For
the fifth day of the Octave of Easter, here is something from Tokens of Trust
by Rowan Williams:
When we celebrate Easter, we are really
standing in the middle of a second ‘Big Bang', a tumultuous surge of divine
energy as fiery and intense as the very beginning of the universe. What a
recent writer wonderfully calls ‘the fire in the equations’,* the energy in the
mathematical and physical structures of things, is here sat Easter; and when in
the ancient ceremonies of the night before Easter we light a bonfire and bless
it and light candles from it, we may think of the first words of God in
genesis, ‘Let there be light!’ – p. 95
The reality of the new creation is that every
moment of our history has now been opened to a future of healing and promise;
but from moment to moment the possibility and the reality remain of struggle,
uncertainty. The future is just that–the future: not something we can know and
control. It is in God’s hands, ultimately, and we have been given confidence
that God is the end of the story and that our history cannot just fall away
into final, irredeemable chaos. – p. 96
On the far side of all the testing, the pain
and struggle of our history, there is Jesus. Finally, beyond all our history,
he will be there to try and test all things by his absolute truth; in his
presence everything and everyone will finally be shown for what they are and
find their true place. – p. 97
*Kitty Ferguson, The Fire in the Equation:Science, Religion, and the Search for God (I think Ferguson got the phrase from
Stephen Hawking)
And
Williams writes this in On Christian Theology:
In short I want to claim that that the story of
the empty tomb is not in fact incidental or secondary to the exposition of what
the resurrection means theologically . . . But, it will be asked, does this
mean that I think belief in the empty tomb as an historical fact to be
essential to belief in the resurrection? Actually, yes. – p. 194
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