Mac over Seattle, circa 1999.

The Incarnation grounds us in the love of God. “God with us.” The Cross is the core of that love and Paul says it is central to everything Gospel. If you reinterpret, sidestep or attempt to co-opt the Crucified God your theology, no matter how well-intentioned, is worthless and void.

Mine too.

As Bono sings “Kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall….but You go on.”

So in some ways we are right to fixate on the cross. If you are on a sinking ship and there is one lifeboat left to get to safety that is pretty much the only important thing. What you do after, how you will rebuild, if you will marry, have kids etc…is all dependent on being rescued.

But here is the part we are not so very good at. I am not. In fact I am a disaster. It’s like I understood on that lifeboat what the real questions of life are and now that I am on dry land I have no idea how to translate any of it.

So it is with the empty tomb. What do we do with such expanse? He is not here. But He is here…Now.

That’s a little open-ended, no?

As I flew in 1999 into Seattle en route to Redmond I was pondering Jacques Ellul’s notion of the “City” as “man’s replacement for God” (The Meaning of the City) it was doubly ironic as I was arriving over a city that connections millions, if not billions, of replacement parts of the whole artifice, and was doing so as the head of a major Internet Gaming Portal (“re-creation” for the rest of the time when we are not replacing God in earnest).

This is what we do with our freedom. And we wonder why we feel more empty than a tomb.

Maybe, just maybe, it is because we have no idea what to do with the open-ended freedom of Easter. An empty tomb, a Living Lord who wants us today with Him, and a yawning existence with millions of competing voices. We shrink back at its immensity and seek diversion, not as they did in Pascal’s time as a clear-faced alternative to the seriousness of Truth, but rather now like hiding in the bomb shelters of London.

If Good Friday and Easter morning can begin to deal with our paralyzing fear of death, it is on Easter afternoon we realize we have another great fear: the fear of life.

And what is His answer today? To make it all “alright”?

No.

He never lied as people do. He said then as He says today. He says simply “I will be with you”.

And if you want to hear Him you must do a simple thing. Listen quietly because the world screams, but God whispers.