Let him Easter in us

You might get the impression that Easter is festival of child-friendly cuteness – bunnies, painted eggs, chocolate and the obligatory daffodils. It’s true that Easter culminates with a focus on joy and rebirth, but that’s by no means the whole story.

For Easter is a journey through the most horrendous darkness into amazing light.

Day 1: Jesus, a good, innocent man is executed. Evil, it seems, has triumphed. Within a few hours the hopes which had inspired his followers have crumbled to dust. This messiah, they must have been thinking, was no different from all the others who made promises, and shared visions they were unable to fulfil. Jesus’ followers had forgotten, if indeed they had ever truly understood, his counterintuitive words about dying and rising again.

Day 2: 24 hours of utter despair. Jesus has been placed in his tomb, a great stone rolled across the cave-mouth. His followers face the utter despair of shattered dreams. There is no comfort other than the sharing of tears, and the stirring of life around them as Jerusalem shakes itself awake for a new week mocks their pain.

Day 3: Early morning. Some women visit the tomb. He is there! He is alive! It’s not a ghost! It’s Jesus, the same yet somehow changed. Wonder and joy! A deeper magic than the power of evil has overcome death. Jesus followers realise that the dream is in fact only beginning, and that it’s a bigger dream than they had ever imagined, embracing the whole of humanity, the whole world, the whole universe.

We’re familiar with journeys through darkness into light. It’s spring again, and we are living through the annual rebirth of nature after the long death of a wild, wet winter.

Most of us have personally experienced times of difficulty, struggle and pain, when we have felt, perhaps, that things would never improve. But then one day we’ve sensed the tiniest ray of hope breaking through.

This journey is central to Christian belief too. Christian visionaries sense that, for all its wonder, there is something amiss with the whole universe, as though a spell had been cast over it, and we believe, whatever the language means, that the spell will be broken, and the whole cosmos rebirthed into something new, the same, yet different.

And for Christians death itself, followed by an Easter resurrection into that re-born cosmos is another key journey through darkness into light.

This all seems very theoretical and speculative. The key point is that what happened to Jesus the first Easter is not simply another example of the journey through darkness into light, not simply an encouraging indication that what happened to Jesus can happen to us all, but the key act which makes it possible for us to break into light at the end of our journeys. Somehow, in travelling through death into life Jesus took the whole cosmos with him, and we await the results of this at the end of time as we know it.

All this has some very practical implications. It prompts us to ask what it means to follow Christ on his journey through death to life. We find ourselves called to be active participants with Christ on the journey. There are things we need to put to death – by which I mean acknowledging them, owning them, and relinquishing them – things like pride and greed, and ways of living which must change.

But there are also things in us which we need to call out into the sunshine of a resurrection morning – parts of me I’ve buried, my hopes and dreams, the real ‘me’ I have hidden for so long. As we journey through darkness into light a joyful Jesus summons from the cave our true identity.

And Jesus’ Easter journey brings hope for us in our despair. Some of us may be Easter Saturday Christians. We feel surrounded by darkness. The dreams we once had of the difference Jesus could make have crumbled. We are disappointed with God, disappointed with Jesus, disappointed with ourselves, and angry.

Some of us may be people of no religious faith, with whom the Easter Saturday story nevertheless resonates. We’re despairing because our lives have lost their purpose: there seems to be no ultimate meaning and we wonder if we have the courage to walk through the darkness alone.

The good news of Easter is that Jesus brings hope in our despair, whoever we are, however weak or non-existent our faith. The living Jesus invites us to reach out in the darkness, and promises that in some way we will recognise as authentic, his hand will grasp ours, and lead us forward, sunshine piercing the darkness and mist, towards the glory of the Easter Sunday garden. ‘Let him easter in us.’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 17th April 2014)