What was the Resurrection?

It was the day the world was born again. Or maybe it was the first day of Creation or the day before Creation. Perhaps it wasn't the day that the world was reborn but rather the day that time caught up with its true beginning. For God made humanity not so that we could love Him but so that He could love us. And what greater love is there than that? Can it possibly be imagined that the Crucifixion was an afterthought? That it was just a way to fix the Fall? Could the Resurrection possibly have been Messiah climbing out of the grave saying "I'm glad that's over with." I submit that this was the true spiritual "big bang", regardless of when the material world emerged. I hold that this was the brilliant flash of light into a lightless world which illuminates all of history and nature and poetry.

It was like an atomic explosion, though that is a puny little thing by comparison, in which the first wave of heat and light and the wave of fleeing godlessness (which is to say, nothingness) can be seen striking the pagan myths with all their dying gods and the poets with their tragedies and romances and sacrifices and the philosophers with their renunciations of the world and the common celebrants with their love of the world. Then there was the second wave that lit up a bush in the deserts of Northern Africa and thrust Jonah into the belly of a whale and then out again and cast the Israelites into exile and then pulled them back to their one true home. Everywhere we look we can find the scattered debris. And then there was the fire, the awful, wonderful, ravenous, gentle fire. It came, I believe to every man and woman that ever lived. It came, and still comes, to those without knowledge who were yet confronted by their forgotten Prince begging in the streets. It came to the singers and writers and philosophers who forgot themselves and their worldly pride in the pursuit of that light that is behind and inside and illuminating the veil of Creation. It came upon people whose nations were still only barely feeling the first wave, people who had no idea of its name, but the fire also came to those who knew precisely what it was called. Its newness came even to those who thought it old and outworn, something to soon be forgotten. It came to those who thought they could bind it up in laws and traditions and lord it over others, and many of these hid their faces in terror and shielded themselves with ignorance. It engulfed those bored of the normality of ceremony and they smiled at the subtleties and laughed delightedly at the symbols. It sought out the wild savages through trained missionaries and included them in a philosophical heritage. It surrounded academic snobs through simple servants and taught them to feast and to fast. It pursued a boy named Clive Staples Lewis with a merciful relentlessness until he bacame a man who went to bed at night listening for the approach of "Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet" and then until his terror and resentment gave way to love.

This day was sunlight upon a leaf. The whole world was infected with the shadows and the hollowness and before that day to touch that which was most heavily infected was to fall further into depravity. But what this Man touched became clean; He reached out into our emptiness and where our hands would have whithered His poured out health and fullness. This same Man passed out of the world through the threshold of death which is available at every point and so at every point was His life-giving touch. We could not concieve of the terror of our depravity so He mourned on our behalf until the weight of our sins bore Him down into the absolute Nothingness... and then He left them there. The One in whose image we had been made and Whom all of us lived as imitations of did what we all must do and what He could not do from His celestial throne, and so we learned how to die. We were incomplete and He poured into us all abundant life. Then He gave us the knowledge and power and hearts to see the crooked things and work to make them straight.

This was a cosmic call to arms. There is a cycle by which sin begets sin which plays out in a thousand different ways in every aspect of life, a rusted chain that is invincible to all inside it. This chain dug into our bodies and built up habits and instinctive depravities. This chain laid the foundation for empires and cities wherein the merchants and bureaucrats and skeptics sat in comfort and safety. This chain delivered a dull and lukewarm world into the diseased hands of the very first to fall. On this day, that chain was broken. It was cut and shattered and pulled apart in a million ways at a billion moments and with it all the palaces of the world were overturned and all the powers of the flesh were undone and those ancient sinners of the first and final war were made to flee from farmers and peasants. The world had been one giant swamp and at the sound of this shofar the mountains rose up to touch the clouds and the waters sank deep enough that whales could swim. Fights and fueds have been born out of simple selfishness but men and women of war have fed upon thicker bread. The wrath and hope and fear and zeal of wars that decimate nations and rouse the muses have been fueled by the power of the Messiah's return. If there had been no Messiah, abolitionism would not have been peopled with his imitators nor would the twentieth century have felt the terror of his German and Russian impostors.

And the truly glorious thing about it all is that it is not just an event or a force that has done all this. It is a person. It is a man who lit up the darkness and breathed life into dullness and set up a place for every kind of person and appointed a time for every natural passion and laid the foundations for the cosmic army called "The Church." And He is doing it still. It is not simply radiance which goes ahead of and behind that day; it is Him. It is He who calls me by name.