This Easter the media will rightly remind us of the carnage in Ukraine and the Middle East. For as we celebrate this great Festival, commemorating Christ’s victory over evil, we are confronted with death, barbarity and terror in the world. Unless we choose to live in fantasyland, we have to relate the two.
First, Jesus Christ did not escape death. Nor did He promise His followers a trouble-free world. Actually, they themselves can expect an above average share of suffering.
Secondly, we believe that Christ’s death was no accident, no mistake. It was typical of the evil deeds that human beings mete out to each other. Innocent suffering did not begin in Jerusalem and will not end there. But the crucifixion was a calculated risk: God’s costly and unexpected intervention in human affairs. The Christian claim that God’s Son was put to death is deeply offensive to religious groups who cannot believe that the remote and all-powerful God to whom human beings should submit, has Himself submitted to our brutality. Yet it is in this way that God enlists in His creation without violating it.
Thirdly, Christ’s way of sacrifice, forgiveness and reconciliation is God’s ultimate offer to the human race.
The first reaction of the people who witnessed the resurrection of Jesus Christ was fear. Incredulity, too, but fear. And no wonder: they were seeing the King of Kings.
In the last book of the Bible, the Risen Christ is described like this: “I saw one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across His chest. His head and His hair were white as white wool, white as snow; His eyes were like a flame of fire, His feet were like burnished bronze refined in a furnace, and His voice was like the sound of many waters…….. When I saw Him, I fell at His feet as though dead.”
That is the proper first response of reverence and respect to a vision of God. Only then can we hear the words spoken by this terrifying figure:
“Do not be afraid: I am the First and the Last, and the Living One. I was dead, and see I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of death and the world of the dead.”
God’s rule over the world – the world at its worst and the world at its best – was reasserted at the first Easter. This is no domestic, ecclesiastical event. It is God’s glorious yet solemn challenge to His rebellious creation: the grip of evil and death is terminally weakened. Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed!