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Worth Quoting

From Jeremy S. Begbie:
The three days of Easter do not tell us that the world's pain and agony are required for God to achieve his purposes (still less for God to be God), or that sin is a requisite part of the harmonious fabric of things, part of the world's chiaroscuro.  God does not bargain with evil but shatters its power, overthrowing the principalities and powers; evil is a wholly contingent intrusion, an irrational interruption of original goodness....  By the same token we ought to be wary of schemes of salvation that suggest the divine strategy is, so to speak, primarily to balance things out (as in strictly retributive views of atonement and eschatological justice).  The world is not so much balanced as reconciled, and reconciled with a God of infinite excess. Through the three days of Easter, evil, sin and death are defeated by a love that does not simply "match" what has been hurled at it from rebellious creatures, but infinitely exceeds anything and everything it "answers."  The fulfillment toward which the resurrection points us, and which it anticipates, is not a mere restoration of a previous order, a return to the status quo ante of Eden; it is not only a recovery of what is lost but radical recreation of all things.  Easter is--if I may put it this way--an aesthetic joke, vastly surplus to any "requirement" or "compensation," vastly outstripping any expectation and every predictable equilibrium, involving not merely the evening out but the transformation of creation's brokenness into something of infinitely expanding, superabundant beauty.
                                               --"Beauty, Sentimentality, and the Arts"
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