Easter

As I write it is Holy Saturday- the day Christians recall the Jesus was dead in a grave. They were frightened, wondering what all these things going on around them meant. Just like us.

Through the horror, hate, oppression, genocides, wars, stupidity etc real humans are really suffering, and dying. Being tortured and murdered just like Jesus...as Paul put it "filling up what is lacking in the suffering of Christ."

A powerful army is tormenting and killing Jesus in Gaza. Trump is torturing and killing Jesus at the border and in remote supermax concentration kamps. Conservative polititians are starving the poor and homeless Jesus here in America.

"Conservative christians" would jeer and scoff at what I just said. But they are standing next to the Pharisees in the crowd calling for no mercy on the afflicted Jesus right in front of their eyes who is homeless begging on a corner.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

The Jesus of the Gospels answers this question for me: "as you have done to the least you have done to Me." Mathew 25: 31+

The theology most Christians hold is what they've been taught: a focus on the person of Jesus...and ignoring His message or the meaning of anything he did. So they focused on his suffering and death on Good Friday...and never considered that He was suffering and being killed in countless real people round the globe- not 2000 years ago; but right now.

The Incarnation is of far greater importance than the Crucifiction in that Jesus became one of us. And in so doing linked everything we do or endure to Himself. And he was unjustly tortured and killed just as people are today. 

In taking on our nature He made our sufferings His, so that when we see an immigrant being sent to a hell on earth by some political machine we would see Jesus being turned over to the Romans; or when we see a Palestinian lying dead in the rubble of what was their home we would see the 12th and 13th Stations of the Cross.

Easter celebrates not just that "He came back from the dead" but rather is/was something memorable to convey a teaching. Easter like Passover is about Liberation. Liberation from the grave is the symbol of the lesson He was providing: the power to rise from our dead state, from our self centered darkness into a new life filled with His light..

God didnt require Him to die to appease some burning anger against us! What a flawed Person the Creator and Sustainer of life would be if that perverse view were true. Anger, retribution, the desire to punish are our evils- the very behaviors Jesus taught we had to overcome through love of all, even to those who presented themselves as our enemies.

No, God did not need or want a human sacrifice anymore than he wanted Abraham to slaughter Isaac. He "desires mercy not sacrifice."

Easter is about liberation from our darkness, our sinfullness and offensiveness against others. It us about rebirth into a better way of life, renewing the face of the Earth. 

It isnt just a call to repentance and metanoia; its a call and means to transfiguration- to assume a new way of life, to put on the Risen Christ after having died to our selfishness.

Heaven isnt some fairytale wonderland awaiting the pious after death. It is the renewed life, vivified by the love from God for neighbor, here and now. The kingdom of God is within and without you. Now.