Easter is here…
John 20:19-31
I began church ministry in 2012 on Vancouver Island, and then served at Meadowood in Winnipeg. Since my first Sunday worship experience with you last September, I have been continuing this spiritual journey called ministry, fortunately and gratefully, at Immanuel. Right after the Good Friday service, when I joined the church’s informal, unofficial, annual tradition of post-Good Friday service lunch at the Pancake House on Pembina — you may well wonder why pancakes come after the Good Friday service, and not on Shrove Tuesday. Some churches have a pancake dinner the night before Ash Wednesday, which is the starting day of the season of Lent. Since Lent is traditionally a liturgical time of fasting, people have made a tradition of eating pancakes and sausages on Shrove Tuesday – pancakes on Good Friday falls outside of that tradition. Don’t think about it too hard - it‘s just one more fun, quirky Immanuel “behaviour” which has no theological problem, but reveals a just slightly “unorthodox” bending, which I love. During the lunch, a member who sat across from me kindly commented, “So, Ha Na - now, you have experienced with us the full cycle of the church year.” I responded, “not until Easter. After Easter, I will have.” So, really, now, WOW, I have arrived at Easter, having travelled safely and joyfully with you through Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent and Holy Week. Time flies fast.
For the past 6 years, as I have grown in ministry, my understanding of Easter has grown too. I am sure that your understanding and how you embody the Easter experience as your own has also grown. As each of us is a unique creation of God and our life stories evolve in overlapping yet different paths, we can understand each other’s Easter experience as they truly are, with compassion, and at the same time we deepen our understanding of Easter, each year, with new insights from our changing lived experience.
What has personally stood out for me and therefore has shaped my theology of Easter is the following definition: Easter is and should be a bodily and physical resurrection experience, as much as it is the spiritual experience of hope and new life. If we cling to the understanding that redemption or salvation is about the immortality of our soul — that kind of thinking is misdirected; it doesn’t seem to me to be the right reason to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Instead, I believe in the significance of the meaning and power of the bodily resurrection of Jesus and therefore ourselves as well. Every year, Nature reveals the great analogy and the image of the risen Jesus through the miracle of the spring which comes back at the right time, in the right way.
In the Christian tradition, we have this liturgical time of three days. On Friday, Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. On Sunday, (or on the Third Day), he rose again. In between these two days, on Holy Saturday, which is the day of the Sabbath, (the shadow, the middle space, the void), the Apostle’s Creed mentions that Jesus “descended into Hell.” “Hell” is not the Christian place of eternal punishment, but the Jewish Sheol or the Greek Hades, an afterlife place of nonexistence. This is where the bodies of the righteous rested, those who died from injustice, who awaited God’s transformation of this world and the imminence of God’s justice. It was those who lived in a time of violent injustice with the hope of rising again at the end of the world (eschaton— meaning not just the end in a chronological sense. My son’s worst fear is a meteor or Planet X hitting the earth, forcing us to face the end of the earth in fire too soon, but I assured him if it happens, it might happen millions and millions of years from now. Our faith in Christ and resurrection is not about the far future of millions of years later.) Holy Saturday represents the ultimate time of Uncertainty - on that day, Jesus descended into hell, or Hades, below the earth, to liberate all the righteous ones along with himself. He was not alone on the first Easter. He was with the thousands and thousands of the righteous when he rose again. That’s our belief in communal resurrection.
In this sense, if resurrection is our Christian hope and is in the centre of our believing, (and yes it is) it is because we believe we will rise with the whole of humanity and we will transform to be the new earth of nonviolent justice and love - even if imperfect, now, perfectly in eschaton (the end).
It is Utopia — the perfect, unimaginable, beautiful cosmic transfiguration. Utopia comes from the Greek for “no place” or “not this place” or “not here, not now”. Why does it happen? Is it automatic or just because God planned it? No, Resurrection is both an event of the future and the hope of now, because the creation below this earth and upon this earth demand it! We cry out to God for restorative justice, warless peace, and cleaning up the mess humanity has spread across this planet through love!
I see the prominent images of the bodily Risen Jesus in the gifts of Spring. We sometimes think that the declaration of “Easter is here” almost means the same as “Spring is here.”
Fran Darling, who was the minister at Chemainus United Church, was diagnosed with cancer in early 2012, and was advised to take medical leave. I was a student and was looking for a congregation where I could start my internship. I was interviewed and given a chance to temporarily work for them as their student minister. Fran really wanted to come back - she wanted to be part of the life of the church as much as she could, while I was there. I tried to accommodate her wish and the congregation was strongly supportive in general. Her fight with cancer was very inspiring, yet her health rapidly deteriorated. By early 2013, Fran knew she was going to die, and so she prepared for her last sermon on Easter. Her death was impending, and the vigil for her passing began during Holy Week. Many gathered around the Maundy Thursday table, thinking of Fran, who was at home. On Easter Saturday, 6 a.m., Fran passed away. She wrote in her Easter sermon “A West Coast spring unfolds very, very slowly… We cannot understand Easter’s joy without beginning with grief.”
I witnessed that Fran’s spiritual journey did not end with her physical death. Together with those who grieve her death, her ending was not yet entered into fullness or completion until we, together, experienced Easter in the day's morning as fellow members of the earth. We only slowly realize the truth, everyone and every being taking our own time.
On that Easter morning, the day after Fran’s death, 9 am, I got out of my car and stood in the church parking lot. I looked around and then looked up. I was standing on the quiet, warm earth which constantly moved with energy - creative and new. What I remember of that Easter Sunday is that the sunshine was pervasive. No clouds. I met the bright, brilliant blue sky with my eyes wide open to see through the sky. I tried to bid farewell to Fran. Instead, what I received was blessing, endless and unconditional blessing in the splendid light and warmth of the Spring. (And the pink cherry blossoms were in full bloom, everywhere!) It was the bodily, physical, temporary experience of resurrection, reconciliation and forgiveness for me.
Sometimes it is quite hard to explain what we know intuitively and translate it to a more reasoned logic. How can I explain better my physical, bodily experience of the resurrection of Christ in theology, other than just trying to ask you to pause, recollect and remember the moments when you were in a certain place and Nature’s beauty or Mother Earth’s material transformation touched your spirit and body and granted you hope. A beautiful moment of Spring which embodies the astounding, fresh, material, constant change is an example of The Utopian event called Easter.
I celebrate that I had my first Easter with you this year. I wonder what our journey together will be like after sharing more Easters and experiences at Immanuel. What Easter might we be able to dream together, live together, and act together, like Spring, as the Utopian event, ‘warm and flowery’, ‘snow melting, green shooting’? Will we emerge from our tomb: our body opening up like a flower, our voice becoming stronger, our flesh becoming warmer? May we witness resurrection, our physical and bodily participation in Easter’s dance, in our own and shared life together.
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