We Got Easter Backwards
Resurrection was never meant to be a holiday mood. It was meant to sustain resistance
We got it backwards.
We treat Easter in our culture like a one-day event: sunrise service, too much chocolate, ham, maybe a new outfit, and then back to Ordinary Time. We act like resurrection is a finish line rather than the starting line. And in a political moment this disordered, that mistake is costing us something we can’t afford to lose.
The church knew better, which is why the liturgical year keeps time differently from the rest of the world. Eastertide runs fifty days, from Resurrection Sunday to Pentecost. Fifty days of living inside the claim that death doesn’t get the last word. Fifty days of practicing what it looks like to be people who refuse to be governed by fear, because we’ve staked our lives on the conviction that the worst thing that can happen isn’t actually the last thing that can happen.
I need those fifty days right now. I suspect you do too.
Because when Easter collapses into a single morning, resurrection becomes sentimental, a pastel rendering of the world. It shrinks to become the kind of faith that feels good on a Sunday but offers nothing useful by Monday when the news is already terrible again, and the cruelty seems freshly organized, and the folks with power are using it to hurt people without it.
But Easter as a season? That’s a story we can live inside of. That’s something that can hold us.
The earliest followers of Jesus didn’t walk away from the empty tomb with their problems solved and a spring in their step. They walked away confused, frightened, and facing the same empire that’d just lynched their teacher. And if we’re honest, their friend.
What changed after Easter wasn’t their circumstances so much as their orientation to those circumstances. Resurrection didn’t remove the Roman boot from their necks. It told them the Roman boot wasn’t the truest thing about the world … at least the world they lived in.
That’s the word I need on a Friday morning in April, after doing my taxes and while I’m reading the news and wondering what kind of world my grandchildren are going to inherit.
The powers that traffic in cruelty are counting on our exhaustion. They’re counting on us treating resistance the way we treat Easter: a single day of feeling something, followed by fifty days of going back to normal.
But there’s no normal to go back to. There’s only the long, stubborn, fifty-day Eastertide insistence that love is more durable than anything Caesar can throw at us.
After all, what sustains us isn’t optimism. It’s the story of Jesus’ resurrection and the promise that even the systems of domination and cruelty wielded by Caesar don’t get the last word.
And resurrection, it turns out, takes more than a day.
Thank you for this reminder of the necessary perseverance and perspective of being Easter people.
This is why we need ALL the liturgies of Holy Week, and, more than anything, a real, substantial Great Vigil of Easter, starting in pitch darkness (NOT at dusk or sunset!!!), singing and praying and rehearsing multiple high points of our story -- a creation that is VERY GOOD; a great flood; a passage through the sea; a valley of dry bones raised to new life; the promise that the mountains and hills will break forth into singing and all the trees of the field will clap their hands; the three days spent by Jonah in the belly of the whale; the three young men in the fiery furnace -- and at last, only after sitting with this story in the dark, renewing our baptismal vows and proclaiming HE IS RISEN INDEED. And then, only then, gathering in amazement and joy around his table.
Just showing up on Sunday morning for the flowers and chocolate is an appalling distortion of the Good News -- a tame and laundered version, comforting and respectable -- assuring us that all the blood and horror of Good Friday were just a bad dream and now it's morning and everything is normal and nice again. That is not a message of liberation; it is a bland assurance of civil religion that simply lulls us into complacency.