* A Páscoa não é apenas uma consequência da cruz, mas quase um acidente dela, pois começou dentro da própria cruz, no momento em que Cristo se tornou, por assim dizer, a mais profunda cruz para Si mesmo.
Easter is not only a consequence of the cross; it is also almost an accident of it. It followed the cross, but also it began in the cross. I say “in” rather than “on”, for by the time it began Christ had become, as it were, the very profoundest cross to Himself. That certainly He had always been prophetically, but now the exploration of His prophecies was complete. The cross was He, and He the cross. His will had maintained, or rather His will in His Father's will had maintained, a state of affairs among men of which physical crucifixion was at once a part and a perfect symbol. This state of things He inexorably proposed to Himself to endure; say, rather, that from the beginning He had been Himself at bottom both the endurance and the thing endured. This had been true everywhere in all men; it was now true of Himself apart from all men; it was local and particular. The physical body which was His own means of union with matter, and was in consequence the very cause, center, and origin of all human creation, was exposed to the complete contradiction of itself.
It would be perhaps too ingenious a fancy, which in these things above all is to be avoided, to say that actual crucifixion is a more exact symbol of His suffering than any other means of death. It is, however, with peculiar explicitness in the physical category what His other agony was in the spiritual—so, for a moment, to differentiate them. He was stretched, He was bled, He was nailed, He was thrust into, but not a bone of Him was broken. The dead wood drenched with the blood, and the dead body shedding blood, have an awful likeness; the frame is doubly saved. It was the cross which sustained Him, but He also sustained the cross. He had, through the years, exactly preserved the growth of the thorn and of the wood, and had endued with energy the making of the nails and the sharpening of the spear; through the centuries He had maintained vegetable and mineral in the earth for this. His providence over-watched it to no other end, as it over-watches so many instruments and intentions of cruelty then and now. The cross therefore is the express image of His will; it depends in its visible shape and strength wholly on Him.
In the moment of the final so-near-to-identity of Himself and His wooden image, He spoke. He said: “It is finished” [John 19:30]. It is at that moment that Easter began. It is not yet Easter; the Deposition has not yet taken place. He speaks while yet He can—while He is not yet as speechless as the wood—and He announces the culmination of that experience. Life has known absolutely all its own contradiction. He survives; He perfectly survives. His victory is not afterwards, but then. His actual death becomes almost a part of His resurrection, almost what Patmore called the death of the Divine Mother: a “ceremony”. Not so, for the ceremony was itself a work and a discovery, but then proper ceremonies are so; they achieve, as this does. The joy of His self-renewed knowledge perfectly exists, and His resurrection is—in His Father and Origin—at His own decision and by His own will. It is the will of His unalterable joy which, having absorbed, exists.
This moment of consummation is therefore related to man's inevitable demand that all things should be justified in the moment that they happen. We must perhaps, joyously or reluctantly, consent to leave the knowledge of that justification till afterwards, but we must be willing to believe that it is now. Or better, that the result is neither here nor there, neither now nor then, and yet both here and there, both now and then. There has indeed been much admiration, much gratitude, much love, that God should be made like us, but then there is at least equal satisfaction that it is an Unlike us who is so made. It is an alien Power which is caught and suspended in our very midst. “Blessed be God,” said John Donne, “that He is God only and divinely like Himself.” It is that other kind of existence which here penetrates our hearts, and is at all points credibly justified by our justice. The supreme error of earthly justice was the supreme assertion of the possibility of justice. In His mortal life He never pretended, in making all His impossible and yet natural demands, that He judged as we do. The parable of the laborers, the reply to James and John, are alien from our equality; and so is the incredible comment on Judas: “It were good for that man if he had not been born” [Mark 14:21]. And who caused him to be born? Who maintained his life up to and in that awful less than good? It is in the gospels that the really terrifying attacks on the gospel lie.
He was not like us, and yet He became us. What happened there the church itself has never seen, except that in the last reaches of that living death to which we are exposed He substituted Himself for us. He submitted in our stead to the full results of the Law which is He. We may believe He was generous if we know that He was just. By that central substitution, which was the thing added by the cross to the Incarnation, He became everywhere the center of, and everywhere He energized and reaffirmed, all our substitutions and exchanges. He took what remained after the Fall of the torn web of humanity in all times and places, and not so much by a miracle of healing as by a growth within it made it whole. Supernaturally he renewed our proper nature. It is finished; we too do but play out the necessary ceremony.