On one of Chicago’s coldest, dreariest nights last winter, I found myself standing inside a dilapidated diner, waiting for a tow truck. My car’s engine had died in an intersection. I missed a scheduled meeting that night and hours of work over the next few days as I tried to wring fair, honest workmanship out of a service station set up to prey upon stranded motorists.
As I stood there, wasting time, I could not help thinking of a story about Jesus I had just been reading. I had come across one of the most fanciful of the apocryphal Gospels, the Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus Christ. This early church document purports to reveal unknown stories about Jesus’ childhood, a period virtually passed over in the canonical Gospels.
It tells of the boy Jesus shaping birds out of clay and then watching delightedly as they flap away, alive. It shows him breaking a witch’s spell that had transmogrified a man into a mule. Where Jesus’ sweatdrops hit the ground, balsam trees grew; where his swaddling clothes lay, fire did not burn. A dying boy placed in Mary’s house was cured by the mere smell of Jesus’ garments.
The apocryphal Gospel made me grateful for the contrastingly sober reporting of the inspired canonical writers. They depict Jesus’ supernatural power also, but not as magic or caprice. Rather, in them his miracles are acts of mercy or signs pointing to underlying spiritual truth.
Jesus The Repairer
One of the apocryphal stories from Jesus’ childhood stayed with me, however. It has a certain charm—partly, I think, because it so closely parallels a view of Jesus widespread in evangelical circles today. And it was this story that came to mind as I waited in the diner for a tow truck.
According to the Gospel of the Infancy, Jesus’ father Joseph was a mediocre carpenter at best (“for he was not very skillful at his trade,” 16:4). After fashioning imperfect milk pails, gates, sieves, and boxes in his workshop, he would call upon Jesus for the final touch. Whereupon Jesus would stretch out his hand, and miraculously Joseph’s workmanship would expand to just the right shape and smooth to just the right finish.
On one especially crucial job, the story goes, Joseph failed to measure correctly. He carved for months on an elaborate throne for a king, only to find it did not fit the required space. Enraged, the king muttered threats against Joseph. Just as things got tense, young Jesus appeared and, miraculously, the throne enlarged to fill the huge space. All the decoration stayed in perfect proportion as the throne expanded.
Oh, how I wish Jesus operated like that today! I say this not in sacrilege or in jest. As a free-lance writer, I could desperately use his assistance. If I merely had to come up with the germ idea of an article and sketch out some rough copy, and then, if Jesus would come along and scratch out dangling clauses and showy adverbs and unnecessary diversions of thought …
Last summer I worked for six weeks on articles designed to present a Christian message to a secular audience. I labored over every word, cutting and polishing, seeking the precise tone the selected magazine called for. But, like Joseph’s throne, my articles came up short. Unlike Joseph, I experienced no miraculous intervention. All the effort went to waste.
And then my car died on Clark Street. What possible good could come from hours of haggling with a larcenous repairman? One slight miraculous adjustment to a timing belt and I could have been on my way again, with more money in my pocket to give to missions.
Two Realities At Once
Choosing appropriate adverbs and keeping a car running are trivialities compared to what many Christians face each day. I think of those imprisoned for their faith in hostile countries, or of a member of my church with a mentally handicapped child. Why doesn’t God reach down and fix them, they wonder. It is not a question of believing in miracles. God surely has the power—why doesn’t he use it?
Such a cosmic question hardly belongs in a column of this length, except as it touches on an important lesson to be drawn from the apocryphal Gospel. That Gospel, adopted as genuine by Gnostics of the second century, was properly rejected by the orthodox church. Its stories of Jesus’ boyhood express a dangerous heresy: the desire to escape this flawed material world, bound in time and space, in order to achieve life in a more spiritual realm, above the tedium of everyday living.
The apostle Paul battled Gnosticism valiantly. He clung to the ultimate reality of a perfect spiritual world, which we will realize fully someday, and of which we have a foretaste in this life. But he never denied the tedious, often painful, realities of this life. How could he, with a life full of shipwrecks, imprisonments, beatings, and the constant nagging pain of his mysterious “thorn in the flesh”?
The Book of Philippians captures Paul’s ability to affirm both realities at once: the earthly and the spiritual. “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” he says, and then quickly follows with a counterpoint, “for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose” (2:12–13, NIV). In the next chapter, he summarizes the practical theology with wonderfully compact phrasing: “Only let us live up to what we have already attained” (3:16).
In short, Paul portrays the Christian life as a kind of duality, a suspension that includes the triumph of eternal victory, but also the poignant “not yet” of our current state.
I confess that sometimes I wish it were not so. When struggling with a knotty article or trying to get a stubborn car to run, or when facing an intractable problem, physical or spiritual, that will not go away—at such moments I yearn for deliverance that would speed up the “not yet.” I long for the kind of messiah described in the apocryphal Gospel, who will hover beside me, fixing up my words, my physical flaws, and all the myriad complications of life in modern society.
But then when I study the canonical Gospels, and the explanatory Epistles that follow, I can see the wisdom in God’s plan. It would be miracle, surely, for Jesus to stretch thrones, make clay birds fly, and change mules into men. But it is miracle far greater for him to take the ragtag group of 11 who followed him, along with an imperious Christian-hunter named Saul, and transform them, flaws and all, into the foundation of his kingdom.
It would be miracle if all my words came out perfect and if my car never failed again (I could accomplish so much more for the kingdom, a voice whispers). But that he uses the raw material of anything that I write, or that you say, or that we, his body, do on this earth—is that not greater? Paul said it well: “Only let us live up to what we have already attained.”
PHILIP YANCEY
