Dear Bellefield Family,

When it migrated from Latin to French and finally to English, the word ‘romance’ didn’t have the sense of romantic love that it does today. The word simply meant a story or an adventure. This is how G.K. Chesterton uses it in his book Orthodoxy, where he says that there is “thrilling romance” to orthodoxy (i.e. Christianity).

We don’t tend to think about the Christian faith as being particularly adventurous. Christianity is often pictured as something buttoned-down, a bit stuffy, and conservative. Faith usually restricts possibilities, emphasizing the conventional. There is certainly something to this perception. The 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard regularly expressed his disdain for the conventional, herd-mentality Christianity of Danish society during his life.

One of the wonderful things about the gospels is that it shows us that this view of Christianity is almost completely false. In the four gospels, Jesus is so thoroughly unconventional that they involve masses of people simply trying to answer the question, “Who is this man?” Jesus explodes on the scene in Galilee, forcing people to consider things they never have before, to glimpse possibilities that they didn’t imagine, and see God’s hand in ways they never would have expected.

This is why iconoclasts and revolutionaries throughout history have loved Jesus. They see a kindred soul in his life and work. But just as the conventional, traditionalist view of Christianity fails to do justice to its full message, the iconoclasts and revolutionaries also fail to see Jesus for who he fully is. We are used to people ‘throwing away the rulebook’, or having the courage to think differently. But that’s not what Jesus does. Jesus doesn’t throw out the rulebook, he doubles-down on it. He says that the people who were the best at following the rulebook still haven’t been following it enough.

This is why people struggled so much to figure out who Jesus was. He wasn’t a revolutionary in the sense that anyone expected, nor was he a conventional religious leader. He was the great paradox, the ultimate revolutionary, the one who leaves us unable to complete the phrase, “He’s like…”

This is the adventure of faith that Chesterton was talking about. Some people are temperamentally conventional, others are natural iconoclasts, but Jesus draws us into something more exciting and more difficult: we are to follow the one who is unlike anyone else.

How can we do that? The answer, of course, is that we cannot. But what is impossible with man is possible with God, and that is why we celebrate on Easter. The salvation that Jesus achieves for us through his death and resurrection now draws us into the adventure of faith through our union with Jesus.

Is Christianity a thrilling adventure to you? There is a danger to the familiarity of Easter that we treat it (and Jesus) as something conventional and easily grasped. I’d invite you to take time this season, through worship and personal study, to re-encounter Jesus and the romance of faith that he invites us into.

In Christ,

Greg Burdette