“Paint Christ Alive …Risen!” Easter is not just a Sunday. Easter is not just a season of the church year when we keep out the white paraments. Easter is the reality which changes everything. I find in Easter the hope that I need. Out of the death of God’s Son came his new life and our new life. In Easter we find the promise that God is not done with us yet.
It is said that Michelangelo once chided his artist friends: “Why do you keep filling gallery after gallery with endless pictures of one ever-repeated theme of Christ in weakness, Christ upon the cross, Christ dying, most of all, Christ hanging dead upon the cross? Why do you concentrate on what was a passing episode and not the final scene? Paint Christ not dead but alive, risen with his foot set on the rock with which they sought to hold him down.” Along with Michelangelo, my faith that Christ was raised from the dead gives me confidence that the bad news of today is not the final word. The final word – the LAST WORD – rests with God, and that rallying cry is: “Christ is risen! Christ is risen in-deed!”
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann once wrote: “Because of Easter I can come out from behind my desk, my stethoscope, my uniform, my competence, my credentials, my fears – to meet life a little boldly.” That’s what Easter means to me, too! Happy Easter! And I hope to see you in church on Sunday.
Paul Wood