Today I simply want to keep adding to what Alison is writing.
If God can raise someone from the death in the middle of human history, the very fact reveals that death, which up till this point had marked human history as simply something inevitable, part of what it is to be a human being, is not inevitable. That is, death is itself not simply a biological reality, but a human cultural reality marking all perception and a human cultural reality that is capable of being altered. This it seems to me is the decisive point at which any pre-Christian notion of sin and the Christian understanding must differ. The drastic nature of sin is revealed as something which has so inflected human culture that death is a human reality, and not simply a biological one, one which decisively marks all human culture. This nature of sin as related to death is simultaneously revealed as something which need not be. It is not that God can, of course, forgive all our sins, but then there is also death which is just there. It becomes clear that God is not only capable of forgiving us for such things as we might have done, but the shape of (God's) forgiveness stretches further than that, into what we are: we are humans tied into the human reality of death. We need no longer be.
We need no longer be tied into the human reality of death. I am not there. Put me up against death and I let that 'bad boy' push me around and make less of me. And yet, our God whose forgiveness is a power that no other power can match or control becomes the gateway through death's threats. We must remember that death is not one single action. It is a whole complex that is constantly trying to steal life from us. From anxiety that makes us shudder to fear that makes us pull back, death really is working every angle. But death 'need no longer be' our reality. Through the resurrection our eyes are opened by our God who already makes death into nothing more than something dead and gone. Death (mighty death) is dead and gone. Therefore we can say and must say: To Life.
Connection: It is much easier to write these words than to step up and live as though death is a done deal. I do think that we begin with words. We begin by telling the story of God's power to bring life - to heal life - to transform the power of death into a vision filled with life (which truly angers death). This is why we need to other voices of life that are around us. we need the encouragement that comes when there are others who remind us that death need no longer be.
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