Easter. Resurrection Sunday. The preeminent holiday of the Christian calendar. Outranking Christmas because this is the day when all that we see as beginning at Christmas comes to its triumphant culmination: Christ overthrows Death! The baby of Bethlehem strides out of the tomb, the King of Kings, glorious in power, to reign in majesty forever!
The details of the story of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection are familiar to, perhaps ingrained in, the minds of Christians everywhere. If you grew up in a Christian family, you might remember your Sunday School teacher moving the stone away on a flannel board; you may have been the teacher. The story could be told without having to open a Bible, just remembering it from hearing it so many, many times. And that’s a good thing, mostly.
The question is, have we heard it so many times we don’t really think about it anymore? For me, I have to take it off the flannel board and move it into real life. My life. To do that, I need to read it — again! — in the gospels, this time realizing that the people in it weren’t flannel-backed paper, they were regular human beings. Like me. Like you.
The apostles were young or young-ish men who loved and believed in Jesus, believing to the extent of their understanding. Imagine being one of them, walking toward Jerusalem and hearing your Teacher (who had performed miracles in your presence) telling you that you were all going to the city so He could be killed and then rise from the dead. Forget for a minute that we’ve had two thousand years of knowing the end of the story: what would you or I have thought when He said it? “There must be something wrong with my hearing” or “One of us is….crazy?” Then skip forward through all the horrifying, unimaginable events of Friday to Sunday morning, early.
We are apostles, gathered somewhere in Jerusalem, hiding, hoping the soldiers or religious leaders don’t come and drag us off to be killed. Would we be feeling like our heads had been run over? And then the women come back from the tomb with a wild story about seeing angels and two of the eleven go running to see. To see what? No one knows what to expect, but at least there’s something, maybe some hope for something.
Back to present-day “we”, we know what happened after that. But how often do we put ourselves in place of anyone who lived the events of the gospels? When I do, the wonder, the glorious awe, the fountain of joy bursts out and flows into my mind and heart. These people wanted to spend their lives serving Jesus. So. Do. I. And I don’t want to lose that “Easter” feeling of wanting to sing and shout, “He’s Risen! He’s Risen! He’s Really Alive!”
It’s odd-funny, when I thought about writing a Resurrection Sunday blog, I actually wondered what there was to say that was “new.” Then my church online made me realize that Jesus is ALWAYS new, not just on Easter. Our preacher, Russ, also referenced two points on which I realized I had erred in my “The Day After” blog, and that little voice said (smiling, I could feel it) “Maybe you haven’t learned everything there is to know in the Gospels, after all.”
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