Hope is alive again

For He is Risen. The man like all men - and yet utterly different. God came down, into his own creation, where he lived, ate, worked, prayed - and preached. Jesus Christ. Not simply the man whose life was "most touched by the divine" (as wibbly, wobbly, radical ersatz-conservative Andrew Sullivan put it). But life itself: the breath that surged into our souls and gave us life when we were fresh formed from dust and smaller than a thumb, vulnerable in our mother's womb. Life itself: so lively that his mere words, simple commands, demanded and shaped the world into existence. Such life overflowing that a touch of his hand healed (and whose Spirit heals still) whilst a word dropped from his mouth spilled star-systems throughout infinity. Power, power, power - and yet he knew what it was to weep, and to fear, and to suffer.

He suffered like a champion, an invincible warrior - beaten, bloodied, mocked, hobbling under the weight of his wooden load, and yet, within this, in his staggering, awful journey, there's the sure march of a soldier to a battle. He submits to their nails and taunts, in the greatest undercover military operation in history. In go the nails, up goes the cross, out spin the dice as his clothes are bartered away. He is vanquished. He is beaten. He is finished.

And in that single, final moment, as he "gives up the ghost", all is reversed. The great plot-twist of humanity that few saw coming. Proud Death, and proud executors, stand happy with their work. But Death has let into itself no mere man: Death, the enemy of Creation and its Creator, has let in that being whose dominion is without end, the one perfection of history; Death has let in Life. Three days pass - and we hear only rumours on the wind of what precisely happened; stories of preaching to the captives of hell, stories of Christ cutting off the chains from Abraham, Jacob, David, and all others righteous but without Salvation, and carrying them behind him as he fought his way out.

We know, at least, what finally happened. We know that, on that Sunday, that essential day - that day began the New Epoch for man. In a small, unassuming tomb in the hills of Israel, a body wrapped in grave-clothes stirs. Perhaps but a wriggle of a knee, a yawn, or an itch - with even an awkward stretch of his bound-up legs, the victory is announced! And all the vast systems and processes and ways of the world and mankind - decay, misery, hopelessness, fear, isolation, poverty, hatred, despair, envy, darkness in all its forms – are disarmed. When we call on his name and serve him, they are destroyed. He sits up, alive again – this is the time for our victory horn, this is our flag, raised aloft above all evil, this is the CNN bulletin announcing a successful end to combat operations in Eternity.

He is with us and at last we live with hope. For hope itself, life itself, every embodiment of all good – whose goodness language’s superlatives merely subdivide and gesture to, though unknowingly – is back, having, in this, broken and rubbished Death, satan and hell all to pieces.

He is Risen. He is with us. Let us kneel and worship the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ of Nazareth, 0BC – Forever.

Happy Easter.