What Makes Christianity So Good?

“What’s so good about Christianity? I mean, why are you a Christian?”

My interviewer (a pastor) asked me this question on a Sunday morning. As a guest, I was about to talk about Jesus’s wisdom. The impromptu interview was designed to help people get to know me a bit before I spoke. Many listening were Christians. Some weren’t.

         The good question gave me pause.

My thoughts buzzed like a circuit breaker about to shut off. Too many cords plugged into one outlet.  My feelings raced about like loud and giggling children bounding into the living room on Christmas morning.

How do I describe what’s so good about Christianity to strangers in ninety seconds? I thought of the person I’d just met a few minutes before who’d never been to church and wasn’t a Christian but risked coming that morning for the first time in her life.

         “What’s so good about Christianity?” I repeated.

         “The tears of God,” I said. “I’m a Christian because God cries.”

I began to share how my life growing up was full of sorrows. I told how when I first read about Jesus; I came across a Bible verse I’d memorized and held onto since.

In the days of Jesus’s life on earth, he prayed with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard . . . (Hebrews 5:7)  

 Back then, maybe I thought God would yell at me.

“Stop your crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about.”

Or maybe he’d tell me that crying displays a lack of faith or proves that I’m a weak man.

Or maybe I’d heard that shedding tears is beneath God’s character and weakens him. To suggest he cries is to dishonor and disrespect God's power, holiness, and perfection.

But when I read about Jesus crying, I was surprised to encounter a God who felt sad about sad things and cried compassionately for those who suffered hard and evil things. Could this mean that the life experiences I had, rather than the experiences I was supposed to have, could be held and heard by God?

And when I read of Jesus crying out “why” in his suffering on the cross, a night light in the room of my problem with God and evil turned on.

Jesus gave me hope.

“For what one cries about reveals what one loves,” I said.

Sure. Our tears can reveal misguided love, like the one who laments losing the thing that harmed them.

But tears, like laughter, can also reveal the genuine good we’ve rightly cherished.

• Jesus cried for his friends when one of them died (Jn. 11:35).

• Jesus cried for his enemies when the city, the people, and the generation in which he lived harmed each other, dishonored God, and rejected his love (Lk. 19:41).

• Jesus cried when a friend betrayed him, when other friends abandoned him, and the pain of dying was set before him (Matt. 26:36-39)

 Once you get a glimpse of what one loves, you discover the sources of their joy.

But joyful people can struggle to cry with those who cry.

Sorrowing people can struggle to laugh with those who laugh.

But divine love has no such limits. Divine love remains capable of both sorrow and joy.

Isn’t it this breadth of capable feeling that makes true love so relieving when we taste it?

When we are heard in our tears and enjoyed in our just delights, isn’t this how we know that someone’s claim to love us is true?  Truth wouldn’t lie about sad things with smiles or demand frowns from a God-given joy.

What’s so good about Christianity?

“The tears of God,” I said. In those tears, God’s love, joy, and truth are given and his loveliness discovered. Here are all the materials we need for an authentic life in the real world.

This is why I’m a Christian.