Strange Things
By Eric Stiller
“You bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.” - Acts 17:20
One of the greatest challenges Christians face in the modern West is gaining a hearing for the gospel in a world that believes it already knows what the gospel is—but doesn’t. Of course, some bare details remain as trace memories: a few scattered statements by Jesus, his death on a Roman cross. But the memories are dulled by centuries of familiarity or, increasingly, sloughed off as part of a superstitious, unscientific, unenlightened, barbaric religious past. The irrelevance of Christianity is regarded as settled fact. “Been there, done that.”
One of the ways Christians respond to this challenge is by trying to make the gospel less weird and more palatable to secular sensibilities, whether through the soft-pedaling of Christianity’s supernatural elements, the adoption of our culture’s consumeristic, “whatever-works-for-you” approach to spirituality, or other ways.
Historian Tom Holland (not to be confused with the Spider-Man actor) is not a Christian, but has spent a lot of time contemplating the strangeness of the gospel. In a recent interview, he observed the instinct of Christians “to identify with the preponderant ideology of the age, which is a secular one. That is a terrible mistake. Christianity is nothing if it’s not spectacularly odd.” He went on to lament the consequences “if the strangeness, the weirdness, the mystery is not given space to breathe.”¹
The strangeness of the gospel is part of its strength. We see this in Paul’s encounter with the Athenian philosophers in Acts 17. When they hear him proclaiming Jesus in the marketplace, some mock while others are perplexed. But all of them want to hear more. “You bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean” (Acts 17:20).
The gospel was strange to them, and as a result, they wanted to hear more. One obvious difference between ancient Athens and the modern West is that the gospel was truly foreign to them. There were no trace memories of an ancient Christian past. However, they were spiritually curious. Similarly, the current decline of religious affiliation has not stifled the spiritual hunger of modern Americans, as witnessed by the rising number of those who identify as “spiritual but not religious.”²
If the gospel could be shown in all its dizzying strangeness, might that not elicit a corresponding curiosity among modern spiritual explorers? If so, the real challenge for today’s Christians was well articulated by G.K. Chesterton over a century ago: “The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders.”³
When something is reduced to the familiar or the ridiculous, it loses meaning. This is especially true of Christianity. Our post-Christian world has fallen asleep to the real meaning of the gospel. But if we could somehow make it reappear in its original strangeness, might that not rouse some people to wake up to the disorienting, world-transforming reality of Jesus?
How might we do that? Paul’s speech provides an abundance of possibilities. But one particularly potent way is by living lives that embody the strange beauty of the gospel. And there is nothing more beautiful, or, in our world, stranger than sacrificial love. A love that goes down when everybody else is trying to go up. A love that is content to remain small when everyone else is clamoring for platform. A love that pours itself out for enemies rather than exacting revenge.
It’s the love of Jesus, and we see it at work in Paul. Hearing him in the marketplace and wanting to know more, the Athenians “took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus” (Acts 17:19). “Took” is a word that means to catch or seize something. Oftentimes it means to arrest someone.
Paul was not being arrested. But there is an ominous element of force here. They seized him and led him to the top of a hill where he proclaimed the gospel to the world. Many people mocked. But some came to faith.
What would lead Paul to live a life where people can grab hold of him, lead him to places where he’s evaluated and judged, and yet be so inwardly free and secure that even when people mock him, he loves them so much that he can give up his freedom that they might be set free?
The only way is because Jesus was seized. Jesus was led to the top of a hill. Jesus was nailed to the cross and through his death he proclaimed the saving love of God to the whole world. And even though many people mocked, many others put their faith in him and their lives were changed forever.
When that love comes into our lives, just like Paul, our lives begin to mirror the love, the life, and the beauty of Jesus. Others may see it and have no idea the source - at first. But just like Paul, perhaps the strangeness of our lives might compel people to ask, “What does this mean?”
There’s a character in season four of the tv show Stranger Things named Eddie Munson. He’s mocked and rejected by his high school classmates. But when a popular cheerleader is mysteriously and bizarrely killed in his trailer home, the whole town turns against him and he runs for his life.
At the end of the season, he stops running and joins the fight against the supernatural forces of darkness that killed the cheerleader and are attacking the town. In fact, he gives his life. Eddie’s uncle is heartbroken, but his friend Dustin reveals to Mr. Munson the true nature of Eddie’s sacrifice:
“I wish everyone had gotten to know him. Because they would have loved him, Mr. Munson. Even in the end, he never stopped being Eddie, despite everything. He could have run. He could have saved himself. But he fought and died to protect this town that hated him. He isn’t just innocent, Mr. Munson. He’s a hero.”
The strange beauty of sacrificial love has the power to wake people up to the real Jesus: the innocent one who died to save a world that hated him. Like Eddie Munson, if they could really get to know him, they would love him. But it means giving them some way to reimagine him beyond the settled and the tame. The more the strangeness of the gospel shapes our lives, the more the true hero might once again step forward from the shadows of sterile familiarity, tilt his head back, and roar.
¹Hoover Institution, Does God Exist? A Conversation with Tom Holland, Stephen Meyer, and Douglas Murray, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2u54a1FL28.
²“More Americans Now Say They’re Spiritual but not Religious,” Pew Research Center, September 6, 2017, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/06/more-americans-now-say-theyre-spiritual-but-not-religious/.
³G.K. Chesterton, The Defendant (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1902), 60.