ArticleIn 1942, a small group of German university students known as ‘the White Rose’ began secretly distributing pamphlets around Munich urging their fellow citizens to resist National Socialism. Unique among German resistance movements, the White Rose openly denounced the mass murder of Jews as it happened in real time. Hans and Sophie Scholl, Alexander Schmorell, Christoph Probst, Willi Graf, and their professor, Kurt Huber, were all captured and paid for their bravery with their lives, executed by the Nazi authorities.
The White Rose members hoped that post-war Europe would flourish again. ‘True anarchy,’ they wrote, ‘is the generative element of religion.’ Even in the dead wood of German culture, they believed that their work would help generate something new and wholesome in the post-war ruins. They cultivated hope by sharing forbidden ideas, fertilizing their imaginations with literature, art, and theology, and developing a moral vision to counteract the poisonous ideology they had once been indoctrinated with as members of the Hitler Youth.
Their hope was anchored in a profound conviction that death was not the end. Alexander Schmorell, on the eve of his execution, wrote to his family with remarkable clarity and peace: ‘In accordance with the will of God, I am to leave my earthly life today, to enter another, one which will never end and where we will all meet again. May this reunion be your solace and your hope.’
That hope — that regeneration is possible even in a world devastated by violence — remains at the heart of the Christian celebration of Easter. But today, as Christians around the world mark the resurrection of Jesus, they do so while contending with another century of ruin.
What permits humans to face the repeated devastation of their world and still begin again? Why does the Easter story still speak to people living amid war, displacement, and collapse?
This season arrives amid images of families in Gaza sort through rubble left by missile strikes, Ukrainian children struggling to feel safe, let alone complete schooling, in the basements and shelters that are their perpetual classrooms, or hear about the Myanmar government continuing to bomb opposition groups while restricting humanitarian aid after a devastating earthquake. Across the globe, the story of destruction plays on a loop.
History suggests this is nothing new. After the sacking of Rome in 410 CE, Augustine of Hippo observed in The City of God that ‘whatever devastation, slaughter, looting, burning, and affliction was committed…was done according to the customs of war.’ Even with new technologies of war, the ‘customs of war’ persist. The story of human conflict is tragically consistent.
And yet Augustine did not believe these cycles of human misery would repeat forever. Humans, he argued, endlessly fashion ‘new miseries,’ but only God — who exists outside of time — ‘can make new things’. The apparent permanence of human ruin, in other words, is not actually permanent.
This theological promise is frequently captured in the Bible through recurring images of rebuilding and restoration.
Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.
Isaiah 58:12
Christians believe that this restoration, this divine rupture into human history, came through the death and resurrection of Jesus, a moment they see as the first fruit of new life. For Christians, Easter is the high point of the year because it marks this divine act, the crucial intervention capable of breaking humanity’s self-perpetuating cycles of ruin.
British sociologist, Anglican priest, and pacifist David Martin captured this idea in Ruin and Restoration: ‘[Jesus] Christ takes our burden upon him and falls and sinks under the weight of evil. Our losses are thrown into high relief in the figure of a burdened and tortured man. We recognise the primal violence that lies latent in ourselves and that we inflict on others in the violence wreaked on an innocent man.’
When Christians reflect on Jesus’ crucifixion, they confront the depth of humanity’s propensity for violence and domination. The broken body of Jesus mirrors our collective brokenness, displaying the cost of humanity’s addiction to cycles of conflict. Conversely, his resurrection reveals the possibility of escape from cycles of destruction and a new path for human history.
This message is not confined to theology. Contemporary Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish, while not professing a religious faith, draws on Easter imagery to express the persistent suffering of those living amidst conflict. In his poem ‘They Woke You at Dawn’, Darwish observes that while Christ was ‘condemned and crucified / in the sea of a single day’, there is an ongoing sea of suffering for those whose ‘cross is raised with every dawn’. Darwish begs for God to ‘bring me down,/ let me have my rest’ in a poem whose title lets us know that Darwish feels ‘exhausted on the cross’.
Even in despair, Darwish expresses his deepest human hope, a longing for peace and fellowship without end.
‘I want eternity at the breakfast table
with the bread and oil.
I want you—
earth,
my defeated banner.’
In a ruined world, marked by cycles of violence and suffering, this is where the Easter message lands. It offers humanity an invitation to participate in the hopeful work of rebuilding amid the ruins of our shared human estate, and to hold fast to a hope that has survived empires, exiles, sackings, and genocides. A hope that inspired the White Rose to resist. A hope that invites us today, amid ruin, to prepare for a feast that has no end.
Danielle Terceiro is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Public Christianity. She is completing a PhD in the area of literature and theology at Alphacrucis University College. This article was first published in Eureka Street.