Dinner with a Perfect Stranger

by David Gregory

  He looked off across the room, not seeming to focus on anything in particular. He shook his head almost imperceptibly, then looked back at me. “People distort the truth because they reject the final proof I’ve already given.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That I rose from the dead.”

  At that moment the waiter, easily within earshot of our last exchange, appeared with our desserts. I avoided his eyes as he served them, refilled our water, and then departed. I spoke first.

  “You’re sitting here—alive—across the table from me. If you say you were once dead, it’s pretty hard for me to prove otherwise.”

  He took a bite of a strawberry. “Good point. Why don’t we deal with the actual facts? What do you know about me historically?”

  His use of the first person still disconcerted me, but I could go for this topic. I plunged in. “From secular histories, we know Jesus was an actual person.”

  “Okay.”

  “We know he was a teacher who had a large following.”

  He nodded.

  “We know the Romans executed him,” I continued.

  “Which brings us to the event in question. What happened then?”

  “Well, his disciples claimed that he was raised from the dead, but of course they would claim that.”

  “Really? Is that what they expected to happen?”

  I searched through my Sunday school data bank. “Not that I recall,” I admitted.

  “Despite the fact that I told them repeatedly it would.”

  “True.”

  “Did they believe it at first, when the women told them about it?”

  “No.”

  “When did they believe?”

  “According to their accounts, when they actually saw Jesus.”

  “So when these men wrote accounts of my life, they describe themselves as failing to believe beforehand, failing to believe afterward, and only believing after they were hit in the face with the evidence, and even then they stayed in hiding, afraid of the authorities. Is that the way you would portray yourself if you wanted people to follow you in a cause?”

  “It’s possible,” I answered. Improbable, perhaps, but possible.

  “For what purpose?” He lifted a fork to his cake. “So they could be impoverished, persecuted, and finally martyred?”

  “Lots of people have died for believing something false.”

  “Yes, for a false philosophy or false religious belief. But this is different. We’re talking about people who willingly died for their belief in a historical event. They were there. They saw whether it happened. They all said it happened, even though saying so brought them nothing but suffering and death. People don’t die for something they know is a lie, especially when it brings them no benefit.”

  High-school debate had taught me a thing or two about argumentation. Like when to drop a losing point. I sampled my tiramisu and thought a moment. “Maybe they thought Jesus had died, when he really hadn’t.”

  “How often do you think the Romans let people who had not yet died down off crosses?”

  “Probably not too often.”

  “So you’re implying the Romans let someone down so badly injured as to be left for dead, then two days later my recovery was so miraculous that the disciples thought I was God himself?”

  “Okay, it’s unlikely,” I replied. “But the disciples did have something to gain from claiming Jesus had been resurrected.”

  “Go on.”

  “They had status to gain as those who began a new religious movement.”

  His answer surprised me. “You’re right. They did have that status.” He leaned forward and rested his fork on his dessert plate. “You’re saying that the men who spread the word about me, who taught people to love one another, who told slave owners in a brutal society to treat their slaves well, who told husbands to love their wives at a time when women were treated as chattel, who told people to honor and obey the government that was martyring them, who launched the greatest force for good that the world has known, that they did all this based on something they knew to be false?”

  “It hasn’t all been good,” I retorted. “What about the Crusades? Or the Salem witch trials? Or the Spanish Inquisition? What about Europe’s Wars of Religion between the Protestants and the Catholics, or the fighting in Northern Ireland? Your own people are always at each other’s throats.”

  His countenance changed noticeably, and he let out an audible sigh. “That’s true.” He remained silent for a few moments, looking at the table. “It makes me very sad.”

  The change in him disarmed me, taking me off the defensive and, frankly, off the offensive as well. I sat looking at him, then asked honestly, “Why has Christianity been such a mixed bag?”

  He folded his hands on the table. “Several reasons. Most of the people who have done these things didn’t really know me. They may have seemed outwardly religious, but they weren’t mine. They never really put their trust in me.”

  “Pardon me for saying so, but that seems a little convenient for you.”

  “Not really. More than anything I wanted to have a relationship with them. But they wouldn’t.”

  “Still,” I countered, “you can’t claim that no real Christians have perpetrated any of these things.”

  “No, I can’t. That’s the tragedy of it.”

  “It almost seems the norm.”

  He unfolded his hands and sat back. “It isn’t. But it’s been too frequent.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they never learned to live as the new people they were.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “When people put their trust in me and receive eternal life, they get more than forgiveness. Otherwise, heaven would be populated with a bunch of forgiven sinners still running from God. God won’t have that.”

  “So what does he do about it?”

  “He does more than forgive them. He changes them on the inside. Their heart, their human spirit, is actually made new. In the depths of their being they no longer run from God; they are joined to him. They no longer want to disobey God; they want to do what he says is good.”

  “But they don’t do it,” I objected.

  “Often they do. But not always. A new heart gets you in the game. Then you have to let me be your instructor. I teach you how to live based on what’s been made new on the inside. Some people don’t let me do that. They’d rather do it their way. So they remain judgmental or selfish or fearful. There’s no joy in that.”

  “This sounds almost New Agey, like something Dave and Paula would say.”

  “Maybe,” he answered, “but it’s not. Tell me, you’ve talked to your two friends enough. What do you think they’re after?”

  “Connection with the divine, I suppose. Except they believe they already are divine in a sense. It’s a little confusing.”

  He nodded as he finished a bite of cake. “How do they try to connect with God?”

  “More enlightenment,” I replied, more as a question than as a statement. “Working on letting go of misguided desires and embracing”—my New Age vocabulary was failing me—“embracing something. I’m not sure what.”

  “They’re trying to achieve through a lot of effort the very thing I offer for free.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When someone receives me, God forgives them, he makes them new on the inside, and”—he paused momentarily—“he comes to live in them.”

  I had been downing my tiramisu during his explanation, but this last statement caused me to halt an approaching bite. “He what?”

  “He comes to live in them. That’s as close to God as you can get. And unlike people trying to manufacture the connection on their own, it’s the real thing.”

  I wasn’t sure that sounded like a great deal. “The last thing I need is God looking over my shoulder every minute.”

  “He’s already looking over your shoulder every minute. What you need is him living in yo
u every minute.”

  “What for?”

  “Well, for one, how else are you ever going to love your daughter unconditionally, to say nothing of Mattie? You want to love Mattie better, but you don’t know how. And even if you did know, you don’t have the ability. Only God loves that way. He wants to do it through you.”

  He was right. Despite my best intentions, things weren’t going all that well with Mattie. I constantly found myself getting irritated with her, and she with me. I was afraid Nick the romancer had gone into hibernation. I picked up my fork, took a bite of tiramisu, and finally spoke. “I’ve never heard all this before.”

  “I know. My disciples knew it and lived it and passed it on. But the message got distorted along the way. Church hierarchies, power structures—they crowded it out. People wanted to reduce God to a set of rules. But he’s not about rules, any more than marriage is about rules.”

  “Then what’s he about?”

  “Joining people to himself. He designed them to be joined to him, like man and woman are made to be united. People were meant to have God’s very life in them. Without that, they’re like a new SUV with no engine. They may look good, but they don’t work. They’re missing the most important part.”

  I leaned back to take in what he’d said. “If this is what Christianity is all about, why don’t they say it?”

  “Because most haven’t understood. Some have, though. It’s never been hidden. Read the last third of John’s gospel. It’s all there. Mr. McIntosh knew it.”

  “My seventh-grade science teacher. I always liked him.”

  “Believe it or not, he liked you too.”

  “All the times he sent me to detention?”

  He smiled. “You didn’t give him much choice, did you?”

  “No.” I smiled back. “I suppose I didn’t.”

  I took another bite of my dessert, as did he. We sat silently for a couple of minutes as I cleaned my plate. I finally broke the silence.

  “So. Where do we go from here?”

  “That’s a good question,” he said. “Where do you want to go?”

  I wasn’t sure.

  8

  “WHY DOESN’T GOD just show himself to people?”

  The waiter had walked off with our dessert plates. I had resisted the urge to scrape mine with my fork as I usually did at home. Waiting for coffee, I decided it was now or never to get some of my remaining questions about God and life answered. This one seemed like a decent place to start.

  Jesus wiped his mouth with his napkin and returned it to his lap. “What would you have me do?”

  “I don’t know—appear to everyone personally.”

  He chuckled, and seeing the irony in my statement, I couldn’t help but join him momentarily.

  “No, seriously,” I said. “Most people don’t get a dinner invitation.”

  “I did appear to humanity. I became one of you. That’s about as personal as it gets.”

  “But that was two thousand years ago.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Most people didn’t believe then, either. You don’t have to see with your eyes to believe.”

  I rested an elbow on the back of my chair. “At least God could perform some kind of sign that would show he exists.”

  “I did that, too. They still didn’t believe. My Father did that at Mount Sinai with the Jews. They turned away from him within six weeks.”

  The waiter appeared with our coffee orders: a cappuccino for me, regular coffee for him. He used a little cream, no sugar.

  “It’s not a matter of further visual evidence,” he continued. “People have all the evidence they need. It’s a matter of the heart. Do they want to trust God and humbly receive the gift he offers, or do they insist on proving themselves good enough and doing it their own way?”

  Somehow his statements about “people” seemed to have a very personal application. I wanted to keep the conversation on a more impersonal level.

  “But how can you say people have all the evidence they need?”

  “They have creation to tell them that God exists. Humanity knows more than ever before how intricately designed and finely tuned creation is. People have me to tell them what God is like. That’s one reason I came, to reveal the Father. They have my resurrection to prove I am God. They have the Bible as God’s message to them.”

  I took my first sip of cappuccino, licking the foam off my lips as he drank some coffee. “My religion professor said so many copying errors were made over the years that we don’t really know what the original Bible said.”

  He shook his head slightly as he put his cup down. “He doesn’t do much research, does he? As I said before, he would find the opposite is true. It’s been painstakingly copied. The number of places where you have a question of any consequence is minuscule.”

  I had to admit I hadn’t done the research, either. I forged ahead. “But what about all the contradictions?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Like…I don’t know specifics. I just know there are supposed to be contradictions.”

  He smiled. “I’ll give you one. One gospel account says I healed two blind men outside of Jericho. Another says I healed one.”

  “There you go.”

  “Okay. The other day when you told Les that you and Mattie had gone to a movie, had the two of you gone alone?”

  “No, Mattie’s friend Jessica came with us.”

  “Why did you leave that fact out?”

  “It wasn’t relevant to the story I was telling.”

  “True.”

  I expected more, but he stopped there.

  “Are you saying the Bible’s historical accounts are true?”

  “Your own archaeologists are telling you that. You should have renewed your subscription to U.S. News & World Report. Check out a cover story on it.”

  “But I can’t believe that God really created the universe in six days or that the earth is only six thousand years old. That’s preposterous.”

  “Who is asking you to believe that?”

  “All those fundamentalists. They added up all the genealogies in Genesis and said that the earth was created six thousand years ago.”

  He took another sip of coffee. “Genesis presents a flow of history. It says that God created the universe in an orderly fashion, starting with light itself. He made the earth, then gave it design: forming continents out of the oceans, creating plant life, creating animal life, creating humanity in his image. Now, is there anything in that sequence that your scientists would disagree with?”

  “Well, they wouldn’t agree with the ‘in God’s image’ part.”

  “No. That’s their problem isn’t it? They don’t want to acknowledge that they are created in God’s image, because that would make them accountable to a Creator. They don’t want that.”

  “But what about all the miracles? Like Joshua marching around Jericho seven days, then the walls falling. Or David plunking Goliath in the middle of the forehead. Or God parting the Red Sea.”

  “Are you implying that the Creator of the universe can’t perform miracles?”

  “You wouldn’t even change my wine back into water.” I was unable to restrain a slight smirk.

  He returned to the miracles. “I’ll grant you, David and Goliath would be hard to verify outside the Bible. But they’ve already discovered the ruins of Jericho. The city was built just as the Bible describes it. And the walls fell in exactly the manner described too.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. As for the Red Sea, give your archaeologists a couple of decades.” He winked. “But that’s not the real issue, is it?” He put down his coffee and leaned forward. “Remember how, when you were six, you couldn’t believe a two-wheeled bike would stay upright under you, until you tried it and you saw that it would?”

  “Sure.”

  “If you actually open up the Bible and ask God to speak to you, Nick, you’ll see that he will.”

  We looked into
one another’s eyes a moment. I finally spoke again. “Not everyone has access to a Bible.”

  “No,” he acknowledged, “not everyone does.”

  “So what does God do about them?”

  “The Father asks people to respond to the revelation they’ve been given. That may only be creation and their conscience. That’s what he holds them accountable for.”

  “But they never get to hear about you.”

  “If anyone is really willing to do what God asks, he will reveal himself to them.”

  I let out a disbelieving snort. “Well, if they don’t have a Bible…”

  “God can use whatever means he wishes. Usually he sends people. Sometimes in areas where the gospel is restricted, like in Muslim countries, I reveal myself in dreams.”

  “But it seems like people in some places have a huge advantage. They can hear about you all the time.”

  “Yes, and they ignore the message. As I said, God reveals himself to anyone willing to trust him. He provides his forgiveness to all who will accept it.”

  “And what about people who think they’re good enough, like Mrs. Willard?”

  “They will stand before God on their own merit.” He lifted his cup to his lips once more, then returned it to the table. “That’s not a position you want to be in. It’s like a father who offers a billion-dollar inheritance to his son, but the son says to him, ‘Not until I’ve proved myself worthy.’ It seems noble to try to be good enough, but in reality it’s just prideful obstinacy. The son wants the inheritance on his own terms. He doesn’t want to accept it as a gift. But God offers it only as a gift. You can’t earn it. No one can.”

  I took a long sip of my cappuccino, which had cooled some. This time I wiped off the foam with my napkin and placed it on the table instead of in my lap. I looked back up at him.

  “Is there a hell?”

  “Yes,” he answered quietly. “For those who choose to stay separated from God, there is existence. It’s not an existence you want.”

  I sat silently for a moment.

  “What’s it like?”

  “If you remove all sources of good from life as you know it, that’s what it’s like. God is the source of all good. For those who choose separation from him, there is no good.” He paused. “You can’t even comprehend how bad that would be.”