Living In An Easter World

All around the world today (next Sunday for our Orthodox brothers and sisters) throughout all the various time zones of the earth, people will gather to celebrate Easter:  the Christian festival celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ nearly two-thousand years ago.  For a little while, just as it happens at Christmas time, the rocks will be rolled away.   What I mean is that the rocks which usually close and  hold us in the narrow confines of our various tombs in life (the tombs of nationalism, racism, bigotry, fear, insecurity, hatred) will be rolled away for a day.  We’ll talk about that other world where Jesus has gone“ to be with the Father, that Easter world where peace like a river flows, that Easter world where all suffering shall end, and tears shall be no more. We’ll talk and think about an Easter World today—but Monday will soon come and the stones will be rolled back in front of the tombs in which we choose to live in this world.  

Is that what Jesus’ death and resurrection is all about?  Was it just a matter of preparing a place for us to go when life here on earth is done?  Was his dying just a matter of “taking on our sin(s)” in order that we might get into the good graces of a “loving Father” (who apparently can’t stand the sight of us or love us unless we are cleansed “by the blood of Jesus)?   Was that the only stone Jesus sought to roll away—the stone that held us in a tomb of unworthiness?  What a miserable, selfish, egotistical religion if it only sees faith as a means of saving one’s own puny soul! Jesus’ earthly ministry was not focused there.  How did the Christian faith ever become focused there?

The power and reality of Death has many forms other than the natural death of the physical body. These forms of Death are far more devastating because this Death dehumanizes persons while they are yet alive.  Jesus came and confronted the power and reality of Death in all its myriad forms, he suffered through it, and he rose above it.  Jesus calls us to confront and challenge the power and reality of Death, to suffer through it,  and to rise above it.  Jesus calls us to bring to this world—filled with tombs sealed by huge stones of human greed and arrogance which is described biblically as “hardness of heart”—a taste of the Easter world.  This is the meaning, the hope, and the power of Christ’s resurrection—of Easter.  “Where, O death, is thy victory. Where, O death, is thy sting?”  

The daffodils wait on Easter Sunday 2018