3 days on

For one reason or another I thought about Easter in a new way and God spoke to me about it in a new way too. I know it's a bit late to write about Easter but what can I say...I'm generally a little late. So here it is...

I have grown up in the church and understood that Jesus"died on the cross for my sins" since I was a small child. I knew that he said "Father forgive them, they don't know what they're doing". I generally know how it all happened and understand (to an extent) it's implications. But what was different this year was that I thought of the humanity of the whole situation. This is what I wrote on Saturday night at a friends house before bed...

Tomorrow is Easter. The day we celebrate a turning point in our faith tradition. It is the day we recognized as the day Jesus conquered darkness and death. The day he said my name and your name and all other names under heaven. On this day Jesus stood, filled his lungs with air and lived again. He was saying come to me. He died so that we could live and then he rose and lived again so that we might know Him and live life abundantly. 

But I wonder what the disciples and all of the other followers of Jesus thought for those few days he was dead. I picture them mourning the death of a dear friend. Wondering to themselves, "was he really it?" I picture their souls mourning, wishing for just one more hour to be near this man. I imagine some feeling depressed and others finding hope and perhaps a few who felt betrayed.

Just think of it. The one person you respect and look to most. Your mentor, your friend who might actually be the fulfillment of everything you believe has died well before his time. You are left in the middle of this big mess without a clue how to deal with it. You've been tossing and turning at night, as if your body knows, anticipates the pain to come. And then a knock on your door one day, only a few days, in fact, after your friend has died. And they say, he is alive. He's been seen. He wants us to meet him. You know he's done some crazy stuff but not this. This isn't funny, people playing with your emotions like this. But you have to go see for yourself. So you go, with guarded hopes, to see your best friend again, the person you hope to please. The one you call master.

And you see him, you touch his skin. He is real, and you know something magnificent has happened. And He looks at you and says to your heart, I did this for you, so that you might know me and He smiles, knowing you understand and hugs you. This is real. This is power, this is love, a mystery. the hope of my heart and the deepest longing of my soul.

Somehow, in my years of doing Christianity I never really thought about Jesus' death in the same way I think about death in my life now. But his death isn't just a story. It didn't happen in a movie. He yelled in pain, not for dramatic effect, but because it hurt. He was stabbed with a spear. 

I guess thinking about the reality of his death made me understand differently that he came back to life. I don't really like words like "resurrection" because no one talks like that now. Talking about it like that runs the risk of disconnecting it from reality. So this is how I say it. Jesus died and he was dead for a few days. His body started to get stinky, then he came back to life. He was laying in that tomb and he filled his lungs with air, sat up and lived again. It was real and it changed the entire history of everything.

So today, Wednesday night, 3 days on from the day we celebrate as the greatest moment in the history of all things, 6 days on from the day marking the most tragic moment in the history of all things I can say I am celebrating the reality of Jesus and His story. That he lived, that he was the life on which the story of all people balanced. It's the greatest story ever lived and the only one worth trying to replicate.