A most disappointing Sunday.
Not everything gets better on Easter with the Resurrection.
For many of us, Holy Week plays out a well-worn drama with great predictability. We “follow” Jesus into Jerusalem with the pomp and exuberance of Palm Sunday, then into the descending night of Gethsemane as the darkness falls on our Tenebrae (Good Friday) services—all of which drives to Holy Saturday as much as to Easter Sunday. The silence of Holy Saturday allows us a singular space on the Church calendar to “pretend” that we don’t know about the Resurrection. We reflect on the lost hopes and the despairing of the disciples, their confusion of how it all went wrong. We reflect on our own frustrated or unfulfilled hopes, our own losses, our own grief—the difficulties of our human experience without the whitewash of theology.
Then comes Sunday.
We “remember” the Resurrection, and we sing and celebrate and rejoice as we find in Scripture the disciples had. We forget our grief. We recover our loss. But only in the drama.
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We live out of the drama for Holy Week—but we don’t live there. Neither did the disciples, whose Jesus and whose hope was ripped from their eyes and rent, whose anticipated future was humiliated and sealed in a tomb. Forever. Because what emerged from the grave was not what they gave up. The Resurrection story is not a story of having ‘A,’ losing ‘A’ and (surprise!) ‘A’ again. It’s having ‘A’ and losing ‘A’ because (surprise!) ‘B.’ If we may be honest, it’s a taking away irrevocably and the giving of something entirely new and good.
Jesus’ death negated the hopes of his followers irrecoverably. They were not Resurrected—would not be Resurrected. Whether they hoped that their leader Jesus would rescue them from Roman oppression or that their friend Jesus would remain at their table, his Resurrection made it clearer than his death that they could never hope to recover what they’d lost. These would remain in the grave, always.
Instead, they would gain something new to the measure they would receive it. If they would shift their expectations, they’d gain the king that Jesus is at the cost of the king they hoped he’d be. They would gain a new friendship with the person of Jesus at the cost of the relationship they’d once had and how they’d once enjoyed it. There would be no more illusions of triumph. There would be no more dinners with Jesus at the table. And even if they would eat with him again in the Kingdom, as he promised, it would never be the same.
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For us too, there may be a time of putting to death the things in our lives—good and less good—even of the hopes we’ve held. We can grieve these even as Jesus grieved Lazarus. All the more so because God doesn’t guarantee them back to us. Sometimes God removes something good from our life or asks us to lay something down for a season so that, by detaching, we can have freedom with respect to it when it’s restored; sometimes God gifts us with that freedom but never restores it. And we can grieve this.
And some things take longer to unfold than it takes the sun to rise on Easter Sunday. We have all lost so much in the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s unclear how much of it we’ll recover—how much any of it will ever be the same again. This year, more than any I’ve known, has been a most disappointing Easter Sunday. The joy didn’t come; Jesus didn’t feel Resurrected; it continues to feel at many hours very much like night waiting for the sun to rise.
But I do think of how Easter was for those who lost their Jesus. He didn’t appear to everyone at once—or at all to many. Some couldn’t believe the news—or their eyes. Surely, for some, it took many days and many weeks to wrap themselves around what Jesus being alive meant for them now, when it simultaneously frustrated and fulfilled their deepest hopes. And, like Mary, they still had to let go.
I imagine that the disciples continued to grieve the loss of Jesus, even as they had joy in his Resurrection. Things would be better than they had been. Jesus’ kingship would be far greater than they narrowly expected. But things would never be the way they had.