Believe!

What does it mean to ‘believe’ in Easter? Are we required to suspend disbelief in order to believe the Easter resurrection story? Do we have to be literalists about this one event… or else? I mean, this is THE heart and soul of the Christian religion, is it not?!

Well, I like to dance on the edge, so I’ll try to give you at least one point of view.

First, why does the resurrection work theologically? We understand why it’s absurd, but what about it makes sense?

An underlying theme all through the Bible is that of sacrifice. By law, Israel was commanded to offer blood sacrifices to God. They were meant to heal the relationship between God and God’s people, because the relationship was everything! You wanted to keep that relationship in good standing and go with God, not against God, because to go against God meant losing God’s good graces and the protection that came along with being God’s chosen.

The blood sacrifice might seem barbaric to us, but it was the practice of almost every religion in and around ancient societies. Their understanding was that offering something pure and innocent could atone for and break the grip of sin, an efficacious metaphor so to speak. Basically, you ask God to place the sins of the people upon the innocent. The sins then died with the sacrifice.

Sin, atone, repeat.

But it didn’t work. Sometimes the ‘sin’ part became so saturated with evil that there was no sacrifice that the people could possibly offer that would atone for it. In Amos 5:21, God barks at his people, “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon.”

Turns out that what the God of the Hebrews really wanted wasn’t blood sacrifice at all, but justice and righteousness like ever flowing streams. (See Amos 5:24) But no matter what, people just couldn’t do it. Justice and righteousness always turned into greed and political corruption. (That isn’t merely a problem Israel had, but a problem the entire world has!) So, what was the point? In the end it wasn’t working. Killing animals to get rid of our own sins resulted, not in a better community or a better relationship with God, but only in a dead animal.

So, why on earth would God send his only Son (basically God’s own self, we claim) to do what no animal ever could? If all of creation is fallen, there is nothing at all that will truly atone for sin, except, perhaps, for the sacrifice of someone or thing that truly has no sin. To be honest, there’s no such thing. Everyone has sinned. If I am a fallen creature, I can only pay for my own sins. I can’t pay for yours.

But what if I really didn’t sin? What if, after every temptation known to humanity has been thrown at me, I still don’t sin? (If you want the truth, I find that harder to believe than a resurrected body.) If I were sinless AND willing to offer my own blood to cover that of the guilty, it would work! Isn’t that the goal of sacrifice? One person like that could ‘take on’ the sins of the world, die and thus kill along with him everyone else’s sins once and for all! Halleluiah! This is what we claim Christ did!

But then there’s the resurrection business. (And the ascension too, but let’s take one thing at a time.) Dead guys don’t come back. Yet Christians make the claim that Jesus died and then was raised from the dead. In fact, this the very heart of the Christian message because we believe that the sacrifice was so pure and so perfect that it was connected to Life itself. (Note the capital ‘L.’) So, it couldn’t die. The irony of that is so deliciously perfect, we make it the centerpiece of our belief system.

Well, of course we do. It speaks a twisted truth that should cause us to abandon every sinful pleasure we ever indulged in and fall on our faces in homage to Jesus! But it doesn’t, does it? How has the world truly changed because Christians worship Jesus of Nazareth or because Christians believe that this same fellow rose from the dead because he was Life itself? Not much, I’ve got to tell you! What is the point of believing it if it doesn’t change us?

I’m convinced it doesn’t change us because we have substituted ‘belief’ as relationship for cognitive belief. Let me explain. The Greek word for ‘belief’ or ‘believe’ is πιστευο (pisteuo). Its meaning is far more subtle than cognitive belief. It is, in effect, the thing that causes confidence. It is the trust that is established through relationship. Cognitive belief is only one, minor part of the meaning of pisteuo. So, when Jesus asks us to believe in him, what is he asking us? He is asking us to grow in trust through the establishment of a relationship! The bad news is that this is much more difficult than merely believing cognitively. The good news is that it makes a lot more sense.

Belief in Jesus is not forced, instantaneous, magical knowledge. Instead, it is a growing and dynamic relationship that leads to trust that Life itself is greater than death and that because of this, our lives have meaning, a destination, a purpose. When we make belief a determined delusion that we are forced to agree with or we go to hell, nothing changes. Nothing at all. God becomes mean and petty. God becomes silly and small.

But when we insist that belief is an ongoing relationship with the author of Life, we do indeed begin to change because we are no longer approaching life in fear, mired down in hierarchies of knowledge. We change and are changed because we are free to take the relationship we are growing into and apply it to the world. Only then will the true meaning of sacrifice take shape as justice and righteousness.

I hope this article helps those who are skeptical of rote belief. I think you’re right to be skeptical! But keep showing up! Seek that relationship with the God of Life. Growth cannot be far behind.