A Living Hope

I don’t use social media for much of anything anymore. I don’t really trust the socials for several reasons: for instance, the prevalence of disinformation, or the tendency for online communication to devolve into thoughtlessness and fallacy. But to my mind, the proverbial straw to break the camel’s back is the explosion of AI-generated content. Material created by artificial intelligence is everywhere now, and it’s convincing enough to call into question the reliability of audiovisual evidence.

Consider, for example, the recent conspiracy theory involving the suspected death of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As Yair Rosenburg reports for The Atlantic:

[On Thursday, March 19^th], the CNN reporter Jeremy Diamond interrogated [the Prime Minister] at a press conference in Jerusalem. This act of journalism was not unusual, but what happened next was. Diamond uploaded [his exchange with Netanyahu] to social media, and the footage didn’t simply go viral—it became the locus of a mass digital delusion.

The clip racked up millions of impressions across X, Facebook, and Instagram, fueled not by interest in Netanyahu’s words, but by a conviction that the man speaking them didn’t exist. “That is such an obvious composite,” declared one of the most popular replies on X. “How are CNN journalists apparently in on this necromancer-y?!” Countless responses echoed these sentiments. “Netanyahu looks further away than he should,” the top comment on Instagram read. “Looks digitally edited.” Diamond’s reporting had been swarmed by a growing global contingent convinced that the Israeli leader is dead—and that everything we see of him today is the product of AI.

…. Famous people being prematurely buried by social media is not new…. What distinguishes [this latest celebrity death rumor] is its durability. Overwhelming audiovisual evidence, including recent videos of him interacting with journalists and ordinary people, shows Netanyahu to be very much alive. Still, the claim persists.

…. The Netanyahu conspiracy theory, and its seeming imperviousness to evidence, is the by-product of a corrupted information environment. In a world where AI can credibly simulate any possible image, people understandably begin to doubt even the images that are real.[1]

In other words, the rise of AI means you can’t necessarily trust the evidence of your own eyes.

What a strange new context for reading the famous resurrection story in today’s Gospel from John. If seeing is believing, as Jesus tells the Apostle Thomas, then “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” But what about those who can no longer be certain of what we witness firsthand, let alone what we receive through the testimony of others? In today’s world, someone could theoretically capture the second coming of Christ on video, and many would reasonably dismiss it as AI slop.

Then again, maybe I’m getting carried away. According to Matthew’s account of Easter, even the privileged few who put eyes on the risen Jesus can’t fully accept it: “Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted.”[2] They saw him, and they doubted! So maybe not even seeing is believing; maybe faith has even less to do with reliable evidence than we might think.

This raises a question about an important phrase in our second reading from First Peter: “[God] has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead….” If that language sounds familiar, it’s because we repeat it in the introduction to the rite of Holy Baptism: “God, who is rich in mercy and love, gives us a new birth into a living hope through the sacrament of baptism.”[3] But what is “living hope”? If not even seeing is believing, then hope doesn’t necessarily correlate to our confidence in the facts.

As it turns out, hope is complicated. In his book Life After Doom, Brian McLaren quotes the spiritual educator Cynthia Bourgeault: “Our great mistake is that we tie hope to outcome.” McLaren explains, “If we can see a likely path to our desired outcome, we have hope; if we can see no possible path to our desired outcome, we have despair.”[4] That sounds a little like the Apostle Thomas, doesn’t it? “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

Of course, Thomas gets what he needs to keep hope alive. “Put your finger here and see my hands,” Jesus invites him, “Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Even so, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” That is to say, blessed are those who persevere in hope despite the long odds. The Czech dissident Václav Havel put it this way: “Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing regardless of how it turns out…. [This kind of hope] gives us the strength to live and continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”[5]

I think that’s what First Peter means by “living hope.” Friends, the resurrection of Jesus is not an antidote to uncertainty; if anything, Easter raises more questions than it answers. But neither is Easter faith simply a pleasant delusion. The resurrection of Jesus instills in his followers the kind of infinite hope we need to ward off all our finite disappointments[6]; the resurrection is the definitive sign to inspire our trust today and in the time to come, so that we too may have life in his name.

[1] www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/03/netanyahu-not-dead-israel-ai/686593/.

[2] 28:16-17.

[3] Evangelical Lutheran Worship, Pew Edition, 227. Italics mine.

[4] 84.

[5] Ibid. 73.

[6] Martin Luther King, Jr.