“Does the story have to be true?” Bradley Jersak

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Recently, I wrote,

God participates in our lives. How? Not through coercion or force but through loving care. How? Most often, God’s care shows as people are inspired to love and care for each other; to embody God’s presence and care in the world … to be made in God’s image and likeness is to image (verb) God in the world as God’s hands and feet.

A reader responded with this astute question:

  •  I wonder. Is it God compelling these acts of love? Or is it our idea of God that compels us. I suppose a question I ask is—does the story of a good God have to be true? or can our idea of a good God be enough to compel us towards peace, love, kindness, generosity, etc.

That question stimulated these thoughts:

I’m always nervous about the word ‘compelling,’ as it tends to imply coercion or force, but I think I know what you mean. Let me muddy the waters a little more: What makes a story ‘true’? Think about the parable of the Good Samaritan. It is a story. Is it a true story?

If ‘true‘ means, was there an actual Samaritan man in history who found a half-dead guy (who you could ID and look up) and an Inn with an address you could visit, then of course not. Is the story factual in the historically located sense? No. But is the story ‘true’ in some other and deeper sense? Yes, in that it describes truthfully what compassion looks like and how it expresses itself in the real world in ways that inspire us. It is so true that we now even have ‘Good Samaritan Laws’ in many countries around the world. 

But what about the Gospel stories about Jesus? Those are different than parables. They are presented as good-news proclamations of eyewitness accounts of a historical person, so that’s a bit more complicated. How do we know about Jesus? We have a story (four canonical versions, in fact)—and to your question, does it matter whether those stories happened as described? No and yes, in different ways. 

One way it might not matter is if the story inspires you—as it did Tolstoy, Gandhi, and MLK—to do justice, love mercy, act compassionately, etc. If the stories of Jesus inspire you to live life as a Jesus-follower, then they are inspired and true whether they happened or not. Many of my friends find this to be enough, and it may be for you as well. 

But there is another sense that is crucial to me—a sense I need not impose on you, but which I have experienced many times. If the story of Jesus’ resurrection is not factual in some way, then Jesus is simply dead. He is no longer actually alive and his claim to be with me always and forever is not true except as flimsy metaphor. Jesus would be reduced to an inspiring memory but not a living person who relates to me or listens to me or helps me in real life. And even if I think I need him to be present to me and in me, my longing for that experience doesn’t make it true. Not if he’s dead.

For some of us, the experience of ‘knowing the living Jesus’ (whatever that means) has generated such a profound transformation that it exceeds the possibilities of an inspiring story. Something more is going on, so I enjoy exploring those encounters and hearing stories about them. In fact, I hear some real doozies because I’m authentically open to hearing them. People feel they can share their pearls with me because I don’t trample them into the dirt with knee-jerk scepticism.

Further, my suspicion is that everyone’s notion of God is an incomplete intimation of Something or Someone that is nevertheless Real… much more real and alive and present than our ideas about him. And even earnestly seeking after our imperfect, inadequate, and subjective notions of God prove to be a sufficient opening for God to participate in our lives in a healing and transforming way.

I see this in 12-step recovery (e.g., Alcoholics Anonymous, etc.) all the time. Whatever limited ideas of God (aka ‘our higher power’) addicts conceive (ranging from agnostic to hyper-religious), as they ask ‘God’ for help, they experience recovery and liberation in ways they can only attribute to ‘a power greater than myself who can restore me’… without having to box up God in dogmatic religious boxes. The miracle is that even their most tentative steps toward a God they barely know brings about inner transformation and healing that reshapes and grows their image of God. It’s fascinating and joyful to hear someone say, “I came to believe that God is loving and not angry as I experienced my life being made new.”

I suppose the lesson here is for us to be inspired enough by the Jesus story to participate in his vision of compassion, mercy, justice, etc., until we meet him in those practices. Then we’ll notice how God’s grace shapes our conceptions of the divine into something and Someone who far exceeds our expectations (a Love higher, wider, longer, deeper than we can conceive).    

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