Is it merely a symbol for life’s rejuvenation in spring? … the acclamation of the tender bud’s triumph over the thick white cold of winter and the re-emergence of nature’s green and yellows and mauves and reds where drab and dull once reigned?
However it is that the celebration of Christ’s resurrection coincides with the awakening of spring it is appropriate. Winter’s surrender to spring has an obvious parallel in death’s surrender to life.
But how empty this all this, if it has no parallel in our experience. We can view spring through a window or we can explore its green meadows, be filled with the fragrance of its bloom and taste the warmth it brings to the air. Spring demands an experience. What we know must be felt.
Some women who go to visit a tomb of a man they had seen die return convinced he is alive. It causes a stir among the man’s followers, but not enough for them to believe he is alive.
Two men walking down a road in mourning over a man who now walks with them, but they do not even recognize him.
If Easter means anything, it must mean more to us that to hear that a man named Jesus is yet alive or that somehow he is now with us.
It must be a vibrant living experience, an infusion within the very core of who we are of a life that cannot die. Not some oblivious and distant possibility, but the most evident reality, where death loses its significance and we lose the fear we have of it.
A motley crew of fear ridden disciples huddled together in hiding in a second floor room with the door locked. They had even seen their Master ascend, but what they knew of the resurrection, they had not felt. This they did not feel to the core until Pentecost when real life took up residence in their souls.
Though the source of their experience was unseen, they had been changed. And so too the change we have reason to hope for, as much as we in winter hope for spring.
May 5, 1997
