Why Easter?

A holiday that's been turned into egg hiding, and rabbits still matters for its underlying meaning.

I have always been enamored by the Saturday between Good (God) Friday and Easter. There is no reference in the Bible to what happened between the murder of Christ and the resurrection. The scriptural account ends with Jesus being placed in a tomb of Joseph of Arimathea by a few people (John, Mary, his Mother) and picks up at the tomb early on Sunday morning with John and Peter. Yet there is nothing describing that day in between. The disciples had been scattered. Most of them fleeing from the Garden of Gethsemane late Thursday night when the Jewish leadership sent their goons in to arrest Jesus.

I have to imagine that the mental wrestling match that most of them went through was as excruciating as anything they had ever had to go through. Imagine having invested the last three years of your life, wandering around Israel with a teacher you believed to be the political and religious restorer, only to find out that those in power had other ideas and they would go to any length to murder the man whom you had followed. Add to that, in the moment he most needed your defense, you scattered like a rat into the night air. Jesus was dead, and the entire adventure you had invested your life and soul in was seemingly over. There would have been fear. Your associations with this now-dead “criminal” would possibly sentence you to the same unhappy end, too.

I imagine that most of them were holed up in rooms in Jerusalem or had left the city to make their way back to the towns from which they had come, head in hand. The stories and parables of the last three years would be circling in their heads. “What was all of that for?” and “How could I have been so foolish?” The one whom they thought would lead them into a new era of Israel was dead, and everything that they had seen and worked for was wrapped in a shroud in a nondescript stone tomb outside the city walls. The Romans were still in charge, and the Jewish leadership had only been slightly inconvenienced by the whole affair. Nothing that had been promised through parable or teaching would be coming to pass. It would have all felt like a waste.

So, Sunday in the Christian belief system matters. For those who would have been wrestling with this terrible demise of what they had hoped for, Sunday and an empty tomb were significant. It meant more than just “saving face” for the disciples; it meant that all the weight they had carried from their own betrayal and abandonment might have the chance to be redeemed. If they could see Jesus, they could say their apologies and ask for his forgiveness for their actions. Sunday was significant to the disciples not because they could then suddenly create a new religion and power structure that the Church ultimately became, but because they could see the one they had left for dead on a cross on Friday and bring their contrition as a friend.

Sunday matters because Saturday is where most of us live life. Caught between what has happened and what is yet to come. I have always thought it funny how much we read our current iterations of the church back into the stories of the Bible. For instance, I have never thought that when Paul was writing his letters to the churches, he would finish a sentence, sit back and crack his knuckles, and say to himself, “dang, that’s some good stuff right there! I bet one day they will put that in a book that gets printed billions of times in hundreds of languages and they will call it scripture.” Paul, instead, was living his life, tuned to the spirit, telling the churches how this Jesus stuff worked. I feel the same about the disciples. This bumbling group of adolescent-minded men were not capable of following the instructions of Jesus when he was alive and walking with them, let alone designing a grand new faith that would be the most widely adopted religion in Western society. They were just glad to see him one more time and maybe, if Jesus would be kind, hear them out for why they had been such awful friends that night in the garden.

Any government can rile up its citizens to democratically convict a person of anything. That is the essence of government. So while Friday is a necessity in the story, the behaviors of those involved are nothing new to the human experience. Those in power want to stay in it. Those who must judge the merits want to make sure they remain liked. Those in the crowd can be easily swayed by how the facts are presented. Mankind can be awful and cruel, and can justify beating and murder in the name of government justice. None of that is new.

Saturday is normal for humans. Tormented by our own shortcomings, our conscience tears at our souls when we know we have not lived up to the moment we found ourselves in. Self-conviction and failure are the same things that humans have felt since the Garden of Eden, or when Cain killed Abel. We are possibly most at home in this self-deprecation. So when Sunday comes and the tomb is empty, it changes our optimism and gives us hope that another chance exists for us to talk to Jesus and tell him what happened and grieve for our choices. It matters because without forgiveness, there is only justice. Justice is certainly what we deserve. Our own minds and souls know it. Yet in the story of Sunday, we have a hope that we can grab hold of and believe that this unmerited grace and forgiveness can be ours too.

Our society depends on Sunday. Without it, we will only be left with the easy things. Administering justice through mob rule or powerful corruption, and our own self-loathing that comes from our failures. If that is all we have, then our lot is one that will perpetually rely on us finding the most noble of people to lead us, and then living with their inevitable failures. It becomes a cruel world with no chance for optimism or dreaming about what we might become. We will be saddled with a Saturday life. Alone, lonesome, and filled with self-hate. Sunday matters because of how different it makes the human story.

Happy Easter.