Wishful thinking

One of my favourite moments from C.S. Lewis' prolific career comes in his early allegorical novel, The Pilgrim's Regress. In his most obvious parody of Sigmund Freud, Lewis has his hero, John, imprisoned in "Zeitgeistheim", a prison where humanity is revealed "as bundles of complexes" and in which John concludes that "there may be no Landlord [the novel's equivalent of God]" and that "I am mad. I am dead. I am in hell for ever." John is rescued from the prison, however, by a woman called Reason, who is able to ask the giant imprisoning John a series of riddles he cannot answer. Once freed from the prison, John and Reason attempt to rescue the other prisoners, "those who have been Freudianised too long", but they refuse to be rescued, "wailing together and saying: 'It is one more wish-fulfilment dream: it is one more wish-fulfilment dream. Don't be taken in again.'"

The average Australian may not be consciously influenced by Sigmund Freud on a day-to-day basis, but in this one sense we are very much his intellectual children: we don't like to be taken in by anything. Think Darryl Kerrigan from The Castle with his catch-phrase of, "Tell him he's dreaming." We pride ourselves on our state-of-the-art b.s. detectors. There's no fooling us.

But, just as it was for Lewis' prisoners stuck in the "darkness of the pit...and the filth" of Freud's prison, the land of You-can't-fool-me can be a very lonely place to be. In fact, if you take it too far, you can start believing in nothing.

There's something about Christianity that seems profoundly too good to be true. Sin defeated, death overcome, eternal peace and happiness and fulfilment ahead of us...It does sound a little like a pipe-dream, doesn't it? But there's a flaw in our logic that kicks in at exactly the moment we call something "too good to be true". The flaw is this: we assume that something really good must be a fraud, or have some kind of "catch" hidden in it. Why? Because life disappoints us, constantly. So we guard against disappointment by...refusing to believe in anything enough to let it ever disappoint us. Which sounds kind of sad, when you think about it.

If a scientist developed an anti-ageing medication, we'd look into it. If a wealthy businessman offered us his secret to success and happiness, we'd pay to hear him speak, or buy his books. Well, Christianity can top that. Christianity had someone come to earth and say, "I am life. You can't have life without me." It had someone who said, "Death is not the end, and let me show you how I know." It speaks to our deepest cynicism, because it doesn't just come with the claim; it comes with its own credentials, and with its own proof. And those who first expounded its truth to the world knew that it was true, not because they were easily duped, but precisely because they weren't.

We know they all doubted. Some even doubted when Jesus appeared before them, risen from the dead (see Matthew 28:16-17 if you don't trust me). And they were well-acquainted with doubt. They'd found someone they felt they could put all their trust in, someone they could give their lives to follow, someone who (they were pretty sure) was the one God had promised. And then he died. Just like that. You don't recover from that kind of disappointment quickly. So if anyone in human history has reason to feel disappointment with life, any reason to be doubtful and cynical, it was them. So, when they found that it was true, that death had been defeated, that sin had been overcome, they knew they had to give their lives to tell everyone.

It's easy to say, from the sidelines, "It can't be true. Dead people don't come back to life." And you'd be right. They don't. But someone came to earth to change all of that, to show us another way. We don't experience it fully now. We only experience it in part. But, if you let it sink in, the truth of that event changes everything. However things look now, in the darkness of this pit, it will look a whole lot different when we can see it from Jesus' perspective. Because the boundaries have now been changed - the boundaries of what can and cannot happen, the boundaries of what is, and what is not, too good to be true.