To All UChicago Students: Jesus is Alive

There’s a very peculiar man on the UChicago campus nowadays, holding up signs of controversial Christian messages. I approached him today with camera and notebook ready, and asked him a few questions.

First, it was apparent that his English was suffering quite a bit, as he was quite eager to ask me to proofread his signs to make sure they were grammatically correct. In fact, they all looked okay, and I soon found out that he was from Germany. My desperate attempt to speak German failed spectacularly, but he switched over to some phrases in Mandarin Chinese after finding out I was indeed Chinese and not Korean. With his barely comprehensible Chinese, he spoke in such an accented way that I had to pause to figure out what he was saying. At one point, he asked me “do you know Jesus?” in Mandarin Chinese, after which I responded “I’ve heard of such a person…” in Chinese, but I don’t think he quite understood. He promised me that a couple years from now, he would be traveling to China and Hong Kong spreading the good news.

In any case, his central message, of course, is that he himself is “completely sure” that “Jesus is alive”. He is quite disappointed that approximately 90% of people who worship on Sunday stop worshiping on other days, and this rejection of Jesus in their everyday lives leads to disastrous consequences.

When I asked him about the deeper philosophical meaning of his signs, he simply noted that homosexuality is not natural and, in the Old Testament, God killed homosexuals. I asked him whether he thought homosexuality could be “cured,” but he didn’t understand what the word “cured” meant. I emphasized that one goes to the doctor to cure an illness, and he nodded, exclaiming, “Yes, Jesus is a doctor… Jesus is a doctor…”

We welcome this German guest to our beautiful campus. Though his message was hateful and ignorant, it never hurts to reach out a hand.