Wed 3/27/2024 8:25 AM

Tom Holland, the author of a recent book titled “Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Changed the World,” who himself is not a Christian, writes this:

“A myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound—as Tolkien, that devout Catholic, always argued—a myth can be true. To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it—the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe—that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.”

Some believe it; some, do not.  Friedrich Nietzsche declared, quite honestly, that it was utterly unbelievable to him: “God on a cross—preposterous!”  The gospel of Luke tells us the apostles were informed by Mary and the other women of the resurrection of Jesus, but that “these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”

The Easter story is not—it cannot be—a mere curiosity.  It is, in the end, a story that changed the world and gave birth to a civilization.  To our civilization.  Believe it or not—but the one response that is not available to us is to pretend that it doesn’t really matter.

Have a wonderful day.