“Easter is for children.” I have heard that expression throughout the years. It has been said by persons of faith and non-faith – well-meaning people who love to see the delight in children’s eyes on seeing the Easter Bunny or colored eggs scattered over a lawn. To me, however, the expression isn’t wrong – it just doesn’t begin to touch the true meaning of Easter.
Easter truth is for every person, every living being who has ever struggled to find meaning and hope when money cannot purchase that which is most deeply needed. Easter is a word of grace in anxiety, a word of peace in conflict, a word of hope in despair, a word of comfort in sorrow. Easter is assurance that the last word in this world is not ours but God’s.
In The Apostle’s Creed, the line that has long touched my soul is here contained: “Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead and buried: He descended into hell.”
I take great comfort in that line – for at those times in life when we find ourselves ‘in hell’, Jesus knows where to find us and we are not alone. If that sounds harsh, my sense is that few, if any of us, do not find ourselves in that place at one time or another.
The death of a child or loved one, the loss of a job or home, an unexpected medical diagnosis that changes our world, a betrayal, an accident, a fight that leads to painful separation… the list can go on of life-events that cause us to know the reality of ‘hell’. Jesus, the Apostles’ Creed tells us, descended there, knows the landscape and can find us when we are there. We are not alone.
Jesus did not remain there, however, and we’re told that on the ‘third day he rose again from the dead …’ God had the last word for Jesus . . . and God has the last word for us. Easter fun is for children, but Easter truth is for every one of us when obstacles and pain block our path or suck the air from our lungs.
We don’t understand precisely what happened on that first Easter but we know that something happened, something that turned Jesus’ followers from despair to hope, from doubt to faith, from defeat to courage. Jesus got up, he rose and in that action God lifts us all up.
The New England author Henry David Thoreau once wrote, ‘All people live lives of quiet desperation.’ Over the years of my life, I’ve seen how true that is, even though most of us give no evidence of that reality. Easter truth assures that ‘quiet desperation’ is not the end but a stop along the way. The end is God, with the Easter truth, ‘He has risen’ and in his rising is our life and hope.