| "Is Jesus Christ alive or is Jesus Christ dead?" Those were the opening words of an essay one of my students wrote in response to the book Living Jesus by Luke Johnson. I have to admit that Steve’s opening line grabbed my attention - I had to read it a couple of times to be sure I had it right. Is Jesus alive or is He dead?
Well, of course, we know He is alive? Isn’t He? We’ve just celebrated the Resurrection! What other answer could there be? Yet Steve’s stating the question was provocative, the kind of question that makes one think.
Absolutely, the faith of the Church, the teaching of the Gospel is that Jesus lives, that He is alive here and now. He died on the Cross--but was raised up and glorified, as we celebrate today.
But the fact is that many people, even "good" Christians, treat Jesus as if He were dead. Indeed, many seem unaware that Christ is God. Jesus is remembered as a figure from the past, an historical figure, a prophet, a great teacher, a model of how to live, someone to be respected, even to be loved, but… Much of the study and research and writing about "the historical Jesus" in the last quarter century imply that it is Jesus as he WAS, from birth to death, who is important, somehow downplaying the "post-Easter Jesus (as one author put it), suggesting that the "Christ of Faith" is less real or less relevant, somehow disconnected to the "Jesus of History".
Let me assure you: we do not gather here to remember a dead philosopher. We do not worship a great teacher who lived and died almost two thousand years ago. Christ is not simply one great man among others - a Socrates, or Buddha or Confucius or Muhammad - who taught folks how to live. Jesus Christ is the living God, the Word made Flesh who lives forever. He is definitely alive and that makes all the difference in the world.
The event of the Ascension of the Lord underscores this. Jesus indeed lived "in time"; He was crucified and died "in time". He was raised - and experienced alive by those earliest Christians - but He did not die again, but was ascended to the realm of God where He is living and in relationship to us still - and always. He is free of the limitations of time and space, free to be alive and present to us. Really! Now!
We - if we are Christians - live in relationship to Jesus Christ; we pray to Him, we worship Him, we gather here to encounter Him truly, in His Word, in the Eucharist, in the shared faith of this assembly. Christ communicates to us, teaches us, touches us, fills us -not as a fond but distant memory from the past, but as the Living God who loves us now, whose love is never ending.
And that, by the way, is Steve’s answer to the question he raised in his essay. "Is Jesus Christ alive or is He dead?" Absolutely alive. And I add: we meet Him here!
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