It’s hard to write a post proclaiming the joy of Easter when all around you see lives crumbling from the cruelty of those who should be the protectors against cruelty, who should be the most loving and kind, but who, by virtue of their closeness, know precisely the cruelest words to say and choose them out of a hate that cuts too deep for words.
It’s hard to write a post proclaiming resurrection when all you feel is hearts dying from the anger, fear, and sorrow inflicted by those who should be the ones holding you through those emotions but who, by virtue of their closeness are best able to inflict that pain.
It’s hard to write an Easter post in a Good Friday world.
How do you begin to announce joy and victory when you are surrounded by nothing but sorrow and defeat?
How do you find the strength to go on when your best friend, your mentor, your life is dead?
It all started out fine. A group of very close friends gathered for one of the holiest nights of the year to celebrate the feast that commemorated their ancestors’–and in turn, their own–freedom from slavery. No one knew, save perhaps one, that anything was any different about that night than any other Passover dinner they had shared together. None of those friends, save perhaps one, gathered around their leader, their rabbi, their beloved master knew what he knew would soon begin. None of them, save perhaps one, knew that this was the beginning of the end.
The end was near because their fearless leader was starting to get a little too much attention among the people, and the government was starting to notice and feeling a little uncomfortable. Because those in power among their own people were jealous of their power and afraid to lose it to a nobody from a small town in the middle of nowhere. Because one of the friends gathered around the table, had betrayed his teacher, for reasons largely unknown.
The teacher knew. He cryptically dismissed the betrayer to do what must be done and finished the dinner with his friends, bidding them remember him each time they ate the bread and drank the wine at that sacred feast. And then they left, meeting soldiers led by the betrayer.
The teacher was arrested. He was questioned by the religious leaders and sent to the governor to be given a sentence for trumped-up charges of blasphemy. When asked by the governor what should be done with this man, the mob of people outside demanded a long and painful form of execution for insurrectionist tendencies that would endanger the state.
His friends fled, fearing for their own lives, and he was left almost completely alone to die an agonizing, public death after being mocked and tortured by those who held him prisoner.
Can you imagine being one of them? Spending all night regretting your flight but not knowing if you would have died beside him had you stayed? Hoping all the while that it was somehow a joke, or that you’d wake up tomorrow and it would all be a dream?
Can you imagine the dawning of that Saturday? Realizing that none of it was a dream? Spending the day laying low for fear of being arrested and all the while haunted by the fact that he was dead? Your best friend, lying in a tomb, cold as the stone that covered the entrance? Your teacher, your mentor, around whom your entire life had revolved for three years, gone? How could you go back to your old life after being changed so completely by this mysterious man? How could you live without him? And all that time, you had truly thought he might have been the long-awaited Messiah.
Utter, hopeless, unceasing despair.
You climb into bed that night and you think it surreal to have now lived a whole day without him. It takes hours to fall asleep and all night you dream of the life you had once had and of the death he suffered.
Then, suddenly, one of the women in the group shakes you awake. You open your eyes to see it’s barely dawn, and you grumble and pull the covers back over your head. But she demands that you wake up, and you look at her face, so full of panic, and so you follow her to your best friend’s tomb, where she had gone early that morning to anoint the body for burial, now that the previous day’s Sabbath was over.
Wordlessly, she points at the tomb, and your feet seem to propel you forward of their own accord. The stone has been rolled away from the entrance, and as you stop in the doorway, you see the linen wrappings that had covered the body of your friend, but there is no body. As if things couldn’t get any worse, someone has stolen his body. With a sigh, you trudge back home to tell the others, not knowing how you could possibly break the news to people already so overcome with grief.
Maybe an hour later, the woman comes back. You look up to see her walk through the door, eyes wide as saucers. “I saw him.” Everyone assumes she means that phenomenon where you see everywhere the face of a loved one recently passed.
“No, I saw him. Alive. I thought he was a gardener, and I spoke to him, and he knew my name. And I looked up and, all of a sudden, I recognized him. I know it sounds crazy, but…he’s…not dead. He’s alive. He’s coming here later, he told me to tell you.”
Can you imagine the feeling when he walked through the door? When you’d just convinced yourself he was really dead, and then, there he was again? When you could swear it was a stranger and a trick of the light, until he speaks, and then you know? When you remember he had predicted all of this, and you can barely speak for the shock of seeing him standing there? When you realize that death is dead?
It’s hard to look for Easter in a Good Friday world, but the message of the resurrection is that it is at the moment when we have lost all hope and consigned ourselves to the power of death that God rekindles our hope and Life returns. The promise of Easter is that no darkness is without an eternal light to destroy it, no pain without a healing hand to cure it, no death without a living Lord to conquer it.
Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Happy Easter, everyone!
Plagal Cadence 