The Fool's Easter

This year has featured two unusual alignments between the Christian calendar and the secular calendar. The first was the coming together of Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday on February 14 (click here for a reflection). The second is the coming together of April Fool’s Day and Easter Sunday on April 1. This will, no doubt, be great fodder for critics of faith in general and Christianity in particular. “April Fool’s, this stuff isn’t for real!” Of course, the Christian can easily retort to the atheist, “April’s Fool’s, this stuff is for real!” These sorts of jokes and jabs aside, what insight can be gleaned by bringing together a whimsical, secular, holiday, with the most important feast day of the Christian year? Let’s first touch base on the meaning of each observance on its own merits.

April Fool’s Day is an annual invitation to joke, prank, and pull one over on someone. Unusual newspaper articles, frightening friends with shocking, but old-fashioned fake news, and so on, often characterize the largely innocent quality of this holiday. Of course, it’s not really a holiday. No one gets April Fool’s Day off. Wait! I just received notice that as of 2018 April Fool’s Day will be a federal holiday in the United States and Canada. Yeah. Long weekend! Party time. Celebration. Oh wait…April Fools! This observance, while seemingly silly and light-hearted, has not gone without its controversies. Critics of April’s Fools, and specifically of the sometime elaborate hoaxes that individuals or organizations put on, decry the waste of resources and the confusion that ensues from such pranks.

Easter Sunday is the most important day of the Christian calendar. It is sometimes also referred to as Resurrection Sunday. Both names are proper, the first by long custom (ancient connotations aside) and the second being the event the holiday celebrates. Easter Sunday is a national holiday in many countries with a Christian cultural heritage. For many, Easter is more about family and candy that it is about the resurrection of a 1^st century Jewish Messiah. For the Christian, Easter is the high point of the Christian story and speaks of Christ’s victory over the difficulties and mysterious of sin and death. Christ’s resurrection validates His status as the long expected one and validates His teachings as worthy of reception. Christ is the example of what will take place to all who put their trust in Him. 

What happens when you put these together? You get the dangerous invitation to Easter as merely a sentimental occasion with pretty flowers, fine hats, and in a few places, fuller churches. Pretty flowers, fine hats, and fuller church are all fine and well. But, if Christians merely gather to smile and nod at a story they believe to be some sweet sentimental yarn of a nice man overcoming bad things so that we can be non-dangerously nice to each other, then we will have missed the message of Easter (for more on that click here) and settled for foolishness. The joke will be on us. We will have pranked ourselves. Because Easter rolls away the stone and shows us that the worst of misguided humanity, in its doing the worst, to a singular shinning life, does not have the last word. This is not foolishness. This is astonishing and for over twenty centuries has turned the wisdom of the worldly wise into spiritual tomfoolery. Don’t be fooled. Christ is Risen! 

He is Risen!

Easter is unusually early this year. Lent started in the darkness of the winter and while in in the global north Easter has long been tied to spring, it’s still early enough that physical days of shadow and snow may linger. Yet, after 2000 years what more is there to say? Sermons galore, songs abounding, poems piling high, and liturgies around the world resounding with the cry, “Alleluia the Lord is Risen. The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!”

There alone may be enough to be said. The proclamation of the Resurrection message has continued over twenty centuries through hell and high water, through towers falling, through economies booming, through endless paperwork, through endless controversial elections of the moment, and through the whispers of lovers and the laughter of children. In Saint John’s account of Easter morning Mary Magdalene is asked by Jesus (who she thinks is the gardener), “why are you weeping?” (John 20:15).  

It’s a good question. Not only for Mary, but for us. Mary weeps because she has lost her Lord, because the great movement of hope that was rising in her time had been nailed to a cross, robbed of all breath and taken lifeless to the tomb. All this calls for tears, but to add insult to injury, it seems the body has been stolen. Many of us too have lost our Lord, or had our hopes nailed to a cross of cruelty or terrible circumstance. Many of us have felt robbed of all breath, walked lifeless through life’s thousand little cuts and sat tomb-like contemplating our future.

Easter is easily mistaken as an occasion for smiles, cute bunnies, and new dresses. These have their place, but as happy little trinkets alongside the vast red canvas of the world’s history and our personal histories of blood and sorrow. Easter is a time to weep. To weep over the losses of life for ourselves, those we love, and the world. But it is also a time to tune our spiritual ear to the lyrical delight of hearing our names uttered by the risen Lord. When Jesus said, “Mary” she recognized him instantly and then -- I suggest -- she did not stop weeping but her tears of sorrow turned to tears of joy (John 16:20). This Easter, may yours and mine do the same.