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Heaven & Earth Meet in The Easter Story

Easter is a profound narrative that leaves us grappling with the full depth of its meaning. Heaven meets earth in a dramatic way in this historic, cataclysmic series of events from Palm Sunday through the trial, cross, and resurrection of Jesus. Bishop Robert Barron gives a beautiful message for Palm Sunday, to show how Jesus, in his flesh, is indeed the glory of God returning to the temple. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpVbF1k0h-o

One lens through which we can view the narrative of Easter is the love of the Father for the Son. We see an expression of the exponential love of God that is unparalleled in human history. Jeremy Begbie helps us unpack this high calibre love.

In Christ’s life, we discover what it is for divine love to be uncircumscribable by the world’s finitude. In the faithfulness that takes Jesus to the cross and raises him from the dead, we find the ultimate measure of what cannot be thought or spoken. In his cruciform victory over evil, confirmed on Easter Day, we encounter power-for-the-good-of-the-other. And here, in one utterly “possessed” by his Father’s love, we see God being who God will be. (J. Begbie, Abundantly More, 137).

At the end of the day, Easter is not about death but rather infinitely more about unconquerable new life and new creation. God’s life is a ceaseless dynamic of giving—a constant generation of new life and superabundant love. The unfathomable love of God gives life to all, inaugurating an economy of grace and goodness in the world. Love is writ large in the cross of Christ, the love between the Father and Son, but also love between God and humankind. Who could imagine a greater demonstration? The Son-Father relation of eternal love forms a central theological nerve within John’s Gospel.

This high form of love reaches its apogee, its most intense ‘living out’, in the crucifixion—where the Son and the Father give themselves wholly to each other in extremis, to the point of the Son’s death—and in the raising of Jesus to new life, even the nothingness of death must yield to God’s love-driven giving of life. God loves out of the abundance of his generosity. (J. Begbie, Abundantly More, 165)

William Cavanaugh adds pertinent words about the Word made flesh: “On the cross, it is hard to recognize the invisible and all-powerful God in the tortured body of Jesus. At the same time, God is manifested in the self-sacrificial love that the cross reveals. Jesus offers himself as a sacrifice of reconciliation and a new covenant to gather the nations” (W. T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry, 363). Amidst the betrayal and defection of close friends, the false testimony of hostile witnesses, injustice, poor government leadership, hatred and revenge, mocking and scourging, divine love prevails. Jesus, our Lord and exemplar, took the lowest place, rejected and marginalized as a common criminal. The cross breaks the power of violence, evil, and scapegoating in human culture.

There is a divine confidence in Jesus’s John 17 prayer at the Last Supper even amidst the coming chaos, anguish, and doom. Jesus prayed for an eschatological, dynamic oneness, offering his disciples joy. He knew that they would experience hatred and persecution (forces of dissolution and deconstruction) someday. It is by facing such hostility that they were to enter his joy, to experience his glory. True disciples of Christ must descend before they ascend. The Easter narrative continues today as we make space for the Father’s love for the Son in our hearts, within our communities. The Christian life consists in our sharing, by the Spirit, in the intense and immense love relation of Father and Son. Life of this eternal quality and love co-dwell. This is God’s strategic genius: The eleven disciples and those to follow in centuries to come, are situated in the real world with one missional tactic, to live out the love of Jesus Christ together—a further incarnation. This is our existential opportunity to access the full meaning of that rich and costly love in 2025. Like Abraham, we get to offer the thing we most love for service to the King of the Jews, who loves us to the end.

He is Risen Indeed; Blessed Easter,

Gordon E. Carkner, PhD