Christ is risen

12 Apr 2017 • Articles

Author: Dominic Keech

Before you begin reading, look at your watch. Has time flown since you last checked? Maybe you’re reading this while waiting, much slower than you’d like. Time, whether too swift or too slow, evades our grasp. We worry about wasting it, running out of it, or having to wait for it. With instruments we measure it, but we can never control it. As days become years, the cycles and repetitions of our lives highlight our captivity to time. Easter comes again with its proclamation of joy; but another year has passed. Our lives trickle into history. And, somewhere on the horizon of our lives, we know there is a moment coming when our time will cease.

For many, the Easter feast begins with the ancient liturgy of the Easter Vigil. It starts as a fire crackles into light in the darkness. From it the Easter candle is lit, and lifted up for all to see. The symbolism takes us way back, to the power of God in the beginning: Let there be light. It is the same power which begins existence anew on the third day, as Christ is lifted up from the darkness of death. A cross, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet and the numbers of the year are cut into the candle, as these words are proclaimed: Christ, yesterday and today. The beginning and the end. Alpha and Omega. All time belongs to him and all ages. All time belongs to the risen Jesus.

At Easter, we see what happens when God becomes a human being. He comes to be bounded by time, as we are; and he meets the end of time which faces each one of us, in his own death. But God in flesh is more powerful than his captor. He emerges from beyond our horizon, as a new kind of human life: mightier than death, possessing even time itself. As Lord of all time, the risen Christ is present to us: every Easter, and every Sunday, the Day of Resurrection; but also in every swift moment of our fleeting lives. He is with us, holding all our time in his eternity. Our Easter hope is to rise, and be like him. Then we will know that nothing in our lives has truly slipped our grasp or gone to waste, when we are raised to lives of everlasting peace.

Fr Dominic Keech is Chaplain of Brasenose College in the University of Oxford.