Friday, March 23, 2018

A Few Thoughts On Easter


Shortly, Christians will once again celebrate Easter, an annual affirmation of the faith's central tenet that Jesus was resurrected from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion.  This singularly important belief is so essential to the Christian faith that the apostle Paul wrote "if Christ as not been raised, your faith is futile and we are of all people most to be pitied."


The resurrection is central to Christianity because it signals a new paradigm where the power of death has been destroyed, where the temporary is subsumed in the imperishable, where life triumphs over death.  Paul writes that "Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.  For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.  For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive".
Death had been the victor, the inevitable conqueror, the vanquisher of life from whose grasp no one could escape.  Jesus' resurrection obliterated the status quo, creating a new spiritual reality for humanity.  "He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent," Paul writes.  "For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross."
 The old dynamic was estrangement and death.  The new dynamic is reconciliation and life. 
Through Jesus' resurrection, death becomes impotent, its power erased, relegated to a mere passageway between the temporal and the eternal.  Within the paradigm created by Jesus' resurrection, even that passageway will one day be unnecessary.  "He (will) reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.  The last enemy to be destroyed is death." 
For Christians, Easter is a time of reflection for what Jesus has accomplished for the creation that God has loved into existence but also forward-looking, to a day of unimaginable joy, when the words of Isaiah will be fulfilled:
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine,
of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.
And he will swallow up on this mountain
the covering that is cast over all peoples,
the veil that is spread over all nations.
He will swallow up death forever;
and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces,
It will be said on that day,
“Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us.
This is the Lord; we have waited for him;
let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”