Re-visiting Easter

Source: http://www.catholicbishops.ie

What did it mean for our world that Christ has risen?

As we celebrate Easter, was reminded of its significance from Philip Yancey's book, "The Jesus I Never Knew". He shares his first memory of Easter as an association with death not resurrection due to the unfortunate early demise of his cat which led him to learn that Easter the ugly word irreversible. As he grapples with the death of his friend, Bob years later, he re-visits this question again in view of his grief:

In the cloud of grief over Bob's death, I began to see the meaning of Easter in a new light. As a five-year-old on Easter Sunday, I had learned the harsh lesson of irreversibility. Now, as an adult, I saw that Easter actually held out the awesome promise of reversibility. Nothing - no, not even death - was final. Even that could be reversed.

...What would it mean for us if Bob rose again? We were sitting in a chapel, numbed by three days of sorrow, death bearing down upon us like a crushing weight. How would it be to walk outside to the parking lot and there, to our utter astonishment, find Bob.

That image gave me a hint of what Jesus' disciples felt on the first Easter. They too had grieved for three days. On Sunday they heard a new, euphonious sound, clear as a bell struck in mountain air. Easter hits a new note of hope and faith that what God did once in a graveyard in Jeursalem, he can and will repeat on grand scale. For Bob. For us. For the world. Against all odds, the irreversible will be reversed.

We who read the Gospels from the other side of Easter, who have the day printed on our calenders, forget how hard it was for the disciples to believe. In itself the empty tomb did not convince them: that fact only demonstrated "He is not here," not "he is risen."

There are two ways to look at human history, I have concluded. One way is to focus on the wars and violence, the squalor, the pain and tragedy and death. From such a point of view, Easter seems a fairy-tale exception, a stunning contradiction in the name of God. That gives some solace, although I confess that when my friends died, grief was so overpowering that any hope in an after-life seemed somehow thin and insubstantial.

There is another way to look at the world. If I take Easter as the starting point, the one incontrovertible fact about how God treats those he loves, then human history becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality. Hope then flows like lava beneath the crust of daily life.

For another view of the meaning of life in the context of Easter, can check out the link here.