He is RISEN! He is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!

Easter was, Pascha is. The truth endures, because the truth is found in the eternal God-man: Jesus. How do I know? I found Jesus at the altar, knew Jesus through childhood prayers, and read His words of life in the Bible.

As a boy I recall the first Easter where I had chosen to follow Jesus. Dad and Mom surprised me with a Bible in my Easter basket  that I still own forty-seven years later. When I sit with Mom and Dad at Easter service with that Bible, The truth endures.

I found Jesus by calling out to Him and then experiencing Him in prayer and as I read Scripture. His voice and body were visible to me in worship in the small churches in West Virginia and later larger congregations in Upstate New York. Jesus is and one can experience Him. Of course, if someone were to question that experience, since we can misunderstand people when they speak to us or even if they are speaking, reason, theology, and philosophy come to our aid. I certainly did, messed up terribly, and wandered away from home.

Jesus kept being and so was there even when I did not wish Him to be. His truth endured.

All over the world billions of Christians celebrated the fact: Jesus is alive. Best of all, Jesus is coming again to bring the City of God to Earth. We will live in the paradise of God where every is is what ought to be. Over eternity, every gratuitous pain will be healed by the patient action of love. Free will is honored, but God does what only God can do and will bring good from bad.

King Jesus is the once and future King: He ascended to let history keep working out and to allow the Holy Spirit to come. We are able to relate to God through the indwelling of His Holy Spirit. We can become like God, because God inhabits our very being. Humankind can enter a new family. The entire project of Creation has the operating system, once corrupted, slowly transformed by God’s Holy Spirit.

The news is fundamentally good, always good, just as it was when I first read it in that Bible I got with the green cover in 1973. Christianity is rational and a person might believe it to be true for that very reason, but that would not make a person a Christian. Jesus is a person and knowing about a person, while something love desires, is not knowing and loving the person. I cannot love my dear wife Hope by merely knowing facts about her, asserting she loves me, and believing in her existence. Instead, most fundamentally, I wait on her to speak and instruct me how best to love her. So it is with Jesus who is knowable, but only if I listen, especially to what He would say to me through the pages of Sacred Scripture and in the mysteries of the Divine Liturgy.

That’s why we can live in hope, though we yet only see by faith, empowered by love.

Christ is Risen!

He is risen indeed!

Alleluia!