a good story : part 2

 

Once upon a time, my wife visited Hannover, sight-seeing. While there, she walked the Red Thread, a 4,200m narrow ‘red carpet’ painted on the pavement that takes visitors to the city on a self-guided tour of 36 must-see highlights.

When she got home, she told one of our sons all about the things she had seen, complete with photos so he could see them too. The next day, she did it all again for me. It was obvious that she wanted to share the experience, even though we had not been able to travel with her, and listening to her recount her adventures drew us in.

This is what we bring home from our travels: not just laundry to be washed, or some small souvenir or duty-free purchase, but stories.

When Luke (who wrote the two-part work Luke-Acts) wanted to tell Theophilus (the friend for whom he was writing; possibly a patron, possibly not an individual but any Gentile devoted to the god of the Jews — theophilus means lover of god — who was interested in finding out about Jesus) about his trip to Philippi, where he met an unnamed Lydian woman who dealt in purple and whose household was baptised into the Way of Jesus, he made sure to include that his journey took in a stop-off on Samothraki.

Theophilus would have known that Samothraki was the home of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, a household of deities whose names were a closely-kept secret, whose matriarch was the Great Mother, venerated at altars made of purple stone.

Luke doesn’t mention the temple complex explicitly, but he doesn’t need to. While I needed to be told about the sights of Hannover, the Sanctuary of Samothraki was more equivalent to the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty. Common cultural currency.

The stories recorded in the library we know as the Bible exist on more than one level. The question, ‘Did this event take place or is it a way of conveying a deeper truth?’ fails to grasp the nature of such writing. In Acts 16, we hear about a household who are baptised into the Way of Jesus; but we should also understand this as an expression of the triumph and reign of Jesus, the human god, over the family of Great Gods of the Macedonian world.

That is to say, the conversion of the Lydian woman’s household is a manifestation of the rescue that the Macedonian who appeared to Paul in a night vision asked him to bring about.

Here is the thing: stories are our best attempt to navigate the world we live in; but our stories — personal histories, national myths, worldviews — can also hold us captive, ultimately to the fear of death, to the inevitable possibility of losing our (way of) life. But the claim of Christianity is that the God who created the world we live in set Jesus as Lord and Saviour, first over a wayward people scattered across the eastern Mediterranean, to reign over the gods of the empires that surrounded them, and from there expanding outward to reign over every story. Not by erasing them, but by setting them free from captivity, free to help us navigate deeper into the unknown without fear. Into an even greater story, that is both bigger still and more personal.

Your story is set against the backdrop of a bigger story — late Modernism, for one — and one that waits to be transformed, or rather, is being transformed all around us. One that needs your story, and the compelling story of Jesus. That story is currently ongoing. Where we are on the Red Thread — somewhere between 1 and 36 — and what we will experience along the way is ongoing. Enjoy it. Be sure to take photos, to take hold of memories, to be open to whomever you might meet on the Way, to recount the experience. Tell more, and better, stories.