Celebrating Resurrection in a Dying World

Trigger Warning: This post contains discussion of death, war, suicide, and still-birth.

There it is.

Another church advertising their upcoming Sunday service.

Join us this Sunday at such-and-such times to learn about the Risen Christ!
Egg hunt following service and pictures with the Easter Bunny!

I suppose it is that time of year. The daffodils and the tulips are blooming, the bermudagrass is starting to green, the shelves are stocked with pastels, and the bunnies and the peeps are finding their way into just about every shopping cart. Easter is upon us again, bringing with it demands of frilly dresses, short-sleeve button ups, and eggs – plastic, deviled, painted, saladed, and otherwise.

Oh, and church.

I’m sure that studies have proven this, but anybody in the Bible belt knows that the rule is you can be a Christian if you go to church on Christmas and on Easter. We’ll get all dressed up and sing songs about how Jesus is alive, do all of the festive duties, and go back to our lives the next day, fingers stained with dye and never wanting to see another boiled egg.

I understand that this probably comes off as bitter and, perhaps, crotchety. After all, what harm is there in letting people have their fun?

Despite all this, I don’t actually think that there’s anything wrong with filling little plastic eggs with coins or candies and having kids rummage about the house or yard or wherever we pretend the rabbit hid them. I also, turns out, don’t think there’s anything wrong with remembering around the turn of Spring every year that you should probably be going to church. And I certainly don’t think that there’s anything wrong with deviled eggs.

It’s not so much what’s there that bothers me; it’s what isn’t there. Especially this year. Let me explain.

A little over a year ago, the Coronavirus broke onto the world scene and proceeded to mercilessly steal away over two million lives (and climbing). Families everywhere mourned the loss of their loved ones who – due to the horrid infection rate of the virus – often died alone, with final words passed over the phone or through window panes. Nurses have described the flood of patients as a wartime triage, quickly having to make the decision of who lives and who dies due to the staggering need and the minimal resources to treat them.

Shortly thereafter, a man in uniform murdered a man by kneeling on his neck for nine minutes while the unarmed victim cried out for his mother, and the country was once again reminded that racism did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation, nor did police brutality end with body cameras. The social unrest that followed would come to mark the year as one of upheaval and uncertainty, but the bloodshed was nothing new. The names pile up in the wake of a world moving on.

After that, we learned about a doctor on the border administering forced hysterectomies and sterilization to detainees. Ethnic genocide in China. Homeless children in Syria left scarred and disfigured by another bombing. More COVID deaths. More law-abiding murders. Another shooting in Atlanta. Another shooting in Colorado.

Even without global pandemics and racist violence, the world is dying. It may not look that way from my back deck – the blooming redbuds and the henbit peaking up through the lawn would want me to believe otherwise – but everything in creation is racing towards death. Just recently, the winter took the lives of many in Texas as hundreds were left without power, water, and heat in a record cold. An explosion in Beirut, and the world spins on without blinking. Earthquakes, flooding, rockslides, and hurricanes seem to be picking up the pace. And still, while natural disasters and industrial accidents pile bodies to the heavens, it is no match for the efficiency with which we kill each other.

But it isn’t just that.

In the house next to ours lives an old woman who woke up this morning thinking of all the things that need to be done in her yard: the fence needs to be cleared, canopies need to be raised, pergolas need to be moved, and abandoned sheds need to be torn down and hauled away. She was out there this morning with a bow saw and a pair of loppers attacking the ivy that never seems to end, knowing full well that she will likely not live to see the end of the work ahead.

Just last week, a friend of mine told me about witnessing a suicide at work – an eleven year old boy googled the best way to tie a noose and dropped himself in it. He had to be there when the family found out and those faces are still what he sees when he goes to bed and when he wakes up. This he holds with him as the anniversary approaches yet again of his cousin’s own suicide.

We have friends who have suffered a miscarriage; we have friends who have suffered multiple miscarriages. Some of my friends have tried to take their own lives. Some of my friends’ parents are dead. Most of us have watched grandparents die and while modern science builds its Babel, the grave awaits our breaking bodies. Be it COVID or cancer, a car crash or another Columbine, something is going to put us in the ground. Maybe it will be old age that does it, and if we are lucky it will be painless. But most of us will not be lucky.

So what the hell are we doing painting eggs? And why in the world are we singing about life when everyone – everywhere – is dying?

I look at my daughter with a sobering realization that as young and lively as she is, she is not long for this world. And while I have no idea what suffering the world is storing up for the day her childhood crumbles, I know that death is part of the world she was born in. Already death schemes for her. And whether its eighty years or eighty seconds, it will get her. Lord willing, it will get me first.

And in this moment Easter begins to hit a little different. What is Easter, anyway?

Two-thousand years ago there was a man who claimed to be God and king and he was executed for it. They drug him from court to court through the night, ripped the flesh off his back until muscles spilled from his shoulders, and marched him to a hill and nailed him to a cross. He slowly suffocated, each breath becoming more desperate and tried. He soiled himself as a crowd watched and jeered and mocked. Wave after wave of unrelenting pain, and then he died above a pool of his own blood.

They pried the nails out of his hands and carried him to his tomb.

And then he lay there, unmoving and unbreathing.

And for two-thousand years, people have claimed that this man who claimed to be God and king did not stay dead. That a torn and tattered lump of flesh and organs was healed to the point of living again. Lungs breathing, heart beating, neurons and synapsis firing as the man got up and walked out of the grave, never to return again. For two-thousand years people have claimed that this Godman King would come again and put an end to death, suffering, pain, evil, and all things bad forever and ever.

And for two-thousand years people have been dying.

And for two-thousand years people have been suffering horrible, horrible things, and still no one has shown up.

Two-thousand years of still-births. Two-thousand years of suicides. Two-thousand years of murder, rape, war, and oppression.

And Christians still have the gall and the audacity to celebrate resurrection day. To say that all of this suffering will be defeated on some yet-to-come day when Christ will come again and raise the dead to life.

It’s offensive, isn’t it? To look at people who are suffering at the hands of sin and death and tell them that it’s all going to be okay. It’s like telling someone with stage four cancer that there’s a pill you can take that will make it all go away. It’s like telling a child who just said goodbye to their grandparents to come back tomorrow and they’ll be good as new.

And yet this is the audacious claim of Christianity, that really and truly the world was not supposed to be this way. That death slithered into the world a very long time ago, but it is neither welcome nor long for creation. That there is a man who claimed to be God who defeated death by succumbing to it, only to leave the tomb as empty as death’s claim on him. That sin, suffering, pain, and death – never at rest in hunting down life – had the chance to throw everything at Christ and destroy the giver of life, and it was nothing. The wave of death met its mountain and broke beneath it. And it has been a very long time since death was defeated, and it has not yet died, but it will, and the time spent dying will pale in comparison to the time spent living.

So, what is Easter? Easter is neither cute nor quaint; it is raw and gritty. Easter is, to steal from Levi the Poet, a middle finger to the grave. It is a victory cry in the cemetery with fists pushed back above the dirt. It is looking death in its ugly face, seeing it for what it is, saying its damnable name, sitting in its abominable stench, staring into its grotesque and disgusting eyes and seeing it, knowing it, feeling it, and hating it, and declaring, “death, thou shalt die.”

We will do an egg hunt this year and you’d better believe that my daughter is going to look adorable in her pastel dress. We will walk through daffodils and smile amidst the tulips. I’ll eat as many deviled eggs as I can handle. We will go to church and sing songs about Jesus raising from the dead, because he did and we will. Death is not the end. Death will die. Easter is not primarily a time for egg hunts and pastels. To celebrate resurrection in a world so marred by suffering is a serious claim. Here’s to the Christ who overcame death by suffering its worst and raising in power to vanquish death, and to empty tombs on the day when he makes all things new.

Happy Easter.