held accountable for your actions?

Christianity makes an extraordinary claim about Jesus. It doesn’t claim that He was merely a remarkable teacher whose ideas survived Him. It claims that He rose from the dead and is alive, that He knows you, and that He calls you to turn from sin, put your trust in Him and follow Him. In return, He offers forgiveness, reconciliation with God, a new life now and eternal life beyond death. The invitation He made two thousand years ago remains open today.

That doesn’t mean you’re expected to switch your brain off and simply believe. Quite the opposite. Look at Him. Examine Him. Read the Gospels. Ask the questions. Challenge the claims.

But perhaps don’t dismiss Him because of somebody else’s behaviour and perhaps don’t assume that you’ve never encountered Him simply because nobody sat you down and formally introduced you.

His fingerprints are everywhere.

Almost exactly a century ago, the American Baptist minister James Allan Francis tried to capture the extraordinary paradox of all of this. He reflected on a man born in obscurity, with none of the conventional instruments of power, no army, no political office, no wealth and no earthly status, and contrasted that apparently insignificant life with the influence it subsequently exercised over human history.

He said it far better than I can, and after everything I’ve written here, perhaps the most appropriate thing I can do is simply hand the story over to him.

Because ultimately this entire extraordinary history comes back to one person.

It is difficult to think of a better place to end.

He was born in an obscure village the child of a peasant woman.

He grew up in still another village where he worked in a carpenter shop until he was thirty.

Then for three years He was an itinerant preacher.

He never wrote a book, He never held an office, He never had a family or owned a house.

He didn’t go to college, He never visited a big city, He never travelled more than two hundred miles From the place where he was born.

He did none of the things one usually associates with greatness.

He had no credentials but himself.

He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him.

His friends ran away., He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial.

He was nailed to a cross between two thieves.

While he was dying His executioners gambled for his clothing, the only property he had on Earth.

When he was dead He was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.

Twenty centuries have come and gone and today he is the central figure of the human race and the leader of mankind’s progress.

…All the armies that ever marched,

…All the navies that ever sailed,

…All the parliament that ever sat,

…All the kings that ever reigned put together have not affected the life of man on Earth as much as that One Solitary Life.

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