Saturday 4 April 2015

Reflection for Easter Sunday: Burning the Empire Down...







Today is Easter Sunday. Jesus is risen.

He appears to some of his followers; women, to be exact. The women, astonished, tell the men. The men don’t believe them.

Then Jesus appears to the men. Then they believe.

Eventually, the men will make themselves the rulers of the Church and make sure that women never tell them anything ever again…  

But Easter will not be contained. It can’t possibly ever be tamed.

Easter is the revolution- social, political, spiritual transformation.

If Christ is raised, then nothing is impossible. How can we ever say, ‘that could never happen’ ever again?

Nothing can ever be the same. Anyone who thought the status quo could just go on as normal was deluding themselves;

Even those who eventually co-opted Christianity into their imperial structures could never truly diffuse its incendiary message.

They could cloak it, confuse it, obfuscate it, entangle it, bend it, twist it…

But in the end, this was a fire that had only one purpose:

Burn the empire to the ground.

Jesus said, ‘I have come to set fire to the earth; how I wish it were already burning!’ (Luke 12:49)

At the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday, we lit the Paschal fire;

From it, we lit the Paschal Candle;

And from it, we passed the fire into the church and passed it to each other, lighting the candles each of us held…

This is a fire that will never go out.

This is a fire which exposes all the structures of power, empire, violence, and greed for the pile of kindling it is.

This is a fire that exposes all the wealth, stocks, shares, bonds, and accounts of the world as mere paper and plastic…

The radical Good News- food for the poor, sight to the blind, release to the prisoners, freedom for the captives, life for the lifeless, a voice for the voiceless- burns every oppressive structure to ash…

Bakunin said that the urge to destroy is also a creative urge;

Jesus told us that the urge to set fire to the empire is a spiritual one.

So have a Holy and Blessed Easter.

Keep your matches dry…



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