Easter is not merely an event of long ago. It is not only the celebration of divine desire to be at one with humankind. It is not only the renewal of the cosmos. Nor is it simply our kindled hope for what is promised us.
For Paul the Resurrection was no metaphor; it was the power of God. And when he spoke of Jesus as raised from the dead, he meant Jesus alive and at large in the world not as some shimmering ideal of human goodness or the achieving power of hopeful thought but as the very power of life itself. If the life that was in Jesus died on the cross;
Of all the mysteries our faith invites us to contemplate, the Resurrection is by far the most astonishing. Not simply in the sense of being difficult to believe in a logical fashion. That, in a way, is the very point of it.
The last certainty is the certainty of death. It is the one thing of which we can be sure. We may try to forget it, but it will not forget us. Nor can we ever really forget it until we have faced it and come to a decision about it. In the midst of life we are in death, unless we know that in the midst of death we are in life.
Clearly for these Greek-speaking Christians our human reconciliation with God was effected by the entire dynamic of the Christ-coming. The salvific emphasis was placed upon the incarnation as much as upon the crucifixion. And the sense of redemption was universal and creation-centered rather than individual and focused solely upon humankind.
In Jesus’ time, crucifixion was not against the law. It was carried out by the law. It was an exceptionally gruesome method of torturing a person to death, carried out by the government not in secret dungeons but in public.
“Take, eat, this is my body,” Jesus said. Then he took the cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the new covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”
Sin, sorrow, and suffering, and death itself, were indeed taken away at the Cross, but we mortals must enter into the depths of this mystery in actual experience. The fact that the Savior bore all this for us does not mean that we bear nothing of it; rather, it means that we are invited in to that place (the Cross) where suffering is transfigured. We (the Church) are his Body, says St. Paul. As such, we share in his suffering for the life of the world.
Reflect, my son, Do you walk too quickly for God?
Hear that song which the Lord sings with your life. Recall that:
There is one time for the lattices of heaven to give dew,
And another for the sun to fire the sands.
The story of the woman anointing the head of Jesus with precious ointment is yet another story of conflict. The woman is immediately despised for her action. The indignant critics condemn her for senseless waste: that stuff of hers should have been donated for the relief of the poor instead of being emptied over Jesus’ head.