The One Morning Everything Rests On

Ten past two, the laptop shut, the tea gone cold at his elbow an hour ago.

It started in the car. Somebody had left a podcast running when he plugged the phone in, and for eleven minutes on the ring road a pleasant, unhurried voice explained why the whole thing had probably started as a misunderstanding that got tidied up later. He did not argue with the radio. He turned it off at the roundabout and drove the rest of the way home with the heater blowing.

That was in March. It is not March any more.

Nineteen years. That is what he keeps coming back to, sitting at this table. Nineteen years of getting up on Sundays, of teaching a class of eight year olds, of praying at hospital bedsides for people he loved, of naming a daughter after a woman in the Gospels. Nineteen years, and tonight at ten past two he has admitted something to himself that he has known for a long time and never said.

He has never looked.

Not properly. Not once. He has read plenty around it. He has read the encouraging things, the devotional things, the things that assume it and go on from there. What he has never done, not in nineteen years, is put the claim itself on the table in front of him, alone, with nothing to defend, and look straight at it.

And he knows exactly why. It is not laziness and it is not that he never had the time.

He is frightened that if he looks properly, it goes. And if it goes, then his father's funeral goes with it, and the class of eight year olds goes, and the woman he sat with at three in the morning goes, and the last nineteen years turn into a very long, very kind mistake.

So he has kept his eyes at an angle to it. And the thing about keeping your eyes at an angle to something is that you can do it for decades, and it works, and you can be a good and generous and prayerful person the entire time, and there will still be a night at a kitchen table when it is ten past two and the tea is cold and you cannot do it any more.

If you are at that table tonight, sit still. I am not going to talk you out of anything.

The man who put it at risk first

There is one sentence that ought to be handed to you before anything else, and it was not written by a critic. It was written by the man who did more than anybody alive to spread the thing in the first place, in a letter, to a church he loved, and it is one of the most reckless sentences in all of literature.

And if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is empty and your trust is empty.1 Corinthians 15, verse 14

Read what he just did.

He put the whole thing on one morning. Not on a moral vision, not on a beautiful idea, not on a community, not on how it makes you feel. On whether a particular body was in a particular tomb on a particular Sunday, in a real city, under a real governor, in a year you could have counted on your fingers at the time.

And then he wrote down, on purpose, the terms of his own collapse. If that did not happen, he says, we are empty. Not partly wrong. Not still valuable as a story. Empty.

Nobody protecting a myth writes that sentence. A myth is protected by making it unfalsifiable, by moving it somewhere it can never be checked, by turning it into something about the human spirit. Paul does the exact opposite in public and in writing, and then, a few lines earlier, he lists the people who said they saw Him, and says most of them are still alive, which in a letter read out loud in the ancient world is an invitation with an address on it.

I am not going to tell you the historical question is closed, because it is not, and you would rightly stop trusting me the first time you read anybody else. There are people who have spent their whole working lives on this and disagree with each other, and there are things about that week we do not know and will not settle from here. Whoever tells you it is all tidy is selling something, and so is whoever tells you it is all been debunked.

Here is what I will tell you, and it is the only thing you actually need at ten past two.

You are allowed to look. It was built to be looked at. The man who wrote the letter looked first, and wrote down what would sink him, and then went to his death still saying it. What is written stakes the whole of it in the open in 1 Corinthians 15:14, and the Holy Spirit has never once been made nervous by somebody looking.

So the fear that has kept your eyes at an angle for nineteen years is not reverence, and it is not faith, and it is certainly not something God asked of you. It is just fear, and it has been charging you rent.