This is the first day of the New Creation. Our Lord entered the world through a door no one had entered before, a virgin womb. He temporarily exited this world and descended into the realm of death. It appeared as though He had gone the way of all men, but He had exited in a manner unlike any other—His tomb is empty. Humanity is risen together with Christ.
The Resurrection is not merely Christ’ triumph. Since we were created from the Archetypal Image, our humanity bears the very markings of His Eternal relation with the Father. Our vocation is to be the extension of the Eternal communion of the Father Son and Holy Spirit. We were created for God’s delight. We were designed for happiness and joy.
But our ancestors sinned against Him. The first created chose to experience life independent from God. This primordial story sums up the condition we now know as sin- an egotistical understanding of life. And this is what death truly is. Created in the image of God, we were called to reflect what He knows of us. It is to be a relation of gazing: that in looking upon His face we will have the knowledge of our true identity. This is what Adam beheld when our lord breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. There was a first face-to-face interaction, and Adam awakened. The first day of God’s rest, as Adam awakened at the end of the sixth day, his first day on earth was a day of rest. We know the story because we have lived it. There was a shadow of turning where man sought to establish his own identity based on his own knowledge. This is the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Duality, which leads to idolatry, for man’s failures became the new reference point of what he now thought of himself.
“And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled” Colossians 1: 21
Paul tells us that we were alienated, we were enemies of God in our own minds, by means of wicked works. God did not declare us to be His enemies, we deduced that in our own minds. It distorted the image we bear. Instead of communion, we entered into a state of alienation. However, in that state, the One who is the Archetype of the ectype- the Image from whom we were created-became man. He came to impress the Eternal perspective of God in our human nature. God being God could not let His creation enter into ruin and non-being. In His sublime goodness, He partook of what we were, that the compatibility He established from the origin should not only be restituted but superseded. O wonder of wonders! O marvelous is sin that causes grace to superabound. These are the words of St. Athanasius, reflecting on God’s magnificent response to the fall of man in his commentary.
In the midst of our nakedness, exposure and our failure, He comes to clothe us—to reimprint His image as He originally intended. God never changes His mind. He is immutably resolved about you. And for your information, you cannot surprise Him. He knows you through and through- in your laying down and rising up, in your secret struggles and your public triumphs. He sees your tears and He shares your laughter. He is a God Who is near. A God who chooses to suffer with His creation. This is the scandal of our euangelion. Our brethren in the Abrahamic Faith, Jews deny that God could not lower Himself to become as we are. Our Muslim brothers equally share this perspective, claiming that God is too transcendent to become imminent; they go on asserting that Allah will not allow his prophet to suffer such a horrendous death of crucifixion. Yet this is how God has chosen to speak to us.
The worst thing humanity has ever done against God- crucify the God-man to the cross-is the very place where God reveals His eternal adoption of us. If you are wondering what your contribution to salvation is, it is your apostasy, but God took our apostasy to reveal His Eternal adoption. The incarnation was not God testing humanity, it is not God giving us another chance. Jesus Christ is not the plan B of Adam. Before the beginning, He has always been God’s plan. All that He does, the Word became flesh and dwelling among us—was a revelation. Becoming flesh means taking on humanity as it truly is, with all its frailties, failures, vulnerabilities, and capable of suffering and Christ did suffer. He was tempted at all points such as we are.
We do not worship a God who is untouched by human pain. He knows hunger, He has experienced betrayal. Our God has sensed abandonment. He entered fully into the fabrics of our existence- not just a visitor, but as a representative Who lived every moment of what it means to be human. For every damaged part of our humanity, He experienced the same and repaired it. He embraced our brokenness and He did not merely die in our place on the cross, He restored access to the Tree of Life which Adam refused to partake of. He didn’t just cancel sin; He unplugged humanity from the fall. He absorbed Adams’ delusion, and every illusion of separation was exposed and died when Christ breathed His last upon the cross.
He wore our shame like a crown. At His weakest moment, after hours of agony from nine in the morning to around three o’clock in the afternoon, He was thirsty, and He asked humanity for one last gesture of solidarity when He said, “behold I thirst”. A Roman soldier gave Him a sponge soaked in vinegar-the same vinegar soldiers used for personal cleansing in the bathroom. They were mocking Him in the lowest manner possible. When the Lord tasted its bitterness, He decided to breathe out His Spirit. He didn’t die a martyr death, no man takes His Life from Him, for He has the power to lay it down, and He has the power to take it again. That is what our Lord endured. We fed Him our shit. Even after we offered Him our refuse, He said, “it is finished”.
Three days and three nights, He entered into death itself. There is one thing God could not do, God could not die. Here is a divine dilemma: within the divine essence, the substance of divinity cannot suffer, because He is the Creator and not the created. God is impassible. Yet when the Eternal Son of God in His one Person takes on our human nature, our suffering nature, —He gains the ability to die—not as God but as man. Being God who does not die, human nature dies, but the divine nature destroys death.
This Easter Morning, I announce: death has died!
Haven’t you heard the news; death has died. Death died in the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The tomb has become the womb of the New Creation. Christ emerges as the First born of many brethren who have been conformed and jointly formed with the Archetype, now the Prototype. He is now the sample Son, the Prototype of who we are. Apostle John tells us concerning eschatology that while we do not yet fully know what we shall be, we do know this: “When we see Him, we shall be like Him.” Because we were jointly formed with the First born of the Father. He is the First man who entered death, mastered it and exited from it triumphantly. Therefore, humanity is rebooted with the Resurrection. It is man 2.0. As Apostle Paul says, we once bore the image of the earthly, who was a living soul. But now we bear the image of the heavenly- the Life-Giving Spirit. If we bear the image of the Life-giving Spirit, brothers and sisters this therefore means, Resurrection Sunday is not merely the celebration of Jesus coming back to life, it is the message of the New Creation and the full manifestation of the sons of God, who are to bestow life upon the whole cosmos, because Jesus did not come out of the tomb alone. If you were at the tomb that Sunday morning, you would have not seen someone walking out, you will see a glorious flash of light shining forth. Although everything still looked the same, the world was created anew.
We are not simply reborn in Christ, we are what God has always wanted. You are not who you think you are, you are far more—more than you can imagine in your wildest dreams. God did not create that which is insignificant. Do not hesitate to embrace the extreme goodness of the Good News. The mystery of Christ risks being disbelieved simply because it is incredibly good and marvelous. You are not defined by Adam. You are not defined by the genealogical success or failures of your forefathers. You are not even defined by yourself; the Resurrection is God’s reclamation of your life. We must wake up to this grand unveiling of our co-resurrection with Christ.
Celebrating the Resurrection of Christ on one day is not enough. Most Christians are glad He came back to life; they are not incorrect, but they are incomplete. What does His Life signify to you? all that He is, is of no benefit to you unless you are also united with Him. I laugh when I hear that the fish in the midst of the lake is complaining about thirst. How can the believer in Christ complain of deficiency whereas Christ is the fullness of God and in Him we too are filled full with the fullness of the Godhead.
This is not just the day Jesus came back to life, this is not even simply the day God proved Jesus is the Son of God. This is the day that Christ Jesus gives us the Eternal assurance of death’s defeat. We must awaken from the nightmare called death. Death is not when man is in a corpse state. Fear is death. The illusion of separation is death. Selfishness, lust, ambition to the point of pride is death. The pursuit of the world to the point of neglecting God are all expressions of death. You do not understand the meaning of this day until you awaken and escape the nightmare that is death, and embrace that Jesus Christ is Alive and you are alive in Him as He has always been.
He says to you today, as it was once said to Adam, “in dying you will surely die” — He has recapitulated death and now He proclaims, “in living you will surely live”. And because He lives, we are alive in Him.
Christos Anesti! Christ is risen !