Risen Indeed: An Easter Meditation

Risen Indeed: An Easter Meditation

By Tom Wachunas


“And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.” -Revelation 21:5 –

“He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so. This is the beginning of the New Creation: a new chapter in cosmic history has opened.” - C.S. Lewis, from “The Joyful Christian” –


On this Good Friday I spent an hour or so browsing dozens of pictures of paintings and sculptures depicting the Resurrection of Christ. What follows is simply an invitation to think on what Easter might mean to you.

Archived within these blog posts are several appreciations of art as a spontaneous response to being alive. The act of making art – what we commonly call ‘creating,’ and the process of it ‘creativity’- is itself but a tarnished reflection of our Divine origins, a remnant spark, a flickering remembrance. I have believed this with all my heart for many years. There is a certain sense of desperation that I sense when considering the whole of human creativity through the arts - a sense of the sacred progressively becoming elusive and worse - irrelevant. As I get older, I notice in our world an increasingly fading and corrupted memory of the primordial creative act described in Genesis. God thought it, and so it became. And it was good. Then, it got wrecked, by our own hand.

On this Easter weekend I’m immersed in gratitude for my own capacity to make art, to consider it, to savor it. To savor art that, at the very least, even if indirectly, affirms what is noble or pure or good about being alive. To participate in the memory of “And God said…” How, then, can we use this capacity, this memory, this participation?

What if, as artists and lovers of the arts, we saw our creativity as a way back to thanking, praising, and worshipping the author of our talents, the source of our capacities, the God who made us in His image? What if we saw ourselves as participating in, instead of resisting, His original plan for us? What then would motivate our creativity? What would our art – indeed our life - look like? What would it inspire? Hope? Joy? All things made new?

Unlike Prometheus, we don’t need to steal light from jealous, stingy, unapproachable gods, and suffer the eternally painful consequences. It’s always been ours for the asking. The image that accompanies this missive is the 1510 Isenheim altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald. It’s a beautiful, stunning reminder of the hope and victory first promised us in Genesis. And more, consider it a remembrance, on this Easter and beyond, of not just the greatest story ever told, but the greatest promise ever kept.