The Larger Miracle

"The Lord of Life was held in the grip of death."

The sentence from this morning's sermon at church has been haunting me all Easter afternoon. The Rev. Lynn Hill took a different angle than any I had previously considered across years of studying the Bible, and both hearing and preaching messages.

The larger miracle, the pastor asserted, was not that Jesus came back to life but that he was dead in the first place. Jesus' very being is one that constantly teems with the life of God. The idea of him dying is almost unfathomable. That death could hold him from Friday until Sunday, that sin could keep him immersed in its trenches--almost unspeakable.

Of course he broke free of death's fingers. What else could Jesus be but alive? And what else remains for those who allow his life to permeate their own, that they should be alive and death not hold them? It is incredulous to think that death--and anything under its umbrella that separates us from the love of God--should put its mark on us to any level of permanence.

Death and sin do and should have a foreign taste. They were never supposed to be on the menu. To be in Christ is to be fully alive. It is the most natural thing in the universe.