The excerpt below is from a blog article by author and pastor Winn Collier (www.winncollier.com) and was published as part of a 50 days of Easter blog series on “What is the Good News?” It hit me squarely in the face today – as what Easter is really about, what life and death are really about:
“Most of us are aware of an ache, a sorrowful wondering if our world will ever be right. We know deep in our bones that something has gone wildly amiss. We know that the injustices and loneliness and social fractures rife in our world are evils we ought rail against. We might not all believe hell is a place where bad people perish, but I’ve yet to meet a person who disagrees that we encounter bits of hell in Darfur’s refugee camps, in terror and the wars terror spawns, in urban centers where young girls peddle their bodies on the streets.
And we know, somehow we simply know, it was not meant to be this way. But why do we know? My hunch is that we have this primal intuition because our story carries echoes of the good news. Might it be true
that we were created for Eden? Might it be true that we gasp at beauty and are furious at evil because we were made for beauty, not evil? Perhaps Jesus’ story (God became human, died as a scandalous act of love and then walked out of his tomb as signal of God’s intention to resurrect everything death has ruined) tells us what our heart already knows: we are people of life, not death.
Perhaps Jesus’ story, rather than offering a Pollyanish fairytale, narrates why the world I experience collides so cruelly with the world I long for. For me, Jesus’ good news provides the one hope that I haven’t gone utterly mad.
A people of life, not death: this we know. And here we encounter the jaw-dropping good news. Death might be everywhere, but death does not have the final word. Jesus has come, and death (of every sort) will one day be emphatically undone. And life will dance free in the streets. As Frederick Buechner said, “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.â€