Reciting the Apostles' Creed every Sunday may seem like a rote and mindless recitation to some, but every time I repeat it I am inevitably brought back to the central and foundational truths of my life. Like a divine GPS rooted in the Holy Scriptures, it is a guide that unerringly points me towards home. I've written before about this ancient statement of faith, and it's time to return to it and attempt to plumb some of its depths.
The central (and lengthiest) part of the Creed is about Jesus Christ, because he is the focal point of the Gospel and of all God does in this world. Strangely, the Creed says much about his birth and death, but almost nothing about his life and ministry, which should tell us something about our faith's priorities. People who admire Jesus only as a good teacher or moral example completely miss the whole point of the Gospel. We may admire him for his teaching, respect him for his miracles, but we worship him because he was born a tiny baby to become the man who would die for the sins of the world.
"On the third day, he rose again from the dead..." So goes the Creed. And here we must stop for a moment. St. Paul says of the resurrection that "if Jesus be not raised, our faith is empty and we are still in our sins." (1 Corinthians 15:17). Without the resurrection, Jesus was just another ordinary Jew who got caught in the crosshairs of Roman oppression, a martyr perhaps, but not a Savior. It is the resurrection that makes Good Friday good, turning what looked like utter defeat into total victory.
"But," you say, "I don't feel any different." That line of thinking occasionally bothers me, too. I am not a particularly emotional man. I watch people who get all worked up over their relationship with Jesus. Some of them get excited, jumping and dancing all around. Others tear up, nearly overcome by the love of God. I raise my hands in worship, but not necessarily because I FEEL the presence of the Holy Spirit, but because it is one way of offering myself fully to God. I often wish I could feel his presence more deeply and more often, but either something inside me is broken, or it's just not the way I'm wired.
But the Creed doesn't say, "I feel...that on the third day he rose again from the dead." It says, "I believe" it. There are a lot of things I feel in life, but I've learned that often those feelings are deceiving. I've remember feeling that things were going just fine at Park church...just before the whole enterprise nearly imploded through the actions of some people I considered good friends. My feelings weren't very trustworthy then, and aren't much more reliable now.
But my beliefs are another thing altogether. I believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. There is plenty of Biblical evidence for it, and plenty of logic behind it. But I cannot prove it, any more than I can prove that Aristotle or Plato actually lived. It is our faith in the resurrection of Christ that gives us hope that we too, will someday rise again to a life more full and free than anything we have ever known here on earth. Jesus himself promised it: "Because I live, you shall live also." (John 14:19). I believe in Jesus' resurrection, and am grateful tonight for the promise inherent with that belief, that there is more, much more than we have yet seen. In my book, that's not a bad way to end this year and begin the next.
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