Living in Easter's Light

Beloved in Christ,

In the gospel for this coming Sunday, Thomas demands proof of the resurrection. He wants to see and touch the risen Jesus before he will believe. After he is given that proof, the evangelist addresses us directly across the centuries: “But [the signs in this book] are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

What does it mean to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the risen Lord, in order to have life?  Episcopalians often bristle at the notion, partly because the waters of the modern world have atrophied our capacity to imagine a God who transcends what we can understand, and partly because large strands of Christianity have reduced it to a formulaic transaction: “if you intellectually assent to this doctrine, you will avoid God’s wrath and punch your ticket to heaven.” It would be boring if it wasn’t so problematic.

It’s not at all what John means. Belief isn’t a commodity we possess, but an action, a direction in which we commit our hearts. Belief is a choice we make about where we will place our trust. The resurrection doesn’t fit in a neat little package on the shelf of my mind, but I am going to live my life as if it is true. I’ve set my heart toward God’s power to do the good thing I cannot imagine.

When we choose to believe by setting our hearts toward God’s promise, then we are set free to truly live in Easter’s light, right here and now. The fact that God raised Jesus’ real, brutalized body from the grave, as hard as it is to imagine, honors the sacred dignity of all God’s children who suffer in their bodies, whose bodies are tortured, hungry, deported, imprisoned, abused. Choosing to set our hearts on Easter, when God raised Jesus’ real, brutalized body from death, empowers us to resist the forces that degrade the sacred bodies of God’s children whose bodies are tortured, abused, imprisoned, deported, or hungry. We can resist those forces because we know the heart of the universe is a God who has done, and will do, the loving thing that is impossible to imagine, and our whole life becomes a matter of reflecting the light of God’s impossible love into the world’s darkest nights.

Grace and Peace, 

The Right Rev. Craig Loya