Dear Saints,

Happy Easter!

Ludwig Wittgenstein once offered, “It is love that believes the resurrection.” I agree with him -- let me try to explain.

Wittgenstein is not saying that reason and logic serve no purpose in our commitment to the idea that Jesus rose bodily from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus is an historical fact of the highest certainty (check out N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God or Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ for the relevant arguments), and it can be known as such.

Wittgenstein, rather, is proposing that the heart - the very center of our being - needs to be saved, needs to respond to the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus. The heart is the place from which faith springs forth, the heart entrusts itself to the Beloved.

And the heart believes by loving!

My friends, the risen Jesus is the first part of God’s re-created world, set free from the disfiguring forces of sin and death. We enter this new world, we live into this new world, by LOVE. In light of his resurrection, we are invited to trust and follow Jesus. Both of these actions are informed by the mind, but they are movements of the heart and the whole self. And yes, they are fueled by LOVE!

Trusting and following Jesus, we persevere in the life of great and costly love to which we’ve been called. Love has conquered death, my friends. What can love not conquer in our hearts, our lives, and our world?

In the Peace of the Risen Christ,

Father Daniel

δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ