On Death and Resurrection

It's always death and resurrection. It's presence through the valley of the shadow of death, not a detour around the valley altogether. 

We live in a time of quick fixes and seemingly endless resources. We're bombarded with ads that tell us how this product is going to fix the thing you didn't even know was wrong with you; if you just try hard enough for long enough (and buy enough) you can stop anything bad from happening, even death. Which doesn't turn out to be true, but we keep trying.

This is what keeps me coming back to the Triune God. In this holiest of weeks of the church year, we walk alongside Jesus as he goes from triumphant entry to the cross and grave. We stand alongside Mary Magdalene and the other women who go early in the morning and find that the tomb is empty.

And rather than that being the end of the story, it's where our story begins. We worship and follow a God of death and resurrection. That is the pattern God sets for Godself and for us. We cannot have Easter morning without Good Friday. There's no way to jump from Palm Sunday to Easter without going through Holy Week.

Some of us have been sold on a Christianity that is all about results and "blessings"-- material wealth and security. But that is not what the cross and the tomb give us. This week we sit with the story of the God who came and lived as one of us, who was tortured, humiliated, and died for us. A God that death could not contain, but who brings life out of death.

So much ink has been spilled over the centuries trying to decide what exactly happened when God died on the cross. These atonement theories do their best to make sense of how God did what Jesus did-- die and rise again. But what matters isn't so much how all this happened... but that it happened at all. That with the empty tomb on Easter morning, God began a new thing, heaven began breaking into our broken but beautiful world. And God continues to be at work to bring heaven fully here to earth. 

This is why we tell the story over and over again every year. Because Jesus' death and resurrection forms and shapes us. It shows us who God is and how God acts in the world. It gives meaning and comfort in the midst of despair. And it brings hope: hope that the end of the story isn't really the end. That when endings come (because endings always come), God is still at work after the book has closed, after the credits have rolled. Because God is doing a new thing. 

May you have a blessed Holy Week, and may the work of God be revealed to you throughout it. Amen.