And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God,
to those who are the called according to His purpose
Romans 8:28 NKJV.
Romans 8:28 NKJV.
Each year, Easter becomes more and more central to me, in my understanding of the Christian life. By ‘Easter’ I mean the whole season leading up to the recalling of Good Friday and the celebration of Easter Sunday. Why is this?
For one thing, it is the focus of the Gospels, described by one theologian as ‘extended passion stories with short introductions regarding the life of Christ’. The Gospels focus on Easter. When we see how nearly half of each of the Gospel accounts is given over to the last week of Jesus’ life on earth, we can see that from the very outset of the church, this period in the life of Jesus was focal.
This focus also tells us something about where the emphasis of early Christian teaching lay. As Richard Bauckham points out in his recent book, Jesus and the God of Israel, it is in the face of a struggling Jesus that the true divine identity is revealed. What does God feel? Look at Jesus. What does God do about suffering? Look at Jesus. What does the future hold for men and women? Look at Jesus.
It is when people are caught in the midst of adversity and difficulty that we begin to see what their character is really like. So it is with God. The New Testament message is that when we look at Jesus Christ, we meet with the full divine identity of God. There is no looking over the shoulder of Jesus to see what God is really like, hiding behind Him in some remote heaven. Jesus Christ is Immanuel: God with us.
And this is the immensity of what we are both called to participate in and also to celebrate in and through our living. To know God is to be drawn into a participative harmony and closeness with Jesus Christ. To receive the Spirit of God is to be energised for a deeper and truer participation and harmonisation with the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. To enter salvation is to be drawn into oneness with Jesus Christ in the process of enduring the pain and suffering that comes with ownership of what He stands for, holding on to the hope that we will one day fully share in what He has become. Passing through the Cross into the victory of resurrection.
In declaring the revelation of God in the face of the suffering Christ, we acknowledge the revelation of this self-emptying God who comes to us and the whole world out of love. In celebrating His love for us we affirm the truthfulness of what He has for every man, woman and child in this world, worked out in the passion of Christ and met with in our own personal experience. Easter is the spectacle of God’s faithfulness worked out in the flesh and blood of a man who represents each and every one of us.
In His love,
Jim
