The early Christian community spoke of the scandal of the particular–the God of the universe revealed in flesh and blood. They felt the strange, incongruous power of this idea. They felt too the awful strangeness of beholding the very image of God in a human being broken and beaten and hanging on a cross. The scandalous, revelatory power of the particular. It has a special claim on the Christian imagination. It shapes and refracts what we find significant, how we live, against what powers we struggle.[1]

–Douglas Burton-Christie

¹⁸ For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ¹⁹ For it is written:

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

²⁰ Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹ For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. ²² Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, ²³ but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴ but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵ For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

–I Corinthians 1:18-25

The Christian is no stranger to strangeness; indeed, it might even be said that the Christian is no alien to the foolishness and weakness of the things of God in Christ. It is this theme, the scandal of particularity, the foolishness and weakness of the cross, the notion that the very God who upholds all of seen and unseen reality by the Word of His power, became flesh and dwelt among us; that He dwelt among us even as a mere man, obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. It only takes a matter of moments of meditation, spirated by the Holy Spirit, to become consumed by this tremendum mysterium et fascinans, the majesty and reality of the cosmic Christ; the notion that the eternally triune God freely and graciously became ensarkos. I think if most people, especially Christians, allowed this fact to become the very grist of their daily lives, that all there would be left to do is worship. How does this God of gods squeeze Himself into the flesh and blood of a particular human being, into a man from the squalors of the Galilee in Nazareth? It remains a miracle; for some to the point that it is the ultimate skandalon upon which they cannot get past; and instead, indeed, they inhabit a stumbled-existence all the days of their vain lives. God forbid it if this becomes the trajectory of the professing Christian.

Barth writes presciently on this particular scandal of Eastertide,

It is content simply to tell the story—this is how it was, this is how it happened. There is interpretation only in the lightest and sometimes rather alien strokes, of which we have to say much the same as we did of what we called the softenings occasionally found in the first part. The real commentary on this first part and the whole is, of course, the Easter story, which we can describe as the third and shortest part of the Gospel history. This tells us that God acknowledged this Jesus of Nazareth, the strange Judge who allowed Himself to be judged, by raising Him from the dead. It tells us of forty days in which this same One—whose history this was and had to be—was again in the midst of His disciples, differently, but still actually in time and space, talking with them, eating and drinking with them, beginning with them a new Gospel history, the time of His community, the time of the Gospel as the good news about the Judge who allowed Himself to be judged, the time of the proclamation of this event. He Himself was and is this event, the origin, the authority, the power, the object of the proclamation laid on the community. He Himself, He alone: He who was alone and superior and majestic in Galilee; He who was again alone but beaten and humiliated in Jerusalem, in the very midst of Israel. He, the Judge who allowed Himself to be judged, lives and rules and speaks and works. He is Himself the word which is to be proclaimed to all creatures as the Word of God. That is what the Easter narrative tells us. It gathers together the sum of all that has been told before. Or, rather, it tells us how the sum which God Himself had already gathered together in all that had gone before was revealed as such to the disciples—again by Jesus Himself. The Easter story is the Gospel story in its unity and completeness as the revealed story of redemption. The Easter story is the record of how it became what it was (in all its curious structure a history of redemption) for the disciples—not by their own discovery but by the act of God in the word and work of Jesus Himself. It tells us, therefore, that this history, Jesus Christ Himself as He exists in this history, is significant in and by itself. It tells us that all the significance which Jesus Christ as the subject and subject-matter of this history can acquire for individual men by means and as a result of proclamation (which has Him as its origin and object), has its basis and truth and practical and theoretical power in the fact that He is significant in and by Himself—even as He exists in this history. What is significant in itself has the power to become significant and will in fact become significant. But only that can become significant which is already significant, and in such a way that this being is the power of the corresponding becoming.[2]

Χριστὸς ἀνέστη Christ is risen! He is risen!

[1] Douglas Burton-Christie, “The Scandal of the Particular,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 2.1 (2002) vii-viii.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §59 [227] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 220–21.