To know the power of the resurrection is to have one’s life fired by a different energy. We know the way of vengeance and retribution that’s shut up in our ancestral bones. We know about getting ours and getting even from the day we’re born. But to know the power of Christ’s resurrection is to live a life fired a little more fully by energy from the moment when God sent none of our violence back to us.
In the realm of God, remembering is not simply recalling a past event. It is seeing how a past event is actualized simultaneously into a present reality and a future promise. Remembering God’s act of love in delivering the people of Israel, gives birth to Jesus’ act of love in washing feet, and gives hope to a kingdom characterized by a meal prepared with love.
Like Paul and the Philippians, we must be able to put the past in perspective and become a forward-looking people. Our very lives depend on it.
“It breaks the father’s heart that his own child thinks he has to justify himself at all. It breaks his heart that his child thinks a father’s joy and affection must be earned and that all the responsible son’s efforts at goodness over the years had been a kind of performance to do just that.”