Today’s Life-Line is:

The outstretched arms of Christ on the cross hold and take with him to death everything that is wrong in the world, everything that is awry in us, every contradiction of how things are supposed to be, every violation of our own or other person’s divinely-infused humanity, and the ungrateful disregard for and the arrogant desecration of the whole earth community. Resurrection is not the defeat of death by a more powerful form of killing but the transformation of death in and through the vulnerability of God and the extravagance of love.

Death is not eradicated by a bigger death any more than violence is abolished by a more forceful violence. Death is transfigured by the tender, all-encompassing embrace of infinite love. Like a mother holding her screaming, kicking, upset child, first restraining by holding close, then communicating with her body not a more dominant force but a disarming reassurance, shushing with a deep affection, drawing out and absorbing the chaos of the little one until the now soothed child, calmed and confident in its mother’s embodied love can trust, receive, and be transformed by it. Is this not the same embrace of grace that transfigured the wayward son in the mercy arms of the prodigal father?

~ Dan Miller, from “Resurrection: The Radical Imperative.”