Jesus liked to communicate with stories. I do too…so I’m starting with a strange one.
In the year 1989, I started my first real job at a pizza shop called “Pizza Transit Authorities.” This was surely one of the most pretentious-named pizza joints in the history of pizza. Pizza Transit Authorities (PTA for short) was on the bleeding edge of pizza entrepreneurship with their groundbreaking “3 pizzas for the price of one” philosophy. There was no place in our little town where you could get more pizza for your dollar.
But there was a problem in this pizza utopia. What if three pizzas were more than a person wanted? Well, in that case, PTA had a special price for just one singular pizza. Eventually, people got wise to this, so when we told them the special price for one pizza they began to often say, “thats a pretty good price...on second thought gimme 3 pizzas for that.”
And we were stuck….we couldn’t actually give them 3 pizzas for that single pizza price.
Chaos ensued. If you have ever worked in customer service with people who feel like a discount or coupon isn’t being fully honored, you know what a cauldron of depravity that can create. People got angry on the phone. They got angry in person. We sat on a pizza throne of lies in their eyes. PTA became a miserable place to work.
That was when my brilliant teenage co-workers and I stepped into this pit of despair with a revolutionary idea. We implemented a strategy that we knew would heal the PTA wounded and be a balm to pizza victims in our care. We called it: BACON NIGHT.
Bacon Night was built on one simple premise: Thursday nights (when the boss wasn’t working of course) every single pizza order that came in got bacon on it.
Order a pepperoni and sausage pizza? You got pepperoni, sausage and bacon.
Order a cheese pizza? You got cheese and bacon.
Order a pizza with bacon on it??? Oh my…you got the windows of bacon heaven unloaded on your pizza until it looked like a cheesy cake of salted meat coming out of the oven.
People. Loved. Bacon night.
And they loved us.
I remember customers would come in at other times during the week and specifically ask for us. They would tell our boss, “no offense sir, but I want that guy to make my pizza. He’s from bacon night!” We found that no one brought their bacon-blessed pizzas back or asked for a refund on bacon night. In fact, in all the many weeks that we did bacon night, we never had one single complaint.
To be clear, we were all eventually fired. But that’s for another blog.
The point is, I cherished the thought that for one brief moment, we brought joy to the pizza downtrodden. We changed the world via the joy of surprise bacon.
Now, what in the world does that have to do with anything?
Let me connect that story to something I try fervently hold on to: the good news of Jesus is good news for the world. Really good news. Though the darkness of this present-day Babylon is so often overwhelming, we have something of great joy to pass along to the world.
Tim Keller used to talk about “emotional apologetics” in our post-christian slice of the world. He said this:
There is a certain sense in which you have to prove to people today that Christianity makes emotional and cultural sense before they will even start to listen to you about whether it makes rational and intellectual sense.
What Keller means is that people will often care more about what their heart is searching for rather than the abundance of evidence and rationalistic arguments we have for the faith. In other words, why would a person care about thousands of biblical manuscripts, cosmological arguments for God or evidence for the resurrection if they think Christianity doesn’t address the deep desires and problems of their heart they so desperately try to fill?
Part of the good news is that Christianity does indeed address that. It offers that. Jesus is that. Jesus is the ultimate happy ending that every person has ever searched for. Moreover, the hunt and the desire point to Him. As CS Lewis so famously said in the ‘Hope’ chapter of Mere Christianity:
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.
Babylon is littered with derailed hearts that desire value, identity, meaning, purpose, and satisfaction. I can relate. We all want that. But if that road of desire ends anywhere other than Jesus, it will always end in the shredding of self rather than flourishing. I can’t help but think of Johnny Lee’s famous song “Looking for Love.” It could be a theme song for so many testimonies because sinful people tend to look in all the wrong places.
But praise be, Jesus is the happy ending of vagrant souls. He is the “joy of every longing heart” that we sing of at Christmas. Christianity makes emotional sense of our lives like nothing else can because Jesus is the “real thing” that every heart was wired to find its true satisfaction in.
The good news of an empty tomb is still really good news for a weary world. We want to keep surprising people with the joy of that. I’ll probably think of this the next few times I smell bacon cooking…coz you could say it’s always Bacon Night with Jesus.
“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” – Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
…but the angel reassured them. “Don’t be afraid!” he said. “I bring you good news that will bring great joy to all people. – Luke 2:10