Further Reflection: Easter and Resurrection

Third in a Series

In worship on May 3, Carla asked a few church family members to share the meaning they were finding in Easter. She liked what was said enough to suggest we publish the reflections here. We’re posting one each day.

My understanding of Easter has deepened significantly in the last two years.  Holy Week

of 2025 I sat at the bedside of my dying husband and held his hand as he took his last breath.  He had struggled for about five days with the final process of dying.  But for about nine months before that, after he had to move into a nursing home since I couldn’t care for him by myself at home anymore, Brian had been unhappy and frequently voicing his wish that he could die somehow quickly.  When we talked about things more deeply, though, I could hear all his mixed emotions about dying.  He longed for release from a failing body.  But he felt sad not to have more time to spend with all his beloveds—me, his children, and his grandchildren.  And even though Brian was a believer in Jesus and one who himself had preached many Easter sermons, I also heard him struggle with fear about what dying would really mean.  Is it the end?  Will my unique identity fade from memory and be lost, almost as if I had never existed at all?  I honestly think his own wrestling with those kinds of existential fears prolonged his life at the end, because he wasn’t quite ready to let go of this life.

I struggled with something different.  After the stroke and the move to the nursing home, though I tried my hardest, there was little I could do anymore to relieve his suffering or sadness.  Over time that came to be an excruciating experience.  Some of you will have heard me say that it occurred to me one day that it was a lot like the first three months in Heather’s infancy when she had colic and cried inconsolably for hours EVERY SINGLE NIGHT.  Back then, I just felt I was losing it—I needed that crying to stop.  So too with Brian, his inconsolable sorrow about the state of his existence tore at my heart, and because I love him so much, I thought my own heart would break if he couldn’t just somehow be released from this state even though I was incapable of giving him any relief.

As I sat with him through the days he struggled to be born to eternal life, I was very conscious of being held continuously in a kind of Love I had never quite experienced before.  The whole experience reminded me of labor before giving birth, though this time it was Brian’s body, not mine, that was struggling.  I felt we were cocooned in a Love that wouldn’t let us go, no matter how hard or painful the bodily struggle felt.  And this Love communicated to me that Life would go on—livingness was not something that could be stopped.

I was surprised, then, in the weeks after he died that I heard a part of scripture I had read many times before differently.  I’ve always been drawn to I Corinthians 15 and its argument about the importance of belief in resurrection to Christian faith.  I have also always been especially intrigued with the verses that describe a process through which everything that resists God’s purposes must be subjected to Christ before the Son subjects himself to the Father so that God will be all and in all.  But one line in that part of the chapter had never quite made sense to me—this one: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”  Why is death an enemy?  It’s part of the “circle of life.”  And whether we live or die we belong to God.  So why is death an enemy?  Paul also says that the “sting of death is sin.”  What does that mean? Slowly, some new ideas occurred to me.

In the Christian understanding, God is ever and always Creator and Redeemer.  God’s creation was not a one-off moment sometime in the prehistoric past.  I think the best way to think about God as Creator is as an overflowing, powerful livingness that goes out of itself in love to make space for the other.  God could have been complete in Godself.  But out of infinite love, God wills into being the entire cosmos—every single bit of it, and also the cosmic evolutionary process that led to the birth of our galaxy, the planetary system circling our star the Sun, and eventually the long, laborious process through which life emerged from primeval seas and single-celled organisms to all the complexity that makes up our beautiful blue planet today in 2026.  And God is continuously creating through all of this—holding things together, moving them forward to the next phase, the next generation, the next new wonder.  God loves it all—supports it with faithfulness and is also continuously redeeming—that is moving each individual part and the whole forward, preserving what is good, true, and beautiful, and overcoming what is evil, false, corrupt, violent, destructive.  

For all of us who are animals (we mortal ones), our first breath is also the first step on an inevitable march towards death.  I know it sounds depressing to say it that way, but it is true.  Our mortal bodies are wonderful, beautiful, complex, resilient—they are gifts to us.  But they are not capable of immortality.  Because our bodies are also vulnerable, fragile, able to be damaged by forces from within and without ourselves.  And eventually, when enough goes wrong with our bodies, we die.  And that is where I discerned some new meaning in Paul’s words about death as the last enemy.

God didn’t create the world as spectacle or a power play.  God’s continuous loving care is evident through all we can learn about the history of the cosmos and the complexity of the ordering of everything in nature.  If we accept Paul’s prophetic vision of the end, the picture is of a future in which God fully inhabits or indwells the whole of God’s creation, including every living thing that ever exists.  We aren’t there yet.  

There is another line from Paul’s Corinthian correspondence that I want to mention now.  His claim in I Cor. 13 that “love never ends.”  Love is eternal or infinite.  We can have little foretastes of the profound truth of this even in this life.  You learn the strange math of love when you learn that it is the only thing you can possess that is not diminished by giving it away.  In fact, the more you give it out, the more you are filled with it.  And that I think is exactly who or what God is in God’s very self: eternal, almighty, love.  God’s loving creativity and redeeming work are sculpting a future for all of us that retains what can be reconciled with God for the eternal experience of loving community.  God doesn’t lose anything.  

Death might at first seem like a fearsome resistance to God.  If it were able to destroy forever what God creates and redeems, then it would be God’s nemesis—a formidable foe.  But God didn’t create for death and decay, and God is not limited by the forces of mortality.  Paul tells us that Jesus’s resurrection is a downpayment on the future we can expect:  the reality that nothing can finally be separated from God’s love and destroyed—not even by death.  The resurrected self, however, will be very different than the embodied human who had to die.  It will be preserved in true identity, but transformed into a form that can live with God forever.  We are going to be changed by God’s power to creatures fit for immortality.  Paul tells us that “flesh and blood” can’t live in this new way:  we HAVE to die.

Death is an enemy, then, not because it is a serious challenge to the power and love of God.  No, death is an enemy because it can poison US with its “sting.”   And Paul says that that “sting is sin”—mistrust in God or rebellion against God.   It is sin that makes us fear death.  We give it a power over ourselves that it doesn’t deserve, as if it were a real rival to God.  Worse, our fear of dying may set us on the course to trying to become gods ourselves—denying our utter reliance on the Creator/Redeemer for everything we are and have.  I have been kind of humored to read about all the billionaire tech bros who have convinced themselves that their brains or money are going to allow them actually to avoid having to die.  It’s a very powerful delusion—grounded in hubris, but also in fear.  And it is a sin.  Jesus set a different model “not thinking equality with God was something to be grasped after” (Phil. 2:6).  Instead, he humbled himself even in obedience to death.  He accepted that he had to die—even in a horrible and unfair way.  And that is why God raised him up and set him before us as the resurrected Lord.

Death, then, is the enemy insofar as it appears to try to separate us from the God who created us for loving communion.  But it does so most successfully if we are deceived into thinking death’s power is greater than God’s, setting us upon the futile course of pretending that we will never die, and thus spending all our energy on preserving ourselves as isolated individuals rather than giving ourselves freely to others in love. Our risen Lord calls us to live with childlike trust in God who sustains us in life so that we can learn to love with abandon. For it is that participation in Love that begins to form us as the creatures whom God can indwell for eternity.

I knew the afternoon that Brian took his last breath that he was not “gone.”  I felt a calm certainty that he continued to live in God, and that all of who he was, redeemed from those faults that could cause discord, was now being held lovingly in the hands of the God who raised Jesus.  God had defeated the enemy death in this one beloved human, too.

This year, my Easter season was marked with a different kind of sorrow.  My sweet little dog Fritz who I’d only had for just five years got a horrible idiopathic syndrome that left him blind and without olfactory sense literally overnight.  While I consulted with doctors to see if there was anything I could do to help him recover, I watched him struggling with depression and sadness that were reminiscent of Brian’s struggle a year ago, and I felt the same horrifying helplessness of my love’s ability to take away his suffering.  Once again, I thought, it is true that death is the enemy.  The mortality of our bodies leaves us vulnerable to things that are painful and difficult frightening, unfair, and that seem to end in unrelieved tragedy. I comfort myself, however, with the thought that God loves every single part of creation, including my little pup, with the same faithfulness that he loves me and you.  And I believe there is a place for all of us (every kind of creature) in God’s future.

I’m going to end with a little anecdote that Heather and Jason told me about when I visited them last month.  My grandson Henry just turned 3 in March.  They said Henry was in bed in his own room on the night before his birthday and they overheard him singing happy birthday to himself.  They were kind of curious why, since they hadn’t really talked to him about the birthday that night.  The next morning he told them:  “Last night “Grandpa Grandpa” (which is what he called Brian), and “Grandpa Ramon” (one of his grandpas on Jason’s side for whom he is named) visited me and sang happy birthday to me and gave me a gift.”  Both grandpas had died in the year before.  I wonder to myself whether God would give all of us those kinds of glimpses of eternity if we had the eyes of a child to see them.

Dawn DeVries