Toward the conclusion of her acceptance speech at the DNC, Kamala Harris declared that the story of America is “The Most Extraordinary Story Ever Told.”  I don’t think she used this phrase by accident.  Rhetorically, it was a clever move.  It conjures up another familiar phrase: “The Greatest Story Ever Told”—a phrase that is used to describe the story of Jesus.

I doubt that the Vice President—or her speechwriters—were trying to make a theological point.  Or to suggest that America is a Chrisitan nation.  I think they phrased it this way because they knew it would resonate—for many, it stirs up positive, even powerful, connotations.  I think they chose this phrasing to enhance the rhetorical flourish of her conclusion. 

“The Greatest Story Ever Told”

I recently caught part of an interview Joe Rogan did with Jordan Peterson.  In it, Peterson was talking about the story of Jesus’ death.  I can’t put it as eloquently or brilliantly as Peterson did, but essentially, he was arguing that the sacrifice Jesus made on the Cross is the quintessential Jungian archetype of self-sacrifice—Peterson loves the famous psychologict Carl Jung and his understanding of archetypes.  I have yet to hear Peterson speak where he hasn’t mentioned Jungian archetypes at least once!

Peterson went on to explain that what makes Jesus’ sacrifice so heroic, so archetypal—indeed, the Jungian archetype for sacrifice—is the fact that it is the most tragic of deaths.  With Jesus, you don’t have just any old, average human being suffering a tragic end, an end that, at least to some extent, might be deserved.  Instead, you had the best of human beings.  The most innocent of victims.  The last person on earth who deserved such a fate.  And the fate he suffered was the cruelest and most humiliating of tortures humans could come up with in that day.  The greatest of indignities.  The height of injustice. 

Peterson is right.  Even though, as far as I can tell, Peterson sees the Incarnation more as mythology than historical fact, he is right about this story.  Whether you believe it is only an archetype, a myth, or whether you take it to be the actual Incarnation of the Eternal Son of God, the extremes involved are as vast and wide as could be, making it the archetype for sacrificial love.  The supreme example conceivable. 

Think about it: At least according to the story, you had this man who understood himself to be equal with the Lord Yahweh—the One he dared to call his “Abba” Father—willingly lay his life down in the most demeaning, debasing, humiliating way possible. 

You had this man who believed himself to be, as the later creeds would put it, God from God, light from light, true God from true God declaring that he had come not to be served, but to serve, to give his life as a ransom for the many. 

You had this man who made the ultimate sacrifice only in order to save people like the very ones who were nailing him to the cursed cross.  As Paul says in Romans 5, rarely will someone die for a righteous person, a good person.  But God proves his love for us in that, while we were still sinners, while having made ourselves God’s enemies by rejecting him, Jesus died for us.  Dying for one’s enemy, while barely possible, represents the furthest extent to which love can go, the most noble, gratuitous, sublime display of love possible.  Which is precisely what the story of Jesus says God himself has done for us in Jesus.    

Jesus traded heaven’s throne for a cross to save those who counted him, God, their enemy.  Whether fact of fiction, the total extremes at the heart of this story are what make it the greatest story of heroic self-sacrifice ever told.  They are, as Peterson pointed out, what makes it the Jungian archetype for sacrificial love.  The accumulation and summation of all other stories about sacrificial love.  The “original” from which all others are merely “copies”, and to which these “representations” point. 

And based on another interview Peterson did several years ago, this time with Bishop Barron, I get the sense he would say the same thing about Jesus’ resurrection.  That, regarding death, it is the Jungian archetype for death’s defeat.  Going from the extremist of humiliations and defeats in the Crucifixion, the story of Jesus’ rising three days later, with his dead body having been gloriously transformed to the highest heights of the transcendent realm, is the ultimate victory over death.  The greatest story of death’s defeat ever told.

“The Greatest Story Ever Told”

The two biggest realities in life, the two most universal and universally profound experiences we encounter are love and death.  As nearly all would agree, love is the most important thing, the ultimate value, in life.  It is, deep down, where the meaning is found.  If there is some ultimate reality, love points us to it.  Love must be its essence.

And death, death is our greatest foe, the enemy we fall most silent before.  As many psychologists have argued, death—or our denial of it—lies at the root of all our other psychological and human ills: fear, anxiety, profound distrust of the other.  And, from gossip to violence, this leads us to do all kinds of destructive things and, from racism to war, to be enslaved by all kinds of intractable problems. 

The story of Jesus’ death and resurrection addresses these two realities like nothing else does.  Or can.  His cross displays the greatest love possible, assuring us of our precious place in God’s heart.   His resurrection defeats our greatest nemesis and saves us from all the angst and self-destructiveness that comes with our mortality.    

“The Greatest Story Ever Told”

The two attributes we most associate with God are his power and goodness.  Although we could use many other attributes to describe God, this is what we most mean when we use the term “God”: A being who combines perfect power and perfect love.  In the story of Jesus’ cross and resurrection these two attributes are displayed—to perfection.  The fullest way God could display them toward humanity.

Giving up his divine prerogatives in order to become a helpless baby, a vulnerable human being.  Then living a life of radical service, especially to the least and most marginalized of society, a life that culminates in making the ultimate sacrifice to save us who, by our rejection of God and His will for us, have willingly made ourselves his enemies, is the ultimate way God can display his love for humanity. 

And then, after all seemed lost, after the most tragic ending to the most loving person who ever walked the face of the earth, having risen from the dead to eternal glory, completely vanquishing the grave and death, humanity’s greatest enemy, is the ultimate way God can exercise his power on behalf of human beings.

Given that love and death are the two realities that most preoccupy us as humans, these two supreme attributes of God could never be more fully, nor beautifully, on display than they are in the perfect love of the cross and the perfect power of the resurrection, the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus’ death and the ultimate victory over that most tragic of all deaths.   

“The Greatest Story Ever Told”

Over the past sixty years or so, the findings of science, especially in astrophysics and molecular biology, has been making belief in a Higher Power, a Supreme Mind, a Transcendent Intelligence much more reasonable.  Due in large part to these findings, recent surveys reveal that the youngest generation of scientists are significantly more likely to believe in some kind of a God than their predecessors have been.  Whereas belief in some kind of higher, divine intelligence was around forty percent in previous generations, it is sixty-plus percent, nearly two-thirds, among scientists in their twenties and thirties.  The trend is up.    

If, as this trend in science suggests, there is a God, then this is exactly the story we’d expect to see played out before us.  If there is a God, this marriage of perfect love and perfect power in the death and resurrection of God Incarnate is exactly the kind of revelation we’d expect.  In fact, if there is a God, we’d expect nothing less—an all-good, all-powerful God could do nothing less. 

This is exactly how we’d expect God, whose two most defining attributes are perfect power and perfect love, would deal with the two biggest realities we encounter in human life.  There is no more complete and perfect way for God to express his perfect love for us than by trading heaven’s throne for a cross, making the ultimate sacrifice to save us.  There is no more complete and perfect way for God to exercise his perfect power for the sake of human beings, than to conquer our greatest foe, death itself.  

Love and death.  An all-good and all-powerful God.  What else would we expect?   

In the story of Jesus, of God Incarnate, we see the perfect marriage of God’s perfect love and perfect power.  Like no other story, this story fits our deepest intuitions about God and, if God exists, what must be essential to His nature.   

“The Greatest Story Ever Told”

I don’t know if America is the most extraordinary story ever told, if we could conceive of a more extraordinary story.  But I do know that the story of Jesus is the greatest story ever told, that a greater story of God and his love cannot be told.  The king of heaven giving up the glory of heaven, the greatest treasure there is, to become a helpless baby and bridge the unbridgeable chasm between divinity and humanity, the Infinite and the finite.  And then go on to live a life of total self-donation, self-gift, a perfectly innocent, sinless life, only to suffer the most excruciating fate known to that point. 

And then, to infuse his flesh-torn, beaten-to-a-pulp, lifeless-for-days body with new life.  But not just new life.  Transformed life.  Elevated to the transcendent sphere.  To the very heights of glory.   

If modern science is making it more and more reasonable to believe in an all-powerful, all-good God, to believe that this is a reasonable explanation for the universe we find ourselves in—perhaps even the best explanation for the universe we find ourselves in—then it is more than reasonable to believe that the story of Jesus isn’t just the greatest story ever told.  But that it is also the truest story ever told.    

So, do you think this is the greatest story ever told?  Do you think the fact it is makes it more reasonable to believe?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.  You can go to the “Contact E. J.” page of the Raising Jesus website and leave your comments there.  I look forward to hearing from you!