SS is for the Shadow of one's-Self

Day 4
a concept that Easter throws into hard reverse to the wonderment of anyone who dares to grasp it afresh. She, looking in the mirror, finds gray hair and crows' feet dimming beauty that was, and she grieves. A sportswriter in my town notes how the local major league shortstop, a master of the art, has made an early bunch of errors this season. He hopes sadly that the man will quit before the shadows stretch into a risible parody of the magician he used to be.

Easter asks both--writer and woman--to quit being silly and to start dreaming big. For real shadows let the woman look not in the mirror but at her high-school graduation picture. What she'll find there is the palest imitation of a beauty that awaits. As for the writer, let him dig out the ten year old video and understand that precisely there is the stick-figure cartoon of the shortstopping marvel-to-be who will one day dazzle in the ball parks of New Jerusalem.

In passing, note: I did not say "the ball parks of heaven." That was deliberate. Heaven in the American mind is a pale, feeble thing, the construct of people who, dwelling in darkness and mired in decay, muse dimly on something they call "the afterlife." What is this? Who can want it? Easter shouts "Life!" It markets afterlife no more than it peddles afterbirth; and if this last comparison is too gross to contemplate, so be it. It's time we gave the Revelation its due: "I looked, and lo, [not just the same old heaven but] a new heaven and a new earth." Let those who can't imagine what that portends get help from C. S. Lewis. (See especially the final chapters of The Last Battle, seventh and last of The Chronicles of Narnia).

As for where such wild dreams arise, see the persistent motif in the Easter accounts of Jesus Unrecognized. John tells of Mary Magdalene, Luke of the Emmaus Two, both of those apostles-on-the-verge huddled in their Jerusalem hideaway. To all Jesus appears. Until he gives himself away, none are able to connect the figure before them with the man they knew. Why? Because one is the shadow of the other, but which? Apart from Jesus' own testimony that he isn't a ghost (Lk. 24:39) the answer becomes plain the moment we remember that the woman's new wrinkles and the shortstop's failing skills--this shadowing of a better self that was--is a sign of God's grim judgment: "Earth to earth, dust to dust." That judgment died with Jesus. A new one took its place in the first midnight hour of the first new day. Say this carefully, gingerly: what bursts from the tomb is a better, livelier Jesus, a vastly brighter Jesus. Good Friday's three o'clock shadows--our sin, his death--have fallen away. No wonder he defies recognition. But then so will we, we who dare to trust that God's final judgment in him is God's last word on us.

In that day we will wonder how the people we are could possibly have sprung from the shadows we were; and in our wonder we will sing the glory of the Lamb.