God of the Im/Possible
With the resurrection of Jesus Christ, time is interrupted and we are startled by a deeper reality: God is doing new things. Underneath a world racked by war, racial hatred, gender discrimination and global warming, the power of divine love is swelling with new life, symbolized by the risen Christ. The resurrection does not mean that Jesus was resuscitated from the dead but that he rose from the dead. As Saint Paul wrote, “if Jesus was not raised from the dead, then our faith is our vain” (1 Cor 15:14).
Early Christians had such faith in the risen Christ that they threw themselves wholeheartedly into defending the faith amidst the pagan Roman empire. The late historian Henry Chadwick recounts how the emperor Nero rolled Christians in tar and lighted them as torches because they would rather undergo a tortuous death than renounce their faith. When the aristocrat Perpetua and her maid Felicity was arrested for being Christian, her father begged her to renounce her faith rather than suffer martyrdom in the coliseum. Her answer was simply, ego sum Christianus: I am a Christian. Her pregnant assistant, Felicity, while in labor pains, was stripped bare and sent into the coliseum to face the lions. While awaiting her fate a guard jeered at her, saying, “if you are suffering now, imagine what you will suffer when you face the beasts.” Felicity answered, “now I suffer but then there will be another suffering in me,” indicating her wholehearted faith in the risen Christ. Throughout the ages and into our own time, faith in the risen Christ has evoked a power of freedom and trust that death does not have the final victory. The Archbishop and Saint of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, was repeatedly threatened with death for defending the people. His powerful words of resistance rose from a deep inner place of radical faith: “If I am killed, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.” This is a declaration of resurrection: I will not die but I will live in my people.
One who lives for others, lives for God. The human person is like a wave-particle duality; the particle aspect is the particularity of our lives, and the wave dimension is the breadth of our relationships. While I am alive, I am changing and growing from one moment to the next. This is true of both my body and my character; indeed, the whole pattern that is “me.” Because I am always investing my future in another, while I am alive, that other is “me”—my many selves that I am becoming but after I am dead, that other is you because my own self is woven into yours. We live on in our relationships, and in and through our relationships, we are continuously created. In a sense, this is the fundamental meaning of the resurrection. The experience of Jesus raised from the dead ignited his disciples with a new fire of hope; the experience of Jesus, alive in a new way, set the world ablaze with an evocative love. The disciples experienced something new and wonderful: God is doing new things. They realized the power of God and the presence of Jesus were one and the same and this power was now among them; indeed, in them. Violence, slavery, oppression, all were exposed for what they really are: thwarted gods opposed to life. In Christ, a new light shone, a power present from the beginning of time but now seen more brightly as the power of hope, promise, and new life ahead. The disciples realized this power and began to speak and act as if a new world was dawning on the horizon.
Today, Christianity has become a religion of the empire, enervated of its transforming power. Rules, laws, dogmas, judgments, lines of division, all have weakened the Christian message and reduced it to a routinized formula of abstract concepts and beliefs. But Christianity is about God in matter; a power of divinity shaping matter and changing matter through the energies of love. Something is going on in this world of constant change and it is the restless God seeking to become fully united with all creaturely life in a deep and personal way. We find ourselves in an unfinished universe of immense proportions where suffering and death are built into the system of new biological life. We are here after 13.8 billion years of death and major extinctions. God will always find a way to push through unto new life. This is the symbol of the risen Christ; not only does life have a power of unquenchable love but we are becoming something more unified in this incredible process of evolution, despite the powers of opposition and entropy. God has a vision of wholeness, and we are invited to realize this vision as artisans of the future.
The Good News of the Risen Christ is this: Let God matter! Let God matter your bodies, your minds, your hearts and souls; let God matter the trees, the flowers, the gentle breeze, the sun and moon and stars and every living creature. Let God matter because matter is the mirror of God. Look into this mirror of matter and see what you believe. If you see Christ, divine love shining through the beauty of all things, then believe what you see; that God is restlessly seeking to become more. Become what you see and realize that you are the body of Christ.
Let us leave our tombs of darkness, our stifled and protected lives, closed in by giant rocks of hardened hearts or wounded egos or deep fear and anxiety. God is the infinite potential of infinite love and to believe in God is to believe in that which is not yet; the possibilities of what we can become. So throw yourselves into the heart of God – let go and see what happens when faith steers the power of the will. Venture forth into the unfinished world where God is struggling to be born; let us not settle for mediocrity but let us liberate our minds to imagine a new world. This is the Christian way; the way of the im/possible, the hidden potential of infinite love within us, calling us to respond in faith, hope and love: Faith in God’s infinite power of love; hope in the power of life before us; and love as the energy of resistance, creativity, novelty and dreams.
Is Christ risen from the dead? Maybe. The only testimony that makes this Christian faith real is our response in faith:
I believe in one God, one human family, one planetary community, one body, one love, uniting all in beauty, for God’s infinite love is infinite, fecund and beautiful.
I believe I am entangled with all earth life and all living creatures,
I believe this future is the relational unity of all things in God,
I believe this earth has a future entangled with God,
I believe the heart of God is love.
Beliefs guide us, faith strengthens us but love—well, love is the core energy of life. Where there is love, there is no death, only future. Love raised Jesus from the dead; love heals and makes whole. It is time to stop talking about the risen Christ and begin to love in a radically new way. The power in our midst to reimagine a new world is love.
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This Easter message is just what my heart was seeking. I don’t go to church anymore, except possibly Christmas, Easter, weddings and funerals. So my husband Ed and I went to Mass yesterday, hoping for joy and inspiration. The Mass was a disappointing often repeated ritual of platitudes. The hymns chosen were odd and different, not joyous. The joy we experienced came from the good will of the people we greeted before, during and after the Mass. This Easter message above rings with truth deep in my being. Thank you. I am grateful beyond words.
As 88 years old male, the only thing that makes sense to me now is Love.
I am also convinced the only way to help make it so, is through the loving touch of woman in leadership roles across the world. thank you for stepping up Illia
So powerful, Ilia! Thank you for your courage and persistence in bringing this message into the world!
You have articulated all that I’ve been ‘knowing’, but unable to organize in a simple coherent platform of belief amid the clatter of liturgical push and pull. A special thank you for bringing The Creed into the 21st century.
Thank you for this beautiful message, Ilia. A recent statement by Dr. Dan Siegel keeps resonating in my mind: “The lethal lie of civilization is that we are separate selves.” I long for new ways that we can learn to enter the reality and beauty of our interbeing. It’s everywhere, but we skim through life on the surface without seeing the deeper truth. Our society’s infatuation with guns is perhaps the starkest example of how we love and protect the lie of being separate.
So hungry for this message , so profoundly grateful for the magnificent vision and words that so precisely names It—the God asking us to dance with its love, beauty, forgiveness but mostly its Love. Thank you!
Magnificent, Ilya….
Visionary
Beautifully put! Christ is risen, and is seated at the right hand of the Father; meaning Christ is doing the work of God. But how? – by the advocate he promised he would send – the Holy Spirit. I believe the Holy Spirit is what Christians call the cosmic energy necessary to perform love; love is the Holy Spirit made tangible.
Your vision expresses exactly what we need today to live the reality of Christ, the recasting of our Faith with ideas at once contemporary and eternal. Pax et bonum.
I think it’s fair to say that divinity is not, nor has ever been in the ruling imperial power structures of the world (political, military-industrial, economic, and religious). It is these power structures, and those who identify with and invest in them that make the human species a danger to itself, and the entire planet. That was so in the time of Jesus, and remains the same today, pitting the same dark forces against the message of the gospel that conspired to murder him at the outset, from birth, throughout his ministry, and on the cross. Such made the resurrection necessary. It is largely among the disenfranchised that Christ gathers his little flock, which will one day rule the earth, level the playing field, and reign in eternity with him as “kings and priests.” So let the Putin’s and the Musk’s of the present global order boast that “he who rules AI (technology) rules the world.” Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again to reverse the age old order that weaponizes money, power, and technology to uplift the few over the many who suffer under them. If not so, then surely our faith is THE leading vanity among humankind’s pantheon of godless vanities. And we, the most hopeless and pitiable of earth’s creatures. Maranatha.