Easter and Empire

 Let’s talk about Easter and Empire. More specifically, about the way the Easter story challenges the pretensions of Empire, exposing imperial power as ultimately empty, as so much sound and fury signifying nothing.

Of course, Easter is about much more than this. It is about the redemption of the world. It is about the defeat of death. It is about God’s love for humanity and the astonishing lengths God is prepared to go to for the sake of creatures like us, sinful and petty and limited as we are. But the path to redemption passes through the cross—which, before it became a Christian symbol, was the ultimate symbol of imperial domination and control. 

The cross was deployed to terrorize any who might question the authority of the Roman Empire: human beings, nailed to wooden posts and hoisted up for all to see. Still alive when initially crucified, the victims of this imperial terror were allowed to die slowly of exposure and deprivation, and any who might think to defy the might of Rome could see these victims in various stages of demise: suffering, dying, dead.

The cross represented a certain kind of power: the power to dominate and control through the infliction of suffering and death and the fear of death. This was taken to be the ultimate proof of the Emperor’s supremacy and the final argument for obedience.

Bow down or die in agony. If you choose not to bow, you are a fool or you’re crazy, and the price for your defiance will be a living hell. 

This is the message of Empire. The empty tomb is God’s answer, declaring the emptiness of this imperial message and the final impotence of imperial power. 

Don’t get me wrong. The power to kill is terrible, and even worse is the power to kill slowly and painfully, with deliberate attention to humiliation: the conscious effort to turn a living human being into a thing. 

We see the evil of it in the Passion story, in Jesus’ journey to the cross, in His anguish. And on the cross, Christ stands in for humanity and thus declares in the most unequivocal terms, “What you do to the least of these, you do to me.” On the cross, God announces that what Empire does to secure its control—every hammer blow, every word of mockery, every infliction of death—is done to the very Creator of the Universe. It is a monumental crime against God.

That is the first lesson of the Easter story: the magnitude of the evil that imperial power commits. The use of suffering and death and the threat of these things to dominate and control others is a crime against the Great I Am, Being Itself, the Creator and Sustainer of all that is.

But the Easter story has a second lesson. It is this: the power to kill is nothing in comparison to the power to give life. That power lies with God, and through that power God will undo Empire’s every pretention to supremacy. 

Not only is the coercive domination of human bodies evil, but it is, in the final analysis, impotent. Everything it accomplishes is eventually swallowed up by the very forces of death that it wields with such sinister glee. What remains, what endures, is the life God gives out of boundless love.

It is in this power of love and life that we must abide if we seek anything eternal. If we desire anything that will last, we will not find it in the power of Empire. We will find it, instead, in the quiet power of healing the sick and feeding the hungry and loving our neighbors as ourselves. 

When we do these things, we abide in God. And when we abide in God, the threat of death cannot force us to bow. For when we abide in God, there is an empty tomb at the far side of every dark moment, every threat, every misuse of terrestrial power to terrorize and kill.

It is said that life is fleeting, and death the final answer to it all. The Easter story inverts this. It is death that is fleeting, and life the final answer. And if that is so, our standards of wisdom and foolishness become inverted as well. When that refusal to bow before coercive power springs from an allegiance to life and love, then—foolish as that may seem to the disciples of Empire—that refusal is the greatest wisdom in the world.