On Easter Sunday, both the encounter and the clarification
reach their highest point. If Jesus is the clarification of God, the Triduum (Maundy Thursday—Good Friday—Easter)
is the clarification of Jesus. The Triduum is the ultimate Jesus encounter. Without Easter, Jesus is just another in a long
line of martyrs--people who have been sacrificed standing up for what's right. He's like Socrates or Seneca, like Martin Luther
King or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, like (some of us remember) Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman.
But Easter means that Jesus is more, and the more
that he is transfigures and ennobles the deaths of all the martyrs. For Easter is not martyrdom, but victory. Easter is faith
that life is more powerful than death. Easter is our hope that even though the seed dies, in the process it brings forth the
grain.
Now the green blade rises from the buried grain,
Wheat that in the dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been;
Love is come again like wheat arising green.
I read an article recently—an interview with
an artist living in upstate New
York. She made a comment that fascinated me. She said that we need the past because it teaches us
to have a conscience, and we need the future because it teaches us to have hope. Conscience (this implies to me) is useless
without hope. It would be like Lent without Easter. I once read that some prison guards dislike mandatory sentences ("life
without hope of parole") because inmates without hope are much more difficult to manage. And life itself can become a prison
and watch it go to the dogs if people lose hope that it can move forward toward something better.
For all these years, I have been preaching that Easter
is not about the corpse of Jesus. It is not about an historical anomaly happening to an individual. Easter is a promise to
us all. It is what motivated Martin Luther King and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and countless other Christian martyrs and confessors.
Easter clarifies God. It gives us a God who is committed to life, to our lives. It is not about the resuscitation of corpses,
but rather about the resurrection of God's whole world. He so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. The result
of this divine self-giving is Easter: "Love is come again like wheat arising green."
Happy Easter,
—Pastor Bastien
Taken from April 2005 Footnotes
