As I said on Good Friday, I have been guided in preparing the homilies for the Triduum by that breathtaking phrase from Paul's letter to the Galatians, "For freedom, Christ has made us free". So we saw on Holy Thursday night that freedom expressed in the career of Jesus. Jesus exercised that in washing the disciples' feet, manifesting His own true demeanour towards them as a servant. We saw Friday, the cost of that kind of life, that way of behaving. And it is not surprising that Paul should be struck by that because the very thing that altered Paul's life, from being a Pharisaic Jew to being a Jesus Jew, was his belief that God had raised this Jew from the dead. And what was different about this Jew that changed Paul's understanding about what a good Jew was? It was precisely the freedom of this Jew who in his own life thereby redefined what it was to be a good Jew. And the hallmark of that redefinition was Jesus' freedom. Jesus' absolute freedom with everyone, above all with those people who were least. The most profoundly excluded by convention or legislation, or simple distaste: women, the poor, the handicapped, the social misfits and outcasts. That's what constitutes freedom. That's what Paul had in mind when he said, "For that kind of freedom, Christ has made us free". And the Resurrection, of course, simply lays out the ground of that freedom.

Why is freedom so notable? Because in the Jewish understanding, freedom is the hallmark of God him/herself. Jesus could be free and responsible because He believed in this supremely free God. This God who in freedom, was able to respond to everybody and all of creation as opposed to the way we act, inhibited by fear or guilt or embarrassment. God was universally free to all of creation and that freedom was God's response. So the Resurrection is simply God freely choosing to raise this free human being, this free Jew, to God's self. Freedom calling to freedom. Depth calling to depth, or in the wonderful model that the great Cardinal Newman took, Heart speaking to Heart. Just as Jesus chose to be free to respond to everybody, so it is the freedom of God that moved God to raise this man Jesus. For those of us who believe this, Jesus becomes the paradigm for our own lives. This sounds so simple, so easy, until you begin to apply it to the world that we live in. What kind of freedom do we experience? And how responsive do we feel the world is to us? Big corporations? Big governments? Big institutions? Big churches? Big universities? It is only when we begin to imagine this kind of liberation that the full wonder of the Resurrection begins to dawn on us. I think of my experience: I am sixty-two and full of the cynicism of all those years, and the disappointments, and frustrations and the sadnesses, that result from the unresponsiveness of the world to me and my unresponsiveness to the world.

The notion of God freely responding to all of us, is all but incredible, and so again, with Paul, we hope against hope. We believe that Christ has made and freed us for freedom. It is the same in The Letter to the Galatians in which Paul said, "In Jesus there is no longer male/female, slave, free Greek, or barbarian". This absence of distance between us is just absolute responsiveness. This is the thing that we say we believe.

And to finish, again with the writer whose thoughts I have depended on so heavily, for much of my life, the German theologian, Metz, who says that "anybody who thinks of the Resurrection without having fully in mind its cost, namely the Cross, has turned it into a pleasant myth or a daydream". And therefore, I bring that up first because it is true, and then because it is so easy for us Christians to leap from the Cross into the arms of the resurrected, Jesus, and to forget that those wrists have holes in them. And so we don't listen when Luke says that every day we are to pick up our Cross and carry it. And so every day we would prefer to ignore the suffering of our world, even our own suffering. And here too Metz is enormously important because he said that "to the extent that we omit the suffering of anybody at any point, we have failed to take the measure of the Resurrection into account". And this applies particularly to we academics, for whom suffering finds no legitimate place. We desperately need this! We desperately need this, because only this opens up real joy to us and not some kind of Disney-fied illusionary daydream. Happy Easter.