This Joyful Eastertide

There is only one thing more remarkable than the idea that man, ably assisted by the Devil, might actually succeed in putting God to death, and that is the idea that God, in response, would not finally forsake man, leaving him to inhabit the desolation he had insisted upon, nor enact His final punishment, swooping His elect to Heaven and blasting the Earth to a charred hulk, but, refusing death the last word, reinstate the logos of human life in the same human body that a human woman had given Him, and after that return almost casually to the company of His human friends, or if not casually, at least with a bewilderingly calm demeanour and words of dumbfounding gentleness.  He would, very simply, continue to love him as he always had.

Actually, I am wrong — there is a second thing, more astonishing still: that this was the intention all along.  The Passion, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection — no, the Fall, the Exodus, the Exile — through all this the last word was already provided for.  We could do our worst: the Word would not be suppressed; mankind, the summit of creation, would not be discarded.  The old sentence is completed, and what begins now is a tale of everlasting freedom.  And even though, with Ascension Day tomorrow, our earthly Eastertide also now draws to its close, it is only a vision of the Easter that awaits us, which has no ending.