Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel

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.

must see Christ, the saving victim, the merciful judge, not only in the victim whose blood is on his hands but in the self he could and would not be, the self he has decided against:14 in the first instance, the non-violent, the non-oppressive self he has rejected, then also in the penitent self he has refused to become in burying or neutralizing h

attempting to keep the devotional and the critical together in one interpretative process:

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.

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.

the divine judgement on the world is not delivered from a supernatural plane, but is enacted within the relations of human beings to each other.

The exaltation of the condemned Jesus is presented by the disciples not as threat but as promise and hope.

a divine justice, righteousness, which acts only to restore

racism is not evil because its victims are good, it is evil because its victims are human.