PARTNERS
WITH GOD The two largest news magazines, Time and Newsweek, every year about this time put Jesus on the cover. The magazines generally ignore religious belief the rest of the year, but at Easter Jesus becomes news again. And why not? According to a Newsweek poll, 78% of Americans believe Jesus rose from the dead, and 81% of Americans identify themselves as Christians. Christians comprise roughly one-third of the earth's population. At the very core of the Christian belief is the Easter story, the story that gives meaning to our faith, and hope to our lives. It convinces us that at the end there is not an oblivious annihilation, an eternal blackness without consciousness. How does this enigmatic story of Jesus emerging from the tomb give us this assurance? While the gospels differ in the particulars, they all agree that the crucified Jesus was seen alive in various settings and with many different people, thus precluding the possibilities of mass hallucination or ghostly manifestations. Several years ago in Romania, of all places, with its history of vampires and undead, there was a woman who fainted when she opened her front door and found her husband standing there. The reason for her surprise was that three days earlier her husband had choked on a fish bone, had stopped breathing, and had collapsed. When the family doctor arrived, he knew that the man had a weak heart, and so right away he assumed the man was dead. A couple days later, though, grave diggers at the cemetery heard the sound of someone knocking on wood. They rushed to open the man's coffin to find that he was still alive. In this case it was resuscitation, not resurrection. In Jesus' case, there was no question about it. He was dead. The Romans were very efficient executioners and not likely to leave anyone alive on the cross. Jesus had given up his spirit into God's hands. He was dead. They put his body in a tomb, and on the third day, there was an earthquake, an angelic visitation, and then the appearance of the risen Christ. The message of Easter is that God, the Creator of life, who in the beginning conceived the very idea of life itself, formed a biological substance and through successive stages brought humans into being and infused our species with the divine spirit–this same God can bring back to life that which God created in the first place. The message of Easter is that life can emerge from death, that our past mistakes can be rectified, that our sins can be forgiven, that we can begin anew. We are living in an apocalyptic age. Scientists tell us that within fifty years most of the world's oil reserves will be exhausted, and within a hundred years the melting of the polar ice caps will eliminate much of our coastal areas. Global warming is already spawning destructive hurricanes at an unprecedented rate. The environmental nightmare predicted during the first Earth Day thirty-six years ago is beginning to come to pass. It is time to apply our Easter faith that gives us a renewable
and sustainable hope that the earth can be reclaimed and renewed.
We must become partners with God in the restoration of our planet
as we work to bring it back from the brink of annihilation.
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