Easter in an Age of Pandemic
The Buddha once admonished his students that understanding his teaching is both difficult and dangerous. This is partly because, he warned, a doctrine can so easily be misunderstood, even morphing, over time, into its opposite. So it is with many great religious ideas - and Easter is no exception.
The New Testament portraits of Jesus vary: he’s an itinerant healer and preacher, the divine Logos, “the Human One” – and a provocateur, crushed by the empire, who nevertheless rises from the dead. What struck early audiences as most scandalous about this story wasn’t so much the “rising” bit, but rather the idea that “Christ” – literally “the anointed one,” the Messiah, the long-awaited deliverer – would be tortured and killed at all. It was “Christ crucified,” Paul wrote, that seemed a stumbling block to some, and sheer foolishness to others. The Messiah, by definition, was supposed to triumph.
As Covid-19 continues to ravage the world this week, Easter trumpets will be in short supply – and even when they do ring out, in streamed worship services or on Facebook, for many, they’ll ring hollow. We are awash in death and the fear of death, and Easter, we’ve been told, is supposed to be an exultant celebration of new life. We’re supposed to gather in great numbers and sing “Alleluia.” These days, it can all seem absurd, or tone-deaf – or both.
But the merely triumphant version of Easter has always been a distortion, a distraction from the Gospel stories themselves, and, at its worst, a morphing of the Easter idea into its opposite. Easter Sunday is a day - and Eastertide is a season - of hope against hope, not definitive triumph. It’s for looking ahead and taking joy in the coming spring, not looking back at some victorious summer. Rediscovering this perspective is both necessary in this age of pandemic and, at its best, a resource for enduring it.
For starters, the New Testament accounts of Easter are embedded within passion narratives, awash in death and the fear of death. That is, they are embedded within stories about how, for various reasons and in various ways, both personal and institutional, human communities conspire against ourselves. Instead of confronting and resisting death-dealing forces, we collaborate with them, wittingly or unwittingly. We shirk, ignore, betray, and scapegoat. We protect our own, and leave the most vulnerable behind.
One of Jesus’ ancient names is “Son of Humanity,” or “The Human One.” For Christians, then, when we hang Jesus on the cross, we hang Humanity on the cross. Our violence is self-inflicted. The cross is suicide.
And at the same time, Christians confess, another of Jesus’ names is the divine Logos, as the Gospel of John puts it, God’s “Word,” the ancient Hellenistic idea of an underlying pattern of life and beauty running in and through everything. In John, Jesus calls himself “the bread of life” and “the resurrection and the life.” From this angle, to kill Jesus is an attempt, both quixotic and heartbreaking, to kill life itself. The cross is biocide.
The story of Jesus’ crucifixion, then, is a kind of mirror, reflecting back what we have done – and even more, what we continue to do. And Easter’s empty tomb declares the good news that in the end, such madness will not have the final word, and that our dearest hopes for a different kind of world – in which we renounce our suicidal, biocidal ways – are well founded.
But to declare good news about the future is, in the same gesture, to indict the present. The world of Easter Sunday is still very much a Good Friday world, still awash in death and the fear of death. The empire, callous and bloodthirsty as ever, grinds on. Jesus, still wounded, lives to see another day – but his followers don’t recognize him, and even when some do, they receive him with a halting mixture of confusion, fear, doubt, and joy.
Sound familiar? The Easter story is our story, too, and so its light and shadow can be for us a story to think through, to feel through, as we make sense of a dark and dawning day. In an age of pandemic, the Easter story can give us eyes to see, calling our attention, for example, to the ways we have not served – and may yet serve – those who are most vulnerable to the world’s death-dealing forces. Likewise, in an age of climate change and mass extinction, the story may inspire us toward new forms of responsibility, of loving “our neighbors as ourselves.”
The New Testament begins with a virtually hidden birth, holed up in a barn in a backwater town. A few distinguished foreigners come calling, along with some ordinary shepherds – but all in all, the event goes by quietly, unremarked by the world. The story ends in a similar spirit, with a small, rather unimpressive band of disbelieving believers standing in the valley of the shadow of death, the same ones who betrayed and deserted Jesus just a few days earlier, now confused and encouraged and looking ahead to a new, uncharted mission.
This Easter, we may experience this old story in a new way, one much closer to its original spirit. Easter is only a beginning, not an end. Perhaps most striking of all, the risen Messiah doesn’t marshal an army of angels to rescue humanity from our destructive ways, but rather commissions that small, bruised band of stragglers. Indeed, it’s God’s stubborn faith in human dignity – that dignity so radiantly on display amidst the havoc of Covid-19 – that shines at the heart of Easter’s good news.
So sound the trumpets, yes – but not in mere triumph. Retrospective, definitive victory is the opposite of Easter. Sound them in a way that looks forward, not backward. Sound them as a wake-up call, a signal to begin, a summons to step up into our dignity, to play our role in God’s story of redemption. Sound them in hope against hope, faith against faith, a dogged Easter trust that insists, despite appearances, that - with God’s help - it’s not too late for us to rise.
+ Matthew Myer Boulton