Sunday, January 24, 2016

The Truth is Still Out There



Tonight marks the return of X-Files in the form of a six-episode mini-series on FOX.  To get ready I watched the last episode of the ninth season, originally broadcast on May 19, 2002.

F.B.I Special Agent Fox Mulder spends nine years (at least the nine we are privy to) believing that “the truth is out there.”  In the end, he does the only thing that makes sense.  The final scene shows him in a hotel room with his best friend in the world, Agent Dana Scully.  They have traveled to every corner of the globe, encountered the best and worst in people, and had their cosmic worldviews irreversibly altered.  The two of them are frightened to the end of hope by what they have experienced.

Scully asks him if he has learned that all he suspected was actually true, then what was it that he believed.  It is then that Mulder reaches for the necklace Scully wears and takes her Christian cross in his hand.  Dana speaks the last words of the epic series: “Maybe there is hope.” 

If Fox Mulder becomes a believer in Jesus Christ it will be a truly genuine conversion.  It will not be a “things go better with Jesus” faith which is popularly marketed to today’s religious consumer.  It will be a faith that has been fought for and worth dying with, where the tough questions of reality are wrestled with in light of Christ’s claim to be “the way, truth and life.”  It is the faith that God wants us to have.  It is the kind Jesus promised when he said, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

After nine years, Fox Mulder knows that real life is terrifying and ultimately absurd if humans are on their own.  In the end, He takes up the cross.  He has the answer. 

I still don't believe that human beings resulted from a piece of Mars that crashed into the Earth, but I think somewhat better of Chris Carter now.

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