Easter

Easter has always been a special time. If Christmas is the Birth – snowy days, carols, and crackling fires in the fireplace – then Easter is Spring, the Rebirth, when the earth comes back to life, trees budding, daffodils blooming. Birds are popping out to fly and sing. “He is Risen,” might well be their song.

When we’re small, putting on our Sunday best, it’s mostly about the egg hunt, and the candy. And later, summer dresses and socializing. Maybe a round of golf. We sit quietly through the service and listen, sing some hymns, bow our heads. Hear the story again, the horrifying death, and then three days later the resurrection, the return from death.

But of course few educated Christians completely believe it really happened that way, with the fog of history, pathology, and the constraints of biology and medical fact. We’re a practical, reasonable people. It’s symbolic, metaphor at best. And a good story.

Because believe me, no one comes back from the dead, the well and truly dead. Rolls the stone away, steps out into the light, and walks up the street, greeting the neighbors. 

And yet still I have known demons, as real as a glass on a table. And the bottle beside. Seen them sweep in and take my friends away. Claw at my own garments as I move through the wreckage, trying to make sense of it. And angels also have appeared in their guises, saving my life on more than one occasion. Or steering me down a clear path, when I had started on another – muddy, pot holed, dangerous. So why not Jesus, the son of God. Surely He could. And science would have nothing to do with it. Only faith.

Several Easters ago I had a dream. Where it came from I have no idea. I came upon the tomb in the cool of the morning and, as the stone had been rolled away, stepped inside. It was empty, and as I turned to leave He was standing there, in the light near the entrance. And no words were spoken. He just looked at me, and I felt the purest, greatest love that can be imagined. It swept over me, no room for disbelief. Then he walked away and left me there, feeling whole for maybe the first time in my life. 

I woke feeling it hadn’t been a dream at all. That I had in fact been somewhere, in the presence of something far greater than myself. And the practical went out the window, and any reasonable explanation had no relevance. I was a witness. He had risen.