The Strangest Story in the World

But whom say ye that I am? MARK 8:29

The heart of The Everlasting Man is its account of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Chesterton called it, in a phrase that he admitted was much too weak, the strangest story in the world. His aim in these chapters was to strip away the familiarity that keeps us from seeing it, and to look at the Christ of the Gospels with fresh eyes.

Reading the Gospels as new

He began, in the chapter called The Riddles of the Gospel, with an experiment of the imagination. Suppose, he said, that a man who had never heard of Christianity sat down and read the four Gospels for the first time. What would strike him? Not, Chesterton argued, the meek and mild teacher of popular imagination, who said pleasant things about loving one another. He would be struck by something much stranger: a figure who spoke with terrifying authority, who gave startling commands, who rebuked demons in the tone of a man taming a lion, who told stories of breathtaking beauty and uttered sayings that seemed to turn the world upside down. He would find not an endless stream of platitudes but a series of riddles.

And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. MATTHEW 7:28–29

The catastrophic claim

Above all, the new reader would stumble over the claim. This man, a Jew among Jews, spoke as though He were God. Chesterton thought that the honest reaction to such a claim was not polite admiration but shock. He wrote that it was no fault in a man who heard it for the first time to think it impious or insane; that stumbling over it is the first step towards understanding it. “Stark staring incredulity,” he wrote, “is a far more loyal tribute to that truth than a modernist metaphysic that would make it out merely a matter of degree.” Either the claim was true, or the man who made it was a blasphemer or a madman; what He could not be was a merely good teacher with an unusual vocabulary.

Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses? MATTHEW 26:65

Readers of C. S. Lewis will recognise the shape of this argument. Lewis, who read The Everlasting Man as an unbeliever in his twenties, later set out a similar case in his own words, and it became one of the best-known arguments of modern apologetics.

The road to the cross

Chesterton then followed the story to its end. He noticed that Jesus did not wander into His death by accident. He set His face towards Jerusalem, and walked steadily into the trap that He knew was waiting. And in the trial and crucifixion, Chesterton saw every power of the ancient world combine against Him: the priests and the politicians, the philosophers and the mob, the empire of Rome and the religion of Israel. All that was best and worst in humanity joined in one verdict. He wrote of the cry from the cross with a hushed reverence, as a mystery too deep for words, in which, as he put it, “God had been forsaken of God.”

And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? MARK 15:34

The first day of a new creation

And then the dawn. The friends of Jesus came to the tomb on the third day and found it empty. Chesterton wrote that they hardly realised the full meaning of what they saw: that the old world had died in the night, and that a new creation had begun. In the last sentence of the chapter called The Strangest Story in the World he wrote that “in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.” The God who had walked in Eden in the cool of the day, and been hidden from by fallen man, now walked in another garden at sunrise, risen from the dead.

Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. JOHN 20:15

And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. GENESIS 3:8

Weighing it

These chapters are Chesterton’s greatest achievement, and they are thoroughly faithful to the Gospels. His insistence that Christ cannot be reduced to a teacher of morals, his vivid sense of the strangeness of the Gospel story, and his radiant account of the resurrection have strengthened the faith of countless readers.

One thing should be added, gently. Chesterton writes about the cross with deep reverence but says less than the apostles say about what it accomplished. He sees the drama of the passion — the world rejecting its Maker, the Son crying out in the darkness — and he sees the new creation that follows. The New Testament adds, with great plainness, that Christ died for our sins, bearing in His own body the penalty that we deserved, so that we might be forgiven and justified. Chesterton believed this. But the reader who has been moved by his account of the strangest story should go on to the epistles, where its meaning is explained.

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. 1 CORINTHIANS 15:3–4

The reader should also know that in the same chapters Chesterton speaks of the New Testament as the selection made by the authority of the church from a larger mass of early Christian writing. Evangelicals believe that the church did not create the canon but recognised it: that the books of the New Testament carry their authority from God, who inspired them, and that the church’s task was to receive what He had given.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read one Gospel through this week as though you had never heard it before. What strikes you as strange?

2. Have you been content to admire Jesus as a good teacher? What would it mean to take His claim with full seriousness?

3. Read Mark 14–15 and notice how every group in the story turns against Christ.

4. Read John 20:1–18 slowly. Imagine the dawn in the garden.

5. Read the chapters of The Everlasting Man called The Riddles of the Gospel and The Strangest Story in the World, in the Ochorus library.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus Christ, You asked Your disciples who they said You were, and the question still stands.

I confess that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God, who spoke with authority and walked steadily to the cross for me.

Thank You for bearing my sins, and for being forsaken so that I might never be.

Thank You for the empty tomb and the dawn in the garden. Make me a part of Your new creation, and let me live today in the light of Your rising. Amen.