Not so elementary, my dear Jesus

A study conducted in Britain in 2008 produced shocking results. Turns out Her Majesty’s mostly loyal subjects are struggling to differentiate fact from fiction.

The survey found that 47 percent of 3,000 people believed King Richard the Lionheart was a myth. We could attribute that result to the expanse of time separating the Royal Ricky from a contemporary English world he might equally have imagined as fantasy. However, the survey also found 23 percent believed Winston Churchill, the country’s famous World War II prime minister, was made up too—and he only died in 1965 and you can Google the proof of his existence!

Meanwhile, 58 percent thought Sherlock Holmes, the fictional detective of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s imagination, was in fact a real person! Evidently, my dear Watson, there is something elementary amiss.

One wonders how Jesus would rate these days in the land of Cranmer, Wesley and Wilberforce? And how would Jesus poll in your neighbourhood?

Let us consider a crucial question for mission that too many churches have failed to take seriously in a land where we once sang “God Save the Queen”: How do we communicate the fact of Jesus to the world as we now know it?

This is very much the question missionaries must always ask.

Once upon a time we could assume our culture accepted that the man of Galilee did inhabit the planet, even if given no allegiance as the Son of God. Jesus and King Richard were both real, it went mostly without saying. These days, the odds are stacked against that conclusion.

There are even vocal pockets within the Christian religion itself lining up against a real Jesus. Quests for the historical Jesus—often aimed at exposing a “Jesus myth”—produce endless books, receive plenty of airtime (which we’ll probably see again as Easter nears), and neutralize faith. While the roots of this debate go back two centuries, it has only recently become the primary (dare I say only?) expression of the Christ preached by the popular media. The church seems bent on decapitating herself yet again. How can we communicate Jesus to our befuddled world when Christians themselves seem muddled?

The tables have turned on fact and fiction. The past is play dough in postmodern hands and we’re mixing the colours like proverbial toddlers until nothing vibrant remains. When most people get their history from Hollywood, and welcome it as manipulated, romanticized entertainment, doesn’t that produce a culture where fact is viewed only real once it titillates and sells? Doesn’t such history produce a memory for fiction and amnesia of the facts? And doesn’t it just produce indifference, intellectual laziness and shrug-ability once the credits roll?

Let’s be honest, it is a radical move to base your living in the present and eternity upon he who was sent by love 2,000 years ago. What evidence that awakens faith is there that he really lived, died and, even more astounding, rose from the dead? And how do we communicate his reality to our age? The answer to those crucial questions must once again enliven the minds and hearts of believers, so we can give an answer for the hope the living Jesus has unquestionably planted within us, no matter what the surveys say.