Theme for Easter day

Death, nothingness, life again. Easter is upon us! We join the women who mournfully and dutifully walked through their dark fear and grief to prepare Jesus’ body for the year where the body and all that represented fell away to leave just bones. Bones all knew would rise again on the last day clothed with a new body. We join in their shock at the loss of the body, at their surprise to find the “two men, light cascading over them”[1] and the good news they proclaim. How do we respond to this proclamation? With the women, trusting and believing; with the male disciples, disbelieving these foolish women; or with Peter, doubting, yet running to see for himself?
Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians encounters and entirely different response. He is writing to people who found the resurrection superfluous. They believed their bodies held them captive, and that when they died their soul was freed and went to be with God for eternity. Who needs a future resurrection? No need for a last day or to pay any attention to this world. It is all about eternity with God. There a lot of people who hold this line today.
Paul’s response is that our bodies do not hold us captive, but are part of our essence and our ability to express ourselves. There is no future in God that does not include our bodies. Why was Paul so hot on this? William Loader suggests that “Paul cites all this evidence for the resurrection of Jesus because he wants to assert that Christian hope envisages an embodied, fully human existence. Human existence and human community are to be taken seriously both for the future and for the present, unlike at Corinth.”[2] 
For Paul Good Friday and Easter were not just about my private faith and Jesus dying for my sins, but was about the redemption of the whole cosmos. Jesus death and resurrection is about all humanity, and life in God was not an event that happened after death, but starts now, in this life. This physical world is God’s world. Jesus death and resurrection restores all in God.
So again, how do we respond to the good news from the two men who spoke to the women at the empty tomb?  Peter ran to an empty tomb. Where do we look for the risen Christ?
[1] Scripture quotations from THE MESSAGE. Copyright © by Eugene H. Peterson 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.
[2] http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/

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