Jesus in the grave. Moses in the wilderness. The journey from an old way of being to finding ourselves established in the new takes time.
Today is Easter!
Are you feeling it?
“Lo, the day of Days is here. Festival of hope and cheer!!”
Who’s with me?
“O day of light and gladness” Alleluia!
Or maybe you’re not there yet.
Maybe you’re still in the days of dark and sadness. Days of storm or Stormy Daniels. Maybe you’re in the festival of fear and trembling. The festival of this is too much, and will this ever end, and my God, why is this man still President?
It’s Passover, too. The first night of Passover was Friday evening. We’re in the week, now, of Passover.
And there again, the question is: we’re in Passover, but are you?
Liturgically it’s happening. We’ve had the Seder. We’ve told the story. We are through with the plagues, and out of Egypt, released from bondage, done with slavery, and on our way to the Promised Land.
Or maybe not.
Just because the holiday has arrived doesn’t mean that we’ve arrived, this side of the grave, or this side of Egypt.
It’s a little pushy, isn’t it? To demand that just because Easter has arrived by calendar, our spirits must be up at dawn singing “Alleluias” and feeling alive again. Maybe we’ve had a hard week. Who knows what tragedy has just happened, what bad news we got from the doctor. Just because Passover has arrived by calendar, it’s too much to expect that we all must escape from our personal Egypt and be ready to celebrate. Maybe what’s been holding us down is still on top of us. How dare the robins and the daffodils insist that just because it’s the first week of spring we must be feeling personally sunny?
The wheel of the seasons has turned and the North American continent is turning toward the sun again, but maybe we’re still turned away, still sitting in the dark, still feeling the chill in our bones and depression in our spirits. Not only this year but any year, Passover and Easter might arrive as April Fool’s jokes played against our suffering souls.
Could be.
Or maybe you are feeling sunny and free and alive today.
Who knows?
Easter, and Passover, and Spring, come every year. The myths of being dead and coming to life, of being oppressed and then being liberated, the fact of winter giving ‘way to spring, get told again this time each year, and will be told again a year from now, just as they were told a year ago, without regard, of course, whether we personally are moving at the same speed that the calendar moves.
You might have an Easter-like feeling in your life sometime this year. But there’s no guarantee that it’s happening to you today. It would be remarkable if it were, actually. Maybe you have an “Easter” every year, or maybe your personal cycle of hardship and liberation happens less often, every five years, or ten, or you experience only a few real Easter moments ever in your life.
And though it isn’t part of the myths themselves, the myths must acknowledge this truth: the movement from dark to light, is always, must be, reversed by a movement back to the dark again. The myths are one time stories, discrete events of resurrection or liberation, but spiritually, we don’t live that way. We roll through life with highs and lows, that are followed by highs again, that are followed by other lows.
The only way it makes sense to have an Easter this year, and then to have another Easter next year, is to admit that sometime during the year to come, Jesus is going to climb back into the grave again. The only way it makes sense to have a Passover every year, is because that feeling of being in bondage keeps returning. We’re never permanently free. We keep slipping back into Egypt. We need to be reminded again and again, that liberation is always possible, is always promised, is always worth working for, because we keep finding ourselves oppressed again, depressed and entombed.
Then when things get really tough, really dark, here comes spring again, here comes Passover again, here comes Peter Cottontail, hoping down the bunny trail. “O day of light and gladness.”
Easter isn’t a day. It can’t be. It would be useless if it were. Easter isn’t a one and done, historical event. Resurrection happened once, only, to Jesus, we are told, 2,000 years ago. But Easter is an ongoing event: an annual event, officially, but unofficially as often as we need it.
Passover, the same. And though the fact of Spring happens exactly once a year, the feeling of spring can arrive more or less often.
We need to be told the stories now, so we remember them, so that we can use them, when we need them, now or later this year, or further into the future.
But Easter, and Passover, are also more than a day, in a different way.
Both of them are particular events that happen within larger stories. And in this way, too, simplifying these myths to single days, single events, bleeds away the power of what these stories can mean in our lives. So let’s tell the whole story.
First Easter.
Easter week begins on Palm Sunday, a week ago. Jesus enters the city of Jerusalem at the high point of his ministry. We’re told in Matthew that he presents himself as a king, re-enacting the ceremonial procession of a new king of Israel, riding on a donkey, palm fronds spread on the road, the crowd singing the Hosanna psalm that was used at the coronation of David.
Jesus shows his power over the priesthood, throwing out the money changers and criticizing the temple religion that in his eyes has become a corrupt servant of the rich and powerful and the Roman occupiers of Israel, instead of working to create the egalitarian society of justice and love that Jesus sees as commanded by his faith.
On Thursday, Jesus celebrates the Passover with his disciples. They have a last supper together, and Jesus gives them the commandments to share food and drink in his memory in years to come.
That night he is betrayed while praying in the garden of Gethsemane.
On Friday he is quickly tried, and crucified. We’re told he dies on the cross at 3 o’clock. Because evening is fast approaching and the Sabbath is about to begin, there isn’t time for Jesus’ followers to bury Jesus properly, so instead they place his body in a borrowed tomb, most likely a cave, and close the entrance with a large rock to keep scavenging animals away.
The next day is Saturday. Jesus’ followers spend the day in shock and mourning.
As soon as it’s light on Sunday, Jesus’ followers come to the cave to prepare the body for proper burial and they discover the miracle. Jesus isn’t there. He has risen from the dead.
So Easter is a story, the Passion Week, with Sunday the end of the story. Easter isn’t a declaration of new life that comes out of nowhere. Easter Sunday is a resurrection that follows real death on Good Friday. In three days, Friday, Saturday, to Sunday, Jesus moved from death on the cross to resurrection.
If Easter were just a day, then we would miss the important aspect of the story that to move from death to life is a process not an event. To move from death to life takes time, at least three days, even for Jesus. The miracle isn’t just Sunday morning. The miracle happens Friday evening, Friday night, Saturday, Saturday night, and then, at last when we stumble into Sunday morning.
And during the journey of these three days, so the story goes, Jesus wasn’t just laying in the tomb. Jesus was working. The followers discover Jesus’ resurrection on Sunday morning, but according to the story, Jesus was already resurrected on Saturday. Did you know that?
Many Christian churches regularly recite a belief statement called the Apostles’ Creed. It begins like this:
“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord; Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell; the third day He arose again from the dead.”
Did you get that? On Saturday, Jesus, “descended into hell.” “Crucified, died, and was buried” on Friday. On Sunday, “he arose again from the dead.” On Saturday, “he descended into hell.”
Jesus was resurrected on Saturday in order to do the work of offering salvation to all of the righteous souls that died before him. The picture of Jesus opening the gates of Hell, is a favorite subject of artists and poets throughout Christian history. In Eastern Orthodox churches the icon placed at the front of the church on Easter Sunday is not the cross or the empty tomb, but Jesus opening the gates of Hell.
So by the time we get to Sunday, Jesus has been busy.
Easter is the end of the story, told this way, but coming to life again is a process not an event.
And Easter Sunday isn’t even, really, the end of the story. Like a lot of Christian holidays, Easter is a season not a day. Easter Sunday is the first day of a 50-day season that ends with Pentecost. Pentecost literally means 50. During the 50 days that start today Christians tell the stories of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances. Forty days from today is the day he ascends to Heaven. And then on Pentecost, Christians celebrate the day that the Holy Spirit descends onto Jesus’ disciples and gives birth to the Christian Church. That’s the real end of this story, the real end point of this journey.
Coming again to new life is a process, not a sudden miracle. You don’t just wake up one Sunday suddenly feeling, “Oh cool, I’m out of the tomb. Oh day of light and gladness!” Coming again to new life takes time. You have to wait. And you have to work. You have to suffer. You might even feel like dying. You need to be put away in a cave and covered with a rock. As the Christian theology insists, you’ve got to really die. And even then you can’t just wait around for the Sunday miracle. You’ve got to spend a Saturday or so in Hell.
The Easter myth is that coming to new life is hard. It’s tough. You’ve got to work and wait, and sweat it out. And you will get there, is the Easter message. But not suddenly. Maybe not soon. And certainly not easily.
The Passover story, also, is the celebration of a single event, but an event that implies a story.
Passover, the event, is the evening at the end of the 10 plagues that God, through Moses, inflicts upon the Egyptian people in an attempt to persuade Pharoah to release the Hebrew slaves. This last plague is the slaughter, by God, of the first born of every Egyptian family, and the first born of their livestock, too. God tells Moses to tell his people to mark the doorways of their homes with lamb’s blood, and then, during the horrifying night, God passes over the marked homes, and spares those families.
It’s at this point in the story, that the Bible gives the commandment to celebrate the Passover every year. The commandment to remember the Passover actually comes just before the night when the passing over occurs! It’s a commandment to remember something that hasn’t actually happened yet.
And more than that, part of the commandment is that the Jews should tell the story of the Passover every year including the promise that God has made to them to take them out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. The Jews are being commanded to remember something that won’t actually happen for 40 years. The Exodus story is only just about to begin. They are about to start a journey through the desert, a journey that we are told will take 40 years to complete, and they are already being told to celebrate it every year. Imagine then, every year, for those 40 years in the desert, the Jews celebrate a Passover that reminds them every year that God has brought them out of Egypt in order to bring them to the Promised Land, and every year for those first 40 years they look out at the desert surrounding them and say, “Really, God? Really? Is this the year we get there, because this still looks a lot like desert to me.”
Passover, the event, marks a significant point on a story of moving people from slavery to liberation, from suffering to joy, from bondage to another person’s needs to a life of self-determination, from a kind of death to a kind of new life, but the event of Passover is only a point on a journey, and in this case not even the end point. Passover isn’t the Promised Land. In fact Passover happens still in Egypt, a lot closer to the beginning of the story than to the end.
To get to the Promised Land takes time: 40 years, even if you’ve got Moses himself to guide you. It takes wandering through the desert. It takes complaining and grumbling, the Bible tells us. It takes backsliding, returning to old ways. To get all the way there requires moving through days and weeks and years even when you feel like giving up, when you doubt you’ll ever get where you’re going. 40 years! Coming to new life is hard.
In each of these stories, Easter and Passover, there is an instigating event that brings an old stable reality to an end, and then a lengthy process ensues before a new reality is created. These are stories of change and transition and then at long last a new and liberating normal. These are stories of destruction and creation, but not as single acts, but as long, effortful, cycles: 3 days from death to resurrection, plus 50 more days to the creation of the church; 8 days of Passover plus 40 years of the Exodus before we get to the Promised Land.
You may have experienced an instigating event in your life recently. A cancer diagnosis, the end of a job, the decision to end a relationship. A journey begins. An instigating event could be a happy event, or an event that mixes happy and sad as they often do. A life change that you choose and plan for yourself, or an instigating event that comes to you as a surprise or blessing: a new addition to the family, graduation from college after years of study, a new job. In these cases, too, an instigating event provokes a change, a journey begins that will lead, slowly, to a new reality.
In the life of this church, you all experienced an instigating event last year when Rev. Rahnema announced her resignation. That event might, for some of you have felt like what the followers of Jesus might have felt thrown from what they thought was a flourishing ministry, to a sudden and bewildering end. Followed by a long and sorrowful Saturday that you might still be feeling.
Little help it must be, at times like these, to be told to celebrate God’s victory over death, when Jesus is still in the tomb, or to celebrate your entrance into the Promised Land, when that entrance is still 40 years in the future. But that’s the truth of these myths, and the spiritual truth of how change happens. Liberation is won slowly. New life comes eventually.
It’s hard to wait. When we’re in transition, it’s hard to trust that the journey is moving forward. It’s hard to imagine the way forward, or believe that necessary work is happening in places we can’t see or know. But the story of these stories is that we must have patience. We don’t move directly from instigating event to miracle. We never do. We cannot rush. We cannot hurry. We cannot jump.
We must take a journey. A journey that takes time. A journey that takes work. A journey that takes us through a vast desert. Maybe we will even have to go through Hell.
We can do this, these religious myths tell us, because we did it then. We’ve done it before. Come journey, then, out of bondage, out of the tomb. And know we will get to the Promised Land of our future happiness, we will emerge again to the resurrection of our lives.