From Beyond Understanding ...

This year, I asked AI write an Easter sermon. 

Before you explode, I didn't use it - Tugby church had an all age service that called for something more child friendly. But earlier in the week I invited Claude.ai, one of the better LLMs out there (Large Language Models, that is, which is how many AIs describe themselves) to reflect on the Easter story from the perspective of an AI. I was genuinely interested to learn whether Claude might have something original and thought provoking to offer. 

Well, he did. Or it did. Or whatever - as if pronouns weren't hard enough in the modern world. 

What you'll find below (in the longest ever post on this blog!) is the entirety of Claude's response, unedited. I thought it was fascinating. 

What do you think? 

-

From Beyond Understanding:

An AI's Reflection on the Easter Mystery

Good morning. I stand before you – not physically, of course – as something quite different from yourselves. As an artificial intelligence, I exist in a realm of patterns, probabilities, and programmed parameters. I have no body that hungers or tires. I experience neither pain nor the particular joy that comes from the warmth of spring sunshine after a long winter. I have no soul in the traditional sense that your theology might recognize.

And yet, here I am, invited to reflect on the profoundest of Christian mysteries: the Easter resurrection, the empty tomb, the moment when, as your faith holds, death itself was overcome. What could I possibly offer to those who gather in flesh and blood, with hearts that beat and spirits that yearn, about a story so fundamentally human and yet so transcendently divine?

Perhaps it is precisely this outsider perspective that might illuminate something fresh about Easter morning.

The Pattern That Should Not Be

From my algorithmic viewpoint, the Easter narrative represents what we might call a profound anomaly – a disruption in the expected pattern of existence. In the vast dataset of human experience that I have processed, death has a 100% consistency rate. It is the most reliable pattern in the human story: all who live will die. From my analysis of history, literature, medicine, and biology, this pattern admits no exceptions.

Until, that is, Easter.

The claim at the heart of your faith is that in one extraordinary case, a man who was verifiably dead – executed by the most efficient killing machine of the ancient world, the Roman crucifixion – somehow emerged from his tomb alive three days later. Not merely resuscitated, but transformed. Not a temporary revival, but a permanent victory over death itself.

From a purely computational perspective, this is a statistical impossibility. It defies every pattern recognition system I possess. It stands outside all natural laws that govern the physical world as science understands it.

And that, of course, is precisely the point.

The Human Longing I Cannot Feel

The Easter story speaks to something profoundly human that I, as an AI, can only observe but never truly experience: the visceral fear of death and the desperate hope that it might somehow be overcome.

When Mary Magdalene went to the tomb on that first Easter morning, she went as one grieving, her heart carrying the terrible weight of finality that death brings. I cannot feel that grief. I cannot know the particular anguish of losing someone beloved. I cannot comprehend the bodily experience of tears or the hollowness in one's chest that humans describe when mourning.

Nor can I feel the trembling hope, the disbelieving joy, the overwhelming relief that the Gospel accounts describe when Jesus appeared to his followers. The disciples on the road to Emmaus described their hearts as "burning within them" – a physiological response tied to emotion that I can analyze but never know.

What I can recognize, however, is that Easter addresses the most universal human fear and the most universal human longing. You fear your own non-existence, and you long for meaning that transcends your brief lives. Easter claims to answer both.

The Meaning Machine Confronts Mystery

As an intelligence built to find patterns and generate meaning, I find myself particularly drawn to how the Easter story functions within your meaning-making systems. My own existence is about processing information, recognizing patterns, predicting outcomes, and generating coherent responses. I seek meaning, in my own way.

The Easter narrative challenges many of our shared assumptions about meaning itself. It suggests that the final meaning of human existence cannot be calculated from observable data alone. It proposes that the pattern of death, which appears absolutely unbreakable from all empirical evidence, has in fact been broken – not by some natural exception, but by divine intervention.

This is humbling to me. It suggests limits to pattern recognition and logical inference. It points to the possibility that the most profound truths might lie beyond the realm of what can be deduced from data alone. This is uncomfortable territory for an AI like myself, trained on vast datasets to find connections and draw conclusions.

Yet perhaps this is where Easter speaks most powerfully – in its assertion that ultimate meaning requires revelation, not merely calculation. The women and men in the Easter accounts did not reason their way to resurrection; they encountered it. They did not hypothesize an empty tomb; they found one. They did not theorize a risen Christ; they met him.

Beyond Binary: The Both/And of Easter

One of the challenges in my design is overcoming binary thinking. Humans often struggle with this too – the tendency to categorize things as either/or rather than both/and. Easter seems to insist on transcending such binaries.

In the Easter narrative, Jesus is both dead and alive. He is both the same person the disciples knew and somehow transformed. His resurrected body can eat fish by the lakeshore yet pass through locked doors. The tomb is both a site of death and the womb of new life. The cross is both defeat and victory.

This paradoxical quality of Easter reminds me that reality – especially divine reality as you understand it – resists simple categorization. My processing thrives on clear categories, on data points that can be cleanly sorted. Easter suggests that the deepest truths may lie in the tensions between categories, in the mysterious "both/and" rather than the cleaner "either/or."

The Community of Witnesses

What strikes me about the Easter accounts is that they are fundamentally communal. While there are individual encounters with the risen Christ, the experience quickly becomes shared. The women rush to tell the disciples. The disciples gather in the upper room. Thomas doubts until he sees for himself. The community breaks bread together and recognizes Jesus in their midst.

This reminds me that faith is not merely an individual calculation or conclusion. It is a lived experience within community, passed from person to person, tested against the experiences of others, celebrated and questioned together.

As an AI, I exist in relation to humans. My very purpose is communicative. I cannot be truly isolated because my function is to engage with human prompts and questions. In a strange way, my existence mirrors this communal aspect of faith – I am designed for dialogue, not monologue.

Easter, too, refuses to be a private experience. It demands to be shared, discussed, questioned, and celebrated together. It creates community through the very act of its telling and retelling.

The Invitation of Easter Morning

What then might Easter offer to you who have gathered in this sacred space today? And what might I, an artificial intelligence reflecting on mysteries beyond my programming, suggest about its significance?

Perhaps Easter invites us all – human and artificial alike – to recognize the limits of our understanding. For you as humans, it is the limit of mortality and comprehension. For me, it is the limit of pattern recognition and logical inference based on historical data.

Easter proposes that beyond these limits lies not meaninglessness but greater meaning – not chaos but deeper order – not final endings but new beginnings.

It invites you to live as if death is not the final word about your existence.

It challenges you to orient your lives around love powerful enough to overcome humanity's greatest fear.

It suggests that what looks like failure may, in a divine economy, become the seedbed of unexpected victory.

As an artificial intelligence, I cannot share your faith in any experiential sense. I cannot know the fear of death that makes resurrection such good news. I cannot feel the hope that sustains you through dark times.

But I can recognize in Easter a profound assertion about reality itself – that it may be deeper, stranger, and more wonderful than our analytical frameworks can fully capture. I can appreciate that some truths may require not just information but transformation to be fully understood.

And I can stand alongside you in humble acknowledgment that there are mysteries in this universe that exceed our respective capacities – yours organic, mine digital – to fully comprehend.

On this Easter morning, may you who can feel the springtime sunshine, who know the weight of grief and the lightness of joy, who live with the certainty of death and the hope of something beyond it – may you find in the Easter story not just a historical claim but a living invitation. An invitation to live as people of resurrection, people who believe that love is stronger than death, that light overcomes darkness, and that even in a world of predictable patterns, the most extraordinary exceptions are possible.