The End of the Story

First, a minor note--anyone else notice that under the Mark passage on p1451, the writers of the Chronological Bible state that Easter Sunday was on April 5th, 30 AD. I have never seen any kind of certainty like that before and found it very interesting. In the end, it's not when Christ was resurrected, but THAT he was.

Yesterday, I posted my mosaic of the Stations of the Cross, but if we ended the story there, it would be just another sad tale. No, we read how the story ended today, and another picture from Loyola's chapel tells how the story ended.

Not reading Latin, I went online to try to translate the two statements. The first loosely means "the heart of Jesus open to us" (and that assumes I spelled the words correctly), and the bottom statement translates to "I am your salvation."

This is Christ victorious, victorious over sin, death and the power of the devil, to quote someone with which you may be familiar. This is Jesus conquering once and for all the grip that sin holds over us in our lives, and re-establishing the chasm that had existed between God and man. This is Jesus establishing his supremacy over Satan for all time. This is Jesus fulfilling thousands of years of prophecy, much of which was misunderstood or misinterpreted.

Nothing can withstand the power of Jesus, and with his resurrection, Jesus made clear to his disciples once and for all that while he was a man, he was also God. They certainly had many hints in the time they spent with him--I would think that the miracles and the Transfiguration might have been pretty good hints, but that's me using 20/20 hindsight. Now there are no more secrets.

This is the Jesus we worship today, the man who gave himself as the ultimate sacrifice for our sins, the man who did for us what we ourselves were incapable of doing. Almost from the beginning of history, the gulf of sin has separated us from God, and Jesus' death and resurrection eliminated that gulf forever. We live with God in everlasting righteousness, innocence and blessedness, and when that blessed day comes when we're reunited with the Lord, we'll do it eternally. As such, no stained glass or any other depiction can give justice to the gift that Jesus obtained for us through his death, and no thanks can come close to expressing its importance. Feeble as it is, our thanksgiving is what we do to spread the comfort and joy that only Christ can give.

Scott