by A. South

Created on: March 24, 2008

As Christians, we proclaim, and we believe, and our hope is rooted in the fact that Jesus Christ has risen from the dead.

That's our hope.

That's our reality.

But at the same time we proclaim that we also recognize that the fullness of His resurrection power has not come to bear in our lives or in the life of this planet, this creation.

When you read about the two women who go that morning and see the stone rolled away, and then realize that Jesus has risen from the dead, He gives them a message to go and tell His disciples. For the women and Jesus' disciples, this message is disorienting, challenging and almost unbelievable to try to figure out what to make of this.

You get the sense that they realize as they see the risen Christ that things will never be the same, that the world will be changed forever because Jesus Christ was raised from the dead.

And yet, every one of those disciples died without seeing the full fruition of Christ's resurrection of Christ coming to bear on the earth.

The hope of the world is the risen Savior, Jesus Christ.

The hope of my life, the hope of your life, the hope for real change, for you to become a different person...

The hope for this world to be renewed, redeemed and redone where sin and death and sickness and suffering and poverty and injustice are done away with once and for all.

Where there will be no need to pray for the poor, because there won't be any poorOr the sick, or the bereavedbecause the power of the resurrection will have come in it's completion.

So how should we respond to that? If that's true, what must be true of us?
We are to love one another, and we are to love precisely because Jesus Christ loved us.

We are not bound by sin and death. We have a message to proclaim and a power to move into the world in love.

The darkness in our own souls doesn't win and the darkness of the world doesn't win.

if the darkness is passing away, then we must have hope.

We are a cynical people, and we are cynical because we don't believe change is possible, and yet we proclaim that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.

If a man can be raised from the dead, then we must look at the world, our lives and our hearts with hope, not optimism. Hope. Hope that is rooted in the historical reality of one who was dead and is now alive forever more.

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