If this week has been about recognising Jesus walking beside us (and perhaps further than some of us) into the darkest experiences of humanity, this Sunday, Easter Day, is about the powerless of those places to hold him.  It's about the victory of light over darkness, hope over despair, life over death.

That's a sentiment, an ideal, that I believe every human being longs to be true.  The victory of good over evil is a basic facet of most of literature and art throughout history - and resurrection, returning from the dead is not a stranger to fiction:  from Shakespeare's Juliet (yes, I know that one doesn't end well), through to GoT's Jon Snow we meet it again and again... Sherlock Holmes, Aslan, Gandalf, Harry Potter... in one form or another they all, and many more, have staged miraculous comebacks from both literal, and supposed death.  Time and again it seems authors want to say to us, "If you think death is the end... you know nothing."

But Sunday's story has got something on it's side that none of those others do.  Truth.  Not in an abstract, metaphorical sense, but a literal, visceral 'this actually happened in history' sort of sense.  For once, in actual you-can-reach-out-and-touch-it history, the hero's return from the grave was not a tired cinematic trope, but a real-life honest-to-goodness miracle.  That's not the only thing that sets it apart either - here's another: it was done quietly.  When no one was looking.  It wasn't for heroism, or drama, or vainglory (you need witnesses for that sort of thing) - it was for something else entirely.  

The scene my mind keeps jumping to in thinking this through is one at the end of the film Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, as 'Operation Firestorm' comes to close.  Sam (Shia Laboeuf) is lying dead on the ground, shot by the evil robot Megatron.  In just a moment he will, as all good heroes do, recover - but for now he's lying there, as a med-evac chopper flies in in slow motion, and his girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox) leans over him in tears, and cries out,
"Listen to my voice: I love you, and I need you.  Please, please come back to me...  Please, I love you!"

Wow!  What a place to find it!  But there - that line - is what Easter Day is about.  Except it's not the cry of one actor to another - it's the cry of God Himself to God Himself, from one person to another - from the Father to the Son, and the Son to the Father, and the Spirit to them both, and both to the Spirit.  It's a cry that echoes in eternity, and reaches across the uncrossable breach between Heaven and Hell.  It's a depth of love and longing that carries with it the power to reverse the abandonment of the cross, to render the full sin of humanity forgiven, and, yes, to bring forth life where there was only death.

It's a love that overflows beyond the perfection of the Trinity to wash over and engulf you, and me, and every child of God.  It's a love that will stop at nothing to get to us.  It's a love that counted no price too high for our sake.

St. Paul puts it like this: "I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Chaucer steals from Virgil to put it like this, "Amor vincit omnia" - "Love conquers everything."

Easter is a day when God speaks to God, but also a day when he cries out to us - and what he cries is this:

"Listen to my voice: I love you, and I need you.  Please, please come back to me...  Please, I love you!"

What answer will you give?  Are you ready to breathe again?