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If you read this on Friday, it won’t be Easter yet… but in reality, every day is Easter! Everyday we’re blessed with new life. Everyday, God’s promises reach out to us with outstretched hands. You wouldn’t know that from the news, however. But Jesus embraced even the worst of “bad news”—he took into himself betrayal, rejection, hate, and suffered the worst of deaths, a victim of human sin. John’s gospel is probably the clearest of the gospels when it comes to this theme. In John 12:32 Jesus says, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all people to myself.” And if we didn’t already know what Jesus meant, John tells us that he’s talking about his crucifixion.
In the Orthodox tradition, they highlight how Jesus as God’s Son, as fully divine, does a cosmic thing with his death and resurrection. “All people,” “all things,” are restored, renewed, in this event. God came out of eternity and entered into time—human time—once and for all. Fifteen billion years (the approximate age of the universe) is nothing to God in God’s eternity. But God entering fully into time, in the person of Jesus, entering fully into our humanity, hallows all of time, and God does this out of love for us. We, as beings with a soul—a soul that intersects with God’s eternal will for us—are “raised” through faith here and now. St. Paul calls that becoming a “new creation,” and a way of life follows. There is now “no longer male or female, Jew or Gentile, slave or free,” but Christ is in all things (Galatians 3:27-29; Colossians 3). So “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience” (Col. 3:12); we have an Easter ethic—modeled on Jesus’ Way.
As God’s beloved creation, breathing with the breath of God, we will be caught up into Christ’s Holy Spirit at the end of created time. On that Easter Sunday, it was as if Jesus had one foot in time and space, and one foot in eternity. The God who has given us a spirit, a soul, promises us that the same will happen to us. That is Easter today and every day. We live in mortality—we are reminded of that every day—but God’s loving Spirit is with us; death has been swallowed up (I Corinthians 15:54-56). And may the Spirit of the One who raised Christ from the dead, give life to your mortal bodies.
Peace,
Pr. Christian