The Story of Easter is Personal
Death is hard because we are inherently circle people. It’s in our nature to see things in terms of forever. Unless it involves something unpleasant like cleaning toilets or getting a cavity filled, we don’t like endings. That’s why death’s stark ending hurts our souls and breaks our hearts.
2016 was shrouded in gloom. As we said goodbye to Professor Snape, Princess Leia, John Glenn and Harper Lee (and that’s just the beginning), death hung heavy in the collective air. But for me, 2017 has been hard for more personal reasons.
Already this year, a close family member lost her mother to cancer, a friend has been battling an aggressive disease, and my father-in-law looked death square in the eye with a massive heart attack that stopped his heart for nearly twenty minutes. He barely survived. For me, this year is the reason the story of Easter is so deeply personal to Christians.
In the Christian faith, Easter represents hope.
For Christians, the celebration of Easter commemorates not only the Passion of Jesus but the miracle of His Resurrection. According to Christian tradition, Jesus was killed on a Friday afternoon and resurrected on a Sunday morning, with the promise that every person ever living (and dying) on the earth will not stay dead forever. If you have read this far, you are my April fool.
This hope rings true to people of faith—including people from religious traditions outside Christianity—because we are circle people. We like the promise of no endings.
When my sweet ninety-year-old grandmother died a couple years ago, I cried. I have so many memories of times spent just with her. She made me strawberry milk, and I played in the ocean that was her backyard during irrigation days. I miss her. My grandfather, her husband, died just before I was born, so I never knew him. But I’m sure she cried and cried and cried when he died. That’s what happens when we lose those we love.
But the promise of Easter is that those separations and sorrows won’t last forever.
A few years ago, I performed Johannes Brahms’ Requiem in a choir. If you enjoy that kind of thing, it’s a piece you don’t want to miss. After learning to chew up and spit out the unfamiliar German words, I could finally focus on the meaning of the text. And the words resonated with my soul. I spent several rehearsals, tears streaming down my face, rejoicing as the somber plodding refrain, “All flesh is as grass; … for lo, the grass with’reth, and the flower thereof decayeth,” made way for the triumphant declaration, “Death, O where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy triumph?”
When Christians celebrate the events of Jesus’s final week of life on earth—Palm Sunday, remembering His triumphal entry into Jerusalem as a king; the Last Supper, where He taught His closest followers important Christian doctrine; the Garden of Gethsemane, where He prayed throughout the night; Good Friday, a day of betrayal, anguish, and death—they do it looking forward to the hope of that early Sabbath morning when Jesus put an end to the finality of death.
For circle people, the story of Easter promises an end to the endings and hope for countless tomorrows with those we love. And that makes it personal.
