Why Easter is So Great

What makes a superhero great?  There are super powers, strong character traits, and origin stories for most superheroes, but these are not really what determine how great a superhero is.  Super-villains have super powers, strong character traits, and origin stories as well, but they are villains.  In fact, the difference between hero and villain is usually quite dualistic in most stories as it seems to matter only whose side one is on.  The question, however, is about greatness.  Super-villains could be great, but they are never called that (unless “great” is used as another word for “cool”), and there is one reason for this:  They never win.  Only superheroes win and only superheroes are great.  Each superhero is roughly as great as his deeds and the enemy he is able to overcome.  Beowulf is a great hero because he slew two fiends and a dragon.  James Bond is a great hero because he outwitted several evil masterminds and saved the world (i.e. the world‘s status quo).  Superman is a great hero because he defeated incredibly powerful enemies and saved the world from annihilation.  Among these examples, considering their stories alone, Superman is clearly the greatest.  If Superman, with all his powers, was never able to defeat any of his enemies, he would not be so great at all.

Beowulf vs Grendel

Iron Man vs Dr. Doom
(Super-battles have gotten flashier, it seems, but the struggle remains the same)

Let us consider a real live person; Jesus Christ, the God-man.  Being the Word of God, He created the universe.  This is indeed a mighty feat, but creation involved no enemy and no resistance.  As the Word-made-flesh, resistance began before He was even born.  From Herod’s preemptive threat of infanticide to the everyday work of carpentry, Jesus met problem after problem.  Yet everything the world saw Him do was no different from what men did before him.  His miracles were certainly incredible and He amassed an impressive following, but then one very problematic thing happened.  He died.  How could the Son of God die?  Why would He die?

There are two ways of understanding the fall of man and his salvation.  The first way is that, when the very first man committed the first sin, he offended God who is supremely good.  This offense incurred a supreme penalty.  There was no way any man could ever make up for what he had done.  The penalty of sin is death and we went on dying, always paying for our sin without actually paying it off.  When God himself became a man, he was sinless and so did not have to pay the penalty.  He paid it anyway, and died.  It was then that our debt was finally paid and we were freed.

The second way of understanding is that, when the first man committed the first sin, he gave himself up to the power of Satan.  We rejected God and made the Devil our master, and he is a cruel master indeed.  Man was not created to die, but death and decay are unavoidable when the creature is separated from his Creator.  God became a man so that he would be able to die.  He gave Himself up as a ransom for us.  When God the Creator suffered death, the power of death was broken.

Yet Jesus Christ’s death by itself was not enough to change our fate and reverse our corruption.  The story of man is pathetic:  Every man lives a brief life and then dies.  There is nothing he can do about it:  When death comes, his time is done.  If God had come down to earth as a man, lived a short life, and just died, then our story would be even more pathetic.  But even though He is a man, He is also God, and being the Eternal Creator, death did not last for Him.  On the third day, when the whole world had never been more dismal, Christ rose as a man more glorious than man had ever been.  Death was changed and life was given a new meaning.  Jesus Christ changed us:  Death does not mean the end anymore.  We will live on forever, body and soul.

Christ’s enemy was death itself.  His problem was man’s slavery.  No man could have imagined how death might be overcome, let alone think it even possible.  The answer for Jews was to work around death; to mark one’s grave, to be remembered, and to have plenty of children to carry on the name.  But God is great.  He destroyed death.  Life was an absurdity under the threat of death but He turned the threat of death into an absurdity.  The greatness of Jesus Christ surpasses even human imagination.  A greater hero cannot be thought.

Jesus Christ trampling Death and lifting Adam and Eve from their prison

Belief in the Resurrection implies other beliefs as well:

·         Jesus was completely human; else He would not really have died or risen. 

·         Jesus was completely God; else He could not have risen (not even angels can raise the dead) and if Jesus was merely human and God raised Him, then His resurrection would not have been any more special than Lazarus’.

·         We deserve to die.

·         Death is bad; else Christ’s victory over it would not have been that great.

·         Death is not that bad anymore because it will not last forever.

·         Our bodies are good; else God would not have cared about saving them.

·         The things our bodies are designed to do (like eating, drinking, and dancing) are good.

·         If there is any such thing as good news, Easter is good news, and everyone should hear it.

Choosing Faith

I read something written by (presumably) an atheist the other day.  It read, "You don't choose to have faith.  You either believe something or you don't." 

This strikes me as literally weak-minded; as if the mind is purely passive.

When we are presented with some information, our mind does things with that information.  We think about it. We weigh it against other information we have previously received.  We then choose to accept the information as true or, else, we reject it as false (though perhaps choosing to remember the information since it often implies something about whence we obtained it). 

For instance, suppose one knows almost nothing about cosmology, astronomy, or physics.  Suppose then that he is presented with a striking proposition; the earth is a sphere.  Because he walks on level ground and sees the sun rise and set beyond a straight horizon, this comes as a challenge to what he has already assumed about the world.  Perhaps he hadn't decided to believe that the earth is flat, but merely took for granted that it was flat because it had always seemed obvious to him.  Now that he is confronted with this alternative belief, however, he must make a choice.  There is, for him, no definitive proof that the earth is either flat or spherical.  He might hear arguments from those who believe it flat and from those who believe it spherical; both of which make sense to him, yet neither offering absolute certainty.  A sailor says to him, “I see the mast before the ship,” while an astrologist says to him, “the stars spin above us in a circle.”  He himself has charted neither sea nor stars, but only understands as much as he can reason from the explanations of others.  The man does not accept the new theory as fact upon first hearing it.  He scoffs at first.  Then he wonders.  Then he listens to the arguments.  He weighs it against what he has learned and tries to imagine a universe different from what he had first imagined.  He is no fool, but neither is he stubborn.  He wants to know the truth about the world.  But alas, there is no way to be sure.  He makes a choice and deems himself a member of the newly educated few who now possess the extraordinary “knowledge” that the earth is a sphere (and a lot of good that will do him, too). 

This is no easy choice, however.  A few days pass and he finds himself listening to his neighbor complain about the heretics who claim that the world is an orb which revolves about the sun.  “I am no heretic,” he thinks.  He discards the belief which he so willingly accepted just days earlier.  Given a few more days, he glances into a shop and sees a series of maps, all of which are divided into oval segments, as if peeled from an apple.  “If such maps did not work, no sailor would return from sea.  Of course the earth is a sphere,” he reformulates.  Such a pattern might take place in his mind indefinitely.  Most often, however, it is important to note that there might not be any additional information which sways his mind to a particular belief.  It is usually only an impression or influence which causes him to decide that one proposition is better to believe than another.  Most often, if he is thoughtful, the impression might come from his own meditation.

The fact that one is moved to believe a proposition true by virtue of his own meditation is most especially important when belief in the proposition would effectively influence his action in everyday life.  The shape of the world, interestingly enough, does not usually affect how one conducts himself.  If one were faced with the proposition, “there is gold in Yukon Territory,” however, he must do some nimble thinking before acting on that knowledge.  Who gives him this information bears weight on his belief, plus the content and nature of the story he hears from the teller.  If a ragged and poor man claims to have returned from a gold-infested Yukon Territory, one might not be ready to believe it.  A government-appointed surveyor posting an official notice in the newspaper is more likely to be believed, however.  So there is gold.  How much gold?  That one person found gold does not guarantee that everyone who ventures into the wilderness will find it.  One who finds gold does not necessarily return home with every ounce.  Thus goes the usual thought process until one comes to a decision.  In this case, the decision is not a simple “true or false” judgment, as was the case concerning the shape of the earth.  When one decides to believe not only that “there is gold in Yukon Territory” but also “I will find gold in Yukon Territory” and “I will bring home the gold that I find,” the decision is almost a moral one.  The truth implies a course of action.  In this case, though, there is no way to determine that the propositions are true unless action is taken.  One must make the provisional choice to believe before the belief is verified.  If one chooses to believe that he will come home with gold, he will leave his home town behind and travel into the wilderness.  If he believes that he will likely die of starvation, hypothermia, disease, or wild animals before ever finding gold, or that, if he does find gold, he will likely die on the way back or fall prey to robbers, he will not leave home and travel into the wilderness.

It is often stated that belief is based not on certainty but on probability.  In this case, however, there is no probability.  The man who hears the news, “there is gold in Yukon Territory,” never met a man who traveled there.  There are no statistics in the paper and his only impetus amounts to a mixture of greed, hope, courage, and imagination.

This is not meant to be a nuanced reworking of Pascal’s “wager”.  Rather, both the first and second instances are meant to show that information and outside influence alone are not enough to move one to belief; subconscious or otherwise.  Faith, or properly speaking, ‘religious belief’, is a choice which one makes consciously in response to the circumstances in which one finds himself.  We are all presented with a very limited amount of information, most of which is obtained second-hand, while first-hand experience remains easily doubted (on account of the influence of modern philosophy).  All of the information we receive is either inconsequential to the manner in which we live or it is speculative, presuming that a consequence will happen.  To deny that the mind has the power to decided one proposition true and another false is to deny the existence of morality altogether:  Our actions depend on our beliefs; yet our belief itself is an action.  Information does nothing by itself.  We decided what to do with it.