Is Easter Still Relevant?

image credit: https://pixabay.com/photos/fog-mist-trees-forest-morning-996633/

It's 6 AM Easter morning. The sound of birdsong has drawn me out of sleep, while thoughts of our world gone mad keep me restless. The prospect of a few quiet moments alone with my thoughts, hands wrapped around a mug of steaming bitter coffee draw me downstairs to my computer to reflect and maybe pray. 

What does Easter mean on a day like today? When thousands of people must wake to a world newly absent a grandparent, parent, sibling, or child; when millions of people must wake to a reality absent of meaningful work.

A fluffy Easter Bunny dapper and decked in pastels and carrying an over-sized basket full of goodies for good children simply won't do. It's not only unlikely, it's downright garish. None of what our fluffy friend offers will sate the ache of all this loss and anxiety. Can a story that promises only consumable happiness do anything at all to satisfy our smallest citizens in a time like this?

I should be grateful. I am so grateful.  It's easy to social distance in suburbia. We have a comfortable roof over our heads and our house sits tucked back on its spacious acre. There is a playroom for the kids, plenty of house projects to do, grocery service if we plan ahead, high speed internet for learning and work, and perhaps most of all, we are not sick and we have not lost our jobs. We are among the lucky ones, even as we bear witness to the stress and loss around us. The pandemic has been called a great equalizer, because no one is exempt from its potential threat. But the truth is, some are more exempt than others. And in places like Detroit and New Orleans and NYC where it rages at its worst, politicians ask why it is hitting our minority citizens at a significantly higher rate. Are they really shocked? Do they think if they play dumb they can uncover the "mystery" and come out looking the heroes? Privilege is so clearly at play.

Which brings me back around to our friend the Easter Bunny, who will offer us consumable pleasures at a small cost, but will not help us to hold grief and joy in equal measure in our hands, who will not lighten the burden of sickness, or financial stress, or death. Who will not teach us to keep confronting inequality when this is all over.

Still, it may seem that the story that started Easter is as improbable as a giant pastel bunny who lumbers through the night delivering baskets of candy eggs and small gifts. I mean really. A man who is God. Who then dies a horrific death. Whose friends are certain he is gone for good and are utterly alone. Hidden away in fear, huddled as a group of mourners, they must have been forced to ask, "Who is God, really, now, anyway, if not the man we followed for three years?"And when he returned, still bearing the scars on his hands and feet, how could they have been sure it was him, even then? Because as many have noted, no one actually witnesses the resurrection at the moment it occurs, though all four Gospels attest to its reality.

You might feel as you wake to this new day, this unusual and silent Easter morning, that the giant bunny story has as much chance of being true as the God-man Jesus who died and rose again to save us from our sins. What sins can we be guilty of? we may even ask, in an age where we want for little, and easily forget how little we really are.

But today. Today. Cloistered and waiting at home, I can imagine it. The way the disciples must have waited in fear for something they could not name and did not know how to expect. And I can imagine a Jesus who looked Thomas in the eye and reached out his hand to let Thomas touch him with all that doubt and fear and longing to be set free of it. And I can imagine a Mary who grieved at the tomb and who only recognized the man she had followed when he said her name, when he named her. "Mary," and she knew him. "Lord," she replied. I can imagine that, because what the story of a risen Christ offers is the truth that though we are fragile and fallen creatures, we are too precious and beloved to be abandoned to death and loss and fear.

I used to believe that life was full of seasons of sadness and seasons of joy, that life is an undulating wave of either one or the other. When Kaleb was born, we discovered (like all humans eventually do) that joy and grief more often live side by side. That darkness and light cannot be separated. And that our hearts would always keep breaking and mending and that even a broken heart stitched back together can never be the same heart it once was. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, we grow worn and weary with use, but we also become more real.

And so, while there is nothing real about a giant, grinning bunny, there is something very real about a Savior who understands the way our burdens and our joys can be held at the very same time and in the very same space, the way our fears and hopes can be buried and blooming within us always and all at once.

On Maundy Thursday, my family gathered in the living room to watch church, to commemorate the last supper in which Christ first bent to wash the dust of  travel from his disciples' feet and prepared to break the bad news of betrayal and impending death. The disciples must have been so confused. At what must have seemed the peak of a historical movement, a religious revolution, their leader would leave them. This Thursday evening, in the quiet of our living room, with three wiggling kids snuggled and squirming in sleeping bags, with only the crackle and snap of wood succumbing to flame in the fireplace, and our own straggling voices singing hymns, we participated.  We participated in wondering and waiting and watching. We participated in solitude and anxiety. We participated in asking what Easter joy could be discovered on a day in which we will gather around a table that is absent my parents and our friends. An Easter Sunday in which families around the world will be forced to grieve deep loss, and to do so utterly alone.

It is in that quiet--in the loneliness and fear and wondering--that Christ will enter in, that he will call us by name and we will recognize him, that he will reach his hand out for us to touch and see that he is just who says he is. And in the quiet of our homes we will be reminded of a story that though utterly improbable is really the only one that teaches us to hold our joy and our pain in the very same hands at exactly the same time. I will take that story. And I will ponder it. And I will let my doubts be what they are, and I will let my joy rise as it will.

Happy Easter, friends.