Take a moment, and ask yourself: What is the Gospel? What is the ‘Good News’ that beats at the heart of my faith?
Now, take another moment and ask yourself what you make of Evangelist?
There are two aspects to Evangelist’s contribution that are worth pondering. The first is his method. Whereas our instinct might be to soothe someone’s spiritual anxiety and discomfort, perhaps by assuring someone wrestling with a sense of guilt or unworthiness that God is loving and compassionate, Evangelist seems to aggravate precisely that we would seek to alleviate. Before he presents the Good News of the Gospel, he wants to make sure we understand why it is Good News. He wants to make sure we know the reality of what the Gospel saves us from. He pushes until the man before him is convinced that ‘I am not fit to go to judgement … the thoughts of these things makes me cry’.
Only now will Evangelist reveal that there is a way to be saved from that judgement. This is the second thing worth pondering: the content of the Gospel. The Gospel is not here being presented as a way of dealing with our sense of guilt, or lack of fulfilment in life. It is about how God protects us from His own holy response to our sin. Only when the reality of judgement is in focus, does Evangelist take to his lips a phrase of John the Baptizer, ‘Flee from the coming wrath’ (Matt.3:7).
But why does Evangelist not take him straight to the cross?
It is possible that this is a narrative devise used by Bunyan to expose the mistakes we can make in trying to deal with our guilt. It gives him a chance to introduce characters such as Obstinate (stubbornly holding to an opinion or course of action) who will not accept the Bible’s diagnosis of his state before God (‘away with your Book’), nor entertain any sacrifice of what he thinks of as ‘the good life’; Pliable, who sets out to follow the way of Christ without any ‘burden of sin’ and quickly loses interest in what had initially seemed attractive, when the going becomes difficult in the Slough of Despond (discouraged and disheartened by the response of mocking, threatening and calling back by others); and Mr. Worldly-Wiseman, who holds the remarkably contemporary opinion that we don’t need to be Christian to be good, and that while a little bit of self-affirming, ‘civic religion’ is no doubt a good thing, you certainly don’t want to be too serious about anything Evangelist says! That’s all a bit extreme, and unnecessary. It might sound sophisticated and reasonable, but ‘Christian’ (as he is now called) soon learns the hard way that Morality only increases the burden of sin, ‘and he soon began to be sorry that he had taken Mr. Worldly-wiseman’s counsel’.
More likely however, Bunyan understands and is teaching us about a wisdom that is needed in leading people to Christ. Counter-intuitively, there is great spiritual danger in rushing ahead of the Spirit’s leading someone to the Cross. Jesus once left a teacher of the Law ‘not far from the Kingdom of heaven’ (Mk.12:34). Not far… but not ‘in’ either.
Even though he is weighed down by his burden of sin, and is anxious about judgement, Christian is not ready yet to trust Christ, or at least, he is still too ready to trust others. He might be willing to trust Christ, but he is not yet willing to trust Christ alone. Only after he has been to the house of the Interpreter will be ready to climb ‘Salvation Hill’…
Questions to ponder:
Is Bunyan setting the bar too high?
Does reading this part of Pilgrim’s Progress help you make sense of your own experience of becoming a Christian? …and perhaps what you have seen of other people’s experiences of becoming Christians, or not, as the case may prove to be?
Take some time to pray for those you know who think and behave in ways that remind you of Obstinate, Pliable and Mr. Worldly-wiseman. Is there any way over the next few days you could say or do something that might help them re-engage with the Gospel?
