April 4, 2010
Background Scripture: John 13:21-30; 16:16-24; 20:11-16
Devotional Reading: Psalms 5

Like most children I loved Christmas, but didn’t quite know what to do with Easter. Christmas was joyful. Lent and Holy Week, on the other hand, were somber, disheartening and even the joy of Easter morning seemed encumbered by grave clothes, an empty tomb and confusing reports of a Risen Christ.

I have come to realize, however, that the difference between Christmas and Easter is the experience not of two conflicting aspects of our human life, but an understanding that the two are inseparably joined. Just as the birth and death of Jesus were one life, so Christmas and Easter are the boundaries of all human life.
So, for disciples of Jesus Christ, Good Friday is not the end. That “something more” we call the Resurrection. Easter’s joy is the Christmas elation tempered and seasoned by the experiences of human life: health and sickness, gain and loss, success and failure, youth and old age, life and death.

The Resurrection does not keep us from experiencing these, but it provides us with victory over them. Easter is the mature and enduring joy that survives all the temporary celebrations and laments along the way.

Edwin Markham writes: “The few little years we spend on earth are only the first scene in a Divine Drama that extends into Eternity.”

The Monday after

They’re praising God on Sunday,
But they’ll be all right on Monday-
It’s just a little habit they’ve acquired.
I think the “all right” in this rhyme means that, despite the Hallelujahs on Easter Sunday, many of us return to “life-as-usual” on Easter Monday. For some that may mean arguing the Easter faith instead of living it.

Is it immortality or resurrection, a resurrected physical body or spiritual? Why didn’t Mary Magdalene recognize Jesus immediately, or why didn’t the disciples on the Emmaus road recognize Christ until he broke bread with them?

If everyone doesn’t survive death, how are non-believers punished? Will we awake in Heaven or in a transformed Earth? Et cetera … How easy it is to miss the forest by focusing on the trees!

It is entirely human for us to want to nail down these questions and answers. But the Easter faith calls us to rise above the normal “human boundaries.” It is something that we may apprehend, but not necessarily comprehend. We can experience it without being able to understand the “how” of it.

Is it not arrogance bordering on blasphemy for us to assume that we can reduce the mysteries of God to human formulas? We don’t need a formula to experience the power.

Life before death

William R. Inge wrote of the afterlife, saying: “I do not know what I shall find. I must wait and see.” I don’t know if he meant he must sit-and-wait or live-and-wait.

To me the wonder of Easter is that we don’t have to wait until after death before living the power of the resurrection.

The meaning of Easter is not just that Jesus Christ was dead, buried and rose again, but that we can live in the power of that assurance right now.

I was born into a county where there were seven or eight covered bridges.

To ride my bicycle into the temporary darkness of a covered bridge was a kind of mystical experience. I steered through the darkness by concentrating on the light at the other end.

So, Jesus reassured his disciples of the temporary darkness they would experience: “A little while and you will see me; again a little while, you will see me” (16:16). By the grace of God, the darkness is only temporary.

So the resurrection faith can empower us not only after we die, but while we are still on this side of life. The Easter faith is every bit as much about what we do on Easter Monday as what we sing and say on Easter Sunday.

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Rev. Althouse may write to him in care of this publication.