Raised to Love

A meditation for Lent 2004

If we are honest about it, we have a problem with how we as a community of faith celebrate Easter. We have too often, and for too long, let the advent of Spring become the focus of the central event in the Christian Year. Lilies and orchid corsages, bunnies and candy eggs somehow miss the mark and may distract us from a joyous celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Of course, some folks welcome the distraction. Not able to get their minds around the affirmation that God raised Jesus from death to life, they would rather not talk about it, or they argue for or against such divine intervention in our human history.

We are invited, as we struggle with this truth, to consider the belief that we have both a spiritual and a physical nature, and to remember the invitation to faith is an invitation to “let Christ live in you.”

As we share in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection we come to know the life God wills for us. This sharing, I believe, is a matter of loving and being loved. We need to hear that God loves us and to know our love for God and each other follows from the abiding love of God which we meet in Jesus Christ, crucified and raised to reign in power.

God’s love is the power of the resurrection. More power to you!

Raised To Love

Come with me to an understanding of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and I will show you a new creation.

If I speak of life and death with the wisdom of theologians or take flight with the poets’ winged words, but I speak without love, I place no lasting beacon against the darkness, and I labor alone on life’s shore.

And if I preach prophetically and claim to understand the mystery of “He is risen!” and if I know the Easter story word for word and profess faith in a rolling stone and an empty tomb, but lack love, I am nothing.

If I give up my lingering doubts and sacrifice my reason to say, “I believe,” but do so without accepting God’s love, I gain no true peace with God.

Love, looking for answers, searches for truth patiently; is kind toward skeptics who wrestle with the irrational; pursues understanding, without envy for a simpler faith. Love is not overbearing, but affirms its claim to be at the heart of God’s work in us and for us.

Love, eager to demonstrate the power of the resurrection, still does not resort to power plays; is not party to misguided dogma, but finds joy in doing the truth.

Love, breaking out of the tomb, raising Jesus from death to life, is able to bear with disbelief; believes joy will overcome it; hopes in God’s love for the world. Love outlasts mere determination.

Love, made visible in the graveyard of this world, never leaves us.

But as for the desire for proof and the need for evidence, that will end; as for voices from beyond, they will cease; as for putting our hands on the risen Christ’s wounds, we will be blessed in believing without seeing!

For such knowledge is at best, partial, and the evidence, insufficient; but when Christ appears and stands before us in glory, and we see him with eyes of faith, our need for proof will vanish.

When, as a new disciple, I came to know the Christ of faith, I spoke of him as the Son of the living God; I thought of him as my teacher and healer; I reasoned with disciples of old that he would never suffer and die; but when I had come to experience God’s love to the death, I gave up speaking, and thinking and reasoning about God, and was open to living in the love of God.

For now we see God’s glory - reflected in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but in time we shall come face to face with that glory and know and love God fully, even as we have been fully known and loved.

And now there remain for us these three: faith in the resurrection to the life we share with Christ; hope for a spiritual body like his; and love that waits by the seashore. And the greatest of these is love, the love of the One who greets us with the dawn and who invites us to break the fast.

Accept and come to life with love.

(Permission is given to reproduce, with source acknowledged.)
From Love’s Letters: A Poetic Book of Confessions by George Gunn
(Library Lane Press / Copyright 2001)