His last words were meant for us...
“It is finished.”
And in our witness of death’s beauty, we experience how lovely is life. No longer does death have the sting of victory for in Jesus’ lovely death we are set free to realize how lovely is life.
As we celebrate the glory of Easter contemplate these two truths:
Lovely is death. In Jesus' death perfect love overwhelms the darkness of fear, the darkness of pain, the darkness of anxiety... the darkness of sin. For in His death we meet love, for He is love and “perfect love casts out fear.” Lovely is the death of the One who is love for through His death we are baptized in His glory so that we might “walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:4).
Lovely is death is the truth of all those who “lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely” so that we might be consumed by Jesus, “the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb 12:1-2).
Lovely is life. The joy of the cross is rooted in its destruction of our death so that through the death of Christ we might become baptized into the loveliness of life. Through the Spirit our hearts are awakened so that in hearing His voice we might truly live (Jn 5:25).
Lovely is life is the truth of all those who believe in Christ that “though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die” (Jn 11:25-26). For in Christ and through the Spirit, we are more than conquerors because in His death we become “the resurrection and the life.”
Only when we see how lovely is death can we experience how lovely is life. Only when Easter is lived through Christmas and Christmas through Easter can and will the Church become the eruption of hope bursting forth from the empty tomb! Amen Jesus! Tweet
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