"Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me." ~ Matthew 25:45
I think this is one of the first scriptures I knew verbatim and internalized. It made sense to me, and still does, that serving the poor and needy is akin to serving God. It's one of the cornerstones of Christianity.
By the time I got to college I was somewhat grounded in science. Thus, I had a hard time reconciling the more "paranormal" parts of our religion. I was all there for the moral lessons, but I saw most of the miracles as primitive man's misunderstanding of the world. I wasn't sure what to do with the most pivotal moment of our religion though, namely the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
|Subject: American painting of Christ on the Road to Emmaus | Date: 1725-1730 | This image is available from the United States Library of Congress. |I connected the story with the verse from Matthew, and I reasoned that when they fed the hungry man it had been like they had fed Christ, and at that moment His teachings and Church had been resurrected.
When I put that together I felt as if I deserved a proper pipe for having unmasked Professor Moriarty. The problem is that I was wrong. I was trying to take God's power out of the Bible.
I've come to realize a critical part of believing in God is accepting that God's nature and power are beyond our understanding. I'll never be able to fully grasp how He can be His own son, or how a third of God can be killed and resurrected. It will never make logical rational sense to me, but that's OK.
I've come to realize that, at least for me, being Christian requires me to have faith in the facets of God which I can't understand. This Easter I'll take grateful joy in the fact that Jesus Christ died for my sins and rose again to show us that death is not the end.
