The tension of Easter
I listened to a radio show yesterday at work. As part of the schtick, they discussed (at some length, including a listener survey) their favorite Easter candy.
It got me thinking about Easter, and how carefully we avoid its message. Like the pagan cultures that celebrated some kind of spring festival, we would rather have a holiday that points us to birds, bunnies, and blooming flowers. With a little creativity, we can tie the resurrection of Jesus into that structure. Lilies. Baskets. New life… see?
If we begin with Jesus, though, we have to come at Easter from a very different perspective. We don’t get Sunday’s empty tomb without a brutal death on the cross the Friday before. Small wonder we’d rather make the holiday about buds and blooms and bunnies.
I’m as eager for spring as anyone these days. People have been teasing me about it lately, because they know I love winter and all that goes with it. On an emotional level, this last week of blizzard, cold, and wet, concrete-like snow has taken a terrible toll. I was crabby all week, without any good excuses. I apologized to Lisa multiple times for my state of mind. I have been tired this week beyond excuse. I hadn’t quite figured out why until I commented to a Latino friend at work yesterday, “Yo espero de la primavera.” I’m waiting for spring.
We had a month of 50 degrees, no snow on the ground. The gophers and boxelders thought it was spring. Then we got socked in with ice and slush.
The weather is an apt metaphor for the state of our hearts, I suppose. We are a people who have lived long on the easy things. We come to trust our conveniences. Everything from communication to laundry is made easy by our technology. We have come to believe life should be easy. We forget too quickly what a struggle the simplest things have been for us as a species up until very recently.
It feeds into a dangerous set of assumptions: My life should be easy. My endings should be happy ones. I should be able to have what I want, almost all the time. Underneath all of this lies that most pernicious American heresy: God wants me to be happy.
Then the blizzard comes. The bills come due. The doctor frowns and shakes his head. The pink slip lands on your desk. The transmission goes out. Your credit card gets hacked. The relationship ends. Your thoughtless actions catch up with you.
You can fill in the blanks. Life is hard, even if we don’t believe it should be.
Trouble is, by avoiding a thousand tiny hard things along the way, we have trained ourselves to be soft. We have trained ourselves not to step up and do the difficult thing.
At the height of his ministry, when everyone thought he was all that and more, Luke’s gospel tells us that Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem.” That’s the turning point in Luke’s whole gospel (Luke 9:51). Jesus had a great career going in the northern part of his country, in Galilee. But he turned toward Jerusalem, where the temple officials and the political powers would put him on a Roman cross. His followers would lay his lifeless body in a borrowed tomb.
This is the history that leads up to Easter Sunday. The tension builds between Jesus, who comes to rescue us, and our claim to be sovereign over ourselves. We’re like a six-year-old insisting, You’re not the boss of me! So when Jesus comes as king, we crown him with thorns and enthrone him on a cross because we can’t stand to submit and follow. We can’t stand to go into the hard places where Jesus takes us.
We don’t want to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection, because it proves his kingship. We’d rather just breathe a sigh of relief that the snow is finally melting, the flowers are finally blooming, and we can go back to what we wanted to do in the first place. Break out the jet ski and get the lake cabin opened up.
We are cheating ourselves. Our shallow entertainments sentence us to shallow joys. Only if we enter into the suffering of Jesus on the cross can we experience the euphoria of Easter. Only if we recognize that it’s not just the Romans, but our own hands, that pound the nails can we see what a victory it is when Jesus greets his followers on Easter morning. “Peace be with you,” he says, precisely because that is what he brings. And until that moment, we didn’t know just how much we needed it.