Easter Day

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It really is true! This really is God’s Son, the Beloved. Not just one among millions of crucified, tortured murdered people, though that also, in communion with all of us, even the God abandoned, the God-forsaken. God really did so love the world – really does love us so much that He gave His only Son. God did not spare His own Son but gave him up for us all. What we have been celebrating the last few days, indeed for most of Lent – it’s all real!

And for this reason and others it is all right for us Christians to rejoice, to be even really happy, even to engage in a sometimes almost irrational, over the top ecstatic joy.

This is expressed even in the literary forms in our Scriptures. There is a big contrast between the well-ordered Passion Narrative much the same story in all the versions, and the ecstatic Resurrection Stories all over the place. Though they agree more or less that the women who were there for the crucifixion and burial were also the first cab off the rank when it came to witnessing and being witnesses to the resurrection – which is fair enough.

It seems the early Christians had a lot less trouble with the Resurrection than the Crucifixion. They saw the Resurrection as a powerful Divine Reversal of an atrocious human deed: as St Peter is reported as saying in the early preaching in Acts, you/they killed him, God raised him up. To start with, they were very much Easter Sunday rather than Good Friday people. It was the Crucifixion rather than the Resurrection which took lots of meditation and dealing with, to come to the point of experiencing the crucifixion while still very much an atrocious human deed also as a Divine deed, an outpouring of God’s love, God’s loving us so much.

For us sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes crucifixion is all too evident. I asked myself during the week, where is Christ being crucified today? Having recently listened to one of the Massey lectures on the ABC, from a UN bloke involved on the ground in AIDS programs in Africa, I thought: mostly in Africa. But then, having told stories showing how very desperate the situation is in much of central and southern Africa, not just AIDS and drought but so-called ‘re-structuring’ bringing about the near destruction of once vibrant civilizations, the lecturer then went on to tell stories also from his own experience giving a basis for hope: surprising signs of hope with people on the ground in the most unlikely places, seeds of grace on which to build, in our terms the Spirit who creates out of nothing and raises the dead still working away.

This takes us to another aspect of Easter. We rejoice not just in an event back then, promising a similar event in our future: just as Christ has been raised, we shall also be raised – though this too! We rejoice, like the early Easter Sunday Christians here and now in the presence of the Risen Lord and his continuing power to save, a presence which is the ground of hope but also power for here and now transformation, for us, and bit by bit also for our world. We too, thus, are Easter people.

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