Our Lord, Who is Alive

You may recall that last year I had some reflections on Morning Prayer at Trinity College's research conference. (If not, you can find that post here.) It is a beautiful practice, and I was once more struck by its deep rooting in the breadth of scripture.

But this year, what really got me was the end of the collect (pronounced COLL-ect), which is a concluding prayer near the end of the service, and one of the few statements in the entire service that is not directly from scripture. The collect differs day to day, but always ends, "through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever."

Here's the part that kept getting me: "Jesus...our Lord who is alive." I kept finding myself unable to keep from smiling as that was prayed. Jesus is alive! Jesus is alive, and that is no little point to make. These prayers are ancient. Most of them were translated by Thomas Cranmer during the Reformation out of the prayers of the Roman Catholic Church. These prayers were written at a time that almost no one (as far as I can tell) doubted the resurrection of Jesus. There were nearly no atheists. There was no theological liberalism as we conceive of it. To speak of "our Lord who is alive" would have been very nearly redundant.

But not now. Not today. That little piece of prayer that for centuries was unchallenged is now one of the most counter-cultural statements that you can make. Almost no one doubts that a man named Jesus existed. Almost no one, Muslims excepted, doubts that he was crucified by the Romans. But the question is, where is he now? Or more to the point, how is he feeling?

Our Lord Jesus is alive. There is no statement more central to our faith. Without it, you are in no way a Christian. Maybe the first writer of that prayer understood that the resurrection was of such importance that it that ought never to be assumed. I may not intend to take up the practice of Anglican daily prayer, but we could do a lot worse than to confess each day to ourselves, than to confess to each other and to our world, that Jesus is alive. And that is something to smile about.