In the bus on my way home last week a guy stood up all of a sudden and started to preach. It was standard evangelical theology. We are all sinners, often doing the wrong things, unable to overcome our weaknesses, because of which we face punishment and eternal damnation. But there is hope, because thanks to God we have been given a saviour, Jesus Christ who died for our sins on the cross in his great mercy for us. So let’s confess him as our Lord and Saviour, and his healing power will renew our hearts and give us eternal life.
On the one hand I admired the guy. He was youngish, in his early thirties I think. You need some courage to get up in a crowded bus, raise your voice and proclaim your message. On the other hand he annoyed me, because he forced himself on people in a riding bus without giving them much choice than to listen to him. The alternative would have been to get up and leave the bus or to shout him down. Nobody did anything of the kind. They just remained in their seats for the five minutes or so it took him to finish his memorised message. They showed neither approval nor disapproval. At the end of his sermon the preacher asked the people to say after him in prayer and to confess Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. Nobody did and he finished the prayer as he started it, on his own. At the next stop he left the bus.
It would have been different if he had approached passengers individually and asked them whether they knew Jesus Christ and believed in him. Then they would have had the choice of entering into a conversation with him or declining it by telling him that they are not interested. This would have been more respectful of the freedom of his fellow human beings and of their right to be left alone. But I guess he felt such a strong sense of mission, such a strong urge to save people from hell and damnation, that he took the liberty to go a little too far.
I felt no inclination to get into a discussion with him myself, certainly not on a bus while trying to get home after a rather busy day. There are better times and places. But had a discussion taken place I would certainly have posed the question to him: what do you think? Would the Son of God have become man, even without the sin of Adam and Eve?
I wonder whether he would understand the question at all and grasp its implications.
Ton
