- www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=533

Our beginnings, writes Walter Brueggemann, celebrate the abundance of God’s blessing; the fruitfulness of Genesis 1, ‘God was pleased with what he saw’, and the exuberance of Psalm 150, ‘Praise him with trumpets’. Our endings are full of abundance too, because they are in God; neither in life or death, can we be separated from God (Romans 8:38). Knowing our beginning and end, we should be less anxious about the present.

Yet we are very anxious. Brueggemann says, our present is full of an insatiable appetite to consume. The story we tell ourselves is that there is not enough to go round; we want more in case provision runs out. He claims we believe there is a scarcity of life and love. The risk, then, is to live in the present tense, trusting in God’s abundant beginnings and endings, able to live based not on what we want, but on what others need.

Easter becomes for us the present tense. We know the beginning; Christ’s cross offers an abundant self giving love born of suffering. We know the ending; Christ’s resurrection is the overwhelming abundance of God who refuses to be separated from us in life or death – however we treat him. Knowing our beginning and ending in Christ, allows us to risk living a different kind of present tense, as Brueggemann says, ‘at home and at peace, to care about others as we have been cared for’.

The first witnesses of the risen Christ were shown an unfamiliar present tense. They knew the beginning, the cross, yet had not comprehended it. And whilst they had been assured of the ending, they had chosen not to believe it. In the garden, beginning and ending came together and they were challenged to view Jesus in a different and radical present tense.

‘Why are you looking among the dead for one who is alive? He is not here; he has been raised.’ (Luke 24: 5-6)

May God bless you this Easter.