Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel

What is at issue is simply the transaction that leads to exclusion, to the severance of any relation of reciprocity.

Christ as criminal, Christ as madman, Christ as alcoholic vagrant: all this and more is implied in the unconditional identification of God with the victim.

Jesus is unquestionably within the human story, but he is remembered as one who absorbed and did not transmit deprivation and violence. And that is hopelessly paradoxical.

a divine justice, righteousness, which acts only to restore

To be a self is to own such a story: to act as a self is to act out of the awareness of this resource of a particular past.

The Lord who judges is the Lord who saves; the Lord who vindicates his oppressed witnesses also comes, in their words and hands, to save their oppressors – who are his as well.

No amount of the rhetoric of ‘self-transcendence’ can substitute for the recovery of the self, the self as the memory of crucifixion and crucifying: there are no dead selves discarded or buried to be the foundation-stones of new identities, because God is the God who opens our graves and gives back the past.

God is the agency that gives us back our memories, because God is the ‘presence’ to which all reality is present.

it is the ‘city’ thus constituted that condemns and rejects God’s holy child; and it is in and to that city that the crucified is now proclaimed as risen.