Article December 19, 1983 Issue

The unfailing Christ

NATHAN A. TALBOT

So many things seem uncertain. International relations, the economy, the weather forecast, the car battery, the souffle. No wonder people feel the need for something beyond this mortal sense of existence with its sweeping promises and small deliveries.

If any one thing in the midst of human experience could rightly be defined as certain—as absolutely infallible—it would be God's Christ. Shifting, changing, matter-based existence is unsatisfying. In fact, deeply unsettling. We may not have strongly felt this, but in our heart, all of us long for something that will not wane. And sooner or later all of us will see the Christ—which Jesus so fully exemplified—as ever the same. We will feel Christ as the settler of our uncertainties, as an unfailing, healing presence.

Jesus' life illustrated many lessons. And one of the most unforgettable was that his divinely endowed nature, the Christ, could never be defeated. But does a material perspective show that? After all, Jesus was rejected; he was betrayed, denied, crucified. Spiritual discernment enables us to see that the Christ never failed Jesus. It led him right on through those events and right on up to his full expression of Christ, the perfect idea of sonship—right to the ascension itself.

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