Easter Isn’t Here to Help You Feel Better
What’s your experience of Easter?
Many people have a day at church and with family. The “Easter Bunny” may make an appearance. It’s springtime in the northern hemisphere, and the cold may be giving way to green, along with the warmth of longer days. (In the southern hemisphere, Easter comes at a time when days shorten and the cold returns. I wonder how that would change your reflections on Easter!)
Did you know that the Easter season lasts 50 days?
It’s not one day. This calls for a few notes on the liturgical calendar from the Roman Catholics. Easter is the longest season in the liturgical calendar other than Ordinary Time, which isn’t so much a season as it is the time between seasons. I’m confident that Ordinary time holds rich value in the life of the Christian community, AND I’ll still say that Easter is our longest liturgical season for a reason, despite its 7 weeks to Ordinary Time’s 34.
What is Easter here for then?
There are as many perspectives on this as there are people, and I want to call out one that is particularly problematic. It’s easy in my world these days to take Easter as a reminder that “everythings going to be okay.” I can breathe a sigh of relief, and go on with whatever I had been doing. This perspective abandons the Gospel we say we proclaim. It leaves out the reality that if we say we’re following Jesus Christ, we’re going to experience what he experienced. It leaves out the fact that the world we come in contact with is suffering, not to mention the world we’re insulated from! It leaves out the disciples’ experience of despair, doubt, and discouragement. It leaves out their fear of and actual experience of persecution and martyrdom. Can you imagine an Easter in your life so powerful and deep that you were willing to suffer and die? Easter is not meant to help you feel better and go on with the status quo. This is not the good news!
Easter is meant as a season for our ongoing transformation.
It calls us out of our individual lives, our families, and our tribes into a more universal building up of the Reign of God. Your life is not about you. Your family’s needs are not the highest needs. However you might fit into one or another “tribe,” it is not the boundary of your responsibility as one who follows Jesus Christ. These are three areas that are intended to offer some measure of stability, though it may be an illusion, that gives us confidence to reach out, to forget ourselves, to suffer with others, and to be transformed through our own daily deaths: personally, familially, tribally.
