The Best Thing ... Ever!
What of Easter? It may have only been two weeks ago, but my hunch is much of the world is already moving on to those next things – “Mother’s Day” (May 8th by the way), Memorial Day and planning for summer vacation. For some, such plans are being made for the first time in two years! Yet we, we Christians have now just stepped into what we call the “Great Fifty Days.” The chocolate may be melted, the baskets put away and the plastic eggs sealed until next year, but Easter… We are still living in the Easter season.
Even more so, we are (if we are true to our faith) living “in” Easter all the time. Yes, we have the liturgical rhythm that keeps us mindful of our story, but the Cross event happened once and the Resurrection of Christ happened once; and all that is wrapped up in that which is offered for us to take within ourselves – regardless of whether the world has boxed up Easter for a year or not.
“He has been raised; He is not here!” are words we hold to from the Resurrection narratives (Luke 24:6), and those words, signifying that act of particularity, signified the whole reason for Christ’s coming among us – in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words, “The resurrection of Jesus Christ is God’s yes to Christ and to his atoning work.”[1] That means, in short, that all the forgiveness and eradication of guilt that we seek for things done and left undone took place on Golgotha. It was offered, not as some kind of trophy for distinguished service, but as a kind of door prize just for walking through the door of faith.
Bonhoeffer has a bit more to say to us about the Resurrection, some encouraging words here: “What does the resurrection mean, and what can it mean for us...it remembers the struggle of guilty humankind against divine love, or better: of divine love against guilty humankind, a struggle in which God seems to succumb of Good Friday and in which precisely by succumbing he actually is victorious on Easter…Good Friday is not, like winter, a transitional stage. No, it really is the end, the end of guilty humankind and the final judgment humankind pronounces on itself. If God’s history among human beings had come to an end on Good Friday, the last word on humankind would be: guilt, revolt, unfettering of all human-titanic powers, storming of heaven by human beings, godlessness, abandonment by God, which ends up ultimately in meaningless and despair…” (“Yuck,” by the way, just a quick editorial note from the Rector.) But, “The meaning of the Easter message is: God is the death of death, God lives, and so does Christ live; death was not able to keep him against the superiority of God. God pronounced the mighty word against death, destroyed it, and raised Jesus Christ. That is Easter. Not abandonment by God, but the fullness of God…God and God’s mighty victory over humankind, over death and guilt and rebellion. That is Easter…”[2]
So, we are in it now…in “Easter,” really up to our necks! And that is a good thing, is it not? Given what Bonhoeffer has to teach us, it is a good thing indeed. In fact, given what that bright white angelic light said to the two women on that first Easter morn’, “He is raised … He is not here,” it may very well be the best thing ever (strike “may very well be” and in its place, put “IS!”).
[1] From "Meditations on the Cross," p. 64.
[2] Ibid., pp. 71-73.
