"The kingdom of God is at hand," Jesus announced at the beginning of his public ministry, "repent and believe in the gospel."  Though Jesus made many remarkable and controversial assertions, this one perhaps grounds them all.  Jesus is saying that something bigger than this world has irrupted into this world, that the pervasive materiality of this cosmos has been interrupted and transformed by an even more pervasive eternality in which it is comprised and from which it draws its meaning.
     Surely one of the biggest obstacles to religious faith is deciding to acknowledge that what is not of this world can (and has) enter(ed) it--and changed it.  Although Jesus' Jewish audience was acutely aware of the implications of what he was saying, that in him, Jesus, God's rule had broken into earthly space and time, we moderns, schooled as we are in the improbablity of a spiritual presence in our reality, are not.  We are not inherently convinced that the divine can irrupt into the temporal.
     And why should we be?  Perhaps the better question is, however, why should we not be?  If the divine has never come to earth, if the divine has never entered into our experience, if the divine has never shown its face to us, where does this leave us?  We're living and dying on a planet that is in turn living and dying in a galaxy and universe that are in turn living and dying:  life and death, life and death, yet in the end only death remains.
     But we all know that we, we who are transcendent and personal and moral beings, would wish it to be otherwise.  We resolve to be brave, we resolve to be rational, but ultimately we know that we must do the most rational--and bravest--thing:  believe.