Jesus: A Mythic Life

A myth is a story so deeply moving and true that it shapes the rest of your life. When I was in seventh grade, I found a copy of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in the Rochester Christian School library. On the bus ride home, I started reading it and knew from the first page that my life would never be the same.

For a certain kind of nerdy kid in that era Tolkien baptized our imaginations.

Of course, not all myth has to be fantasy or even fiction. Both my wife and I had our marital expectations shaped by Sheldon Vanauken’s deeply mythical Severe Mercy based on the life and death of his wife Davy.

There are moments in every man’s life when he realizes that what is happening is more important than the factual events. It might be as simple as a smile or an email from a friend, but he knows that his life is changed. It happened to me once when I sat looking over the ocean on what will always be to me the mythic Island of Skye.

There is nothing I can say about it that would make it seem real to you. I can only say the green grass, the sea, and the great dome of the cosmos seemed more real than at almost any other time in my life.

It is good that such mythic moments are rare, because they might wither the soul if there were too many of them or perhaps we grow drunk by the intensity. Such splendor, such glory might be too much for me and I would make an idol of the moment in my mind.

Knowing Jesus must have been hard in this way. He was a walking myth .  . . all the stories come true . . . once He was, the Lord of time, happy, and forever alive: the factual basis of every fairy tale.  It is no wonder that people who knew Him either converted or wanted to kill Him. The symbolism of His every move could have provoked Socratic discourse to discover the deeper meaning. The gospel writer says that the world could not contain the books that could be written about His life and this is not hard to believe in a man who threatened to make every cup He used a Holy Grail.

I have never met a man who could remain indifferent to Jesus. Some may mock Him, but He grows with the mockery and makes the instrument of torture a thing so precious that the world’s greatest artists have labored to gild and celebrate it. You cannot defeat a mythic man, because His breath is more important than your quip, His silence more profound than your words, and His jests more wise than all of philosophy.

Jesus.

Jesus.

Jesus.

I often feel stupid, lost, and desperate for meaning, but at my lowest moment there is Jesus. He is there. He is not bound by my constraints, discouraged by my defeats, or made insecure by my impiety. He is.

Jesus adored is enough to give me the rarest and most precious thing: hope.

Jesus loved is all I need to find a high romance and splendor. His very Name turns the merely cosmic into High Heaven and His Monarchy gives majesty to the simplest chore.

There is not single boring moment when I am aware of Jesus.