The message of Easter

We're always on the road to renewal

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
—Derek Walcott, “Love After Love”

Let me run something by you.

Today, Easter Sunday, is a Christian holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ and freedom from sin and death. Today also marks the end of Passover, the Jewish festival celebrating the exodus from Egypt and freedom from slavery.

It also happens that the day after tomorrow, Tuesday, is Earth Day, which this year is celebrating renewable energy and freedom from dependency on fossil fuels.

And one more: This Thursday is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, a more somber day that reminds us never to forget, that freedom is never to be taken for granted.

So on this Easter Sunday, we are literally surrounded by the idea of freedom.

I bring up all of these dates and holidays, not to give you a scholarly rundown from the Preacher’s Almanac, but because they all converge right now at an interesting moment in the continuing human saga. Like a comet that only appears once a century, like a constellation that is only visible part of the year, maybe these four days orbiting so closely together this year comprise a cosmic whack on the side of the head, a numinous knock on the door, to say, don’t despair. Don’t be afraid to walk forward into the unknown. This way lies freedom.

Together these celebratory days signal a kind of hope—hope that just as oppression, persecution, genocide and plundering of the planet have always plagued the human race, so too have liberation, freedom and triumph continued to emerge, again and again.

Let me just say that I think it is overly simplistic and not at all realistic to take in today’s ongoing wars, the abductions, the clamping down on free speech or the right of free assembly or any one of a dozen other causes for alarm occurring these days, to look at all this and say, well, we’ve been here before, and history shows that good will ultimately prevail. After all, the Israelites escaped Egypt. Jesus rose from the dead. We won World War II and liberated the death camps. But those are history, or in some cases, maybe historical narratives. The truth is, we’ve never actually been here before.

I recall a conversation between my mother and my sister years ago. My sister, Jane, was having a hard time with her daughter, Meghan, who had reached her teens and was being, well, a teenager. And Jane was complaining to Mom, and she said to Mom the accursed phrase we of my generation swore we’d never say, “Why, when I was her age ….”

And my mother cut Jane off before she could finish. “But you were never her age,” she said. That bit of wisdom has stayed with me. The world Jane and I became teenagers in was not the world her kids or my kids became teenagers in. My sons’ 15 or 16 were not my 15 or 16. The 2000s, their coming of age years, were nothing like my coming of age years in the 1970s. They didn’t have the Vietnam War on TV during dinner, the women’s liberation movement, or Nixon resigning. I didn’t have the Gulf Wars or 9/11. They could look stuff up on the Internet. I spent many late nights poring over books and thought a mouse was a tiny animal. Different worlds.

And so it would be disingenuous to look at current events and say, we’ve been here before. We have not. What’s going on right now is unique and unprecedented. But what this moment has in common with the flight out of Egypt, the crucifixion and resurrection of a messiah, the Holocaust or even the damage being done to our planet from climate change … is that all of these events were unprecedented, too.

Maybe that is why the story of the Israelites’ release from bondage more than 3,000 years ago lives to this day, complete with the seven plagues and the parting of the Red Sea. Or the resurrection of Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago and the movement that followed that became Christianity. It isn’t so much that history repeats itself, but that the unprecedented happens again and again.

And that, strangely enough, gives me hope. Religion, stripped down to the studs, before the drywall goes up or the entryways are built, without the who’s right and who’s wrong or which guests will be allowed in, is about making sense of the temporary nature of human existence. What is the meaning of it all? And stories like the Exodus, like the resurrection, were ancient people’s attempts to answer those questions, of grappling with their God and the nature of whatever might be beyond the human imagination.

And their answers were these: Out of darkness comes creation. After a flood comes a rainbow. After enslavement, freedom. After death, resurrection and new life. There’s a pattern here. And it’s a pattern whether you believe these stories really happened or are merely stories, whether you believe in a God or not.

The pattern is that time after time, a dramatic event tends to lead to a dramatic result. And, fiction or nonfiction, like the events leading up to it, the result is often unprecedented, too.

In other words, and I know it probably sounds crazy, the more tumultuous the times, the more unexpected—and unpredictable—the eventual victory over chaos might be.

The Resurrection was an extraordinary event following the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. And while crucifixion itself as a form of execution was nothing new for the Romans—Pontius Pilate crucified so many Jews that the Sanhedrin wrote to Rome to complain—the execution of Jesus Christ followed a three-year ministry that rocked ancient Judea. Thousands would turn out to hear Jesus teach and preach, pretty remarkable when you consider that there were no loudspeakers in those days. He clearly captured imaginations. His life had no precedent.

But his life, remarkable as it was, could have ended with his death and burial, and case closed. Instead, at the moment Jesus breathes his last up on the cross, we get a scene worthy of the final minutes of an Indiana Jones movie. The temple curtain is torn in two, there is an earthquake, and, according to Matthew, “The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.” (Matt 27:51-53). Then, in what to me is the most breathtaking aside in all of the gospels, Matthew casually mentions this: “After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.” (Matt 27:53)

Wow. First of all, shame on Matthew for no spoiler alert. He tells us Jesus rose from the dead fourteen verses before Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James and Joseph, come upon the angel at Christ’s tomb:

But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said.” (Matt 28:5-6)

“The Resurrection.” Tiffany window at First Parish Church in Taunton, MA, c. 1894. Photo hastily taken by Rob Kinslow.

Second, I don’t know about you, but the fact that multitudes rose from the dead and then showed up all over Jerusalem on Easter Sunday seems worthy of a bit more attention than we give it at Easter time.

I don’t mean to sound cheeky. I just want to point out that there is more to the story many of us have known all our lives … and to suggest that we are so used to the Easter story, even if we were not raised in a Christian tradition, that we are inured to its extraordinariness. Even if you believe the gospels are total fiction, at least consider that some ancient people felt it important to create a narrative that says incredible things happen when you place your faith in love. Not only does our hero rise from the dead, but everybody who lived a good life up to that point gets a second chance. What a comeuppance for the tyranny of the Roman Empire.

We may not know how these stories came to be, but we can appreciate that they point us toward hope. We may not always understand what these stories have to teach, but we can appreciate that there just might be some wisdom there that is waiting for us.

There is much wisdom to be had in the Easter story, but especially now it feels important to embrace the possibility that following crucifixion comes resurrection. Said another way, that following unprecedented setbacks comes progress we could not have imagined.

Today, many things are being crucified. Our environment. Democracy. Human decency. Political bipartisanship and compromise. Our constitutional rights. People in war zones—Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It can all feel overwhelming. It feels like everything is building to a fever pitch. It feels … unprecedented.

One could look at all of this and feel overwhelmed. Or one could have faith in love and believe that unprecedented times lead to unprecedented heroes. Unforeseen solutions. Unpredictable turns of events. Unidentified flying angels.

Unprecedented means something new. Don’t give up on the possibility of something new. Resurrection and renewal are always just around the corner.

The message of Easter is a simple one: Stay open to being pleasantly surprised. Something good can always happen. You just might wake up one morning and roll back the stone of the tomb of your anxieties. The stone is all the things you thought were in the way, the news you can’t bear to read, the oppression and repression bearing down. You roll back the stone to reveal an angel, who, upon closer examination, is a mirror image of yourself. You realize it’s another day, you have been resurrected, and that every day is another second chance.