Frederick Buechner has died at the age of 96. I'm assuming that the announcement of his demise is accurate because he was around so long as an influential Christian writer I was surprised through the years to discover he was still alive. I thought he might go on forever.
A Presbyterian minister, Buechner wrote novels, essays, and a remarkable little book which was huge in meaning called Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. Buechner imagines Jesus before Pilate as a tragic-comic figure with Pilate's "what is truth?" as a sort of tired, bemused shrug. I quoted from that passage in the book a number of times through the years. Buechner offers:
The Gospel is bad news before it is good news. It is the news that man is a sinner, to use the old word, that he is evil in the imagination of his heart, that when he looks in the mirror all in a lather what he sees is at least eight parts chicken, phony, slob. That is the tragedy. But it is also the news that he is loved anyway, cherished, forgiven, bleeding to be sure, but also bled for. That is the comedy. And yet, so what? So what if even in his sin the slob is loved and forgiven when the very mark and substance of his sin and of his slobbery is that he keeps turning down the love and forgiveness because he either doesn’t believe them or doesn’t want them or just doesn’t give a damn? In answer, the news of the Gospel is that extraordinary things happen to him just as in fairy tales extraordinary things happen.
This still makes profound and improbable sense to me, even though at a certain level the notion of God-with-us in the person of Jesus, the Christ is nonsensical by the world's standards. The apostle Paul calls it foolishness, yet God's wisdom.
I have no doubt that a great deal will be written about Frederick Buechner's brilliance but today I just need to say thank you.
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