The Imagination of God

A Meditation for Easter Sunday

Before the stone is rolled away, before the angels speak, before the women run breathless back to the others, something deep and sacred moves.

A shaking, not of earth, but of vision. The kind of shift that doesn’t just change results, but remakes the rules.

Resurrection is not the reversal of death. It is God’s radical imagination of life itself. It exemplifies the certainty that divine love is not hemmed in by what we think possible.

But long before the women reached the tomb, prophets and poets sketched its outline.

A World Beyond Memory: Isaiah 65:17–25

"For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth... the former things shall not be remembered."

God dreams aloud in Isaiah, inviting us into a world that forgets how to die.

The wolf eats straw like the lamb.
Babies live full lives.
The sound of weeping is not banished; rather, it simply no longer fits.

This isn’t mere optimism.
This is Divine imagination breaking through the depths of despair, planting trees of joy where no seeds were ever sown.

This is what resurrection looks like, not just for Jesus walking free of a tomb, but for all creation released from its funeral clothes.

The Day That Breaks the Cycle: Psalm 118:1–2, 14–24

"I shall not die, but I shall live..."

This is the song of someone who knows the odds, yet dares to sing anyway.

The stone everyone discarded has become the thing that holds the whole house together. But there's more.

The psalmists do not say death is unreal.
They just say it’s not the end of the song.

This is the day the Lord has imagined, a day beyond logic, beyond fear, beyond the last breath.

A day not born of strategy or strength, but of stubborn, radiant hope.

A God Who Includes What We Could Not Imagine: Acts 10:34–43

"God shows no partiality..."

Peter, fresh off his rooftop vision, speaks to people he once thought excluded.

But the resurrection has loosened his tight categories.

Once you’ve seen a dead man walking, forgiving you and eating with friends, you can’t draw the same lines in the same places.

God, it turns out, imagines a wider circle than we ever dared.

This isn’t sentimentality.
It’s resurrection logic. The kind that disarms death and dismantles walls in one motion.

The Empty Tomb and the Unwritten Ending:

Luke 24:1–12

"Why do you look for the living among the dead?"

The women come expecting grief.
They bring spices, not songs.
Their love is faithful, but their vision is still bound by yesterday.

And yet.

The tomb is empty.
The body is gone.
The logic of decay no longer holds.

The angels don’t give answers.
They ask a question:
"Why are you searching for the living in the wrong place?"

Resurrection doesn’t just offer new information.
It changes the entire way we ask the question.

Peter runs, not just to confirm, but to confront the limits of his own imagination.

The tomb is open. And so is the future.

The Resurrection of Imagination

Easter is not about denial. It’s about defiance.

Not with swords or slogans but with a love so fierce, so full of possibility, that it remakes the world from within.

Resurrection is neither reincarnation nor resuscitation. And a spiritual metaphor or a sentimental fable doesn't explain it.

It is God's radical imagination showing us what life can be, a love letter scrawled across time that says:

"You thought the story ended here.
But I never stopped writing."

A Prayer

God of the Unimaginable,
You speak, and galaxies flare into being.
You breathe, and dry bones dance.
You rise, and death itself forgets how to hold us.

Let Your imagination live in us—
that we may see the world not as it is, but as it is becoming.
As You are making it.
As You already dreamed it could be.

May we live as people of the open tomb,
wide-eyed, wonder-soaked,
alive with the knowing that life always has the final word—
because You do.

Amen.