Death had overpowered the world for a while, symbolically meaning from the first parents who listened to the serpent in the Garden of Eden to the fulfillment of the promise of a saviour, people lived in the valley of death, valley of sin. The question was who will save us from sin and death? The same question is asked in the gospels as “who will roll back the stone for us.” They had even kept guards, lest the dead man walk.
On the Easter morning, women go to the tomb of Jesus, and find the stone already rolled back, not by our merit, or not one of us rolled the stone back; they look in and see that the tomb is empty. According to Matthew, they meet a man there, or an angel there who told them, “as he had said, He is Risen.”
Word spreads. Silence is broken, people began to speak again, the apostles began to walk and run again, they began to gather again. This is Easter morning. Resurrection of Jesus literally brought life back on track. The ancient foe is defeated.
The apostles who had gone fishing and had caught nothing the whole night saw Jesus walking into their midst; they followed his instructions and had a huge catch of fish. The apostles who in disappointment were running away to the village of Emmaus were met with a companion; he accompanied them, explained to them the scriptures, for they still had not understood the scriptures; they recognised him and returned in a hurry to Jerusalem. The disciples who were sitting behind closed doors in fear were visited by the risen Lord; he does not accuse them for their fear or indifference, he offers them peace, they arise and begin again. Thomas who was not there and was doubtful is made to touch Jesus’ wounds and believe; and he would not look back again. Peter who had denied Jesus three times, confirms his love for him three times. Yes, the resurrection of Jesus not only brought life back on track, but also put it forward on greater tracks.
Resurrection has this effect on all of us. I have seen people in fear, at death-bed, holding tightly, clutching, and clinging, to the crucifix—they are not clinging not merely to the cross but to the possibility of resurrection, to the truth that sickness, failures, defeat, and even death is not the final word. I have seen my mother in her death-bed, clinging on to a cross with faith in the resurrection because of Jesus.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Crime and Punishment, explores the personality and life of the central character. Rodion Raskolnikov is a young, brilliant and ambitious student in St Petersburg who has talked himself into a terrible idea. He has constructed a philosophy; cold, logical, and entirely self-serving, that certain extraordinary men are above the moral law that governs ordinary people. Napoleon, he reasons, crossed rivers of blood to remake the world, and history called him great. Why should a man of sufficient intellect not do the same, on a smaller scale, for a sufficient reason? And so Raskolnikov takes an axe and murders an old pawnbroker, a woman he has convinced himself is a parasite on society. Then, in a panic, he murders the pawnbroker's innocent half-sister too, who simply had the misfortune of walking in. The novel is the story of what the murder does to him; not the legal consequences, those come later. The killing does not make him feel like Napoleon. It makes him feel like a man buried alive. He becomes feverish, erratic, consumed by a guilt he refuses to name, cornered by his own mind. He is in a tomb of his own making, and he cannot find the door.
Sonya Marmeladova is, in every outward sense, his opposite. She is the daughter of a broken, alcoholic civil servant, a man who drinks the family into ruin. To keep her stepmother and younger siblings from starving, Sonya has been driven into prostitution. She did not choose this life. It was chosen for her by poverty, by a father who could not hold himself together, by a world that offered a young woman with nothing but few options. She carries a yellow permit, the official document that marks her as a registered prostitute in Tsarist Russia, and she carries it alongside a worn New Testament. Both things are true of her at once. She has been broken by the world and she has not been extinguished by it.
Raskolnikov is drawn to her. He goes to her room, in a building where the ceilings are low and the wallpaper is peeling, and he tells her what he has done. He confesses the murders to her before he confesses them to anyone else. Sonya does not recoil. She does not call the police. She does not deliver a speech about justice. She reaches for her New Testament; the same one she has read until its pages are soft, and she reads to him the story of Lazarus. She is reluctant at first, feeling somehow unworthy to read it aloud. But she reads. Her voice gains strength as she goes. "Lazarus, come forth." And he who had been dead four days came out. She is reading resurrection to a man who has entombed himself. She is sitting in a rented room with a murderer and offering him, not condemnation, but a second chance—possibility of resurrection. She makes him hang on, and not take the path that Judas took. Hang on till the miracle happens. It shows that resurrection is not just an ancient historical claim; it is a psychological and spiritual necessity for the human soul trapped by its own darkness.
One of the consistent messages that the risen Lord prompted to those he met is to have peace. Do not underestimate the power and potency of peace in personal life and around our immediate surroundings.
The essence of KM Gaffoor’s Malayalam poem Yudham (War) could be translated this way: over small things, we lose our patience and cool, we grow in anger and revenge. When the food had a little less salt, we struck the table in frustration, and pushed the plate away violently. When someone gave a harsh feedback we banged the door so hard. When a glass slipped and shattered, we raised our hands in punishment. Over small things—a meal, a feedback, a mistake—we became storms. ‘This is us.’
And then we, seeing the horrors of war, ask, what is war? Why is there war? KM Gaffoor answers it plainly: ‘War is simply us, made larger.’ War is not something that happens out there, between nations and armies and strangers on maps. War is something that happens in here—in the kitchen, at the dinner table, in the spaces between people who are supposed to live with each other.
Easter makes us aware of the presence of the risen Lord among us, who urges us to hang on, urges us to choose peace, nonviolence amidst violence, conflict and war. He has done it and we too can.
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