Easter is Coming

“It is a very funny thing about life,” concluded W. Somerset Maughan;; “ if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it.” We live in  a new millennium that accepts almost anything and rejects almost nothing--except one’s right to be right.

This is quite different from orthodox Christianity, including the Church of God Reformation Movement, so-called, people that have experienced Easter as a spiritual Memorial Day—a Fourth of July birthday celebration all wrapped up in one neatly wrapped holiday package. Easter is recognized as the holiest of all days on the Christian Calendar. Non-Christians celebrate it as a secular holiday of intense marketing and anticipate their annual spring frolic at a warm beach, or an annual visit from their Easter Bunny. Even the most devout of Christians agreeably toss in egg hunts at the park for their children and encourage them to find the most eggs at their yearly hunt.

Some consider Easter only a memento, a legendary witness to a memorialized past. They respect it and insist that it deserves the esteem and veneration due all cultural wisdom of history. Others see Easter as no more than a dusty relic, a symbolic legend from a past that deserves nothing more than a quick click of the delete key.

Others of us respect the diversity of opinions but strongly wonder if Easter doesn’t call for a closer look. We believe if it has any contemporary relevancy whatsoever, we should at least download the seven last words of Jesus and reexamine them for any value they might offer our present age. To reject or ignore any such suggestions for improving our troubled times only further complicates our lives and that seems unnecessarily unreasonable!

One wag suggested, Easter is a time of the year when church members are insulted because the minister doesn’t recognize them from one year to the next. One minister went so far as to suggest that for us to find true meaning in Easter, we must experience a heaping hour of Palm Sunday and a walk in the shoes of Jesus  as he rode into Jerusalem. Finally, he suggested seasoning this with a dash gospel stories from that week’s events, all thoroughly mixed.

That recipe calls for gathering on Maundy Thursday and experiencing the Last Supper while sitting around the table with Jesus and his disciples. Stir these ingredients thoroughly. Pour in the events of that week Jesus was arrested and blend them into sixty minutes at the foot of the cross on Good Friday. Let this simmer thoroughly through Saturday evening.

Mix in a full ninety minutes of the new day of Easter morning. Don’t fail to worship and retell the story. And when you have stirred and sufficiently mixed these ingredients, serve them well-frosted with a liberal portion of Easter Day worship. Make sure you give others a good taste through sharing it joyfully.

Now I know that fads are just habits; they are practices, customs, and styles that come into being as if they were all there is and are gone tomorrow. Remember when streaking debuted? This whimsical levity quickly became a youthful fad. It stirred emotional ire among the elders, but it faded from view as quickly as it arrived. So: can you imagine going to a fine restaurant for dinner--and it happens -- just as the Maitre de arrives at your table.

Like the chilling breeze that causes your lady to reach for her shawl; it happens. You sense that something happened. You saw a blur from the corner of your eye--a shadow. It was over almost before you knew it happened. The Dining Room, however, throbbed with a sudden explosion of adrenalin. That caressing breeze danced through the candle-lighted shadows and left snippets of excited conversation erupting. Preoccupied patrons rippled like Maple leaves in the breeze. 

Whispers transitioned into psychological evaluations of the young. Couples quietly discoursed on the young and restless herd that tries so hard to cram all of life into the single moment we call now.  Describing it conjures up visions of a distressed and occasionally disruptive and thoroughly self-indulgent generation.

The question remains, did you see what you thought you saw? Left floating on the ether waves, it fades quickly. It passes into mindless oblivion, like the afterglow of a flashbulb exploding in the darkness of a photogenic moment. That is how I perceive Easter’s arrival –unexpected and quick but gone before anyone realized it arrived.

Hindsight suggests just maybe such events should have alerted everyone that something was afoot, especially on that Friday we call Good Friday. Yet; it was just another dingy, dismal day of Roman execution. No one was quite sure of anything at the time, although some obscure Jewish Prophets dreamed of such things.

Looking back, I can imagine the mushroom of gossip and rumors floating upward, not unlike that destructive cloud seen by the crew of the Eola Gay after it dropped its nuclear cargo over Hiroshima. The murky uncertainty that lifted over Jerusalem lacked the violence of Hiroshima’s holocaust, but it spread across the face of time just as quickly, and it turned a page in our history book.

Like every other day; few people saw any significant difference.  Only later, a fringe few recognized the cumulating events like a bad penny returning to the mint. The events of that week revealed behavior that has haunted history and left humanity preoccupied while other events took precedence.

Some only see Easter as a series of broken tokens and a few hallowed traditions. Yet, a myriad of Christians have found a vision reminiscent of the glasses worn by Timmy's Grandma, referred to in the introduction of the book from which this is excerpted. That expanded vision. when poked and prodded, caused people to eventually create some new time zones, redesign their old calendars, and reexamine human existence through lenses highly suggestive of a whole new dimension of life.

Our vision of Easter is that way.

This is walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com

*from CONCLUSIONS FROM THE CROSS,  a self-published work of this writer