Life Wins -- A Newspaper Piece.

It was a crisp spring morning. Some of us gathered in the parking lot of the Roman Catholic church, another group gathered at the United Church across the river. Both groups walked down the hill to meet at the bridge and greet each other by shouting: “Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!” before all going to the community hall for coffee. So it was that people from a variety of churches celebrated the victory of life over death together. 

Every year, on the Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, the Christian story invites us to consider the primal battle between life and death. Which will win? On Friday we gather and tell a story of betrayal trial, conviction and torturous execution. We watch as the body of the one we call Messiah is taken from the cross and laid in a stone tomb. Can this be the end?

SPOILER ALERT! There is more to come. Life wins. Just when it looks like the powers of death have had the victory Life Wins!! And in that victory lies our hope and our promise. Life will always win. As Right Rev Dr. Richard Bott, Moderator of the United Church, says in his Easter video message: “the resurrection of Christ says, “No. Death has no dominion”. Life wins, in the end life will win.

This, to me, is the heart of the Gospel. The heart of the work of Jesus is not done on the cross with his death but in his life. The heart of Jesus’ ministry is in the teaching and healing he does before the cross and in God’s powerful word of life after the cross. In Jesus God invites us to share in the life of the Reign of God, life that confronts and conquers the forces of death in the world.

It can be hard to believe that life could possibly win. After all death-dealing seems so prevalent in the world. We live in a time when racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia are used to divide us, to declare some as less worthy than others – and death wins again. We live in a world where everyday somebody on this planet lives with the threat of bomb blast or gunfire or violent unrest – and death wins again. We live in a world where we as a species most often choose the easy familiar way of comfort even when we know that our current patterns of life risk making the planet unlivable for our children and our neighbours – and death threatens to have the last laugh. But we believe that life will yet win. Easter tells us that life will win. How will we react?

What difference does it make to be invited into God’s Reign where life wins, where death has no dominion? Well in Scripture we meet a variety of people who experience the presence of the Risen Christ and they are no longer the same. I think particularly of Peter, the rough fisherman who, once having experienced Easter, becomes the leader of a movement that would take him to Rome, heart of the Empire, to proclaim the Good News he found in Jesus Christ. Or I think of Saul of Damascus, full of zeal for the persecution of the followers of Jesus, who had his own Easter moment and became the foremost apostle to the Gentiles, spreading the Word of Life around the eastern Mediterranean. When God’s word of life that shatters the dominion of death enters our lives we are called to be agents of life.

When the Word of Life pronounced at that first Easter enters our hearts we are called to be changed. The Word of Life pushes us to help make changes in the wider world, to push for that world where life, and that in abundance, is made available to all. As people who have met the Risen Christ we have a calling to fight against all those things I listed earlier that help death win. As people who have heard the Good News of Easter we have to have hope that this fight will be victorious, because we know that life wins, that death no longer has dominion.

Jesus was all about the Reign or Kingdom of God. That Kingdom is a kingdom of life. The powers of the world often work against the kingdom of life. Sometimes we might lose hope. But the story of Jesus ends not with an agonizing death on the cross but with the words “he is not here, he has been raised”. Life wins. Resurrection happens and life wins. The world will never be the same because life wins. We can never be the same because we have met the Risen Christ.

Christ is Risen. Alleluia. Happy Easter.