Christ has conquered death. We live in the light of the Resurrection.
This is wonderful and true, but let us beware a danger lurking here. As we celebrate Christ’s victory over death, we may view the Resurrection as somehow a correction for something that went wrong – death and resurrection, like poison and antidote. Christ died, but now everything is OK because he rose again.
But nothing went wrong. Christ’s death wasn’t a mistake that needed to be corrected. Hard though it is to accept, Jesus death was exactly as it should be. And it is our death that was conquered by his death. His victory was the dying. The resurrection was the demonstration, the consequence, of his victory, a victory already achieved.
Jesus’ resurrection wasn’t for his benefit – it was for ours. We are resurrected because of his victory over death. His victory wasn’t that he conquered his own death, it was that by dying he conquered all death – so we are all raised to new life.
The resurrection was an event in time, it occurred that Sunday morning 2000 years ago. But the significance lies not in the event at that moment in time, but in the fact that everything became different from that moment onwards. The gospels actually tell us nothing about the event itself – no one saw the resurrection. They only talk about what came after, and those accounts are very different. They don’t even agree on how long Jesus remained visible to his disciples afterwards, or what he did during that time. What however is very clear is that the disciples were very different.
So our celebration of Easter starts with recognition of an extraordinary event in the history of the world – but its power comes from the fact that we are changed. We are the resurrected people. We are the ones who have no reason to fear death. Death had no power over him. Death has no power over us.