Resurrection in the Ruins: Easter Hope and the Healing of the World
A Stone Rolled Back in a Fractured World
Resurrection Sunday isn’t a retreat into denial. It isn’t the triumph of optimism or the victory of spiritual escapism. It’s the announcement of something unspeakably tender and radically disruptive: love has risen from the grave. Life has emerged from death. A wounded body walks again, not to erase the scars but to transfigure them.
“Resurrection doesn’t ignore the world’s pain; it walks right into it, still bearing the marks.”
This isn’t a metaphor. It’s the deepest reality. The resurrection of Jesus Christ was literal, bodily, and historical.[1] Resurrection doesn’t ignore the world’s pain; it walks right into it, still bearing the marks. And because of this, resurrection isn’t just something to believe. It’s something to embody. Resurrection is a way of seeing, a way of standing, a way of loving.
We live in an age of many cruciform wounds: climate change, artificial intelligence, immigration crises, rising nationalisms, and failing states. And yet, we proclaim that resurrection still rises—not in abstraction but in resistance, new beginnings, and the remaking of all things.
The Earth Shall Rejoice
Creation groans, and resurrection answers—not with quick fixes but with renewal from within. The Risen Christ isn’t disembodied light. Christ walks through gardens, eats fish, breathes on friends, laughs, and weeps. Resurrection is earthy. It affirms soil, skin, and sky.
The same power that raised Christ is now at work in creation, not to abandon it but to redeem it.[2] The resurrection calls us to live as gardeners in a burning world: to plant, compost, clean, protest, and protect. This isn’t sentimental ecology. It’s holy resistance and God-given stewardship.
“The resurrection calls us to live as gardeners in a burning world: to plant, compost, clean, protest, and protect.”
Easter people are resurrection people. And resurrection people don’t shrug at melting glaciers, disappearing species, or poisoned rivers. They grieve and act. They mourn and sow. They walk with the wounded Earth as if it matters because it does.
Machines Cannot Resurrect
We are raising machines without raising our souls. Artificial intelligence expands, evolves, and encroaches. But resurrection reminds us that life isn’t code; it’s a gift.[3]
Easter speaks differently in the face of algorithmic control and digital domination. It says presence matters more than precision, flesh matters more than function, and mystery matters more than mastery.
The risen Christ doesn’t return as an optimized spirit. Christ returns in a body that still carries trauma. This is the scandal of Christian hope: that real life is slow, sacred, and vulnerable. So, while the world marvels at machine learning, resurrection calls us to soul learning. To become wise, not just smart. Loving, not just efficient. Alive, not just animated.
“The risen Christ doesn’t return as an optimized spirit. Christ returns in a body that still carries trauma.”
Cruciform spirituality embraces technology as a tool, not a master. Resurrection spirituality insists that the most human things—prayer, slowness, compassion, touch—are not obsolete. They’re eternal.
Resurrection Has No Borders
No gate was needed on Easter morning, and no tomb was guarded enough. The stone rolled back, and with it, every barrier we thought was permanent. The resurrection undoes the logic of exclusion. Resurrection dismantles walls, borders, and divisions.
Christ emerges not into a homeland but into a world. And Christ goes first to the margins: to grieving women, fearful disciples, and doubting friends. This is a migrant gospel of movement, displacement, and hospitality.
To live resurrection is to welcome the stranger as sacred.[4] Not because it’s politically expedient but because it’s what the Risen Christ does. Resurrection people open doors. They sit with the undocumented. They grieve deportations. They tear down the idea that any human is illegal.
Easter isn’t a private inheritance. It’s a shared homeland. Resurrection remakes us into one new humanity: borderless, beloved, and bearing witness to a love that moves across every line we draw.
“Easter isn’t a private inheritance. It’s a shared homeland.”
The Empire Cannot Hold
On Friday, it looked like the Roman Empire had won. Power had spoken, and the cross was its verdict. But Sunday shattered that illusion. Resurrection is the rejection of death-dealing systems.
Today’s empires are subtler. Nationalism is cloaked in nostalgia. Propaganda is disguised as prayer. Glory is draped in flags. Worship is confused with politics. But resurrection refuses to salute what crucifies.
Easter people love their lands without worshiping them. They remember that the tomb was in a garden, not a capital, and that Christ’s risen body spoke peace, not dominance.
Resurrection disrupts tribal pride and calls forth a new kind of nation—not one of borders and blood, but of beatitudes and broken bread. It’s a people shaped by grace, not genealogy. By cruciform love, not coercive power. But the inclusive resurrection, not ethnicity or blood.
To follow the Risen Christ is to refuse every nationalism that demands your worship. It’s to pledge allegiance to the kingdom with no flag, only a cross, and now an empty tomb. All nations and empires will bow before the almighty, sovereign God and the Risen Christ, who rules and reigns in justice, righteousness, peace, and love.
Resurrection in Ruined States
When systems collapse, governments fail, trust corrodes, and cities fall, resurrection isn’t absent. It begins again in the rubble.
The risen Christ didn’t return to Caesar’s throne. Christ returned to wounded disciples, hiding in locked rooms, clinging to scraps of hope. This is where resurrection still begins.
In failing states, resurrection moves through local churches, feeding children, planting gardens, and holding vigils. It whispers in the courage of communities that refuse to leave one another. It shows up not in spectacle but in solidarity.
Resurrection doesn’t fix everything. But it makes everything possible again. It breathes into the bones of places that thought their song was over. And somehow, impossibly, the music begins again.
The Risen Christ Within
Resurrection isn’t only a literal, historical, bodily event. Resurrection is an indwelling. The same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead now lives within.[5] The tomb was outside us. The life is now within us.
This means resurrection isn’t a memory to admire but a force to embody. It moves us to forgive when bitterness feels justified, to rejoice when grief is still fresh, and to speak life when the world only mutters despair.
The mystical path has always known this: resurrection isn’t flashy. It’s hidden. It’s slow. It happens in the ordinary rooms of our days: as we make meals, tend wounds, tell the truth, and keep going.
To live resurrected is to carry a light that doesn’t deny the darkness but refuses to be overcome.
“To live resurrected is to carry a light that doesn’t deny the darkness but refuses to be overcome.”
Resurrection Is Rising
Easter isn’t a weekend. It’s a way. A reorientation. A revolution of how we see and live. Resurrection doesn’t mean the cross didn’t matter. It means the cross wasn’t the end.
The same world that crucified still groans. But it’s now pierced by glory. And in every place where death once reigned, something new is already breaking through.
So rise, not with denial, but with defiance. Rise with fierce joy. Rise with peace that disturbs. Rise with a love that bears scars and still sings. Rise with the presence of the risen Jesus Christ.
Resurrection has begun. And you, beloved, are part of it.
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Bibliography
Lennox, John. 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020.
Moltmann, Jürgen. God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.
Pohl, Christine D. Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999.
Willard, Dallas. Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2002.
Wright, N.T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003.
Notes
[1] See Luke 24:36–43; Romans 10:9; 1 Corinthians 15:3–8; N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003).
[2] Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993).
[3] John Lennox, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020).
[4] Christine D. Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).
[5] See Romans 8:11. See also Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2002).
This should be a book! Thank you. The story has just begun…