Maybe it’s not how I would’ve done it, but that’s kind of the point.
Jesus Christ could’ve proven he was God by commanding a legion of angels to help him down from the cross. He could’ve demanded His enemies bow down before Him, cowering in fear at the miracle they’d seen. That’s what the men who crucified him said as they mocked him.
Instead, He let them think they’d won and silenced Him. He waited three days and began appearing to select people, reminding them everything He taught them before was completely true.
Easter Sunday is a paradoxical thing to contemplate. Here we have the most powerful man in the world, apparently succumbing to the sin in the world. Secretly, it all went according to plan, exactly as foretold to the people to whom He preached.
Jesus didn’t come screaming out of the hewn rock, looking for revenge. That might be man’s way of doing things. When you’re part of the Holy Trinity, you don’t need to do things the way man does.
I don’t have to tell anyone that the past year has been difficult. Things aren’t as easy or as fun as they once were, thanks to coronavirus and its limitations on everything you do.
Occasionally I’ll hear a snarky atheist ask why a kind and loving God would let there be something like coronavirus happen in the world.
I don’t know what wonders and miracles may come from what we’ve encountered in the past year. I know how it’s helped my family grow closer, slowing down to enjoy our lives while we can.
Maybe that’s the goal. Maybe it’s not. I don’t know that I need to know.
We humans have this strange desire to have an answer for everything. As a journalist, I want to have an answer for everything too. Yet so much of my job is finding the appropriate authority to ask those questions. How do you ask questions of the one who was, is and always will be?
You don’t. You can’t. It takes faith.
I understand there are those who look at the word “faith” and see intellectual laziness or ignorance. I pray for those people all the time, that they’ll one day better understand what just makes sense to the faithful.
I’ve heard people say Jesus is just a collective imaginary friend. I don’t know what kind of childhood they had, but my imaginary friends as a child never asked me to do the hard work that go so completely against my own will that Jesus does. My imaginary friends couldn’t answer the question of what happened right before the Big Bang.
Faith is the recognition that there is a God, and you’re not Him.
National surveys say the world has less faith than it once did. Meanwhile people complain the world lacks civility, and we’re falling farther away from the morals that matter most to us as a country.
These are the moments it helps to remember the world’s bigger than any of us. There’s more than our here and now. We’re all part of an intricate plan that goes over thousands of years. The victory is already won for those who choose to believe.
And it all started with Jesus Christ, dying for our sins and rising three days later in a way none of us ever would have considered. That’s the real power of Easter.
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