For the Bible writers, separation from God was seen as the root-cause of the kind of evil and horror that we see around us every day. And several of the stories Jesus told were about separation. (Luke 15:13) I'm not talking about whether someone says they are an atheist. It is not saying "Lord, Lord" that matters but doing the will of the father; by their fruits you will know them. (Mat. 7:20)
Where did the separation come from? From 'the fall of man'? From our sin and disobedience and lack of response to God's love? Yes certainly. But the theologian John Hick traces it back even further. In his book 'Evil and the God of Love' he suggests that the separation was necessary if man was to be free in the face of God - and indeed if the universe itself was to be the kind of place where such freedom could exist. Without that separation we could experience only the power of God, not his love. His power had to be veiled, Mount Sinai hidden in cloud. (Exod. 24:16) Jesus shared that separation with us. He accepted it and yet he cried out against it. And surely the paradox of Calvary is that God's strength - like our own - could only be made perfect in weakness. Perhaps that's the paradox of God himself.
And the joyous witness of those early Christians on that first bewildering Sunday morning was that death could not hold Jesus*. He had borne our separation and secured our peace.
* See my prose poem 'He Walked Away' in 'Poems of Youth and Age' (previously called 'Interlocution')

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Behold The Man*
SpiritualThis is mainly a five part idiosyncratic reflection on the life of Jesus of Nazareth; someone whom many people with little time for religion still find attractive. It is mostly from a talk I gave in 1988 while visiting a church in Pennsylvania. Plea...