Easter: When God wins back lost ground

"From Plato's cave to Lewis's Narnia, ordinary religious metaphors tend to employ the literal and familiar to speak (however truthfully) of an otherworldly reality. The New Testament witness to the resurrection of Jesus, by contrast, redescribes earth in terms of heaven and history in terms of eschatology. For the early Christians, this marks the place in which God's world irreversibly invades the world of violence and corruption, planting here the flag of redemption."

Markus Bockmuehl, Cambridge Companion to Jesus (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 117

Chrysostom on the Resurrection

Not that we would be unclothed, but clothed,

that mortality might be swallowed up in life . . .

We do not wish to cast aside the body, but corruption;

not the flesh, but death.

The body is one thing, death another . . .

What is foreign to us is not the body but corruptibility.

De resurrectione mortuorum 256-274 (4th century)