The Day of Resurrection
The cultural artefacts produced in the West because of the death on a cross of a Jewish man 2000 years ago is astounding. Art, poetry, literature, sculpture, Cathedrals, the rules of war, human rights, freedom of speech, secular space, the rise of Western science, and not to mention the Christian religion itself, are products of faith in Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and risen. It's easy to forget how much we stand on this legacy of Christianity in Western culture. And we forget what the Christian revolution meant to the pagan world around it. It was a revolution. And that is part of why the fading of Christianity - with its dead, pathetic, crucified Lord on a cross - is not recognised as the civilisational catastrophe that it is by very many people. (Although we'll have to wait and see what happens in the West - something is afoot, and I'm not being nostalgic here.) The general contemporary atheist of the West (e.g. the "New" Atheists of not that very long ago) seems ignorant of the original revolution and its continuing benefits and cultural richness. You probably have to go back to Nietzsche to find the atheist who understood that with the cultural death of God (and he meant Christianity) everything people assumed morally would vanish. There would be no reason to continue the accepted moral standards of the West, and instead, all would be negotiated by power (i.e. down the barrel of a gun).
The death and resurrection of Jesus together changed everything. Jesus died an outcast, rejected by all, judged a sinner and worthy of execution. And without the resurrection this is how he would have been lost to history: just one more failure, one more criminal, one more statistic, and then lost amongst all the other dead of history. But the resurrection of Jesus changed this. The resurrection is God's 'Yes!' to the sin that crucified Jesus. And although the resurrection of Jesus is about life after death, on its own this is too narrow an understanding. If the 'Jesus thing' is only about the resurrection, why does the risen body of Jesus still have nail holes? It's because the cross and its meaning cannot be divorced from the resurrection. The death is rolled up into his resurrection. These two features of the death and resurrection of Jesus - God's "Yes!' against human sin and the nail holes in the resurrected body of Jesus - were significant facets of the Christian revolution. However, why didn't Christianity end up a religion of revenge? That is, a movement of God's revenge for crucifying the Lord, directed at all sinners? Instead, Christianity is a movement (from its inception) of forgiveness opening up a way for forgiveness through repentance. Why forgiveness? Revenge is the usual human way.
The reason is because Jesus died out of love, for us, without the self-righteous anger of the movements of change peppering all of human history. And he died in obedience to the one he called Father. And the Father sent the Son into the world out of love for us. And in this death initiated and ended in love, human failure (sin) is judged. It is love that judges us. And it is love that saves us. To follow the well worn path of revenge would be to betray the very reason for Jesus and deny the God who sent him. That is why Christianity is not a religion of revenge. The constancy of love (see Parts 1 & 2) demands nothing more (or less) than love. And we are disciples of that constancy of love.
