Easter: Anointing by Resurrection

God would prove Jesus’ anointing not by vindication, but by resurrection.

-- Russell Moore, The Evangelical Temptation to Prove Ourselves

Jesus rarely confronted political power, because he knew that's not where real power is.

This Easter, we are hiking in the Havasupai region in Arizona.  While many Easters, for me, have been in the context of a church building, this one is a whole different kind of church…the cathedral of outdoors. In this church, it dawns afresh on me that real power is in what God has created — among other things, the Earth.  

If God has resurrection power, then all that is built into the created world, including all of its beauty, can certainly overcome what we do to it (in spite of how damaging that can be — we can certainly ruin things for a long time).  

I’m grateful today that resurrection power is just another marvel-form of Creator power.

One of the foundational reasons for our sense of isolation and unhappiness is that we have lost our contact with nature. 

Acknowledging the intrinsic value, beauty, and even soul of creation, elements, plants, and animals is a major paradigm shift for most Western Christians. In fact, many in the past often dismissed such thinking as animism or paganism. We limited God’s love and salvation to our own human species and then in this theology of scarcity, we did not even have enough love left to cover all of humanity! To be honest, God ended up looking quite stingy and inept—hardly “victorious,” as our Easter hymns claim.

Easter is the feast of hope. This is the feast that says God will have the last word and that God’s final judgment is resurrection. God will turn all that we maim and destroy and hurt and punish into life and beauty.

-- Richard Rohr