Alison notes that we have a paradox at hand (in the resurrection). He will then (tomorrow) tie that to sin. Here we have an apparent paradox: it was the extraordinary proximity of God to the human story - such that God was actually involved in it as one of us - that permitted us the possibility of understanding for the first time the degree of the distance of God from any of our representational possibilities. In more traditional terms, it was only the complete immanence of God in our history as raising a concretely dead man from the dead that revealed the complete transcendence of God. In some ways, God's intimate connection to the human story helps to address the question of every little child: Where is God? If death rules life and is the power that controls how we can go about out everyday life experience then God is not a part of what is here. That is, God cannot and is not contained by our everyday reality. In fact, with the resurrection - with God right in the middle of the way death tries to rule all things - with death being left with death's pants pulled down, God redefines all of our understanding of life. The resurrection of God's Beloved gives us a glimpse of the beyond pulling us out of our locked in stories so that new life can emerge and we can begin to live within it. I would imagine that death must be really upset with God because right in the face of all the 'authority and witnesses' to the brutality of Jesus' death, God is a power able to live within death's grasp and yet able to break death's bond. The ultimate outsider doing a cosmic inside job. Connection: I need to know that God is available even as I fear death and expect to be overcome by death's pull. I need to know that I am connected and beloved by a power that will side with me in and through the best that death can throw at me. O God of life, reaching in and save us as you always promise. Amen |
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