Easter’s meaning is even more important in a time of war and suffering | Opinion

The bombs are still falling. The body counts scroll across our screens. Somewhere, a mother is weeping over a child. Somewhere, a soldier is following orders.

Into all of this, Christians proclaim on Easter Sunday: He is risen.

It can sound like escapism. It can sound like we are looking away from the world’s suffering toward some celestial consolation prize. But that is not what Easter is.

To understand what Easter actually means, we have to understand what Good Friday was.

Jesus was executed by the Roman Empire. This is not a minor biographical detail. Rome had a very specific use for crucifixion. It was not simply a method of killing. It was a technology of terror, designed to humiliate, to warn, and to demonstrate who held power over life and death. You crucified the people who challenged the order of things. Rebels. Insurrectionists. People who said that Caesar was not, in fact, Lord.

Jesus never raised an army. He never organized a rebellion in the conventional sense. What he did was more threatening than that. He went around telling people that the poor were blessed, that the hungry would be filled, that the last would be first and the first would be last. He touched lepers. He ate with traitors. He told a story about a father who ran toward his disgraced son. Every one of these acts was a direct challenge to the Roman logic of power, which said that the strong dominate the weak, and that is simply the way things are.

The French philosopher René Girard spent his career studying how human societies hold themselves together through violence. His insight was disturbing in its simplicity: communities bond by finding a common enemy, a scapegoat, and destroying them. The victim’s sacrifice temporarily relieves social tension. Everyone feels united. The cycle then repeats.

What Girard noticed about the crucifixion is that it exposed this mechanism rather than repeating it. Jesus was the innocent scapegoat who did not stay silent, did not stay dead, and whose story refused to let the violence look justified. Easter blows the cover off the whole system. It says: we see what you did. We see why you did it. And it did not work.

Jesus absorbed the full force of empire and did not return it. He was arrested and did not call down armies. He was tortured and did not curse his torturers. He died and did not stay dead. Each of these is a form of resistance, not passivity. There is an enormous difference between being defeated and refusing to participate in the logic of defeat.

This is why Easter has always been dangerous to empires. Not because Christians have out-muscled anyone. But because resurrection means that the final word does not belong to whoever holds the sword. Terror loses its power when people stop believing that death is the worst thing that can happen.

We live in a world that still runs largely on the Roman logic. Nations achieve security through dominance. Leaders hold power through the threat of destruction. We are told, again and again, that this is simply how things are. Realism, they call it.

Easter is the annual Christian insistence that this is not realism. It is a very old lie.

None of this means Easter is simple. It does not resolve the grief of people living under bombs or losing children to war. Christians do not have clean answers to offer in those places, and we should be suspicious of anyone who does.

What we have is a story. A man who refused to answer violence with violence. Who was killed for it. Who, we claim, rose.

He is risen. The empire is not the final word.

That is the message. In a time of war, it is worth saying out loud.

Charles Halton is the Associate Rector of Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Lexington and recipient of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion for his book “A Human-Shaped God: Theology of an Embodied God.”