Terrible Hunger
I remember reading a G.K. Chesterton quote: ‘Every man who ever entered a brothel went there looking for God.’ His point is, we’re looking in vain for something to satisfy this terrible hunger in us, and so often we go looking in the wrong places. Well, to borrow Chesterton’s idea, no man ever opened a book or walked into a movie theater who wasn’t looking for God. We’re drawn to stories, to songs, to paintings, buildings, faces, feasts, and laughter because they remind us of the world that was, and the world to come. The art itself is only a window. Beauty can’t satisfy; only Christ, the source of it, can.
His major contribution to the world was not a set of aphorisms. He was born in a turdy barn, grew up in a dirty world, got baptized in a muddy river. He put his hands on the oozing wounds of lepers, he let whores brush his hair and soldiers pull it out. He went to dinner with dirtbags, both religious and irreligious. His closest friends were a collection of crude fishermen and cultural traitors. He felt the spittle of the Pharisees on his face and the metal hooks of the jailer’s whip in the flesh of his back. He got sweaty and dirty and bloody – and he took all of the sin and mess of the world onto himself, onto the cross to which he was nailed naked.