Easter Day - Love that cannot be Contained

Over the Three Great Days I am reflecting on Three Perspectives of the Divine’s Love for us. On Easter Day we consider the perspective of love fresh from the Tomb – love that cannot be contained by hate, fear, decay or even time. (Luke 24:1-12)

When the faithful women come to attend to the hastily buried body of their beloved teacher and friend Jesus they are alarmed to find the tomb empty. They expected only the small comfort of attending to his broken body with the appropriate spices and ointments. But they find the tomb empty and Jesus gone! And strange messengers of light ask the question that still echoes down through time “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen.”

The first disciples and we today are confronted and challenged by a love, a living presence, that cannot be contained by the tomb or the powers of hate, fear, violence and death. A love that is not constrained by the powers and limitations of the known world. The world – the empire, the fears and distrust of the people, the frailty of the disciples, the vulnerabilities of human flesh - had all done their worst and had laid the broken body of Jesus in the tomb. And yet the love of the Divine for Jesus and through Jesus for us could not be contained!

With the first witnesses we are perplexed and alarmed by the enormity of it. And like the first followers we will take time to comprehend what this means to us and for us. Many of us become stuck with questions of how does resurrection work? I do not know the medical answer but I do know that a group of frightened and broken-hearted followers expected to find a dead body yet did not, and that what and who they encountered changed them forever. They were empowered and emboldened by their encounters with the living and resurrected Jesus in a way that changed them, their world and our history.

The resurrection of Jesus and the disciple’s encounter with the living Jesus points to one of the ways we understand the love of the Divine for us. The love of the Divine expressed in resurrection and renewal points to the power of love to break all our containments! God’s love cannot be stopped by fear, violence, despair, even death. The terrible forces that break us do not stop God. The good news of Good Friday is that love accepts no boundaries and nothing can separate us from the love of God.

The good news of Easter Day is that - although a terrible battle - the love of God won over death and hate and fear and therefore we too can dare to be a resurrection people. A people who see and feel the forces of destruction in our world but know in our marrow, in our hearts and imaginations, the green shoots of hope, joy, peace and love. Easter Day means love has the last and the lasting word on any matter.

And if we believe this, if we can even glimpse the possible truth of this, we can go home and out into our community with hope that is stronger than the evening news or the confronting diagnosis our loved one has just received; we can experience joy even in the midst of a still broken and vulnerable world, family dynamic or situation; we can know peace in the deepest corner of our hearts while still experiencing the disturbance and uncertainty of the various aspects of our life; and we can be assured that we are loved deeply, completely and eternally, and that we can be a conduit for that sort of love in whatever our particular situation.

Even so, come Lord Jesus the Christ, the resurrected one, come love us into the fullness of life. Amen.

You may like to read a reflection on Easter Day from a previous year.

Easter Day

This is my work informed by everything I have heard, read and experienced. I am indebted to the wisdom of others. This week I am especially grateful to:

Borg, Marucs J & Crossan, John Dominic “The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem” Harper-Collins, New York, 2006