ANSWERS FOR SOPHIA ON THE CHURCH

An Ancient Byzantine Icon of Emperor Justinian (Shown as “David”) Giving an Answer, Guided by Holy Wisdom, “Sophia”, and the Spirit of Prophecy, “Pophetia.” May the Lord help us to be like Justinian, Guided into Truth by the Spirit of God to the Answering of All Questions. 

Dear Sophia, 

I am so happy to hear your questions and learn about your thought process regarding the Christian Faith. Your questions are all very good, and I think they need to be answered, one by one. Let’s see if I can answer in a way that is simple, biblical, and faithful to our Ancient Christian inheritance and Orthodox Faith. 

The question of the Resurrection of Christ is not a secondary or a merely “decorative” belief within Christianity. Instead, it stands at the very heart of our faith. When the Church proclaims, “Christ is risen,” it is not speaking poetically or symbolically, nor is it offering a psychological reassurance in the face of death. It is making a concrete and unsettling claim: that Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, truly died and was bodily raised from the dead by God. From the beginning, Christianity has insisted that if this did not happen in reality, then the entire faith collapses into illusion. As I said in my answer yesterday, if the bodily resurrection is false, we are “most miserable” as the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:19. 

The Gospel accounts themselves emphasize the physicality of this event in a way that resists romantic or mystical interpretation. The tomb is empty, not because the memory of Jesus survived, but because His body is no longer there. The risen Christ bears wounds that can be touched; He eats with His disciples; He speaks, walks, and is recognized… yet He is also transformed, no longer bound by decay or mortality. He sits, as a Man, in Heaven, at the right hand of God the Father. The Resurrection is not a return to ordinary life, but the beginning of a new mode of existence, a foretaste of what the Scriptures call the “new creation.”

Because of this, Christianity cannot honestly be reduced to a coping mechanism. Coping mechanisms tend to soften reality, dull pain, or offer escape. The Christian proclamation does the opposite. It begins not with triumph, but with a tortured and executed Messiah, a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” It spreads not by promising comfort, but by calling people to take up their cross. The Ancient Christians did not gain social advantage or emotional safety from their faith; they inherited persecution, exclusion, and often death. A religion built on a crucified and risen Lord does not anesthetize suffering, but confronts it head-on. 

The Resurrection does not remove suffering from human life, and it doesn't explain it away. Instead, it declares that suffering does not have the final word and isn’t the ultimate meaning of life. In the Orthodox understanding, the victory of Christ is not the elimination of pain, but the invasion of death itself, “conquering death by death.” By rising from the dead, Christ enters the darkest human reality and breaks it open from within. This is not optimism; it is our defiance grounded in hope, and the reason the Gospel of Christ is revolutionary and always new. 

Modern voices often demand that the Resurrection be proven “with science,” but this demand misunderstands both science and the Resurrection. Science investigates regular, repeatable processes within nature. The Resurrection is neither regular nor repeatable; it is a singular act of God, just as creation itself is singular. This does not make it irrational or anti-scientific. The begging of the world, it is something that cannot be proven in a laboratory because the conditions predicate these conditions, as the cause predicates the effect. It places these claims outside of the scope of laboratory verification. No experiment can measure meaning, love, justice, or moral responsibility, yet these realities shape every human life, and are ultimately “realer than real.” The Resurrection belongs to this deeper level of truth, where history, meaning, and divine action intersect.

Equally important is the question of God’s silence, especially when one reaches out in sincerity and feels unanswered. Scripture itself is filled with such cries. The Psalms are bleeding with longing and frustration. Job pleads into the void. Even our Lord Christ, on the Cross, takes the words of abandonment upon His own lips - “My God, My God, Why have You Forsaken Me!” Silence, in the biblical and patristic tradition, is not proof of absence. Often it is the space in which faith becomes realer than imagination, stripped of emotional reward and sustained by trust. In my own life, in the midst of such difficulty and pain that I’ve experienced, feeling abandoned by God, I cannot come to conclude that God doesn’t exist, but that He doesn’t give me what I want. 

It is striking that the Resurrection itself occurs in holy silence. No human witnesses see the moment when death is undone. There is no spectacle, no announcement, no triumphal display. The women arrive at the tomb expecting to find a corpse and finding only emptiness and absolute confusion. God’s greatest act is revealed not through noise, but through the absence of noise; the absence of death where it should have reigned; the absence of human ego where it would normally occur. This pattern should caution us against assuming that God’s presence must always be felt to be real. Sometimes, God is found in darkness and blackness, in the “thundering clouds” and the “staring abyss.” I see this more and more in my own life. 

For those who cannot attend the Church, whether because of family constraints or personal circumstances, the Orthodox tradition does not suggest that faith is suspended. The Church has always known seasons of exile, isolation, and waiting. Sometimes, this makes us stronger. Sts. Mary of Egypt and Simeon the Stylite are such faithful who were called into a wilderness, away from the constant attendance of Services. Faith begins not with perfect participation, but with honesty before God and sincere repentance. Reading the Gospels slowly, praying without pretense, even offering frustration and doubt, and these are not failures of faith, but its earliest movements. Of course, these cannot substitute for the Eucharist, but they help to prepare for it. 

Ultimately, the Resurrection speaks not only about Christ, but about the meaning of human life itself. It declares that bodies matter, that history matters, that suffering is neither ignored nor glorified, and that nothing endured in love is wasted. What you do with your body and in the life has huge consequences. Christ rises from the dead bearing wounds, not erasing them, or making himself beautiful by our worldly standards. Sometimes scars, tears, and continued emotional wounds aren’t taken away, because they become signs of God’s power and restoration in our lives. In this, God reveals a profound truth: what is redeemed is not the illusion of a painless life, but life itself, transfigured and made whole.

From an Ancient Orthodox perspective, our faith is not blind certainty or emotional reassurance. It is a loyal trust formed in the presence of unanswered questions, which, little by little, as we grow in holiness and wisdom, are rectified by purified vision. Doubt is not betrayal, silence is not rejection, and seeking is not failure. The Resurrection does not silence questions, instead, it gives them a horizon and a definition that challenges our core assumptions. It tells us that even when the way forward is unclear, death is not the end, and love is stronger than the grave.