EASTER REFLECTIONS

The resurrection of the dead is basic for faith. It points to God’s final triumph, and generates a radical hope. It indicates that, even in history, we have an obligation to live in accordance with the plenitude of the resurrection – in accordance with God’s guarantee that the new human being is a real possibility. But this basic truth by no manner of means divests the reign of God of its importance. In and of itself, the resurrection is eschatological. The reign of God shows us how to go about constructing the eschatological, how we may journey toward the eschatological…In the resurrection God declares that there will be a new sky and a new earth, and that the risen Christ constitutes the firstfruits of that new creation. But in Jesus’ preaching of the reign of God we see the basic element of this eschatological novelty in our very history, and we hear the demand that we not only look forward to that reign, but actually construct it.
Jon Sobrino
Spirituality of Liberation: Toward Political Holiness, p. 130

God took the evil of the cross and the lynching tree and transformed them both into the triumphant beauty of the divine. If America had the courage to confront the great sin and ongoing legacy of white supremacy with repentance and reparation there is hope “beyond tragedy.”
James Cone
The Cross and the Lynching Tree, p. 166

When boundaries function to defend privileges of the “haves” from the desperation of the “have-nots,” the Bible takes sides on behalf of the excluded. Jesus models a way that transgresses borders, embraces the “other,” and embodies the dream of God by welcoming everyone to the table. [The] Gospel stories remind us that challenging the social protocols of simple table fellowship can change the world. When four young African American college students sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1, 1960, they began a nonviolent revolution that spelled doom for the persistent system of American apartheid. We should never underestimate the power of a strategic meal – especially when it is shared across boundaries.
Ched Myers and Matthew Colwell
Our God Is Undocumented, p. 137