BlueCollarTheologian

Among the things I lost when my car was stolen was theologian Alan Lewis’s masterful meditation on Holy Saturday called Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday. This excerpt that I posted last year on Facebook is all that remains. Enjoy on this, the Feast of the Resurrection.

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This sudden, breathtaking reversal of the Good Friday verdict on Jesus’ conflict with his opponents is what gives Easter Day its special quality of celebration and emancipation. The guilty despair and cold forsakennesss of the second day give way on the third to joy, relief, deliverance. Today the mood is similar to that of guilty prisoners, sentenced to die, hearing the word “no condemnation” (Romans 8:1), which means reprieve and pardon; of the terminally ill miraculously restored to health and vigor; of penned-in children at the end of term, spilling noisily out of school, relishing the endless prospect of freedom and fun. Easter attests, incredibly for those who watched him die, that Jesus is indeed the one anointed by the Spirit to preach good news to the poor, release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate those who are oppressed, and inaugurate the climatic “Year of the Lord” (Isaiah 61:1-2; Luke 4:18-19). The Pharisees are falsified, their claims of legalism snapped. The iconoclastic God of Jesus has triumphed over the idols of religiosity and moralism, confirming what the Law and Prophets had so often announced to deaf, unwilling ears: that Yahweh’s justice is merciful and gracious. Now we know for sure that without condoning sin God is a God who loves the sinner, seeks out the lost, embraces the contrite breakers of the law, and elects as friends and chosen people not those who have merited favor through self-righteousness and effort, but cheats and malefactors who are spiritually flawed and bankrupt morally. What Jesus had spoken in daring declarations of forgiveness and practiced in outrageous acts of friendship has now received definitive, divine corroboration. In the impossible, shocking words of Paul, once Saul, whose personal history actually proved their truth, God is “a justifier of the ungodly” (Romans 4:5)—made manifest as such through the raising of one who hung upon a cross of godforsakenness and was buried in a grave of wickedness.

Likewise the victims of the world’s godlessness, those bruised and crushed beneath the heel of the powerful, have cause, on on hearing Easter’s story, to raise their heads in dignity and hope. In the curious logic of grace, the God of resurrection who welcomes home those who have done every form of evil proves by the same token to be ruthlessly and tirelessly opposed to every form of evil, refusing to be reconciled to sin and the satanic. Easter is God’s victory, in particular, over the deadly forces of pride and domination. By raising Christ, the weak and helpless victim of unjust cruelty, the Father not only vindicates the Son but verifies the faith for which the Son died—that the self-promoters who destroy others cannot prove victorious in the end; for the way to life leads only down the path of risky, loving self-expenditure and humble servitude.

Alan Lewis, “Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday,” 63-4.