Easter: The Real Resurrection Message

Photo by MohammadHosein Mohebbi on Unsplash

Easter has always been one of my favorite holidays — year by year, it jockeys for the number one spot with Thanksgiving or Independence Day, for different reasons, obviously. (People always ask me, “What about Christmas?” While I appreciate the music and the magic around Christmas, I never emerge from the holiday less than completely exhausted; therefore, it doesn’t make the cut.)

I was raised going to church and Sunday school, and my mother always made sure we had something new and colorful to wear on Easter. It was a long day, starting with the sunrise service at 6:00 am. As a teenager in the youth choir, often I had to sing at that, well, perhaps not so ungodly hour.

The sunrise service was followed by a community breakfast, and then on to the Sunday school class and a church service. It was a taxing day for both adults and children.

This year, still masking and social distancing because of the pandemic, I asked my mother, now in her eighties, if there was going to be a sunrise service, which in recent years had been held outside in a centrally located field. My pious mother replied, “Probably, but there won’t be a breakfast.”

Aha! I caught her. What she’d really been looking forward to all these years was the breakfast! I don’t blame her. For once, she didn’t have to prepare it.

Growing up in New England, you never knew what the weather would bring — from mid-March to mid-April, Easter might be a sleet-filled day or seventy degrees.

Although I still identify as Christian, the Jesus story, combined with the timing of spring — the burst of color, the renewed hope, the fresh start — make Easter an anticipated event for me every year.

Here is my takeaway from the Jesus story, and it’s good for all faiths. A man with new and radical ideas about love, life, and faith was hounded by conservative religious leaders of the time, and eventually put to death by the government for those ideas. Despite that sad ending, we can’t fear the new ideas; they are the only things that move civilization forward.

My takeaway as a Christian must include the resurrection, which is central to the Christian faith. To be honest, my fact-based education tells me there was no physical resurrection, although the Mary and Martha scene makes for a dramatic story. But stories have been used since the beginning of time, often to reveal a deeper truth than facts alone provide.

To me, that deeper truth is this: As is often and sadly the case, the truth and beauty of someone is only fully revealed and recognized after a loved one has passed. And so, through his disciples and the word-of-mouth of many witnesses, the story of Jesus was told and spread to all nations. In that way, Jesus lives on, within us (if we so choose). Isn’t that the holy spirit at work?

I don’t need to believe that when I die, I will go to heaven. That thinking has a tendency to make us sit idly through our years and not do the work necessary to bring heaven on earth — right here and now, which I think was what Jesus intended.

That is the resurrection: making our world a place where we love our neighbors as ourselves and love God and treat the planet as though we love the Creator.

Two thousand years later, we haven’t come anywhere near that ideal, except in a few pockets of humanity here and there. And so, we can’t expect to sit around and complain and wait for Jesus to return and save us — yet again.

The real resurrection is when we learn to save ourselves, from ourselves. Maybe Jesus is up there patiently waiting for us to do our job. Smiling, waiting. If we could ever resurrect ourselves, I think he’d be so proud.