Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

Easter is the door opened by Christ that leads to a world beyond the brutality of the Leviathan, beyond the thin red line of bloody battle, beyond a world under the domination of Satan. And no one has captured the idea of Easter as the inauguration of a new world better than G.K. Chesterton. Just as Orthodox Christians always quote from Chrysostom’s Paschal homily on Easter, I cannot let Easter come and go without quoting this poignant passage from Chesterton’s Everlasting Man. On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of a gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.