Three Truths and a Lie

Photo by Blake Sherman on Unsplash

For a few years Jill and I hosted an annual Valentine’s dinner party in our home—an elegant (at least by our standards) affair. We invited folks from different settings and walks of life. Our guest list would mix coworkers, neighbors, parents from our kids’ school, church members—most of whom had never met before.

After the meal we’d convene to the living room where we led a parlor game, a way for us to get to know one another better. We found one icebreaker particularly revealing: “Three truths and a lie.”

Here’s the idea: You think up four things about yourself: three true, one false. There’s a bit of a strategy, too: You dig deep into your life for the most bonkers or bizarre experience. The factual thing should be as hard-to-believe as possible, even outlandish, while you make the lie pretty prosaic or normal—just not true. You want a challenging game of guessing.

Once I said, for example, that the house I grew up in California was a block down from Jane Fonda.

True—or not?

In this case, the actress and controversial figure did move there (after I went away to grad school). True! My house was indeed a block from hers.

One person at the party said that his great-grandfather shot the great-grandfather of novelist William Faulkner in a duel. Wait. What?

Sounds made up. A lie?

Turns out it happened! I don’t recall all the details—was the fight over a love interest, or a straying chicken? What a far-fetched bit of someone’s history!

No matter how beige our life seems, I think we’ve all done something weird or been something weird. We can almost all recount a real-life story that stretches belief. Or we’ve witnessed something about which we say, in the old cliché, the truth seems stranger than fiction.

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I think of the disciples in the wake of Jesus’s resurrection in a similar way. They had some major work to do on processing what is true and fanciful. And a bit of news that at first look seemed impossible.

Lest you think they somehow glibly believed that first report from the women that Jesus’ tomb was empty, the account in Luke’s Gospel presents another angle. They were actually asking themselves, It can’t be true, could it? The women’s account was so startling that the disciples first received the women’s word as, Luke’s Gospel tells us, “an idle tale.”

The original language here refers to the off-the-rails imaginings of a person plagued by delirium. If it’s an “idle” tale that the women tell, it’s not because it’s silly, but because it’s hard to believe. The “tale” that seems too good to be true.

We who know the story and how it turns out, forget that for the disciples, Jesus was dead. Really dead. Not “mostly dead,” as Miracle Max says of Westley in The Princess Bride. And he endured a humiliating death, no less.

The cross meant a tortuous end reserved for the worst offenders: threats to the state, violent criminals. No more final, painful, and ugly end could happen. And the goal of the Roman empire’s vicious use of this form of execution was designed to wipe the memory of the one strung on the cross forever from the memory of anyone once close. We are talking about an attempt to erase a person’s existence.

So his followers lose hope. They were looking at, in the great phrase of David Zahl, a collapsed horizon of possibility. Anything smacking of life restored or resurrected would seem like a cruel lie.

I’ve been thinking about the resurrection—the big event at the center of the Christian faith. Author Andy Crouch calls Easter “the most pivotal day in not just … the Christian calendar … but in many ways the most pivotal day in history.” It is “the day when everything changes, when we discover that the news we have about the world is better than we could have ever imagined.”

I love the sound of that.

But is the Easter story true?

When Jesus had predicted not only his death, but also his resurrection, his coming back to life, his disciples didn’t seem inclined to believe it.

But, with the women’s amazing tale of what they’ve just seen, maybe they begin to doubt their doubts. Peter must have sensed at the least the barest sliver of possibility. Enough to want to see for himself the empty tomb, to see if the burial linens were cast aside.

And the rest, as they say, is history—our story. Or I should say history set on a new course. With the resurrection, conventional truths get blown up. For on Easter the disciples are forever changed.

A huddled, fearful, sad-sack bunch begins to be transformed into a vibrant community, into an unstoppable movement. And Luke, telling this story, wants us to begin to hope when maybe we thought we couldn’t. He wants us to wonder, what might the reality of a risen-from-the-dead Jesus mean for this life, my life? What difference might one who conquered death make for my struggles and anxieties?

By the way, back to the parlor game. I remember one of the things Jill, my wife, recounted: “Before I was born,” she said, “the only baby outfit my mother bought for me was a dress to bury me in.”

People shifted in their chairs, seemed stunned into a moment of silence—until the double takes. I had heard the story before but never put quite so starkly.

The only baby clothes her mom bought were for burial. Of course our guests had questions. “Because of incompatible blood type issues,” Jill explained, “I was expected to be still born.“

So much for that prediction.

Occasionally something happens that seems too good to be true.  It turns out to be astonishingly true. That’s what makes the parlor game a challenge. That things are not always as bad as they seem also makes life open-ended and full of possibilities when maybe we’ve surrendered to the same old same old.

Something happens especially when God shows up. Especially when Jesus is on the premises.

Sometimes we expect the worst and find ourselves surprised.

Life holds the strange and wonderful along with the strange and difficult. I include in that package news of a risen Jesus.

So what do you think of the resurrection? What might it mean for you?

Kate Bowler, seminary professor and author of accounts of her experiences with stage 4 cancer, was asked on a podcast what joy looks like. “You thought life was headed determinedly in one direction,” she said, “and then suddenly it makes a left-hand turn. … [Joy is] that inbreaking feeling where it could have been one way and then it was another. … A door opens.”

I like to spend time mulling over the great ending of the Jesus story, the rewriting of hopelessness seen in Jesus’s resurrection. The assurance this news might bring to the hard things we face, the harrowing things the world faces.

If this is not an idle tale, we let it sink in, and see the difference to be had when help arrives for the things that intimidate us.

Later in the New Testament, the apostle Paul stresses how the resurrection sets our ordinary existence on a new trajectory, a better path than we expected. God’s power in us and around us, Paul writes, “is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 1:19-20). 

I find myself awed into my own silence when I think about that. The dynamism at the heart of Jesus’s victory over death lingers relentlessly in daily life. What transpired in the risen Jesus has to do with the everyday, not just the eternal. God is working in the little things and big. The seemingly microscopic and the massive. Not just in some future eternity, but here and now. Everywhere and all the time.

Paul is saying that the power that erupted in the resurrection of Jesus, that explosive truth at the heart of Christian faith, that victory over the forces of evil and injustice and death, is still moving, flexing some muscles. That glory is at work in the times and places we volunteer, serving the poor, say, or putting time into bringing change to where there is injustice or disregard for those Jesus called “the least of these.”

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When telling my friend Daniel about my work on my just-turned-in book, Fully Beloved—the demands and the effort and the stretching, and in particular a chapter about the resurrection realities of the living Jesus, he reminded me, “That power you are writing about can also move through you and what you write.”

 His reminder got me wondering about how many other of our occupations could be infused with a life beyond our own. How there is a story repeating itself that has to do with God’s moving and acting, hope that lodges in us with possibilities we might otherwise miss or neglect, but still long to be true.