I Never Really Liked Easter...

I have to admit that I never really got what all the fuss was about with Easter. Don’t get me wrong. I loved getting a cute new dress each year and the sudden uptick in chocolate was fantastic. Plus, I grew up going to church every Sunday so I understood the story of Jesus dying in our place for our sins and then coming back to life. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand. It just…didn’t seem all that exciting.

Christmas? Now that was exciting. There are presents and decorations, and an all-encompassing feeling of magic fills the air. Even the “real reason for the season” is fun. Jesus, God incarnate, shows up as a cute little baby to save the world and he’s born to a humble young woman from Nazareth. Everything from the biblical Christamas story to Prancer (I’m talking the 1989 version) makes you feel like you could be the Chosen One, just like Mary…just like Jesus.

And then there’s Easter.

Right now I live in Seville, Spain: arguably one of the best places on earth to be for Holy Week. People pour out onto the streets to see the Semana Santa processions and most of all the pasos. (Think floats, but instead of carrying guys in Squidward and Pikachu costumes, they carry stunningly carved and painted statues of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and other Holy Week characters. Oh and in Seville they’re carried, from below, on the shoulders and necks of dozens of men called costaleros. You should really YouTube it.)

But the truth is, I know that the vast majority of Semana Santa participants have no deep interest in Jesus or the events of Holy Week. For most of them, it’s a time to be with family and friends, to take a break from work, and to keep alive a local tradition and its icons. And as impressive as they are, I didn’t grow up with these traditions or icons so not even they, in all their glory, have made Easter more exciting for me.

After a lot of contemplation, I think I finally have the words for it. Easter is much harder to connect with emotionally. For one, as stories go, it feels quite predictable. (And just to be clear, as a practicing Christian, I mean no disrespect here. I’m just trying to be transparent with my struggle to enjoy Easter because I think there may be others who feel the same way.) God comes to earth (super cool, we enjoyed that during Christmas) and then He dies. But wait! Then He comes back to life. But obviously God wasn’t going to stay dead. That wouldn’t be a very powerful God.

It’d be one thing if Good Friday was the focal point of Holy Week. It’s much easier to feel something when you think about Jesus suffering and dying on the cross and that He did it because He loves you. Knowing that someone loves you enough to suffer for you-- that they think you’re worth it -- that’s a powerful emotion.

But we don’t have our biggest celebration on Good Friday. We have it on Easter Sunday because that’s when Jesus came back to life. Yet if you grew up in church, the story of Jesus coming back to life can lose some of its sparkle as the years go by. I know some people who still get teary-eyed on Easter Sunday as they think about what Jesus has done for them. I think that’s invaluable and beautiful. I wish wholeheartedly that was my natural reaction, but it’s not.

As I’ve allowed myself to wrestle with my apathy toward Easter, I keep coming back to this: Easter is about new life. New life in me. Not praying a prayer and going to heaven, but having a new heart. This world kind of sucks and the most natural result of living in it is letting my heart get hard. When I think of all the people who have hurt me when they should have protected me, when I see people who had the power to save lives or change them and instead filled their own pockets, when I think about how it feels to be rejected, ignored, insulted, or to fail at something new, I think, Why even try? Why give people a chance?

That’s the sound of my heart getting hard. Yet here I stand at a mere 29 years of life (punctuated by heartbreak, rejection and disappointment) and I still wake up with a sense of wonder for what the day will hold. I still feel the beat of hope pulsing in my heart. Hope that unkind people can change and proud people can apologize and broken people can be made whole. Not because I see it happen every day all the time - but because I’ve seen it happen in me. And if Jesus can do that for me, then He can do it for anyone else who wants it.

I think about people in the past generations of my family who faced the same questions I face and who reached the ends of their lives having lost all sense of hope. It led them to some dark places. I don’t want to end up that way, and I have Jesus to thank that I haven’t ended up there.

And that is something to get excited about. That is something that brings tears to my eyes. That’s something that makes me say Praise God. Not because it will make all the little old church ladies happy. But because I feel it in my heart.

“I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” -Ezekiel 36:26

I think about this verse a lot, but I especially like to think about it on Easter. Yes we’re celebrating Jesus’s resurrection on Easter but His resurrection points to our hearts. A cold, dark stone stained with the grime of humanity at its worst…replaced by a living, beating, unblemished heart. Enough life for yourself and so much that it flows out into love for others.

I mentioned that Easter is less exciting because unlike Christmas it’s the end of the story. Hanging from the cross, Jesus said, “It is finished.” Right? So why does it feel like a let down?

Well, simply put, because it’s not finished yet. Jesus hasn’t come back. People are still manipulative, selfish, insensitive, and unjust. War, dirty water, gun violence, and greed still ravage our world. And that sucks. How could we celebrate when there’s so much left to do?

Rich Villodas puts it a lot better than I do, so I’ll just quote Him: “The Bible doesn’t end with souls ascending to a disembodied heaven. It ends with a fully embodied heaven descending to earth. The resurrection is the good news that God in Christ is committed to the renewal, reconciliation, & resurrection of all things - and so should the Church be.” 

Easter is Jesus's invitation into His work of redemption, of bringing beauty back into the world. It might sound like filling a ravine with an eyedropper to you, but it doesn’t to me. I’m choosing to be a part of something much bigger than myself and my story when I join Jesus’s redemptive work.