My daughter in Denver called at 8:15 on Friday morning, as she was driving her children to their nanny-share. “We have a question for you,” she announced. My granddaughter, who just turned three, wanted to know, “What is Easter?”
How do you explain Easter to our young “Covid-babies,” who haven’t even spent much time in a church? Well, you’d think that I, a priest who used to lead weekly children’s chapel, and my daughter, a therapist raised in the church, would be able to do a pretty good job of it! Without any Godly Play figures or books, though, I started rambling on speakerphone about the baby Jesus growing up, helping people, and then being killed. But then God made him alive again, showing us that his love is more powerful than anything. As I finished, my daughter looked back only to see my granddaughter silently and forlornly weeping in her car seat. Good job, Rev. Gran’ma! I think I spent too much time on the part about sweet baby Jesus dying.
Can you blame me, though? We don’t have any trouble describing the crucifixion, do we? We humans know all about suffering in this world. We can paint a picture of pain and death without any trouble. Just turn on the news!
But when the tomb is empty, and the dead and suffering Jesus is gone, what then do we say? Are there even words for resurrection? A bland announcement that “Jesus triumphed over pain and death, and what seems tragic isn’t really so,” just doesn’t cut it in our messed-up world, does it?[1] Such platitudes just might just leave us teary-eyed in the backseat, too.
What about a visual image, then? A picture of resurrection would be helpful. But artists throughout Christian history haven’t been able to paint resurrection, either. There are no paintings of that moment when Jesus went from death to life. How could there be: It would be like trying to paint the moment of creation! All that we’ve been able to do is to paint and describe what happened afterwards. We have the dramatic image of earthquake and angel today in Matthew’s Gospel. We have the gardener speaking to Mary in John’s Gospel. We have the risen Jesus appearing to various combinations of disciples. But these images and stories only show how we experience what happens as a result of this momentous change. They don’t show it.
I watched a YouTube presentation this Lent by New Testament scholar Dominic Crossan. He showed artistic renderings of the resurrected Christ throughout history. What was fascinating to me was to learn the difference between how the risen Christ is viewed in the Eastern, or Orthodox, tradition, and in our Western tradition.
In the West, resurrection is painted as ascension. We have Jesus, all by himself, coming up out of the tomb. He’s headed heavenward, toward the Father, surrounded by glory, power, and light. He has won the battle and is leaving death—and the suffering world—behind. The trouble with the Western image is that it doesn’t really show that resurrection has anything to do with me and you. It’s all about Jesus’ victory. These images don’t really speak to me.
In the East, however, resurrection is called Anastasis, or UpRising.[2] The thing is, this UpRising isn’t just for Jesus alone. In the Eastern paintings, we see the Risen Jesus straddling a rickety cross that spans a dark abyss. He’s pulling Adam and Eve up out of the pit of death after him, as if he is re-introducing them to each other, as Rowan Williams puts it. Here, the resurrection is “a moment in which human beings are reintroduced to each other across the gulf of mutual resentment and blame.”[3] In the East, Jesus’ UpRising includes—from the beginning—all of humanity, as our prototypical humans are pulled out of death. The resurrection of Christ is an UpRising of all Creation frombondage—from the bondage of separation from God, separation from creation, and separation from one another. The resurrection re-creates community. It builds bridges. It unites. And in so doing, it re-creates all of Creation itself. It’s as if today, Jesus takes our hands, pulls, and says, “Here you go! You’re free. Now go re-connect all that has been bound and broken. See you in Galilee.”
In an attempt to do better today than I did on Friday with my granddaughter, I’d like for her and the other children to come forward now. Maybe they can at least help us grown-ups feel what Easter is all about.
See this pitcher of water. I said a prayer over this water to make it special, to set it apart to cover us with God’s love when this water touches us, like in baptism. But it still looks like plain old regular water, doesn’t it? It’s hard to see that it’s special at all. Now, today is Easter, the day we remember that God is strong and always protects us. To help us remember, we’re going to take a drop of this pink Easter egg dye, and we’re going to drop it in here. Pretend like this drop of dye is the special love that God shows us in Jesus’ birth and life and death. See how it falls to the bottom and doesn’t change the color of the water much? But if we stir it around, this one tiny drop of pink rises up from the bottom and spreads all over the whole pitcher. See! It makes all the water new and different! It’s all pink now! We can see it!
But we’re not finished. If the pink water stays in the pitcher, it doesn’t have anything to do with us. So I’m going to ask you to take these branches and dip them in this water, and then go shake the water all over everyone, like this! I want you to yell, “Do not be afraid! Christ is Risen!”
[When they are finished]
Therefore if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come!
[1] Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1982), 78.
[2] Dominic Cross and Sarah Crossan, “Rising Up with Christ” found at https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/rising-christ.
[3] Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 31.
No comments:
Post a Comment