What God did on Easter cannot be explained, dissected, formulized, or ignored. Virgin birth should have prepared us. God came to inhabit flesh by pulse and respiration. But Jesus was God squeezed into a box that could not hold him here forever. No one expected God-made-flesh to burst through every verifiable fact of death and walk out of a three-day entombment.
Like you, I have taken a slow, thoughtful, heart-examining journey to the cross. But it is only half the truth. Easter should wake us up to possibilities we dare to believe. We live without a finality picture. We live by the Creator’s Word of power and unfathomable good. Though we live in a broken world where cancer invades, divorce separates, children go hungry and too many people die from guns and drugs and disease; as resurrection believers, we live with the breath of God that breathes resurrection life into us. We live new-made, new-loved, and new-prepared for Eden life. This is life of intimate walks with God. Life that spans the chasm between earth and heaven. Life that changes every why and empowers every how.
It is time for Easter to wake us up to how we live below resurrected life. Where drudgery takes away joy. Where the heart has lost hope or lives with an anemic replica. Where God’s all-new cannot penetrate our perspectives.
Remember, Jesus did not leave Mary crying at the tomb and he won’t leave us there
either.
We need to tell our stories as Easter stories, how tombs shut out life, how God broke in, how we are resurrected in our hearts and minds, passion and hope by a love so great that we will burst unless we live it to its fullest.
Easter should take our breath away, catch us off guard, set us on a different path, and reorient us toward the new that God wants us to live. Easter re-presents us with the choice to live new.
We’ve rehearsed the story all we need to; now it’s time to live it. Whatever God helped you clean away through Lent opened more places to receive God’s empowering new. It’s time to live a new Hallelujah with all joy and full abandon.
