In the morning, Sunday morning, we celebrate Easter. Resurrection. New life. A fresh dawn filled with eternal hope.

Friday, we commemorated death by crucifixion. Jesus Christ yielded up His life, suffered divine rejection, and carried the entire weight of sin and degradation upon Him into the grave. The Perfect taking upon the imperfect so that the beloved of God might take on the righteousness of God.

The days between death and resurrection are long, fraught, and afflicted with questions lacking answer or even insight. How dark must it have been?

Then Easter.

Yes! He is risen. He is risen indeed.

But.

I can’t help believe that if we interviewed Jesus Christ about His ordeal from Maundy Thursday to Easter morning, He would remind us that in dying He took our sins and our sinful selves into Himself. “I am crucified with Christ,” Paul declared when reflecting on this grace.

When yielding up His spirit and succumbing to burial, Jesus Christ took us who are in Him with Him to the grave. All that God could not stand about us, everything intolerable, our fallen nature as descendants of Adam, and the entire breadth and depth of our sinfulness, Christ carried with Him into the grave. Paul writes about this as well: “We have been buried with Him.”

Our timeless and all-knowing God realized before He laid the foundations of the world in preparation for creating us that humankind’s demise in the Garden of Eden would afflict our humanity and compromise our viability as people. Such profound failure would necessitate a profound remedy.  

If I was God, I would have abandoned my plan as ill-fated with this foreknowledge. But I am not God!  

Foreknowing, God created a plan in concert with Jesus Christ. St. John notes that Jesus Christ is “the Lamb slain before the foundations of the world.” The solution of mercy was in place before the idea of sin was even conceived.

Before we ever showed up, God identified His children with Christ’s covenant, work, provision, and life. His work was finished in the mind of God before the Incarnation occurred.

On Easter morning, Mary discovered an empty tomb. In time, it was evident that Christ was no longer buried, but risen. Risen indeed!

And we were—and are—raised with Him “in the likeness of His resurrection.” Christ lives! And because He lives, you live, I live.

Tradition is: The pastor or priest declares, “He is risen!” and the people reply, “He is risen indeed!”

I can’t help but believe that if asked, Jesus would love it if we would add to our declaration, “And I am risen to new life as well! Indeed!”

Thanks be to God.

* Scriptures referenced: 2 Cor. 5:21; Gal. 2:20; Rm. 6:4; Rev. 17:8; Mt. 28:1-10; Rm. 6:5; 6:1-11