Please excuse me if I go slowly through my use of James Alison's writing. It simply catches me wondering and wandering. The resurrection of Jesus was not a miraculous event within a preexisting framework of understanding of God, but the event by which God recast the possibility of human understanding of God. For this to happen God simultaneously made use of and blew apart the understanding of God that had developed over the centuries among the Jewish people. God did this in the person of Jesus, through his life and teaching, leading up and including his death. Within the fullness of the life of Jesus - that must include his death - the vision of the realm of possible life within God's loving embrace is expanded and made to be eternally concrete and eternally present. What becomes visible is the Reigning story of the powerlessness of death. Even when it is an ever-prsent reality, death is not a power within what Alison calls a 'preexisting framework of understanding God.' It will be within the Jesus Story that death is exposed as a lie and the power of death is no longer able to be a power that rules us. What is alive and vibrant is the sustaining love that reunites all things - rather than the powers of division. Among us - God's Beloved - is a gift that announces and exposes the grand hoax of death that is usually able to lead us around by the nose and scare us into believing anything that is not the power of God's love. Connection: I find that the power of death - in all of its many forms - is a tough foe to face and defeat. The tapes of 'this is the way it is' or 'this is the way I want it to be' can be deafening. So we are told to gather and rehearse the story of a truthfulness that does not bend to what appears to be the strongest voice in room. O God of life, you open us to wideness of your love so that all the powers that attempt to contain us must |
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