When I sat today to write, I realized that the last time I posted to this blog was on Good Friday, almost five months ago. It was March 29, just four days after the death of our oldest son, John. I had posted several Lenten reflections in previous weeks, but I realize now that they stopped abruptly right before Easter. It’s understandable, considering the circumstances.
Yet even as our son was dying, there were moments of grace through it all, even glimpses of resurrection. God’s eternal love made itself known as my husband Guari and I witnessed and participated with John even through his suffering in moments of kindness, humor, recognition, forgiveness, reconciliation, shared tears, shared laughter, and awe.
We were both at John’s bedside when he died. As he breathed his last, his eyes opened and his face suddenly changed to express amazement and pure joy. Surely this was an end-of-life vision of the Love at the heart of the universe, the eternal presence of God, the mystery of resurrection. God’s grace continues to comfort us, including this memory of John’s apparent awakening to glory as he passed from this world to the next.
In this Spirit of Resurrection, I re-start my blog postings with a belated Easter reflection, taken from my book The Cross in the Midst of Creation:
Celebrating the joy of Easter in our time is filled with paradox. How can we understand and celebrate the resurrection of Jesus when corporate wealth, institutional power, and ideologically driven people in high places dominate public policy and endanger the world? For the “good news” of Jesus to be relevant, it must address the threat posed by the powers and principalities to human life and to creation itself…. (p. 183) The foundation of Christian faith is… the lived experience of the presence of the risen Christ and lives transformed by the Spirit, as described in Scripture and attested to by witnesses throughout the ages. As people who seek to live by the faith of Jesus, the good news must equip us to call the powers back to their role to serve rather than dominate life and inspire us to participate in the ongoing story of God at work in the world… (p. 184-185)
“Facing death is part of what it means to be human and aware of our mortality. The ongoing cycle of life and death is integral to life as we know it here on planet earth. The resurrection of Jesus is a foretaste and a sign that death is not the end, that in some mysterious way, life goes on beyond the grave. Still, the primary focus of Christian faith is not life after death, but eternal life here and now. Life in Christ enables us to live in defiance of death, which appears not only at the end of life but also in our everyday lives: in the loss of loved ones, in communal tragedies, in injustices that diminish us, in depression, in human bondage to sin, in the death of nature. Death comes in many guises, and the powers have myriad ways to magnify and inflict death.
Those of us who have heard the gospel know that the death of Jesus is not the end of the story…. We come to realize that even when reflecting on the crucifixion, we do so in the presence of the risen Christ, who is always with us, even when God seems absent or when we question our capacity to endure. When I enter into communion with the crucified Jesus, I also commune with the risen Christ. For, as Jesus said, “He is God not of the dead, but of the living” (Mark 12:27).
Living in Christ enables us to resist and offer life-giving alternatives to the death- dealing stratagems of the powers, as Jesus did. This is the good news of the gospel: that even when facing death, despite death, in defiance of death, God comes to us in Jesus, raising us to new life and enabling us to participate in the life of God. Such experience itself is resurrection.” (p.222-223)
So may it be.
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