(11 of 12)
As any believer might point out, there is the chance that Jesus was right. Perhaps he was what he claimed to be--the Son of God, the Messiah of Israel. Since his Resurrection, he has become--in the minds of billions--a transnational Messiah who continues to care for individual humans and to save them from internal and external evil.
I am one who believes himself a direct recipient of such care. Fifteen years ago, as I was about to undergo five weeks of withering radiation for a 10-in.-long cancer inside my spinal cord, I found myself--an outlaw Christian who had, and has, no active tie with a church--transported, thoroughly awake, to another entirely credible time and place. I was lying on the shore of the Lake of Galilee with Jesus' disciples asleep around me.
Then Jesus came forward and silently indicated that I should follow him into the lake. Waist deep in the water, I felt him pour handfuls down the long fresh scar on my back--the relic of unsuccessful surgery a month before. Jesus suddenly told me, "Your sins are forgiven." Appalled by my dire physical outlook, I thought ungratefully, "That's the last thing I need"; so I asked him, "Am I also cured?" He said, "That too." Then, as though I'd forced his hand, he turned and climbed ashore with me well behind him.
Despite succeeding years of more successful but unavoidably devastating surgeries, permanent paralysis of my legs and a nonstop assault of spinal pain, I've experienced no similar encounter. That fact tends to validate, for me, an objective core to the experience. If I manufactured one visionary self-consolation, why wouldn't I have repeated that solace in ensuing years of even worse trouble? In any case, to the surprise of my doctors, I've survived without apparent return of the cancer, and my life is more rewarding and productive than before that washing in Galilee. My lifelong sense that Jesus of Nazareth stood in a unique and redeeming relation to the Creator of this universe at least has intensified, though I have felt no right to claim intimacy with him. As for so many others, he has never seemed less than mysterious, and my experience of his overwhelming but oddly businesslike healing and the memory of the unstinting mercy in his grave face and eyes are indelible.
Yet a person who shares Jesus' belief in himself may feel what I cannot--that one must accept his final instruction to the disciples at the end of Matthew: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go then and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and see, I am with you all the days to the end of the age."