Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel

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.

The Father, as such, will not judge (5:22): judgement belongs to the Son, because it is the Son who is concretely involved in the processes of violence and condemnation.

a divine justice, righteousness, which acts only to restore

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

Insofar as these phenomena are a celebration of the humanity of the oppressed, a willingness to receive from those we have imagined have nothing to give, they are one of the most hopeful signs in our divided civilization. Insofar as they refuse to take seriously the possible transcendence of the oppressive relationship, they are profoundly unhopefu

The self is – one might say – what the past is doing now, it is the process in which a particular set of ‘given’ events and processes and options crystallizes now in a new set of particular options, responses and determinations, providing a resource of given past-ness out of which the next decision and action can flow. It is continuity; and so it i

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

the condemned and the court change places, the victim becomes the judge.

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.