If I stop to think about it, it seems funny to me that Easter is once a year. Not the Easter bunny and egg hunt part; the resurrection part. The part wherein we celebrate the fact that Jesus died for the sins of the entire world, but then rose from the grave again, proving that he was the son of God and had the ability to overcome death – and that we do too, because of his sacrifice.
I don’t know about you, but I need to celebrate Easter every day, not just one weekend a year. I need to live and breathe the fact that Christ died on a cross for my sins, my personal wrongs. And yours. Because if I can hold onto that fact, the fact that he died a brutal death for all of us, and that because of it, we get to walk into eternity, I can somehow find it in myself to live with more gratitude, peace, and love than would otherwise be possible for me. Because without Jesus, without what he did, I am nothing but a mess.
It’s easy to forget. It’s easy, when the dishes are piled up and the laundry seems endless and the bills are waiting to be paid. It’s easy to forget that somewhere at the end of it all, eternity is waiting for us, and we ought to live like we know it. We ought to be celebrating the resurrection with every breath we take.
This year, although Lent passed me by in a whirl of sickness and travel and work, I snapped awake hard on Thursday of Easter week. A colleague sent me an email that said something about wishing me a blessed Maundy Thursday, and I sort of came alive with realization in a way I never have before. If you don’t have a traditional church background (I don’t, not really) and the term “Maundy Thursday” doesn’t mean anything to you, it’s what the traditional church recognizes as the day before Jesus died. And the church calendar is pretty accurate, so Easter as we recognize it is always within a couple of days of the real anniversary of the actual events. Anyway, Maundy Thursday is the night Jesus and his disciples shared the Last Supper, the night he washed their feet and told them that in his kingdom, the first would be last. It’s the night he went to Gethsemane to pray his way through what he was about to do for all of mankind. Thinking through those events on Thursday night, on what was very possibly their actual anniversary, they suddenly became more tangible, more palpable, than ever before. Not just a story I cling to, a tenet of my faith, but a reality.
Friday was the same. As I climbed into bed that night, I thought about how on that night, over 2000 years ago, the reality of Jesus’ mortal death was crushing his followers. How everyone believed he was lost to them forever. That his ministry – and his love – were over. I could feel the grief that must have suffused them all. On Saturday, I thought about how long the hours between Christ’s death and resurrection must have seemed to his disciples. I thought about the despair, the emptiness they must have felt – and the fear. Of course, they didn’t really know what was coming – even though he’d told them multiple times, they hadn’t been able to grasp the truth.
On Easter morning, I woke up early in the darkness of pre-dawn, and I thought about Mary. How she arrived at the tomb in the early hours to care for her Lord’s body, but found it gone. How heavy and broken-hearted she must have felt. And then, the angel came, and gave her the news. How she must have felt like she was walking on air after that. Sitting there in the dark, I couldn’t hold back the tears that came. Tears of thankfulness and joy.
All of this in in the Bible, of course, but I don’t often go back and read the accounts. I don’t often try to just let it sink in. And most years, Easter feels like a fog to me. It’s usually cold and rainy, and there are baskets of treats to assemble and eggs to hide and a big meal to worry about. Jesus can easily get lost in the shuffle, become just a piece of a holiday that has become more secular than spiritual – a too-small piece of the anniversary of his own victory, and ours. Our guarantee of Heaven.
This year, there was clear space in the days and in my own heart and mind for the reality of Easter, and that made it the best Easter I’ve ever experienced. It had nothing to do with planned events or the new church we visited or anything else I did. It was just because of a few quiet moments when God came near. I’m hoping he’ll do it again, and that when he does, there will be room for him to remind me why I live.
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