I had a fairly dramatic incident unfold a few weeks ago. It involved some heated emotions and a lot of words. I retold folks about the event and what happened. And then this week a video of that moment was shared with me. It turns out that the whole thing was less intense than it felt in the moment. Quotes I was absolutely sure people had said exactly as I had reported them turned out to not quite be accurate. Afterward, on the video, I laughed. I had not remembered that at all.
I’ve seen the reenactments on 20/20 and read studies about how eye witness accounts turn out to be unreliable. It’s an odd feeling when you are telling your story and then see how maybe it wasn’t quite what it felt like. The bare bones of what happened were right and those details I got wrong didn’t really make a difference, but it reminded me of the discrepancies we find in the gospels, especially in the accounts of Easter.
We as Christians pour over the Bible. We take meaning from the nuance of each situation and some of us spend our live parsing each word, comma, and phrase. I’ve long been of the belief that the Bible is inaccurate in that the details aren’t God dictated. The Bible is the writing of people who had a divine encounter or heard from people who had a divine encounter. In the retelling, in the emotion of the moment, in our own lenses, there are bound to be details and moments that aren’t the same as if we had a video of all of God’s doings.
So what do we do? I believe we let go of trying to find the truth and instead settle for the truth. What I mean by this contradictory statement is we let go of trying to prove Jesus, of using those words, commas, and phrases to shore up the theologies we already hold and instead dive in to what it means that God is bigger than death, both men and women witnessed the risen Christ, and that we are called as Easter people to tell the story of love and life in God, even when we get it just a little bit wrong.
-Eilidh
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