Easter Sunday

Passages: Jeremiah 31:1-6, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, Acts 10:34-43 and John 20:1-18.

Hope Chapel, a large Evangelical church near my home in Manhattan Beach, California, blasts trumpets at six a.m. Easter morning. To my secular neighbors, this made Easter morning one of their least favorite mornings of the year. Although not traditionally an early riser, I definitely didn’t mind being woken up at dawn by trumpets on Easter Sunday. Even as a young child, Easter has always been my favorite holiday. It’s an odd choice for a kid, considering the splendor of Christmas and the fireworks of the Fourth. I’m not even that big on chocolate, and was always the last of my siblings to finish my Easter or Halloween candy (often I would give a lot of it away). But even when I was a child, the excess and ordeal of Christmas bothered me. Easter was festive enough to be set apart from other family gatherings, but relatively simple compared to Christmas. Although I certainly didn’t grasp the theological concepts yet, it was easy to sense the seriousness of the day and its profound importance to Christianity.

My older sister never shared the same enthusiasm for Easter as I did. I loved Easter egg hunts so much so that my mother would continue to hide empty plastic eggs around the house for a month so I could “pluck eggs” – my sister would seldom pluck eggs with me after Easter, especially since there wasn’t anything in the egg. My younger brother was way too pumped about Christmas to even consider Easter as a contender in the year’s favorite holidays. Santa brought Nintendo – the Easter Bunny left a basket with stocking stuffers. Christmas morning was spent in pajamas, playing with your newest and coolest toy. Easter morning you wore stiff, uncomfortable dress clothes on hard wooden pews, bored out of your mind.

But the trumpets and the suits, the eggs and the pews, made sense to me, even if they didn’t to my neighbors. It’s not that I truly understood Easter – I still don’t really understand Easter. But I sensed there was a substance to the day that exceeded all others. Now that I'm an adult, Easter remains my favorite holiday for some of the same reasons. It's resistant to commercialization, it's substantive and, perhaps most importantly, it's challenging. The challenge of Resurrection Sunday is best seen in the image of the Empty Tomb.

I had a professor say the other day that The Empty Tomb was the heart of the Christian faith. I wouldn’t call it the heart of our faith – I think God’s love occupies that sacred space – but I would say it is Christianity’s ultimate reality. The original ending of the Gospel of Mark, the earliest composed, ended with Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of James and Salome fleeing Jesus’ tomb, where his body was not found and a messenger declared his resurrection, terrified. The earliest and most reliable manuscripts of Mark have no image of the risen Christ!

Mark is our reality as Christians 2,000 years after Jesus’ Resurrection. Unlike Thomas, we cannot feel the wounds and touch the hands of the savior. Unlike Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of John, we cannot look upon the face of our Rabboni (teacher). We don’t even get to see an empty tomb. We have an ancient account about an empty tomb, passed down through more than a hundred generations. Christ’s resurrection is a mystery – none of us can know with certainty. And that unanswerable mystery presents a challenge.

In the Gospels we see the challenge of the Empty Tomb dealt with a host of ways, but Mary’s reaction in today’s lection is particularly insightful. Instead of believing what Jesus repeatedly claimed he would do, Mary Magdalene is convinced that someone moved Jesus’ body. She laments, “They have taken my Lord away and I don’t know where they put him.” In the throws of this despair, Jesus stands before her, but she cannot even recognize him. She tells that which she seeks, “if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him.” Perhaps the doubts of Jesus’ disciples should comfort us with our own doubts in the face of the Empty Tomb, and perhaps their fears of the unknown should comfort our fears. Although this passage in John reveals to us the humanity of doubting Jesus’ victory, it also shows us how getting lost in those doubts will obfuscate how God is visibly working in our lives. After all, during her self pity and lament, Mary didn’t even recognize Jesus’ presence.

I’m not exactly sure what it says about my faith that I’m attracted such a challenging holiday, one that simultaneously mourns loss and celebrates victory. Nor am I certain about what it all “really means.” But I do believe that God is speaking to me during this time of year, and that my connection to Easter is something to be examined and reflected upon. The fact that it’s not just barbeques and fireworks, decorations and presents (not to diminish the importance of Christmas), but also serious, piercing to the foundations of our faith, makes Easter truly unique and set apart from other holidays. For the most part, Easter has resisted the consumer culture of so many other holidays precisely because its message is difficult to package, and has the mysterious image of the Empty Tomb beneath its feet. But for those of us who look into that tomb and believe in the victory and resurrection of Christ, standing on that ground is the image of transcendent life.

Have a happy and blessed Easter.