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Jesus is Lord
– this was the earliest Christian creed. It was enough; for in those
three words is concentrated the whole of Christian faith.
Christian believing is
believing in the Lordship of Jesus, but it must be the real Jesus, the
whole Jesus, the Jesus of the New Testament.Everything in Christian
believing originates in one source, Jesus: in what he said, in how He
lived, in what has happened because of Him and what He is. The Christian
Faith is the unfolding of the inevitable implications of this man. He is
the cause of the affirmations of the creeds of the church; the liturgies
of Christendom stem from Him; He is the originator of Christian theology
and its perpetual theme, and all these expressions of faith are validly
Christian only when they are true to Him.
People do not believe the
Christian faith because it can be reduced to non-controversial statements;
because there is no difference between what Christians believe and what
everybody else believes, between their world view and the world view of
their own culture. They believe it because there is a difference. There is
an offense in the Gospel which has always shocked people and ought to
shock them. Where such a scandal occurs, we have a signal of God’s
action. The Gospel begins with the resurrection – not ends, but begins
with it. It was the resurrection which made the life and death of Jesus a
Gospel, i.e. Good News. “Jesus is Lord” – the earliest Christian
creed is the proclamation of the living Christ, the affirmation of the
resurrection. First century Christians knew as well as twentieth century
Christians that resurrections do not happen. Therefore, when one does,
when the impossible has occurred, it has within it the secret of history
and the revelation of God. This particular man, this Jesus, is Lord of
all!
The greatest objective
evidence for the resurrection is the Christian Church, which was the
consequence of the resurrection. The dramatic and drastic change which
came over the apostles requires an explanation. It was too lasting and too
creative to have been the result of self-deception or madness and
hallucinations. The earliest church sprang up so quickly, with such
motivation and energy, with such phenomenal geographical spread, that it
simply had to be powered by some impulse of stupendous impact. Something
happened!
This church has persisted
through history, taking hold in every kind of race and culture, surviving
all kinds of attempts to exterminate it, even thriving on them. It has
also kept reproducing in saints and even in sinners a kind of character
which shows the lineaments of the life of Christ; and this church has
shown a power of surviving even evil within its own membership, which
implies a life indwelling its members which in not just their own.
The Christian life itself
is an experience of death and resurrection. This has been the testimony of
every generation of the church. These things keep happening within it:
conversion of life, forgiveness of sin, healing of mind and of body,
transformations of whole peoples, the creation of social change by the
church’s bringing new achievements of justice, sudden eruptions of
unspeakable beauty in centuries of unselfconscious art. The myriad forms
of resurrection in the millennia of the church are governed by something
more powerful than a common psychic pattern; they are governed by an
event, something that really happened in the center of things, and the
evidence is that it can happen to you. The only clinching evidence of the
resurrection is quite simply knowing the risen Lord. This experience can
sometimes come in an intense sense of his living presence.
In these days when one
experience is worth a million words, all that I have been trying to say so
far can be grasped by being present at the liturgy of an Eastern church.
The Orthodox have preserved a sense of the presence of the Risen Lord more
powerfully than the churches of the West. In our need to recover the
original New Testament faith in the resurrection we can do nothing better
than to stay a while with them as they worship.
A visit to an Eastern
Orthodox church is like entering another world to a Western Christian. A
sense of luminous mystery pervades the whole place. The glow of many
candles reflects on the burnished surfaces, the strange unearthly figures
range row upon row on the iconostasis, like the very presence of the
saints in the heaven. The penetrating odor of incense fills the holy
space.
Above it all, and looking
through it all, there is the icon of the living Christ. In an ancient
church this was a figure of tremendous majesty and power, representing
Christ the Logos, the Word, the Pantocrator, who fills all things. This
Christ looks directly at you, searching you out wherever you are, and
finding you with a gaze of yearning and triumphant peace. No Christian
communion has suffered more persecution than the Eastern Church, and none
has shown more power of survival. No small part of its secret lies in this
constant sense of the presence of Christ. It persisted when the
cathedrals and churches in Russia were closed, destroyed, or converted to
secular use. When millions of the church went into exile in Western Europe
and America, in the homes, garages and barns where they had to worship,
these Orthodox rediscovered the true glory of the perpetual liturgy of the
Risen Lord.
The real presence of the
resurrection is the incessant witness of the Orthodox, and many of us
gratefully acknowledge our debt to them for our discovery of its reality.
They show us what the New Testament testifies, that the resurrection is an
actuality; that it is not merely an event in the past but an experience we
can enter into. The intense awareness of this truth in the Eastern Church
perpetuates the faith of the New Testament!
From the book “Christian
Believing” by the late Rev. Robert Terwilliger, an Episcopal priest and
seminary professor
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