Out of this hideous death and out of this almost more hideous feeling one has that here was this good man, not only being tortured to death but also abandoned by the God for whom, in a way, he was dying -- out of this, nonetheless, comes whatever on earth it was that happened two days after the crucifixion, which we use the word "resurrection" for. What happened? Who knows? And in a way, almost, who cares? Because even if somebody had been there with a television camera and taken a picture of Jesus walking out of the tomb, what would that be except, for many people, an interesting historical fact, just as it's interesting to know that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492? But what difference does that make to me? So what if a Jew in the year 30 A.D. was brought back from the dead? In other words, what's important is not so much what happened in the half-light of daybreak on that day in 30 A.D., but what happens now. What matters is not what happened on Easter Sunday, but what happens in my life. Is there any sense that, for you and for me, Jesus exists, or the power that was in Jesus, the power that led people to see him as kind of transparency to holiness itself, to the mystery itself? If that is alive, that's all that matters, and what happened on that day is of little consequence except in a minor historical way. - Frederick Buechner, in an interview on Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, published on their website INTERVIEW: Frederick Buechner April 18, 2003 Episode no. 633 |