In years past, i.e., the last two, I’ve done something creative as my act of commemorating the significance of Easter Sunday. Last year, I wrote a song, and two years ago I wrote two stories (published betterly here). This year, I did not have it in me to do anything so wonderful. Instead, I rode up to Russian Ridge with a group of friends and saw the sunrise atop a green wind-blasted hill, where we could survey the whole bay below. From that height, the peninsula looked clean and fresh and sinless, full of hope and potential. The Dumbarton bridge appeared ghostly and beautiful, a thin testament to the humble works of man–much different than the overbearing, ugly, crowded aspect it has up close during the day.
I realized that this must be how God can choose to see the world–not just as better than it is, but as it actually will be, redeemed and full. No fire and charring of the elements, maybe–I believe, right now, that God’s redemption and revolution will come in a way we do not expect; it will come from the inside out. Just as Christ died and was transformed, not destroyed, into something new and magnificent that heralded the truth and the promise for the rest of humanity, so the entire world will be remade, not undone. In a way, of course, remaking is undoing, and it is in this sense that the old heaven and the old earth will pass away. But they will pass away, leaving in their places, not new versions of themselves, but themselves, new.
At this point in my reverie, the sun broke over the eastward hills, brilliant and uncontrollably powerful, turning everything that was colorless (bloodless) and ghostly (dead) colorful and alive, full-bodied and recklessly physical, joyful and singing. The world around me was resurrected in a commemorative play that God had instructed his creation to perform, acting out the Resurrection that happened to one man long ago, and that will one day happen to each of us, and each blade of grass, and each far-flung star, if we keep hope alive.
Just as soon as it came, the moment, that window into God’s promises, passed with the sun behind the gray clouds that were to obscure it for the rest of the day. Though the warmth of the memory remained to comfort me in the chilly cold of the morning, the veiling of the light was a reminder that the time we hope for is still not yet, and all that we can experience for now are previews–previews that change the world, but previews nonetheless. The real show will come later, and at that time we will see the real playwright’s best work, and we will all of us drop to our knees in awe, because that work will be love for us, demonstrated mysteriously (openly) from the beginning of time until its end.
In other words, HE IS RISEN INDEED, and this curious, absurd truth is the only thing that can give us hope for ourselves and the rest of the world, because it is oftentimes the only thing we can point to where creation has gone the right way, the way it was supposed to go; that is, sans death. 2,000 years of time and, more effectively, our own various doubts, muddle that picture for us, but we cling however tenuously to it, knowing that, not just is the world without this hope a cold and hard place (in fact, our hope does little to change that many times), but, indeed, without this hope there is no world at all, no sense for even our doubts.
And that is why, incidentally, I believe it–because of the difference between eighteen seconds before sunrise, and eighteen seconds after.
