Easter

In the closing pages of Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus (IVP Formatio), priest and scholar Wesley Hill quotes Lesslie Newbigin who famously said, “I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!” Easter hope, in other words—in stark contrast to wishful thinking and toxic positivity—is in touch with reality. Rooted in shared human history, resurrection hope knows the world can be a terror-stricken place, but that the powers of evil and death won’t get the final world.

Hill’s Easter is the latest in the Fullness of Time series edited by Esau McCaulley, consisting of short, accessible books about seasons of the church year. Geared primarily for the liturgically curious (as far as I can tell), they’re also worthwhile for those of us whose lives have been oriented around liturgical time for decades.

Easter may well be the church’s “greatest, most joyful feast day,” but as Hill reminds us, Easter Vigils tonight and joyful services tomorrow morning are only the beginning. “Many Christians have become habituated to the forty-day observance of Lent,” he writes, “but not as many are attuned to how the church calendar calls us to an even longer fifty-day period of joyous celebration and delighted feasting.”

The four gospels each tell the story of the resurrection, and Hill devotes a chapter here to a survey of those interrelated but distinct narratives, including the various accounts of how Jesus’ friends and disciples reacted to the frankly baffling news. As Hill reminds us, emotions would have rightly been mixed. Not everyone had remained faithful to the end; some may have feared reprisals. But Jesus kept on surprising them with good news.

To the ones who abandoned him at his moment of direst need, to the ones who fled to save their own skin while his was being flayed, to his betrayers, he says, “Peace.” Not “Now you’ve got it coming,” not “Prepare to pay for what you’ve done,” but “Peace.” Mercy for the undeserving is the overriding, hope-awakening theme of Easter.

During the life and ministry of Jesus, and in the immediate aftermath of his death and resurrection, his disciples weren’t exactly paragons of perception. “They misunderstand his mission and teaching at every turn,” Hill writes. But after the Ascension and the day of Pentecost, “the original witnesses of the risen Jesus came to understand that Jesus’ resurrection was the beginning, the preview and foretaste, of the long-awaited communal resurrection of the entire people of God.”

Hill goes on to consider how the dramatic stories in the book of Acts reveal to us how “resurrection people” might live and worship and serve and die. He writes:

Acts is the story of the aftermath of Easter. It is one of the most striking pieces of evidence we have for the truth of the Easter proclamation: If Jesus had not appeared to his dispersed and demoralized disciples, imbuing them with new vigor and purpose, how could we ever explain their almost overnight transformation from a fearful huddle, hiding behind locked doors, to a barn-burning band of fearless preachers and ministers who were ready to defy the empire, if necessary, to take their message to the farthest reaches of human society?

I’ve been in churches where Easter sermons take the resurrection to be good news for the hereafter, without any real significance for the here and now. Hill calls this kind of theology “escapist etherealism,” and he’s right. I’ve also heard preachers who prefer to think of Easter as a mere symbol for new possibilities—good vibes as far as they go, but devoid of any real power. The witness of early Christians, however, is something else entirely. These first disciples insist that the resurrection of Jesus, as Hill writes, is not “a pacifying metaphor or an eternal dream but an actual incursion of divine power into the middle of real space-time history.”

The book of Acts, then, is not only the story of how Christians imitate Jesus in light of the resurrection. It’s also about the ongoing work of interpretation, where we see these disciples “recalling memories of Jesus and continuing to tell his story, not just as the story of a concluded human life but a human life that is ongoing and capable of changing current events.” That’s the story we’re invited into, today and every day.

Happy Easter, friends. May we be filled with true resurrection hope to fuel us for holy, courageous living in these fraught times. Optimism won’t cut it. We need something else, something more. In the evocative words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, then, “Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.”