Jesus Resurrected

Easter is not celebrated the same as Christmas.  Our culture embraces the Christmas story and the pageantry around it.  The story of the Mary, Joseph,  shepherd, angels, stable and baby Jesus is one that many understand and embrace.  Easter morning with the empty tomb and the various accounts in the Gospel as to who was where when can be most confusing.  A humble birth makes sense; a resurrection does not.

Frederick Buechner has written a helpful word on Easter in his book Beyond Words.

Easter is not a major production at all and the minor attractions we have created around it — the bunnies and baskets and bonnets, the dyed eggs — have so little to do with what it’s all about that they neither add to it nor subtract from it.  It’s not really even much of a story when you come right down to it, and that is of course the power of it. It doesn’t have the ring of great drama. It has the ring of truth. If the Gospel writers had wanted to tell it in a way to convince the world that Jesus indeed rose from the dead, they would presumably have done it with all the skill and fanfare they could muster.  Here there is no skill, no fanfare. They seem to be telling it simply the way it was. The narrative is as fragmented, shadowy, incomplete as life itself.  When it comes to just what happened, there can be no certainty.  That something unimaginable happened, there can be no doubt. (p. 91)

The unimaginable has happened.  Jesus has risen from the dead.  We may never fully comprehend all that this means, but we can be messengers of this truth for the world.  Like the women at the tomb, we may be confused, unsure, even afraid.   Yet we continue to have the same task, to go and tell, even on the morning after. 

How has the message of Easter changed your perspective or life?  How do you life in the light of the empty tomb?

Prayer: Lord God, though my mind may never fully comprehend the depth and height of the resurrection, continue to fill my heart with the joy and power of Easter.