Is “Telling the Truth: The Gospel As Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale” by Frederick Buechner.
Fred says that the Gospel is “the fairy tale that is too good not to be true.” [Selah]
Fred says that the truth is “high and wild and holy, but preachers often reduce homiletics to apologetics. Preachers exchange the fairy-tale truth that is ‘too good to be true’ for a truth that instead of drowning out all the other “truths” the world is loud with is in some kind of harmony with them. He secularizes and makes rational. He adapts and makes ‘relevant’. He preaches to adults instead of children. He demythologizes and makes credible.”
Fred says, “Like the fairy-tale world, the world of the Gospel is a world of darkness, and many of the great scenes take place at night. The child is born at night. He had His first meal in the dark at His mother’s breast, and He had His last meal in the dark too, the blinds drawn and everybody straining to catch the first sound of heavy footsteps on the stair, the first glint of steel in the shadowy doorway. In the garden He could hardly see the face that leaned forward to kiss Him, and from the sixth hour to the ninth hour the sun went out like a match so He died in the same darkness that He was born in and rose in it, too, or almost dark, the sun just barely up as it was just barely up again when only a few feet offshore, as they were hauling their empty nets in over the gunnels, they saw Him once more standing there barefoot in the sand near the flickering garnets of a charcoal fire.
In the world of the fairy tale, the wicked sisters are dressed as if for a Palm Beach wedding, and in the world of the Gospel it is the killjoys, the phonies, the nitpickers, the holier-than-thous, the loveless and cheerless and irrelevant who more often than not wear the fancy clothes and go riding around in sleek little European jobs marked Pharisee, Corps Diplomatique, Legislature, Clergy. It is the ravening wolves who wear sheep’s clothing. And the good ones, the potentially good anyway, the ones who stand a chance of being saved by God because they know they don’t stand a chance of being saved by anyone else? They go around looking like the town whore, the village drunk, the crook from the IRS, because that is who they are. When Jesus is asked who is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven, He reaches into the crowd and pulls out a child with a cheek full of bubble gum and eyes full of whatever a child’s eyes are full of and says unless you can become like that, don’t bother to ask.
And as for the King of the Kingdom Himself, whoever would recognize Him? He has no form or comeliness. His clothes are what He picked up at a rummage sale. He hasn’t shaved for weeks. He smells of mortality. We have romanticized His raggedness so long that we can catch only echoes of the way it must have scandalized His time. You can hear it in the horrified question of the Baptist’s disciples, ‘Are you He who is to come?’ (Matt. 11:13); in Pilate’s ‘Are you The King of the Jews?’ (Matt. 27:11) you with pants that don’t fit and a split lip; in the black comedy of the sign they nailed over His head where the joke was written out in three languages so nobody would miss the laugh.
But the whole point of the fairy tale of the Gospel is, of course, that He is The King in spite of everything. The frog turns out to be the prince, the ugly duckling the swan, the little gray man who asks for bread the great magician with the power of life and death in His hands, and though the steadfast tin soldier falls into the flames, his love turns out to be fireproof. There is no less danger and darkness in the Gospel than there is in the Brothers Grimm, but beyond and above all there is the joy of it, this tale of light breaking into the world that not even darkness can overcome. The joy beyond the walls of the world more poignant than grief!”
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