Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel

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.

memory is the memory of our responsibility for rejection and injury, for diminution of self and others.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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