For a long time, I’ve loved Easter more than Christmas. I think it started with a Cantata. The ones for Easter are so powerful.
Christmas is a mysterious revealing. It is a beginning – full of promise. A sparkling star of hope in the darkness. But Easter is this majestic defeat of darkness. It gives the darkness one more moment and then it destroys it.
It tears the veil, it cracks open the temples, it turns the over the tables. It is the full force of the Heavens that Christmas told us about.
Where Christmas shows us God’s humility and the way The Divine is found in the most unassuming places, Easter shows us God’s might and power over rulers and law and death. Easter puts the things of life on earth in their place.
The Creator is ruler. The Divine is law.
All the shackles of this world are loosened in the fullness of faith because there is nothing above it. It is all. The ways we strive to control and the hurt we cause and the damage we do is no match for redemption.
But we forget. We doubt. We grasp for and bow to human power, human riches, human rulers. We don’t practice discernment and instead follow the crowd. The loudest voices, the biggest promises.
We walk past the tables set up at the temples – who are we to make a scene? We shrug, defeated at the crisis – personal, local, global, humanitarian, ecological. What can we do? We are so small, we are just trying to get by, we just don’t have the space, the time, the energy, the money.
We forget the fullness of God. We forget the promises. We forget the power.
We let the status quo be – “it is what it is” – and we tell others to leave it alone. Don’t cause trouble. But Christ caused trouble. There’d be no Easter without it. We forget the way Christ lived. We forget our own callings. We abandon what we are charged with doing by The Divine.
Who are we to challenge anything? To change anything? It’s so hard. It’s so messy. We are lonely and alone even in our churches and our homes.
We have a heritage lying dormant inside us, a legacy, a power. The Spirit is willing, is able, is available – and yet we are carrying our crosses and jeering at one another. We are soldiers sticking spears in one another. We are the mocking crowd. We forget to lay it all down. We forget what it all meant. We deny Christ more than Peter and doubt Christ more than Thomas and betray Christ more than Judas. We are full of darkness towards one another and ourselves. We live small and mean and scared.
Humanity is no different than it has ever been.
Easter is the escape. It is the Light. It is the Power. It is the Freedom. It unchains us from the way the world has us grappling and yelling and fearful. It is the fertile place we can rest, and from that rest we can yield the fruits of faith that we can use to make this place more and more filled with what Easter brings us – redemption, resurrection, and light.
