Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.